Blade Runner 2049

The original Blade Runner is what first got me into film noir. It evokes noir's guilty heart where other attempts at "future noir" only get the trappings right. Rick Deckard isn't what you'd call a hero: compelled by self-interest, he's hunting down escaped replicant-slaves whose only crime (so far as he's concerned) is their presence on earth. Though he tries to hide it from himself, he's fully conscious of their humanity and fear as he blows them away, as in that slow, sad scene where he shoots a terrified female replicant in the back as she flees into a department store. It's Roy who "earns" his soul at the end, who, with his crucified hand, saves Deckard's life and possibly his soul; we're never quite sure whether Deckard is even really human.

Blade Runner also has a poignant but seriously messed-up love affair, another noir element ratcheted up almost to the intensity of myth. The vast dark urban abysses (reminiscent of night scenes in Phantom Lady and others) and mountainous decayed buildings (like the Bradbury, where the classic noir D.O.A. also ends) meld seamlessly with the iconic score and the plot's moral grayness and lack of resolution.

And, as with noir, I've somehow also found Blade Runner a solace when going through bad times. I can remember one period in my life when I watched it once or twice a week. I think a lot of people would say something similar. And there's not all that much to the plot. It's more of an immersive audiovisual mood experience than a movie. So there's probably a lot of other people who think it's okay but kind of dull. They're mystified by people like me, to whom it means so much.

All of which is to say, Blade Runner 2049 has a lot to live up to. Well, I went and saw it at the $4.00 matinee this weekend, and I...think it kind of succeeds. For me, at any rate. Not quite, of course. How could it? But it continues the story, adds to the background, and deepens the world without doing any violence to the thrust of the original, all while maintaining its own narrative independence.

I have to say, I went into it with pretty low expectations. I've been less than impressed with Ridley Scott's attempts to rekindle the Alien magic, and as for Harrison Ford's reprising the roles that made him famous, well, um, yeah, same thing. So I'm very excited that Blade Runner 2049 proved so much better than I'd expected.

I don't want to say too much, because it's got a good plot with plenty to spoil. But I will say that it's another true noir, with a written-off protagonist, a bizarre love story, and an ambiguous ending. What we see of Deckard (not much, thankfully) does little to explain or humanize him. Like the original, it's elliptical and rather sad. The city is the same, down to the now-retro-futuristic Atari signs. The texture is as rich, too, though perhaps a bit contrived in places, and not quite as authentic feeling. We get to see the world outside L.A., including a protein farm and a humongous waste dump, and it's a beautifully unlovely place. The CGI is some of the best I've seen, though, for me, nothing could ever quite equal the practical effects of the original.

There are some interesting allusions. The protagonist, a replicant Blade Runner, is called K, seemingly a reference to Kafka's bewildered protagonists. One of the short "prequel" films that came out in advance (Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run) centers on a copy of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, a novel about a hunted priest – a broken "whisky" priest – in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. The parallel is obvious, and, given the film's preoccupation with the nature of the soul, fitting. Other religious and mythological allusions abound.

In the end, I think it's movie that I'll have to rewatch once or twice to decide what to make of it, but it's passed the first test so far.

Vast Active Living Intelligence System

I've never been much of a science fiction reader. My attempts at writing it have been pretty unsuccessful, too, at least to my mind. Sometimes this embarrasses me. When a "real-life" acquaintance finds out I write, and they ask, "Oh! What sorts of things?" I stammer a bit, and say, "Oh, you know, sci-fi fantasy stuff." But that's not quite honest, is it? It's just that, if I come right out and say, I write fantasy, people don't seem to know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's just where I live. It sounds like I'm confessing to writing, you know, fantasies, as in the "fantasy suites" down at the Ramada Inn. But sci-fi they understand, and it gets the basic idea across.

Me, I like the prose laid on thick, as in Conrad or Melville. That's probably obvious to readers of my books. But you don't find many gothic edifices or thickets of purple prose in the science fiction field. Descriptions are terse and often rather vague. Everything is done by suggestion. My eye just glides right over it. I'm not particularly intrigued by fictional advances in science or technology, either. Maybe I spent too many years studying spin geometry and quantum field theory.

