Dick Short Stories

[Steerpike]

What are his best short stories? (Not his best collections--his best stories.)

[dANdeLION]

I have never heard of this author. Why don't you tell me what you think his best work is (and tell us about him while you're about it), or I'm going to have to delete this thread, as this forum is for real fiction writers, not fictional ones.

[Steerpike]

I have never heard of this author. Why don't you tell me what you think his best work is (and tell us about him while you're about it), or I'm going to have to delete this thread, as this forum is for real fiction writers, not fictional ones.

It's hard to believe that anyone has not heard of Philip Dick--even if you've never read anything by him, you've certainly seen films based on his stories--Blade Runner (based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and Minority Report (based on the short story "Minority Report") are two that come to mind.

He won the Hugo in 1973 for his novel The Man in the High Castle. Other famous books are The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. He published over 40 novels and numerous collections of short stories.

Here's a good article on Dick: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c ... 3U5BB1.DTL

[dANdeLION]

OH!!! Philip Dick's short stories! I thought you were saying Dick Short's stories. My bad.

[danlo]

Yes three other movies have been based on his short stories: Imposter with Gary Sinese-very good movie! Total Recall based on We Can Get it for You Wholesale and Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and Screamers with Peter Weller--another very good movie. A Scanner Darkly is another movie in the works and they have been bandying about the idea of producing Man in the High Castle. His writing style can be, somewhat, compared to Roger Zelazny for dry wit, cynicism and humor (also because his characters tend to smoke alot, a 60s thing I guess )-but he personally injects an interesting paranoic feel and a lightly vieled political agenda into many of his works. Alot of his short stories have a post-apocalytic bent akin to much of Zelazny's, fairly rare, "pure" Sci-Fi and Harlan Ellison, when he's not being weird. Very engaging stuff, though, and some cool futuristic ideas.

[Brinn]

Ohhhh! And I thought it was short Di..... Nevermind.

[dANdeLION]

Philip does have Harlan's talent for interesting titles, too.