As long as we're slashing and burning, after rewatching it, I didn't think Bladerunner was *that* good.

Oh yeah, right--Michael Moorcock, that master of slow careful composition, that veritable second Flaubert, is accusing PKD of hacking it out.

The point at which I started to have serious doubts about the reliability of genre reviewers and critics was when I noticed how many of them treated Michael Moorcock like a serious literary artist (because he said he was), and Poul Anderson like he was just another commercial hack (ditto). Fiction writers say a lot of weird things about their writing, and you can believe them or not, just as you please. But the books ought to speak for themselves.

It only goes so far toward redeeming conventional genre fantasy to claim that your current hero is the everlastingly reincarnated Eternal Champion, and your setting of the moment is but one world of many in a vaster multiverse. It does make the whole thing seem weightier, somehow, and it helps explain the feeling that one has seen this all before; but that's about it.

But enough about Moorcock. Besides, he's wrong. That New Worlds fetish for deliberately idiosyncratic prose would have been all wrong for PKD.

This one comes under the Law of Conservation of Weirdness. Like Magritte or Dali, Dick generated his surreal effects by creating strange, semi-logical relationships between conventionally rendered realistic objects. The zing didn't come from the language used to describe them, but from the fact that they were there at all, and doing what they were doing with each other. You don't have to be hyperrealistic, but it does take a certain degree of clarity to pull that one off.

Historical footnote: Did you know Michael Moorcock used to be hip? Norman Spinrad, too.

Hwew-

Please know I'm not just some ranting PKD fanboy- I've read him broadly but not deeply- I'm guessing 10 or so of the novels, which sounds like alot, and seems enough to base fair opinions on, but not even close to his total output...

And who, exactly, is Michael Moorcock ^_~? Coupla fantasy novels, bigger in the 70s than now...

This is the best example of film/lit critics being about as relevant/useful as philosphy professors.

Sci-fi has been the abode of quite a few hacks who don the mantle of artiste (with the "e") and look down their noses at others. Writers of formula TV shows who act holier than thou, etc., and now apparently swords and socerers pulp writers. At least the old timers knew they were writing for little magazines with luridly drawn raygun-blasting aliens on the covers.

There was a time when Moorcock could recognize the merits of thoughtful work very unlike his own. He's always had a touch of the attitude that says you're only for sure saved if you're saved in our church, but his outlook seems to be narrowing with age. Which is a shame, since like Dick he's done some really really good work along with the hackwork - not many of us dissing him have produced anything to rival The Warhound and the World's Pain or Mother London. But it's hard to get many insights into humanity when you're too sure up front exactly what you'll find, and he does seem to be on a tiresome crusade against just about every style of sf and f he disapproves of.

I'm glad to see you're discussing this here - it was hard to set up on the Guardian site.

Moorcock has known and appreciated Dick's work for so many decades that it would be facile to accuse him of 'not getting' PKD - it's more complicated than that. But he has certainly forgotten how to read him.

Phil was ten years older than Moorcock throughout their lives. Now, 20 years after Phil's death, Moorcock is a decade older than Phil reached. Their roles have reversed, Moorcock has moved on, and his perspective has dwindled.

Dick was indeed trained as a "snappy hack" and his earliest stories - the ones Moorcock says he can still read - exult in their conventional cleverness. Like the early Beethoven, the young Phil Dick was brilliant without breaking all the rules.

As he matured and his writing accomplishments grew, however, Dick chose his own path, dragging with him both the emblematic trappings of "intellectual" 50's SF and his own autodidactic ragbag of ideas - Goethe, Jung, Bohr, Lao-Tse - into uncharted waters. But meanwhile he had a family to feed - he was thirtysomething, not twentysomething like Moorcock.

While Moorcock was editing a magazine and writing sword-and-sorcery epics, Phil was risking everything on experimental fiction. Some parts of it worked better than others, but what never flagged was the pitch-perfect auctorial voice, nor the determination to keep exploring inward. And that is why there is a P.K.Dick Prize for best new author, and not a Moorcock prize sfor same.

Why is it that the more 'incoherent' science fiction becomes... according to traditional SF pundits anyway... the more entertaining it actually is for me? Lighten up. Three stigmata was a fun, twisty, constantly-morphing piece of word play. It's certainly not my favorite PKD, but dismissing it as the drug-fueled rant of a hack sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to a good writer getting over-hyped.

There are PKD stories that are incoherent. But in the main I come down on Teresa's side. The art involved does transcend conventional structure. "Stigmata" happened to be one of my favorite mindbenders of PKD's. The meat puppet theme can't be done enough imo. If that's Moorcock's opinion of "Stigmata" I wonder where he is on Malzberg et al. I probably don't have to ask...

mmw

For Moorcock to state that he finds Dick's later works unreadable may be an apt statement, but he should have stopped there--and with his subjective impression that Three Stigmata is clunky and not as entertaining as some of his other work. (I happen to agree; although it's a "significant" Dick novel, in terms of his "canon," it's not one I really LOVE to read.) To imply that Dick should have gone on to develop a more polished voice, along the lines of Disch, Delany and Sladek, is sort of to miss the point of Dick. Dick wrote trippy novels that even his everyman heros could enjoy. I regularly hand DR. BLOODMONEY and MARTIAN TIMESLIP to people who read very little s.f., and they never fail to "get" it. As I get older, I appreciate Dick's work more for its comic pacing and understatement rather than its deep philosophical meaning; I also note there are many Dick works that are not worth rereading, and several I could never get through even once. Meanwhile, I figure I might go back and look at those Elric books again to see if they're as entertaining as I found them at age 15. One glance at the increasingly labored and rarified prose in Moorcock's last several, uh, decades of work, just makes me exhausted.

okay now, just a few months ago Mr. Moorcock was lashing out at Tolkien, another writer that Mr. Moorcock seems to consider beneath him.
The sad thing for Mr. Moorcock of course, is that he has lived too long and he has seen exactly what his legacy will amount to. Nothing. The sad thing for literature is of course that Mr. Moorcock has lived too long, period. The sad thing for us is that we must see the better dead insulted by the worse living.
The sad thing for me is that I'm the kind of guy for whom bad criticism spurs me to wanting to kick some ass, and my boot cannot reach Mr. Moorcock's rear from here.

Why is it that the more 'incoherent' science fiction becomes... according to traditional SF pundits anyway... the more entertaining it actually is for me?

I agree with the opinion but wouln't call Moorcock traditional.

I think MM had it all wrong about PKD. as much as I wish that some other equally talented genre sf writers had the posthumous recognition that PKD has gotten...