Leaving aside romancers of the cosmic future like Herbert and Wolfe, whom I personally consider to write a species of fantasy rather than science fiction, what I find when I look at the authors I most enjoy (A. E. van Vogt, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick) is a preoccupation with philosophy, religion, and psychology.

What brings on this little soliloquy is the fact that I've just read (or listened to, at any rate) Philip K. Dick's VALIS yet another time. I find myself reading Dick whenever I go through a particularly severe bout of depression and isolation. His books tend to be about people who are depressed and isolated, of course, but I find them strangely consoling for that very reason. He's a humane writer with a sympathy that never becomes sentimental.

Though possibly his most idiosyncratic work, VALIS is one that I've returned to again and again. It's Dick's hilarious yet deeply sad semi-autobiographical account of one seriously fucked-up (as Dick would put it) person's (or is it persons'?) slightly brain-fried search for God (or whatever) in paranoid post-Nixon 1970s California. Unlike a lot of Dick's fiction, drugs play only a peripheral role. Religious experience has taken their place. I remember my mother once telling me that, to her, it seemed like the Jesus People of the seventies had merely traded one drug for another (that is, dionysian ecstasy). Maybe that sums up Dick's experience.

The milieu described in a number of Dick's drugs-and-religion books bears a disturbing resemblance to a certain phase of my own life, when I spent all my time with card-carrying prophets, traveling evangelists, drug addicts, professional bead-necklace-making drifters, hippies living in station wagons, cell group leaders, paranoid schizophrenics, Hare Krishnas, recovering vampires, and undercover missionaries. I was scared out of my mind, autistic without knowing it, and, for a while, on the verge of homelessness and utter ruin. But that was my world, and the only thing I could do was try to find meaning in it. My general situation was, like Horselover Fat's, fucked up. Actually, it was just after I'd divorced myself from that world that I first started reading Philip K. Dick, starting with And Now Wait for Last Year. What I'm trying to say is, Dick's whacked-out religious novels hit close to home.

You might call VALIS an exploration of lowercase-g gnosticism, that is, salvation through special knowledge (or "information," as Dick puts it). The Exegesis runs all through it, with frequent citations from the New Testament and the pre-Socratic philosophers. What's strange is that it seems to call into question the very concept of saving knowledge, reaffirming John of the Cross's path of negation. A message is only as reliable as the messenger. Sensory impressions, interior locutions, and emotional experiences can always be questioned. Maybe they come from a divine source, or maybe someone's just playing with microwave transmissions. Maybe you're speaking to an incarnation of the pleroma, or maybe it's just a little girl rigged with wires and speakers. Looking in from the outside of Dick's universe, it seems to me that a god whose communication of himself takes place solely on the plane of "information" will always turn out to be a resident of some star system or other, that is, a being more powerful but commensurate with human beings.

It strikes me as ironic that Fat's friend David, a Catholic (and, apparently, a stand-in for Tim Powers), always tries to bring C. S. Lewis into his theodicy. Lewis was himself a gnostic, in that his descriptions of faith, in both his fiction and his apologetic works, amount to a kind of secret knowledge. The heaven described in The Last Battle is a thoroughly gnostic heaven; both Dick and Lewis routinely cite Plato. I wonder how much Lewis Dick had actually read, if any. The David character resists, but ultimately accepts the import of Fat's revelations and the significance of the Eric Lampton film. But then it all just fizzles out, gets explained away (if one can call it that) as the operation of mundane technology and delusion...

I think I'll read The Divine Invasion sometime soon. No doubt I'll have more to say then.

Some other posts on Dick-related material that you might enjoy:

• Dick's Broken-Backed Novels
• Can-D and Other Matters
• The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

In continuation of my project of watching seventies sci-fi movies, my wife and I recently rented The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie. And...whoa. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a movie with more sex and full-frontal nudity. As to special effects, there are next to none. The movie mostly consists of David Bowie wandering around, obviously stoned, saying and doing incomprehensible things. Its weirdness factor approaches that of Eraserhead. Mmm, maybe not quite that, but it's very weird. I guess it says something about how warped I am that I kind of liked it.

What did I like about it? It's disjointed, granted, and there are too many gaps in the logic to count; it comes out to less than the sum of its parts. It does tell a definite story, the story of an alien who comes to earth to get water for his dying planet, creates a billion-dollar electronics corporation to attain his goals, gets lonely and addicted to alcohol and TV, loses everything, and ends up a bum musician, estranged from the haplessly boozy girl who'd been his one solace, stuck forever on earth while his wife and children die on his planet. It sounds pretty crazy when you reduce it to that. And it is crazy. But really it's a movie about loneliness, alienation.

