Philip K. Dick: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)

Edition: Voyager, 1996
Review number: 1315

Philip K. Dick was not an author who concerned himself greatly with the scientific plausibility of the backgrounds to his novels in the way that many of his contemporaries (Larry Niven, for example) did. However, there are many contemporary echoes thirty years on of his paranoid tales; he writing is of now in a way that most writers in any genre can only dream about. What we get in this novel, apart from one of Dick's weirdest titles (the policeman is a fan of John Dowland), includes resonances with identity theft and the possibility of unknown celebrities as we see in so many "celebrity" special editions of reality TV shows at the moment. There is also an element of parody of the fairly common science fiction idea of a genetically superior race within mankind, as described in all seriousness by writers such as AE van Vogt (and to which the back story of many superhero comic strips can be related, from Superman to the X Men).

Jason Taverner is a product of genetic engineering experiments - a "Six", because he was produced by the sixth series of such experiments - and host of the world's top-rated TV show. But one morning he wakes up in a sleazy hotel, and discovers that not only is he unable to prove who he is and regain the privileged life that used to be his, but nobody even recognises him or remembers his work. While not precisely identity theft - identity loss would be more like it - this fits in with current fears, in the UK at least, of what might happen with the introduction of identity cards tied to a single central database, obviously due to become the country's biggest hacker target.

As our society continues every day to become more dependent on technology for smooth running, the consequences of any breakdown become proportionately more serious. Increasing complexity makes it harder to ensure the security of even the most crucial systems, as well as taking the technology as a whole beyond the grasp of a single engineer. However, introducing measures to deal with these consequences can compromise the security of the entire system: to put in a "back door" to recover a stolen identity, for example, can provide a new method to steal one in the first place.

In the end, though, Dick ends up copping out. Jason Taverner recovers his identity, but effectively this happens through Dick going outside the system he has used to set up this novel. The story slips into drug taking and the insights it gives into the nature of reality; this time the abundance of ideas in one of Dick's novels undermines the plot. Effectively, it reads as though he paints himself into a corner, but then discovers the ability to walk through walls; frustrating for the reader, who wants to know what clever idea will be used to get round the problems. Both the drugs and the nature of reality (specifically, how we know that what we experience is real and not a hallucination) are long term preoccupations of Dick's, and both are better dealt with elsewhere in his fiction. So this ending is a major disappointment in what could have been a fascinating novel.

Philip K. Dick: The Penultimate Truth (1964)

Edition: Voyager, 1998
Review number: 1300

There are several Philip K. Dick novels which revolve around conspiracies, about a small minority deceiving the vast majority for some sinister purpose. Of these novels, The Penultimate Truth is the darkest, because of the nature of the deception: the majority live hard lives in underground caverns or "tanks", enduring their situation for the sake of the war that's been raging on Earth's surface for years. Except that it hasn't: the few who remain on the surface live in luxury, spending their time creating fictional evidence of the conflict to keep those below in subjugation.

The idea of a fake war and control of people through control of the media was not of course entirely new even in the mid sixties - the manufactured belligerence between the nations of the world is a major theme of 1984. But there it is news reports of distant conflict that are fakes. Here it is those who think they are almost in the thick of the fighting who are being conned. Of course, such a huge lie cannot continue to be elaborated indefinitely, and the novel takes the natural subject of how the truth begins to come out.

One of the main points Dick wants to make is that deception is a part of any political system (with the arguable exception of anarchy). One of his characters, Lantano (who heads the opposition to corrupt world leader Brose), says: "As a component in his make up every world leader has had some fictional aspect." And this is backed up not only by the Roman examples quoted by Lantano but by the way that the reader becomes aware that Lantano himself is not entirely what he seems. This point about the facades inherent in politics is even more relevant now, in these times when spin and image seem more important than content. As another character says, "The biggest lie is yet to come."

Although Dick was obviously not the first to suspect the honesty of politicians (there are plenty of literary examples as far back as Aristophanes' satirical pillorying of Athenian leader Cleon), The Penultimate Truth was written at a time when people tended to accept what they were told by authority figures more willingly than we do today. After all, the worst of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal were still in the future in 1964. More importantly, the scale of the lie in this novel was unprecedented, and so soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, its suggestion that the picture painted by the West's leaders of the Cold War contained lies must have been an inflammatory one. Of course, it didn't make a massive impact, probably because of Dick's position as a science fiction author, the genre being far more of a ghetto than it is today. (It would be quite reasonable to claim that Dick was, and to an extent remains, the most underrated author of the twentieth century.) The Penultimate Truth is not his best or subtlest novel, but it is his most directly and obviously satirical.

