There's a few themes here that are interesting. Firstly, it's Lem's early recognition of Dick as a genius. I'd like to think that one of the things that Lem had in common with Dick was that they were both mentally traumatized (Lem, barely surviving Nazi-occupied Poland, and Dick, suffering from intense depression and psychoses). They both wove stories around the mind dealing with situations that were pervasive and inescapable. Lem went on to translate Ubik into Polish. Dick responded by accusing him of being a Communist party stooge/pseudonym, and held Lem personally responsible for financial shortfalls from the publisher. So much for kindred spirits!
Neither one of them wrote "entertaining" stories, at least not according to popular trends. The main thrust of the article is how to consider literary greatness in the midst of contemporary entertainment. But, the striking thing to me is that Dick's works are entertainment now. It's one thing for genius to be recognized after the author has passed, but why are Hollywood and Netflix churning out Phillip Dick (and related) stories decades later? Most ideas about future technology from that period are laughably wrong or outdated.
After the events of the past few years or so, I have to wonder if people feel the same sense of paranoia and dissociation echoed in the stories. It's pretty clear modern society is unraveling, and we're heading towards some awful disaster, whether it's ecological, technological, or political. Dick's stories follow those mental patterns and somehow feel familiar.
Finally, I am grateful for taking Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's Science Fiction class at Depauw all those years ago. He maintains this page and the rest of the archives : https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/index.htm
Not only that, but science fiction editors back then were actively hostile to the direction Dick's stories were headed. Here's what Dick himself had to say about it:
"At the beginning of my writing career in the early Fifties, Galaxy was my economic mainstay. Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W. Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, "Nuts." By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on. So Galaxy provided a latitude which Astounding did not. However, I was to get into an awful quarrel with Horace Gold; he had the habit of changing your stories without telling you: adding scenes, adding characters, removing downbeat endings in favor of upbeat endings. Many writers resented this. I did more than resent this; despite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories--after which he bought nothing from me at all."