Specifically reread Ubik, Dick’s best novel, Better than The Man in the High Castle which is more accessible to most readers.

Dick takes us on a wild ride to explore the nature of reality. Full of philosophical, psychological ideas, and whatever Dick chooses to throw in.

Dull it is not. Funny it is at times, cynical throughout, and Dick takes on commercial culture, wealth, happiness and even advertising.

Would make a great, very bizarre, movie or series in the right hands. ( )

Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess the first of these got turned into a tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to finally dip in.

The Man in the High Castle
Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist, and the only won to win): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.

Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.

The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.

Library of America editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
None of the other three are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.

In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)

The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.

One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about.

The best of Dick's novels from the golden years
Priority: Ubik (greatest), Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. ( )

Ubik-did have trouble keeping everything straight at times & didn’t guess the plot ( )

Hoo, boy. Judging by these four novels, which in this Library of America edition are supplemented by a year-by-year chronology of the author's life; a note on the inspirations for these novels; and very informative historical notes; Philip Kindred Dick was a supremely inventive but troubled writer. As I read through these novels between Wednesday, July 30, 2014 (when I bought this Library of America (www.loa.org) omnibus) and 12:30 am American EDT today; I thought, I'd never want to live in the worlds PKD dreamed up. Too grim. To describe the books I needed to consult the front and back flaps of the omnibus I just finished. *The Man in the High Castle*, which was published in 1962 and won the Hugo Award (science fiction's highest honor, for the best science fiction novel of the year, as voted by the fans at the next year's World Science Fiction convention) in 1963, is an alternate history in which Japan and Germany won World War II and the United States is chopped into occupied territories. *The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch* (published in 1965) shows us an Earth, devastated by climate change, in which competing hallucinogens reveal different virtual-reality experiences, and an interplanetary drug lord sets himself up as God. In *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* (1968), made by Ridley Scott into the 1982 movie *Blade Runner*, a bounty hunter pursuing escaped androids (artificial humans) in a postapocalyptic world, is irrevocably changed by one of them. Finally, *Ubik* (1969) may be the strangest book I've read in a very long time, dealing with parallel realities, decay and death, and an elusive panacea in spray-bottle form. Despite (or maybe because of) their weirdness, these stories are riveting. ( )