American Writers (one Hundred Pages At A Time)

In this episode, I look at an assortment of Herman Melville's assorted short prose: some book reviews and short stories. Part one of a two part series on these uncollected works.

This is part two of my review of "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. With an android bomb, the posthuman industrial spying plot winds down as we find our characters in a world of decay and entropy. We will struggle with them to find out footing.

The first part of my review of Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". This novel would have been great it if was just about industrial espionage and post-humanism, which is what we think we are getting in the beginning of the story.

"Not By Its Cover" by Philip K. Dick looks at religious texts, preservation, reproduction and authenticity. It is a nice story that is firmly in Dick's period of religious speculation, but it may be more significant for what it says about knowledge preservation in a digital age.

This episode is the second in my review of Herman Melville's "The Piazza Tales". Two of these stories are quite strange, but "The Encantadas" is a brilliant quasi-historical account of the changing Pacific. Read it!

Poor Deckard. Doomed to be kipple, but maybe he can find some meaning in an electronic frog. Let's read the final chapters of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and move onto a book with a much shorter title.