PKD was an American science fiction writer, mostly writing in the 1950s up to the late 70s. By now I’ve read enough of his stories and books to make some sort of appraisal thereof, and a meaningful evaluation, though I still haven’t read all of them by now.
Background. Born in 1928, died in 1982, he is typically associated with Berkeley, well known as a bastion of left wing extremism (home of Country Joe (“Stalin”) among others). Virtually his entire writing career concerned science fiction. My closest comparison to him is Robert Heinlein.
Themes. Dick was less concerned with the specifics of technology than Heinlein. Nor is there nearly as much sex in Dick’s books compared to Heinlein’s. The topics Dick liked to address:
1. Totalitarian dictatorships supported by high technology. In his view, as societies grew more technologically advanced, the government improved its ability to spy on its own people.
2. Anarchy & corruption. By corruption I mean the gradual breakdown of technology – nothing works anymore and no one knows how to fix it. As freedom and decentralization increase, technology decreases and approaches nature – anarchy and technology are treated as polar opposites. Especially since technology is so closely related to dictatorship, people are uncertain, in a later anarchist society, whether to embrace technology again, although they sense some value in it for its own sake.
3. Altered consciousness and alternate reality. What is really going on? Are we perceiving the real world, or something else? And how can we know for certain? More so than any other writer, PKD’s stories often have you wondering, “what is really going on???”
4. Robot self-awareness. Particularly in “Second Variety”, this idea that robots achieve self-awareness and man’s creations turn against him. Robots create more robots, and so on. In “James P. Crow”, robots run the country, while humans are substandard – discriminated against and kept down – and no one can remember that it used to be the other way around, until Crow (taking an ironic pseudonym) manages to reveal the truth.
5. Time travel, reverse time flow, paradoxes. Time travel is as much an element of PKD’s stories as any other sci-fi writers, and he’s as likely to address the issues of causation as anyone else.
6. His take on capitalism is more along the lines of, “damn incessant advertising for stuff we really don’t need”, and planned obsolescence. He doesn’t seem to take on the system per se.
7. Many of his stories have an abrupt plot swerve at the very end, almost a “gotcha!” like “The Twilight Zone”.
Short Stories. He has more than I can count (121). I read no less than 5 separate compendiums of them. Clearly addressing them all would be useless, but here are the best – aside from the ones which were made into movies, which I’ll address separately.
he Turning Wheel. Asians as mystics controlling a futuristic anti-technology society; Caucasians are reduced to a small underground of lower class caste who actually understand technology.
The Last of the Masters. …is actually a robot, in charge of the last bastion of technology-driven, totalitarian dictatorship left on the planet. A small team of anarchists emerges from the wilderness and takes on the Master in his home base. This is the biggest “technology = totalitarianism” vs. “anarchists = nature” story.
Exhibit Piece. Mindf**k! Bureaucrat/scientist can’t tell if the museum exhibit of a suburban home from several centuries ago is simply an exhibit piece…or if this is his real home and family.
Pay For the Printer. Another “dying world where nothing works anymore and almost no one knows how to fix anything” story.
War Veteran. Time-travel paradox involving a war between Earth, Mars and Venus. By the end, the truth is revealed.
Colony. This is another paranoia trip: an intelligent alien race, very deadly and very aggressive, knows how to mimic inanimate objects.
Nanny. In the future, nannies are robots. In addition to being loved by the children and taking care of them as well as any human possibly could, they have combat capabilities to defeat other robot nannies. This means that parents have to constantly upgrade and trade in for newer, deadlier models. The children are not at risk, but last year’s model certainly is!
Holy Quarrel. The computer running society develops self-awareness (yet again) and becomes a religious fanatic.
Orpheus with Clay Feet. A writer is considered too untalented to write his own material, so he’s initially sent back in time to serve as a muse to someone important. Except that he screws that up so spectacularly, that they decide to send him back to Munich in 1924 to un-inspire Adolf Hitler.
Waterspider. A team from the future has to go back to the past to contact Poul Anderson at a convention of sci-fi writers in the 1950s. This story seems like a “call-out” to a who’s who of sci-fi: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Robert Bloch, even himself (“Phil Dick”, as author of The Defenders).
Beyond Lies the Wub. The Wub is a very intelligent alien which produces odd effects when eaten.
Not By Its Cover. The Wub returns – with odd effects when its hide is used to bind books such as the Bible.
Pre-Persons. I could never imagine a story about abortions could be funny, but this one was. Apparently the pro-choice movement succeeds in extending the time for legal abortions to the age of 12. “Boobs are obsolete, like the Pontiac GTO.”
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked. A cynical “Wind in the Willows” meets “Married With Children” story.
Faith of Our Fathers. Apparently the Red Chinese managed to take over – and is continually dosing the entire population with LSD. The resistance develops a drug which counteracts the LSD – yet the “normal” state perception varies, while the LSD perception is constant.
The Variable Man. Astonishingly good story; they manage to get someone from the past, Cole, to fix their rocket in the future, to assist in the war against Proxima Centauri. Cole has an amazing intuitive ability to not only figure out how things work, but also repair them and even improve them. Lots of excitement and combat.
