New Worlds

According to the useful chronology of Philip K.'s life provided in the Library of America edition of four of his novels of the sixties, John Lennon and Yoko were interested in making a film based on his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It's easy to understand why the druggie couple would have entertained this notion of a fabulously druggie novel, but it's a good job they didn't succeed as any such movie made then would have been catastrophically awful. Made now it would probably be just as bad as it would have been then. The novel is wonderful but unfilmable.

Or rather, what works so well in the text, the sudden, abrupt, spooky shifts of planes of reality would just appear as cliched on the big screen.

As to why they work so well in words, I suppose that's related to Dick's own very real experiences of the awful hallucinatory power of certain illicit substances. That and the tremendous, unflagging pace of the narrative.

Pity about the title though. I almost skipped the novel - which I've not read previously - and jumped to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - which I've read before - simply on the grounds it sounds so thunderously pretentious. Now I come to think of it, though, the book itself is more than a little pretentious - but in a good way, like a fine Star Trek episode, written by a usefully mad man.

For some reason I'm now reading a bit of Ibsen. Yet another plane of reality.