Philip.K. Dick - "Arena" 2/6

Thanks

maybe watch the beyond within docu. in conjunction with this,to realise PKD's intent..:)

Beyond description is "Man In The High Country"
This book is not a masterpiece of anything but it
is a masterpiece of ...something. This freaking
guy had a sense of humor beyond description.

we are living the world that hitler made. not in the 'world that jones made', one that philip k. dick's wrote.

The narrator ruins this...sounds like a snot-nosed kid.

Actually it's Greg Proops: one of the few Californians easily available to the BBC in London at the time.

He was a damn funny and good story teller. I mean Blade Runner is one of the Genre defining books for CyberPunk. But I also think he is a bit of alienated man anyway too and tha is what gave him such access to the ability to express his reactions to an increasingly manufactured and complex world that modern man lives in. If I had one desire it would be for him to write a speculative novel on what he thought a more Utopian world would look like to him. damn Three posts, ok I am done.

Most of his best books people still don't know about or read often.  PKD has the nice distinction of being a mainstream writer who still hasn't become overexposed.

I think that PKD saw technology and pharmacology in the context of the old ideas of how society was arranged with a corrupt central Government & Corporations that only treated people as commodities. He illustrates all kinds of dystopias and denatured lives that could and have result from not using our newly acquired scientific tools to more carefully explore what it means to be a human being in a natural balanced state. I think that is why he resonates today. We all want dignity and balance.

I think PKD lasting value to society is to show the human reaction to a world emerging in the 50's thru 70's that was being sold to the American public over the TV that was so full of unhealthy and unnatural encroachments into what was his much more natural and healthy child hood living in sunny and agricultural California. His readers loved his humorous and introspective tone and dialog as it was able to give voice to self and community alienation so well. He was an amusing & powerful critic.