199 words about Philip K. Dick

You're never "done" with PKD.

Every sci-fi fan knows Philip K. Dick. They say they adore him. Then they talk about Blade Runner 2049 so they can talk about Villeneuve. Few have read a fifth of PKD’s work. I’m a huge fan (VALIS is a sacred text to me); I’ve only read about a third. I’m reading one of his novels now I’d never even heard of before. It’s called The Penultimate Truth, a satire of human hierarchy and control. It’s brilliant. Minor PKD doesn’t exist. Dick was viewed as a visionary but not much of a writer, yet sometimes form can only bow to function. Blade Runner makes an aesthetic statement that Do Androids Dream has no time for. Too much on its mind. Ideas upon ideas, procreating their own little ideas, which run wild and imagine other ideas. PKD’s stories are cogent, vast, irreducible. They quicken the spirit. Some called him a prophet, but it’s not really that. He grasped the layers beneath and above us, the perpetual states of depth and transcendence that meet at the horizon of our space-time tortilla, and he did it with all the absurdity this existence deserves. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll cry. And vice versa.