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morange wrote:Hey if you like Dick (heh), read Ubik. My favorite of his. I find myself thinking about it, just, around, doing stuff. I love the stuff he writes about shared dream-states. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, too.

You can't go wrong with Vonnegut.

I haven't read Riddley Walker. Good, you say?

Someone already recommended Ubik to me yesterday, so it's on the list

Vonnegut. I've read Cat's Cradle and the Mr. Rosewater, and will start Slaughterhouse 5 tomorrow. I'm not sold on him yet. I did enjoy both books, but didn't get a wow. I'll see how I like Slaughterhouse 5 and then maybe get Breakfast of Champions.

Riddley Walker. Yes! Excellent. Without dropping any spoilers, I would say there are two things to get your head around that might seem tricky. 1. It's written in a made up dialect of English, so there are few times you might have to think about what the word or sentence means. 2. It's a lot of mixed up confusing ideas. My advice is don't worry about either of those things. Don't try to understand everything. It'll come together in the end and you can look back to the bits you didn't get on first pass.

The most memorable Vonnegut for me is The Sirens of Titan, and it's more of a real sci-fi story with less of the Vonnegut blah blah blah (which I like, but I like that the story actually does the talking in this one). I wish they would do a movie of it, with Olivia Wilde as Beatrice Rumfoord, the leading female character (described as odd looking but beautiful ). Idk yet about who I would cast for the rest - great characters though.

Did you ever see Minority Report? Best Phillip K Dick movie imo.

Hmm definately going to check that guy out after I finish Use of Weapons.


Just finished Revelation Space, good story in spaaaaace

morange wrote:
Did you ever see Minority Report? Best Phillip K Dick movie imo.

Not true. Not true.

Blade Runner or A Scanner Darkly

Yeah those are great ones too of course. I really love the psychic stuff and deep paranoia of Minority Report, which is my favorite impression from Phillip K Dick books. Like, is someone in my head, and just who's dream is this, if it is even a dream?

Yeah, I think the story "Minority Report" is better than the movie. The movie's pretty good too. There are a lot of bad Dick film adaptations though. Seems people have a difficult time translating his writing to the big screen.

Yeah. In their defense, some of his writing is just terrible (but the best is brilliant). Many many great ideas though. Blade Runner takes the best from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but is still very unlike the book. Harrison Ford's character is completely different than his novel counterpart. Don't get me wrong, great book too, but different. I think an unadapted Dick story on screen would be a very strange thing. How is Ubik not a movie yet, though? Maybe they think audiences are too dumb for it. Ubik is perfect.

Harrison Ford play a more likable character. Sometimes Phillip K Dick's protagonist is pretty unlikable. Intentionally, I'm sure. Dude in Androids only cares about getting a real sheep. Consumerism and all that.

It seems they all take liberties when they make movies of his stuff, and so some are good and some are bad, depending on the film makers. I think the bad ones try to fit him into the mold of a typical movie for the time, and that doesn't really work. His plots are unconventional.

I don't think I've actually read Minority Report, though. Havta do that, now.

Sorry, just got off work, very stream of conscious right now, not all coherent.

yeah, they cut a lot of Androids out of the movie because Dick's novels are too long & complicated to be made into films... his short stories on the other hand...

Ohhhh yeah, that part where he's arrested and taken to that fake bounty hunting headquarters full of androids. That would have been good.

I strongly preferred Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Blade Runner. Might be because I read the book first so I had a very clear idea in my head of what the setting looked and felt like, and the movie just didn't quite work for me. Don't get me wrong I liked it well enough, but I couldn't help feeling a bit let down because of years of people telling me how fantastic Blade Runner is and how much I had enjoyed the book.

They're pretty different. Blade Runner stands on its own merit, but it's difficult to compare it to the book in terms of which is "better".

Yeah, it may well be different enough that comparing the two is a bit of a pointless exercise. Both are good in their own way.

^ Nah, book is way better. I sat down a year or so back and made my wife watch "Blade Runner" (she'd never seen it) and was kinda stunned when it just wasn't anywhere near as good as I remembered it. The art direction is nice - all those East-mmers-West cityscapes - but the movie itself plays like a bad 80s music video. All visual style and pretty much nothing else. So I know exactly where you're coming from, monkeydancer.

Syd Mead = "visual futurist"

His designs for Blade Runner are brilliant.

Rutger Hauer = the perfect replicant

His "tears in the rain" speech is amazing.

Vangelis = superb cinematic composer

His use of the Yamaha CS-80 is "beastly". (It's a beast of a synth.)

I could go on...

morange wrote:Just finished Revelation Space, good story in spaaaaace

Check out House of Suns by the same author. As much as I liked Revelation Space, HoS was so so much better.

Not as good as To the Lighthouse, but because that's one of my all time favourite books I might have set my expectations too high. She just hadn't perfected her style/the form yet in Mrs. Dalloway, in my opinion.