Philip K. Dick: The Divine Invasion (1981)

Edition: Voyager, 1996 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1297

Religious experience of one form or another makes its way into most of Dick's novels. In The Man in the High Castle, for instance, there is the use of the I Ching, both in the story and by Dick as he constructed it, and even in the generally secular Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the need to care for a pet is described in a way that recalls the religious impulse. In later novels, religious ideas become more central, particularly in VALIS and The Divine Invasion. While Deus Irae (his collaboration with Roger Zelazny) is a fairly straightforward story of a quest to find the divine, these novels are still hard to categorise in any way other than weird.

The story of The Divine Invasion is one that some people might consider blasphemous to incorporate into the standard clichés of science fiction so important to Dick's style: it is blatantly and openly a retelling of the central story of Christianity, the Incarnation, within the genre. A zone of evil has forced the god Yah to leave Earth, to travel to the distant human colony of Fomalhaut. There, he impregnates a virgin, whose illness with MS provides an excuse for her and her husband to travel back to Earth - something not normally permitted for colonists - for treatment.

Up to this point, the narrative is reasonably coherent. The few unusual features are explained by the set up: the narrator is reliving the experience in a dream while in suspended animation - interrupted by the life support machinery malfunctioning, picking up a radio broadcast of Fiddler on the Roof (a typical Dick touch). But the, from the birth of the child, the narrative dissolves into a series of alternate realities, orchestrated by divine (or quasi-divine: some disclaim actual deity) beings with an interest in the outcome of the divine invasion.

Parts of this half of the novel cannot be described as vintage Philip K. Dick. Indeed, some chapters could be skipped, improving the reading experience. (Unfortunately, it's hard to know which chapters to leave out without reading them.) This is partly because the series of alternate realities makes the background feel inconsistent, and partle because Dick doesn't integrate his ideas as well as he usually manages to. Even so, just like with everything he wrote, there are lots of interesting ideas here, allied to a quirky take on religion which may amuse or may offend. It should be noted that it is clearly not Dick's intention to offend, at least not just for the sake of causing a sensation. While irony plays an important part in all Dick's writing and tends to blur his intentions, he seems to have seriously wanted to write about two aspects of religious experience: the way that science fictional ideas can feed into religious ones, as seen in the way some people think about corn circles or UFOs; and in the tension between organised religious institutions and personal religious experience.

As it stands, The Divine Invasion is not a great novel, but for those interested in Philip K. Dick, a fascinating guide to the stranger areas in the author's mind. Like VALIS, it reads as though it were written during an extended LSD flashback. Like VALIS, it pushes at the boundaries of the science fiction genre. Any fan of Dick should read both novels. Anyone new to the author should not start with them (though they are likely to begin with the best known writing, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or The Man in the High Castle rather than The Divine Invasion), particularly if they haver any strong religious convictions.

Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Edition: Del Rey, 1984
Review number: 1212

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is of course best known as the source of the film Bladerunner. It is really only one strand of the plot which was used in the screenplay, however; there is much more in even this short a novel. (The sequels, by K. W. Jeter, are much more following on from the film than the book, as is clear from the use of the word "replicant" rather than "android".)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a science fiction classic in its own right, though I would not consider it Dick's greatest work (my candidate for this would be The Man in the High Castle). It is also something of a catalogue of Dick's major preoccupations (how to define humanity, mystical experience, perception and reality), and thus is one of the best first reads for a reader new to the author. (I have thought that The Man in the High Castle is better, because it has less science fiction baggage, but that makes it less typical.)

The background the novel is a future in which androids are used in human colonies on Mars and Venus, but are not permitted unlicensed on Earth. They have a tendency to escape from their menial jobs and travel to Earth pretending to be humans; each police force therefore has bounty hunters who track these escapees down. (This is an unlikely scenario, as it would surely be far easier to police the space travel, performing checks on Mars or Venus to prevent android access to ships.) Rick Deckard is a San Francisco bounty hunter, and the story is about how he tracks down a group of new androids, of a type designed to be more human than ever.

The plot in the previous paragraph is the basis for the film, but Bladerunner is far more a thriller (albeit an atmospheric one) than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The key issue in the novel is empathy for the suffering of others. It is touted as the key difference between humans and androids, and forms the basis for the tests Dekard uses to determine whether someone is human or android - they should differ in their responses to questions about cruelty to animals. The androids are also unable to take part in the dominant religious movement on Earth, Mercerism, which is about sharing the sufferings of an elderly man being pelted with stones as he climbs a hill to the extent of sharing his wounds, like Christian mystics receiving stigmata. An important part of Mercerism is the necessity to demonstrate empathy by caring for animals, which is why all the humans are desperate to own pets (real animals are rare and expensive because of radiation contamination). They are so keen to do this that those who can't afford the real thing buy robotic replicas, hence the novel's title.

