The American Spectator

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The Spectacle Blog

...on Philip K. Dick. Perfect per usual:

Some may complain that a genre writer has beaten Hemingway and Upton Sinclair into the Library of America. But these four novels--The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik--are not simply outstanding examples of their form. With their haunting evocations of alienation, thoughtful meditations on reality and religion, and vivid prose style, they are among the best American novels written in the last century.

The sci-fi genre, in fact, was just a colorful trapping Dick used to frame his tales of ordinary people caught up in situations they can barely understand, let alone control. As one character in The Man in the High Castle says of that book's novel within a novel, "He told us about our world.... He wants us to see it for what it is."

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