It's Electric

Boogie woogie woogie.

I finally got around to reading some Phillip K Dick.  I had 2 anthologies to choose from in my pile, it was PKD or Dashiell Hammett.  I've read some/most of Hammett before, so this is a re-read, so the druggie won the proverbial coin toss.

I chose poorly.


I've read The Man in the High Castle and am halfway through Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep.  The first is an alternate history where the Axis won WWII and is set in Japanese administered San Francisco, around 1960.  The Nazis have just landed a man on Mars.  The second book is Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford being more of a whinger.

Don't get me wrong, I like them ok.  I just think I'd have enjoyed Hammett re-reads more.  Dick is all about reality bending, religion, the spirit of inanimate objects, and drugs and it is just not really my cuppa tea.  Not that the man couldn't turn a phrase.  That part of the writing is superb.  His overarching theme doesn't make me want to seek out more titles, but I will finish the four I have.  Eventually.  After the Electric Sheep I am switching to The Thin Man. 

As for their personal lives, Hammett was a Red and a Dick was a proto Hippy-dippy.  I overlook such foibles in art as long as the work isn't used too much to espouse their erroneous, and political, thinking.  At least too much.  I'm looking at YOU, Steinbeck.  Damn commie.

Gun content... The losing side's buried their rifles to hide them from the Japanese in preparation for the upcoming uprising against the tyrant Tojos.  Which didn't happen.  A huge ennui settled on the defeated US.  How did we lose?  FDR was assassinated in Miami in this timeline in 1933, and everything follows from there with weak presidents that don't prepare for the coming conflagration.