What's the deal with Philip K Dick? Was he a good stylist?

>>9226127
He was probably none of those, but still a great artist and probably a Prophet of some sort

>>9226127
I dunno but community was really funny until the fourth season

Dick did a lot to make sci-fi human. A lot of other sci-fi authors before him made everything cold and distant.
He is the NIN of sci-fi.

>>9226150
NiN made industrial music human?

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>>9226127

>>9226127
Kristen Stewart is looking really hot lately.

>>9226150
This. I remember really sympathizing with the guy in Flow My Tears when he gets depressed and lonely and randomly hugs that dude at the gas station just to have some human contact.

>>9226127
He wasn't a great writer but he wrote about unique ideas/concepts/settings while also putting into it the most sincerity and passion he could muster. It just works.

I've heard friends and former classmates talk about VALIS as some wacky zany religious drug trip, but when I read it I felt it was very emotional and made me quite melancholic for days.

>>9226656
VALIS was excellent in my opinion, the best 'sci-fi' that I've ever read.

>>9226656
I hate it when people reduce PKD to DUDE WEED LMAO, but doing that to VALIS is especially heinous.

>>9226127
PKD was one of the few authors to accurately describe living inside a mental ward from the patients perspective, if that's the very least you want from him, at least give him that credit.

he has good cooky high concept reality busting ideas a great formal education in philosophy/theology and an interest in the world of psychedelia which underpins all his works

prose is mostly bland serviceable pulp prose but he has some beautiful lines in his later works.

his characters are almost all flat, they're just pawns in the narrative. atmosphere is usually really vague and just kind of a generic scifi world. his novels don't take place in the same universe or anything but a lot of his novels have a similar version of the future.

>>9226931
I think his flat character's and mood tend to favor him when attempted comedy. I admit I kek'd at the Jew line in Androids

>>9226127
He had some very interesting ideas about reality.
I like his metaphysics.

>>9226912
This guy gets it.

>>9226276
That's not Stewart, that's Olivier Assayas

He started with the Greeks (+amphetamine)

>>9226276
Marshall Mathers

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>>9226656
>but when I read it I felt it was very emotional and made me quite melancholic for days.
same.
I really hope he was right.

PKD saw over the mountain, he was a really intelligent and original guy who somehow ended up churning out shit science fiction stories for a living

>>9226656
hullo mack

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Ubik is the kind of book no normal human could write.

You could sit down for decades studying and never be able to write a book in its style.

Philip K Dick is a genius.

>>9226127
i want to be pegged by that dyke

It's not that he's a bad writer, just that his prose is merely functional. He's not very strong at characterizations either. However I would consider him a great stylist, not for his prose but for the distinct and recognizable aura surrounding his works. Plus he has a really neat metaphysics.

Who are some other authors who write of the malleable nature of reality? I think someone like Ballard qualifies.

>>9226127
who's the boy?

confessions of a crap artist is pretty great and not sci-fi

>>9229096
>>9229096
Not /lit/, but Grant Morrison

>>9229278
I've read a few of his comics. What are your favorites?

>>9229278
morrison is a solipsist ponce in the vein of alan moore and the guy that wrote camel rides again who is their 'intellectual' mentor

>>9229096
i don't follow, what does it mean to have 'neat metaphysics'? did dick actually develop any sort of philosophical system? as for ballard i did read him a lot and he's a decent writer that would be hanging on /r/futurism if he were alive today, regurgitating clickbait tripes from pop-sci publications as he did while arpanet was just a baby.

>>9229012
elaborate?

He had esoteric alien intelligence broadcast directly inside his brain so all his works are prophetic

>>9229119
Eminem, he started taking hormones

>>9229592
>elaborate?
I'm not that poster but PKD himself talked about it, and if you read the book you can see why. It's so unique and different from anything else in literature ever except perhaps other PKD books, but even his other ones don't go as far as this one. It's hard to describe. It's a novel where reality is entirely uncertain and there are nested realities inside realities, and these realities seem to be breaking down somehow. It completely does away with the novelistic idea of a standard reality, and yet while doing this, it isn't at all over-cerebral but strangely human because the characters are just normal, sometimes sentimental and sometimes scheming people trying to move around in it.

While doing this it also somehow manages to accidentally be a heavily Gnostic parable, as Dick interpreted it in retrospect, although it appears he had not yet gotten interested in Gnosticism or intended to do so while writing it

IDK but it's pretty badass imo