Dr. Bloodmoney - My Part 1 Reflection

I've found Dr. Bloodmoney to be an interesting follow up to The Simulacra  We open, once again, with a trip to a psychiatrist's office. The universe this time around is more accepting of mental rehabilitation. Rather than the hope that the Doctor would fail (as we saw with The Simulacra) the good doctor this time was reccomended by a friend to help a man solve his issues. The first patient in this case is a (in)famous figure who believes he is disfigured despite not being so. People staring, disfigurations that don't exist... sound familiar?

Hoppy shows me differences between this and the last novel we read, but also throwing back to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  What exactly is 'human'? Electric Sheep asked us this, and it seems Dr. Bloodmoney is asking once more. When thinking about his future augmentations, Hoppy mentally remarks that he would be stronger than a human. Does he think himself separate from the human race?

The Simulacra - My Part 2 Relection

Chapter 13 was hardly the end of the book, but it held within it some of the strongest moments of the book.  Kongrosian is finally shown to use his psychic ability, though not on the piano as everyone had hoped.  He turns his powers on the A.G. Chemie agent first and is then revealed to (according to the Von Lessinger device) use his powers later on Nicole. Goltz appears and disappears around the room, dropping information to Kongrosian as Pembroke fires at the moving figure.

I thought the recording of Kongrosian's child was an interesting point in the story, mainly for what it said about the society. The boy's mother protested but Nat responded with: "Its been tested in USEA courts many times and the recording firm has always won". Right now, in our world, we are in a world where often content producers no longer 'own' their content. A musician records a song, a label circulates it for a large cut, then gives some royalties back to the musician. One step farther I've heard mention of musicians getting sued for using their own songs because the rights technically belong to the label they were recorded under. Here we see one step farther than this. These people, children in this case, have no right to the music they produce. It belongs to the recording agency, recording them without permission. What kind of society has this become? I knew the government in The Simulacra was controlling, but hadn't really known the extent until this very moment.

The Simulacra - My Part 1 Reflection

"The Simulacra"
Not a cover for the American release, but an interesting cover none-the-less.

I like to go into my stories 'clean'. That is, no plot synopsis, no wikipedia pre-reading, and absolutely no spoilers. I like to enjoy books as they happen and notice I have a harder time doing this when I know the basis of the story before hand. The Sumulacra has been the exception to this. I read the first few pages without any prior thought, but I had to pause to read the back cover. That seems like a silly thing I'm sure, refusing the read the back cover of a book, but it has been my standpoint thus far in life. Checking out the plot of The Simulacra before hand didn't ruin the story for me. On the contrary, it gave my attention a place to focus and helped the plot to take root in my mind.

The aspect of this first part that interested me most was the existence of multiple protagonists and, more specifically, their relationship with the reader. Thus far in The Simulacra I've been introduced to a vast array of characters with one trait in common: they all could be the fabled 'patient' (save, of course, for our Doctor Superb). Nat Fliegar is our first character, an employee for the Electronic Musical Enterprise and the man tasked with coaxing the illusive musician Kongrosian into preforming for the White House, along with the help of his companions Molly Dondoldo and Jim Planck. Kongrosian himself is already a patient of Doctor Superb and finds himself suffering from a multitude of mental disorders. Other characters call him a hypochondriac. He very well may be so, fearing that he has contracted a 'phobic odor' capable of infecting anyone who comes in contact with him (even digitally!), has turned invisible, and has caused all the psychomotor accidents of late. Vince and Chic Strikerock are another set of characters, brothers at that, 'battling' over Vince's ex-wife Julie. I say 'battling' because only one of the two is really interested in her, Chic is currently using her as a bargaining chip against his brother in exchange for a job.

The plot I find most interesting, and the one that explains that last paragraph's place in this post, is the one surrounding Doctor Superb. Superb was to be shut down with the rest of the world's therapists. A mysterious individual granted him permission to continue practice so long as he turned down no new patients. Someone he was to treat is important to the future, but no one knows who. This is the biggest draw I feel as a reader. I am in the same shoes as Doctor Superb, wondering "Is this the guy??" each and every time a new character is introduced. I find myself drawing conclusions from each character's actions, linking him to others and trying to grasp why he would need to be treated and why the failure of that treatment is so important to the future of the entire country. That motivation keeps the pages turning and makes me anxious to see where all these different roads converge. 

Early Stories of PKD - My Reflection

"The Golden Man"

Setting out to read these stories at first felt like a daunting task. To make my workload more accessible, I copied each story from the webpage provided into a word document. On the positive side, this made it much easier for me to keep my place and cope with being without internet for the duration of my reading. The downside of this was that I was able to see how many 'pages' the single spaced stories took up in word, the longest of which being roughly 60 pages. I managed to unintentionally psych myself out. I broke down each story into a day of the week and read in the order listed on the assignment page. Once my initial fear wore away, I found the stories flew by and left me wanting the words to continue.

Each story presented a rich and thought provoking universe, some in as few as 1,500 words. As I read more and more of Philip K. Dick, this is the one fact that keeps on amazing me: each work of fiction contain its own universe, independent of the others. Each universe welcomes you into it in the way that the reader never feels "spoon fed" the information. Every world is believable, aside from containing futuristic lifestyles nothing like our own. That is the biggest emotion PKD has left me with: awe.