Reviews for Almayer's Folly

The average rating for Almayer's Folly based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-01 00:00:00 Janet Lyon Phillip K Dick's Ubik flirts with perfection. I inhaled this novel over three days when one of my kids was sick and Christmas break was ending. I started the book on the couch during a Mythbusters marathon. By page fifty I wanted to shut the door and leave my kids to forage in the refrigerator for Gatorade and string cheese. And on Sunday night, when I closed the book, I felt satisfied and excited with a novel in a way that doesn't happen much. Ubik is fun, smart, and exhilarating. Ok, let me take a shot at the plot summary. Joe Chip works for a team that shields organizations and the general public from illegal super-psychological activity like, for example, the unethical use of precognition. I think. Anyway, Mr. Chip is down and out, almost too broke to pay the nickel necessary to operate his apartment door. He is charged by his employer (and his employer's wife, currently in "half-life", a finite state in which the dead and living can interact) with leading a team to Luna in search of the criminals of whom they lost track. From there Ubik takes off into territory defying summarization. I'd need a chart to track all the turns and potentialities. The novel addresses Chip's attempt to separate multiple realities and discern exactly who he is, where he is, and when he is. Somewhere in there Dick batters around the I-Ching and Plato's form philosophy. Ubik's genius emerges in Dick's obsessive attention to detail. He's a remarkably disciplined writer for a guy who sounds completely messed up (more on his biography in a second). The novel never goes dry; Dick balances the esoteric, theoretical analysis with an urgent storyline. Joe Chip's inner monologue, his attempts to piece together the myriad of clues pointing to the establishment and resolution of his questions, is paranoid, desperate, and brilliant. Ubik, and PKD's work in general, is a significant element of the genre's template. This is the third PKD novel I've read, and although I don't want to snap them up in a rush, I'll hit more this year. Oh, I should mention that I read the Library of America edition of this novel. The LOA edition (you know, those heavy black books with the nifty attached bookmark) includes three other novels, notes from Jonathan Lethem, and a detailed author timeline/biography. Holy hell, PDK lived a fucked-up life, between social anxiety, industrial strength drug use, and multiple stints in psychiatric care. That said, I love the fact this novel was published in 1969. Put Ubik in your summer of love pipe and smoke it, hippies. I don't want to become a star-whore. Over the last year I've assigned four books five stars. Maybe I'm getting soft. The little note over the fifth star, however, reads "It was amazing", and those three words fit Ubik, so I'm sticking with the fifth star. This novel is the poster child for the difference between workmanlike genre fiction (nothing wrong with that) and the kind that makes you want to jump and down with your hands in the air like you're a twelve year old at his first rock concert. I want to hang its poster over my bed and blow kisses to Ubik before I fall asleep.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-07 00:00:00 Yaron Deskalo The idea of the one wonder-substance, superdrug, holy grail, dietary supplement,… to rule or enhance them all is an old one, but it needed Dicks´tendency to integrate mental illness, illusion, conspiracy, different realities and madness in the mix to make it a new one. So what to think about this? I like this one more than „Do androids dream of electric sheep.", because the plot is so dense, the ideas wrapped around it ingeniously and probably because Dick had so many drug experiences that writing about a topic like that was simply his thing. The interpretations could go in all directions, biochemical, religious, pharmaceutic, transcendental, whatever one prefers and I will choose the economic one by saying that we are already running on so many wonder substances like the marvelous caffeine and that tech will someday bring us something close to a real ubik. Probably including some time travel, Psi and mind uploading to that Dick´s vision can become reality. I added, or at this moment more precisely , will add this part to my review of „Do Androids dream of electric sheep" too, because it´s appropriate and fitting for both novels. The writing style is typical, one red line, no real subplots, the ending is quite kind of unsatisfying (looking at you, Man in the high castle.), it often gets confusing and it´s difficult to differentiate if it´s ingenuity or the authors' illumination. All of that are reasons why Dick is more controversial and not so universally acclaimed a grandmaster of Sci-Fi and I am more on the side of his critics. If one looks at the worldbuilding and complexity of all the other behemoths, Dick seems average, with the only hobbyhorse of dealing with consciousness, reality and the mentioned topics and some novels feel as if he just wrote them for the money (he needed) without real intrinsic motivation. I would call him, and I hardly ever do that because it is not nice, overrated. In this regard, he is more like the Nobel price, pseudo-intellectual, overhyped, higher literature stuff and less like pure, true, entertaining fiction. To write not understandable and confusing to seem deep and arcane is much easier than to write entertaining, suspenseful and yes, true, stereotypical following the rules of the genre. But that´s one of the key elements of why we love certain genres and tinkering around with conventions while writing 60 pages a day under the influence of LSD and amphetamines brings him in the corner of Kerouac and consorts and „first thought best thought." Dicks´ novels don´t feel coherent, there are no satisfying resolutions, just more and more mysteries and open questions and nothing gets answered and much feels unfinished. It's no bad writing, I just wouldn´t highly recommend it, because it are no fun reads and if Dick would have been a bit soberer and invested more time in developing satisfying, believable plots, that could have been great. What annoys me the most are the great moments and ideas that are followed by unanswered questions, unreliable protagonist behavior or losing the overview of what is happening. A direct comparison with other grandmasters of Sci-Fi and what they have revolutionized shows the flaws even clearer. Heinlein with amazing military science fiction, Asimovs´robots and some of the first space opera, Clarkes unbelievable language and subtility, Pohl with his worldbuilding, Gibson with Cyberpunk, not to name all the newer authors, and Stanislaw Lem. Especially he would have deserved the same and more attention and appreciation as Dick and should be named in a row with Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein because he wrote revolutionary brilliant at Clarkes´ level and was really funny in other novels and short stories, highly recommended literature, he is unique. All those authors were able to write entertaining, unique, tropeforming, philosophical, and with metaplots that come all together to a satisfying and logical ending, something Dick was incapable of, because he didn´t construct a universe, just fragments not fitting together and of extremely varying quality. Of course, it may be a question of personal taste and preference, but I have read so much great Sci-Fi, hundreds of novels, that it feels inappropriate to name him in a line with those works and I felt really unsatisfied after having read any of his novels that are all closer to psychological mindf*** mystery whodunnit whatever crossover hybrid than to real Sci-Fi and with less real genre-typical elements in them. All the giants were true intellectuals and able to endlessly talk about any tiny detail or their works and its meaning and sense and it would interest me if Dick would have been able to give answers to complex questions about his work. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: