Skip to Main Content

Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern

Online ISBN:
9781781380659
Print ISBN:
9780853236184
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern

Published:
7 January 2003
Online ISBN:
9781781380659
Print ISBN:
9780853236184
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the science-fiction 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. This book examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. It 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.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close