After bingeing on at least four novels by Philip K. Dick [hereafter, PKD] and being discomfited by the future he envisioned—dark, wet, cold, and lacking many conventional comforts—I picked up Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. I wanted to compare their versions of dystopia with PKD’s and see if the inevitability of death and the determination to avoid it run like leitmotifs through their novels, too. Nora Ephron said it best, in the title of one of her last non-fiction books, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman: at a certain point, … Continue reading Diverging from Philip K. Dick