thank you thank you thank you
Today’s science fiction great is Philip K. Dick (Dec. 16, 1928 - 1982), brilliant author of futuristic noir tales that brought the conservative boys club of s-f into the postmodern age with its plethora of paranoid plot-twists, ontological uncertainties and unrealiable narrators.
Dick is best known for supplying the stories behind films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly… I prefer his wonderfully impenetrable story Ubik, which dizzyingly involves the revelation that the first half of the story is narrated by a person who has died and is kept in ‘cold-pack’, which to him seems like the real, primary world. This state according to Dick is ubiquitous - hence Ubik…
“The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change… and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.” ― Philip K. Dick
Photo: Frank Ronan
