There's a bit in Ubik that stays in my mind. Joe Chip gets into an
argument with his apartment door that refuses to open for him because
he owes it money. I kinda got that the door was an autonomous
money-making agent that held him hostage - a conversation reminiscent
of that between Doolittle and the Bomb in Dark Star. It made me see
the ridiculous side and ultimate absurdity of micropayments leading to
world where a dollar value is put on everything so that every silly
little thing becomes a coin operated nuisance whose actual function is
replaced by squeezing a few more micro-credits out of you.
They call that "web3" nowadays, but you're supposed to enjoy it because you can buy shares in the specific door that won't open for you and they might triple in value while you're locked in.
Years ago I read about cloud computing as getting a free vacation but being charged for each sand particle you touch, small on its own but it gets too ridiculous after some time
There was an episode of Rocko's Modern Life where they go to a ski resort where everything is $5. What a deal! It turns out it applies to literally everything.
While living Boston the walkup replaced the keyed doors with electronic locks. They never worked. I kept my key to the cellar and would come through the laundry room and occasionally fall in snow and pee myself. That is dystopia. Dick understood what the future would be lots of dangerous gadgets. The gestaltmacher in the novel the penultimate truth.
PKD is one of my favorite sci-fi writers and I recommend Ubik if you're a new reader, although like the article mentions, you definitely need to be in a certain mindset to "get it." The Man in the High Castle has an interesting concept but I don't think it's particularly well-written.
One thing that I think goes unnoticed about PKD is how some of his earlier short stories are undeniably, unquestionably bad.Fair Game, for instance. He wrote it in 1953, a decade+ before his work started to get really good: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was written in 1964, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and Ubik in 1969.
I personally find this a bit reassuring. It's nice to know that even someone as influential as PKD took a long time to develop.
>The Man in the High Castle has an interesting concept but I don't think it's particularly well-written.
It should be noted that Ursula K. Le Guin disagreed with your assessment in her famous essay Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown, in which she felt that The Man in the High Castle was one of the only science fiction novels that had a human character - a Mrs Brown.
PKD is my favorite writer of all times. I believe that even for his greatest works the writing could have been more polished, way better. The thing is PKD does not get you with the form of the writing but with the ideas that he captures. Truly visionary.
Dick can be really rewarding, although he's definitely not to everyone's taste, or a particularly good stylist. This is true of other great writers who deal in extreme psychological states - Dostoyevsky for example. The extreme state for PKD was a metaphysical paranoia (probably augmented by amphetamine abuse), which many people can relate to, although it's usually not as intense or as intricate as in his novels. Dick was often writing autobiographical science fiction, which is an absolutely unique vision, though not one I'd like to experience first hand.
I'm no authority on Russian literature but I've never agreed with this criticism of Dostoevsky. His writing is of a different kind, one that has its own logic. This article does a good job of explaining it I think: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-master-of-peter...
it's funny because for me the prose of a lot of science fiction writers was always what turned me away from the genre. I could barely make it through Dune and gave the Foundation up. A lot of science fiction authors which I came to love a lot like Gibson or Le Guin I think I mostly got into because of their sense of style.
Stephenson for me is probably the worst offender for this. I've met so many people both online and offline, particularly other programmers who always told me to read his stuff but he's straight up pasting pages of Wikipedia into his books, I felt like I was being trolled.
I can relate. I'm massive Dune fan, but I see why people would have difficulty with Frank's prose. It's dry and not particularly sensual. However it is incredibly functional and lucid once you acclimate to the world he's building. He has a strong way of making you very aware of how everything relates to one another, both in space and conceptually.
Stanislaw Lem, on the other hand. The substance is usually fantastic, but the reality of the characters tends to get obscured by long, intricate sentences that lack the precise objective descriptions of Frank's writing and lose a sense of where everything is in relation to one another. Lem tends to be extremely light on description in many instances. Perhaps that can be partly attributed to translation difficulties, as I've never read the Polish source.
On the other hand I'd disagree about Neal Stephenson, I'm reading Snow Crash for the first time (halfway through it right now) and I loved the opening chapters. There's a real kineticism with Hiro and YT speeding through traffic that I find very evocative and leaves me pining for my days of doing irresponsible shit in traffic. He really has a way of writing action that feels exciting and focused.
