Philip K Dick wrote a lot of very good stuff. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was a fun little story about a man with buried memories who runs into trouble when he accidentally finds those buried memories. Arnold’s Total Recall has next to nothing to do with Dick’s story and the new Total Recall has very little to do with the old Total Recall. That whole bit of business with Mars is tossed out for starters, which makes it a bit odd when the Mars mutant with three boobs shows up. This is also a kinder and gentler…
Tag: philip k dick
Distrust That Particular Flavor
William Gibson has written some great novels and one of my all time favorite short stories-Burning Chrome. Most of his stuff has not held up well over time, he talks a little too much about Virtual Reality-even after it’s pretty much turned out to be a bit of a bust. Or maybe it just hasn’t been long enough, and once we are all living in The Matrix we will see what a true visionary Wiliam Gibson really was. His last couple of novels are sort of sci fi, in that they have a lot of science and a lot of…
The Man In The High Castle
Philip K Dick was a prolific writer of short stories and novels, and he continues to supply a steady source of material for people who make movies. The Adjustment Bureau was based on a Philip K Dick short story. I first read The Man In The High Castle in about 1982 while I was working my way through of a number of the best SciFi books ever written. I was heavily into Asimov, Heinlein, Lem, and a number of other great writers of science fiction who had found their way onto Best Sci Fi Lists of one kind or another. …
Reading Like a Writer-Improving Your Own Writing
My favorite short story writers are Issac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. These authors took the impossible and made them seem mundane, then pushed the world off it’s axis at the story’s end. These are fun stories to read, you never know what’s going to happen next, but you always know something is going happen. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose is about her favorite stories and writers. Like many college educated writers, she is a huge fan of Long Dead…