Get thee to a secondhand bookshop, they'll have piles of his stuff, no need to buy new.

The Difference Engine is mildy amusing, so go for that instead.

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DFJ?

My Grandad had shelves full of Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes stuff. I read most of it in my early teens (there wasn't a terrific amount else to do down there) and recall that some of the MacLean stuff rocked: Bear Island, Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra especially (I've still not seen the films). Pretty relentlessly fast-paced, I seem to recall.

Ahhh, Liverpool. Well, if you can't get good-and-drunk there, you'll have a hard time doing it anywhere. The Philharmonic is nice, but a bit atypical, catering mostly to the evening theatre trade. If anyone wants a look, there's a mock 3d java applet at the BBC website.

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20 days left ...

to ruin a Dick novel is reading it.

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Now accepting suggestions for a new sigline

Haven't read Jem though. Wan-To is my kind of guy, btw. Poor Wan-wan-wan.

The Difference Engine wasn't bad, but still slightly disappointing. I like alternate history as a genre, and on that note it's pretty thin. Others consider it steampunk, a genre that I care little for.

Selling pictures of yourself as a naked child is probably illegal. Even children that do so can be prosecuted. Remember a case of two 16-yr-olds that made a video of themselves, when the video was discovered, considered childporn and both were charged. Freaky, eh?
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Do not look directly into laser with remaining good eye.

Dude, save yourself some time and just read a few Destroyer novellas.

Irony: ammo says it's time. Tom is blocked.

If only every place treated their toilets with such dignity and good taste.

Also, I hereby humbly suggest "Confessions of a Crap Artist". It's not science fiction, really, but it is by far my favorite Dick novel.

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You can build the most elegant fountain in the world, but eventually a winged rat will be using it as a drinking bowl.

Interesting that you should have felt that way about it. Then again, I've read many more than two Philip K Dick novels, albeit still less than half of them, though. Even so, I wasn't bothered at all about the 'spoiler' thing.

It is after all not so much a documentary-style biography of the man himself as a literary critical biography of his work, and as such would have been pretty hard to write without going into detail. I found it an excellent book and I don't feel that it has spoiled anything for me in terms of those Dick novels I haven't yet read - if anything, quite the reverse. I thought it did an unusually good job of pointing out some of the underlying themes running through his work as it develops over time, and I thought that Carrere did an excellent job of writing about another writer's life and work without making me feel like I was reading an extremely long and boring piece of magazine journalism.

Not only that, but some of the later novels are pretty much unspoilable, I think, both in terms of their rereadability and in terms of the way in which the backstory around Dick's actual life, if you know any of it, whether from this book or elsewhere, seems to add rather than take from the reading experience. A Scanner Darkly, for example, stands up well as a novel on its own, but it has an epilogue which made me suddenly need to read the whole thing again.

Essentially, I don't agree at all that his books would be completely ruined if you knew what was going to happen. I think they're a lot better than that. Especially the later ones.

I amd itn ecaptiaghle of drinking sthis d dar - Dr T

and wish that i could cast a negative vote for difference engine. the rest i haven't read.

and on the subject of philip k. dick i recommend A Scanner Darkly and Confessions of a Crap Artist. I have read most of his work and those two stand out in my mind as far and away the best.
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_{I don't think anyone's ever really died from smoking. --ni}

... fun but pretty dated. I liked the future tourism but felt I had to slog through a pretty artificial cold war action plot to get there.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}