Neal has some hilarious descriptions that really paint a picture. There's a great description of the "rat thing" robotic sentry disarming a lawn full of aggressors with blinding speed and he describes one of the aggressors as having "had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left."
That said, if do have one gripe so far it's the five uninterrupted chapters with Hiro expositing hard with the Librarian daemon about Sumerian mythology. The concepts being discussed are really interesting but it becomes tiring after a while, even when broken up by a few interstitial chapters following YT.
I had high expectations from a bunch of friends recommending Snowcrash, but when I read it I found it to be so awful I couldn't even finish it. It was just so childish and stupid. I don't get why people like it.
Snow Crash is either an accidental or deliberate parody of cyberpunk. The main character is Hiro Protagonist. When he goes into a VR world and is "fighting" with a sword he's swinging a sword around wildly in the real world too, while around other people. And then in Diamond Age Stephenson [rot13]xvyyf gur zbfg plorechax punenpgre va gur svefg be frpbaq puncgre[/rot13].
When I read Snow Crash the first time it was back when cyberpunk was still a pretty hot style, and I was also reading a lot of Gibson and others. It fit well within that context. Then later I reread it and realized what I wrote above, it was parodying elements of the genre while creating almost a quintessentially action-adventure cyberpunk story with a programmer/pizza delivery driver hero. And then it had the typical Stephenson ending, which is to say
Thank you for commenting on Stephenson’s plot resolutions. I love his writing and his stories, but the end of his books are just so unfulfilling. Especially Anathem!
Of his books that I read, it is definitely the one that comes across as the most childish and stupid (with a few good ideas). His other books aren't like that.
I had trouble getting through them as well, but for other reasons. For Cryptonomicon it was his "let me prove how smart I am" diversions off the main story for dozens of pages at a time, and for Anathem it was an interesting idea told in a boring yet difficult-to-parse way, at least as far as I got.
The quality of the prose in those other two books seemed better, at least.
Big fan of PKD books, btw, although I think his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own (but they are quick to read as a result, I could knock one out in about 4-6 hours, usually). The ideas, dialogue, and often the endings make them all worth reading, though.
"his writing style and characters are pretty plain and not that compelling on their own"
Dick is a champion of the underdog everyman. His protagonists tend to be humble repairmen and other "losers" in the lower stratum of society... I find those characters very human and relatable.
The other type of Dick protagonists are those who think they're on top of the world, until their world turns upside-down and so they get to experience being dragged through the mud.... usually finding out that what they thought was a perfect world was broken, hostile, and sometimes even evil.
His writing style is direct and economical. I really don't have a problem with it.
I found Ubik somewhat intriguing. I’m about 60 pages unto Valis, and so far it’s mostly bad philosophy and theology, thankfully saved by occasional flashes of humor, and the almost-interesting fracturing of the main character into at least two people. Does it get any better?
I don't reccomend Valis for anyone but the most diehard Dick fans. Its an attempt to fictionalize an experience Dick had and spent the rest of his life trying to understand. It has some great moments, but it doesn't hold together terribly well as a story. I much prefer more focused stories like Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, or even Divine Invasion.
Supposedly Dick's experience conceived three published novels--Valis, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Divine invasion. There is a fourth, unpublished novel--Radio Free Albemuth that came from it as well. Valis seem to be the most personal since it someone named Philip Dick (or Horselover Fat) having the exact same experience then trying to make sense of it. Divine Invasion has more of the feel of a traditional Dick novel with someone forced to live in a hovel on an alien planet. Timothy Archer is borderline non-SciFi, with only a tiny influence of SciFi, IIRC. And Radio Free Albemuth felt a bit like a cross between Scanner Darkly and Valis--i.e. the Valis story in a dystopian future surveilance state.
It's watchable, but my experience is soured by the terrible experience of contributing to the KickStarter and then not being able to get my reward for years due to living in the UK rather than the US (licensing issues).
I consider Ubik to be Dick's best work... so if you found it only "somewhat intriguing", I doubt you'll be any more pleased with anything else he wrote.
