“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.

Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

This may or may not be Philip K. Dick’s first published genre story—some say yes, others say it’s “Roog” (which also features an animal for those keeping score at home). “Beyond Lies the Wub” is very simple and in many ways playful, although the twist may fairly be called chilling. Certainly it works. The story opens on a scene like the biblical Noah’s ark story, with animals on Mars being led aboard a spaceship. A lot of the crew, such as the first mate, appear to be unhappy about something. They seem to disapprove of the work, or possibly have problems with the captain. One of the crew comes aboard with a “wub,” which is described as a 400-pound pig. The captain says he’d like to eat it, at which point the wub speaks up with perfect English—indeed, polished and intelligent. He says he would prefer not to be eaten. No one else really wants to eat it either, especially once they realize it is sentient, with a detectable personality. In typical Phildickian fashion, these things just happen and no one is particularly fazed. Not even Peterson, who has jurisdiction of the wub and has been carrying on a running conversation with it about cultural matters (specifically, at the moment in the story, Odysseus). We are instinctively on the side of the wub—it has been humanized, so to speak—but alas. The captain gives the orders and the wub is butchered and roasted. At the dinner table the story’s twist occurs and it surprised me, though you might guess it if you think about it enough. “Beyond Lies the Wub” is an early story for Dick but already has many of his hallmarks: the effortless reach for universal Western cultural markers like Odysseus, the whimsy and “soft,” almost magical science. Given: there are animals on Mars, including pigs, and they are sentient and intelligent (and have unique powers too). Take it or leave it. I notice on ISFDB that this story has an unusually high number of rankings, with a fairly high aggregated score of 8.22. Ten “Beyond Lies the Wub” fans can’t be wrong. The story is worth tracking down for all followers of the Phildick.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1
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Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

This is one of a reported dozen or so non-science-fiction novels Philip K. Dick wrote in the 1950s. It’s the only one published in his lifetime and that was not until 1975, though it was written in 1959. It showcases the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his SF and genre work. He was often writing in a rush before the late 1960s, but his prose style tends toward the lucid, if pedestrian. It’s part of what makes the mind-bending stuff work. If Confessions of a Crap Artist is any indication, stripping away the high concept unfortunately doesn’t leave us with much, at least not in this misogynistic story of Bay Area / Northern California life among the effete, feckless, and philandering. Dick dresses it up with some fancy literary conceits, shifting point of view as well as first-person and third-person modes from chapter to chapter. The crap artist of the title is Jack Isidore, who starts and finishes the telling. He is a connoisseur of conspiracy theories and falls in with a group of UFO maniacs. He’s not the main character, though—that’s his sister Fay, a “bitch” as they say it here, entitled, demanding, generally horrible. She goes around demolishing lives. She married a guy for his money and pursues a younger man and breaks up his marriage. Trying for a female point of view is Dick’s first and main mistake. It feels more like someone’s idea of a woman (say, Philip K. Dick’s idea) than like a real woman. How many times had Dick been married and divorced in 1959? Twice—I looked it up. In fact, in 1959 he was going through his second divorce (of five). So, sure, the hate and miserabilism come from a real place. And it is touching in a way to see how badly Dick wanted literary cred. I think it may well continue into the VALIS books, which I haven’t managed to get through yet (soon!). As I’ve said before, I like the playful goofy SF Dick more than any other. His jousts with reality can produce surprisingly powerful effects. This sour little novel seemed very small compared to the best of his science fiction. The Man in the High Castle is marred by its attempts at literary sophistication, which paradoxically may explain why it is at least close to his most popular. It has grounding elements. Whereas in what I would call his best (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, others) he just lets the weird and wild ideas fly. And don’t get me wrong. I like The Man in the High Castle too. Sadly, there is nothing weird or wild or even very good about Confessions of a Crap Artist.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974)

