Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the PostmodernOnce the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and chal |
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Page 22
... characters , although he very often borrows from the genre . Things are already vitiated in the world of Dick's characters ; the crisis of meaning which overtakes the world and the char- acters in the course of the narrative pushes the ...
... characters , although he very often borrows from the genre . Things are already vitiated in the world of Dick's characters ; the crisis of meaning which overtakes the world and the char- acters in the course of the narrative pushes the ...
Page 25
... characters discover that there is something wrong with the coins they are using . That there should be any coins in an advanced world of the future is of course an ' anachronism ' in SF terms , as the novel has already invited us to see ...
... characters discover that there is something wrong with the coins they are using . That there should be any coins in an advanced world of the future is of course an ' anachronism ' in SF terms , as the novel has already invited us to see ...
Page 56
... characters think they are going to attend the funeral of the man who seemed to have died in the explosion on Luna . Here we have a group of characters who do not know that they are not alive , and who nonetheless experience the horrible ...
... characters think they are going to attend the funeral of the man who seemed to have died in the explosion on Luna . Here we have a group of characters who do not know that they are not alive , and who nonetheless experience the horrible ...
Contents
Philip K Dick and the Postmodern | 3 |
Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism | 30 |
Static and Kinetic in Dicks Political Unconscious | 44 |
Copyright | |
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Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern Christopher Palmer No preview available - 2003 |
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