The Philip K. Dick Collection
[v. 1] Four novels of the 1960s: The great accomplishment of Philip K. Dick, in the words of editor Jonathan Lethem, was "to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation." These four novels written in the 1960s -- The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (source of the movie Blade Runner), and Ubik -- are summits in Dick's career. They exemplify the hallucinatory logic, darkly comic exuberance, and unsettling prescience of Dick's genius. These are universes where alternate realities can be marketed and individual identity eroded in unexpected ways, and where the very question of what is human is redefined as the virtual becomes the real, and the divine may lurk in a mass-marketed drug or in a household product. Dick was a true American original whose worldwide influence continues to grow. - Jacket. [v. 2] Five novels of the 1960s & 70s: The science-fiction novels of Philip K. Dick have increasingly been recognized as among the most original and influential works of their time. Dick's wild and prophetic talent bent genre conventions to his own concerns with personal identity, religious transfiguration, and the dark side of commodity culture. Included in this volume are five of his most astonishing works: Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965), Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), and A Scanner Darkly (1977). Each creates a singular fictional universe, at once terrifying in its paranoid logic and suffused with delirious and subversive humor. - Jacket. [v. 3] VALIS and later novels: In the final phase of his now-celebrated career, Philip K. Dick moved increasingly beyond the conventions of the sci-fi genre to probe his imaginative obsessions in idiosyncratic new ways. The novels included in this volume -- A Maze of Death (1970), VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) -- chart an experimental and uniquely Dickian literary territory hailed by aficionados as his most searching and profound. Written in astonishing bursts of creative energy, they fuse personal confession, theological speculation, and reflections on the contemporary scene. Above all, they explore the nature of religious revelation -- its sometimes blinding truths and its sometimes dark human consequences -- in a key that marks Dick as an irreplaceable American visionary. - Jacket.