This story by Philip K. Dick is the last story in The Dark Descent. So I finished it, huzzah! Editor David G. Hartwell often reached beyond horror in the oversize anthology—sometimes to a fault, e.g., Faulkner, Turgenev—so ending on Dick is not a big surprise. He argues for science fiction horror writing: “Bodies of work from such writers as Dick and [Gene] Wolfe and [Thomas] Disch ... demand the broadening of the older definitions of horror literature, and require discarding criteria based on content in favor of the effect itself.” I think a Dick story from the ‘50s, “The Hanging Stranger,” makes an even stronger case for him as a horror writer, but there’s no reason this can’t be a “both/and” situation, at least in principle. “Tempunauts” is a time travel story that takes the Apollo moon mission as a model. A crew of three “tempunauts” has been hurled 100 years into the future in a launch attended by media frenzy. But, in fact, something went wrong and they traveled into the future only a few days. They soon learn they perished on their return from the future. These various paradoxes somehow mean they have thrown themselves and possibly the world or even universe into a closed time loop that is eternal. A successful reentry would break the loop. I’m not sure I understand how they know these things, even that they are in a loop at all. The reentry has failed and we come to learn it’s the result of sabotage by one of the tempunauts in order to (per Wikipedia) “find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.” At one time, when I was a kid, time travel was my favorite SF idiom, but these days honestly the paradoxes can just put me on overload. I like Dick’s storytelling skills but the ambiguities here are a bit arch for science fiction, let alone horror. It seems to be an irrational act on the part of the tempunaut. He learns they die because of the reentry and that it’s because of sabotage and he even speculates a closed time loop may exist. But he has a choice not to sabotage the return and does so anyway. The problem I had was that it wasn’t entirely clear while I was reading. I thought that’s what was going on, but it seemed perverse and unmotivated. It’s a chilling enough idea, like horror should be, but it’s also at way too many removes for me. So the anthology ends on a curiosity, but there’s still another edited by Hartwell and nearly as big, Foundations of Fear. Look forward to getting into that.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Eye in the Sky (1955)

This early short novel by Philip K. Dick is not bad, with a few points that struck me as remarkable. The premise is that a group of eight with a guide are touring a particle accelerator when there is an accident. The accelerator malfunctions and a platform collapses, dousing them in cosmic rays or something and tossing them into alternate universes with only passing resemblances to our own. In fact (or “in fact”), these alternate universes are actually the creations of individual members of the group. They are basically lying wounded in the accelerator all this time. The first we encounter is the vision of an elderly fundamentalist Christian. This was the first remarkable point for me, as the system of belief was not very different from that of evangelicals in our day, nearly 70 years later. Dick’s details are as convincing as this world is terrifying. God (or “God”) is actively involved and belief trumps science and reality at all turns. I thought this was the world we would be staying in—I’m pretty sure it’s what the title is primarily about. But we escape that and then enter the heads of others, in total about four of the nine characters. I thought these subsequent ones were weaker though the action is often strange and fun. The fourth is merely a plot device—got to tie these things up somehow! The other remarkable point here is that the tour guide is a key character, he is Black, and his life situation is dealt with accurately and sensitively. He’s a trained engineer, for example, but the tour guide job has been the only work he has been able to get. He’s an important character and an important part of the story resolution. Taking such views in the 1950s should not surprise me, maybe, but I liked finding this treatment. I’ve read hackwork by Dick from the ‘50s but Eye in the Sky is not that. It deals some heady concepts, keeps things moving, and altogether works well. The other two alternate universes are from two of the women characters. Sadly, they are sexist. One woman is single, which seems to signify that she is psychotic. The other is a champion of culture, but something of a philistine. She likes Beethoven but not Bartok, whose work is destroyed or nonexistent in her world. Just being in favor of cultural priorities makes her a winner in my book, but Dick doesn’t seem to think so—maybe because he’s a kind of Bartok of literature.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“The Preserving Machine” (1953)

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors of The Weird and other highly recommended anthologies, really talked up this story by Philip K. Dick somewhere. It’s not widely included in collections—the VanderMeers’ point, if I recall correctly, was that they had not been able to license it, for whatever reason. Maybe the estate thinks the story is too weird. It does have an interesting premise that is very weird even for Dick. The hero is an academic, Doc Labyrinth, who is worried about nuclear extinction and saddened most by the idea that music would be lost. So he draws up plans for a machine that will save music by converting printed sheet music into animal life forms. The idea is staggering in its way yet also a great example of Dick’s willful soft science fiction. This is creating life that we’re talking about, which is only an incidental function in Doc Labyrinth’s mind. He can’t even build the machine himself. He only draws up the plans and ships them off to a manufacturer. There is not a single theoretical basis for any of this. Take at face value—take it or leave it. I like the cheek, the confidence, but wish for a little more science. The manufacturer at any rate is excited about the project and promptly assembles the machine and ships it to Labyrinth. A sort of charming Holmes-and-Watson scene follows, with Labyrinth and the story’s first-person narrator sitting around trying it out. First they convert the Mozart G Minor Quintet, dropping the score into the machine. Out comes a bird, apparently of heretofore unknown species: “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock.” They call it a “mozart bird.” Later they produce a “beethoven beetle” (note that this story was written before the Beatles and even before Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”) and then a “schubert animal.” The ones that are described merely as “animal” are far and away the creepiest but lowercasing the proper noun has its effect too. Doc Labyrinth is kind of disappointed and lets them loose in the woods behind his house. He doesn’t think about them for some time. When he finally checks on them, they have evolved and changed. Some have died. He tries running a bach bug through the machine—evidently reverse-processing these animals is how the preserved music is obtained again—but the music he gets back is mere cacophony when he plays it. More disappointment. So weird!

