![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Addenda Context: Some outfit called the Library of America have made a very safe choice of Dick's novels and have released them in an omnibus edition. I envisage this as Readers Digest, only full text. A service so you can keep up with the Zeitgeist. Whilst some people still say Dick's nothing more than a hack, other people are wetting themselves in the excitement that he has arrived! The release of Next is possibly to blame - I read one piece saying that Dick had written at least seven novels. I dreamt the thirty others then.
Now the mighty New York Times havewritten up a press release declared that Dick has arrived, which is news to us who have been somewhat aware that he's been here, albeit only after he died, aside from in France where they caught on by the mid-1970s. See here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/06mcgr.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&th&emc=th and reach for the cod.
I don't think the author of this piece shows any evidence of having read any PKD - maybe this review of Carrere http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7DC1430F933A15755C0A9629C8B63&fta=y, but he trots out the cliches - drugs, FBI, many wives, misquotes the Ace Double Bible joke and says:
"So for the most part you don’t read Mr. Dick for his prose. (The main exception is “The Man in the High Castle,” his most sustained and most assured attempt at mainstream respectability, and it’s barely a sci-fi book at all but, rather, what we would now call a “counterfactual”; its premise is that the Allies lost World War II and the United States is ruled by the Japanese in the west and the Nazis in the east.) Nor do you read him for the science, the way you do, say, Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein."
Asimov on Science for the Science, maybe, but not the Foundation trilogy. Or any of it. And Alternate History would do nicely. (I suspect if you check the book it's Nazis in the south but I would swear to that)
Anyway, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden skewers it at Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008949.html) and the description of the article as "writing whose main purpose is to explain to anxious readers whether it’s socially acceptable to like this stuff or not" is spot on to me.
So Dick is no longer neglected so that people can write things like this: http://books.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1300681.php/Sci-Fi_writer_Philip_K._Dick_goes_from_neglected_to_accepted
Apparently the pubic is slow. The what?
Sheesh.
Dig deeper and you can find that [the person who summarised the NYT piece at Monsters and Critics admits]
"I did some interesting posts, one where I talk about Philip K. Dick's neglect as a writer, and mention James Emanuel. I've never actually read Philip K. Dick, (but I've heard good things) and I took it as a chance to speak about how the great artists rise and the mediocre fall away."
(http://jaschneider.blogspot.com/2007/05/monsters-critics-updates-general.html)
Unbuh-leavable.
I wonder where this "trolls and wackos" characterisation of his fans comes from? Sounds more like the people jumping on the bandwagon.
Now the mighty New York Times have
I don't think the author of this piece shows any evidence of having read any PKD - maybe this review of Carrere http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7DC1430F933A15755C0A9629C8B63&fta=y, but he trots out the cliches - drugs, FBI, many wives, misquotes the Ace Double Bible joke and says:
"So for the most part you don’t read Mr. Dick for his prose. (The main exception is “The Man in the High Castle,” his most sustained and most assured attempt at mainstream respectability, and it’s barely a sci-fi book at all but, rather, what we would now call a “counterfactual”; its premise is that the Allies lost World War II and the United States is ruled by the Japanese in the west and the Nazis in the east.) Nor do you read him for the science, the way you do, say, Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein."
Asimov on Science for the Science, maybe, but not the Foundation trilogy. Or any of it. And Alternate History would do nicely. (I suspect if you check the book it's Nazis in the south but I would swear to that)
Anyway, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden skewers it at Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008949.html) and the description of the article as "writing whose main purpose is to explain to anxious readers whether it’s socially acceptable to like this stuff or not" is spot on to me.
So Dick is no longer neglected so that people can write things like this: http://books.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1300681.php/Sci-Fi_writer_Philip_K._Dick_goes_from_neglected_to_accepted
Apparently the pubic is slow. The what?
Sheesh.
Dig deeper and you can find that [the person who summarised the NYT piece at Monsters and Critics admits]
"I did some interesting posts, one where I talk about Philip K. Dick's neglect as a writer, and mention James Emanuel. I've never actually read Philip K. Dick, (but I've heard good things) and I took it as a chance to speak about how the great artists rise and the mediocre fall away."
(http://jaschneider.blogspot.com/2007/05/monsters-critics-updates-general.html)
Unbuh-leavable.
I wonder where this "trolls and wackos" characterisation of his fans comes from? Sounds more like the people jumping on the bandwagon.
Tags: