PKD a modernist?
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 27 Oct 1999
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1875

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Ron Hale-Evans — 27 Oct 1999, 16:39

> At 03:45 AM 10/27/99 -0400, you wrote:
> Well, I'm sort of astonished that there's so much interest in this subject,
> but it's a kick, too. I'll add a couple of thoughts. I mentioned -Catch-22-
> as "pop modernism." I'd like to add to that category the oeuvres of Kurt
> Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick. Vonnegut was an interesting writer, early on.
> He's become a lazy hack, and I think it's great that he's announced his
> "retirement," since I don't want to read any more of his books. Dick was a
> hack too, but I think he could be counted among the more interesting pop
> modernists. I confess that I never could read much of him either. (One of
> the conditions for joining the club seems to be relative unreadability.) His
> post-mortem elevation is certainly a phenomenon.

alga, to label Dick as a modernist writer is barely comprehensible to me.
To me he has always seemed a, if not the, quintessential postmodernist
writer. As for his being a hack, remember what Stanislaw Lem said of him:
that he brought gold from the trash. PKD may have been a hack, but _qua_
hack, he was a great artist.

And I find him also compulsively readable. But I guess you have to have
been there...

ObWolfe: I wonder if Lem would today revise his opinion that PKD is the
only great contemporary SF writer if he read Wolfe. Or Egan.

Ron H-E

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