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pseudanonymous posted:PKD had mental illness problems exacerbated by serious drug use. I doubt he had a clear confidence in there being a single observable reality. I feel every second book of his I read had a drug that changed the world when you take it.
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Mar 17, 2020 13:51
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My favourite PKD novel is A Scanner Darkly. (Also he rrrrrrreally shone in the short story format.)
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Mar 17, 2020 13:52
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genericnick posted:I feel every second book of his I read had a drug that changed the world when you take it. And the ones that didn't had people who realized the world was a lie and they and/or everyone was a robot.
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Mar 17, 2020 13:53
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anilEhilated posted:Oh, I've read them too, but they are a lot weaker compared to the later ones and may discourage a potential reader off Discworld. When I read TCOM and TLF for the first time, there weren't any other Discworld books to read. The best reason to start people with those two is because while they're fun, the series does nothing but get better until it peaks some time around Maskerade.
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Mar 17, 2020 14:22
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pseudanonymous posted:PKD had mental illness problems exacerbated by serious drug use. I doubt he had a clear confidence in there being a single observable reality. See also VALIS, where he declares that all of human history between the crucifixion of Christ and Richard Nixon's resignation is somehow a fake, perpetrated by a conspiracy and/or mental virus called the Black Iron Prison.
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Mar 17, 2020 14:23
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PKD also had some thoughts about Stanislaw Lem. From Lem's wiki page:quote:Lem singled out only one American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick (as he did for the bulk of American science fiction) and would later claim that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:49
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Related, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick" by Robert Crumb https://www.philipkdickfans.com/resources/miscellaneous/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick-by-r-crumb-from-weirdo-17/ 
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Mar 17, 2020 20:08
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I'm loving the PKD chat but he didn't die suddenly of anything. It was protracted, they new he was dying and got an early print of Blade Runner for him to watch on his death bed.
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Mar 17, 2020 20:13
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a foolish pianist posted:PKD also had some thoughts about Stanislaw Lem. From Lem's wiki page: IIRC part of this was because Lem had done a unauthorized (?) translation of Ubik to Polish and due to geopolitical stuff PKD was only paid royalties in Polish Zlotys, which from what I can find were worth 0.0003 of a dollar in 1975. And at the time Lem was also getting himself thrown out of the SFWA for subjecting western authors to literary criticism/saying they wrote bad.
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Mar 17, 2020 23:16
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quantumfoam posted:Steel Frame was very good for a first time author, however I feel Steel Frame got hamfisted and pretty deus ex machina'y towards the 80% mark. Redemption Ark's spaceship chase is loving great. Not a chase, but the similar near-relativistic battle in the second Poseidon's Children book is also really neat. He certainly has his tropes though, no doubt. Spaceship chases, AI Ghosts in the machine, clones.....
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Mar 17, 2020 23:57
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Existence by David Brin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0079XPMQS/ How Long 'til Black Future Month by NK Jemisin - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FSLQXY8/ Supposedly Redshirts by John Scalzi is the Tor free ebook, but the page is currently down. https://ebookclub.tor.com/
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Mar 18, 2020 00:26
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sebmojo posted:I really liked going postal, and both thud and wintersmith (which came after) are excellent imo. I think Going Postal and Thud were when when Pratchett's jokes started getting thin enough that his rigidly formualaic approach to plot kept poking through. Maybe I'd just read too many of them by that stage, but the Tiffany Aching series just seemed so much more fun in tone and (relatively) creative in structure that I remember them much more fondly.
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Mar 18, 2020 00:30
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pradmer posted:Supposedly Redshirts by John Scalzi is the Tor free ebook, but the page is currently down. Came here to ask if this is good, haven't read anything by Scalzi
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Mar 18, 2020 00:39
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mewse posted:Came here to ask if this is good, haven't read anything by Scalzi Kind of a lame premise with a decent twist. Worth a read for free.
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Mar 18, 2020 00:52
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I liked the spaceship chase scenes in the Revelation Space trilogy. Especially with the wack rear end inertia-suppressing tech.
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Mar 18, 2020 00:52
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pradmer posted:How Long 'til Black Future Month by NK Jemisin - $3.99 Buy this book ! Buy this book ! There are some amazing short stories in this collection, both magical reality and science fiction. Jemisin's novels earned her her reputation, the shorts solidify it.
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Mar 18, 2020 01:14
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Groke posted:My favourite PKD novel is A Scanner Darkly. I've read a few of his novels and didn't really like any of them, but absolutely loved his short story "Faith of our Fathers."
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Mar 18, 2020 01:15
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freebooter posted:I've read a few of his novels and didn't really like any of them, but absolutely loved his short story "Faith of our Fathers." I was a huge fan of Blade Runner (seen it a hundred times) and then I learned he was a crazy madman. And I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep one time It wasn’t the same thing but it was better But I kept looking for someone to say this quote:But A Scanner Darkly is more autobiographical than most. For the 1977 novel, Dick drew on his early-’70s experiences hanging out with teenage drug addicts while his own addiction worsened. Like Richard Linklater’s film, it’s ostensibly set in the future, but it sometimes reads like a documentary portrait of post-hippie burnouts: the circular conversations, the paranoia, the sense that freedom had become kind of terrifying, and the drugs had stopped being fun. Linklater’s film keeps part of Dick’s poignant epilogue—one of the most remarkable, and least fantastic, passages in any of his books—in which he eulogizes those lost or damaged by drugs. And Barris, played in the film by Robert Downey Jr., aptly sums up the spirit of an age in which most of a generation decided to push the frontiers of chemical experimentation with no oversight: “We’re all canaries in the coal mine on this one.”