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
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Counter-Clock World (1965)

In Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World, time reversed in 1986 and in the “now” of the novel things are going in the other direction, timewise, from future to past. People come alive in their graves, are unearthed in systematic capitalistic ways, and then age back to zygotes again—they have to find a willing womb, a woman who completes the process by finding a man to return the sperm to. There are lots of funny and obvious inversions, and some not so obvious. They say “goodbye” when they meet and “hello” when they part. They don’t want to be called a horse’s mouth. Cigarettes start as butts and actually clean the air as they unburn. I saw the movie Tenet not long before reading this. Both deliver a similar sense of disorientation in the ways they portray time moving backward. Dick is pretty good at a rare gothic note too, as many scenes are set in graveyards. His descriptions of the experience of coming alive in a coffin are vivid and a little unsettling. It’s a traumatic experience for them and even for us too reading about it. One thing I missed entirely and had to learn from Wikipedia is “sogum,” which is consumed socially and frequently, the way we take smoke or coffee breaks or eat out. Sogum is waste taken anally via a pipe. Later it is disgorged in privacy as food. The story has a giant shot of Christian religion running through it, but it is the usual busy plot of paranoia and secret forces at work. There’s an interesting race element here as most of the characters are Black people or allied with Black people. There doesn’t appear to be much racial tension that I noticed—it’s closer to a genuinely post-racial world. Libraries are in charge of eradicating literature as time flows into the past and they are fairly brutal and authoritarian about it. People say “food” instead of “shit”—that didn’t immediately register on me. Between Counter-Clock World and Tenet, I must say I see a lot of difficulty imagining and conveying what it looks and feels like to live in time moving the other direction. Could we even understand the language? Neither the novel nor the movie is particularly lucid, but it’s obvious how hard they are trying. This is good for any Dick binge.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Father-Thing" (1954)

Horror folks and weirdniks want badly to claim Philip K. Dick, and this story is one of their primary items of evidence. Personally, I think "The Hanging Stranger" is his great horror story. But Dick always seems to me a certain epitome of science fiction, even when his stuff is making me nervous, so I'm generally not that interested in the categorizing conversation. Case in point, I found this story in an intriguing anthology published in 2000, My Favorite Horror Story, edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg. The premise (which really should be repeated every 10 or 15 years) involves asking contemporary horror writers to pick a favorite short story. The result features a bunch of same-olds but that's OK with me—they're all pretty good or better. This story was the choice of Ed Gorman, who I don't know well. In his introduction, Gorman explicitly denies the obvious connection with Jack Finney's Body Snatchers, the novel that provided the basis for the movie(s) Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But "The Father-Thing" does have a lot of elements in common with the movies and they are likely in Finney's novel too. The novel was serialized the same year "The Father-Thing" was published but I'm taking it more as one of those "in the air" things, which happen. There are more or less aliens from outer space in both, replicating humans evidently, purpose unclear. In the Dick story they might be from another dimension, or they could even be some exotic terrestrial insect, which would put it more squarely in the realm of the weird. Anyway, the story has been so oversold by Gorman and others that perhaps inevitably it disappoints a little. It's a simulacrum story at its core, division of remote-controlled doll. Dick keys it sharply on parents and what they are to children, a mix of gods and monsters, telling it from the point of view of an 8-year-old who believes he has witnessed something that means his father is not what he appears to be. Dick shifts the pronouns for Dad to it/its, a simple way to keep readers nervous, even as we attempt to discount the 8-year-old's ideas. A creepy centipede is featured in the last third, which seems to be an attempt to push it more into the rational and assert its fantastical reality with explanation, but in effect it siphons away energy. To me the critical point is that something so profoundly familiar might actually be something profoundly strange—not a bit comforting if you are 8, and a hard idea to shake once it's in your head. Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" version from 1948 altogether made a better job of that, approaching it from a slightly different direction. But I'm not going to argue with the enthusiasm of Gorman and others. "The Father-Thing" is definitely worth a look—another nice point is that Dick makes a Black kid one of the heroes of the story without making a big deal of it. But hey, don't miss "The Hanging Stranger" while you're at it.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg (out of print)
The Philip K. Dick Reader
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Divine Invasions (1989)