Empathy is also the basis for the ethical irony behind the novel - is someone who destroys those lacking in empathy himself necessarily lacking in empathy, especially as they appear in every other way to be normal people. In this society, there are two classes of individuals excluded from empathic feelings, the androids, and the specials, those harmed by radiation who now form an underclass of vagrants and cheap labour. (A further irony is that the character in the book that readers are meant to empathise with is not Dekard but a special named J.R. Isidore.)

The greatness of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? really springs from the way that Dick creates sympathy for the androids and Isidore. (This is of course yet another irony - demonstrating the humanness of the reader via a similar test to those used to detect androids in the novel.) The novel has a melancholy air to it - everyone, readers and characters, has a pretty good idea of what is going to happen, and none of the really want it to go ahead. It is only a short book, and it is one of the absolute must reads of the science fiction genre.

Michael Bishop: Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1987)

Edition: Grafton, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1129

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas is a direct tribute to the famous science fiction author; not only does it use many themes from his work, but Dick himself is one of the major characters. The novel begins with the death of Dick and the rising of a ghostly form from his body. But this is not the world we know, but an America which won in Vietnam, and where the increasingly dictatorial Richard Nixon is approaching the end of his fourth term in office. This is an America where travel is severely restricted, black people have almost all been "repatriated" to African countries, and the remaining population live in fear of the secret policemen known as "No Knocks". Dick is an almost forgotten author, though his earliest novels are still required reading for the Vietnamese who come to the States and are "Americulturated" - indoctrinated into the American dream. Dick's later work (more like the satirical science fiction for which he is really known) was never published but circulates in photocopied samizdat form, among the remnants of the sixties counter-culture. It is to one of the owners of these dangerous manuscripts, a pet shop employee, that the ghost appears, driving him on a course which both of them hope will change this nightmare reality.

Among the themes that Bishop picks up from Dick's novels are alternative realities, external supernatural intervention, a blue collar central character (rather than the middle class scientists/engineers of the genre before him), the importance of the desire to care for animals (as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and the triumph of American popular culture. Although rather uneven (in this reality, there is a lunar base, and the chapters set there fail to grasp the reader), it must be one of the best homages to another author ever written. Bishop even re-uses something of Dick's style.

To choose this way to memorialise one of the greatest of all science fiction writers - one who (eventually) massively raised the literary profile of the genre - seems entirely appropriate, and this is perhaps the best indicator of how successful Bishop has been in this novel. Genre fiction, like popular culture generally, has a tendency to forget most of its past, and so reminders of just how good some of the earlier masters were serve an admirable purpose.

Philip K. Dick: Counter-Clock World (1967)

Edition: Grafton, 1990
Review number: 1108

In general, Dick's novels contain a dazzling multiplicity of ideas; but Counter-Clock World is dominated by just one and careful limits are placed on how fully it is explored. It is in many ways (dictated by its theme) similar to Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake. There, people relive a decade of their lives, fully conscious that they have already experienced what they are going through; here, time has suddenly reversed.

Dick doesn't go to the extent of reversing everything, for a similar reason that Vonnegut's characters' memories are not erased - if everything went backwards, there couldn't be a story distinguishable from a strangely told forwards one. (At the very least, the characters need to be aware of what is going on.) He describes several bodily processes - or, rather, more effectively, he mentions them and leaves the details to the reader's imagination - including shaving, conception and the unpleasant, private affair that is eating. Two of these reversed processes are used as the basis for the plot. Since all that has been created now must be destroyed, the library, which searches out books for this purpose, has become a powerful institution (controlling what knowledge is still available); there can be few novels which make the profession of librarian so sinister. The mainspring of the plot is the resurrection of the dead; undertakers have been replaced by vivariums, companies that seek out those who have recently been revived and want to get out of their coffins. (Dick doesn't go into what happens to those who were cremated.) A small vivarium discovers the lost tomb of Timothy Peak, a religious leader who created a popular cult based around communal drug taking. He is about due for re-animation, and the politics surrounding him make this important and dangerous; those who have control of the cult since his death are not likely to give up their power easily, and the Library doesn't want him to return at all because of the disruption his anti-racist stand caused when he was alive.

The way that Counter-Clock World is written makes me think it was inspired by the striking image of the revived dead trying to get the attention of the living so they can be released from their coffins. The treatment of the time reversal is full of inconsistencies (such as the production of newspapers with current news in a world where all existing literature is being destroyed rather than published). It is an extremely ambitious idea and remains, I think, unique in science fiction; time's arrow is so fundamental in human thought that to conceive of it being any other way is incredibly difficult if properly carried through. It is not, in the end, one of Dick's most successful novels, but it is certainly a fascinating read.

Philip K. Dick: Ubik (1970)

Edition: Panther, 1973
Review number: 1034

In many of his novels, the power of Dick's writing and the vitality of his ideas are diffused somewhat because of the lack of a unifying theme. Ubik, however, is one of his best and most concentrated works, as he skilfully moulds together seemingly disparate elements.

