About this item
Jonathan Lethem editor The most outreacute science fiction writer of the th century has finally entered the canon exclaimed Wired Magazine upon The Library of Americas May publication of Philip K Dick Four Novels of the s edited by Jonathan Lethem Now comes a companion volume collecting five novels that offer a breathtaking overview of the range of this science-fiction master Philip K Dick - was a writer of incandescent imagination who made and unmade world-systems with ferocious rapidity and unbridled speculative daring The floor joists of the universe he once wrote are visible in my novels Martian Time-Slip unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where schizophrenia is a contagion and the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled childs time-fracturing visions Dr Bloodmoney or How We Got Along After the Bomb chronicles the deeply-interwoven stories of a multi-racial community of survivors including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III Famous among other reasons for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab Now Wait for Last Year explores the effects of JJ- a hallucinogen that alters not only perception but reality In Flow My Tears the Policeman Said a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity A Scanner Darkly the basis for the film envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officers tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment himself Mixing metaphysics and madness phantasmagoric visions of a post-nuclear world and invading extraterrestrial authoritarians and all-too-real evocations of the drugged-out America of the s Dicks work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure.
About the Author
Over a writing career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film; notably: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ) , Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
