(no subject)

[ceemage]

It's all nhw's fault, making me go back through my old back issues to find the game-end report for the Rather Silly Diplomacy 2.5 game that I used to run, which finished back in 1988. Found the following snippet in that issue that bears repeating, even after all this time:

Most of my spare time this summer has been taken up with reading Philip K. Dick. I had read Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said some time ago, but over the past few months I have splurged on all the PKD which my local library has been able to find. I am, of course, hooked. I was never a very great fan of science fiction, having suffered a surfeit of hack space opera books in my early teens. However, Philip K. Dick's work is not just fiction, it is literature. You can always tell literature, because it contains several key ideas or themes which can be used as the basis of a very pretentious essay or zeen article. Thus, I daresay that some of the ideas in a book like A Maze of Death can be found in other science fiction. Instance the final "they woke up and discovered it was all a dream" twist (which must have been used many a time in all kinds of fiction, from Alice Through the Looking Glass onwards). But with Dick, this doesn't leave you feeling cheated at being subject to a sudden unforeseeable deus-ex-machina, since the ground has been laid out in such a way to make it an acceptable ending. Not, of course, that Dick leaves it at that, introducing another twist right at the end that I won't reveal here since I want you to go and read this book, if you haven't already.

Of course, I get to comment on my own juvenalia first. I note this concept of "spare time," something that doesn't seem to have followed me into the 21st century. I had also forgotten what a wwhyte wannabee I was at the time. At least I seem to have been fairly respectful of the concept of spoilers - so much so that, having forgotten everything about the book, I may have to take my own advice and read it, even though (it appears) I have already.