The Eye of the Sibyl. A Roman noble is reincarnated in the future – his modern counterpart displays a natural inclination to cite Latin without realizing why. I liked this concept of the “collective unconscious”, inheriting not merely genes but social and cultural memories.
The Defenders. After a nuclear war between the US and USSR, the survivors burrow underground and allow robot surrogates to continue the war above by proxy. Eventually the humans discover that the surface had cooled and recovered long ago, but they had been lied to by the robots.
Books. He had 36, but of these I’ve only read a handful.
The Man in the High Castle. I described this earlier in my blog about alternate history stories in which Germany won World War II. The Nazis run the East Coast of the US, the Japanese run the West Coast, and the middle is still independent. Everyone consults the I Ching for guidance. Fairly good, but not his best work.
Now Wait For Last Year. I liked this one. It turns out that Earth is a former colony of an alien race and humans are not indigenous to Earth. The humans from the original home planet (the Starmen) finally managed to reestablish contact with Earth, but treat the Terrans as second-class idiots. They’re involved in a war with reegs (insectoid race like preying mantis) but the reegs come off as more sympathetic than the arrogant Starmen. The main character ends up taking a drug which induces time travel – and even meets himself. Very intriguing.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. A popular TV/radio celebrity wakes up one morning to find his identity completely erased – no one recognizes him and his name is absent from every database. Ultimately the answer lies with a policeman’s incestuous sister.
Ubik. Easily the biggest mindfuck book of all. Joe Chip goes to the moon on a mission from Gene Lassiter, which goes horribly wrong. From then on, things start getting weirder and weirder. Towards the end we FINALLY get told what is really going on, and the truth is still strange and screwed up. If they ever made this into a movie, “Inception” would get a run for its money.
Movies. Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying levels of faithfulness to the original story and commercial success.
Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Easily the most popular movie, a real cult film. The book has several elements missing from the movie: this whole business of robot animals (real animals are so rare as to be priceless, and even synthetic animals are valuable enough that a catalog of values – like the Blue Book – exists with regard to them) and Mercerism. Deckard (played in the movie by Harrison Ford) sleeps with Rachel (Sean Young in the movie) a replicant who does not know she is. His job is to track down replicants (androids) illegally on Earth – and kill them. For their part, the replicants are dangerous and do not cooperate.
Screamers (Second Variety). In a futuristic war, the robots originally developed by one side to help them win the war eventually develop self-awareness, begin fighting both sides equally, and develop new three new varieties of androids. The first and third varieties are a wounded soldier and a 10 year old boy, but the “second variety” remains unindentified and at large. More of this “who is human, who is really a killer robot assassin paranoia”. The main character in the movie is played by Paul Weller. Although the movie changes the human sides to fictional countries/companies, in the story the two sides are simply the US and USSR.
Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale). Here the story takes place all on Earth and all issues are resolved at home. A bored Earthbound citizen goes to a memory implant clinic to have memories of a fictional Mars vacation artificially implanted in his consciousness – only to find that he had already been to Mars and subjected to memory erasing treatment by whatever government agency he worked for. The movie uses the story as a basis for a much larger story, in which the man (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes back to Mars and gets involved in the mess there. For this I’d recommend reading the story then watching the movie.
Paycheck (same). This has a similar memory-wiping deal; the story and movie are identical in basic plot but change the ultimate ending. A high-skilled technician finishes a major project for his firm and finds, to his surprise, that instead of the expected fat paycheck, he’s opted to forgo that in exchange for the contents of an envelope which he left himself before undergoing the memory wipe – these contents are a bewildering collection of seemingly unrelated and worthless items. The idea is that the contents of the package, when used correctly, will allow him to achieve a result 100x better than his mere paycheck would have been, if he can only figure out these clues he left himself. Ben Affleck stars in the movie. This is another one where reading the story first, then the book, makes sense.
Minority Report (same). In the future, crimes are solved before they’re even committed, by a “pre-crime” division which relies on a mysterious trio of psychics who predict future crimes. Unfortunately, the main investigator, Anderton (Tom Cruise in the movie) finds himself implicated in a murder and then has to escape his own police force and find out what’s going on. In the story he winds up committing the murder anyway (!) to salvage the pre-crime system. “Minority report” refers to the procedure of logging, but officially ignoring, the report of the third psychic when his/her report conflicts with the other two – Anderton finds that the minority report on his own “crime”, which might explain what is going on, is missing, i.e. he may have been set up by his rival (played in the movie by Colin Farrell).
A Scanner Darkly (same). This Dick’s very intriguing critique of LSD and drug use, in this case a mysterious drug called Substance D, which doesn’t seem to directly correlate to anything we know of, but most closely resembles LSD; Substance D is highly addictive, LSD is not. The main doper, Robert Arctor (played in the film by Keanu Reeves) is also a narc assigned to investigate his own house. Down at the DEA headquarters he wears a sophisticated shapeshifting costume which warps his voice and disguises his identity. He watches surveillance camera footage of events occurring at his own house, including himself. His biggest problem is with his housemate James Barris, extravagantly portrayed in the movie (seriously underrated Oscar-worthy performance) by Robert Downey Jr. Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder are also major characters. The movie uses a unique rotoscope technique.
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