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Published January 19, 2017

Philip K. Dick’s Vision of Fascism in America

I have to confess that I haven’t seen the TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but I found Aaron Bady’s discussion of the series — and how it differs from the book — at The New Yorker, quite interesting:

In another year, the show’s insistence on humanizing fascists might have seemed like a provocative choice—an effort, like Arendt’s, to understand how normal people can find it in themselves to commit the worst atrocities. In 2017, however—when it is more urgent than ever to distinguish right from wrong, real news from fake, and differences of political opinion from the dangerous undermining of democracy—it feels instead like a pernicious cynicism. At the same time, the series depicts the ideological excesses of the Resistance in the most unforgiving light. More like Al Qaeda than French partisans of the nineteen-forties, they are grim, unsympathetic zealots, who use scattershot terror tactics and have no qualms about causing the suffering of innocent bystanders…

…This nihilism would have been alien to Philip K. Dick… Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” focussed on how everyday people struggle to carve out lives of integrity in the face of evil, even while knowing—perhaps especially while knowing—that their actions will not ultimately change the course of history. In the novel, Frank Frink’s primary struggle is how to be an artist, not how to overthrow the Reich. In Dick’s view, this, too, was a form of resistance: his major theme as a novelist was the unavoidable complicity of living “normally” under empire; he believed in evil because he saw it everywhere. But if there wasn’t much hope in Dick’s fiction, that was exactly the point of writing it: even in the midst of a triumphant fascist dystopia, the quest for intellectual autonomy lived on in the dissident imaginations of those who could envision a different kind of world. It is telling, too, that the “man in the high castle” was in Dick’s novel not a collector of film reels but a novelist—an eccentric inventor of alt-histories who served as a stand-in for Dick himself. The character was, above all, a tribute to artists who dare to resist power in dark times.

The cover of the Penguin Modern Classic edition (pictured above) was design by Jim Stoddart.  

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Published October 15, 2010

PKD Documentary

After mentioning Philip K. Dick earlier this week, it only seems appropriate to post A Day In The Afterlife, a 1994 BBC documentary about the author:

(via Largehearted Boy | Open Culture)

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Published October 13, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

A new monograph on Japanese un-brand MUJI to be published by Rizzoli later this month (via Swiss Legacy).

Finishing Touches — Type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones on the little details that make their typefaces:

In the middle of Gotham, our family of 66 sans serifs, there is a hushed but surprising moment: a fraction whose numerator has a serif. So important was this detail that we decided to offer it as an option for all the other fractions, a decision that ultimately required more than 400 new drawings. Why?…[I]t’s something that we added because we felt it mattered. Even if it helped only a small number of designers solve a subtle and esoteric problem, we couldn’t rest knowing that an unsettling typographic moment might otherwise lie in wait.

And on the subject of typography… A handy PDF chart for mixing typefaces (via Smashing Magazine)

Blade Runner Will Prove Invincible — Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in a letter to the production company (via Coudal):

The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field… Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start… My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you… It will prove invincible.

And by coincidence, not only did I just watch the director’s cut of Blade Runner again just the other day (for approximately the bazillionth time), it was recently announced that Blade Runner director Ridley Scott would be producing a 4-part TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle for the BBC. Awesome.

Deceptively Simple — Three Percent’s Chad W. Post on OR Books innovative publishing model:

The OR Books business model is deceptive in its simplicity. In many ways, it’s a throwback to a time before supply-chain intermediaries permanently altered the bookselling business—a time when publishers were also printers and bookstores. It’s a model that—if successful in the long run—thrives on both satisfying the needs of customers and maximizing the publisher’s return.

And finally…

Part One of Eleanor Wachtel’s interview with John le Carré about his new book Our Kind of Traitor for CBC Radio’s Writers & Co.:

Writers and Co. John Le Carre Interview

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Published May 19, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

90 Covers — David McCandless talks about the protracted cover design process for his new book Information is Beautiful (via This Isn’t Happiness):

Engage — Online literary magazine and short fiction hub Joyland — founded by authors Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz — is launching an e-book imprint.

Graphic Novels for Booksellers — A core list compiled by Graphic Novel Reporter.

And if that’s not nerdcore enough for you, take a look at The Periodic Table Of Super-Powers.  “Orphan” is atomic number 1.

Absurdity and Tragedy — Author Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick and his own novel Chronic City at 21C Magazine (via Maud Newton):

I’ve always agreed with the view that – with science fiction – its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell’s 1984, where he explicitly said “It’s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.

That suggests that Dick’s work is dated to the ’60s and ’70s. And I thought of him very much in this framework, and not as an extrapolative writer… But I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I wanted to like Chronic City more than I did. Dan Green has a comprehensive critique of the book (and Lethem’s post-modernism) at his blog The Reading Experience. Dan is, perhaps, less forgiving than I would be, but definitely smarter…

[W]hile Lethem’s work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn’t so much that the novel is short on “satiric bite” as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists.

Lethem reads from Chronic City and discusses the book in this video interview with The Guardian.

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