Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik (Library of America No. 173) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Jonathan Lethem (Editor) "FOR a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail..." (more)
Key Phrases: moratorium owner, conapt building, kidney balm, Palmer Eldritch, Phil Resch, Joe Chip (more...)

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Product Description

Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him." Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.

About the Author

Jonathan Lethem, editor, is the author of six novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude; a story collection, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye; a novella, This Shape We're In; and a book of essays, The Disappointment Artist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among other places.

"Dick's great accomplishment was to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation." Jonathan Lethem

Product Details

• Hardcover: 900 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; Third printing edition (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530097
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530094
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #16,054 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive PKD, June 7, 2007

By	Doug Mackey (Fairfield, IA USA) - See all my reviews

In the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WHETHER FAN OR NEWBIE, THIS IS A MUST-HAVE, April 1, 2008

By	Allen Smalling "Constant Reader," (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Library of America (LoA) has issued a volume of Philip K. Dick's novels from the 1960's, and in so doing has legitimized PKD as a "classic" American author -- in this case an author of science fiction. You can get this volume by subscribing to the LoA, or by getting it thru Amazon, which at this time is far the cheaper method. (The main difference between the two vols. is that the LoA version comes in blue cloth with a slipcase, while the release to bookstores -- Amazon included -- is a regular hardback with a dust jacket.)

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE does not take place in the future, as conventional sci-fi does. It is set in the time and place Dick wrote it -- San Francisco in the early 1960s. It is the past that has changed. FDR was assassinated in 1936; his successor, President John N. Garner, remained too isolationlist to re-arm America in the face of growing Nazi and Japanese threats. As a result, the USA lost World War Two, the eastern and midwestern parts of America going to the Nazis; California and the Pacific Northwest to the Japanese. In between lies a Rocky Mountain redoubt called the "CSA," chief city Denver, which is where the novel's multiple, shocking climaxes take place.

HIGH CASTLE has compelling plotworks along two story lines, but what the initial reader will notice is how the Japanese influence postwar San Francisco and how, eventually, they stop being the dictators as much as gentle giants atop of the government and business elite. The story with the Germans in the East is far more gruesome, and fortunately for us is related by one character, a Jew "in the closet," because the Japanese-held CSA would probably have extradited him to the Nazi East Coast for, apparently, what we all fear from Nazis.

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH takes place in the "not-too-distant future," on an Earth that has almost globally-warmed itself to death. The main character lives in a co-op block in "Marilyn Monroe," a suburb of New York City. On a normal day, the temperature hits 180 degrees F. and ordinary people go and come only after dark, or with the help of intermediaries like pre-chilled taxis.

PKD was good friends with sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, and the Heinlein touch is apparent not only in the satiric tone of the novel but in the neologisms Dick invented. He saw the rise of blogs, although he called them "homeo-papes" (short for papers). Even though many of the terms took different names, the prescient point is that Dick foresaw and foretold them. And the new monikers are easy to figure out though a bit startling -- part of the fun IMHO. The hero, who is Palmer Eldritch's enemy, finds himself drafted and sent to a chilly moon of Jupiter by the resettlement-happy United Nations. Desparate refugees clinging to these moons are truly happy only when ingesting hallucinogens by chewing a specialty lichen!

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? was the origin for the movie BLADE RUNNER. As usual, Dick did not warn of a post-atomic world; neither did he foretell a slick, high-tech and comfortable future. Insted, the grungy L.A. of near history was well presented by director Ridley Scott in BLADE RUNNER. The plot is driven by a Raymond Chandler-esque detective story, but as often happens in PDK literature, a philosophical question emerges: what is human, anyway? Is a machine (android) tuned to be a human and act human of the same stature as a human?

UBIK, first published in 1969, was Dick's most far-out novel to date. It is an imagining of spiritual realities distracting from and then supplanting the ordinary humdrum of unpleasant reality. In essence it takes themes he raised in PALMER ELDRITCH and rode them far into speculation. But the novel is amazingly fun and easy to read for all that.

If, after reading this product, you find yourself interested in this compelling man and his struggles with poverty and schizophrenia (and of course how he hatched many of his ideas!), take a look at the Afterword of this LoA volume, because it really is a nice tight biography of Philip K. Dick.

Want to read more? The LoA has a companion volume with five of PKD's novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Ready for short stories? THE PHILIP K. DICK READER is new, fresh, and packs in lots of stories, including "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," the inspiration for the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie TOTAL RECALL. Also "The Minority Report," which title Hollywood did not change for the movie. Do not look for biographical or critical comment in THE PHILIP K. DICK READER, though; the cost of the book's efficiency is the fact that it has no commentary or biography, just the stories themselves.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FINALLY: RECOGNITION AND RESPECT FOR PKD, June 24, 2008

By	Nelson H. Wu (Virginia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Finally: Philip K. Dick gets the recognition and respect he deserves with his addition into the Library of America canon. This volume collects four of Dick's most compelling and visionary novels of the 1960s and serves as a great introduction to PKD's world of panic and paranoia. (The recently published and comprehensive "Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick" makes an excellent companion piece to this edition, but those stories also tend to be gimmicky and hokey where Dick's novels are lean and mean.) For initiates, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" -- collected here along with "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Ubik" -- is as good a place as any to start. Deftly combining elements of traditional science fiction with the hardboiled detective novel, Dick explores all of his signature obsessions in this story of a bounty hunter who sets out to exterminate androids in our midst. First and foremost, the novel succeeds as a page-turner -- but it also works on a deeper level, exploring the nature of reality, what it means to be human and the way materialism, or what Dick calls "the tyranny of an object," controls our lives and deepest desires.