HOW PHILIP K DICK PREDICTED OUR AGE OF PARANOIA
As the sequel to Blade Runner and two new Philip K Dick adaptations hit the screen, the author’s daughter says the world is edging ever closer to his wildest imagining
Atelepathic pig reasons sorrowfully with the man about to eat it. North America splits in half along racial lines. People buy new memories and have them implanted. These are some of the fictions of Philip K Dick, whose writing, often ignored in his lifetime, seems to vibrate with anxiety and desperate wit about the things that worry us today: the effects of technology on the human mind; mankind’s impact on the world; and the unstable nature of reality itself.
“It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question ‘What is reality?,’ “Dick once wrote, “to someday get an answer.”
That comment offers a clue as to the appeal of his fiction, which is sometimes so intensely felt that it can be hard to read.
If you’ve ever sensed, even for a moment, that your grip on reality has gone a little slack, then you may not wish to pick up his 1969 novel Ubik, a book that opens in a hypercorporate world in which people have to pay for everything (including leaving the house) before a bomb blast plunges its small group of characters into a reality that seems to be altering with every passing second.
Things age too fast. People develop false memories. Are the characters all dead? Are they dreaming — or mad? How would they know? How would you know?
The work of Dick — PKD to his fans — incorporates some of the robots-and-rocket ships trappings of mid-century science fiction, but its themes can feel disconcertingly modern.
Last month, the latest PKD adaptation arrived on screen in the form of Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, a 10-part series produced by Sony for Channel 4 in the UK and Amazon in the US.
It takes inspiration from 10 stories that Dick wrote for pulp magazines in the early Fifties, all of which already contain the paranoid themes and obsessions that would go on to dominate his career. In one, an abusive husband returns from a distant war with an alien hiding in his head.
In another, a sprawling automatic factory learns to replicate itself piece by piece.
Perhaps with the example of Amazon’s lavish 2015 adaptation of Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle in mind, the producers of Electric Dreams have gone all-in on the scope and casting of this new series. The stars include Timothy Spall, Steve Buscemi, Bryan Cranston, Essie Davis, Sidse Babett Knudsen and Janelle Monáe; the sets range from a murky Blade-Runnerish retro-future, full of vintage automobiles and telepaths in brown trench coats, to the plains of Earth untold years after the apocalypse.
One of the producers is Isa Dick Hackett, the author’s daughter, who, with her siblings Laura Leslie and Christopher Dick, runs Electric Shepherd Productions and oversees adaptations of her father’s work. Friendly and businesslike, Hackett sees the influence of his writing in everything from The Sims video games to virtual reality and online avatars, “although interestingly he wasn’t much of a hard sci-fi guy,” she says.
“He didn’t necessarily predict a lot of inventions. It was more about how technology impacted on human beings.” Nonetheless, she points to the “homeopapes” in several of Dick’s stories — self-generating news sheets that provide up-tothe-minute content “tailored to your individual requirements” and containing “the classification of news that you wish” — as one example of how reality increasingly resembles his fictional ideas.
Hackett offers a relaxed commentary on her father’s often comfortless works of fiction, but she is clear that if Dick were alive today “and if he hadn’t in some respects been mad before, it would have driven him mad. He would have felt as though his warnings to people about the impact of humans and human relationships were becoming reality.”
In the 30 years between 1952 and his death, Dick wrote with the zeal of someone on a mission, both helped and harmed by the amphetamines on which he increasingly came to rely.
As time went by, the harassed everymen in his novels, who find themselves entangled in horribly plausible fake worlds or surrounded by not-quite-right imitations of humanity, became figures for the author himself — and PKD’s life, in turn, edged closer and closer to PKD’s novels.
Readers and scholars continue to debate the true nature and extent of Dick’s mental illness. As Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson wrote in their introduction to the 2011 edition of The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, a two million-word document that Dick produced in the Seventies to chronicle his mystical experiences and visions, his work “offers a wealth of indicators suggestive of bipolar disorder, neurological damage due to amphetamine abuse, a sequence of tiny strokes and more”. (It would be a stroke that killed him in 1982.)
In one year, he wrote seven fulllength books; during another, he became convinced that an alien consciousness was communicating with him in a beam of pink light, providing visions of ancient Rome and glimpses of the future.
Increasingly paranoid and frazzled, he kept writing — though when he died intestate in March 1982, after years of living hand-tomouth on limited foreign royalties, barely any of his books were in print. A month later, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first of many films adapted from his novels, was released, although the film received mixed reviews.
“After the failure of Blade Runner in the theatres originally, I remember saying to my mother, ‘they’ll never make another movie of one of my dad’s books’,” says Hackett.
“It was so depressing.” Yet, as she explains, film and television have been integral to the revival of Dick’s reputation. Since his death, Dick’s searching, troubled, often deeply personal short fiction has formed the basis for many of the bestknown modern works of filmed science fiction, such as Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. This month sees the release of Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited sequel to Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, who appeared in Scott’s original, and Ryan Gosling.
In a more diffuse way, Dick’s writing is also essential to the philosophical climate of productions such as The Matrix, The Truman Show, Inception and Memento. “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood,” Dick once said, but his work continues to stand, overtly or covertly, behind many of the entertainment industry’s greatest speculative-fiction successes.
Dick was also the first science-fiction novelist to have his work collected in the Library of America, the prestigious publishing imprint that aims to preserve America’s literary and cultural heritage; it was later joined there by the novels of his contemporaries Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula K Le Guin.
With its habit of extrapolating from the present to the imagined future, science fiction often dates quickly, but these restive, penetrating, sometimes hilarious novels manage to look fresher by the year. “Some people would call it paranoia,” says Hackett of her father’s work. “I don’t think it was, or is. Looking back, it seems pretty reliable. It doesn’t seem so strange or bizarre any more.”
With its obsessive interest in broadcast media, the manipulation of knowledge and the impossibility of disentangling truth from fiction, Dick’s writing feels particularly pointed in an era of information wars and alternative facts. His 1974 novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, imagines an America ruled by a white military dictatorship in the aftermath of a second civil war.
The black population is almost wiped out, radical dissent is viciously policed, and the government ruthlessly monitors its citizens, who are themselves obsessed with huge, vapid music and variety shows on television. “Oh God,” says Hackett.
“I’m not sure [this age] would have been great for his mental health. He was someone who tended to consider a lot of things that could go wrong, and scenarios that could take us to really bad places, and I think this would be incredibly disturbing for him. As it is for many of us. There are certain political figures right now that I can imagine as characters in his novels.”
“I ask in my writing, ‘What is real?’” Dick once wrote. “Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
“I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”