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Mar 18, 2020 01:28
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mewse posted:Came here to ask if this is good, haven't read anything by Scalzi It wasn’t bad but I liked old man’s war better in terms of scalzi books.
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Mar 18, 2020 01:43
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Fumblemouse posted:I think Going Postal and Thud were when when Pratchett's jokes started getting thin enough that his rigidly formualaic approach to plot kept poking through. Maybe I'd just read too many of them by that stage, but the Tiffany Aching series just seemed so much more fun in tone and (relatively) creative in structure that I remember them much more fondly. Yeah, they were a breath of fresh air. Pratchett remembered to that it was ok to have lighter humor. That is one reason why I like TCoM and the early books since they were more wild in a sense.
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Mar 18, 2020 02:12
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mewse posted:Came here to ask if this is good, haven't read anything by Scalzi It only makes sense if you're a Star Trek nerd and think you'd like a book that is basically an excuse to mock it. Then it goes all Last Action Hero by having the characters break the 4th wall and journey to the real world to ask the show writers to be better writers, because those senseless deaths suck. Agent to the Stars is my favorite Scalzi book, but the Old Man's War series was fun, too.
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Mar 18, 2020 02:15
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biracial bear for uncut posted:It only makes sense if you're a Star Trek nerd and think you'd like a book that is basically an excuse to mock it. Yeesh. I'll give it a shot, thanks for the replies everyone
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Mar 18, 2020 02:48
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C.M. Kruger posted:IIRC part of this was because Lem had done a unauthorized (?) translation of Ubik to Polish and due to geopolitical stuff PKD was only paid royalties in Polish Zlotys, which from what I can find were worth 0.0003 of a dollar in 1975. And at the time Lem was also getting himself thrown out of the SFWA for subjecting western authors to literary criticism/saying they wrote bad. Add in that Lem's review-commentaries of PKD's Ubik(reprinted in Lem's Microwolds collection) was so in depth you really don't need to read/buy Ubik afterwards. For a paranoic like PKD, those reviews by a dude behind the Iron Curtain while PKD's work was mostly ignored by mainstream critics in the US/Europe was conspiracy fuel x5. Junkenstein posted:Redemption Ark's spaceship chase is loving great. Which spaceship chase you are talking about? This is made worse retrospectively to me because in return we got 5 pages combined about 2 different "Clavain's army of hyperPigs assault a lighthugger in space" sequences in Redemption Ark.
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Mar 18, 2020 03:12
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The thing about PKD's son's hernia is spooky as gently caress.
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Mar 18, 2020 04:08
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TOOT BOOT posted:The thing about PKD's son's hernia is spooky as gently caress. Right?
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Mar 18, 2020 06:02
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Scorpio and the hyperpigs own
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Mar 18, 2020 06:26
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Jedit posted:When I read TCOM and TLF for the first time, there weren't any other Discworld books to read. The best reason to start people with those two is because while they're fun, the series does nothing but get better until it peaks some time around Maskerade. I read them in publication order starting in the early 90s. I remember skipping school to buy the Discworld adventure game on floppy disk.
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Mar 18, 2020 10:42
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branedotorg posted:I read them in publication order starting in the early 90s. Same, except I started in the late 80s (whenever Wyrd Sisters came out) and backfilled the ones before that in completely random order (i.e. whichever order I could find them in). I had previously tried and quite failed to get anywhere in the Colour of Magic text adventure game on the C64 but at the time I didn't even realize it was based on a book.
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Mar 18, 2020 10:50
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Groke posted:My favourite PKD novel is A Scanner Darkly. The quote:This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed–run over, maimed, destroyed–but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
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Mar 18, 2020 12:53
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Strom Cuzewon posted:The But the abbreviated note goes real well with that Radiohead song. But also thanks for posting the long form.
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Mar 18, 2020 13:39
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mewse posted:Yeesh. I'll give it a shot, thanks for the replies everyone Having Will Wheaton narrate the audio book was an inspired bit of meta humor, though. It gets points for that.
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Mar 18, 2020 14:45
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Tor fixed the redshirts download around mid-day
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Mar 18, 2020 21:38
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The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHY76/ Semiosis by Sue Burke - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071RXVGGB/ If you haven't heard of any of the sale books and have forum search you can usually find some opinions if you do a title or author search in the book barn subforum. That's what I do for books on sale that I don't know.
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Mar 18, 2020 22:56
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https://mobile.twitter.com/Thebookdad1/status/1240305601986449408 Lots of authors putting out free or cheap ebooks for the quarantine.
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Mar 18, 2020 23:08
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Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend?
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Mar 19, 2020 01:26
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? Doomsday Book, you’ll cry
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Mar 19, 2020 01:43
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World It gets a bit off-topic near the end, but is overall a solid read on living through a horror pre-modern science. e: wait poo poo this isn't the book rec thread, uh, hang on let me see if I know of any genre-fiction plague stuff. How do you feel about zombies? e2: World War Z is a boring rec but it's a genuinely good book! The first half of it where the infection is spreading and countries are freaking out is some really classic zombie horror and I enjoyed it a lot. StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 01:57
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? Station Eleven is really good. I kept yelling at the author "you're getting the pandemic wrong" But she writes good and interesting characters. And there is going to be an HBO movie/series
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Mar 19, 2020 02:18
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? A Canticle for Leibowitz and the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts is pretty good too, though not as good as Blindsight. pseudanonymous fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 02:18
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? Top 5: The Stand Parable of the Sower The Andromeda Strain Earth Abides Station Eleven Bonus The Road (not really a pandemic book) The hot zone Zombie apocalypse books are cheating or I’d recommend The Passage. buffalo all day fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 02:20
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