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

Radio War Nerd EP #393 — Philip K Dick (Patreon)

Published:
2023-08-31 14:36:13
Imported:
2023-08
Tags:

Downloads

Some files exceed the archive size limit and weren't saved: 1 file. Please note these limits are in place to keep this site running long term, without costing a fortune. You can favorite the creator though, certain milestones increase the limit.

Content

The War Nerd sets the record straight on Bay Area author Philip K Dick's works. Error has no rights here.

Total time: 1:41:05

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio Studios

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

*Buy John Dolan's comic memoir "Pleasant Hell" now available in both audio and ebookformat.

Files

Comments

Avtomatt

Hey guys - the title of this episode is still "Prigozhin Kaput" in the RSS feed. The file is correct, just the title is wrong.

Mark Ames

gah! thanks, fixed it

Jaime Christley

Everybody loves Dick! Jokes aside, he’s my favorite novelist, maybe neck and neck with Richard Stark.

Jason Thompson

Awww hell yeah! Can’t wait to listen to this! Curious if you mention Thomas Disch’s beef with Dick. I love ‘em both!

Karl Childers

the literary episode is a nice change of pace, i recall another episode in which you discussed PKD years ago, might go back and find it. wanted to say i think PKD is at his strongest in the short story format & shout out two of my favorites of his shorts, "Tony And The Beetles" for how it captures the social attitudes between colonizer and colonized peoples, and "The Hanging Stranger" for pure hair-on-end reality-warping paranoia.

j

This is exciting! Thank you guys. You’ve reminded me, I was listening to the audiobook of VALIS a year ago, got to maybe the last ten minutes and I just had to put it down… brain broken… makes me think of Russia Gate paranoia. Three Stigmata is next on the list, should I adequately recover. Also, of mild curiosity: Kim Stanley Robinson did his PhD in PKD at UCSD.

HarshMalarkey

Alright thats the last straw I'm getting into this author

MoldyTolge

Got a lot of heat in high school English for reading books that had DICK printed across the spine; those people simply never encountered the V.A.L.I.S. beam 🤷‍♂️

Jaime Christley

your friend's reaction to AUGIE MARCH was exactly what happened with me and ATLAS SHRUGGED, maybe 10-odd years ago. although I only needed to read half of it before tearing it in two and chucking it in the trash. also it was Angela Lansbury in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, not Elsa Lanchester!

Seraj Farabi-Iverson

Oh this is so exciting! I was thinking of re-reading some PKD to maintain my “cyberpunk” chops!

Matthew Bolton

Your literature shows are by far my favorites

jordan

looking forward to this one a lot

Jaime Christley

I've read DO ANDROIDS DREAM a few times and find it incredibly moving in ways that are completely independent of the film's (great) qualities. If I can submit a sentimental favorite, the 1954 novel SOLAR LOTTERY is far more pulpy than he would get later - and far less weird. (But still weird.) A terrific read, and a fast one. I often think of the twitch of the bottle.... This episode really drove home how many PKD novels I still have ahead of me!

HarshMalarkey

Only read Ministry for the Future but it changed my brain forever

Jon Spiegler

1) VALIS 2) transmigration 3) Flow my tears

Isaac Suárez

Great episode- my one defense of “A Scanner Darkly” is that it works really well as an elegy to the victims of the drug war- particularly amphetamine and meth addicts. I work as an addiction counselor and the aspect of the narrative that revolves around the neurological effects of “Substance D” (and the split consciousness of being both a witness and a participant) was extremely resonant to me. In a day and age where a hundred thousand die a year to drug overdoses- and millions of others live with the lifelong physical and psychological affects of meth abuse- it’s eerily prescient.

Ander Pierce

Loved the excerpt with the psychic jackal. Looks like I have to read more Dick.

David Andrews

This episode was probably great if you are a Dik fan. I hope you don't do too many more of these.

Simon Tudhope

Going to listen to this tonight on the lonely drive up to Stockport! Have been wondering which PKD to read next… By the way, would you guys ever do a deep dive on Andrey Platonov? You’d be doing a service to humanity! Otherworldly writer, true communist, dogged, loyal and with a heart and mind that makes most other writers of his era seem small. (Or our era, for that matter.) Played a part in the civil war and WW2, for the war angle. The Foundation Pit, Happy Moscow, The Return… argh, people need to read these books! There are great English translations by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and coincidentally their translation of Chevengur is out in November. I got in touch with Robert years ago, and I’m sure he’d be up for a chat on the pod. He knows his stuff.

Sam Zeng

"actually this is just like the civil war" John

Jaime Christley

try The Penultimate Truth or The Crack in Space - nobody ever mentions them but I think they're pretty great....

John Waaben

Red-wing blackbirds are sick. They love wetlands. Their sweet, robotic songs always make me feel at peace.

