Fine re-binding confers literary respectability on Philip K.Dick
Still from Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner
There’s a story in The New York Times today, by Charles McGrath, about Philip K. Dick’s books, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that Blade Runner was based on, being re-issued as elegant hardbacks.
ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.”… So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper.
His novels were initially published as cheap, pulpy paperbacks:
His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’ ”
Charles McGrath wonders if this is a serious re-examining of Philip K. Dick’s writing, or an attempt to re-brand and re-package books that have captured the public imagination, often through the movies they’ve been based on. And he points out the way that many of Philip K. Dick’s themes resonate with our times, particularly questions of authenticity and identity.
The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.
