Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

 What specifically did you hate about The Man in the High Castle? I think it's a masterpiece. Not only is it an early and original example of alternate history, but it's well written, and has wonderful characters. I love how PKD tells his story through the lives of little people. Also, pound for pound, it has an amazing amount of creative ideas in it, far more than most science fiction novels.

Philip K. Dick is much different from other science fiction writers. It's funny how were all so different, and resonate with different writers. I took to PKD when I first discovered him in high school. The first book I remember reading was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It was 1968 and I can still see it on the new 7-day book shelf. I was at the Coconut Grove Library branch, in Miami, Florida. I pulled it down because of the strange cover. I took it home and read it, and thought it very weird indeed. I really didn't start getting into PKD until later though, around 1973 or 1974, when I started doing drugs regularly, and was blown away by The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I gave up drugs a couple years later, and sort of forgot PKD for a while. Then I got him to him again, when I started reading his mainstream novels that started coming out. Then I rediscovered him again with his Valis books. My favorite PKD novel is Confessions of a Crap Artist. I wrote about rereading it not long ago at my blog.  

http://auxiliarymemory.com/2013/01/08/confessions-of-a-crap-artist-by-philip-k-dick/

Here's an interesting video review for our group: Smackdown between The Caves of Steel vs. Double Star.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2015/05/video-starshipsofa-gives-asimov-vs-heinlein-smackdown/

I posted my perceived winner to the SFSignal site.

That's two people who said they might have been too young to enjoy PKD. That's interesting. One criticism of science fiction from the outside world is it's too much for young adults. So maybe PDK is atypical because he's more mature. A lot of science fiction has young people as protagonists, and often PKD had men that were older, often divorced, sometimes with a kid. They were regular guys, struggling with their jobs, dealing with bosses and wives.  I can see where that wouldn't appeal to younger readers. PKD was known as a druggie writer, but often his science fictional drugs were just substitutes for mental illness. There's a lot of mental illness is his stories. I can see where that would be a turn off for young people too.

One reason I've read The Martian Time-Slip several times is because the characters are struggling with mundane real-life problems, even though the setting is Mars. Like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick's Mars, is just 1950s America transported to another planet. Actually, Bradbury was more of the 1930s America. Dick always reflected the 1950s, and to an extent the 1960s, but mostly he was a 1950s person. His drug use was never psychedelic, but had the feel of troubled people of the 1950s. Y'all might not know this, but the 1950s were obsessed with psychiatry.

 So PKD's work is focused on 1950s mental problems, rather than 1950s dreams of conquering space. 

 I hate when authors revise their science fiction. Fixing things means we don't get to see how they originally extrapolated.