I probably should have gotten to Lawrence Sutin's biography of Philip K. Dick sooner, if only to help direct my little reading program. This biography appears to be well-researched and certainly has a good deal of sympathy and understanding for Dick's work. Dick is one of those artists like William Faulkner who was both so prolific and so consistent that no one really agrees on his single best, though a handful of titles show up regularly: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, you-pick, etc. I have been flailing around looking into any Dick titles I see endorsed by anyone, which led me to more arguably minor work, such as Dr. Bloodmoney or The Zap Gun or some of the stories. At the same time, I missed no fewer than four of the 11 titles Sutin says are essential, including VALIS (which I must admit I've foundered on a few times). I'll be trying to get to them eventually. As a biography, Divine Invasions performs the usual service of pinning down data points and clarifying the life and the work. Things I did not know: Dick hated his mother, was married four times, and never took hallucinogens much. In his relationships with women, in fact, he comes across as a creep—a contemptible one even. So it goes. Most biographies reveal feet of clay one way or another. On the other hand, it sounds like Dick was even more of a high-IQ genius than I thought, reading widely in modern and ancient texts, including in Latin and German. I was a little dismayed to find out how religious he was, even more or less conventionally Christian, though it wasn't entirely surprising, except maybe the Christianity. I was less interested in his psychology and ideas anyway, and more in his work strategies. There's plenty of everything in Sutin's biography, and I was particularly happy to extend my reading list as I came to implicitly trust Sutin. Then I went to the wilds of the internet to assay the opinion wilderness. It is particularly rich and confusing when it comes to Dick and not much less so on which of the half-dozen or so biographies are best. Dick had a way of reaching lots of people in lots of different ways. Sutin's book is invaluable at taking a crack at organizing it all and is generally acknowledged as the most encompassing, objective, and accurate. In a way, I'm still trying to figure out what appeals to me about Dick in the first place. I used to think it was the hallucinogenic weirdness and certainly that's part of it. But read enough Dick and that side starts to feel more mechanical, even rote. I found myself landing on The Man in the High Castle as my idea of the best—though it's marred slightly by too-busy weird elements, it's less so than many of his most lauded. The one thing I think everyone agrees on, including Sutin, is that no one has yet got to the bottom of Dick, and no one may ever. He is a moving target forever.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Golden Man" (1954)

This long 1954 story by Philip K. Dick makes an interesting comparison with the movie made in 2007 based on it, Next. The story has all of Dick's paranoia, with a government agency out systematically hunting radiation mutants, but a lot of time is spent on setups and revelations, as we watch one of the operations at work. In the story, the mutant Cris Johnson is barely even socialized—he's never even spoken. Mutants are categorized into 87 types but he's not one of them. A lot of time is spent defining his power, which is being able to see into the future. In the movie, mutants are a non-issue. Cris (played by Nicolas Cage) is a stage magician in Las Vegas, and he can see two minutes into the future—with some exceptions. It's quite a bit different from the story, which more works through how a consciousness or brain would function with that kind of information coming in. In fact, the movie could have stood a bit more of that. It was directed by Lee Tamahori, who also directed Once Were Warriors, a movie I liked a lot. Next has star power and some indie cred, with Cage, Julianne Moore, and Jessica Biel. Cage is good in the part, more in his restrained smoldering mode. I read the story and saw the movie on the same day, both for the first time, and for once I enjoyed the movie more. It seemed more lucid about the power. In the story Cris is treated literally as if he were a god, which seemed silly. With the ordnance going off and Cage striding around unfazed, occasionally twisting aside to let a bullet pass him, the movie can be thrilling and hilarious all at once. Cris has a line in voiceover where he denies he is a god (as if speaking to the Dick story) but in his best moments in the movie that's exactly what he looks like. There's no paranoia in the movie about mutants, which was a good idea to dispense with as the X-Men and the age of Marvel loomed ever larger in 2007. There's a government agency but it's counterterrorist. The specific case at hand involves a loose nuke in the Los Angeles area, a scheme apparently run by Russians. It goes to some ridiculous and unlikely places but it always keeps its cool and the fascination with the power is infectious. Dick's story feels a bit pounded out and padded for the sake of word count, though it does retain his unique sense of paradox. The movie doesn't feel very Phildickian to me but has other ways of getting trippy that are often interesting. It feels like everybody involved was having more fun than Dick writing the story.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Paycheck" (1953)

