Three Novels by Philip K. Dick

Superpithy comments about philip k. dick novels that i read over the last month. All three are short, all three are interesting, all three are fun and best read at Night, Alone (seems Obvious, i know), with uninterrupted classical music playing in the background courtesy of WETA 90.9 FM. You should go to their website and donate some money, because i haven't yet and probably won't because i assume that somebody (or in the worst case, The Government) will (The Lighthouse Problem).

1. Ubik

Ubik is creepy. Its characters find themselves in an existentialist crisis that doesn't seem to end, except for some of them, one at a time, when they (apparently, possibly, or maybe not at all?) Die. Reminded me of The Sheltering Sky, which if you've never read, you need to, especially if you're ever going to go to North Africa or if you sometimes think it'd be Really Fun to go get Lost in a Desert where you don't speak the Language (because the Reality is: it will Not be Fun; it will just be a Reality you aren't built to Cope with, and this will make you profoundly unhappy and possibly sick and finally, possibly, Dead). Faith plays a big role in Ubik--I like this quote from Tessa Dick, Philip's ex-wife, about what she thought Ubik was all about: "Ubik is a metaphor for God. Ubik is all-powerful and all-knowing, and Ubik is everywhere. The spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make it easy for people to understand it and use it. It is not the substance inside the can that helps them, but rather their faith in the promise that it will help them."

2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Empathy looms large in this book. Bladerunner was based on it. What's the Point: if you lose your Empathy, you lose your Humanity. if you never had any Empathy, you probably weren't ever Human. it's important to be Empathetic towards all living things, including spiders and possibly even robots (androids) that are trying to kill you.

3. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

My favorite out of these three books. Reality is Questioned. Like other Dick novels (Ubik and A Scanner Darkly come to mind), the whole thing feels like it plays out under a low and heavy and unfriendly sky that might just be the roof of a tv/movie studio. There are a couple of conversations in here about the meaning/definition of Love and Death, and the connections between the two. They read like Socratic Dialogues, and reach similar conclusions as Socrates and his mates did on the same subjects in Phaedrus (regarding Love) and Phaedo (regarding Death). No, i do not spend my days thinking in Syllogisms or boiling things down into Categorical Semantics. But i do remember having learned about them way back when.