Understanding Philip K. Dick

Understanding Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Eric Carl Link
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Understanding Philip K. Dick

Understanding Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Eric Carl Link
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick

The Exegesis of Philip K Dick PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547549253
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1003

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Book Description
"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."-Jonathan Lethem Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.

Understanding Philip K. Dick

Understanding Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Eric Carl Link
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781570038556
Category : Science fiction, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Ubik

Ubik PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547572298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A mind-bending, classic Philip K. Dick novel about the perception of reality. Named as one of Time's 100 best books.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

The Philip K. Dick Reader PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Citadel Press
ISBN: 9780806518565
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Includes the stories that inspired the movies Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Paycheck, and Next "More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds." --The Wall Street Journal The Philip K. Dick Reader Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), Second Variety (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), Paycheck, The Minority Report, and twenty more.

A Life of Philip K. Dick

A Life of Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Anthony Peake
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1782129146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Philip K. Dick was a writer who drew upon his own life to address the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia and transcendental experiences of all kinds. More than 10 major Hollywood movies are based on his work including Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. Born in 1929 just before the Great Crash, Dick's twin sister died when she was a month old and his parents were divorced by the time he was three. In his teens, he began to show the first signs of mental instability, but by then he was already producing fiction writing of a visionary nature.

A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 9780345260642
Category : Impostors and imposture
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself. Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.

The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547572484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

The Best of Philip K. Dick

The Best of Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Echo Point+ORM
ISBN: 1648370004
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Thirteen short stories by the legendary author of The Man in the High Castle and other science fiction classics. Philip K. Dick didn’t predict the future―he summoned the desperate bleakness of our present directly from his fevered paranoia. Dick didn’t predict the Internet or iPhones or email or 3D printers, but rather he so thoroughly understood human nature that he could already see, even at the advent of the transistor, the way technology would alienate us from each other and from ourselves. He could see us isolated and drifting in our own private realities even before we had plugged in our ear buds. He could see, even in the earliest days of space exploration, how much of our own existence remained unexplored, and how the great black spaces between people were growing even as our universe was shrinking. Philip K. Dick spent his first three years as a science fiction author writing shorter fiction, and in his lifetime he composed almost 150 short stories, many of which have gone on to be adapted into (slightly watered down) Hollywood blockbusters. Collected here are thirteen of his most Dickian tales, funhouse realities with trap doors and hidden compartments.

The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick

The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick PDF Author: Kyle Arnold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199743258
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, written by a psychologist, investigates the inner world of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In 1974, Dick was beset by religious visions, and warned police he was an android. The book explores whether Dick's experience was a spiritual awakening or caused by mental illness.