This long story by Philip K. Dick has a kind of fairy tale D&D aspect of quests, where the main character Jennings has multiple tasks to do, puzzles to solve, and dilemmas to resolve. Jennings is an engineer who works on projects so top secret that he must undergo memory wiping after each one. At the end of the latest, following the memory wipe, he finds that he has formally and legally declined payment in favor of an envelope full of trinkets, as he calls them—a code key, a ticket stub, a parcel receipt, etc. Before long he is in trouble with the police for his work on the project. But he can't remember anything about it and they've never heard of memory wiping. Then the trinkets start to come in handy, one at a time. By story's end we're learning of a machine that can see the future, which is how Jennings is ultimately able to save himself. In 2003, John Woo made a movie of it with the same name. It starred Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, and typically Woo makes the stakes higher. In the movie Jennings is saving the world, has a beautiful faithful girlfriend, and the envelope contains 20 trinkets—or knickknacks, as he calls them in the movie. Don't ask me why that change was made. The movie got terrible reviews but I like John Woo in a general way and the picture is reasonably faithful to the story. The story is just less Phildickian enough that it can work as John Woo. The best effect in the story, the reveal of the device called a time scoop, is missing in the movie, where the concept is based on optics, explained early, with a lens that can see around the curve of the universe into the future (kind of like the way it's always tomorrow in Australia). It might even make sense, but I miss the nice way the story ends. Otherwise it's all about constructing set pieces around random everyday objects, such as a single paperclip in the movie. Woo and Dick are both good at set pieces but Woo might have the edge here. It certainly has some of that thing you find in puzzle movies (and stories all the way back to Sherlock Holmes at least) where convenience is remarkably persistent. Whereas one abstract clue—that paperclip, say—could suggest multiple potential uses our hero somehow always lands unerringly on the right one at the right time. Remarkable! It's arguable that it's not that bad in this case because the person providing Jennings with the clues after all is Jennings himself, who should know how he thinks. It was enough explanation for me to enjoy the action, but my complaint is that it is merely action. In the end neither story nor movie may be that good as Dick or Woo, respectively, but there's worse. Scanners and Impostor are much worse adaptations of Dick. You can pick your own poison with Woo. How about Broken Arrow?

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Impostor" (1953)

I think there's a name for the type of story Philip K. Dick has written here—not exactly doppelganger, and mistaken identity isn't it either. On an Earth at war and under constant attack by aliens from Alpha Centauri, Spence Olham works in some kind of war industry engineering capacity. On his way to work this morning he finds himself arrested as a spy and saboteur, charged with being a robot impersonating the real Olham and armed with an embedded implanted U-bomb (which sounds pretty scary). They take him to the far side of the moon to confess and detonate. But Olham escapes. He wants badly to straighten it all out. The military intelligence that led authorities to Olham indicates the U-bomb is triggered by a spoken phrase. For fly-through readers it's hard to tell how Dick the narrator is playing it. He appears to have no suspicions about the Olham we're traipsing along with. Yet I leaped immediately—perhaps knowing it's a Dick story—to wondering if Olham weren't the robot. Anyway, spoilers, he is, the triggering phrase is "but if that's Olham," and the last line of the story is, "The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri." Nyuk, nyuk, get it? I love the way Dick blows the whole planet to smithereens for the sake of a punchline. In 2001 a movie was made out of it directed by Gary Fleder (Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead) and starring Gary Sinise, Madeleine Stone, and Vincent D'Onofrio, with a cameo by Rosalind Chao, aka Keiko on Star Trek. As a live action story it's a bit too much to blow up the planet so they don't. D'Onofrio is basically fine-tuning his Law & Order: Criminal Intent shtick, so at least he seems to be having a good time. You get the impression they thought based on a story by Philip K. Dick plus lots of action scenes and doomsday mood would get them over, but sadly no. The movie is not as good as the story, as usual, but this time the story is not even above average. The point of it seems to be as a jokey anecdote but maybe you can't make a movie like that. I do like the story of a robot that doesn't even know it's a robot, that's the type of story I was trying to think of—see also Blade Runner, of course, which I imagine could have been part of the pitch here. Impostor does have some interesting ideas about personalized advertising that were developed much further and better the following year in Minority Report. This story is just minimally a head trip—that's the problem. The Dick brand (so to speak) is so restrained as to be almost invisible. Almost—because there is that nice thing about the sentient robot that doesn't know it's a robot.

In case it's not at the library.

