5/19/2023 0 Comments Hologram microcosm alternativeWeekly - the opposite poles, one might say, of an overall mainstream acceptance. In the past two years, Dick has been the subject of laudatory front-page features in The New York Times Book Review and the L.A. Hollywood adapts a Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a story ("I Can Remember It for You Wholesale") into the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, while an acclaimed French film adaptation of yet another novel (Confessions of a Crap-Artist) was released in America in the summer of 1993 under the title Barjo. Punk and industrial rock bands take their names from Dick titles and pay homage to his books in their lyrics. The renowned Mabou Mines theater group performs a dramatic adaptation of the Dick novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said in Boston and New York. He is both lucid and strange, practical and paranoid." An electronic-music opera with a libretto based on the Dick novel Valis premieres to great acclaim in the Pompidou Center in Paris. New Age thinker Terrence McKenna writes of Dick the philosopher as "this incredible genius, this gentle, long-suffering, beauty-worshiping man." Dick appears on the cover of The New Republic while the critical essay within declares that "Dick's novels demand attention. Dick is to the second half." Ursula Le Guin, who has acknowledged Dick's strong influence on her own acclaimed SF novels, points to him as "our own homegrown Borges." Timothy Leary hails Dick as "a major twenty-first-century writer, a 'fictional philosopher' of the quantum age." Jean Baudrillard, a leader of the postmodernist critical movement in France, cites Dick as one of the greatest experimental writers of our era. Art Spiegelman, author/illustrator of Maus, has written: "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the twentieth century, Philip K. This astonishing turnabout in recognition of Dick is evidenced both by the intensity of the praise bestowed on him and the range of voices that concur in it. Indeed, the story of his emergence into sudden literary "respectability" is a revelatory parable as to the fierce cultural strictures that, in America, dominate the type and degree of attention paid to an author and his works. And as for the world at large, Dick is, at long last, receiving his due as a writer of both imaginative depth and intellectual power. Thankfully, this kind of critical parochialism is diminishing even within the SF world. But it is nonsensical to maintain, in the face of the plain evidence of the fictional texts themselves, not to mention his own writings on SF in this volume, that Dick's ideas and his fictional realms are divisible dualities rather than the permeable whole of a life's work. It is as if, for these critics, to declare that certain of Dick's ideas make serious sense is to diminish his importance as the ultimate "mad" SF genius - a patronizing role assigned him by these selfsame critics. To this day one finds, in SF critical circles, sharp resistance to the notion that Dick's ideas - divorced from the immediate entertainment context of his fiction - could possibly be worthy of serious consideration. But the lack of attention paid to Dick's nonfictional works is due to factors that go beyond unevenness of quality.
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