Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - By Philip K. Dick Page 0,1
believing he is being followed, has his telephone tapped and that everyone hates him—until the analyst realises who the man is, understands that he probably is under surveillance and is suddenly overwhelmed with hatred for him. The patient is Doctor Bloodmoney, in the book of the same name, a kaleidoscopically brilliant piece of story-telling.
Three of my other personal favorites are:
Ubik—which Larry Ashmead at Doubleday thrust into my hands one afternoon with excitement and a smile, telling me I had to read it immediately. I began it on the train back to Baltimore that evening and could have wound up in Cincinnati or Kansas City had it not been for a conductor who might have understudied Jerome Hines. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a book I read at a more stationary single sitting, and whose title occasionally runs through my head to the tune of “Greensleeves.” I am not certain why. The tune, I mean. The single sitting part becomes self-explanatory on opening the book.
Galactic Pot-Healer—When the encyclopedia defines a particular creature as the dominant life-form on a certain planet and then points out that the species only consists of one member…This one is almost whimsical. But not quite. A Philip Dick book can never be categorised that neatly. But this one is a bit special in the focussing of its humours (Elizabethan usage) and in the almost pastoral quality of certain sections.
By mentioning these personal favourites, I do not intend to detract from his other works. I have read almost all of Philip Dick’s stories and I have never put down a single one with that feeling all readers know at some time or other, that a writer has cheated, has taken an easy way out, rather than addressing himself with his full abilities to the issues he has invoked. Philip Dick is an honest writer in this respect—or, if I am wrong and he does ever handle something in the other fashion, then it is a tribute to his artistry that he succeeds so well in concealing it.
Inventiveness. Wit. Artistic integrity. Three very good things to have. To say them, however, is perhaps to talk more about the mind behind the words than the ends to which they are addressed. For to say them in all good-intentioned honesty about a story results mainly in a heaping of abstractions.
A story is a series of effects. I owned at the beginning that Philip Dick’s effects fascinate me even more than the social discontents pulsing through the neon tube in front of the wrinkled mirror suspended by the piano wire from the windmill of his mind. He is a writer’s writer, rich enough in fancy that he can afford to throw away in a paragraph ideas another writer might build a book upon. I cannot detail these effects. But then, I could not have written the label for the Ubik can either. It is the variety and near-surreal aptness of his juxtapositions which defend this matter, too, against facile categorisation. The subjective response, however, when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain.
This I value, partly because it does defy a full mapping, but mainly because that which is left of a Philip Dick story when the details have been forgotten is a thing which comes to me at odd times and offers me a feeling or a thought; therefore, a thing which leaves me richer for having known it.
AUCKLAND
A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN 1777 DIED YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD.
THE ANIMAL, CALLED TU’IMALILA, DIED AT THE ROYAL PALACE GROUND IN THE TONGAN CAPITAL OF NUKU, ALOFA.
THE PEOPLE OF TONGA REGARDED THE ANIMAL AS A CHIEF AND SPECIAL KEEPERS WERE APPOINTED TO LOOK AFTER IT. IT WAS BLINDED IN A BUSH FIRE A FEW YEARS AGO.
TONGA RADIO SAID TU’IMALILA’S CARCASS WOULD BE SENT TO THE AUCKLAND MUSEUM IN NEW ZEALAND.
Reuters, 1966
1
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.