trilbynorton's reviews
242 reviews

Nick And The Glimmung by Philip K. Dick

adventurous funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

I don't know how popular Philip K. Dick's only children's book actually is with children (I'm guessing not very), but I hope for any kids who have read/will read it, it acts as a gateway to the hard stuff, like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

adventurous funny mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Friends, this is clean-up time and we're discounting all our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we're throwing away the bluebook. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used only as directed.

Philip K. Dick's Ubik, second only to his other paranoid "what even is reality" novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, feels in many ways ahead of its time. Published in 1969, it predates Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation by over a decade, presaging the French philosopher's arguments concerning the unreality of modern society. (If I wanted to sound even more pretentious, I might further assert that the ubiquitious product of Ubik, which seems to underpin the reality of the novel and yet which the characters are incapable of obtaining, symbolises Jacques Lacan's order of the Real, which similarly underpins society's constructed reality but which can never be approached.) The novel also feels almost like a deconstruction of the "simulated reality" genre. Though there is an explanation offered for the inconsistencies encountered by the characters, various inconsistencies in the plot and world-building (not to mention the final, delirious twist) appear to undermine this apparent answer. Ubik ultimately doesn't make any sense, and I think that's the whole point. Reality doesn't make any sense, either.

Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar

adventurous fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This would have been a fun "what if?" story if Mark Millar had explored the actual possible consequences of Superman growing up in the Soviet Union. Instead, the Man of Steel's ascendancy to the head of a global communist state is indistinguishable from pretty much every other comic book dystopia. It's difficult to tell if Millar actually knows anything about communism and the Soviet Union beyond collective farms and big parades.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

He reached the conclusion that there cannot now, nor in the future could there ever be, talk of "contact" between human beings and any non-humanoid civilization. In this satire against the entire species the thinking ocean is not mentioned once, but its presence, in the shape of a contemptuously triumphal silence, could be sensed underlying virtually every sentence.

Solaris is clearly about the impossibility of communication between human and totally alien intelligence (bringing to mind Wittgenstein's talking lion). A planet-covering ocean moves with seeming purpose, produces complex structures, and sometimes even appears aware of the human scientists studying it, and yet the question of its own consciousness is never satisfyingly answered. What struck me most about Lem's novel, however, is his fabrication from whole cloth an entire academic field surrounding the "thinking ocean". Protagonist Kris Kelvin muses occasionally on the study of the planet Solaris and details a whole history of scientific endeavor, complete with orthodoxies, schisms, and fringe pseudosciences.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

adventurous dark hopeful reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

He had never thought of it before, had never felt any empathy on his own part towards the androids that he killed. Always he had assumed that throughout his psyche he experienced the android as a clever machine - as in his own conscious view. And yet, in contrast to Phil Resch, a difference had manifested itself. And he felt instinctively that he was right. Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is easily one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels. It’s also one of his most serious; while many of his books were humorous satires or Kafka-esque farces, Electric Sheep treats its world and subject matter with the significance it deserves. This is because Dick had something to say, something he was desperate to share about how he felt humanity was going wrong, something that comes through in every aspect of the novel.

That something is the struggle between entropy and empathy for the future of the human species. On the side of entropy is a crumbling world beset by environmental devastation and persistent nuclear fallout, a world increasingly abandoned for the off-world colonies. And, of course, the androids, emotionless constructs who live just a few years and seem incapable of imparting meaning to their allotted time. Dick’s androids represent where he saw humanity going in the insecure and uncertain world of the late 1960s.

On the side of empathy is Mercerism, a new religion whose adherents share the experience of WIlbur Mercer, a mysterious figure they watch climb from the decay of the “tomb world”, up a mountain to its peak where he is inevitably thrust back down. Mercerites feel everything Mercer feels, and everything everyone else tuned in feels too, allowing for an empathic fusion sorely lacking on this future Earth. And, of course, there’s the animals. With most of the planet’s biodiversity destroyed, there is great social status connected with owning a real animal. But even caring for an ersatz “electric” animal brings people pleasure and allows them to practise empathy outside of the fusion of Mercerism.

Anyone coming to the novel from its outstanding film adaptation Blade Runner will likely be surprised by how different the book is, but should also get a lot out of how the film takes that basic idea of “entropy versus empathy” and reconfigures it for the visual spectacle of science fiction cinema. Both novel and film deserve their vaunted places as classics of the genre.

Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

A great example of the importance of prose. Creatures of Light and Darkness is essentially pulp space opera, with superpowered beings zipping about space and fighting each other. But Zelazny's prose is mysterious and evocative, turning lurid science fiction into enigmatic mythology.

Seaguy by Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

"Egyptian meteors. A mummy on the moon. Now I've seen everything."

What would a world in which the superheroes actually, finally won look like? Maybe an absurdist late-20th century stasis in which nothing happens and people in silly costumes spend all their time going to theme parks and watching TV.

Morrison's "everything and the kitchen sink" storytelling works brilliantly here, as his post-superhero utopia is a great vehicle for weird stuff.

The Ganymede Takeover by Ray Faraday Nelson, Philip K. Dick

adventurous funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Like a lot of books from Dick's "middle period", this contains a veritable hoard of good ideas that never really get developed. The Earth has been occupied by worm-like beings from Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. The occupation is opposed by a small resistance force comprised mostly of America's black population. The rest of the US seems to have reverted to something resembling the antebellum south, complete with the return of slavery. A cache of weapons is found that can create persistent and physical hallucinations, with a purported mega-weapon that can allegedly detach the Earth's entire population (and anyone telepathically linked with them - oh yeah, the worms are telepaths) from reality. One of the worm overlords goes native and becomes obsessed with 20th century fighter planes.

It's impossible to dislike a book that has this much stuff in it.

Vimanarama by Philip Bond, Grant Morrison

adventurous funny fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

Fun but slight. The story moves along at a fast clip and includes a lot of Morrison weirdness, but there's no real room for the stakes to matter or the characters to grow. It also feels a little odd to have the protagonists be British-Asian. It obviously feeds into the Hindu/Buddhist flavour of the Morrison weirdness, but it is very clearly a non-British-Asian writer writing about that experience.

Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko

challenging dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process - the spellbinding process of creation - is infinite; this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.

In many ways, Vita Nostra is the anti-Harry Potter. Both feature young people getting invited to weird schools to study an unusual curriculum, making friends, passing exams, and clashing with teachers along the way. But whereas Harry Potter creates a cosy pseudo-Victorian stasis that readers would love to live in themselves (to the point of hurling themselves at a wall in a London train station), Vita Nostra instead takes place in a hostile and unpleasant institute which no one in their right mind would wish to attend. Students aren’t invited with magical letters but essentially blackmailed into attending; they don’t study fun and easily recognisable subjects like Potions and Charms but a mysterious subject simply named “Specialty” which is never actually explained to them; and instead of getting the loving support of a friendly faculty, students are antagonised and bullied by mean teachers to the point of mental breakdown.

There is a point to the academic belligerence, although we are left as much in the dark as the students until late in the novel. There are hints throughout, to do with the relationship between language and reality, but I won’t spoil anything here. Suffice to say that Vita Nostra is one of the strangest books I have ever read. The strangeness is imparted in large part by the slippery prose, in an excellent translation from the novel’s original Russian; in even simple descriptions of places and people, the book’s prose seems to loosen the reality of the world. Now that I’ve read it, Vita Nostra is going to stay in my head for a very long time.