A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Mark Cobley reckons we should love Philip K Dick because, like all great writers, he was a little bit mad
For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K Dick got there first’. This verdict, from Python-turned-director Terry Gilliam, proudly adorns the dust-jackets of Dick’s works and it’s easy to see why the publishers chose it. It sums up his brand of literate, cynical science fiction fairly well. But it also makes reference to his continuing allure as a troubled genius, whose difficulty separating reality from fantasy eventually came to resemble that of his books’ protagonists. Dick, who died twenty-five years ago this March, has only recently achieved the mass appeal that eluded him during his life. Hollywood has raided a number of his novels and short stories for inspiration, starting with the brooding Blade Runner – a film so literally noir the
picture is near-indiscernible – and continuing through Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and finally Next, released in the US just a couple of months ago.
Few science fiction writers have attracted so much attention from film-makers, but few of the resulting films have done Dick’s work any justice without substantially replumbing them. This is perhaps inevitable, given how clunkily plotted, narratively inconclusive and goddamned depressing the original novels are. Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott with Dick’s eventual blessing, comes closest to recreating the creeping paranoia and cynicism that pervade his books. Dick is no great writer as a writer – but as a commentator, a generator of ideas and a weaver of words into mood he has real stature.
Dick’s visions of the future are, almost without exception, degenerate versions of the present. He nailed pre-millennial tension about three decades too early. We are presented with drug-addled peasants scratching a living in the dusty soil of Mars (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), trained assassins chasing android untermenschen across a blasted Earth (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a cowed, servile America under the yoke of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (the ‘what if?’ history of The Man in the High Castle, one of the first serious attempts at the genre). It is affecting how often Dick’s characters are the little people – the books may be peppered with spaceships, Martians and robots but really they are about human beings, lost and bullied by forces they do not understand.
Dick’s rapid, scatter-gun prose style furthers the tension, as does his habit of blind-siding the reader with invented philosophies and concepts and, just when you are getting comfortable with them, turning them on their heads. These switchback paradigm shifts are a favourite technique, as in Electric Sheep when the mass-empathic religion Mercerism is introduced, explained, acknowledged as a social good, and then abruptly exposed as a cynical, android-run sham for no particular plot purpose. The very senselessness of it, the capricious way he destroys the hopes of his characters without any warning, make the books compelling reading, because there is no way of predicting what he might come up with next. When, in High Castle, a fugitive Jew is spared the gas ovens of upstate New York thanks to the whim of a stressed Japanese official, it comes as a genuine surprise, because it would have been just like Dick to let him die.
Dick is preoccupied with the boundaries of reality, and his characters pick their way dismally through anti-capitalist dystopias full of ersatz, degraded copies of the true and authentic. In Electric Sheep the assassin must distinguish between real people and the renegade androids that resemble them in every way in order to win the bounty that he is saving up to buy a ‘real’ animal instead of an electric copy. In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said the protagonist awakes to find his entire identity has been erased, and A Scanner Darkly’s SubstanceD narcotic throws all who consume it into paranoid psychosis. Meanwhile, the characters in High Castle, who inhabit a world where the Nazis won the Second World War, are all avidly reading a forbidden book in which the Allies were victorious, which offers an alternative reality. (This novel-within-a-novel motif is also a favourite of Dick’s). All present a sort of unreality.
Dick’s output divides neatly into two periods. The first, spanning the Asimovian glory days of US science fiction in the 1960s, includes his best-known and most accessible work. But Dick really gets interesting following a bizarre incident in February 1974, when – the unkind observer might conclude – he went temporarily insane. Following the incident he produced the semi-autobiographical Valis trilogy, which must rank as some of the oddest books ever to appear in science fiction. The first – also titled Valis – is the only book I’ve read to be narrated by one half of the author’s own split personality, and it is riddled with his thoughts on philosophy, religion and metaphysics, recounted through often amusing arguments with his friends. In some parts the book begins to resemble Umberto Eco’s bewilderingly academic opus Foucault’s Pendulum, with its
obsession with hidden history and the occult, and is just as well researched.
The story concerns a blinding revelation apparently disclosed to Dick by an alien intelligence variously referred to as God, Zebra or VALIS. Dick became preoccupied with the idea that history ground to a halt in the first-century AD and all that has followed has been a continuation of the materialistic, degenerate Roman Empire. He also believed that he was a reincarnation of a first-century Christian called Thomas, persecuted by this eternal Rome – a revelation summed up in the phrase ‘The Empire Never Ended’, which appears repeatedly in this and other works.
Valis is no easy book to read, but worth it. As a portrayal of borderline insanity it is simply excellent, but it is also – rather ironically – a story about contact with the alien or divine that reads like a real-life account. In this it is utterly unlike 98 per cent of published science fiction. There are no Vulcan handshakes here or green men barking ‘Take me to your leader’ – this is a man whose brain has been genuinely fried, as he repeatedly admits, either by the recreational drugs he used or through contact with something supernatural. He sounds bewildered, helpless and terrified as he tries to figure out which.
Critics often dismiss science fiction as an escapist fantasy, and most of it is, and unashamedly so. The later work of Philip K Dick stands out precisely because he began to take it all seriously. As the cover notes for Valis ask: ‘It was madness, pure and simple … but what if it were true?’.