Of course

I can imagine a subset of RWN listeners banging their shields and chanting, War! War! We Want War! ... and I was occasionally thinking it, but then I have an unhealthy parasocial relationship with my podcast friends. And just like with my irl friends, especially my novelist and screenwriter buddies, I'm happy for their enthusiasms and share their joys, even if I can't entirely relate. So, I guess I'll try one of these PKD novels. However, what I can't understand is how these humanitiesheads never heard of Louis Auchincloss, part of the Bouvier-Vidal set, wrote like 100 books. Nobody reads him anymore, of course, but Dubya gave him a medal, ... so he probably had a role in 9/11.

The Drooping Rhino

Outstanding episode. PKD mentored a young K.W. Jeter, and wrote the Afterword to Jeter’s first novel, “Dr. Adder.” The character Dr. Adder is a psychotic doctor whose primary source of income is serving as a matchmaker between prostitutes and military bigwigs, taking an empathic drug that enables him to determine the specific form of mutilation that both prostitute and bigwig are dreaming of. Then he performs the surgery. It gets weirder from there. In his Afterword, PKD lamented how long it had taken for Dr. Adder to be published, and how weak and ossified sci-fi had become by 1979; “Now, I ask you, aren’t you tired of reading about magic and wizards and little people with turned-up fuzzy feet?”

a clash of purple

The Episcopalian bishop wandering out into the desert reminds me of a recent horror show called Midnight Mass. This small isolated town's aged Catholic priest goes on a trip to the Holy Land and, being senile and all, wanders off into the desert. He blunders into a sandstorm, some ancient ruins are uncovered, he goes inside for shelter, and a winged vampiric creature attacks him. The monster feeds him its blood and it restores his youth, so he believes it's an angel and brings it back home (pretending to be some young priest who is there to replace the old Monsignor) and starts secretly feeding its blood to everyone during Communion, to make them all healthy and happy. But it turns out there are side effects, and the creature is not benevolent, etc.. I have a friend who had to stop watching because the story takes place on these islands, and there's an island full of feral cats, and the monster drains all their blood and the next day all the dead cats wash up on the town beach, and my friend is a cat lover, so... Also this truly evil white suburban housewife woman (much scarier than the angel monster) poisons a homeless man's dog because she despises the homeless guy. Not that the people who made the show hate animals or anything, they just understand that a modern audience is more shocked and horrified by bad things happening to animals than to people. The show is apparently the creator working through his own personal history with Catholicism (he was raised Catholic, but when he got sober he also turned atheist).

jason perry

I’m not getting any hits on a Kafka story called THE CLOAK—is there a different name?

After Tommy

same! id love to find the story.

After Tommy

what tier do I need to sub to for the war nerd's pkd audiobook?

SB

First of all, I’m so happy to hear that John and Kathrine are buying an apartment in Italy. Finally, their years of being homeless, not unhoused by homeless, will be over I hope. “Any fools knows, a dog needs a home, a shelter from pigs on the wing.” It was a great episode. The reading from Three Stigmata brought flashbacks. Thank you. Also, congrats on the Italian ex-PM confirming the gist of the Ustica as was discussed years ago with Annibale. The analysis was spot on.

Nomad22

Midnight Mass is honestly one of my favorite works of horror fiction. Mike Flanagan clearly channels King, but I think he one ups Salems Lot. And Bev Keene is one of the great villains of modern serialized TV. Again kind of a King trope (crazy religious lady), but done really well. The show also gets bonus points for best use of Neil Diamond in a dramatic work lol

Josh Thompson

Robinsons thesis is a very interesting overview of PKD's work, that functions almost as much as an interesting insight into the the ways that KSR thought about science fiction as he was starting his career. Most clearly to me, the dichotomy between realism and science fiction that KSR reads as central to PKD's life and work are two threads that KSR himself so clearly works to entwine in his own work.

Alex

I second the PKD audiobook request. I would pay basically any amount of money for an audiobook of the War Nerd reading A Scanner Darkly.

Alex

I think A Scanner Darkly resonates with a lot of punks because it really, truly captures the hopelessness and desperation and spiritual desolation of being an addict, and being surrounded by addicts (at least that's why i love it so much)

dmitry myaskovsky

Scanner darkly is great in parts.. scanner darkly is like valis in that regard- great first two thirds, and something of a movie script resolution... my favorites are probably transmigration of t.a., scanner darkly, ubik.

Ezra de Leon

My two favourites are The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - maybe it's my Catholic school upbringing - and The Man In The High Castle but there are a ton of PKD novel that I haven't read.

Ezra de Leon

Here's a Philip K. Dick story written by him for the Harlan Ellison Anthology 'Dangerous Visions': In a hydrogen war ravaged society the nubile young women go down to a futuristic zoo and have sexual intercourse with various deformed and non-human life forms in the cages. In this particular account a woman who has been patched together out of the damaged bodies of several women has intercourse with an alien female, there in the cage, and later on the woman, by means of futuristic science, conceives. The infant is born, and she and the female in the cage fight over it to see who gets it. The human young woman wins, and promptly eats the offspring, hair, teeth, toes and all. Just after she has finished she discovers that the offspring is God.

Brendan O

Has anyone made a list of (some of..?) the PKD stories mentioned in the episode?