Rating: Summary: I'll pass, thank you very much. Review: I've a moderate tolerance for flat-footed prose, but I didn't get far with this before I had to give it up. Possibly it has compensating virtues: I don't care.Apparently the consensus about Theodore Dreiser, by the bye, is something like this: "Dreiser is not a particularly good writer. His sentences can be clunky, truncated and fragmented. His language is stilted and awkward at times. He has no ear for writing dialogue. But these technical limitations are more than offset by Dreiser's incredible insight into the interior lives of his characters." Still I'd be very surprised (I've not read him) to find his novels nearly as badly written as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (It seems to me, for that matter, that prose approaches poetry when it is especially felicitous, not when it is especially awkward and inept.)
Rating: Summary: One of the best books ever written by man. Review: Do androids dream of electric sheep is perhaps one of the best books ever written by man. Philip K. Dick weaves an absolutely Crotch-numbing plot, filled with memorable, interesting characters. The Futuristic setting is so well designed it gives me chills. Bless Philip K. Dick for this wonderful novel! d.
Rating: Summary: so-so for sci-fi Review: Not to upset all you Bladerunner supplicants, but I thought this book was a little disappointing. (I quite honestly found Bladerunner a little disappointing too, since I saw it several years after my friends had filled my ears with praise for the flick.) Still, the story gives an interesting glimpse into the world of Philip Dick, who was nothing if not creative. (He also had less than a clean bill of mental health, but perhaps he's another example of madness being the flip-side of genius...) In a nutshell, check this out at your local library, and if you like it, pick up more of his stuff--he's written quite a few books. I've heard _A Scanner Darkly_ is a good one, so you might want to check that out.
Rating: Summary: bad even for B science fiction Review: PKD: "Maybe I'm a great writer in France because I've got good translators....Somebody suggested I write the translator, Japanese translator, and ask him specific questions about the book. And I could tell something about the Japanese edition that way. And he wrote back. And he was really - I thought the Japanese were suppose to be very polite because I was really wrong. In his first letter he said your book wasn't any good to start with....And he went on like that. I was really amazed how up front he was in his contempt for the book." Translations better than the original (they couldn't possibly be WORSE) might account for international reputation -- to the extent there is one....When I was a kid reading science fiction in the late sixties, I considered the concurrent A writers Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Fred Hoyle. (Robert Heinlein wrote a little A stuff, "A Stranger in a Stranger Land", for example, and a lot of B stuff.) I put Philip K. Dick resoundingly in the B category and mostly avoided him. Now re-reading and re-evaluting all these things I consider H. G. Wells and Stanislaw Lem the only consistently good science fiction writers. (Back then Lem wasn't available in English.) I was right on about Dick.
Rating: Summary: One of the best Review: The awkward, stilted and often redundant writing style lends a poetry to the prose (I am also a Dreiser fan). This is one of the most moving sci fi novels I have ever read. The "spider scene" brought tears to my eyes. An unforgettable book.
Rating: Summary: Do not believe the hype Review: This is a TERRIBLE book. Too many unanswered questions to make it deeper than a dixie cup, too much grammatical acrobatics to read well, and so many cutesy ideas beat to death. Dick had one hell of an imagination, but he couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag. William Gibson took his imaginative direction and made it readable, believable and entertaining. Gibson can take an idea and make it just one story element; Dick had to beat it into your head ad nauseum. If only Ridley Scott would make a movie out of Neuromancer...
Rating: Summary: trash Review: From page one: "Friendlily, because he felt well-disposed toward the world...he patted her bare, pale shoulder." This guy writes lovelily, doesn't he? Aspiring science-fiction authors take note: Avoid turning adjectives that already end with "ly" into adverbs. Someone is bound to try to pronounce your prose aloud, trip over himself, and sue you. In any case, the "friendlily" in the above example is superfluous: ALL shoulder patting is friendly (this is the meaning of the gesture). A simple "He patted her shoulder" would have been much more effective. From page two: "After a hurried breakfast - he had lost time due to the discussion with his wife - he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep grazed. Whereon it, sophisticated piece of hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building." "He ascended clad for venturing out" is awkward and amateurish. "Clad", "whereon", "that it was", and "bamboozling" are affected. The nested "whereon"s are confusing. The colloquial "bamboozled" is inconsistent with the formal "clad" and "whereon". In short, anyone with any literary discrimination at all will find this book unreadable.
Rating: Summary: Very good read IMO Review: The only thing I didn't like was how fast I read it. Coming in at about 250 pages, its a quick read. Only took about 2 days to finish. Like other movies based on books, this book is alot better than the movie. The movie left out alot of things that would of been great to see on the big screen. This is my first PKD book, but rest assure I'm on my way to buy some more of them.
Rating: Summary: How could you possibly not read this book? Review: Okey, granted that this book is probably over-hyped amongest all science fictions, being the one the movie Blade Runner is based on, this is still a book you must read. First of all, the book adds the background that the movie never could, such as the love for animals, which trensends to the opposition of androids. It is a fairly visual book that will give you an all together different feeling than the movie. I decided to write this review really to counter balance the preious reviewer. Yes Dick's writing is not as a traditional novelist's. He writes in such a way that keeps you guessing what he really meant. Several of his novels have similar flavors, such as "The Man in the High Castle". I have read this book and loved his style, and am in the process of reading through his entire catalog. You will find his style quickly and decide for yourself whether you like it or not. If you choose to give it a try you will find one of the most bizarre mind and most interesting stories.
Rating: Summary: my first pkd book Review: i have not yet read any other pkd stuff...but, i think that perhaps i shall. about the book...it is rather short, a little over 200 pages i believe, and very easy to read. one does not find themselves reaching for the dictionary every other page, as with some other (and mainly my favorite) authors. this is a nice thing if you have been reading some of more verbose of pkd contemporaries. the plot is straightfoward, and follows the idea of much of what i deem to be the better of the sci-fi genre...philosophy under the guise of unlimited means. pkd brings us to contemplate what our reality is, and i feel is commenting on how little of our own lifes we actually acknowledge, by showing how empty the androids can appear through the eyes of one who has been enlightened by the fallout. by enlightened i mean simply had theyir eyes opened to what we take for granted: life. the book shows the struggle of artificial life (us?) to make the jump cognitavely to what humans should be valuing. a great read on a couple of levels...enough action to hold most people, and some theoretical philosophy slipped in there.
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