Capture Ο χρυσαφένιος άντρας Penned By Philip K. Dick Provided As Digital
ιστορίες από έναν εξαιρετικό δημιουργό. A mixed collection of PKD stories with a few good ones,
Stand outs in the collection are "The Little Black Box" about a quasireligion based empathy acquired by using a technological artifact, and "The Unreconstructed M" which is a rare PKD mystery complete with a murder, clues, gangsters, a private detective, and a police chief.
What makes it unusual is that the murder weapon is a small robot that plants clues to throw off the cops.
The title story, "The Golden Man", is interesting in that it essentially predicts the entire XMen comic/movie franchise humans developing mutations that give all sort of special abilities.
There areknown types
of mutants including chameleons, precogs, telepaths, psychokinetics, teleporters, and others, The DCA hunts down mutants and "euths" them to insure they don't outevolve homosapiens, The Golden Man turns out to be a new type of mutant, What's weird is that the story was used as the basis of a movie called "Next", starring Nicolas Cage, that had almost nothing to do with the original story.
"Small Town" reads like an original Twilight Zone episode with a downtrodden husband who escapes daily life by building a detailed model railroad layout in his basement that's an exact duplicate of his small town.
It's a fun read even if it's not hard to guess where the story is heading,
There are a few other moderately interesting stories and some forgettable ones, Overall worth a read if you come across the book but I'm not sure it's worth special effort to track it down.
There are lots of better PKD books around, AChanging
In the fifties, when PKD wrote his story The Golden Man, there seemed to have been a general fascination with the idea of mutants, i.
e. human beings that were, in some decisive ways, different from the runofthemill us, Sometimes mutation was seen as the result of some tampering with nuclear material just think of Spiderman, who made his appearance in the earlys or of nuclear war and widespread contamination, or of evolution itself.
Very often, mutants were regarded as a hope for mankind, as leaders who could help us strike completely new paths and overcome civilizations numerous problems.
PKD was wary of that naïve optimism, asking himself the legitimate question that if those mutants are really so superior, why should they bother employing their marvellous faculties in order to help us out of our selfcreated messes or why should they do so without the ulterior motive of seizing power over humanity.
The eponymous Golden Man in our story is not really a Nietzschean Übermensch but he is also different from most other mutants that populate the world of PKDs short story, a society which has grown used to mutants as a result of a past nuclear war and which has adapted a strict policy of hunting these mutants down and “euthing” them as they “euph” the term.
In this story, we get introduced to a wide variety of mutants through the talk of the characters , ranging from an eightbreasted woman to some menacing creatures in Tunis, which kill their victims and then take on their forms, continuing their lives.
Our Golden Man is devoid of language, uninterested in social exchange, but able to know what is going to happen in the near future and adapt his course of action to it instinctively.
Apart from that, as his sobriquet implies, he is very goodlooking tall, athletic, of a golden colour, which is why especially the women in this story often refer to him as a god come down from heaven.
The fact that an unthinking being, with some precog abilities, appears to be superior to homo sapiens, maybe able to replace him one day, is seen as a dire humiliation by the representatives of nonmutant society:
”To be replaced by an animal! Something that runs and hides.
Something without a language! He spat savagely, Thats why they werent able to communicate with it, We wondered what kind of semantic system it had, It hasnt got any! No more ability to talk and think than a dog,
That means intelligence has failed, Baines went on huskily, “Were the last of our line like the dinosaur, Weve carried intelligence as far as itll go, Too far, maybe. Weve already got to the point where we know so much think so much we cant act, ”
In other words, the existence and the success of the Golden Man seem to suggest that our assumptions as to evolution tending into the direction of intelligent humans may be starkly erroneous.
We are probably not the crown of creation, not even of any further interest at all, but just a blind alley, leading nowhere.
Maybe, the whole idea of evolution following a scheme is wrong, Maybe, its just a trialanderrorgame, a wilful squandering of life forms that tends to go nowhere in particular
One may imagine that PKD had some difficulty getting this story published and that when it was published in the science fiction magazine If, the following number had a twopage editorial consisting of a letter by a school teacher who criticized Dicks story for not presenting the mutants in a more favourable life.
Hmmm, peoples implicit trust in mutants and their desire for being led by them, will it ever be exploited politically, one wonders
One may say that in this respect, PKD fails in credibility to a certain extent because near the end of the story, the Golden Man seems to be weighing various alternatives of action, which is something that could not be achieved just relying on animal instinct, Id say.
Maybe three of the stories were really good, Five were average. And seven were marginal to bad, And perhaps this was the worst time to read this book, The final story is basically plotless and is just a screed about fetal rights being so fundamental that they trump the rights of living people.
It was an antiabortion story, which is fine if its a good story, but it ended up just being a treatise without a story, and it finished the book.
Just kind of inadvertently sour and sad, Dick also wrote a little explanation about each story, and surprise, he received a load of criticism from other women writers and the public about this final “story”.
Oh well, wasnt the best collection anyway,
This short actionfilled novella, first published in If April, is set in a postapocalyptic world where government agents like Baines hunt down all mutants, killing the most dangerous and neutering the rest.
Baines, though, had his hands full with his latest quarry: a beautiful young goldenskinned man named Chris who lives just one step into the future, but can see the consequences of that one step so clearly that he always chooses the prudent thing to do.
He has another “superpower” too, . . but youll have to read “The Golden Man” yourself to find out what it is, I think I can say this much, though, without spoiling it for you: it has something to do with the way evolution chooses the most effective mutations.
Philip Dick himself, in ainterview, told us something about his reasons for writing this story, Apparently he was weary at thes fantasy of the benign mutant leader or mentor a view favored by John W.
Campbell, the editor of Astounding:
Here I am also saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W.This was an interesting short story dealing with humanities reaction to human genetic evolution, I'd recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Philip K Dick, Αυτός ο άνθρωπος Όσο αγαπάω τα διηγήματά του, τόσο αδιάφορα με βρίσκουν τα μυθιστορήματά του. Πώς το καταφέρνει
Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders, But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us, I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us, Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading, Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as to where we would wind up going.
It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't,
Όλα μα όλα τα διηγήματα σε αυτήν τη συλλογή μα και σε μία ακόμη που έχω διαβάσει είναι γεμάτα εκπλήξεις, εκρήξεις εγκεφαλικές, στιγμές σαστιμάρας που σε κάνουν να αναρωτιέσαι "τι ακριβώς έγινε τώρα", ανατροπές, στιγμές αυτοαμφισβήτησης πράγματι το βλέπει αυτό ή έχει αποτρελαθεί. Είσαι διαρκώς με μια γλυκιά απορία στο μυαλό που σιγά σιγά μετατρέπεται σε αυτή την εσωτερική ένταση που κάνει τον αναγνώστη να μην τολμάει να αφήσει την ιστορία στη μέση. Λατρεύω Philip K. Dick.
Θα διαλέξω ως αγαπημένα το "Η έξοδος οδηγεί μέσα" και το "Ο βασιλιάς των ξωτικών". .