6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More handshake than introduction, August 2, 2008
This review is from: Vintage PKD (Paperback)
In the quarter-century since Philip K. Dick's death, Hollywood has trounced us with multiple adaptations of his work. A partial list would include Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Each of these films does something different, but what none of them, with a couple of possible exceptions, manage to do is fully expose the viewer to the conceptual richness and edge-of-sanity viewpoint of Dick's work.
This anthology from Vintage Books, Vintage PKD, aims to change that for neophyte readers of the PKD canon. Contained within this slim volume (less than 190 pages) are a couple of short stories, an essay or two by the man himself, and chapters excerpted from several of his novels. Wisely, the Vintage editors stayed away from the works that have been adapted for the screen, as well as some of the more heavily anthologized works, such as his 1959 story "Time Out of Joint." Since PKD was so prolific -- despite dying at age 53, he managed to get more than thirty novels and hundreds of short stories published -- this left a lot to choose from. Of the works excerpted here, the best-known one may be The Man in the High Castle, the 1962 alternate history of an America divvied up between the Japanese and Nazi Germany after the Allies lose WWII, which won PKD a Hugo Award.
As a sketch of the artist's development and talent, Vintage PKD is successful, in that the alert reader will discover the strength and flow of his writing, the progression of his abilities and the warmth and good humor that ran hand-in-hand with his paranoia and deep-seated rage against the universe and its injustices. However, as even an incomplete portrait of the concepts PKD struggled with, this volume is an unqualified failure.
The majority of PKD's work revolved, even early in his career, around questions of reality and identity, individuality vs. autonomic reflex, and very little of that is seen here. Only the short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" and the essay "The Zebra Papers" explore this in any detail, leaving the rest of the works here to either hint vaguely in that direction or ignore it altogether. Considering that most of PKD's works delved into this at length, not addressing these concepts in richer detail does an injustice to his work.
Additionally, the matter of his personal exegesis, a document that explains or interprets scriptural writings, is left unaddressed. In the 1970s, PKD had a massive religious experience, one that colored his thinking and philosophical explorations for the rest of his life. Several of his novels, including VALIS and Galactic Pot-Healer, can trace their lineage directly to this experience, and PKD himself documented this experience and its intellectual aftershocks for years. Only a few oblique references in "The Zebra Papers" and the chapters from VALIS even mention this. To read an overview of PKD that doesn't touch on this or the questions of reality and humanity is like reading an overview of Nietzsche that fails to mention the übermensch.
Overall, Vintage PKD is not a bad anthology; the works within are well-written and enjoyable, and may serve as a nice reminder to people who are passing familiar with his work but haven't read any in a while. For the uninitiated, however, the picture this book presents is frustratingly brief and tantalizingly incomplete. No electric sheep need apply.
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