The Library of America has just brought together in a single volume four of Philip K. Dick’s most original novels from the 1960s: Hugo Award winner
The Man in the High Castle (1962) which describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones;
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), which posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure who can transcend death;
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality;
Ubik (1969), which depicts a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life”, pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions, as time collapses on itself and characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive, constantly shape-shifting panacea Ubik.
As with most of Dick’s novels, no synopsis can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these four books. Posing the questions “What is human?" and “What is real?” in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works fantastic and weird, yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation.
For editor Jonathan Lethem’s comments on Philip Dick, click
here.
