Laura Miller, It's Philip Dick's World, We Only Live in It nytimes.com
[ on a vaguely related metaphysical / epistemological front. Clip: ]
At its best, Dick's fiction captures the depredations of what he called, in his great 1965 novel ''The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,'' ''the evil, negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality and despair'' embodied in the book's title character. Dick described the two central questions posed by his writing as ''What is human?'' and ''What is real?,'' though he never quite nailed down an answer to the latter. Humanity, he felt, was distilled in kindness, compassion, empathy -- the only way to fend off Eldritch's evil trinity. . . .
Of course these writers could as easily have been inspired by the world around them as by Dick's stories and novels; a great speculative writer always extrapolates from the material at hand. What's striking is how early Dick zeroed in on those ideas. In 1968 (1968!) he opened the novel ''Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'' with a husband and wife bickering over the proper use of their ''Penfield mood organs,'' gizmos that allow them to fine-tune their personalities. ''My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,'' the wife announces, much to her husband's annoyance. He suggests she set the mood organ to 888, ''the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it.''
Aldous Huxley used the idea of chemical mood control even earlier, in ''Brave New World,'' but Dick took speculative fiction's rarefied thought experiments and integrated them into the humble fabric of everyday life. As weird as his work can be, it's always grounded in the lives of Willy Lomanesque working stiffs -- late on the rent, nagged by their wives and just trying to get by. In his own life, Dick alternated between the 1950's ideal of a nuclear family and a freer but chaotic demimonde; that tension between midcentury suburbia and our liberationist impulses preoccupies us still. Like Dick's characters, we take comfort in vicarious glamour. The bored and miserable Mars colonists in ''Stigmata'' spend all their time playing with Barbie-like dolls. Using a drug called Can-D, they can transport themselves into the dolls and briefly become gorgeous young people who drive Jaguars, revel in seaside trysts and otherwise savor a life in which it's ''always Saturday.''
The controlling powers in Dick's futuristic worlds are more often huge corporations than governments. ''Stigmata'' is essentially the story of a cosmic battle for market share; in ''Ubik,'' metaphysical salvation comes in a spray can. Dick's most distinctive contribution to the literature of paranoia was his refusal of the conspiracy theorist's secret comfort: better a world manipulated by sinister agents than a universe governed by no intelligence at all. The great terror of Dick's books is entropy -- the cold, dusty, random creep of decay and disorder, blindly devouring each insignificant human life. Anyone on the bad side of the free market can recognize this combination of pervasive power and utter mindlessness. Remember what the prophet said: kindness is our only hope. |
