"Dick,_Philip_K._The shifting realities of Philip K Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Dick's ideas and his fictional realms are divisible dualities rather than the permeable whole of a life's
work. Thankfully, this kind of critical parochialism is diminishing even within the SF world. And as
for the world at large, Dick is, at long last, receiving his due as a writer of both imaginative depth and
intellectual power. Indeed, the story of his emergence into sudden literary "respectability" is a
revelatory parable as to the fierce cultural strictures that, in America, dominate the type and degree
of attention paid to an author and his works.
Philip K. Dick (1928-82), author of more than fifty volumes of novels and stories, has become,
since his death, the focus of one of the most remarkable literary reappraisals of modern times. From
his longtime status as a patronized "pulp" writer of "trashy" science fiction, Dick has now emerged --
in the minds of a broad range of critics and fellow artists -- as one of the most unique and visionary
talents in the history of American literature.
This astonishing turnabout in recognition of Dick is evidenced both by the intensity of the praise
bestowed on him and the range of voices that concur in it. Art Spiegelman, author/illustrator of
Maus, has written: "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is
to the second half." Ursula Le Guin, who has acknowledged Dick's strong influence on her own
acclaimed SF novels, points to him as "our own homegrown Borges." Timothy Leary hails Dick as "a
major twenty-first-century writer, a 'fictional philosopher' of the quantum age." Jean Baudrillard, a
leader of the postmodernist critical movement in France, cites Dick as one of the greatest
6
experimental writers of our era. New Age thinker Terrence McKenna writes of Dick the philosopher
as "this incredible genius, this gentle, long-suffering, beauty-worshiping man." Dick appears on the
cover of The New Republic while the critical essay within declares that "Dick's novels demand
attention. . . . He is both lucid and strange, practical and paranoid." An electronic-music opera with a
libretto based on the Dick novel Valis premieres to great acclaim in the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The renowned Mabou Mines theater group performs a dramatic adaptation of the Dick novel Flow
My Tears, the Policeman Said in Boston and New York. Punk and industrial rock bands take their
names from Dick titles and pay homage to his books in their lyrics. Hollywood adapts a Dick novel
(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a story ("I Can Remember It for You Wholesale")
into the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, while an acclaimed French film adaptation of yet
another novel (Confessions of a Crap-Artist) was released in America in the summer of 1993
under the title Barjo. In the past two years, Dick has been the subject of laudatory front-page
features in The New York Times Book Review and the L.A. Weekly -- the opposite poles, one
might say, of an overall mainstream acceptance. The headline for the L.A. Weekly feature sums up
the thrust of the critical turnaround: "The Novelist of the '90s Has Been Dead Eight Years."
What makes this posthumous triumph all the more wrenching is the knowledge that, during his
lifetime, Dick could succeed in reaching a wide readership only within the "ghetto" of the (SF) genre
-- a critically derided "ghetto" that effectively prevented serious consideration of his works from
without. Dick wrote a number of mainstream literary novels (including the above-mentioned
Confessions of a Crap-Artist), most of which have been published posthumously. But the greatest
of his fictional works fall within the SF genre, which allowed Dick a conceptual and imaginative
freedom that was severely crimped by the strictures of consensual reality favored by the mainstream.
Even within the SF genre, Dick was considered something of an odd figure, with his penchant for
plots that emphasized metaphysical speculations as opposed to "hard" science predictions. Still, the
sheer vividness, dark humor, and textured detail with which Dick rendered his spiraling alternate
universes and the oh so human characters who inhabited them won over a sizable number of SF
readers. In a writing career that spanned three decades, Dick produced a number of stories and
novels that are widely regarded as SF classics; these include Time out of Joint (1959), Martian
Time-Slip (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), A Scanner
Darkly (1977), and Valis (1981).
In 1963, Dick was awarded the highest honor that SF has to bestow: the Hugo Award for The