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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3354 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I love myself some Dick that came out wrong

I love myself some Philip K. Dick, but once you get past the classics, that is, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and everything that had a movie very loosely based on, the stories start to blend into one. It's as if he had this massive 7D hologram of a perfect story inside his mind, and every book is a crude projection of it from a different angle.

everything that had a movie very loosely based on

That is a lot of stories though. PKD might be one of, if not the, most adapted writer of the 20th century.

*EDIT: Ok, checked and he's nowhere near Stephen King in how many works he has had adapted.

He's also one of the most prolific writers, as well, so there's still a couple dozen novels left.

I positively adored A Scanner Darkly. I read The Man in the High Castle and felt distinctly underwhelmed; so far, I'm enjoying Ubik more than that. Come to think of it, I think those are the only of his novels I've read, with everything else of his that I've read being the contents of this short story collection, each of which made a sufficiently big impression on me that I can still recall the premises ~20 years later. I particularly recall "Second Variety" (which anticipated Terminator by thirty years) being terrifying.

Second Variety has been adapted in a movie, if you enjoyed that. The movie is good cheap 90s sci-fi jank, called Screamers.

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