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Ladataan... I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (1993)Tekijä: Emmanuel Carrère
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Kirjaudu LibraryThingiin nähdäksesi, pidätkö tästä kirjasta vai et. Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. While this book told me what I wanted to know about Philip K. Dick, it also tells much more than I wanted to know about the plots of his books. There are still a number of Dick's novels that I want to read, and so it was frustrating to find that Carrere outlines in detail the plot of each book. I've never read a biography that goes into such detail about an author's works. His point was to show how intricately entwined Dick's fiction was with his personal life. But for those of us who haven't read all of Dick's books, yet still plan to, this is not ideal reading. If I had read all of his books already, I wouldn't have minded and probably would've appreciated the book even more. As it was, I had to skip over large chunks of potential plot spoilers.
Emmanuel Carrère thinks the posthumously published social novels Dick produced were done to please snobbish friends and lovers. However, Dick was continually looking for the form which would best suit his ideas. No great stylist, his problem was that he had a hard time putting a story together without the conventions of genre fiction. His best work uses the methods developed in the pages of Galaxy by a group of writers including Pohl, Kornbluth, Bester, Sheckley and Harlan Ellison. What we today recognise as the "PKD future" is actually a collaboration between these socially conscious writers responding to Eisenhower's and J Edgar Hoover's America and specifically to McCarthyism. Unlike the conservative techno-SF writers, they actually predicted the world we know today.
From the master chronicler of psychological extremes, an unforgettable portrait of the "Shakespeare of science fiction" whose work has influenced millions For his many devoted readers, Philip K. Dick is not only one of the "most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century" ( The New York Times ) but a source of divine revelation. Dick, whose work inspired such films as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, dedicated his life to solving one ultimately unanswerable question: What is real?In the riveting style that won accolades for The Adversary, Emmanuel Carrère follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink lights, three-eyed invaders, and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews as well as unpublished sources, Carrère traces Dick's multiple marriages, paranoid fantasies, and vertiginous encounters with the drug culture of sixties California. He vividly conjuresthe spirit of this restless observer of American postwar malaise whose more than fifty novels subverted the materials of science fiction-parallel universes, intricate time loops, collective delusions-to create classic works of contemporary anxiety.As disturbing and engrossing as a book by its subject, Carrère's unconventional work interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw-from cloning to reality TV-a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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Google Books — Ladataan... LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Kongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo:
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Carrère gives a reasonably full account of Dick's life, while assuming that his readers are those who have already read most or all of Dick's major works, and the earlier biographies. (Cautionary note: this means that, if you haven't read Dick's major works, you should beware of spoilers.) His goal is working out an understanding of his subject's mind from this wealth of material. To what extent did the traumas of Dick's childhood (the death of his twin sister when they were a few weeks old, his parents' divorce, his mother's own obsessions) contribute to his own instability and emotional problems, and to what extent were they merely the background against which his own personality oddities played out? How did his problems and his drug use affect his fiction? How much was the drug use the cause of his later problems, and how much was it an unguided attempt at self-medication? Carrère seems both clear-eyed and sympathetic in his descriptions of not only Philip Dick, but also his parents, wives, and friends. This is a highly readable and interesting book about a fascinating writer.
Recommended. ( )