“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” (1963)

This story by Philip K. Dick is more like a paranoid dystopia all dressed up in sci-fi trappings. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have arrived to investigate, 10 years later, an all-out atomic war that occurred on Earth and led to massive destruction. There are a lot of levels and much complexity to the investigation and indeed to the story, with a Phildickian take on media coverage and distribution that he has used elsewhere and I’ve never quite understood, called “homeopapes.” Whatever it is exactly, it’s how news information gets around in this slice of the PKD universe. The group responsible for the war is still at large and they have taken control of the “cephalon” of the homeopape. My online dictionary defines “cephalon” as “(in some arthropods, especially trilobites) the region of the head, composed of fused segments.” So a somewhat distractingly precise way of saying brain or central processing unit. Maybe it’s me but I’m not sure Dick always gives us enough context. Anyway, the spy-craft villains are using the homeopapes to set up a more or less fictional character (albeit a real person, or patsy), one Benny Cemoli, to be framed for starting the war. They’re pretty sure they can outwit the alien investigators. This story is more short on Dick’s high concepts and works mostly as a kind of bitter, cynical spy story in a dystopic world. I’m turning to the internet for help on homeopapes. They also appeared in Ubik and I’m getting the definition “An automated device that produces a newspaper without human assistance.” In today’s parlance, a news feed made out of algorithms. So more of a production idea than distribution, presumably accessed via personal electronic devices, although who knows what Dick might have been thinking of in 1963. The subterfuge / propaganda work is only moderately compelling now. It feels like it’s been done a lot—start with Nineteen Eighty-Four—but maybe it felt more fresh in 1963. Sometimes it’s more evident than others that speed was basically Dick’s drug of choice. Paranoia gets to be a prime mode of thinking and then, in that frame of mind, the intricacies of betrayal and getting over can seem almost heroic, even though often they are not.

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Story not available online.