Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies, #27)

by Christopher Palmer

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 0 shelved
Book cover for Philip K Dick

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging.
  • ISBN10 1846313767
  • ISBN13 9781846313769
  • Publish Date 1 March 2003
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Imprint Liverpool University Press
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 272
  • Language English