this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Books
1 readers
1 users here now
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have read several Philip K. Dick books lately. They are all crazy in their own way, but Ubik might have been the craziest so far of what I read. I look forward to more of his books. Oh, and I also read a really weird classic sci fi recently—Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss. I am discovering I really like crazy and weird books.
I have rad a few and thought “Now wait til last year” was pretty nutty
What I find incredibly impressive about PKD is that his prose is really, really plain. It’s meat and potatoes straightforward and very rarely has flourishes.
But, using that straightforward prose, he can drop out the bottom of reality better than any other writer I’ve ever read. There’s a few moments in UBIK specifically that are singularly terrifying in the vein of a schizophrenic break. The solid, reliable reality of things just breaks, and it’s deeeeeeeply unsettling.
Yes, there is such an economy of language, yet he says so much and gives me so much to consider. Ubik really blew my mind (just one wtf moment right after another). Then I followed it with A Scanner Darkly. It really hit me hard in several ways. I had to take a short reading break. The YouTuber Media Death Cult has a lot of great videos on PKD and his work (he also has a project going of reading all his novels).
OMG! This is what I thought of immediately! Ubik. At the end I was like WTF did I just read??
The Carnivorous muffin's surrealist web fiction are also pretty good.
You might want to check out James Tiptree Jr; she was a very original and trippy scifi author.
Will do! I had heard the name before and I think it just fell out of my consciousness for a bit.
How was Hothouse? That piqued my interest
It was bonkers. I had no idea where it was going the entire book. All of the weird carnivorous flora are wild and incredibly varied, and so imaginative. The humans and any other animals that have survived to this point in our future (our sun is dying) have evolved in interesting ways. So many crazy things happen and I don’t want to give anything away. Best to go in a bit blind and enjoy how it unfolds.
I read Hothouse this year and also loved it. Some reviews I saw complained about the one-dimensional characters, and I see where they're coming from, but the crazy imaginative stuff you mentioned made up for it in my opinion. Now I'm curious to check out more by Aldiss. Crazy/weird is my favorite genre!
Yes! And what happens to Gren is so weird and unexpected, which does actually give him more depth. Agreed. I will have to check out more Aldiss, also.
Great, thanks for the description. I will hit this one after my current read
have u read "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch"? Craziest PKD in my opinion, and one of his best.
I’m finishing up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and was looking at this one for my next read. Glad to see it confirmed heheh
I was actually considering that one next, or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
both are excellent!
Flow My Tears is the most underrated PKD book ever imo. Can’t recommend it enough
For me the craziest one was VALIS, no contest.
I will eventually get to Valis. :)