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Mary Shelley - Frankenstein - with the exception of Electric Sheep, possibly the novel I've read the most times. The Last Man - first half is a bit of a slog so just enjoy her prose. Also, pick up the collection Mathilda and other Stories as there's even more proto-SF goodness there. She was way ahead of her time. Philip K. Dick - any of his more celebrated novels (DADOES, UBIK, Scanner Darkly, Valis, Stigmata) are a safe bet. And while you'll always find good things buried in pretty much everything he wrote there is some crap, too. A typical example is We Can Build You which I've just finished. For the first few chapters you are presented with what amounts to a prequel to Electric Sheep. But just as your excitement mounts Dick ruins the mood entirely by switching the focus of the novel to vicariously psycho-analysing his own obsessions via the lead character. He did this a lot in his novels but it's especially grating in WCBY because the novel was gathering steam so well. Currently reading Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem, a vocal admirer of PKD. Pretty good so far. (Have just ordered Hyperion thanks to this thread. Christ knows if I'll ever get around to reading it but it's been in my Amazon wishlist since the last ice age.)
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Aug 6, 2014 10:44
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Is Anathem any good? It's been sat on my shelf looking all big and throbbing for a few years now but I've never cracked it open.
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Aug 6, 2014 11:44
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Snak posted:Reading it made be feel really sympathetic for PKD and it was really kind of a sad experience. At the same time it was such an engrossing read I definitely want to read more of it. I have a whole shelf of Dick (  ) but if I hadn't read a biography (Divine Invasions) very early on I would've lost patience with him a long time ago. Being able to read PKD's books and ideas in context with his real life has allowed me to get past the glaring flaws in a lot of his stuff - the vicarious neuroses, the terrible writing, wondering on which page he is going to comment on a female character's breasts....
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Aug 8, 2014 03:31
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Kilmers Elbow posted:(Have just ordered Hyperion thanks to this thread. Christ knows if I'll ever get around to reading it but it's been in my Amazon wishlist since the last ice age.) So, about a third of the way through Hyperion and....it's OK. My current impression is that the autobiographical accounts of the main characters are (thus far) a bit too long-winded and could have done with some trimming. It seems that the only relevant information to the broader mystery is to be found in the final dramatic revelations of each character's tale - which renders the majority of it somewhat superfluous. Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying them; the separate narratives do have their own distinct feel to them. The diaries of Hoyt's mentor (forgot his name) do a fair impression of a quaint Victorian travelogue, and the General's section is pretty much full on space-opera. I'm currently into the Poet's section which, too, has its own flavour - but already I'm wary that much of what I'm about to read of the Poet's life and times are little more than delaying tactics before yet another climactic revelation. We'll see.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:44
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Re: Hyperion, I just finished the detective's tale - it was pretty terrible. The whole chapter was a nasty mix of amateur young adult romance, terrible exposition and sucking William Gibson's dick. Ugh. I'm just about to start the Consul's story, let's see if it can pull me back in.
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Sep 2, 2014 14:14
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