The Penultimate Truth (1964)

I circled back to this Philip K. Dick novel when I saw it on an Esquire list, early in the present political regime, of "essential books to prepare you for what's next," which included the usual suspects by George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Lewis, etc. There's a lot of Dickian muddle to the tale in this novel, whose picture does not immediately come clear. By pieces, we understand we are in a post-apocalyptic Earth after a nuclear war Cold War nightmare style has made the planet surface uninhabitable. Underneath, billions live in so-called ant tanks—the "ant" is for antiseptic, though it obviously recalls the ant farm toys popular circa 1964. The underground people work on the war effort, waiting for the day those above signal it's safe to return. But on the surface there is actually no war, only a complicated ongoing propaganda campaign to keep most people working and living underground and afraid to come to the surface. Inevitably some do. They are captured and herded into crowded apartment complexes. The surface is controlled by wealthy people who live on giant private estate parks, called "demesnes," a term that goes back to the origins of feudalism. As an allegory, the three classes are thus physically arrayed: the working class laboring underground, the middle class huddled into urban states that cannot be escaped, and the upper class living great lives of pleasure on country estates. There actually was a World War III, but it didn't last long and left most of the surface habitable. Obviously Cold War dynamics motivated the underground living, a logical extension of fallout shelters. So that's the context into which Dick injects his usual cast of bumbling, confused everymen and everywomen. The tale is good at illustrating basic home truths, most notably how easy it is to maintain a huge fraud once it is in place. One thinks now, after these past 40 years, of how pernicious and persistent the "common sense" wisdom of the free market remains, for example, trickle-down economics as merely an unexamined article of faith. It's like spinning plates on top of sticks. Once you get it started you can keep it going if you're skillful enough, and deceitful enough. And then the applause. Good one for Dick binges.

In case it's not at the library.

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

For the most part this Philip K. Dick novel dispenses with the usual distortions of reality via time travel or drugs, though mental illness is prominent. In the future, Earth ("Terra") has expanded civilization to the richly populated Alpha Centauri system four and a half light-years away. Alpha Centauri has many habitable planets and moons, many of them populated by Alphanes, an insect-like breed with license plate numbers for names. But Terrans managed to get a toehold in one moon, Alpha III M2 by name, which they used to house the exiled mentally ill. But then, in the last war, it came under Alphane control, which enabled the Terrans exiled there to live as they choose. The story involves a plot on Earth to take back control of it, a mission headed up by the CIA using simulacrums controlled remotely. Dick imagines that the mentally ill Terrans on Alpha III M2 would organize themselves by diagnosis. The "Pares" are paranoid schizophrenics, "Heebs" hebephrenics (a type of schizophrenia), "Manses" manics, "Deps" depressives, etc. They are not always easy to make out from group label or behavior—the Heebs felt Rastafarian without the patois, for example—and I'm not sure any of this would be likely to ever happen, but all right. My favorite character was Lord Running Clam, a slime mold that is not only sentient but telepathic, and not only telepathic but manipulative. My love for him starts with his name. Another point I liked was a supernatural power of one character, Joan Trieste, to run time backward for up to five minutes. She works for the police department and is detailed to emergency scenes where she is able to bring people back to life if she can get there fast enough. She carries the Dick version of a beeper. Evidently her strange power only works in a localized way. I'm not as sure about certain aspects of Alpha III M2, or the strange relationship at the center of the story between a CIA agent with a moral compass and his wife without one. She's a marriage counsellor—one of the best in the business. Huh?! Inevitably there is also a TV variety show host with an uncertain agenda. Clans of the Alphane Moon probably doesn't stand with Dick's best, but even in the din of the meaningless event it does have some of his sharpest ideas.

In case it's not at the library.

Time Out of Joint (1958)