In a world where telepathic talents are commonplace, Runciter and Associates is one of a number of corporations which make money by countering them; certain people, usually children of telepathic parents, have developed a dampening effect, and their services are hired by those who don't want their private thoughts detected or their actions predicted.

This unusual idea is only really used as the setup for the novel, by providing the motivation for a kind of corporate warfare between the telepaths and the inhibitors; the major event of the novel is a bomb attack on a group of Runciter employees. This offhand use of an original idea which for many writers would be the central theme of an entire novel is typical of Dick.

The second idea, which turns out to be more central, (and unites the novel because of its dominance) is communication with the dead. Those who are not too far deteriorated and whose relatives have sufficient money can be stored, not, as some are today, in the hope of later resuscitation, but because a means has been found by which the living can communicate with them, to hear the wisdom of their ancestors (in a science fiction equivalent of the spiritual beliefs of many animist cultures).

This is brought together with a third idea, which is a kind of philosophical panic situation: how can human beings live in a universe which has ceased to be rational or consistent, where it is (more specifically) possible for the technological items around them to regress spontaneously to their equivalents from years in the past? For example, a modern electronic lift will turn into a cage lift with an operator. Dick's interest is partly derived from novels like Lem's The Futurological Congress (where different versions of reality are accessed by taking different hallucinogenics), but is more frightening than its sources because it is connected by him to one of his two major obsessions as a writer, the idea that the universe is controlled by a capricious transcendental entity. (In case you're wondering, his other major theme is how to differentiate human and non-human, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.)

In Ubik, this is treated in a way which shows Dick to have been a forerunner of the inventors of virtual reality. Indeed, it pinpoints an issue which I have not, even now, seen raised anywhere else: what might be the psychological effects of a seemingly realistic yet disturbingly inconsistent virtual environment? The idea of a VR simulation which could send someone insane through overstimulating their pleasure centres is quite commonplace, but Dick;s writing here makes me feel that it would be possible to achieve the same end in different ways, including the philosophical angst of Ubik.

Dick doesn't carry his idea as far as this, being more interested in the related issue of how we know what reality is - adding yet another to the list of important and interesting ideas which are part of this fairly short novel.

Philip K. Dick: The Zap Gun (1965)

Edition: Grafton, 1975 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 993

Philip K. Dick had two concerns which appear over and over again in his novels, the meaning of humanity and the chance or occult motivation of events. The second theme is of primary importance here. The idea of the novel is that the arms race is effectively over, but that those not in the know ("pursaps" as opposed to "cogs") need to be persuaded that weapons research is still going on. So there has arisen a "weapons fashion industry", which each week comes up with a design, which is shown in action on TV (against androids; none of the weapons really work) and then elaborately "ploughshared" - turned into some peaceful gadget. The weapons designers get their ideas acting as mediums in trances, which is where the occult motivation of events comes in.

The crisis comes when Earth is invaded by aliens and suddenly real weapons are required - weapons which the pursaps believe to be already in existence. Or is this what is happening - the only source of information about what is going on (cities disappearing after satellites appear in orbit) is a toy designer who appears to have travelled in time from the future with a warning.

The extremely trashy title may have prevented this novel, which with its theme of the alien slavers is a satire on the pulp science fiction genre, being one of Dick's better known, but it is easily up to the high standard regularly reached by his fiction. It lacks the punch of his biggest classics, but doesn't fall far short.

Philip K. Dick: Lies Inc. (1964, published 1984)

Edition: Granada
Review number: 547

Lies Inc. has a rather complicated history. Originally a magazine story (The Unteleported Man), an expansion was written for novel publication but not used. Then major revisions were considered by Dick late in his life, but not completed, and the original expansion was discovered in his papers after his death (minus a couple of pages). This version was then published in 1984, with the missing passages completed by John Sladek.

In the form taken by the novel today, it exemplifies Dick's greatest strengths and weaknesses. The quality of the ideas is extremely high, and any of the major themes introduced at the beginning (an off-planet colonisation by matter transmission which seems to be a fake hiding something sinister; psychedelic dream inducing machines feeding lies to the population) could provide the basis for novels of their own. Think of the different possibilities for what might motivate the first deception - Dick mentions concentration camps, labour camps and alien subversion as possibilities - and that will give an idea of how rich these ideas could be. (Ideas common to many of Dick's novels come in here - how can we tell who is human and who isn't, how can we trust what we think we see.)

However, after the middle of the novel, the coherence of Lies Inc dissipates, as confusing drug induced visions replace any idea of the plot. Much of this is quite interesting (especially the passages in which characters are given a book - a copy of the novel - in which they read misleading accounts of what will happen to them next, which undermines the reader's confidence in the narrative), but it proves too easy to be self-indulgent.