Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)

Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess the first of these got turned into a tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to finally dip in.

The Man in the show more High Castle
Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist, and the only won to win): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.

Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.

The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.

Library of America editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
None of the other three are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.

In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)

The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.

One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about. show less

Not to be confused with the PKD book Vulcan's Hammer, 'Richard-Bessiere' is a pseudonym used by two Fleuve Noir editors; François Richard and Henri Bessièr. No one can agree, 50 years later, who wrote what, but it wasn't Philip Dick.

At the start of the book our narrator is in possession of a map to a planet which contains a fabulous treasure trove of jewels. He's about to gather together a crew to go look for it when Redbeard, a killer space pirate from his past ("the most feared and show more wanted man in the galaxy") turns up having found our narrator's watch next to the body of the last known possessor of the map. At blaster point our hero pulls out an ace card and tells the pirate that he's destroyed the map... but memorised it. You need me alive! Redbeard, I'm useless to you dead!
So off they go. Stopping only to blow up a galactic patrol ship that gets in their way, they navigate the secret hyperspacial path to the hidden planet, Fortuna. The crew are a repulsive, venal lot, a drunken doctor, a hermaphrodite from Saturn (who keeps the narrator awake at night by having noisy sex with itself), a Venusian who has to eat every 20 minutes and so on.

When they get there they find the planet Fortuna is surrounded by unusually high concentrations of "living proteins" which the author/s claim in footnote is a real thing, citing the, then recent, discovery of ammonia and formaldehyde in space https://www.nature.com/articles/222009a0.pdf - neither of which are proteins - anyway....

And after finding they can't eat the local fauna - the one animal they do try to eat has some kind of chlorophyll for blood, they set off in the direction of 'thataway' because, though the narrator has a map to how to get to the planet, he has no idea where on the planet the treasure is. Luckily the Venusian crew member has the uncanny ability to just point in the direction that any nearby pile of expensive rocks happens to be. So off they go following his sixth sense.

And the book gets very boring and repetitive for a long time. "We were attacked by some giant horrible worms that tried to eat us, so we ran into a cave where some horrible giant insects tried to eat us, so we ran out of the cave again and the worms had gone away but the rocks were suddenly explosive! and then a tree tried to eat us but we ran away and...." for chapter after chapter. During the course of their running away they are constantly beset by creatures with bizarre life cycles. Trees that bear animals as fruit, rocks which hatch out into insects. Caves where time suddenly runs at a different rate - they spend two hours inside while twenty days pass outside. Giant human arms grow out of the ground and try to flatten them with their fists - and get one of the crew. Splat! The whole ecosystem of the planet is one weird hyper-mishmash of mineral, animal and plant. The Venusian dies when something he ate turns him into a tree but luckily he drew a map. Why he drew a map is not explained but the book would have just stopped if he hadn't. More of them die. A fire breathing dragon sets fire to a desert as they are trying to cross a river. Our hero and Laura, the only woman in the crew and Redbeard's girlfriend, get separated from the others. As you would expect - they fall in love.

Eventually they meet up with the remaining members of the crew. Along the way they pass strange columns of light surrounded by circling flying fish. Creatures run into the light and die and dissolve and become proteins which fountain into the air and spread out over the planet starting the life cycle all over again. Some of the molecules achieve escape velocity and get into space to form the panspermial clouds they'd observed around the planet on their approach. (Wait! is 'panspermial' a real word? hang on... Googly... Googly... it is! Cool!) Anyway after observing this weird wonder they find the treasure. Huge piles of jewels just lying about in a valley. A strangely silent valley. The slightest noise makes violent echoes which threaten to bring down the surrounding cliffs and bury the treasure forever. Redbeard steps on a lose rock and makes a sound so loud that the echoes amplify so much they become so loud they become solid (sic)... and bring down the surrounding cliffs... and bury the treasure forever....

The last four characters get back to the ship - "Aha!" cries Redbeard, "I have the jewels! I no long need you, narrator person!" and pulls the trigger on his blaster. But nothing happens! How can this be? (Spoiler: Laura has taken the batteries out.) Our hero fires his weapon and blasts the villain - and the treasure - to atoms.

The doctor fries himself to death trying to repair the ship and the narrator and Laura start to feel feel heavy.

So they sit down and turn into rocks.

FIN

Seriously awful. I suspect fashionable, 1968 type, recreational pharmaceuticals were involved. show less

Much like the other Philip K. Dick novels that I've read, "The Man in the High Castle" is both a product of the author's blazingly original analytic mind and his not-exactly-elegant prose style. Closer to what's called "speculative fiction" these days than any traditional science fiction, the book imagines an America that lost the Second World War. Divided by the victorious Axis powers, Americans survive as a humiliated, colonized, subaltern class. Of course, the idea that America is a show more successful nation both at war and at peace is so central to twentieth century American identity that I imagine that a good deal of the attraction that this novel's first readers felt to it had to do with the fact that it dared to think the unthinkable. Having said that, Dick does a good job of considering what "American identity" might look like if it were considered this country's past instead of its future. I was particularly taken by the interior monologues of Robert Childan, a San Francisco antiques dealer whose interactions with his Japanese clients have caused him to take up the I Ching and even to modify his own thought patterns to match his clients' imperfect English.

Dick's take on the Nazis is trickier, and not just because the novel views them at something of a distance. He doesn't minimize their evil: the alternate history he provides of a Nazi-dominated world is pretty chilling. Still, I feel that there's a kinship between a few of Dick's literary creations and the National Socialist mindset. To Dick, the Nazis represent he psychoses and psychological contradictions that he described in "A Scanner Darkly" operating on massive scale: a purposefully inhuman induced schizophrenia. In "The Man in the High Castle," Dick contrasts this with the gnomic, contemplative verses of the I Ching. It's an odd juxtaposition, one which readers with a limited amount of patience for Dick's religious or astral interests may dislike. Still, even as the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century recede into memory, the social analysis that Dick provides here is probably more illuminating than many popular analyses of the America that actually exists. show less

Very few Science Fiction authors manage to create memorable works that easily retain their relevance in the near and/or distant future. Phillip K. Dick is one of those talented few, and The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Dick's not-so-distant dystopian future is one where global warming is an adaptable but growing dillema, with the bulk of humanity virtually sealed away in air-conditioned office buildings and apartment complexes. The solution, space migration to nearby planets, is such a show more bleak and arduous task that 'settlers' need to be drafted. These off-world settlers often resort to drug-induced shared hallucination involving miniature recreations of life back on earth. Within this structure we find corporations employing psychics to predict future sales trends, upper class elitists physically evolving themselves into 'superior beings', naturally created drugs that allow users to connect on different plains of reality and traverse freely throughout space-time, to name a few. In the center of it all is the titular Palmer Eldritch, a powerful and mysterious businessman who has spent decades communing with alien races, and has returned with what he claims to be mankind's mental and spiritual salvation.

What would normally be a one-trick-pony for other authors becomes a multi-layered examination of everything from religion and philosophy to physical/mental evolution and individual freedom versus responsibility. Dick doesn't bother with simple 'Good Vs. Evil' conflict, but instead shows us that both possibilities are sides of the same coin, and simply asks us to call it in the air. Highly recommended for those who like to think about a book long after reading it. show less