Nerd Industries: Stuart Robinson's blog

I've gotten back to my Philip K. Dick obsession and have been working my way through some of his earlier novels. Right now I'm reading The Man Who Japed (originally published in 1956). It looks like precognition is going to be a theme in this one too. Precognition, telepathy, multiple personalities. It is interesting to see in this novel many of the elements that are also part of his later, more mature work--for example, Ubik (1969). What's especially interesting, though, is how these themes grow increasingly theological over the course of his career. The character of Alan Purcell also prefigures that of Bob Arctor, from A Scanner Darkly (1977), recently made into a film by Richard Linklater.

It would be interesting to use statistical natural language processing techniques to chart the trajectory of the various themes in PKD's work. The same techniques could be used to explore Dick's own idiosyncratic science fiction vocabulary: to jape, conapts, bibs, Jiffi-scuttlers, etc.. I wonder how many of these are his own invention and how many were already part of the science fiction of the time. I tried finding a few of these terms in the OED science fiction citations, but there were no entries for them. Oh well.

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I've been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick recently, focussing primarily on his early novels. I'm about to finish Dr. Futurity (1960). It's another mind-bending experience from the master, putting a twist on time travel that makes the plot of Twelve Monkeys seem simple-minded.

I've also been reading The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick. I found a nice bit there about the idea of an android thinking it is human, as in Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:

"That's one of of the few original ideas I've ever contributed to science fiction. I mean, most of my ideas are rehash--but that was my original idea, was that a guy could be an android and not know it."

I wonder if Dick's claim to prior art is valid. It'd be nice if there were something like an OED for sci-fi plot ideas. Speaking of which, I had a look at the entry for android in the OED for science fiction. It goes back to at least the fifties.

I recently acquired a handy little book that is a must-have for Philip K. Dick fans: Philip K. Dick (Pocket Essential Series) by Andrew M. Butler. It's a guide to PKD's fiction that provides short descriptions for all of his major works (that is, the novels and a cherry-picked selection of short stories). It breaks his work down into a few different periods. The one that I've been reading from lately is labelled as "A Double Life 1954-1960". Here's how the books from that period are rated by Butler:

For a pretty comprehensive bibliography of books by and about PKD, check out good old Wikipedia.