This Philip K. Dick novel follows a familiar Dickian pattern, opening on scenes of hyper-normal California suburban life in the '50s. Small things, very small things, go wrong and characters may seem to overreact but it turns out they are on to something before we are. Things are not what they seem. Except we are on to it pretty quickly, because we know we are reading a novel by Philip K. Dick. And zooming in on our pastoral suburban setting—think The Truman Show now, an obvious heir—there is Ragle Gumm, who makes his living by winning a newspaper puzzle contest most days of the week. He lives with his sister and brother-in-law, Margo and Vic. Vic works in the produce department at the grocery story. The neighbors, Bill and Junie Black, drop in a lot. I'm sure you noticed the strange source of income for Gumm, which is one of the ways Dick does his thing. We know it's weird but no one in the story seems to. Almost right away, we find out the newspaper is collaborating with Gumm to help him keep winning the puzzle contest, which is called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" Meanwhile, also early on, Vic goes to the bathroom to get something for his stomach and feels around for a light cord before he remembers they have a wall switch. This disturbs him deeply—much more than the fact that his brother-in-law makes his money winning a daily public newspaper contest (though at least he grumbles about whether that's actually work). So it goes—in typical Dick fashion, and continuing with the movie lingo, it starts on a tight close-up of one reality, and then dollies slowly slowly back to reveal greater realities nesting inside even greater realities. Dick is always good at communicating how miserable it is to be this paranoid. Time Out of Joint teeters on the edge of schizophrenic experience, with TVs and such presumed to be monitoring devices. Indeed, it all kind of blows up in the last chapter, with fragmented reveals that might also be further delusions. Think of that onion, man. Always more layers. This also reminds me of Twilight Zone episodes where people turn out to be living in dollhouses, have become household pets of a giant alien kid, or are in zoos. Two or three fleeting moments hit that chill of paranoia hard enough to make me a little nervous about reality from the comfort of my bed. No one else is quite like Dick. Add to the stack.

In case it's not at the library.

"Adjustment Team" (1954)

This story by Philip K. Dick works from a premise that is essentially chaos theory, though it didn't have the name yet in 1954. The famous example is the butterfly in Brazil that causes a hurricane in Texas through a chain of random cause-and-effect events. In Dick's story there are figures behind the scenes, pulling the strings to keep things on track according to some master plan—basically, making sure the butterfly is where it's supposed to be and that it's flapping its wings. Obviously these folks have extraordinary powers, as supernatural or divine or at least superior beings. In the way that things happen in stories by Philip Dick, a random person named Ed Fletcher is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody on the "adjustment team" botched their assignment. And Fletcher sees things he shouldn't have seen. What he sees is the great strength of this story, an inspired vision of gray dust. The rest of it is little more than pro forma plotting for the sake of a beginning and end. More than 50 years later, in 2011, it was made into a thriller style movie starring Matt Damon, The Adjustment Bureau. Damon plays David Norris, the renamed Ed Fletcher character, and more new glitzy details have been heaped on—Norris is a high-flying New York politician, he falls in love with a woman played by Emily Blunt he is "not supposed to be with," and the "adjustment bureau" hunting him includes John Slattery and Terence Stamp, looking like auditions for The Matrix. The movie does a pretty good job of maintaining a Dickian air, but it also should be mentioned that in some ways "Adjustment Team" is an early sign of Dick's religious bent, as what else are these technocrats of reality but some kind of angel or perhaps demon working for higher powers? Also, note again Dick's ability to suss things out of the air when they're about to break big, in this case chaos theory. But the best part of either story or movie is Dick's stark vision of the gray "real" reality behind the one we live in. The movie does attempt one scene like it, briefly, in a conference room, but can't match or even come close to Dick's vision and was wise to stop there. In more general terms the story feels a little too long and padded out, as if Dick needed to hit a certain word count. It's not one of his best, but serves notice that even not his best can have really strong things to recommend.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Hanging Stranger" (1953)

Philip K. Dick can be made to fit too easily into the caricature of muzzy-headed acid casualty and/or mental illness case, which is why it's helpful to read a story like this one. He was young when he wrote it, not quite 25, but the images are powerful, mature, and hard to shake. It's written by someone who obviously knows what he is doing. After spending the day working on redoing the foundation of his house, Ed Loyce, an unpretentious model of the postwar working man, emerges to find a strange man lynched, his body swinging from a lamppost. It's a gruesome sight, but what's even more unusual is that none of his neighbors or friends finds anything strange about it. Loyce is wild to do something like call the police but no one seems to understand his reaction. Eventually someone does call the police—on Loyce—and the story deepens into stark paranoia. The power of this story is achieved in various ways. For example, the police do come and take Loyce away. We see Loyce chatting with them in the car. Suddenly he leaps from it in motion and runs away as fast as he can. Only then do we learn that Loyce knew immediately that the policemen were not who or what they said. It's a small enough town that Loyce can figure this out quickly. But we learn nothing of his suspicions until he has run away. It's much more chilling, confusing, and scary to be kept two steps behind the main character and primary point of view this way, a skillful choice by Dick. The story's plot goes much like a Twilight Zone episode—only a single isolated man can see the shift to insanity that no one else can—though it was never produced for film or TV until an episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams in 2017 (haven't seen it). Not everything works. The insect nature of the invaders is a mixed bag as is their portal way to us, and generally it can't quite shake the stink of the Cold War '50s. But calling up the simmering racism of mainstream America—the hanged man is not black, but it's a lynching—does much to overcome these problems and make the story feel fresh and relevant and if anything even more powerful all these 66 years later. The story has the same kind of conformity issues that show up in the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and may have been the most terrifying element of it when it was first published. For me, it's the image of the hanged man swinging from the lamppost in the wind, made infinitely worse by the indifference of everyone. Whatever route you take to get there, this story is unsettling.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Second Variety" (1953)