That said, if you are interested in reading more by him, of his books I can recommend:
It's funny, I'm a big PKD fan and I didn't care for Ubik. I enjoyed the first half or so of VALIS immensely but my favorite of his is A Scanner Darkly.
I think, in 2022, people will understand Scanner better than they used to or maybe it is on the verge of being outdated?
Reading most of his short stories in order is a great experience. Yes, you hit some not so great stories, but from time to time you hit gold. Beyond Lies the Wub, Meddler and Paycheck are some of his early works that worth a read.
Regarding Ubik, there is a Russian movie, Koma, that looks like it had Ubik as inspiration, and in that probably is more faithful than most Hollywood adaptations of his work.
He also had a problem with women (to be fair, he was a professional writer - and apparently his wife wouldn't let him use the house).
I don't think I've read a single well-meaning intelligent woman in a PKD story.
I remember being surprised at the start of one of his books, that the female character introduced at the beginning was clearly competent - turned out she was evil.
I would argue that Juliana Frink in The Man in the High Castle is certainly a "well-meaning intelligent woman". His strongest female character is probably Angel Archer, who narrates The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, his last novel.
Ubik is the only PKD novel I've read and man did I struggle to finish it. Once in a while a passage caught my interest and then I would realize that I was reading was basically a summary of some myth from Gnostic scripture. A real slog, on the whole.
Ubik is hard, I'm rather surprised this writer recommended it as she did. I always suggest people just start out with short story collections to get used to his weirdness and the various sci-fi tropes he reuses a lot (eg 'homeopapes' that printed newspapers on demand). Pick a collection that includes Second Variety.
Flow my Tears is probably his most accessible novel. Do Androids Dream is very disorienting if you were expecting a novelization of Blade Runner and that probably puts a lot of people off him.
I haven't read The Man in the High Castle for a long time, but I thought that it was a rarity amongst PKD's output in that he edited it rather than just writing and selling it. It's also notable for winning a Hugo.
His personal life has some interesting events. But largely he was trying to feed his family by cranking out popular stuff. It's tragic how little he was recognized in his lifetime :(
I've read 45 of all 49 PKD novels on the Wikipedia page. It was a goal I set about 7 years ago. I tried to read the books in order, but had trouble finding some. His style goes from Twilight Zone / Amazing Stories, do thought-provoking alternate reality, to alternate people, to alternate "reality" which is different than what I said earlier. There is "alternate reality" where we are in a different timeline, or aliens, or different technology, and then there is reality that is just bent and distorted psychologically (VALIS, Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time Slip, ...). There's a big blob of boring books in the middle, in my opinion, like "We Can Build You", "The Crack in Space", and "Now Wait for Last Year". But what I've found most fascinating is watching his progression (descent) into darker and darker work. It was also a weird experience reading so much from one author, because after 5 books you start to see significant similarity and I wonder if that is why the middle part got so boring to me.
A few of us in the old country read about ~50 of Agatha Christie's 84 fiction books together in our mid-teens (there was reasons/context:). They were definitely "more of the same", but Agatha has the kind of stylistic English language that made the process itself enjoyable; it's like going on a bike ride, you don't have to see spectacular new sights to just enjoy the journey.
My preference is SF though, but it's because it's the ideas that are the draw for me; if the ideas start repeating themselves, or even themes, it becomes a lot harder to read a lot faster.
> ...it's the ideas that are the draw for me; if the ideas start repeating themselves...it becomes a lot harder to read a lot faster.
I read for the ideas, too. It's typical for me to discover a wonderful book, search out everything from that author, only to observe the ideas becoming repetitive over a long output. Even Terry Pratchett felt very samey to me after a dozen books.
High-output writing seems to be inevitably uniform in outlook. You can easily change the setting of your plot, but it's a lot harder to alter your philosophical view.
The "standards" are my favorites. There were a few outliers that I didn't expect.
I'm predisposed to like anything "time travel": "Martian Time Slip" and it's analysis of autism (sci-fi autism) was a subtle body horror; so Dr. Futurity (reminds me of interactive fiction time-travel puzzles), The World Jones Made (more precog trying to change the future and having "prescience" aka Dune), Time Out of Joint (kinda like The Truman Show or "Time Enough for Love" by Albert Finney), and Counter Clock World about time moving backwards and the religious cults it spawns (just plain nutty, not perfect, but a fun concept to toy with).
