Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Study 102 - The Golden Man (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-15 15:47:22
Imported:
2024-08
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Before X-Men's mutants, there were the deviants! Learn about the menace to humanity in The Golden Man by Philip K. Dick!

Special thanks to our reader James Holloway of the podcast Monster Man!

Here's that news conference with Philip K. Dick discussing the true nature of reality!

Files

Comments

Jim Cannon

Nice dystopia work from Philip K. Dick, as usual. Some eugenics, some genocide, a little "light" sexual assault. Disturbing and a little unsettling. No one to really root for here.

Richard Horsman

I had no idea PKD foresaw the fuccboi. He truly was a visionary.

KateSherrod

This story sure hits differently in this age of the Incel, with its paranoid Virgins blackpilling themselves over how they'll never compete with the golden Chads (sorry, Fifer, but I reckon you're used to that by now). This story plays right into their weird mythology. Oh, Philip, you really did think of everything.

It's a Ghost.

The name Cris is similar to Christ, and Director Wisdom wants to kill him no matter what, which makes me think PKD is saying that it’s a good thing to question the "wisdom" of institutions.

It's a Ghost.

The photo of the woman with eight breasts immediately reminded me of the time on The Dana Carvey show when Dana played Bill Clinton with multiple breasts feeding puppies. . . . So if the salesman had shown me the picture and asked, "Ever seen anything like that," I'd say, "Absolutely!"

Pete Williams

There was a 90s arcade fighting game similar to Street Fighter 2 called X-Men: Children of the Atom. I didn't know it was a literary allusion till now.

Jeff C. Carter

I think the Golden God would absolutely outcompete thinking humans, but his mutant offspring would not be perfectly adapted to survive, even with their super instincts. If a giant asteroid were headed towards earth, they would not be able to 'step out of the way' or 'hide' from it no matter how far in advance they perceived it. Only thinking beings would be able to come up with a solution.

Runninghead

This is one of the most surprising and memorable stories I've read for a long time. At first I'd assumed it was a riff on the story of Apollo or a straight progenitor to the X-Men franchise, but the twist that humanity might be replaced not by a "superior" life-form but by a simpler, more successful one, opened up a fresh new batch of imaginative possibilities in my mind, as many of the best tales do. This anthropomorphic idea that human-like intelligence is necessarily the best approach to everything seems especially relevant now we're all dealing with the massive impact AI. The Turing Test of intelligence, where a machine tries to fool a person they're talking to another human, seems a poor test to me; I've known too many people who'd be fooled by a well-constructed sock-puppet! 🙂
Soon AI, or more precisely Artificial General Intelligence, may easily fool anyone into thinking it's a smart, likeable human without being truly conscious at all! Maybe consciousness is merely an accident of evolution, a quirk of chance quite unnecessary to real intelligence. It's concepts like this that keep me hooked on Dick's work, and on Strange Studies.
P.S.- I'm currently teaching Cyber Security, a subject where, amusingly, "Sock-Puppet" aka "SOC-Puppet" refers to those fake Social Media accounts operated by many global powers with the aim of manipulating public opinion in their allies and rivals. I read this story in advance while on holiday, a time when I usually indulge my guiltily decadent hobby of working on a screen-play for The War of the Worlds" as told from the point of view of the Martians. It was time well spent. I've discovered so many good tales I'd never have discovered on my own thanks to Chris & Chad, thanks guys! 🙏👍👍

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I imagine the intersection of neuroscience and free will would have made PKD very pleased. One of the interesting experiments allowed researchers to determine with roughly 60% accuracy whether a subject would press the button on their right or left by watching what was happening in the subject's brain. Most interesting, the researchers made their predictions about 10 seconds before the subject was aware they'd made a choice. To some degree us thinking people make decisions we are not aware of only to justify them later by telling ourselves a story about how the decision was actually a considered one. There's a little Golden Boy acting on instinct inside all of us.

Steve

Of course, she might have a daughter.

Steve

Yay for James!

Drix

I cant be the only one who visualizdd Cris as Rocky from Rocky Horror? Right?

