Prolific. Consistently thought-provoking. Scintillatingly brilliant with uncanny frequency. Hilarious. Living an adult life mostly in poverty but surrounded by many caring people. A binge fiction writer, letter-writer, and talker.
This was Philip K. Dick. He was kind enough to correspond several times with a nerdy high-school senior who had written a ten-page analysis of three of his major works.
That was me.
PKD's heart would soar at being included in a series of books featuring Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. This latest volume includes FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID, still one of my favorites and the novel that sent me on my own binge of PKD reading.
With an oeuvre of over fifty novels, voluminous short stories, philosophical essays, and a final tome, THE EXEGESIS, which may resemble Prokofiev's Symphony Number 2 in its gargantuan length and ultimate inaccessibility for most fans, Philip K. Dick was a ceaseless writer who found revision a nearly impossible process.
His works are structured by his brilliant mind that thought aloud on paper in the form of stories that questioned the nature of reality but that also revealed a profound love for most of humanity. To read PKD is to become more deeply attuned to what it is to be human--to become an explorer held in suspense by a psychological realist who fabulated fantastic worlds that were strangely familiar.
PKD's best works--five of which are included in this latest volume--are a joy to read. Because he wrote fast and didn't often revise, these are blemished works of art. But all of us are similarly blemished: it's the nature of being human. Brilliance radiates even on pages where archaic slang, incorrect predictions, and other flaws are rife.
One leaves PKD's novels wishing that one could still talk to, correspond with, or hear lecture the author--or simply read brand-new examples of this genius's work. Even with his vast output, one wants more.
One cannot leave the pages of PKD without feeling a strange, perhaps singular, intimacy. These novels incarnate the mind of that brilliant friend who lives nearby and raids your medicine cabinet if you're not looking.
If one is attuned, one leaves the novels of PKD not just loving the words but also loving the man who wrote them, flawed as he may have been.
Rereading FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID for the first time in twenty years, I discovered how much I myself had changed. The jokes had a different tone; the philosophical and psychological dimensions had taken on different shadings and colors. But the engaging ideas, the idiosyncratic but compelling characters, and the sheer energy of the novel convinced me yet again that I was in the presence of a mind that never ceased to teach. Dick, a student of so many disciplines, channelled his deepest loves and fears into his books, and we, the lucky readers alive today who continue to peruse his pages, have been given by PKD a gift similar to Mary Anne Dominic's blue vase at the end of FLOW...-- works of enduring art that are loved by many.
I'm grateful that the Internet was unavailable to PKD: it might have ruined his output of novels and stories.
But I wish I could see the joy and pride on his face at having two volumes (so far) dedicated to his best work.
Emerson himself merited only two volumes.
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From the Publisher
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| Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (LOA #173) | Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1970s & 80s (LOA #183) | Philip K. Dick: VALIS & Later Novels (LOA #193) ( | |
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| Price | $21.51 | $22.73 | $24.15 |
| Deluxe hardcover volumes | In one volume: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik—each exemplifying the hallucinatory logic, darkly comic exuberance, and unsettling prescience of Dick’s singular genius. | Five mind-bending classics in one authoritative collector’s hardcover: Martian Time-Slip; Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb; Now Wait for Last Year; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; and A Scanner Darkly. | A Maze of Death, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: the best novels of Dick's final years, when religious revelation, always important in his work, became a dominant and irresistible theme. |
The Philip K. Dick Collection (3-volume boxed set)
This boxed set includes all three Library of America Philip K. Dick volumes—13 classic novels in authoritative, annotated editions:
The Man in the High Castle • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? • Ubik • Martian Time-Slip • Dr. Bloodmoney • Now Wait for Last Year • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said • A Scanner Darkly • A Maze of Death • VALIS • The Divine Invasion • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
About the author
Two of PKD's best novels plus three others
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) wrote manically through the 1960s, fueled by amphetamines, and tragically died of a stroke at the age of 53. The film "Blade Runner" was released shortly after his death, based on the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", and since then many of his stories have been adapted for film and television.What I offer here is commentary, not plot summaries, which are readily available elsewhere. I recently read three of these novels for the first time and re-read the other two in this Library of America volume.MARTIAN TIME-SLIP (written 1962) 3 STARSThere are those who consider this one of PKD's best, but I can't agree. One problem I have is suspending disbelief as there are Earth colonists farming on Mars without any terraforming or domes. There are also Martian humanoids that the colonists call Bleekmen which are based on the San people ("bushmen") of SW Africa. The plot centers on a union boss named Arnie Kott, and features power, sex, and infidelity. Mental illness is also key. The theme involves the Bleekmen and an autistic boy named Manfred, who symbolize the Divine, in contrast to Kott, who is "human, all too human." The main character, Jack Bohlen, is compassionate and is open to the Divine. Though their existence makes no sense, making the Bleekmen a bigger part of the story might have improved the novel.DR. BLOODMONEY (written 1963) 2 STARSThis post-nuclear war scenario makes no sense. The only redeeming features are two characters -- one is a young African-American man who PKD portrays as a sort of all-American entrepreneur trying to get back on track after civilization is damaged (just damaged? by a nuclear war?), and the other is a woman who is portrayed as amoral but who certainly has gumption and agency. The title character is an evil scientist who apparently can make a nuclear war happen just by thinking it. There are two other characters with strange mutant abilities neither of which I found at all plausible. This is the closest to a total failure of any of the PKD novels I've read.NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR (written 1963) 5 STARSThis is the best of the PKD novels I have just discovered and read for the first time recently. Dr. Eric Sweetscent is hired to care for Terra's leader, Gino Molinari (The Mole), who is very ill. Terra is at war with the reegs, an insectoid race. Critical to the story is a powerful drug -- JJ-180 -- that induces time travel. PKD creates hilarious scenarios but the novel also has a serious theme about intolerance, racism, and war. And Sweetscent's dysfunctional relationship with his wife is the less cosmic element. Not a PKD masterpiece on the level of "The Man In the High Castle" or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," Now Wait for Last Year" is nonetheless among his best novels.FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (written 1970) 4 STARSI read this not long after it was first published in 1974 and found it to be quite powerful. Reading it again now I find it to be seriously flawed. Most of the novel involves the TV celebrity Jason Taverner finding that he is no longer recognized by anyone. It's as if he doesn't exist. It's well written and pulls you along as Taverner meets various people and tries to get his life back. One is LAPD police chief Felix Buckman. But the science fiction twist, which only comes at the end, is utterly preposterous and nearly ruins the novel. PKD aspired to be a mainstream writer, and minus the SF element "Flow My Tears" shows his talent for writing about people.A SCANNER DARKLY (written 1973) 5 STARSI read this novel about narcs and the drug users they infiltrate when it was first published in 1977. Reading it again now I remain convinced that it is one of PKD's best novels. It is depressing to be sure, based as it was on PKD's experience with young drug users. In an afterward he lists 15 people who were either killed or damaged, including himself. Of course it was made into a movie, which I thought was very well done. Significantly it was originally written without any science fiction elements. An editor suggested adding what ended up being the "scramble suits" used to disguise the identity of the narcs. "Scanner" was one of the only novels by PKD that was extensively re-written before publication, and his then-wife Tessa was heavily involved in the editing process.(verified purchase from the Cosmic Book Emporium)
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