He has a recurring theme in some books where the idea of the first Martian settlers from Earth being abandoned-working class drug-addicts is pops up several times, and I think that is one hell of a way to look at it compared to all the other stories about Mars. The idea that they are all failed farmers and sit around taking government-issued mind-altering drugs and playing board games where they become the characters to deal with suburban boredom is just bonkers (Three Stigmata of Palmer E., Martian Time Slip [poverty on mars] and a few others).
"Ubik" is really top-tier though. There's a reason that the standards are called "standards". :)
There is a 5-volume anthology of his short stories by publication order. You can see how is themes evolved or changed with time, and it should be a good reading along his books (also, in publication or writing order) for that reason.
Not all stories there are great, but I think he did better in the short stories arena. Most of the movies based on his work were based on short stories, after all.
I'm a big PKD fan - I also recommend reading the 1909 short story 'the machine stops' by em Forster which was incredibly prescient and I suspect informed some of PKD's thinking.
People have often pointed out this piece 'predicted the internet age' while ignoring the dystopian collapse at the end of Forsters pice, which is alarmingly similar to the current collapse of some aspects of western civilization IMO...
I find his short stories to be quite good -- if not a bit repetitive if read in bulk. His paranoia and the bleakness of post nuclear war are overwhelming after a while.
Quite a lot of his stories have been made into movies, for better or worse. They seem to be enough of a chunk to hang a story on, without getting too much in the way of telling a good story.
Minority Report -- much better in the story. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale -- both worked.
Amazing the standard of pulp fiction in that era - we need a big dose of dystopian 'nuclear war will be an apocalypse that will end our lives' right now given how amazingly unaware people appear to be to the grave danger of nuclear war threat we are facing right now
For anyone that liked “Blade Runner”, it’s fascinating to go back and read PKD’s “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep”, which Blade Runner was based on. You can see the threads of similarity but it’s a way more surreal paranoid bad-acid-trip vibe.
Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
Ridley Scott famously claimed that he “found the novel too difficult to read”. Dick was infuriated with the first draft of the film, and absolutely hated it, writing very sarcastic comments about it.
However, after the script was reworked, and Dick read it, he said "you read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact."
I especially like Special Effects Chief David Dryer's recollection of what Dick said after watching the first reels:
> Dick looks me straight in the eye and says, ‘How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I’d imagined it! How’d you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?’
> “Let me tell you, that was one of the most successful moments of my career,” Dryer concludes. “Dick went away dazed.”
I also particularly liked Dick's comments about what the film meant to him:
> I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runer. Thank you … It will prove invincible.
Part of the problem with that adaptation is that We can Remember It for You Wholesale would be best adapted into an almost comedic Outer Limits episode, as written. Total Recall at least manages to keep a lot of PKD's general themes intact despite seriously diverging from the story, and brings in ideas from his other stories to an extent.
> Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
Are we talking in general, or just PKD?
Next - with Nicholas Cage - was a film I actually enjoyed, but is a far cry from The Golden Man (short story).
I read an anecdote after Ex Machina came out about the 'freaky alternative ending' that wasn't used, which felt like a nod to the Golden Man:
"... So in that scene, what used to happen is you’d see her talking, and you wouldn’t hear, but all of a sudden it would cut to her point of view. And her point of view is completely alien to ours. There’s no actual sound; you’d just see pulses and recognitions, and all sorts of crazy stuff ..."
Exactly the other way around for me. I never liked Blade Runner, especially the last 20 minutes or so. I enjoyed the book. I like Blade Runner 2049 though.
The writer talks about Ubik but does not mention the pervasiveness of corporate power/role in the daily life described (at least from my interpretation), this is well portrayed in Total Recall, also based on a Philip K. Dick story which varies enough from the movie to be read as separate work.
Short story not mentioned but is worth reading if one has not, Second Variety.
