# Philip K. Dick Fans, Take Note! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 25, 2003, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272 "2003-11-25T22:35:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/21 "2003-11-27T01:58:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Yllaria \* > \*\*Wasn’t _Total Recall_ his? It certainly fits his style. \*\* It was based on a Dick short story _We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale_. The movie is quite different from the story. ---
**Author:** ![\_possum\_stalker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/b77776/32.png) [@\_possum\_stalker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_possum_stalker)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/22 "2003-11-27T02:47:25Z")
> [@](#): > > It starts out promising, but then the end reads more like the notes for a novel than an actual fleshed out piece. That’s just me, though. It’s not just you, and it’s not just _FMT,TPS_. A lot of Dick books kind of trail off toward the end. Supposedly this is due to hyperkinetic methamphetamine-driven writing style. For Troma’s sake, look at the ending of _The Man in the High Tower_. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/23 "2003-11-27T03:36:18Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by ShibbOleth \* > \*\*Who _would_ be right for that role? Gary Sinise? \*\* I don’t know. Sinise is a great actor (much better than Tom Hanks, IMHO), but physically, I think that he’s wrong for the role. You need someone who can both stand out in a scene, but blend in as well. Sinise is so _good_ an actor that he tends to outshine the other actors on screen with him. So unless you could find a cast of folks who were of the same calibur as Sinise, I don’t think he’d work (however, I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/24 "2003-11-27T08:58:11Z")
'possum stalker writes: \> A lot of Dick books kind of trail off toward the end. Supposedly \> this is due to hyperkinetic methamphetamine-driven writing \> style. For Troma’s sake, look at the ending of The Man in the \> High Tower. I agree. Many of Dick’s novels look like what they are, the output of a brilliant writer who wrote while taking speed because he desperately needed to finish as many novels as possible in order to get the money fast. That’s why most of them seem to me to be not so much great novels as sloppy novels written by a brilliant author. Dick was capable of tossing out great ideas, but he was careless about tying up plot points, so the endings frequently trail off. Interestingly, though, I think that _The Man in the High Castle_ is probably the least sloppy of his novels and the best of the ones that I’ve read. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/25 "2003-11-27T15:39:39Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Wendell Wagner \* > \*\*Dick was capable of tossing out great ideas, but he was careless about tying up plot points, so the endings frequently trail off. \*\* Also, have you noticed how many of his books are really just extensions of his short stories? ---
**Author:** ![metanet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3e96dc/32.png) [@metanet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/metanet)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2003, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/26 "2003-11-27T22:59:40Z")
I thought exactly the same thing about John Woo (regarding Paycheck)! And I’m also worried about Ben Affleck (I hate him). It’s such a great short story, and it could translate well into an intelligent, cool movie. But at this point, it’s not looking good… Just wanted to mention, it’s _Man in the High Castle_, not tower. Another good story… ---
**Author:** ![gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eb8c5e/32.png) [@gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gentle)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/27 "2003-11-28T04:47:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by adam yax \* > \*\*It was based on a Dick short story _We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale_. The movie is quite different from the story. \*\* To its credit, it’s also the only adaptation which admits, in the opening credits, to be “inspired by” a story by Philip K. Dick. The phrase “based on”, by convention, implies some degree of faithfulness. In the “making of” documentary included on the DVD, the writer of the film praises PKD and talks briefly about Dick’s paranoid worldviews and reality shifts and how they integrated a little bit of that into the film. It’s a bubblegum movie, though. ---
**Author:** ![gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eb8c5e/32.png) [@gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gentle)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/28 "2003-11-28T05:09:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Wendell Wagner \* > **… wrote while taking speed because he desperately needed to finish as many novels as possible in order to get the money fast. That’s why most of them seem to me to be not so much great novels as sloppy novels written by a brilliant author.