This early long story by Philip K. Dick works equally well whether you take it as a '50s-style killer robot rampage or as a prescient treatment of artificial intelligence (which term would not come into use as we understand it now until two years later, in 1955, with The Logic Theorist computer program). Dick invented a fiendish device here called a claw, a silver sphere with retractable whirling razor blades reminiscent of the weapon / monster / dream object in the movie Phantasm. "Second Variety" is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and these claws were developed as a defense weapon, largely against encroaching small mammals. Claws are not only highly intelligent in their hunting protocols, but they are also programed to manufacture and improve themselves. How that is accomplished is another question but one Dick distracts us from with a swiftly moving action story. Like the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica first seen as menacing "toaster" killing machines and then later returned with hyper advancements, so these lowly rat-chomping claws became something far beyond what anyone had ever imagined. Dick manages the story with a lot of skill and a sharp series of reveals that often surprise. If nothing else, "Second Variety" confirms Dick's abilities as a storyteller, sustained long enough that some refer to it as a novella, whatever. Forty years later it was turned into a movie, 1995's Screamers, that made a few changes to the story but was reasonably faithful. I read the story first—it's a better experience, as is often the case—and I'm not sure how much sense the movie would make without knowing the story. I think it might be very little. Screamers has its bona fides. Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon also worked on Dark Star, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, and Total Recall. Total Recall is as close as I've seen to anyone getting Dick right, so there's that too. And they're doing the best they can with obvious limitations on casting and special effects. It's more an exercise in atmospheric mood and brawny swaggering. It also includes some scenes distinctly reminiscent of Blade Runner, and I happen to know for a fact they don't come from the story, so that's weird. But the story is really great and also genuinely Dickian in the way he simply imagines artificial intelligence and exactly what can possibly go wrong just the way we imagine it now. Say, which reminds me, what is the present status and/or policy on military technology and artificial intelligence? You say it's classified? Well, damn.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"Faith of Our Fathers" (1967)

Philip K. Dick's contribution to Dangerous Visions went on to get a nomination for a Hugo Award, more bounty for the reputation of Harlan Ellison's collection. There is also more interesting material here to speculate on the dynamics between Ellison and these writers. We have already seen Ellison request a specific story from Robert Bloch and then write his own version of it. For this one Ellison asked Dick to write it "about, and under the influence of (if possible) LSD." I can only wonder what Dick thought. I don't know his biography or writing habits well enough to even guess. In 1967 Dick was beginning to come into his own publicly yet with much of his work done. What he came up with is typical of his inversions. In this story, everyone is continually high on a mild hallucinogen. It's in the drinking water, administered by Communists who have come to worldwide power. China appears to have won the Cold War. TVs in the home monitor activity—that old schizophrenic chestnut—and citizens are required to be present in front of the screens with their eyes open for political speeches. The illicit drug that commands prices on the black market is phenothiazine, which counteracts hallucinogens. (Phenothiazine is "highly bioactive," it says in Wikipedia, and is the source of thorazine.) Political resistance forces spread the drug to enable people to experience actual reality. However, when it is used during the mandatory televised speeches something strange seems to be happening. The mysterious leader of the world government, known as the Absolute Benefactor, takes on many different appearances according to the phenothiazine users. Of course, someone from the government is out there classifying them (it wouldn't be a Dick story without such natural bureaucrats): the Clanker (a hideous machine), the Gulper (a hideous whale), the Bird, the Climbing Tube, etc. So the story is about solving these various mysteries, including the nature of reality and hallucination, and it also roams into inspired areas of religion. Dick is obviously trying harder here—everyone is, under Ellison's wheedling and pushing—and this story ends up in some pretty amazing places. It's a classic Dick story and maybe one of his best. It's also one for the tally of stories in this collection that rise to the level of dangerous, though it is dangerous in a way that is hard to describe exactly. Better to read it. Or consider this, from Dick's afterword, quoting a 9th-century Irish theologian and poet in the court of Charles the Bold named John Scotus Erigena (Wikipedia corroborates he is real): "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." A mic drop if ever there was one. It might actually be the most dangerous (religious) line in the whole book.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison