Four Novels of the 1960s

[Dave Monroe]

Philip K. Dick
Four Novels of the 1960s
The Man in the High Castle • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch •
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? • Ubik

"The Shakespeare of science fiction."—Fredric Jameson

Read an exclusive interview with Jonathan Lethem about Philip K. Dick
(PDF, 84 KB)

http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/lethem_interview.pdf

Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip
K. Dick (1928–1982) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a
writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet
heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth
century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish
him."

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most
original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo
Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have
won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation
zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different
brands of virtual reality, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can
transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical
death.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in
search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status
is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is
focused on a television personality, was the basis for the movie Blade
Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents
and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life,"
pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to
ever more disturbing conclusions, as time collapses on itself and
characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive,
constantly shape-shifting panacea Ubik. As with most of Dick's novels,
no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising
texture of these astonishing books.

Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a
multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works—fantastic and
weird, yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and
soaring flights of religious speculation—that are startlingly
prescient imaginative anticipations of 21st-century quandaries.

Jonathan Lethem, editor, is the author of seven novels, including Gun,
with Occasional Music; The Fortress of Solitude; and You Don't Love Me
Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critics
Circle Award and has been translated into twenty languages. Lethem is
also the author of two story collections, The Wall of the Eye and Men
and Cartoons; a novella, This Shape We're In, and a book of collected
essays, The Disappointment Artist.

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=252