Philip K. Dick: Transcribed Essays and links

Philip K. Dick published 35 novels and six volumes of short stories during a short, bohemian life of 54 years, a life that involved a lot of drugs, five marriages, several psychological breakdowns, religious visions and an enormous amount of frustrated literary ambition. Now, nine years after his death, he has become a powerful influence on popular culture, especially at a time when the culture bespeaks our deepest fears and most persistent fantasies about technology and its potential to destroy us.

Dick wrote the stories on which two major movies were based -- Blade Runner, regarded by many critics as a science fiction masterpiece, and Total Recall , Arnold Schwarzenegger's don't-mess-with-me blockbuster. There are probably more films in the offing: nine other wittily gloomy futuristic works by Dick have been optioned by movie makers. There have also been a Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said stage and an avant-garde opera based on his novels. And recently some of Dick's books, most of which have been out of print since well before his death in 1982, have been reissued by Vintage Press. It seems as though just about every word Dick wrote and every minute of his offbeat life has suddenly become worthy of attention.

Dick's old sci-fi fans will regard the attention currently being paid him as long overdue. But there are many latecomers to the Philip K. Dick cult, arriving there, as I did, by way of the movies. Many of us are not devotees of science fiction, either. The term itself has always seemed to me an oxymoron, particularly when it encompasses such notions as psychic projection, time travel, the existence of alternative worlds. But the movies inspired by Dick's books have little of that, and the books themselves even less. I'm talking here of a novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and a story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," on which Blade Runner and Total Recall, respectively, were based. The conceptions behind them contained the shock of plausibility, and that is what, in my mind, unites them with other arresting anti-utopian novels like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The tremendous surge of interest in the author, his posthumous status as a guru, a prophet of the New Age, raises that always interesting question about cultural trends: why now?

  My attempt to answer the question by reading the best-known books ran up against the fact that, until recently, Dick had been secluded in a very marginal corner of the literary world, away from the category of what sci-fi writers have always called, with a hint of envy, mainstream fiction. He had a cultish following, his many works most readily available in the sorts of bookstores that specialize in exotica, fantasy, the occult and what is called New Age. But until Vintage started releasing a few of the novels this summer, Dick's books were mostly out of print and even with the Vintage reissues, most of them still are.

  And so, when I tried to find Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or a collection including "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," none of the Manhattan bookstores I tried had either of them. I settled for a novel called The Penultimate Truth in a glossy paperback published by Carroll and Graf. That novel has not been optioned by a movie studio. It is not viewed as one of Dick's classics. Yet it is a good introduction to the author and his dark vision of a soulless, pop-tech future in which there will be no meaningful difference between the real and the fake.

The idea is this: Most of mankind lives in vast multistoried underground "tanks" that manufacture robots for use in the nuclear conflagration that is raging at ground level. The millions of people in the tanks watch news broadcasts about the war and the poisoning of the planet's surface. They know, for example, that to go up there would result in diseases like "stink of shrink," in which your head is reduced to the size of a marble, and "bag plague." And so they stay where they are, until, more or less by accident, one of them ventures into the sunshine.

  And what that person learns is that all is fraudulent. There was a nuclear war. That much is true. But the rest of earthly existence is the secret of a privileged few who live on an entirely habitable earth on vast estates serviced by robots produced by the duped inhabitants of the tanks. Thus "The Penultimate Truth" is a tale of the almost infinite manipulability of facts and images, of a bureaucratic dictatorship whose hold on power is based on the bureaucrats' control of truth.

  The story is told in a gritty, technobabblish sort of noir prose, stripped of sentiment, blunt, disabused, a bit reminiscent of William Burroughs and also of Dick's fellow Californian Raymond Chandler, with passages like this one, having to do with "stink of shrink."

"The microscopic things downfalling to us that some careless ambulatory meta hunk of handmade parts had failed to 'cide out of existence before yanking the drop switch, shooting three hundred pounds of contaminated matter to us, something both hot and dirty at the same time... hot with radioactivity and dirty with germs. Great combination, he thought."

