IdleRich

IdleRich
I find your hostility to this book endlessly amusing. I mean you love all that deliberately difficult and pretentious Dee and Gee shit, and this is basically more of the same but crossed with Lovecraftian spookiness and ancient Middle Eastern mythology. I struggle to see what's not to like for someone with your interests.
It is kind of a big load of bollocks though.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think some of the ideas are brilliant but he's a worse writer than Philip k dick. It sort of gets going with something but then gets stuck very quickly. I was on a roll with it but then started reading this thread which has put me onto Drummond
Twice in a row but I agree with Luka again here - at least up to a point. It's very common to hear it said that Dick has great ideas but that he is a terrible writer, so bad in fact that the books succeed despite his clumsy flailings purely because of the visionary power of his ideas. In fact, that is said so often that it's become the accepted truth that is repeated again and again, even by people who have never read the books.
But for me I just don't think it's true. OK, mabe his writing is not extraordinary, it doesn't revolutionise the form or anything like that - but as I remember it's not especially bad either, it's clear and lucid and using it he does succeed in getting across his (complex) ideas and the way they mesh with the narrative.
I've probably even lazily repeated that myself, but... well, does anyone have any examples of bad writing on his part? What is it that's supposed to bad? It's confused, or clunky or repetitive or what?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
'a scanner darkly' what an awful reading experience. Film also dogshit.
What? Really? I was totally blown away by the book? I thought it was genius the way it captured the paranoia arising from the police infiltrating the gangs and the gangs infiltrating the police. The way that the undercover cops have to disguise themselves when they are back amongst the police so that a spy can't reveal their identity - and then when this is combined with the dissociative effects of substance d and the descent into madness that is arising from its abuse so that you have the mole not knowing which person he is and whether or not the person he is spying on is himself or not. When that happened I found that a genuinely vertiginous idea that properly fucked with my head.
And it's also a very complex idea that he manages to make hit you forcefully in a way that wouldn't work if it wasn't done with consummate skill. It has to be built up to and delivered in such a way that it knocks you off your feet as much as it does the protagonist. It has be to be explained well enough that you get it but not so didactically that it's dry.
So I thought that that book, in particular, succeeds extremely well in fucking you up and scaring you with ideas that had to be elegantly constructed and handled or they would have fallen flat - and taken the whole book down with them. In short I would make A Scanner Darkly (also a good, attention grabbing and intriguing, title, though some might argue that it's a tad clumsy) exhibit A in terms of evidence for his being a good writer.
I'm also surprised you don't like the film. It is necessarily slightly simplified compared to the book, but for me it was one of the more complex sci-fi films of the era that does take on most of what is contained in the book while at the same time being a lot of fun and rattling along at a decent pace, always watchable and with that cool effect. I think it's great.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
has anyone read Reza Negarestani's second book ' intelligence and spirit'? I'm thinking i might buy it. I listened to a podcast with him the other night while shopping https://podtail.com/en/podcast/social-discipline/sd02-w-reza-negarestani-synthesis-between-manichea/ and i thought it was pretty good.
No, but I've got his new one on order apparently. I know this cos I got a message from Amazon the other day saying that I could expect it in April - I'd actually completely forgotten about it though... which is not entirely surprising cos according to that same email, I originally placed the order in early 2019*.

*@suspended, I KNOW I did mention this the other day but I think that this is not, in this case, an automated response that shows the limited nature of my programming. Although it doesn't contradict that hypothesis either.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Well, I mean, objectively... yeah, I guess.

