100
Followers
65
Following
Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog
It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.
Currently reading
Station Zero
Progress:
220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Progress:
749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Progress:
8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Progress:
152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
Progress:
78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Progress:
4/50 pages
Selected Poems
Progress:
18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Progress:
133/789 pages
This novel was published posthumously, set from a completed and corrected manuscript that Dick left to a friend. It contrasts starkly with the completely niave prose of Dick's early work, the author being so technically assured as to even change narrators in mid sentence...twice.In a typically crazy gambit, the first narrator is none other than Dick himself; considerable verifiable autobiographical detail is offered but there is something not quite right - there has never been a US President called Ferris F. Fremont. What is going on? Dick has blurred reality and fantasy once again and by inserting himself in the action beaten Douglas Coupland's appearances in JPod by over two decades.
Other quintessential Dick themes are present; paranoia, police States, characters who appear to be insane. Repression within a democracy is insidious and dangerous, Dick is saying, refering to the McCarthy era. On that basis the book seems more relevant now than it would have been upon initial publication in 1985.