  Dick, in this sense, belongs on a kind of imaginative continuum with other science fiction writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, fantasizing at the beginning of the continuum, about the possibilities inherent in the new science of medicine, raised in Frankenstein the specter that we might create the very labor-saving devices as the computer Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and the half-human, half-machine creature in Robocop - have exploited humanity's deep ambivalence about scientific advance and technology. In these two later works, the startling point was the utter literalmindedness of computers, their absolute amorality, and thus their potential to run amuck, turning against their creators.

For Dick, the real question was not whether mankind's creations would turn against us. He seems to have believed that the existence of nuclear weapons proved they already had. Most of his novels take place in a world rising out of the ashes of nuclear war. His main fascination was the likelihood that technology would lead to the disappearance of the very frontier between what mankind creates and what mankind is. The Penultimate Truth takes place in a world run by robots on behalf of humans who, in some cases, are alive because they control access to the world's limited supply of "artiforgs," synthetic pancreases and hearts. The "replicants" of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be distinguished from humans by only two features: they are superior both mentally and physically, and they die after four years of artificially created life. The replicants are a kind of ultimate genetic engineering achievement, more poetic, more impressively endowed than mere men and women, but they cause human beings to resort to Nazi-like methods to keep them under control.

The author is playful with these technological projections, which are always portrayed as part of the pop culture in the worlds he creates. In "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" the main character, Rick Deckard, who hunts down escaped replicants for a living, wakes up with the help of his Penfield mood organ, which has settings to induce different states of mind - number 888 for "the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on," or number 481, which is "awareness of the manifold possibilities open in the future." This lightheartednessis matched by Dick's lightheartedly philosophical exploration of the epistemological bases for what we believe, or, put another way, for what we, in an age of advanced technology, believe to be illusion.

In recent years, scientists have come up with a new computer fad known as "virtual reality," in which you have the sensation of becoming an actor in a computer generated world. It did not exist in Dick's time, but it seems now to be one of the areas in which the times have caught up with him. In "We Can Remember It For Wholesale," what seem like real experiences and entire identities can be electronically inserted into the consciousness - and electrically retracted as well. You just got to a retail outlet and put your head into what looks like a high-tech hair dryer, and off you go on a vacation more vivid and exciting than anything you can experience for real. And then, when you are, say a secret agent on Mars confronting an adversary, you don't know if you are really there or if you are actually sitting back on Earth with your head attached to wires being given the illusion that you are on Mars.

In a recent telephone interview, David Hartwell, Dick's editor at Pocket Books, recalled a letter that Dick once wrote in which he said the purpose of his work was to get beyond "the only apparently real" to "what is really real."

Dick's agent, Russell Galen, told me: "Dick basically wasn't interested in science fiction. He was interested in philosophical speculation, in what's real, what's fake, what's human, what's inhuman, and he used things like aliens, androids and time travel to explore all of that."

Well, what is real, anyway? And is what is real necessarily better than what is fake, particularly when the fake seems so real that it has the force of reality? What is so important about reality, anyway, in this age of artificial fruit flavors and virtual reality? It is Dick's hip, tuned-in exploration of those questions in his novels and stories that seems to have propelled him from the literary "whorehouse," where his biographer Lawrence Sutin, reluctantly placed him, into the mainstream he yearned for all of his short life.

Mr. Sutin's detailed biography makes Dick himself emerge as a bit of a relic, as though he had been preserved in a time capsule of the 1950's and 60's, bearing with him most of the fads, bohemianisms and experiments that we associate with those crazy decades. He was born Philip Kindred Dick in Chicago in 1928 but moved early on to California, he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out after just a few months. He tried desperately and assiduously to write mainstream fiction, but met with very little success. Science fiction for him was decidedly a second choice. Still, starting in the 50's, as Mr. Sutin puts it, Dick began "producing SF stories at white heat," writing for a rapidly burgeoning number of magazines with names like Galaxy, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, and Fantastic Story.

