From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@apocalypse.org>
Subject: (urth) PKD a modernist?
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 16:39:23 

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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