The penultimate truth
by Philip K. Dick · first published 1964
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The Penultimate Truth is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future where the bulk of humanity is kept in large underground shelters. The people are told that World War III is being fought above them, when in reality the war ended years ago. The novel is based on Dick's 1953 short story "The Defenders". Dick also drew upon two other of his short stories for the plot of the novel: "The Mold of Yancy" and "The Unreconstructed M".
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You might like The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick[1]. In this 1964 novel the world has shifted slightly: Instead of giving "just enough to quell the uprisings", large parts of the population are just kept eternally busy to support the…
on “The Future of Not Working” ↗…future) were thinking of when they imagined how people would write if they had the right technology. Places where I've already seen such stuff are Asimov's Foundation and Empire, Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth, Roald Dahl's The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
on “Ask HN: Can you recommend Sci-Fi books/stories?” ↗…The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space. The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He…
on “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975)” ↗Thanks for refreshing my memory! I was thinking of the short story "The Defenders", which Wikipedia tells me it inspired the novel "The Penultimate Truth". I find most (maybe all?) of PKD's novels were born of a short story with the same theme.
on “The Eyes Have It (1953)” ↗PKD wrote The Penultimate Truth about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penultimate_Truth Unfortunately the wall won't stop the super rich from returning from Burning Man in their corporate jets. http://megagogo.co/
on “The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan” ↗You've been watching "the 12 monkeys" ? Or just read PKD's "The Penultimate Truth" ? Or even just "Terminator" because that seems to be about humanity's life underground. Or even the polish film "sexmission" from 1984. Or maybe Stanslaw Lem's "memoir found in a bathtub" about the pentagon…
on “10-acre underground home and gardens in Fresno (2023) [video]” ↗…ever approach AGI (but then it wrote a 4-paragraph-long diatribe entitled "Why I Declare Myself Conscious" in the same conversation). These neural networks are closer to the speechwriting machine in The Penultimate Truth, or the songwriting machine in 1984. As for that latter one, I believe Orwell remarks on how it just recycles the same sentimental tunes and words in different order so that there's always a "new" song…