> Yeah! Androids is a great book. I've read
>three PKD books so far (_The Man In The High
>Castle_, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_,
>and _A Scanner Darkly_) and am currently reading
>a fourth (_Ubik_). So far Androids is probably
>my favorite.

Well, I just finshed _Ubik_ last night, and I think it's my new favorite PKD book.

The more I think about PKD's books, the more I'm amazed that I like them so much. Generally, I hate books that end up making no sense, and _Ubik_ basically is such a book.

I think it has a lot to do with a lack of pretension. To me, there's no pretension that _Ubik_ is ultimately about something or has "something to say" and I'm just too dumb to see it. Whereas, with other books that make no sense (and here I am specifically thinking of pretty much every Kurt Vonnegut book I've ever read) there is definitely the pretension that there is "deep meaning" here and I should be working hard to find it.

Of course, that doesn't stop the literary types from claiming PKD as one of their own. I really think the reason the man's work hasn't disappeared into obscurity and has actually enjoyed something of a revival as of late is partially due to the idea that there *is* some "literary" merit in his works and that they *do* have some "deep meaning" in there that literary types can spend years digging out as is their wont. I think any book as hard to find "meaning" in as a typical PKD book ends up provoking this response from literary types. They're trained that in "good literature" the "meaning" is hidden and not readily obvious, so when they find a book that has no readily obvious meaning and yet is so deeply concerned with people and characters and isn't just "gadget porn" like a lot of SF, they assume they've found a piece of "literature" and they go to work extracting meaning as they've been trained.

That's not to say that there is *no* meaning in any of PKD's works. First of all, you can find meaning in a grocery list if you try hard enough. And clearly _Ubik_ is a novel "about" life and death. But it's the depth of the "meaning" that I'm challenging. For example: In _Ubik_, there is a scene set in the main character's apartment in which he argues with his front door. It's a pay door, you see, and the door is requesting five cents before it'll let him out. The main character argues that the payments he gives the door are of the nature of a gratuity and are not mandatory. The door then advises him to go read his apartment agreement again and find out otherwise. This man lives in a world in which everything is coin operated--even his front door--and yet is constantly without money.

Literary people would have an absolute field day with this scene and others like it in the book. They'd claim that PKD was making some deep statement and that it was extremely significant that the story's main character is a man who never has any money on him in a world that is coin-operated and that he symbolized something or other. Whereas I'm fairly certain it was just a wonderful little scene that ultimately means nothing but what you assign to it and is just there to give life to this world PKD has created.

PKD also has this habit of not explaining *anything*. In most SF, especially the so-called "hard" SF, the author at least takes a shot at coming up with a plausible explanation for something he puts in the book, and in the hard SF sub-genre, often that is the *point* of the book and everything hinges on how this technology or invention or discovery works.

Not PKD. If he wants people who are recently dead to be able to communicate with the living, he just puts them in cold stasis in special "coffins" has the attendant hook up a microphone and headset and suddenly you're talking to your dearly departed. No explanation as to how the equipment works, no explanation as to what "half-life" is or how *it* works, nothing.
He just puts it down and you assume it works, because the point of the story is not the technology or the science, it's what the people do with it. I've decided I really like that.

He even takes it farther than that. One of the fundamental "rules" of SF is to create a believeable society. The conventional wisdom is, if all doors are coin operated, you'd better have a good idea how the economy of a world in which doors and all other household appliances are coin-operated works, and you'd better give the reader at least a hint of what you know about it.

Again, not PKD. The doors, the toasters, the television sets, the refrigerators are all coin-operated, but never once does he bother to stop and talk about the hows or the whys of such a system. You just assume it works the way he says it does, because again, the door being coin operated is not the point.

The real irony behind the pseudo-comeback of PKD being perhaps fueled by the literary types is that in his time, PKD was scorned by the literary world as a science fiction hack, like most everyone who writes SF. It's only with time that they've come to embrace his stuff. And I'm convinced they only do it because he wrote great books that make no sense, and so naturally literary people assume that there must be sense to be made of it somewhere, and go about trying to find it. Whereas people like me just read him because his books are just so damn cool, it doesn't *matter* that they ultimately don't make any sense.

"When I wrote _Ubik_, I got about twelve pages done and couldn't think of anything else, so I just wrote whatever came into my mind. I wrote it from my unconscious: I let the right hemisphere of my brain do all the thinking, and I was as surprised as anybody as to what came out. In France, of course, it's considered a great novel because it doesn't make any sense; in France, it's a roman de pataphysique. Ever since Alfred Jarry hit town, they've loved stuff that doesn't make any sense. Maybe it does make sense when you translate it into French. Maybe I'm a great writer in France because I've got good translators." -- Philip K. Dick, 1976

-- Dave