The Divine Invasion (2)

"The basis of life is trying."

"The future need not resemble the past."

Philip K. Dick

The Divine Invasion (1)

"Time is a child at play."

"The quality of realness is more important than any other quality, because once realness departs, there is nothing."

"You cannot build a world on wishes."

"Sexuality is the malady of this world."

Philip K. Dick

Vulcan's Hammer

Pretty good book about Men versus Machine, Men versus Men and Machine versus Machine.

"Every time you read a gauge or a dial or a meter, every time you ride in a car or a ship, aren't you putting your faith in a machine?"

Philip K. Dick

Dr. Futurity

Although a lesser known Dick novel, I was really surprised reading it. Jim Parsons - the mean character - is hurled through time and becomes a victim of time. There are some really nice "time-twists" in this novel that starts very slowly but in the second part you race through an ever astonishing story. All this is set in a future society that holds very different morals. This is probably the best book I read in 2007 so far. And that's getting frustrating: I read Moorcock, Shepard, Pratchett, Vonnegut, but every time I come back to Philip K. Dick to entertain me. I ordered a few more Dick books over the internet, but I'm also going to try a William Gibson.

"How can a society be judged by an individual created by another society?"

"Easier to cut a section from a rat brain than build a control."

The first quote made me think about how easily we judge other cultures. The second about all those products that use animal testing, although the availability of alternatives.

Clans of the Alphane Moon

"What you see that you call "death" is only the stage of germination in which the new life form lies dormant, awaiting the call to assume its next incarnation."

"Growth hurts."

Philip K. Dick

The Penultimate Truth

If merely saying that a man had been executed was enough to satisfy everyone, why not merely say it instead of doing it?

Philip K. Dick

! If you liked the movie "Underground" you will surely love this novel. It is about a minority of people who manipulate the media and history itself, all starting with an alternative interpretation of the Second World War.

Philip K. Dick about Reality

* It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
* Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Philip K. Dick

Confessions of a Crap Artist

I am made out of water. You wouldn't know it, because I have it bound in. My friends are mad out of water, too. All of them. The problem for us is that not only do we have to walk around without being absorbed by the ground but we also have to earn our livings.

Philip K. Dick

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter.

Philip K. Dick

Martian Time-Slip

The way he sprinted about, on the tips of his toes, as if dancing to some unheard music, some tune from inside his own mind whose rhythms kept him enthralled. We are so pedestrian, compared to him, Steiner thought. Leaden. We creep along like snails, while he dances and leaps, as if gravity does not have the same influence on him as it does on us. Could he be made from some new and different kind of atom?

Philip K. Dick

Little tragedy of life

A strange thing happened to me, once, back on Earth. A very small thing. I got down a cup from the cupboard, a cup I hardly ever used. In it I found a spider, a dead spider; it had died because there was nothing for it to eat. Obviously it had fallen into the cup and couldn't get out. But here's the point. It had woven a web, at the bottom of the cup. As good a web as it could weave under the circumstances. When I found it - saw it dead in the cup, with its meager, hopeless web - I thought, It never had a chance. No flies would ever have come along, even if it had waited forever. It waited until it died. It tried to make the best of the circumstances, but it was hopeless. I always wondered, Did it know it was hopeless? Did it weave the web knowing it was no use?

Philip K. Dick (Galactic Pot-Healer)

Galactic Pot-Healer

Now reading and enjoying:

* What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov's theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit.

* A man is an angel that has become deranged.

* No creature knows itself.

* Maybe he's right; maybe even failure is valuable. As he says, it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries.

Philip K. Dick

Just a list of favourite SF books

Some of my favourite Philip K. Dick books:
* The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

It's a very amazing work in that you'll never know which character is which, and that even in the same sentence one person can become another.

* Dr. Bloodmoney
You'll never forget Hoppy, the phocomelus, Walt, orbiting the earth, Bonny, a strong woman, and Edie, her strange daughter. Some of Dick's best characters are in this book.
* Ubik
When you're dead, you're near death, and people can still visit you.

Some other favourites:
* The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut)
* The Time Machine (H.G. Wells)
* Grass (Sheri S. Tepper)
* The Many-Coloured Land (Julian May)

Free Will (1)

"Let me tell you a legend about God," Morgo said. "In the beginning he created an egg, a huge egg, with a creature inside it. God tried to break the eggshell open to let the creature - the original living creature - out. He couldn't. But the creature which He had made had a sharp beak, constructed for just such a task, and it chipped its way out of the egg. And hence - all living creatures have free will, now."

Philip K. Dick