What am I missing?

[Anonymous No.2454229]

I've recently read "Dhalgren" by Delaney, "Demolished Man" by Bester, and "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" by Dick. I'll go ahead and say I don't get any of them. This isn't in the sense that I don't understand the literal events, but rather I don't understand what the underlying point of each book is. I've read through their wikis and in some of the books' cases tried finding college papers or professional theses to explain what I'm missing.

My impression of Dhalgren was that it was intentionally inaccessible to most readers (which irks me since I don't understand the point of being widely published if you don't want people to understand your writing) and that the entire book was equivalent to intellectual masturbation on Delaney's part. I understood from my read through that the events of the books were cyclical and that each cycle was supposed to be subtly changed, but none of this answered what the book meant.

Demolished Man took a great idea (I can see why JMS took this concept and ran with it) and then threw the wonderful curveball of Freudian concepts as being the drive for the characters' actions. The whole reason that Reich wanted to kill D'Courtney was because he was his father?!

Flow My Tears I hold in a little higher regard, but again, I don't understand what the point was for it. I got that Alys had taken the drug that allowed her to create a new universe for short periods of time which had drawn Jason in since apparently she wanted to bone him. After she dies and the universe "flops" back into place over the old one, everything is back to normal.

As far as I can tell, I like science fiction. My favorite book is probably Dune and loved the whole series by Frank Herbert (fuck KJA and Brian Herbert). I'm reading The Sprawl trilogy (a little into Mona Lisa Overdrive) and have enjoyed it greatly, but the above stories I cannot get into.

What am I missing?

[Anonymous No.2454263]

You're missing the fact that art doesn't exist to illustrate a point.

[Anonymous No.2454273]

what you are missing is being a white person

niggers cant read.

solution: become white, understand books

[Anonymous No.2454289]

Dune is a great series. Gibson's books are fantastic. Stick with sci-fi and fantasy that follow traditional story structures with classic character archetypes so that the themes are much more clear for you.

[Anonymous No.2454303]

What you're missing is context!

This is true of quite a few writers praised on this board.

All this authors were writing, like Orwell, not about the future, but about their own times and places, using the Gulliver trick with the future to look at the social concerns and mental states of their times. Since I was reading these books when they were first published, i can tell you they are all commentary upon the perceptions of their times and societies in one way or another,. Not that they don't have universal value, but 1984 makes a lot more sense if you remember 1948 a little better

[Anonymous No.2454340]

>>2454303

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to make a thoughtful post. I do get that context is important. In "Flow my tears..." it too me a while to understand that the Pols and the Nats were the police and national guard. This makes sense since the book was written at the height of the anti-war left and the government butting heads. The same thing with 1984. I got that it was a commentary on the nature of communist governments and their ability to revise history for a mostly illiterate population.

I suppose this prompts the question "What was the context of Demolished Man and Dhalgren?" Alternately, does it make me stupid if I don't like non-literal narratives?

[Anonymous No.2454357]

>>2454340

>am i stupid for not liking weird babbleprose

Of course not. I mean, it doesn't inherently make you stupid. I like that stuff but I also really admire linear storytelling.

Also yes, Newspeak was Orwell commenting on his hatred for most political writing and the dumbing down of the English language.

[Anonymous No.2454392]

About four years after Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published, Philip K. Dick was at this party and he met this woman who had the same name as the woman character in the book, and she had a boyfriend with the same name as the boyfriend character in the book. And she was having an affair with this guy, you know, the chief-of-police. And, he had the same name as the chief-of-police in his book.

So they were talking and he finds out that a bunch of stuff in her life are just like in the book. He also went to help a black dude get gas for his car, so he went off, bought gas, and came back. Just like helping the black stranger in the book.

Dick also thought that he had pierced through some loop dimension or something like that, in which the universe repeats itself or something?
Then he finds out it's in the Book of Acts (which he never read) which made him assume that we all live in 50 AD and just repeat everything. He also thought he was the reincarnation of a prophet named Elijah.

Just wanted to share this weird series of events.

[Anonymous No.2454413]

>>2454392

Things to keep in mind whenever you hear a factoid or story about the life of PKD: most of them are completely unsubstantiated or were started by PKD himself, who, in addition to being high on random cocktails of drugs most of the time, was also a compulsive liar.

[Anonymous No.2454445]

I'm not sure I want to comment specifically on any of those books because it's been years since I read them. But I agree with whoever it was who said that art doesn't have to have a point - it's a work of art that you, you know, look at and get something from, and something like Dhalgren is first of all a work of art. There's not a, like, meaning that needs to be decoded... I think these works are saying something or you can get something from them but that doesnt mean there's one single "point" to get.

I think with Demolished Man it's mostly an investigation of selfhood and personality and all that, with an especial emphasis on Freudian images... but like I say it's been a few years.

>>2454392
Yeah, but Phil Dick was crazy as hell

>>2454303
I think this is true, mutatis mutandis, of just about all science fiction. It's human fiction about human things and has relevance to human concerns - even if it's nominally about the 24th century.

[Anonymous No.2454483]

>>2454340

Demolished man is a lot about identity, especially in distinguishing ourselves from our parents. The detectives "peepers" represent the same thing as a parent on the state level. The idea of the government replacing the family and taking on more authority over social relationships was a big deal at the time, and people were conflicted about it. That was just subtext, though. The identity thing was pretty much the main idea
dahlgren is about isolation and social alienation, to an extent reflecting What Chip Delany felt about growing up black and bisexual in a world of white straight people, the society that he was aloowed access to was crumbling and degenerate by his stabdards, as well as societies, and the problem of fringe identification hadn't really been addressed yet. The term "Politically Correct" was still a few years in the future. The drifting, unfocussed social aspects of the book reflect what it was like to be without a valid cultural identity, so the context is probably more personal in that one. The rest of it is still universally relevant today, and I'm surprised it's not read more.