Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (Loa #173): The Man in the High Castle/The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Ubik
by: Dic

Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 12th pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 830 pages. Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethems words, wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him.This Library of America volume brings together four of Dicks most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical death.Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory half-life, pursues Dicks theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. Remainder mark to bottom edge, otherwise like new.