WARNINGS BECOME REALITY
Philip K. Dick’s daughter sees prescience in his books
A telepathic 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; humankind’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 hyper-corporate 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-20th-century science fiction, but its themes can feel disconcertingly modern.
Amazon TV now has the latest PKD adaptation arrived on screen, in the form of Electric Dreams, a 10-part series that takes inspiration from 10 stories Dick wrote for pulp magazines in the early 1950s, 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 Monae;
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“homeopapes” Nonetheless, in she several points of to Dick’sthe storiessheets that— self-generatingprovide up-to-the-minute news content “tailored to your individ-ual 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 write in their introduction to the 2011 edition of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a twomillion-word document that Dick produced in the ’70s 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.” (A stroke 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-to-mouth 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,’ ” Hackett says. “It was so depressing.”
Yet, film and TV 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 best-known modern works of filmed science fiction, such as Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. Next month sees the release of Blade Runner 2049, Quebec filmmaker 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 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 speculativefiction successes.
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question ‘What is reality?’ to someday get an answer.