tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post5553512787634808399..comments2024-01-06T10:36:04.084-05:00Comments on A Commonplace Blog: World after world unseenD. G. Myershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10659136455045567825noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-60868809497138387042013-04-29T16:58:26.795-04:002013-04-29T16:58:26.795-04:00Dear DG Meyers, I enjoyed reading your review.
M...Dear DG Meyers, I enjoyed reading your review. <br /><br />My I respectfully suggest a different opinion about a key part of the book? You wrote, <br /><br />***<br />The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not alternate history, after all. It is the true history no one is willing to face. The United States won the war, and yet capitulated to the Axis, acquiesced to partition and foreign occupation, nevertheless. <br /><br />Dick’s political message has become something of a thematic commonplace in alternate history: even if the events had been different, the outcome would have been the same. War may decide the occupier, but not the sequel of occupation. If the U.S. had not developed the atomic bomb, another country would have—and would still have threatened Japan with it!<br />***<br /><br />I think this navigates the wrong slice of understanding (and misses some magic of the book offers). My opinion is that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy isn't telling the characters that the US really won the alternate history war. The fictional US didn't win the war, then capitulate. The fictional US lost the fictional war in the most straightforward sense. <br /><br />No, the fictional novel Grasshopper Lies Heavy is telling the characters that the alternate history is fiction, that the reader's USA really won WWII in the true reality of the reader's world. That is what is so wonderfully shocking--not just telling the fictional characters, but the writer's respect it shows to the fictional character's reality. The book gives further clues to this interpretation.<br /><br />Examine the middle part of chapter 14. There, after viewing "the imperishable seeds. Of Beauty" of Mr. Childan's silver work, Mr. Tagami shudders into crisis and epiphany. Among several pages of wonderful probing upon the artifact, he willfully staggers through a different reality ("The veil of maya will fall more if I--" The light disappeared.) Here a Yank policeman breaks his reverie, but a page later Mr. Tagami realizes he already crossed the barrier. The barrier to what? "God, what is that? He stopped, gaped at hideous misshapen thing on skyline, like nightmare of roller coaster suspected..." A man tells him, "Awful ain't it? That's the Embarcadero Freeway. A lot of people think it stinks up the view." Further wonderful prose follows concerning Mr. T's return to the book's reality.<br /><br /> The Embarcadero Freeway exists in PK Dick's the reader's world, not the character's. I'm thinking it was an emotional issue at the time for people who lived in the area (and still is). Throughout US cities, such highway monstrosities have brutal effect on their neighborhoods. (Maybe it is its own symbol of brutality, helping Mr. Tagami confront the Germans later that chapter.)<br /><br />Powered by the sublime talisman of Childan's silver work, Mr. Tagami has painfully traveled across realities. This is similar to the way fictional novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, powered by the oracle Iching, connects the fiction to the reader's real world. Side note, I think PKD uses some of the same language of permeability between worlds in UBIK.<br /><br />I do think there is another meaning to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy conclusion about the war. Childan's silver artifact with its beauty/truth sublime power, and artifacts like it that Childan sells, conveys some hyper sense of the "real" reality to the fictional world. And that has some kind of impact to the sense of sensitive people in the fictional novel that there is some kind of way in which the USA has won in that world too. I think it is, roughly, a mystical, poetic, philosophic or aesthetic victory, though, something invisible and in its way unstoppable. It gives the fictional world a change to stop the nuclear war. --What magic helps stop our world from falling into nuclear war?<br /><br />Thanks for posting your review, and thanks for listening. Did you know that PKD wrote part of a sequel to this novel?<br /><br />Cheers,<br />Pete<br />dangerquestmysteries.comPeter Gelmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15844253583785446469noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-36539674975498348902013-01-29T18:02:45.870-05:002013-01-29T18:02:45.870-05:00Is it just me, or is all Dick's work predicate...Is it just me, or is all Dick's work predicated on the gnostic vision of things - ie, that reality is not what it appears to be, but something else entirely? Your sense of your own identity and the world you inhabit: both are either unreliable, could be entirely wrong, or provide only a partial picture at best. <br /><br />It might explain why his work has dated so well. Unlike a lot of science fiction from that era, it's rooted primarily in the spirit of philisophical enquiry, and the big questions - what is reality? Who am I? - are still as valid now as they were then. <br />Aonghus Fallonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-35967362913639278222013-01-27T21:20:50.097-05:002013-01-27T21:20:50.097-05:002 uncanny things about this book:1. in The Man in ...2 uncanny things about this book:1. in The Man in the High Castle, world war III is narrowly averted. soon after the books release the cuban missile crisis occurs. is PKD clairvoyant?<br />2. PKD describes the actions of an assassin. he wishes to be untraceable. he does not fly into california because he does not want his name on a manifest. he changes travelling companions and disguises himself. is PKD alluding to the Kennedy assassin? is PKD clairvoyant?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-39358688762473616512013-01-27T09:38:10.425-05:002013-01-27T09:38:10.425-05:00Oops, that would be Do Androids Dream of Electric ...Oops, that would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, not Blade Runner. In joining the discussion, I should probably get the titles straight. If my credibility isn't shot, now, can I make two more recommendations: The Martian Chronicles, and A Canticle for Leibowitz.Jennynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-565643060460536542013-01-25T19:55:29.716-05:002013-01-25T19:55:29.716-05:00This confirms my suspicion that Philip K. Dick was...This confirms my suspicion that Philip K. Dick was a curiously extraordinary thinker, worthy of more of my attention, and not a one-hit wonder for Blade Runner. Possibly I've been an S/F snob? But I absolutely love Left Hand of Darkness -Jennynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-53661106518081520992013-01-25T11:26:06.604-05:002013-01-25T11:26:06.604-05:00Why do you suppose PKD does not get more attention...Why do you suppose PKD does not get more attention? Does that S/F label repulse readers? In truth, I am surprised that you have spotlighted him. I did not think he was "your cup of tea."R.T.https://www.blogger.com/profile/13220814349193561823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3458341.post-38987479000991595592013-01-25T09:38:03.674-05:002013-01-25T09:38:03.674-05:00David, thank you so much for this exceptionally th...David, thank you so much for this exceptionally thought-provoking essay. It has been many years since I've read <i>The Man in the High Castle</i>. Reading your essay has made it essential for me to return to that book and reread it, more carefully this time.Andrew Foxhttp://www.fantasticalandrewfox.comnoreply@blogger.com