** One of PKD’s best and most underrated (especially by the author himself) novels is the unlikely _Galactic Pot-Healer_ (1969), which was also, if I remember correctly, the most amphetamine-clouded production of his career. It’s a funny, sad, surreal book full of unusually colourful imagery, about a mender of pottery who starts receiving odd notes – one of them he finds floating in the toilet reservoir – from someone who turns out to be a sort of demigod, who needs craftspeople from all over the universe to help him with something on his home planet. Strongly influenced (as was so much of Dick’s writing) by gnostic cosmology, the description of the creature itself, and the protagonist’s initial meeting with it, is classic. The plot structure is wonderful, and it certainly doesn’t fizzle out in the end. I don’t think PKD’s works were harmed by his drug use, quite on the contrary. During the 1950s he wrote some well-meaning but ultimately _boring_ mainstream novels (_Mary and the Giant_, _The Broken Bubble_ etc.). They had the Dick voice, but not the magic touch. His earliest works, much influenced by Vonnegut and Van Vogt, are also much weaker and simplistic than his later, mature fiction. _Time Out of Joint_ begins the trend, followed by _High Castle_ and _Martian Time-Slip_. Every few years he puts out an odd clunker (_The Crack in Space_, _Counter-Clock World_) that harks back to the early days, like he had forgotten how to write intelligent stories. (He also wrote a lot of nice short stories, over a hundred of them, but only the last 20 or so – _A Little Something For Us Tempunauts_, _Faith of Our Fathers_, _The Electric Ant_, _I Hope I Shall Arive Soon_ – are truly brilliant.) ---
**Author:** ![gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eb8c5e/32.png) [@gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gentle)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/29 "2003-11-28T05:42:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by 'possum stalker \* > \*\*It’s not just you, and it’s not just _FMT,TPS_. A lot of Dick books kind of trail off toward the end. Supposedly this is due to hyperkinetic methamphetamine-driven writing style. For Troma’s sake, look at the ending of _The Man in the High Tower_. \*\* Dick admitted to not being able to think up a proper ending for _Castle_. Throughout the writing process, he had relied on the I-Ching to the plot the novel, and when it came time to write the final chapters, he felt the I-C had in some cosmically duplicitous way let him down (“the oracle”, he said, spoke in a “forked tongue”). Personally, as frustrating as the ending is, I love it, and I think it’s the only way it could end. ( **Spoilers ahead**.) The main characters seeks out the “man in the high castle”, the author of _The Grasshopper Lies Heavy_, looking for answers to their nagging feeling of unreality, and of course – they only face disappointment. The author doesn’t live in a high castle. He’s an ordinary guy who wrote a controversial book. The answers, if any, must be spiritual and/or philosophical, and ultimately personal. Is the book “true”, in the sense that it refers to an actual reality in which the Allies won WWII? That’s left unanswered. ( **End of spoilers**.) The book poses the questions and leaves the reader to ponder them. Note that it’s strictly not an “ending-less” book, since by the final page the “character arcs” are complete, the themes consummated, major plot points done with. It’s a book without a traditionally satisfying ending because there can be none. Reality never “ends”; the book leaves us with characters that face their own reality, their own moral decisions, their own lives. In a sense, reality begins when the novel ends. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/30 "2003-11-28T14:40:44Z")
gentle writes: \> One of PKD’s best and most underrated (especially by the \> author himself) novels is the unlikely Galactic Pot-Healer (1969), \> which was also, if I remember correctly, the most amphetamine- \> clouded production of his career. I think that _Galactic Pot-Healer_ came just after the books that were written on amphetamines. The period during which he was writing like crazy in order to make enough money was 1962 through 1966. _The Man in the High Castle_ was written in 1961 just before this period. The novels written in 1962 through 1966 were the following: _We Can Build You_ _Martian Time-Slip_ _Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb_ _The Game-Players of Titan_ _The Simulacra_ _Now Wait for Last Year_ _Clans of the Alphane Moon_ _The Crack in Space_ _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch_ _The Zap Gun_ _The Penultimate Truth_ _The Unteleported Man_ (_Lies, Inc._) _Counter-Clock World_ _The Preserving Machine_ _The Ganymede Takeover_ _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ _The Glimmung of Plowman’s Planet_ (_Nick and the Glimming_) _Ubik_ That’s 18 novels in 5 years. Some of them weren’t published until a couple years later. _The Glimmung of Plowman’s Planet_ wasn’t published until after Dick’s death. Perhaps it’s not that surprising that he might be doing so much speed at that point. A friend who’s old enough to be an adult in that period tells me that lots of people were doing amphetimines in that period. This is just about the time when they became a common thing prescribed by doctors but before it was realized how bad it could be to use them regularly. I would summarize Dick’s career by saying that he slowly improved his writing style until by the time of writing _The Man in the High Castle_ (written in 1961), at which point he understood story structure and writing style as well as he was ever going to. At that point he began to write like crazy to have enough money to support his family. His then-wife now admits that they were spending their money (which would have been enough to support them in reasonable comfort if they had been careful) like crazy, and they desperately needed lots of money from her jewelry business and his writing to support themselves and their daughters. He wrote like crazy for the next five years. There are lots of brilliant ideas in the novels of that period, and perhaps it’s true that some of them were due to the drugs. They were sloppy though and had lots of dropped plot points. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/31 "2003-11-28T14:59:20Z")
In _Radio Free Albemuth_, his last book (which is semi-autobiographical) he claims that he never did any ‘dope’. 18 books in 5 years seems to indicate that he did not sleep too much. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/32 "2003-11-28T15:21:58Z")