Here is a scene that stands out. The alien, Mr. Newton, knowing that his secret has been discovered by a scientist, goes into the bathroom, removes his prosthetic disguise, and emerges to confront his girlfriend. She is so terrified that, horribly, she wets herself. She attempts to love him as he is – love-making on the alien planet appears to consist of becoming covered in goo and engaging in intimate contact (like frogs spawning, perhaps?) – but it is simply too much for her, and they split up, despite the real love she has for him. It's bizarre, disgusting, sad, and beautiful all at once, which pretty much describes the entire movie.

It's one of those elliptical seventies cult favorites, rich in suggestion but poor (one suspects) in actual meaning, that attract any number of idiosyncratic secret-message interpretations. There are all kinds of unexplained little details, like the glittery golden helmets the assassins wear when they hurl the owlish patent attorney and his lover through an apartment window, or the fact that Mr. Newton is imprisoned by shadowy government forces in a palatial suite with a bed suspended from chains behind a secret door in a rec room. There's a rising sense of paranoia, lurking conspiracy, and societal decay. Obscure characters from the beginning of the movie give television interviews toward the end. Events have a nightmarish significance and connection with one another. There are strange side plots that appear not to go anywhere, characters that enter the stage, say cryptic things, and vanish without explanation.

David Bowie, stoned or not, is terrific as Mr. Newton. This is the third role I've seen him in, the others being Andy Warhol in Basquiat and the Goblin King in Labyrinth. He has a strange but compelling magnetism. Candy Clark plays the lonely, boozy hotel maid Mary Lou, who becomes Mr. Newton's lover and introduces him to alcohol and church. She's also quite good in her role. She's very pretty in a wholesome, comforting way, and has a nice, rounded Texoma accent. We meet the character when she carries the frail Mr. Newton, who's suffering from a nosebleed and some sort of gravitational malady brought on by an elevator ride at a seedy border-town hotel, into his room and tends to him with touching concern. She's pretty much the opposite of Mr. Newton, and they seem not to be very good for one another, but their ultimate alienation brings real sadness.

What made me want to watch the movie was knowing its connection with Philip K. Dick's VALIS, a book that fascinates me for some reason. The book features a stand-in for David Bowie and a much-modified version of the film, which is portrayed as having a secret message. The idea of a movie having secret messages about government conspiracies or direct connections with your dreams is something that would strike only a paranoid schizophrenic as reasonable. But, to be fair, The Man Who Fell to Earth is a movie that encourages that kind of thinking. It seems always to be saying less than it's really saying under the surface, with a true meaning grasped only by the initiated.

Well, it's not a movie I can really recommend, unless you don't mind lots and lots of sex and awkward fondling and full-frontal nudity. That said, the "love" scenes are so odd as to rob them of any prurient interest, and actually fit rather well with the movie as a whole in an artistic sense.
 All in all I rather liked it, and, though it's not one I'll be rushing to watch again anytime soon, I imagine that the impression it made will remain for a good while.

Can-D and Other Matters

It's been some weeks since my last post. I've not been idle, for I've been drawing, writing, and taking part in various other weighty and time-consuming matters. But, as my humble blog is being plagued by referrer spam from the Ukraine, which creeps me out, and as the conventional wisdom seems to be that legitimate activity and real traffic drives these automated imposters out as the sound of church bells sends ghosts back to their troubled beds, I shall say...some things.

First topic. Science fiction has never caught my fancy much. I suppose it is the lack of affect. There are, of course, many exceptions, including Van Vogt, Bester, and Herbert. Heinlein and Asimov I read in my youth but outgrew. There are other big names I've sampled but found not much to my liking. Lately, though, the author I've grown most in appreciation for is Philip K. Dick.

I've written a bit about him before. You can see which of his books I've read recently on my sidebar. I think I enjoy them not chiefly for their genre qualities (which often are slight) but for their rather melancholy but intense human drama. His protagonists are always hapless losers and/or paranoid schizophrenics; they generally fall for beautiful, eccentric, unattainable young women and receive both tenderness and suffering at their hands. Wives are distant and cold or absent altogether. Much of this was autobiographical, I take it. His self-revelation in VALIS (which, for reasons I don't understand, is one of my favorites) makes this pretty clear.

