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.
Comments (1)
have you read Valis? he went absolutely nuts by the end and wrote books about god's and/or aliens' messages to him. there's a good biographical book about him with lots of his notes that were found after his death... wow there seem to be lots of biographies. this one had some interesting bits about his religious views though. http://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Realities-Philip-Dick-Philosophical/dp/0679747877/ref=pd_sim_b
Posted by Brendan O'Connor | November 13, 2007 10:06 AM
Posted on November 13, 2007 10:06