In the spirit of For Dickheads Only in which each issue was focused on only one novel and there were reviews, discussions, and well thought out literary criticism all mixed together, I would like to start a similar thing on this site. I will post a book and add any links I found of reviews, etc and in the comments section, please enter your review, your criticism or a link to as post when you have much more to write than would fit in a comment. These posts will be collected in a section in the Literary Criticism section of the site so that if you aren’t able to add any thing immediately, you can add it later. I will add my personal views in the comments section and add links to other published view that I find that are outside of our group to the post
For Dickheads Only already covered Clans Of The Alphane Moon, The World Jones Made, The Cosmic Puppets, Solar Lottery, Beyond Lies The Wub, Eye In The Sky, Blade Runner 2 and issue 7 looks like a mish mash. I’m not sure when these works would be put out here for the scrutiny again, but I think they should be at some point. At least for the meantime I would like to focus on other works. I’m not sure about the frequency of new works being put out and if anyone has any suggests, please add a comment or email philipkdickfans[at]gmail[dot]com. The first work I selected is the Exegesis since many of you are already reading it. Also, Literary Criticism section started working on the novels in chronological order so the next one would have been The Man Who Japed, I believe.
Just so you have some idea about what the rest of the academic world thinks about PKD, check out:
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/43934
From this ‘call for papers’ for the Dortmund Conference it seems that European academia has been asleep as far as PKD goes! The dedicated fan, of course, can quite easily answer most of the questions for this conference call. Oh, I would like to say that Philip K. Dick was not a Beat writer (if he was it would be in his early mainstream novels only – all rejected by the publishers of the 50s and 60s), no, he was a Hippie writer (if you want to classify him so simply). His science fiction caught the energy of the 60s. The Beats were already in the past.
To critics today who perhaps weren’t even born in the 60s and who have only cliches of ‘dirty hippies’ to guide them there is much misunderstanding of the times in which PKD wrote most of his stories: the 60s and 70s.
One could go on forever on all this but the scholars will figure it out in the end; gives them something to do.