One thing I appreciate about him is his willingness to grapple with religious issues in a serious way, asking questions and not doggedly pursuing some stale foregone conclusion. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, for instance, explores transubstantiation and communion, disconcertingly through the use of Can-D. VALIS, of course, is about a kind of religious quest, while Through a Scanner Darkly takes its title from I Corinthians 13. Flow My Tears is another good example, especially since he later believed it had been modeled on Acts, or something. Plenty of others abound. He was searching, searching and not finding, wandering into the desert like his friend Bishop Pike and perishing there, perhaps, but never settling for a glib or facile contentment with some received idea.

More than that, though, I read him for his humaneness. Characters to him are persons, evoking sympathy in the reader, and not lay figures moved about on a stage. And his handling of neurological or psychological anomaly is masterful. Nowhere else have I found such a true depiction of the fractured, warped perceptions of the disordered mind.

Next topic. My children and I have finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lewis' seeming disdain for what he considers ugly, homely, or affected in physical appearance continues to bug me. It reminds me of nothing I've come across in Tolkien. But I was already unkind to Lewis in my last post concerning his work, so here I will say, my God, how beautiful the ending of Voyage is. My kids were spellbound.

It's strange, reading Lewis again after so many years, to realize how I'd internalized his writing. Time and again I come across a word, a phrase, or an entire sentence, and realize that something I'd thought my own had actually been lifted from his work. For example, in my recent story, "At the Edge of the Sea," I referred in the first draft to "sea-people." I was advised to alter this, and changed it to "sea-folk," a felicitous choice, I think; but now I realize that my "sea-people" came from the last chapters of Voyage. Altogether quite a writer, and not to be dismissed as some people do.

Voyage, incidentally, is where I learned the names of all the parts of a ship and other nautical terms. It's a recurring dream of mine to find myself crossing the Atlantic on the Dawn Treader.

Third topic. Something that really annoys me in planet-hopping TVF sci-fi is what I call the small planet syndrome. The most egregious offender is The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke crash-lands in a swamp on an earth-sized planet, and expects Yoda to be living right around the corner somewhere. If I told you, "Go to the third planet of the system of Sol, where you will find a man named Buddy," and you crash-landed in Madagascar or something, you'd be crazy if you met some random person and believed that they could take you to him. Maybe it was the Force? I don't know. I don't think it's even mentioned. But I haven't seen Empire since it was so sadly defaced by its maker, and I'll not see it again until they sell the original version (with models!) on DVD. Anyway, Star Trek is just as great an offender.

Well, I guess that's all I have.

Tom Cruise and Tech-Noir

I've now advanced to the point where, instead of watching only movies that come out in the $5.00 bin at Wal-Mart, I actually rent them online, through a company that shall remain nameless, because I haven't been paid for an advertisement, although it isn't one whose CEO publicly insults the intelligence of its American patrons. Now, generally these movies consist of either sci-fi action flicks from the eighties — preferably with my favorite actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (no, really) — or else Japanese kaiju films, because what I really like is film noir, and it isn't easy to find obscure noir titles available for streaming. But last night I got out of my rut by renting a more recent sci-fi action flick, and that despite its having my least favorite actor, Tom Cruise; the reason being that the flick in question has frequently been described as neo-noir or tech-noir, and was based on a Philip K. Dick story.

I speak, of course, of The Minority Report. Alas, it disappointed in the film noir department. Before I get to that, though, let me discuss…product placement.

Off the top of my head, I saw ads — not just products, but overt ads — for Lexus, Guinness, The Gap, Aquafina, Pepsi… The neat thing about advertisements in the dystopian future is that they scan your eyes so as to tailor their annoying, intrusive, soul-crushing distractions specifically to you, in public places. Now, think about this. We all know what it's like to have Google or Facebook or whatnot try to guess what we're into and adapt their ads accordingly, with sometimes rather mortifying results. Can you imagine a giant animated billboard shouting at you—using your own first name—while you're drifting along with a crowd of strangers, blasting something like: "HEY JOHN WE KNOW YOU SUFFER FROM INCONTINENCE WHY NOT TRY DEPENDS FOR A CHANGE?" Yeah. I mean, would there be an Adblocker for that? And, if that future Adblocker began working so well that it threatened to burst the public advertising bubble, would it begin admitting certain ads so that the world as we know it wouldn't come crashing down around our ears in a case of the parasite killing the host and, thus, itself? But I digress. What I really want to know is why these mega-corporations thought such product placement was a good idea. Do they want to be seen as intrusive, soul-crushing mega-corporations that stalk you every waking moment of every day? Apparently!

