Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (Loa #173): The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electri

Finally: Philip K. Dick gets the recognition and respect he deserves with his addition into the Library of America canon. This volume collects four of Dick's most compelling and visionary novels of the 1960s and serves as a great introduction to PKD's world of panic and paranoia. (The recently published and comprehensive "Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick" makes an excellent companion piece to this edition, but those stories also tend to be gimmicky and hokey where Dick's novels are lean and mean.) For initiates, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" -- collected here along with "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Ubik" -- is as good a place as any to start. Deftly combining elements of traditional science fiction with the hardboiled detective novel, Dick explores all of his signature obsessions in this story of a bounty hunter who sets out to exterminate androids in our midst. First and foremost, the novel succeeds as a page-turner -- but it also works on a deeper level, exploring the nature of reality, what it means to be human and the way materialism, or what Dick calls "the tyranny of an object," controls our lives and deepest desires.

I rarely read science fiction, but that was before I was introduced to the work of Philip K. Dick. His prose is clean and precise. His vision of the future from a 1960's standpoint can in one paragraph be eerily right-on and in the next, quaint. It's a future where typewriters and moon colonies, cigarettes and time travel, can all co-mingle seamlessly and believably.

In the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.

This handsome volume of four of PKD's most acclaimed science-fiction novels from the '60s is a pure delight. To be included in the company of John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow (two other authors graced with 2007 Library of America releases) doubtlessly would make PKD smile: finally vindicated! I'm not sure that his days of horsemeat-eating and penny-ante royalty checks are truly assuaged by this posthumous honor--but better late than never. The chronology of Dick's life and works at the volume's close is detailed and heartwrenching. Hopefully Dick's inclusion in the Library of America series will further increase his worldwide status as a major American talent who transcended the limitations of his genre, creating dystopian visions of lasting significance for humanity. I hope we soon will be feted with a companion volume of four of Dick's mainstream novels--perhaps [...] Wherever you are, PKD--hat's off! It's not just kibble anymore.