But when has that ever stopped anyone here enjoying anything?
Don't get me wrong, I started reading it and I got intrigued and I read it to the end and (as I said above) apparently I ordered his new one, so I must have overall enjoyed the experience. But I do feel that a lot of it is just ideas stuck down there, not really explored or joined up, or really used to do anything more than just say "Look! Cool idea!" in fact let's be honest, sometimes it's not even an idea it's more like "Hey check this out, cool sentence!" - and some of it, that weird pseudo-maths stuff, just seems really kinda fake and an attempt to bestow on it a certain kind of legitimacy that it doesn't really have. I feel that some people take it way more seriously than it deserves and every now and again someone ought to point out that the emperor is naked - and he knows it and he's waggling his dick at you and laughing and daring someone to point it out.
 

luka

Well-known member
This a common misapprehension when it comes to writing, people have a sense of good writing being a lot like good table manners, but it isn't at all.
 

luka

Well-known member
Dick writes in the voice of his characters and puts you right in that Berkley dropout mileu
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
There are lots of ways that you can be a good writer. Dick doesn't write like Proust... but sentences that go on for pages aren't always appropriate and I don't think they be right choice to represent someone living in the world that Dick does.
I think Graham Greene is a great writer - I love the way that he writes simply and elegantly and with a sort of understatement (but not irony) - but again, that cool clear matter of factness isn't what you want when you're trying to explain the beautiful madness of having your mind blasted to pieces and rebuilt in a different way by an overwhelming laser beam of infinite knowledge from the future.
Or think of another sci-fi writer like say Asimov, his style is way too dry and, frankly, boring for what Dick does.
 

jenks

thread death

Don't get me wrong, I started reading it and I got intrigued and I read it to the end and (as I said above) apparently I ordered his new one, so I must have overall enjoyed the experience. But I do feel that a lot of it is just ideas stuck down there, not really explored or joined up, or really used to do anything more than just say "Look! Cool idea!" in fact let's be honest, sometimes it's not even an idea it's more like "Hey check this out, cool sentence!" - and some of it, that weird pseudo-maths stuff, just seems really kinda fake and an attempt to bestow on it a certain kind of legitimacy that it doesn't really have. I feel that some people take it way more seriously than it deserves and every now and again someone ought to point out that the emperor is naked - and he knows it and he's waggling his dick at you and laughing and daring someone to point it out.
i hated the whole thing - i really couldn't get anything out of it at all which is very rare for me - the bad writing, the pomposity, urgh- i had erased the memory of it all until i saw this thread was reactivated. I have never felt that P K Dick, on the other hand, was a bad writer - uneven novels maybe but not because of the actual writing, more plotting or characterisation and I think that is because he is driven by theme. This became even more apparent to me after reading grapejuice's recent book.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Dick is driven by theme, but it's never so problematic as in, say, Breaking Bad (my go to example) where you almost hear the writers saying "this needs to happen so person x needs to do this, regardless if it's totally out of character" - a massive problem for me that really dragged the series down. Horselover doesn't do that to nearly the same extent.
Also, although I think that I like character driven narratives far more, they do need some kind of external stimulus to push things along and start them happening or they become limited in a different way.
But yeah, I'd say that Dick is further along the spectrum towards theme-driven than I would tend to think I like but it does kinda work for me even so. Perhaps it's cos a lot of that stuff he really believed in and thought that he had to get across or something. That's what it infuses it with a kind of importance..
 

luka

Well-known member
it doesnt feel theme based does it, thats the paradox, its not like most sci-fi which is like what poetix was saying about borges, everything but the idea is really just window dressing, decorative, inessential and arch
 

luka

Well-known member
the telling of the story is actually a large part of what those books are, the narrative voice is a huge part of what those books are, the sense of the Dick-presence, being in the comapany of Dick, Dick-rhythms and Dick-time
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it doesnt feel theme based does it, thats the paradox, its not like most sci-fi which is like what poetix was saying about borges, everything but the idea is really just window dressing, decorative, inessential and arch
In Valis it's very theme driven but the them is the character so.... or at least that's one of them.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it doesnt feel theme based does it, thats the paradox, its not like most sci-fi which is like what poetix was saying about borges, everything but the idea is really just window dressing, decorative, inessential and arch
I don't agree with that, I like the writing, I mean maybe that is window dressing but I think that writing in a book is more than that.
 
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