This might all seem like a quibble, but I think it says something about the sold-out nature of the movie and of Hollywood in general. The ads obviously aren't intended as dystopian satire, although Spielberg does leave that escape route open to himself, despite having taken whatever money he took to place them in the movie in the first place. How much more cynical can you get? Placing soul-crushing advertisements under cover of satirizing soul-crushing advertisements! Compare it with the true tech-noir, Blade Runner. We do see obtrusive advertisement in Blade Runner, but it's presented as dreary, frightening, and/or weird. Yes, there are some actual brands here and there, but they stay where they're supposed to: in the story.

The comparison with Blade Runner is an apt one. It is, as I said, the true tech-noir. It maintains emotional detachment. It follows an unsympathetic protagonist through a dirty job and a twisted romance with one of the replicants he's assigned to destroy. It closes without closure, bringing the plot to a logical conclusion while leaving you in the air regarding the protagonist's destiny (or identity). It definitely stands in the line of Kiss Me Deadly and The Maltese Falcon.

This is the kind of picture Hollywood is afraid to present us with now, on a large budget at any rate. It can't give us a seemingly unsympathetic character without making sure we know it's only skin deep and stems from some awful tragedy that the character will get over by the end of the film. Another movie that masquerades as noir — L. A. Confidential — shows the same squeamishness. The two movies — L. A. Confidential and The Minority Report — actually have a lot in common, including pivotal scenes and plot elements. That's neither here nor there, perhaps, but at any rate they share this merely superficial resemblance to film noir. The Minority Report borrows classical music from Kiss Me Deadly, makes a variety of nods to various noir motifs, uses a desaturated palette, etc. But just as it takes more than bleached-out filmstrips to approach the stylistic marks of film noir, so does it take a lot more than an emotionally justified substance-abuse problem to make a true noir protagonist.

As an aside, I find it remarkable that, under the restrictions of the Hays Code, Hollywood could plumb the very depths of human depravity — sure, sometimes you have to read between the lines, but it's definitely there — while in our more liberal time it can show you a lot more, but to little effect, because it's evidently lost its sense of good and evil and their dirty mixture in a man's soul. Characters like Orson Welles' Hank Quinlan can't exist anymore. Everyone is a white hat or a black hat, and writers think they're being profound when they reveal a white hat to have secretly been a black hat all along.

More generally, The Minority Report doesn't take up the challenge it sets itself. It has the potential to ask profound questions about time and free will, but is content with letting the protagonist run around trying to clear his name. The philosophical difficulties with using precogs to prevent crimes and incarcerate the would-be offenders are raised but left more or less to the side; in the end the program is shut down because it happened to screw up. This is Philip K. Dick turned it into a Mission Impossible adventure story with a happy ending; indeed, the specific questions Dick raises are lost in the shuffle. And yes, I've heard the argument that the protagonist is hallucinating the last scenes while in deep freeze or whatever, but I don't buy it. If you ask me, it's just another way the movie compromises its principles while leaving an out for the cultists.

All that said, it's not a bad movie. I don't understand the praise lavished upon it, but I enjoyed watching it. The plot holes, though numerous, aren't that obvious, and the backdrops are quite memorable. The technology really does seem prescient at some points. There are a lot of nice little touches, like the dancing figures on the cereal box that won't turn off like they're supposed to. So, if you're reading this (!), and hanging on my very words (!!), I would say, watch it if you haven't. Just don't expect Blade Runner.

And if you're really wanting to see a great Spielberg movie, go watch Duel. That's where it's at.

Dick's Broken-Backed Novels

I've read nothing like a majority of Philip K. Dick's novels, but I have read quite a few. Most recently I read We Can Build You, about which more below; it's among the prizes I bore away from the Cool Book Sale I described a few weeks ago. (The dear old ladies are selling those books by the box now. It's criminal, I tell you!) I started reading Dick in college after seeing Blade Runner for the first time. Naturally I began with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but since then have read a pretty good selection of his work from different phases of his career.

