Anodyne
Saturday, May 07, 2005
 
Someone writes to ask, "Which of Philip K. Dick's novels would you recommend?", adding, "I don't read a lot of science fiction."

A Scanner Darkly

Radio Free Albemuth

The Man in the High Castle

In Milton Lumky Territory

The Dark-Haired Girl

Puttering About in a Small Land

The Broken Bubble

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

Ubik

Divine Invasions, Lawrence Sutin's excellent biography

This list includes some pretty obscure books. Ubik, Man, and Scanner are all in print as Vintage trade paperbacks. Radio Free Albemuth is a $10-15 pocket book from the used bookseller of your choice. The others are seriously OP and expensive when you do find them, but I'm not recommending them as a book dealer or collector, but as a reader. By and large these are "mainstream" -- non-SF -- novels unpublished during Dick's lifetime, unique in their tart appraisal of West Coast life in the late 1950s and 1960s. I'd put Milton Lumky and The Dark-Haired Girl up there with John Updike's Rabbit books in terms of their influence on me, definitive proof that literary realism is a pretty big yard to play in.

- posted by cjb @ 7:59 AM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }