Great essay revisiting one of my favorite novels, but one always shrouded in so much complexity and ... hyperreality? Something like that. I'd never heard of the Devo-Kent State connection, Davis's Hymn of the Soul comparison, or that Stanislaw Lem essay, which I'll have to go back to. The reverting forms of backwards-moving times has simmered in my mind for a long time. I started to think of this from a lens of evolutionary biology, I wonder if anyone's written more about that? I'm not sure where telos fits in from that perspective, but life often grows towards something while moving through stages, and generations, too, like the generations it takes to build a civil society or culture. Objects like the spaceship, the car, carriages, they're extensions of human life like tools of any animal, like beaver dams or nests. There's something permanent and immutable about the "form" to the human species. This gets interesting with things like computers, and pets. Anyway, great to feel transported back into Ubik. Wes Anderson should adapt a PKD novel, he needs some new more challenging source material.
I’m laughing to myself trying to imagine what a Wes Anderson PKD adaptation would look like. Two totally different aesthetics. I do think a young Luke Wilson could’ve played a great Joe Chip though.
It pairs well with The Lathe of Heaven by PKD’s close contemporary Ursula K. LeGuin. I feel that those two books are getting at the same idea from different perspectives.
Great essay revisiting one of my favorite novels, but one always shrouded in so much complexity and ... hyperreality? Something like that. I'd never heard of the Devo-Kent State connection, Davis's Hymn of the Soul comparison, or that Stanislaw Lem essay, which I'll have to go back to. The reverting forms of backwards-moving times has simmered in my mind for a long time. I started to think of this from a lens of evolutionary biology, I wonder if anyone's written more about that? I'm not sure where telos fits in from that perspective, but life often grows towards something while moving through stages, and generations, too, like the generations it takes to build a civil society or culture. Objects like the spaceship, the car, carriages, they're extensions of human life like tools of any animal, like beaver dams or nests. There's something permanent and immutable about the "form" to the human species. This gets interesting with things like computers, and pets. Anyway, great to feel transported back into Ubik. Wes Anderson should adapt a PKD novel, he needs some new more challenging source material.
I’m laughing to myself trying to imagine what a Wes Anderson PKD adaptation would look like. Two totally different aesthetics. I do think a young Luke Wilson could’ve played a great Joe Chip though.
Like David Lynch doing Dune, but more mismatched. I wonder if Ari Aster making something like Ubik could work though, mixing horror and dark comedy
That’d be an interesting option. The opening section of Beau is Afraid shows he can create an incredible paranoid atmosphere.
Ubik is one of my all-time favorite books.
It pairs well with The Lathe of Heaven by PKD’s close contemporary Ursula K. LeGuin. I feel that those two books are getting at the same idea from different perspectives.
They definitely do feel connected, now that you mention it. Might be time to re-visit Lathe…
I haven't read PKD in years, thanks for the reminder that I should pick him up again 🙏🏾
I try to read or re-read something by him at least once a year. Luckily he has a ridiculously big catalog.
Great read!