Dick did lots of drugs, had many romantic affairs, hung out with beatniks and hippies in Berkeley, thought a lot about the meaning of life. He had agoraphobia. He believed from time to time that the Government, a local radio station and his ex-wives were out to get him. He had visions, he believed God spoke to him. He read voluminously and variously, including a lot of things it was fashionable to read in the 50's and 60's - everything from the Bhagavad-Gita and the I Ching to James Joyce and Carl Jung. There was also Hume and Kant, the Jewish mystics and Cabalists, the Bible the Gnostics, the Greeks. Dick was a kind of Jorge Luis Borges of science fiction.

One of his early novels, The Man In the High Castle , discussed in Mr. Sutin's biography, already displays Dick's propensity for fictional puzzles, multiple realities. He imagines a world in which Germany and Japan have won World War II and divided things up into two global halves, separated by the Rocky Mountains. But a novel within the novel called Grasshopper, imagines a world in which the Allies have won the war. This novel is banned by the world's Japanese and German overlords but devoured by them in secret. Dick, in other words, reverses reality twice.

In 1974, Dick already through four marriages, several episodes of psychotherapy and countless experiments with drugs, had a vision, which he explained in esoteric religious terms. He came to believe that he had a dual consciousness. He was part Philip K. Dick and part a reborn ancient personage, Simon Magus, the Gnostic. At times, Mr. Sutin explains, Dick thought the identity had been programmed into him from the age of 4. Sometimes he felt the identity came from a United States Army Intelligence thought-control impant. In any case, his preoccupation with his 1974 vision governed the writing of his last books, a loosely connected group known as the Valis trilogy, the first three books in the Dick oeuvre reissued recently by Vintage.

Many afficionados of Dick's writing, including Mr. Galen and Mr. Hartwell regard the three novels - VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - as the author's finest achievements. "They are," Mr. Galen said, "three incredibly good books of humor and philosophical insight." Mr. Sutin who agrees with that judgement, says this of the trilogy: "Unsanitized by sanctity, loop as a long night's rave, it breaks the dreary chains of dogma to leave us, if not enlightened, freely roaming."

I'm not so sure of this. For one thing, the three books, part science fiction, part autobiography, part mainstream fiction, give a rundown of the reading Dick did during his life. They are a kind of selected quotations from the classics of arcana, and from a 3000 page "exegesis" that Dick wrote trying to explain his 1974 vision (excerpts of which, edited by Mr. Sutin, are soon to be published in a book by Underwood Miller, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections From the Exegesis). These include nuggets like "Matter Is Plastic In the Face of Mind" and "The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time." I detect sophomoric self-absorbtion here, the solipsistic illusion that every random thought ever written down by the author deserves to be read by others.

All three books have to do with the presence of the divine in this world, usually a divine that seems to have been reincarnated from an earlier era - like Simon Magus, Dick's own alter ego. The suggestion is strong in them that Dick actually began to believe some of the stuff he wrote in other novels, especially the existence of alternative worlds. The main character in VALIS, named with typical Dickian originality , discovers that he has met God and serves as a link with a powerful, Godlike artificial intelligence.

There is the Philip K. Dick signature in these works, a wryness and playfulness about a future that is actually the present, a mingling of the most pop in pop culture with the airiest of philosophical speculations. But it is one thing to ramble on about reality in the fashion of undergraduates late at night, and another to create compelling fiction about its elusiveness.

My own feeling is that Dick was better when he was less self-absorbed, when there was what Mr. Hartwell calls the "distancing" from himself that came from the devices of science fiction. In one of his most inspired moments, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick imagines the existence of a machine that tests whether a person is actually human or is an android trying to pass as a human. It is the only way to make the distinction, and it must be made. The androids, after all, poetic and beautiful though they may be, might take over if those that escaped to Earth were not hunted down.

What an extraordinary, chilling notion - a machine that tests for humanness! Yet, when you think of it, just how science-fictionesque is it? After all, people have been hunted down for less reason than the hunters of replicants had. Philip K. Dick's best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly imaginable. It is the recognizable part that hits home the hardest, because it reminds us of just how unimaginable we can be.

Transcription: Patrick Deese