Probably my least favorite Dick novels are the ones with his trademarked what-the-hell-is-going-on-oh-that's-what's-going-on plotline. These include Ubik and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Even these have their moments, though, like the subtle dig against the protagonist at the end of the latter.

It's quite interesting, really, if you think about it. (In fact, I'm having a little epiphany right now as I'm writing.) In a nutshell, international celebrity Jason Taverner wakes up to find himself utterly unknown and without papers of identification. It's as though he'd never existed. After various adventures he throws himself on the mercy of Mary Anne Dominic, a potter. She's so introverted and unworldly that you get the impression she wouldn't have known who Taverner was even when he was famous.

This is where it gets interesting. Taverner thinks her pottery is nice in an offhand sort of way, but through carelessness breaks one of her beloved pieces. Afterward (or maybe it's before, I can't remember) they go to a café, where they hear one of Taverner's records on the jukebox. People begin to recognize him, and everything is back to normal. Eventually everything is cleared up in typical Dickian fashion, i.e., through drug use. But the epilogue is where the dig is; for we find that Taverner has lived out the rest of his rather frivolous life like any A-list celebrity, in pointless dissipation, while Mary Anne's simple yet beautiful work continues to quietly inspire. Do you see? Taverner returned to reality only after making contact with Mary Anne, whom he plainly saw as a nobody and whose work he took for granted; then it's Mary Anne who's revealed to have lived the true life.

And that's what makes Dick great, in my opinion: his humaneness. It's always people that he cares about, not things; beauty, and not power. This sets him apart from a great many science fiction writers. His most unsympathetic characters are handled with a profound compassion. This is attributable, I suppose, to the suffering and existential bewilderment Dick himself underwent throughout his own life.

Schizophrenia runs in my family. My uncle, who's severely paranoid schizophrenic, lived with my grandparents up until their death; he was (on the surface) a silent, morose man with an enormous brown beard who spoke only in monosyllables, but sometimes he'd lock himself in his bedroom and guffaw and chat about crazy things with the voices in his head. I remember listening to him late at night. He's in an institution now, and isn't the first in the family to have been institutionalized. There are various other quirks and hang-ups that crop up here and there. I myself have of course been diagnosed with an autism disorder, and have at times lived on the verge of homelessness.

So, it's something I have a bit of experience with. Dick's novels are often gripped with a terrifying paranoia that stemmed in part from his LSD use but more, I suspect, from his disorder, for which drug abuse was probably only a desperate remedy, as it was for my uncle. But, miraculously, he was able to turn it to good effect, and the people in his stories are real people, not figments or delusions.

Some of the novels in which he tried to handle themes of mental illness ended up not being wholly successful. Perhaps this is because a what-the-hell-is-going-on story has to have a stable backdrop of reality in order to arrive at a satisfying resolution. When the characters are deluded it's anyone's guess what the real story is. This would apply to V.A.L.I.S. and We Can Build You, both of which have a kind of broken-backed structure; but they're quite memorable, and a more "successful" attempt, The Clans of Alphane Moon, strikes me as rather trite.

V.A.L.I.S. is largely autobiographical; it amuses me that the Library of America copy I have on my shelf is entitled V.A.L.I.S. and Later Novels, as if the editors weren't entirely certain how to classify it. It's narrated in third person by the protagonist, Horselover Fat, which is of course a cryptogram for Philip Dick. The first half is a fairly realistic account of Dick's mental illness, drug use, and various theophanies; the second, a typically Dickian sci-fi story, is quite different in tone, and ends without a clear resolution. That's not doing the book justice, I know, but what I'm pointing out is the visible seam in the middle, where we go from schizophrenia to sci-fi. I'll discuss the work itself in a later post.

We Can Build You, a much earlier work, has this same seam, but it goes in the opposite direction, from sci-fi to schizophrenia. I read it, as I do most of Dick's books, in a single day, and the ending both disappointed me—because the main plot of the book had been abruptly and completely abandoned— and filled me with a very real, poignant sorrow. It is, from many points of view, a failed novel, but it's one that I think I'll go back to long before I re-read Ubik…