Allison Albright

I dunno, I don't think he's that dangerous to be honest. I know a lot of people who go through life more or less this way already. So he can see the future a little. It doesn't seem like he's doing anything about it. A theme I keep seeing in sci-fi is humans afraid of meeting ourselves. Afraid that the new, better humans will treat us the way we've treated everyone else. Also, I've known enough people who are brilliant and could be neuro surgeons and rocket scientists except for the circumstances of their births and the way the world works. People with special powers won't take over the world unless they're born into a social position that would have allowed it anyway. Most of them will be working the same jobs we all have. It'll be fine.

Anne Ominous

Wow! What a great read. PKD comes at you with his world already built and you have to play catch up. Did they ever explain what "DCA" stood for? Nope! It's up to you to figure that out. I would flail at leading this discussion for book club: so many levels to this retro/future. Also: which 1978 Buick? So many good ones to choose from! EDIT: apparently, "DCA" is defined. My bad. My compliment to PKD is still valid though

Beanz

Shout out to the quality of SSoSS fans that there hasn't been any pro-fuccboi commentary in here. I'll admit, I wasn't sure what the comments would look like for this one.

Long time hater

Whilst the story obviously developed beyond the original presentation, I couldn't help but see Autism Spectrum traits in Chris and feel for the hotility and sense of threat people attribute to people who's existence we don't understand and hope the story didn't encourage anyone to further Other people with similar behaviours that stem from communication and processing barriers

MonsterTalk

I love Dick. Someone in my family has epilepsy. And they say that certain lights and strobe effects make them feel uneasy, queasy, disoriented... That's how PKD makes me feel in so many of his stories. Like REALLY disoriented, not metaphorically. As though his words are futzing with my sense of what is real and what is not. Because I don't mean this metaphorically, I carefully control how much Dick I take in. One time I made the mistake of reading PKD's VALIS and Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger at the same time and it was TOO much. There were so many gnostic overlaps in these wildly different books that I felt like I was losing reality. Can't recommend RAW+Dick. This particular story was hugely influential on my thinking about Evolution & Natural Selection. Better than any nature documentary it hammered home the point that Evolution doesn't care about any hypothetical "peak of development." It just needs good enough for NOW. There's no progression of "better+faster+stronger" - just better IN THIS ONE SITUATION. A future where idiots roam the ruins of their smarter ancestors is absolutely plausible. Maybe even inevitable? Anyway, good lesson that requires breaking our innate anthropocentrist tendencies to accept.

MonsterTalk

Apologies if somebody beat me to it and I missed it, but any discussion of Mutants in the history of genre fiction ought to include the titan title: SLAN It's hard to overstate how influential that story was to early fandom. It's the story of a boy born a little different in a world where mutants are outlawed, and how he has to deal with his little bit of psi power in the face of a society that is suspicious and bigoted and dangerous to those born different. I can't imagine why fans loved it. ;) I have seen discussions of the motto "FANS ARE SLANS" in really early SciFi fan convention histories. It's pretty wild to read about that stuff compared to today's fan conventions and to realize when my grandparents were farming and struggling right before and after WWII - a period I always think of as inherently agrarian and rural - in the cities people their age were dressing up in costumes and reading SciFi. see: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fans_are_slans FWIW when my grandpa was 103 I asked him what books he remembered liking the most and his list was Jack London, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. And all of them wrote some weird fiction which he dipped into, though he preferred a ripping adventure yarn. (This was one of the most relatable things he ever told me but he kind of waited till the very last minute and I had to bring it up myself. He also told me in the 1980s rather dismissively "You kids think you invented everything with your Star Wars but we had all that crap with Flash Gordon when I was young. Nothing is new." Sadly, I never got his hot-take on the prequels.

Drasferatu

I love the outtro jam.

Richard Upton Sinclair Lewis Pickman

Truthfully, when I first started on this I was immediately picturing the shiny, gold ‘silver surfer’ image of Cris, complete with a head shaped much like Pip-boy and hair like the molded plastic head of an action figure. The discussion of the peach fuzz also had me revise, but it was tough to shake.