The Cosmic Puppets

A fantastical, fast-paced science fiction novel of mystery and action from award-winning novelist Philip K. Dick.

A study of the novels and short stories of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)with presentation of a literary chronology of his career.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most popular science fiction novelists of the 20th century, but the contradictory and wily writer has troubled critics who attempt encompassing explanations of his work. This book examines Dick's writing through the lens of ontological uncertainty, providing a comparative map of his oeuvre, tracing both the interior connections between books and his allusive intertextuality. Topics covered include time travel, alternate worlds, androids and simulacra, finite subjective realities and schizophrenia. Twenty novels are explored in detail, including titles that have received scant critical attention. Some of his most important short stories and two of his realist novels are also examined, providing a general introduction to Dick's body of work.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, A Checklist, 1700-1974, Volume one of Two, contains an Author Index, Title Index, Series Index, Awards Index, and the Ace and Belmont Doubles Index.

A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Philip K. Dick was a writer who drew upon his own life to address the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia and transcendental experiences of all kinds. More than 10 major Hollywood movies are based on his work including Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. Born in 1929 just before the Great Crash, Dick's twin sister died when she was a month old and his parents were divorced by the time he was three. In his teens, he began to show the first signs of mental instability, but by then he was already producing fiction writing of a visionary nature.

This lively collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain - the dark, the forbidding, the alienated, the fantastic - in a spectrum of popular and 'high cultural' forms of representation.

Greg Olson, author of David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, the essential book on Lynch' s life and art, has resided in the Twin Peaks region of the Northwest for decades, and David Lynch spent youthful years in the Northwest; both of their fathers were woodsmen. Lynch believes that the world hums with spirituality, and over a thirty-year span Lynch and Mark Frost created forty-eight hours of Twin Peaks TV and film, hypnotic cinematic music immersed in the depths and divine heights of human nature, an artistic song of the forest, America, the world, the cosmos. David Lynch is an international icon of visionary artistic innovation, humanistic thought and philanthropy, and spiritual exploration, and Twin Peaks: The Return is his magnum opus, a mytho-poetic summation of his deepest beliefs and concerns. Author Olson, in his characteristically intimate and personal way, traces the Twin Peaks currents of Lynch' s emotional-visceral storytelling, themes, imagery and sound: the way the artist and viewer share an electrified circuit of mystery and understanding. Olson details Lynch' s kinship with transcendence-seeking artists like William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jean Cocteau, Philip K. Dick and the post-World War II mystical Northwest painters. Small town values, coffee culture, the color pink, the Bible, Vedic literature, Marvel Comics Superheroes, and a Parisian camera crew wanting Olson to guide them throughTwin Peaks territory all make appearances. Olson' s chronicle includes personal interaction with Lynch, his colleagues, and the artist' s inner world of karmic balancing, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and veneration of women. Twin Peaks centers on the abiding presence of a lost woman, Laura Palmer, the downward, then upward arc of her life, afterlife, and goddess potential. Olson. Lynch and Twin Peaks have been on parallel tracks for decades. Olson' s longtime love, Linda Bowers, died shortly before Twin Peaks: The Return aired, and his lived experience with Lynch' s art speaks to the healing power of artistic engagement.