It's easy to get over-excited about Dick - he's everyone's favourite rebel: pictures taken late in his life make him seem like a cuddly homespun dropout, and hardly anyone doubts his genius.I am ambivalent about Dick, in the same way that I am ambivalent about myself - his adamant veering off into the mystical and the Gnostic seems to be at such terrific variance with a lot in his work that seems to fit only in a world made for human intelligence alone, and in which human intelligence alone can have meaning. (And I still cannot figure out why I am a transhumanist Christian)That said, this is an incredible book. There are few writers who can succinctly describe the awful vibrations of sour or dissonant human relationships with the same incisive ability as Dick. There are also only a few cases in Science Fiction literature where you encounter truly unconcerned malevolence: here in a scene late in the work where the andys Pris and Irmgard oversee the cold destruction of a spider, and (if memory serves), the character of Weston nonchalantly destroying the frog-like creatures he discovers on Perelandra in the novel by C.S.Lewis.But these are minor jewels in the crown - a desire for fellow feeling over intelligence, empathy rather than power, hope rather than entropy: this composite aspiration comes through powerfully, in a volume that is in wordage terms pretty slight. Another of my mainstay re-reads ( )

The film was inspired by this story but the content of the film and the book are barely related.

This short novel is a very interesting example of how P. K. Dick plays with humans reallity. ( )

fiction, novel, science fiction

Pre09:
Characters: There's the main guy. And then the cooky inventor. And of course the chick. So yea, they exist.
Plot: Darn solid. All about what is human. A sci-fi book being used to explore a sci-fi plot.
Style: Very detective style. Classic cyberpunk too. Short and to the point. ( )

Blade Runner is loosely based on this novel. I enjoyed it thoroughly and read it quickly over two days. It is an engrossing sci-fi read and raises interesting ethical questions about the value of lives. ( )