Lost Weekend with Phil Dick
Jun. 2nd, 2009 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkBeing sick over a weekend seems like such a gyp. I even took two sick days last week (the first I've taken in over 4 years at QLogic) in an attempt to get better quicker. I was doing okay with the cold symptoms when the damn thing mutated on Saturday into a nasty little "stomach flu" (the worst kind of sick, imho). And as icing on the cake [cake. food. *blurghhh*] I had to stop taking my cough meds because I couldn't keep anything down and my cough got worse.
Since I couldn't really go anywhere or even think straight, I figured why not spend the weekend reading a little PK Dick as a followup to the "800 Words..." play on Friday. I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which I liked quite a bit, and Ubik, which I liked somewhat less. In Ubik he seems to be straining to follow that stupid 800-word guideline, and after a while it's just annoying intellectual whiplash. Androids, on the other hand, flowed along perfectly naturally.
Both books were written in the 60's, before Dick's psychotic break/conversation with God, and are perfectly coherent. However, having just been steeped in them, I had no trouble identifying the familiar pathological tropes. Both of these books have a lonely POV character who is unable to relate to the people around him in any but the most superficial ways, and both books revolve around two obsessions: "the world is disintegrating around me" and "it is entirely possible that none of the people I know are real." I think both themes work better in Androids. For one thing, the inclusion of animal ownership as a touchstone for empathy is a brilliant touch, given Dick's shortcomings as a writer and as a person. Clearly, he could relate to animals better than to people, so the pets give the book a little bit of genuine emotional resonance that is totally missing in Ubik.
I was curious to see how the issue "Is Deckart a replicant or not?" was handled in the book. Interestingly enough, it is not really handled at all. It comes up a lot - a number of the people Deckart meets (and practically all of the androids) suggest that he might be one himself, but given his yearning response to animals this is almost certainly not the case. In any event, the question is never explicitly addressed and certainly not resolved. I don't think the reader is supposed to believe that Deckart is an android, just that he often feels like one. As did the author, pretty clearly.
Since I couldn't really go anywhere or even think straight, I figured why not spend the weekend reading a little PK Dick as a followup to the "800 Words..." play on Friday. I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which I liked quite a bit, and Ubik, which I liked somewhat less. In Ubik he seems to be straining to follow that stupid 800-word guideline, and after a while it's just annoying intellectual whiplash. Androids, on the other hand, flowed along perfectly naturally.
Both books were written in the 60's, before Dick's psychotic break/conversation with God, and are perfectly coherent. However, having just been steeped in them, I had no trouble identifying the familiar pathological tropes. Both of these books have a lonely POV character who is unable to relate to the people around him in any but the most superficial ways, and both books revolve around two obsessions: "the world is disintegrating around me" and "it is entirely possible that none of the people I know are real." I think both themes work better in Androids. For one thing, the inclusion of animal ownership as a touchstone for empathy is a brilliant touch, given Dick's shortcomings as a writer and as a person. Clearly, he could relate to animals better than to people, so the pets give the book a little bit of genuine emotional resonance that is totally missing in Ubik.
I was curious to see how the issue "Is Deckart a replicant or not?" was handled in the book. Interestingly enough, it is not really handled at all. It comes up a lot - a number of the people Deckart meets (and practically all of the androids) suggest that he might be one himself, but given his yearning response to animals this is almost certainly not the case. In any event, the question is never explicitly addressed and certainly not resolved. I don't think the reader is supposed to believe that Deckart is an android, just that he often feels like one. As did the author, pretty clearly.
