Thanks to a recent post by Charlie Jane Anders of the blog io9, I just read "The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick,” a riveting article by Paul Williams that was published in the November 6, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Timely, considering that I’m about twenty pages from the end of Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip (1964), which I started reading several weeks ago. While I’m not qualified to determine whether Martian Time-Slip is a demented novel, I certainly could have used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) as a gubble gubble.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Gubbling through Philip K. Dick's novel Martian Time-Slip without DSM-IV-TR
Thanks to a recent post by Charlie Jane Anders of the blog io9, I just read "The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick,” a riveting article by Paul Williams that was published in the November 6, 1975, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Timely, considering that I’m about twenty pages from the end of Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip (1964), which I started reading several weeks ago. While I’m not qualified to determine whether Martian Time-Slip is a demented novel, I certainly could have used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) as a gubble gubble.
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2 comments:
as usual, Anders didn't do anything except read boingboing and then post something about it two days later.
I'm actually quite surprised that he provided a link to the boingboing story - this isn't IO9's usual practice; of course, he stuck it at the end of the piece rather than as a 'via boingboing' at the beginning.
Do yourself a favor and hook into boingboing and drop IO9 - you'll get your news anywhere from two days to a week earlier
Regarding Philip K. Dick's sanity... I'd say he was both sane AND mad (and one of the few genuinely unique visionaries of the field).
It's worth pointing out that a colony on Mars would in reality have to deal with much the same problems that Dick depicted in his fictions:
- Frustration when things don't work out as planned;
- Boredom;
- Escapism;
- Madness; we have yet to see what mental disorders may arise in totally alien desert environments far from Earth.
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