Philip K. Dick's Genius

I've been revisiting some old friends, Philip K. Dick novels and stories that I read years ago, but have been listening to in audiobook format on my commute.

While I can appreciate the folksy upbeat adventures of Heinlein or Asimov, they don't do much for me really. PKD, though, like Kafka, was thinking about important things.

I'd love to see Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? made into a movie. I know, there's Bladerunner, but that movie stripped away some of the most brilliant aspects of the novel.

In the opening of the novel, Deckard's wife (he is married in the book) picks a fight with him about where to set their mood organ. They can dial it to various settings, sexual ecstasy, contentment, motivation to do well, etc. In the hands of someone like Heinlein, this would be a tool used by well adjusted characters to optimize their life. But Dick's characters are real people, and when discussing what to schedule their mood organs to after having a little fight, the wife reveals that her morning schedule included a six hour self-accusatory depression.

This, I think, is a fair reflection of how technology affects our lives. Everything gets better all the time, but nobody is really happier.

For that matter, the way animals are status symbols in the novel, Deckard's electric sheep being a cover for the real ewe that died, that he can't afford to replace. You can really see the way the things you own end up owning you when it's removed from the context of your own life and translated into this alternate reality.

The Man in the High Castle, another masterpiece, explores life in California after Japan and Germany won World War II. The U.S. is partitioned into spheres of influence, the Holocaust has been extended into Africa, and people you can recognize as ordinary every day Americans are taking the I Ching seriously and debating the relative merits of Goebbels, Heydrich, or Göring succeeding Bormann (who had taken over after Hitler) as Reichskanzler. They talk about it in the same tones as Kennedy versus Nixon.

The self-congratulatory nature of the winning side, it's obvious by the very fact that they won the war: their culture and values have merit and the losing side's is deeply flawed if of value at all. It's not so bizarre that the conqueror thinks this way, but the extent to which the conquered tend to embrace the same notion or feel they should be able to embrace it, that's what grabs.

Some of what I get a kick out of with these stories, too, is Dick's social commentary about the details of his contemporary existence. Pay toilets were common when he wrote Ubick. Our hero Joe Chip can't afford to leave his apartment because he's broke and maxed out on every line of credit he has. To get him to come to work, his coworker has to pay his front door to open.

Paycheck explores the world when the real powers are the state and big corporations, and those without the direct protection of one or the other are essentially serfs, which is to say Paycheck explores the realities of today. The Second Variety gets at the heart of the madness of war, with its punchline that the machines man made to kill other men are not only rendering humans extinct but are already building weapons to use on each other.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which was made into a halfway decent movie (Total Recall) with an entirely different ending, gets into the existential nature of experience. If you think you really did something, have tangible proofs and realistic memories, does it matter if you really did?

There's more, of course. So much more. But you don't want to read me dissecting Philip K. Dick for 30,000 words, that'd be a waste of time. Time you could spend acquainting or reacquainting yourself with one of America's greatest literary treasures. He's not the wordsmith that Faulkner or Steinbeck were, but in terms of ideas, he's up there with the greatest.