quips and clips

just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Zap Gun, a novel of psionic fake-weapons designers. prescient comic books, a Kabuki Cold War. also, a pretty astonishing presage of addictive video games and coincidentally the McGuffin that figures at the center of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. one of PKD’s most mind-blowing satires.

just finished reading one of Philip K. Dick’s earliest and most domestically insidious alt-reality novels, Time Out of Joint. if the world that’s out to get you really DOES revolves around you, are you still a paranoid narcissist? PKD is the best.

in my continuing PKDOCD, just finished reading one of Philip K. Dick’s most important early novels, The Man Who Japed: a post-nuke society whose moral tenets are heavily straitened, like a post-modern Dutch Reformed Church, an ad-man/propagandist gets in touch with his seditious subconscious. one of the best and most horrifying climaxes in PKD, too….

just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Counter Clock World, apropos the impending reverse of the sun’s polarity, PKD plunges us into a world where time itself has reversed its course, employing a psionic vitarium owner, one who haunts the graveyards waiting for the voices of the newly reborn to call for their own exhumation. it…

just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky a group touring a particle accelerator is plunged into a chaotic series of alternate realities. bad enough living in your own delusion, much less everyone else’s. PKD never fails to astonish.

just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s novel (this is fast becoming my own personal obsessive Summer of Dick, introduced by my months-ago traversal of his Exegesis, the complete Library of America collection of a baker’s dozen of his novels, and now continuing, happily, through a bunch more of the novels i’d not read previously) The…

just finished reading a very early novel, written when he about 24 years old, by Philip K. Dick, Gather Yourselves Together. not a sci-fi novel, it’s the musings of three employees of a China-based Company left behind to hand over the facilities to the ‘new owners’ the Communist Chinese. along the way, the three give…

just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth, a whodunit whose opening premise/gambit is those of us Plebians are laboring away miles underground, unaware that the raging nuclear war from which we’re presumably being protected has been over for 13 years, while Terran real estate and power has long since been divided into kingdoms….

Just finished re-reading Lucius Shepard‘s talismanic opera/novel, Col. Rutherford’s Colt. Evils resident in objects that only adepts can read. The histories of those inherent evils, and their far-reaching consequences. Perfect.  

Just finished reading another of Philip K. Dick’s Anamnesis/Exegesis-informed novels, Radio Free Albemuth, most of which was rewritten as VALIS. With its more overtly political tone (the nemesis is a thinly disguised Richard M. Nixon) and with its focus on the recording industry I find this a superior work to its more famous edited version….