What do I read after Philip K. Dick?
>>23977133WS Burroughs
>>23977251are any of his books at all revelatory sci-fi?
>>23977251Ty anon
>>23977252Nope. PKD was pretty unique, even if his sentence-to-sentence smithing wasn't great.Some of the SF New Wave writers experimented with schizo-ish writing in certain novels (Disch, Delany, Aldiss...), but they still weren't too similar to PKD.
>>23977324i've read all PKD's main titles and have swooped back around for the lesser titles many timeshe really is something specialhe was definitely some kind of precog as far as where the world was headingi feel bad that he had a hard life and didn't really see any appreciation until after his passinghe'll only be more right over time, i'm sure
>wrote 40+ novels>out of them you could, *maybe*, call 3 or 4 solid and only 1 actually good (Scanner Darkly)>awful lumpen-maladroit prose>most of his body of work is pure speedfreak benzedrine gibberish written for volume, barely readable>WHOA DUDE WHAT IF REALITY BUT TOO MUCH>muh Gnosticism Stop doing drugs and get your act together
>>23977133>science fiction schizophreniaOP, it's time you encountered the real thing.
>>23977405it's just a hokey New Age attempt at producing a Bible. It's not even nearly as engaging as PKDs fiction writing.
>>23977133Something better and funnier.
>>23977413>it's just a hokey New Age attempt at producing a BibleI haven't read the whole thing but this really doesn't describe it at all. It's extremely 'alien' and can't be just be fit into this little description. Trying to explain it as 'hokey' is also really misleading.>It's not even nearly as engaging as PKDs fiction writing.From what small amount I've read of it I really have to disagree with you. The parts leading up to Jesus' crucifixion are far better written than what I've read of PKD, and I say this as someone loving the man to death.
It's pretty difficult to find something as weird and mind-blowing as PKD. Two that come to mind are "The Rituals Of Infinity" by Michael Moorcock and "The Lathe Of Heaven" by Ursula K. LeGuin.
>>23977133
>>23977133Eat a wubb
>>23977252>are any of his books at all revelatory sci-fi?Cities of the Red Night is a class-warfare scifi where meme-characters transition through genres by suicidal orgasm hanging.
>>23977327>he was definitely some kind of precog as far as where the world was headingNot really, everyone that wasn’t a retard knew where the world was heading.
>>23977935You're giving other people way too much credit. PKD was a visionary.
>>23977133He looks Australian.
>>23977133I find the way that Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster plot their stories very reminiscent of PKD. From their books and interviews I've inferred that they all plotted their stories the same way; none of them used definite outlines, none of them know where their stories were going to lead when they started writing them. Instead they trusted their intuition and just made them up as they went along, essentially letting their stories surprise them. I find that this method makes for some really unexpected twists, tonal shifts and a generally dreamlike atmosphere. I honestly don't see the point of reading or writing stories that don't have that "anything could happen" type of feeling.I guess Stephen King would also fall into this camp of non-outlining intuitive storytellers, although I don't find his stories nearly as masterful as those of the forementioned writers.
>>23979083But yeah, neither of those authors wrote scifi, save for some scifi elements in Murakami's fiction, so there aren't many similarities in that respect. But basically all of them wrote philosophical adventure stories with psychological elements, so to me their books have a very similar feel to them, regardless of their superficial genre markers. I guess you could argue that PKD's, as well as Murakami's and Auster's fiction falls into the, very loosely defined, slipstream genre of fiction, though.
>>23977133i think after Philip K Dick, I would try Honore de Balsac
>>23977133Adjacent request of mine, I just read Valis (first PKD for me), loved it, considering fashioning a more psychotic persona myself to send it globetrotting.What do I read next by PKD?
>>23979386The Divine Invasion. It's sort of a (thematic) sequel; it's also about search for God. Easily one of the best PKD novels along with Valis etc.
>>23977133Lem
>>23979126Why would I honor the ballsack?
>>23977133Obviously, A. E. Van Vogt. PKD made no bones about his debt to Van Vogt, and if you read Slan or the Null-A books you'll be right in PKD territory. The main difference (aside from the heretical Christianity) being that Van Vogt liked heroes and spectacle, and Dick favored 'the little guy' and deflation. Dick was quite literate and a little pretentious about it, so you'll see interviews where he praises Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Moby Dick, Borges, and (of course) the Bible and the Greeks, etc, and it's arguable that there's some Kafka and Borges in Dick's work. But really, his stuff is simply Van Vogt rendered more subtle and better written. Van Vogt said that his plots and scenes derived from dreams, which I suspect is another debt Dick owes.Dick (and also Van Vogt) owe something to Raymond Chandler. Not style, God knows, but Chandler's way of cobbling novels together. He would take Black Mask short stories and jam them together till they added up to something novel-length, at which point he try to connect the disjoint plot points and characters up. (Not always successfully.) This is where VV and PKD got those 'turn on a dime' plot lines and sharp incongruities. In many ways all three authors were ancestors of the mashup.
Per>>23977426Robert Anton Wilson & Kenneth Grant, on the occult side of things. Robbe-Grillet on the surreal/abstract noir side of it.
>>23981784Great stuff and great recommendations, thanks, not OP myself but I really appreciate it, you seem to know your Dick well and I’m also someone who’s been looking for stuff that would satisfy my hunger for more Dick besides just rereading more Dick. Which itself is OK so far as it goes, but I think there’s more to life than just rereading an author you like endlessly.>>23977426I think Illuminatus is great as a zany novel-of-ideas, but in terms of technical and artistic merits as a novelist, PKD is way better. Especially when you take into account the accumulated corpus of PKD’s great novels, many of which are worthy of being dubbed sci-fi classics, with there being maybe at least a dozen of these he wrote throughout his lifetime (also largely helped by his speed habit, of course, but then he also wrote some of his best ones like A Scanner Darkly and VALIS after kicking speed, so it wasn’t just the amphetamines that made him a genius). Illuminatus is great if you are openminded and interested enough to be turned on by the plots, ideas, and storylines it engages with, but also suffers from some maximalistic and rambling bloat, and without as great a style as other infamous maximalists (like Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, even Pynchon) have that makes their bloat justifiable for some.RAW really shone in nonfiction, in my humble opinion. Prometheus Rising, Cosmic Trigger, The New Inquisition, and Quantum Psychology are all very worth reading if PKD and his ideas turned your brain on. And especially if you liked Illuminatus. PKD also would use many of his novels as frameworks to express ideas or thought-experiments he found fascinating, sure, he’s “guilty” of that too. He even called himself, in some interview, fundamentally a philosopher or someone engaged in philosophical ideas and using novels as a way to express them. But I think it was in a conciser form and also with more of a novelist’s sense of creating interesting characters, storylines, dialogue, etc. that would keep your attention and also move the reader when necessary. But sure, Illuminatus is a good follow-up to Dick.