When I was reading the story I confidently thought - I know how this goes, for sure Terminator was based on Second Variety. I was very surprised that Screamers was the movie licensed from the story because the Screamers part of the story is just the introduction/setup for the main plot, and the movie simply used the setup technology for the entire plot which kind of misses a point of the story in a way.
PKD has a much stronger claim on that than Harlan Ellison ever did. A writer of great talent who inexplicably chose to drown it in a barrel of pomposity.
Yeah, I've never really bought that. HE made such a thing out of it I think they put it on there to placate him. It seemed to me that his claims of plagiarism rested on very narrow conceptual elements that were too abstract to count as a real rip-off.
See below for another example of this. I really admired him as a writer when I first encountered on him but the more I got to know him the less I enjoyed it :-/
In contrast, PKD stories like Second Variety feel astonishingly like the post-apocalyptic environment ruled by Skynet and the plan of hunting down the remaining humans with terminators. I would be very surprised if Cameron or someone on the creative team weren't inspired by it.
For those who have read Dick's "standards", I recommend one of his novels that never appears in these lists, and probably never will: Galactic Pot-Healer (1968).
PKD later said he couldn't call writing it, this being the period where he consumed copious amounts of amphetamines, and produced a ridiculous number of novels and short stories. I still think it's one of his most enjoyable books.
The plot is a ramshackle Vonnegutian comic fantasy featuring a totalitarian dystopia, an alien demigod, a man who "heals" broken ceramic pottery, and an early version of the old Internet pasttime where you use machine translation tools to translate English into other languages and then back again in order to produce humorously mangled sentences. It's a weird, fun, sad book.
Also worth mentioning is A Maze of Death (1970), which is a creepy alien planet exploration story that becomes something else and unexpected, and probably the closest Dick came to writing a Harlan Ellison story.
It was also one of his last novels and most personal, both factors probably influencing its quality. The Linklater adaptation is particularly good and faithful, nearly every scene is close to verbatim from the book. And most of its omissions and changes are reasonable ones for an adaptation into a movie.
VALIS is the most bizarre but fascinating book I've ever read. I recommend going into it only after reading a number of his other books, and then reading a synopsis of his own life. It's fiction but also psuedo-autobiographical, and a deeply personal story to PKD.
I have a goal to read enough of PKD's work and life story that I can at least appreciate VALIS, if not enjoy it (So far: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik). An unreligious friend read it and, evidently, became born-again christian immediately afterward. Ever since I have been painfully curious about what in this book could possibly have precipitated such a thing.
That book made me aware of how your brains internal dialogue can be influenced by the media you are consuming. I read it in a day or so and really felt it altered my “internal voice”, which was a bit unnerving.
So for everyone here who has declared that Phil Dick wasn't a very polished writer - who is your example of a polished writer that you are comparing him to his detriment with?
I wouldn't call it unpolished at all. I would characterise PKD's prose as workmanlike. It's very effective, just not what anyone would ever call lyrical or stylish. Stephen King once described his own writing as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries", and there's some of that in PKD, at least on the surface level.
I do think PKD improved as a writer in the 1970s, once he kicked his drug habit and slowed down his hyperactive output; from this era, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and the VALIS trilogy all has some beautiful writing and show Dick as a deeper and more mature writer.
As for the rest of the sci-fi genre, there's a lot of talent among his contemporaries. I would especially suggest:
* John Crowley. Widely recognized as actual an Author of real Literature, though only his earliest works could be called science fiction. Start with The Deep and Engine Summer.
* Harlan Ellison. Some of his stories ("I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", "Jeffty Is Five", etc.) are simply masterfully written.
* Samuel Delaney. He's an acquired taste and certainly gets a bit self-indulgent, but novels like Babel 17 are often beautifully written.
* Ursula LeGuin, e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness.
* Gene Wolfe. Increasingly also recognized as a genius, I also particularly like his short stories. Start with The Fifth Head of Cerberus; graduate with the monumental The Book of the New Sun, which has no equal in or out of the genre.
* J. G. Ballard. A consummate stylist, he eventually drifted away from SF, but his earlic works are fantastic. My favourite is The Crystal World, as well as his numerious short stories, including one of my favourite stories ever [1]).
