The paranoid as prophet
November 11, 2005 | 12:00am
Salvador Dali once declared, "After Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world which will have to be eroticized and quantified." Like the prophet-jester of surrealism he was, Dali knew that he was opening another can of worms with that statement and it would take all sorts of fools to answer his call, each with his own claim to truth and their own madness. Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was one such individual and, famously, he wrote science-fiction.
Dick never took anything at face value. In a career spanning the pulps, the ’60s new wave and SF’s emergence from cult to pop culture, he wrote over 50 volumes of fiction that questioned the reality that smothered us into submission. Tellingly, Dick was interested in the concept of Brahmin’s Dream, in which our reality is only the ancient god’s dream and, when he wakes, everything – including us – vanishes.
In novels like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, he takes this idea and reworks it as paranoid acid-trip far surpassing Ken Kesey. In the book, the future is so unbearable that exiles on the colonies choose to indulge in Can-D, a hallucinogenic drug that projects the user into an unreality of doll houses and role-playing where everything is safe and permitted. But a new drug Chew-Z threatens Can-D’s hold on the market and it is a more potent poison indeed. While Can-D shares experiences between its users, Chew-Z – pushed by Palmer Eldritch, this novel’s answer to Milton’s Satan and, in Dick’s own words, the closest he has come to depicting true evil – is experienced in isolation and under Eldritch’s malign influence. Genuinely disturbing, it posits the existential nightmare, the human race as no more than playthings in someone’s sick fantasy. (Other SF writers such as Harlan Ellison in his seminal short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" have tackled the theme but Dick is the one who hits the truly apocalyptic note.)
In his history of SF, Trillion Year Spree, British author Brian Aldiss observed that, "All his novels are one novel, a fatidical A la recherche du temps perfide." Of course, the many books he churned out in the 1960s (usually while he was on speed) explore the same ideas and this may well be due to the paperback format Dick was working for, not allowing him the needed space to fully explore his visions in their appropriate length. Apart from the well-deserved Hugo for his alternate-world history novel The Man in the High Castle, Dick remained a minor writer who never managed widespread commercial success in his lifetime. (One of the most sobering anecdotes about Dick was the one he himself recounted as proof of his poverty. Unable to buy food, he and his wife subsisted for a time on dog food.) He died weeks before the film Blade Runner (based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) opened to great commercial and critical success, triggering a critical reevaluation of his work.
Today though, due to the popularity of the films based on his novels, Dick’s entire oeuvre has been reprinted (even his two unpublished mainstream novels) and we can appraise them for their sheer brilliance and contributions to modern thinking. (Despite his schlock trappings, Dick really was an intellectual and philosopher. Even Jean Baudrillard cites him as one of the great experimental writers of our era.) Perhaps the greatest compliment was when the LA Weekly published a feature on Dick in 1990 titled, "The Novelist of the ’90s Has Been Dead Eight Years." Of course, as Dick himself will remind you, you can never, ever really be sure.
Send comments and reactions to: erwin_romulo@hotmail.com.
Dick never took anything at face value. In a career spanning the pulps, the ’60s new wave and SF’s emergence from cult to pop culture, he wrote over 50 volumes of fiction that questioned the reality that smothered us into submission. Tellingly, Dick was interested in the concept of Brahmin’s Dream, in which our reality is only the ancient god’s dream and, when he wakes, everything – including us – vanishes.
In novels like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, he takes this idea and reworks it as paranoid acid-trip far surpassing Ken Kesey. In the book, the future is so unbearable that exiles on the colonies choose to indulge in Can-D, a hallucinogenic drug that projects the user into an unreality of doll houses and role-playing where everything is safe and permitted. But a new drug Chew-Z threatens Can-D’s hold on the market and it is a more potent poison indeed. While Can-D shares experiences between its users, Chew-Z – pushed by Palmer Eldritch, this novel’s answer to Milton’s Satan and, in Dick’s own words, the closest he has come to depicting true evil – is experienced in isolation and under Eldritch’s malign influence. Genuinely disturbing, it posits the existential nightmare, the human race as no more than playthings in someone’s sick fantasy. (Other SF writers such as Harlan Ellison in his seminal short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" have tackled the theme but Dick is the one who hits the truly apocalyptic note.)
In his history of SF, Trillion Year Spree, British author Brian Aldiss observed that, "All his novels are one novel, a fatidical A la recherche du temps perfide." Of course, the many books he churned out in the 1960s (usually while he was on speed) explore the same ideas and this may well be due to the paperback format Dick was working for, not allowing him the needed space to fully explore his visions in their appropriate length. Apart from the well-deserved Hugo for his alternate-world history novel The Man in the High Castle, Dick remained a minor writer who never managed widespread commercial success in his lifetime. (One of the most sobering anecdotes about Dick was the one he himself recounted as proof of his poverty. Unable to buy food, he and his wife subsisted for a time on dog food.) He died weeks before the film Blade Runner (based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) opened to great commercial and critical success, triggering a critical reevaluation of his work.
Today though, due to the popularity of the films based on his novels, Dick’s entire oeuvre has been reprinted (even his two unpublished mainstream novels) and we can appraise them for their sheer brilliance and contributions to modern thinking. (Despite his schlock trappings, Dick really was an intellectual and philosopher. Even Jean Baudrillard cites him as one of the great experimental writers of our era.) Perhaps the greatest compliment was when the LA Weekly published a feature on Dick in 1990 titled, "The Novelist of the ’90s Has Been Dead Eight Years." Of course, as Dick himself will remind you, you can never, ever really be sure.
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