He didn’t use a lot of marihuana. He only tried LSD a couple of times. He did though use a lot of amphetamines in that period (1962 though 1966). What’s got to be understood though is how mainstream the use of amphetamines were in that period. Lots of people did too much drugs in the 1960’s, and the hippie use of marihuana and LSD were only a part of it. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/33 "2003-11-28T15:28:07Z")
I wrote: \> . . . lots of people were doing amphetimines in that period . . . I misspelled “amphetimine.” It should be “amphetamine.” \> . . . he slowly improved his writing style until by the time of \> writing . . . That should be “. . . he slowly improved his writing style up to the time of writing . . .” So what explains my writing mistakes? Have I been using drugs? Or did I just not get enough sleep? ---
**Author:** ![KidCharlemagne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ed8c4c/32.png) [@KidCharlemagne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KidCharlemagne)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/34 "2003-11-28T17:32:45Z")
I haven’t read any Philip K. Dick but I knew that Total Recall, Minority Report, and Bladerunner were based on his novels/short stories. When I saw the commercial for Paycheck I said, “Gee this sounds like a Philip K. Dick story.” Then I saw the credits. ---
**Author:** ![Zebra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c0e974/32.png) [@Zebra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zebra)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2003, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/35 "2003-11-28T21:32:22Z")
I wonder if there will be a movie made true to his book sensibilities. SPOILERS! General Notes on PKD books and the films. Minority Report IN the book the main charactger sacrifices himself to save PreCrime. He views the society as more important then the whole. In the film, nothing is more important than the individual. Total Recall Well the short story was funny. The movie was a straight action fest, with some humor, but really it just starts with the same set up and goes to a completly different ending. Blade Runner, in the book, Deckard is MARRIED, and a total loser, he is dreams and dreams of getting a real animal of his own. A large chunk of the book is dedicated to a religion that Deckard follows. Of course all of that is dumped for the movie so he can fall in luuuvvvvee with Rachel. I do think Ubik would be a great movie but now it would be another one of those, he was dead all along movies. ---
**Author:** ![MoodIndigo1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@MoodIndigo1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MoodIndigo1)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2003, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/36 "2003-11-29T02:42:01Z")
Just a note for Philip K. Dick fans : as of tonight the [www.philipkdick.com](http://www.philipkdick.com) site will become the official site of the PKD succession. A number of hitherto unpublished texts are supposed to be featured there, as well as candid photos from family albums. I have no connection with the site, so I hope nobody will consider this spam. 🙂 As for the _A Scanner Darkly_ rumours, it is said that the movie will be animation. I just don’t see it. ---
**Author:** ![Carabeo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Carabeo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carabeo)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2003, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/37 "2003-12-09T08:28:24Z")
I’d like to see the one who ports The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch to the silver screen, it’s a hard work. ---
**Author:** ![Grousser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9d8465/32.png) [@Grousser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grousser)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2003, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/38 "2003-12-10T03:35:10Z")
I’d like to welcome **Carabeo** to the SDMB, he’s an old friend of mine and a great PKD fan, too. For me the hardest work in making a movie from a Philip K. Dick plot is to catch his “sensation of doom”. A great depression is felt in the main characters while you are reading. You feel as it something very bad is happening in the background, but you don’t know what it is (even if nothing happens at last) and none of the movies has made me feel that. Maybe _Minority Report_ did it in some fashion, but the result was confusing, I think, because of the actual avalanche of twisted-ending plots in cinema. ---
**Author:** ![ISiddiqui](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/97f17d/32.png) [@ISiddiqui](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ISiddiqui)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2003, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/39 "2003-12-10T04:00:38Z")
> [@](#): > > And I have mixed feelings about Paycheck. Me too. I saw the latest trailer and apparently they are saying that in his memory wipe there was something that could destroy the world (or something), turning the movie into a remember what was erased to save the world movie. Ugh… the story was much better: remember what was erased for personal financial gain ---
**Author:** ![Carabeo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Carabeo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carabeo)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2003, 7:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272/40 "2003-12-11T07:51:58Z")
Thanx my fine friend. I haven’t had read all Dick novels, but for me, the most disturbed one was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch, that’s why i was mentioned that novel before. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-k-dick-fans-take-note/215272.md?page=3)