Of later writers, William Gibson, China Mieville and Iain M. Banks come to mind.
> I would characterise PKD's prose as workmanlike.
That's a good way of putting it. I think a lot of his stuff was just published in a time when editors didn't do much, but also he was picked up by publishers who were pushing pulp, so there's a lot writing that feels "in progress".
Nabokov, or Paul Scott, or Kazuo Ishiguro if you want an example within SF (broadly constructed), would be authors I consider something close to opposite on this axis (though I enjoy both).
My pop turned me on to PKD years before he was all that jazz. He gave me a copy of "Man In The High Castle". That was also my introduction to the I-Ching.
Is SciFi a genre that reflects societal health? I have the feeling that SciFi is a phenomenon that appears and disappears in waves depending on how well a society is function.
There was SciFi coming out of the communist block (Lem, Strugatsky brothers, Zamyatin) which was a comment on the system, there was SciFi from England in early 1900s (Wells) - comment on industrial revolution - and later Orwell - post war, societal controls - and Adams - the world should be more worried about external forces. In the US the genre appears to be a constant starting with Poe[1] followed by Huxley, Dick, Clarke, Asimov, Gibson, Bradbury, Heinlein commenting on all sorts of societal issues. And recently China with The Three Body Problem by Liu. France had Jules Verne but that was more for profit than comment on societal issues.
Coming back to the question, is the popularity of SciFi an indicator for potential fears within society? I know that my favourite bookstore recently had a run on PKD, the bookstore happens to be in mainland Europe.
And what is the relationship between SciFi and philosophy? Philosophy being one of those sciences whose purpose is to question societal forms, constructs and norms.
If you've had mystical experiences and trying to make sense of them, PKD's Exegesis is required reading. If you haven't had any experiences of this sort, then it'll probably come across as disconnected ramblings indicative of serious mental illness.
After spending decades reading everything I could on the subject of mystical experiences, from Crowley (the English libertine) to Timothy Leary and Mckenna, the only other writers I'd put on the same "absolutely essential reading" list as PKD, worthy of intense study, are Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner.
That a pulp scifi author made this list is, to me, supremely fascinating.
It took me several years and as many attempts to get into it and commit, but once I committed and got past the (awful) forward, I went front to back over the course of a month or two. As sibling comment says, it's very repetitive, but it's also iterative; PKD is trying to make sense of a lot of things at once, over and over again with slight tweaks. Each time he gets closer and closer to essentially rewriting Christian Gnosticism (imo) from the ground up.
It honestly changed my life. There were times when I would have dreams and thoughts along similar lines and then end up reading them in the pages that night. It is worth a read if you're in a dark place, because it might give you the same sense of "I'm not alone" that it did to me.
Certainly ain't for everyone, but the reward is great.
I don't know if it's the type of thing that can be classified as "good" or "bad". It's a stream of consciousness from a brilliant man suffering from immense personal pain and some form of undiagnosed mental illness, that I'm sure he never intended anyone to read. It's bizarre and fascinating, especially if you've read VALIS. It shows how his internal world was becoming molded with his own books, his life becoming one of his own stories, struggling with the flimsy nature of reality.
It's so long that it feels kind of futile to read it end to end, but I jump to a random page sometimes and read for awhile. There's a lot of repetition, but is fascinating.
Check the HN FAQ. Paywalled sites are fine for submissions as long as there's a workaround (and there is here), and whining about it (as the person I responded to did) is considered off-topic. It takes about 10 seconds to pull up an archive link and maybe 5-10 seconds more to submit it, only slightly longer than it takes to write and submit a useless comment about how it is paywalled.
Which is crazy to me. This websites policy is "Hey, websites that want their writers paid fairly can only be submitted if us users can find a way to bypass this and pirate their content for free".
I'm not going to sign up to NYTimes, but journalists do need to receive payment for the work they do and you've got essentially one of the biggest tech forums actively helping users avoid that.
> There was no workaround published when he commented.
There was, I'd posted it an hour earlier than their comment.
> Why not just use the working workaround link in the first place?
Who knows, who cares. It takes < 20 seconds to get an archive.org copy and post it yourself. Only a few seconds more than it takes to whine, and a lot more productive.
