Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

What is your favourite Anne McCaffrey novel and why?

Hi folks I just wondered what is your favourite Anne McCaffrey novel and what was it that made it for you? She is only just the best author of fantasy novels in my opinion.
I also love the ship who sang. Helva also is mention in the crystal singer series because she also uses B&B ships in it too.

Of the DragonRiders of Pern series, “The White Dragon” was my favorite, with “The Dolphins of Pern” a very close second.

I also like The Pegasus Stories and the Freedom’s Landing Stories, but those series were not long enough for me to have a favorite book.

What do the songs reveal about the dwarfs nature and J R R Tolkien’s writing style?

A question from the book the hobbit written by J R R Tolkien! Can somebody plz tellme the answer?

I have no clue.

Any Alan Dean Foster/Spellsinger Fans?

I think the Spellsinger series is much more fun reading than Harry Potter. Agree? Disagree?

I haven`t read any of his books yet but after visiting his web sites he`s my hero.

Why was Philip K. Dick heralded as a great science fiction writer?

His writing seems simplistic compared to William Gibson, Dan Simmons, Neal Stephenson, and Frank Herbert. His books are much shorter. It doesn’t even seem to be in the same league. Some of his ideas seem silly. For instance, the idea of precogs that can see into the future. What they actually see is not future events but newspaper headlines. That seems more like fantasy than science fiction. Compare this to the mentats in Dune, which are like human computers. The precog idea is silly compared to mentats.

I don’t know which PKD books you’ve read. My two favorites are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle. One thing that’s great in both of these books is the uncertainty of what’s real. In Androids, the humans think they are more real, but in several subtle ways they seem inferior to the androids. In High Castle, the world is different from ours (it’s about a world where the Nazis win WW2), but a few characters occasionally have glimpses of what we could call the “real” world. In both cases, the tension between what’s real and what’s false raises questions about what’s important. So I would say that unlike Simmons or Stephenson, Dick’s books ask questions about morality and about human nature. I think Simmons is better at plot (especially the first two Hyperion books) and Stephenson generates more new ideas per page (esp. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age), but they both seem more superficial than PKD, to me.

The comparisons to Gibson and Herbert are tougher. Neuromancer is probably the best American book of the past 25 years; Dune is perhaps my all-time favorite book. I suppose I think PKD is ultimately more disturbing and philosophical than Dune, although I love the richer world in Herbert. But in Androids, the question of why Rachel gets angry at Deckard is slippery and tantalizing, and it raises questions about whether love is anything more than possessiveness. I don’t think anything in Herbert is as emotionally complex.

I guess my final answer is that I think Dick is in the same league with Gibson, but that Neuromancer is better than any of PKD’s books. On the other hand, Gibson had the benefit of reading PKD, and not vice versa. For that reason, I might call it a draw. From a literary standpoint, I think PKD is better than the other three writers, although each of them has a book on my all-time favorites shelf.

If you like these books, I can recommend The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.