“Philip K. Dick.
The Pluses:
-Tons of great ideas.
-Still mined for movies on the regular.
-One of the better beards.
The Minuses:
-Prose a little weak.
-Dialogue downright tough.
I drove to PKD’s grave not that long ago. It’s an hour, maybe 90 minutes from my house. I took my brother’s car because my own car wouldn’t make it. Or, even worse, would make it and then not make it back, leaving me stranded in eastern Colorado where I’d have to find a new life either farming or working at the Dairy Queen. THE Dairy Queen, mind you.
He’s buried next to his twin sister who died about a month after birth. It took me a while to find the grave, exactly. It would seem that a lot of graveyards aren’t really that well manned, and you can tell they eventually just start cramming in the dead by the way the roads and plots spiral around in a way that’s clearly not thought out from the start. I had another graveyard experience once, and it confirmed some thoughts that the people who run the graveyard aren’t exactly on top of things. Basically, some groundskeepers were explaining to me how much they liked flat grave markers because you could mow right over them instead of around, and how people get all pissed off when you scratch a headstone with a trimmer. They also explained that they hate when people leave shit because, well, they just have to throw it all away. So to them, the flowers or the teddy bears or whatever are no better than jamming a Butterfinger wrapper into the dirt in front of a grave.
Maybe it takes a certain kind of person to work at a graveyard.
PKD’s grave had a stack of pens in front of it. I guess people leave a pen there, which I did too. When in Rome, do whatever the hell it is Romans do to graves, right?
Although I’m always ready to talk a little smack about his lines, the man had a shitload of pretty great ideas. And his prose didn’t always blow me away, but he did get across some pretty wild ideas, so you have to give him some credit there.
There are quite a few 30 page Philip K. Dick Kindle books for free out there, and I recommend taking a look at one if you’d like to get an idea of what I’m talking about, or more importantly, what he was talking about.
And at times you’ll see his endings coming. I’m thoroughly convinced that this is because the man has been so endlessly ripped off by the genre of sci-fi that it’s hard to separate his work from the generalities that can show up in the genre.”