This is an amazing collection of critical essays on PKD that I think is pretty hard to find. A friend found my copy at a library discard sale. The essays are pedantic as hell but they have a sing-song quality that's kind of nice. Peter Fitting in his essay "'Ubik': The Deconstruction of the Bourgeois SF" writes:
The traditional "representational novel" functions in this way as an ideological support for capitalism: it reinforces the a transcendental conception of reality which mystifies [poll: does he get the pun he's just made discussing Ubik?] the actual reality of the capitalist mode of production and the resultant repression and alienation.
The book even has charts:
Here's the weird part - this edition was published in 1983 - check out the blurb on the back:
"...has at last begun to receive the recognition he deserves..." ??
Here it is twenty-four years later and I still see that sentence in every PKD article I read... Something is out of joint; what could it possibly be?
1 comment:
The Guardian in the UK always has someone saying 'at last, Philip K Dick's writing receives the treatment it deserves' whenever a film based on one of his stories comes out. They did it with A Scanner Darkly and they also did it with Minority Report, amazingly. They've yet to do so with Next, though. Can't think why...
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