Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 27) (Volume 27) - Hardcover

Palmer, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0853236186 ISBN 13: 9780853236184

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2003

Synopsis

Once the sole possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and chal

About this title

About the Author:

Chris Palmer is a tutor in the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His specialist teaching areas include Contemporary Science Fiction, Science Fiction as Narrative and Science Fiction and Postmodernity. He has contributed a number of essays
including "Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family" for the book Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (Greenwood). Chris Palmer is currently researching the science fiction of Iain M. Banks.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0853236186
• ISBN 13: 9780853236184
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272