For friends who haven’t read PKD, but you want to talk to them anyway about the ideas, where do you guide them? Tarkovsky, a Russian movie maker, had some mind bending ideas. Do you just say “Eh, like Star Wars but if it were a horror movie?” Before black mirror there was nothing.

I haven't seen this book mentioned here and I've found it a helpful companion as I work my way through PKD's novels.

This book apparently started out as Kim Stanley Robinson's doctoral thesis when he was getting his PhD in English Literature at UC San Diego in 1982. It was then revised and published generally in 1984. It can be tough to find (out of print?) but electronic copies can be found on the internet in the usual places.

Robinson groups PKD's novels by writing period and general theme. For instance, Chapter 5 is called The Martian Novels, covering the period 1962-1964 with The Game-Players of Titan, Martian Time-Slip, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. We look at the similarities and differences in these novels; KSR points out that Game-Players is stylistically more similar to the early science fiction novels of 1956-1957; the narrative structure that Martian Time-Slip and Three Stigmata have in common; the differences in their resolution; etc.

There are 9 such chapter groupings:

1. The Realist Beginning
2. The Science Fiction Beginning
3. A Table of the Elements
4. The Leap Up
5. The Martian Novels
6. The Triumph of Capitalism
7. Things Fall Apart
8. Lost in Space
9. The Science Fiction End, The Realist End

Another suggestion Robinson presents is reading Confessions of a Crap Artist and Time Out of Joint as "twin novels." Confessions was the last of PKD's early-career realist novels, written in 1959 but not published until 1975, and Time Out of Joint is one of the early SF novels published in 1959. Both books are set in Northern California and share essentially the same narrative, though written in different "modes."

I think this is an interesting idea, comparing basically the same story as a realistic novel and an SF novel, and that's what I'm doing now, having just started reading Confessions this morning, with Time Out of Joint on deck.

I have found that having a big picture overview of PKD's work, and understanding how the novels relate to each other, is a more satisfying way to approach reading them individually. I humbly suggest checking out Kim Stanley Robinson's The Novels of Philip K. Dick if this approach appeals to you too.