Posted: Jul 26, 2014 6:49 am
SafeAsMilk wrote:Agreed. I suspect his drug problem was at least partly responsible for his sloppy work, though I think in general he just wasn't very good. I remember him getting better in later stuff like VALIS, but still...not great. Too busy spitting out amazing ideas and changing the face of sci-fi literature to really spend the time on his craft. Really is part of the character of his writing though, I wouldn't change it for anything.
Possibly, but a lot of the stuff that he wrote in the 1950s was pretty badly written, too, and he didn't get really druggified until later.
I think his ever-increasing collection of exes who got money from him making him have to crank out the stuff like gangbusters may have had something to do with it.
VALIS was pretty well written, but I do notice that the other two, Timothy Archer and Divine Invasion, had very different styles. Divine Invasion, in particular, was very Dickish.