I’ve just finished reading these two Philip K Dick novels in fairly quick succession. About 20 years separates him publishing each of them. Very interesting to compare them.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but they are both about people being transported to other ‘universes’ and in a sort of psychological way rather than physical transport. They focus on the weirdness of being in somewhere subtly different and play mind games with that.
I enjoyed both, but still have an underlying…
I’ve just finished reading these two Philip K Dick novels in fairly quick succession. About 20 years separates him publishing each of them. Very interesting to compare them.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but they are both about people being transported to other ‘universes’ and in a sort of psychological way rather than physical transport. They focus on the weirdness of being in somewhere subtly different and play mind games with that.
I enjoyed both, but still have an underlying disquiet with Dick’s characters. I like his stories, his plot’s have good pace, and everything else is great except his characters. I just don’t think he does character very well, or very reliably. It’s not that his main characters are usually all too human or everyman types. I just don’t think he sticks in character for them, especially in his early books.
I’m not saying I hate it. Some of his work he hits the character nail on the head completely, Do Androids Dream… is a perfect example. the main character of Deckard is perfect, and the supporting characters work nicely into the ‘Android or not’ question. Here his characterisation beautifully meshes with the central theme. And in actual fact I was very enamoured of the pathos of the central character.
I just think that sometimes his main characters take very unpredictable actions. One could argue that this makes them deeper characters, but I don’t think so. When they take unpredictable actions it just means that it’s breaking their mould.
Most of the time it looks like he makes random character swerves to support the plot or bring out something that he had no other way of bringing out.
It’s interesting to see across the two books and a gulf of 20 years, that Dick’s style remained the same. Definitely recognizable as the same author facing the same questions. His prose had improved and the characterization (no matter what I said above) had improved. The writing went from sparse and basically descriptive to using some wonderful similes and metaphors. His characters had become less 2 dimensional (but that may be because of the internal point of view and the focus on a few main characters).
