Philip K. Dick?

Ubik

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Are there any other fans of this amazing science fiction author?

If not, here's the books I've read that I reccomend for a newcomer to his books:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A Scanner Darkly
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
The Man in the High Castle
Ubik (im only 3 chapters into this one, but it's great so far and I hear it's one of his best.)

I can't get enough of his books!
 

Ubik

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Man in the High Castle (imo) isn't one of his best. It was amazing with character development and showing how so many of the characters were linked in some way and the setting was totally convincing. However the ending kinda killed it for me. It certainly left the reader thinking - a lot - but it was hardly a brilliant way to do it. Of course, Dick was probably hyped up on some amphetamines (he called it his fuel for writing) when he wrote it so the ending probably made complete sense to him!

I'd recommend either Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the influence for the movie Blade Runner) or A Scanner Darkly (his only book he wrote while he was not on drugs. his best imo).
 
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TheManeki

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I like Phil's stories, too. My all-time favorite, however, would be the short story "Faith of our Fathers," with Scanner Darkly probably being second.

High Castle was a little disappointing for me. It certainly seemed the best-written of all his books, as well as one of the most coherent, but it just didn't seem to live up to all the hype. :sigh:

You guys ever catch Michael Bishop's Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas? That was a pretty good tribute.
 
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Ubik

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I never read any of his short stories yet! I hate they way they sell the collections, because in each collection they sell they use half of the same stories as the other ones so it's kind of a waste of money. I really wanna read his more famous ones like Minority Report and Faith of our Fathers.
 
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TheManeki

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I was lucky in that a coworker was clearing out his book collection and I got a lot of paperbacks from the 60s and 70s for free, including some of Dick's. "The Golden Man" short story is totally different from the movie Next.

For "Faith of Our Fathers," I recommend checking if your local library has a copy of Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions. It contains "Faith" (and an afterword by Dick) as well as a lot of other seminal science fiction stories from the 1960s.
 
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Ubik

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I was lucky in that a coworker was clearing out his book collection and I got a lot of paperbacks from the 60s and 70s for free, including some of Dick's. "The Golden Man" short story is totally different from the movie Next.

For "Faith of Our Fathers," I recommend checking if your local library has a copy of Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions. It contains "Faith" (and an afterword by Dick) as well as a lot of other seminal science fiction stories from the 1960s.
sweet.

Yeah I heard Next was aweful, but The Golden Man was pretty good.
 
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Babe Ruth

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any other fans of this amazing science fiction author ?..

I like his short story, Beyond the Door, about a temperamental Cuckoo clock.
My opinion, it would've made for a good episode of Amazing Stories, or Tales from the Darkside, etc.
 
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RDKirk

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I read his work in a rush back in the late 60s as a teenager and had to go back over some of them later (Dick and LeGuinn both). Who is in the lead for having the most movies made from his work, Dick or King?

I've always thought Ubik was his cleverest story. Hard to have an ending like that turn out satisfying to a reader. You have to read it to believe it.
 
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Anto9us

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I have read all the Philip K. Dick novels and a couple of collections of short stories.

UBIK was the first I read and one of my favorites; also Our Friends From Frolix X and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Flow, My tears The Policeman Said -- oh, all the novels are good.

One of his short stories -- We Can Remember It For You Wholesale -- was expanded into that Arnold Schwartzenegger movie TOTAL RECALL
 
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Anto9us

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When I say I have read ALL the Phillip K. Dick novels, I mean all the SF ones. Of the three non-sf novels, I only read Mary and the Giant, did not read Puttering About in a Small Land or In Milton Lumky Territory.

I have a hardback that contains four sf novels in one volume:
A Maze of Death
VALIS
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
These books all deal with weird religious themes, and the last one deals with Dick's relationship with Bishop Pike. Dick was an Episcopalian; Pike was the Bishop who died in the Holy Lands when he and his wife drove off into the desert in a rented car with only two bottles of Coca Cola. I read the book by Pike's wife (much younger than him) who had to leave him and go on herself, hoping to bring help back - but it was too late.

Man in the High Castle was a "much awarded" book, but really, is not SF in the sense of aliens or other worlds. The concept is wild -- set in a United States where the Allies LOST WW2 -- Japanese rule the Western States, Germans rule the Eastern States, with middle of country having pockets of resistance; form here the 'man' writes a book of resistance to the Japanese and German conquerors.

My memory is slipping, I had to edit my above post to correct the movie TERMINATOR to TOTAL RECALL, the Schwarzenegger film based on the short story WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE.

I need to spray some UBIK on myself before my memory goes completely...

Hopefully by now Ubik has finished Ubik.
 
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