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I have been on a quest since January to purchase and read Philip K. Dick’s entire body of published work. All told, there looks to be 52 publications that will cover most of this work: 44 novels and 8 collections of short stories.

I read quite a bit. Not like ‘stodgy boring has no life’ reads quite a bit, but like ‘hey, yeah, I read that too’ quite a bit. I stay away from pop pulp and gimmick books, and hover mostly around either the early days of science fiction or the early days of writing itself. No offense meant to those of you who enjoy your WB sitcom/teen dramas in book form, but when I read I need it to provide something different than the almost constant barrage of low quality consumer crap that is flung by Master Control and his corporate advert programs.

Novelized versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Andromeda or the fucking Gillmore Girls tickles not even one of my fancies. Not because it is crap but because that particular crap belongs on TV to be badly acted enough to entice 13yr old girls across the nation.

I am totally down with TV crap, though. Seriously. I have my own TV crap obsessions. For instance: The Headroom.

Max Headroom, despite what some computer-desk bound mouth breathers will tell you, was not an epic piece of contemporary art whose insight into humanity and the way of things was grossly ignored by the masses due to its way-ahead-of-its-time conceptual story telling elements.

Is it my favorite TV show ever? Yep. Do I have a 6ft tall poster of Max’s head(s) tacked to the wall behind me as I write this? Yes Sir/Madam.

It was TV crap, though, that knew it was TV crap and spent the whole crappy 40 minutes making fun of TV crap. I loved it because it was great TV crap.

Back to the books.

Dick’s novels will fark your head. They are so subtle in doing so, though, that it’s fucking crazy. Each little paperback purports to contain enough realism to pull you in and enough spaced out hippy flashback rolled in linoleum and slathered in sci-fi wasabi to put down even the most hardened reader of not-so-having-happened things.

Having never done any drug harder than Prevacid and having the uncanny ability to get totally pasted off of Banaca Spray, I can’t say I can relate to many of his trippy musings – but I think that adds something. I think it adds a level of fantasy as I can’t immediately relate to many if the situations he describes. Christ, I have to look up half of the pharmaceuticals he hasn’t made up and research most of the others which hover somewhere between chemical names smashed together and wholly new words somehow related to the experience. Toss some robots, flying cars, political corporate entities in and you’ve got a pretty nifty little experience.

One thing to keep your eye out for, if you decide that the Dick is right for you; That you want some Dick, as it were:

In every Philip K. Dick novel there is a point, and I honestly believe this is a situation entirely manufactured and that it plays out just as Dick intended, in which – after much dialogue or perhaps a bit of exposition that might lose the interest of the reader – an attractive, usually spacey, dark haired chick exposes her breasts to much ado. She has them lit with LEDs, painted, moving independent of her own body or growing right there in front of the protagonist’s eyes; It is a full on breast-fest for anywhere form 2-3 sentences to 2-3 paragraphs. At first I thought it was a fluke. How interesting that as soon as I started to drift out come the boobs. 18 novels later, I am convinced that the man was a genius. Is the book getting a bit long? You reading one of the few novels that breach 250 pages? Expect a second or even third helping of the arresting breast address.

Dick: He doesn’t like to say it is a convertible, he likes to say the titties is out.

Post (Apocalyptic) Script: For the mouth breathers, I present you this.