PHILIP K. DICK AND
THE UMBRELLA OF LIGHT

ANGUS TAYLOR

Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light
Copyright © 1975 by Angus Taylor
This work was published by T-K Graphics, Baltimore, in 1975. Parts of it
appeared earlier in the British journal Foundation, No. 4, July 1973, in anarticle entitled “Can God Fly? Can He Hold Out His Arms and Fly?”
Reformatted and with minor corrections, 2019Illustrations by C. Lee Healy2

Introduction

5

PART ONE
Monsters from Outer and Inner Space

10

PART TWO
The Willing Extension of Disbelief

21

PART THREE
The Umbrella of Light

31

Notes

46

3

God Appears & God is LightTo those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

4Introduction“So you maintain,” Doug Appleford
said briskly, “that if a person is killed
by a meteor it’s because he hated his
grandmother. Some theory.”(Counter-Clock World, ch. 16)

I

t is only in the last few years that much serious attempt has been
made to understand the nature of science fiction as a genre and its
place within the context of literature as a whole. The editors andwriters of the pulp magazines too often saw science fiction in simplistic
terms of prediction or extrapolation, even while their own stories belied
their claims. A slightly more sophisticated view holds that the function ofscience fiction is the mapping out of the realistic possibilities of the
future; along this line Robert A. Heinlein can maintain that sciencefiction writers are the futurologists of fiction. 1 But what these critics havetended to ignore is the poetic quality of the literature. Science fiction is
not first and foremost science; it is first and foremost fiction. It hasdeveloped within a historical context that has given to it its uniquequalities, but it shares something with all fiction, and with all art: it
attempts to transcend its own materials and evoke another reality. Camus
has described how the artist works through selection, by isolating theunique in the context of the universal. The artist plucks an instant frompassing time and gives it a permanence, but a permanence shaped by theartist’s own vision. C. S. Lewis has likened the series of events that occurs
within a story to a net designed to catch an elusive something else. “Thereal theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has nosequence in it, something other than a process and much more like astate or quality.” 2
The proper study of science fiction, then, removes it from the technocratic ghetto and confronts the issue of its relation to so-called literature.
Recent attempts at defining the genre have tended to crystallize around
two perspectives: the sociological, and what may be called the “formal”.
According to the sociological perspective, sf differs from mainstream
fiction through the greater stress it places upon individuals as social types
in variable contexts. Science fiction, Martin Green has written, reflects

5Introduction
the scientific sensibility, oriented toward the species, toward individuals
as specimens exemplifying laws of cause and effect, toward the larger
features of whole societies. Conventional literature is oriented toward theindividual, toward particular friendships and small group relationships;
science fiction, on the other hand, is oriented in its field of concern
toward larger social groupings. “It is because of this fundamental
orientation of the scientific mind that science fiction, serving readerswith scientific training, treats imaginative themes in the ways it does; thatit invents new forms of nature, new societies, huge sweeps of space andtime, that it moves outward and generalizes, that it concentrates on social
machinery and employs characterological cliché.” 3 Again, Leon Stover
has written: “In realistic fiction, judgment is cast against a quality in theindividual that arises from cultivation of the self – man as a creature of
ethical culture or its lack. The implications are for private reform: Can I
be a better person? In SF, the target of appraisal is man as a creature ofcustom and shared habits – culture as used in the language ofanthropology and sociology. The implications are for public policy: Do
the properties of civilization serve human nature adequately?” 4
The “formal” perspective, on the other hand, concentrates on the way inwhich sf deliberately deviates from the world-as-experienced in terms of
its invented settings – that is, its use of non-mimetic contexts. Critics
such as Alexei and Cory Panshin and Peter Nicholls have stressed themethods employed by sf writers in the construction of their fictional
worlds, and in so doing have noted sf’s relation to older forms of nonmimetic fiction. Indeed, the Panshins would prefer to abandon the term“science fiction” in favour of “speculative fantasy”.
These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive – quite the contrary.
Essentially, they describe form and function, and the critics who stressthe one aspect have not totally ignored the other – as evidenced by
Green’s statement above. In arguing for a definition of sf as the“literature of cognitive estrangement”, Darko Suvin conjoins both
perspectives. 5 As a writer, reader, or critic, then, one may view a piece ofwork either on a mimetic/non-mimetic scale or on a particularizing/generalizing scale: but each scale implies the existence of the other. In
mimetic, or realistic, fiction the unique individual is confronted with agiven, fixed social context, to which they must adjust in one fashion or
another. Those characteristics that differentiate them from fellow humanbeings and make the individual unique also serve as the source of that
individual’s problems in integrating into society. In science fiction the6Introductionsocial context is subject to change, and in this strategy the uniquecharacteristics of the individual tend to recede from view, for the focus ofattention is elsewhere. The individual tends to be related to theirlandscape – physical and social contexts – as a specimen of their kind.
The problems involved with their dialectical relation to their landscapearise not so much from those aspects of their nature that differentiatethem from their fellows, as from that essential nature (present or
potential) that is shared with them – even if, as is often the case, theindividual or others have become estranged from that authentic essence.
In alien landscapes the writer of science fiction explores that region
where the city of humankind verges on the unassimilated outer universe.
Sf, then, exists as one side of the spectrum of strategies for presenting thehuman condition in fictional form. Conceived of as speculative fantasy, it
has a long and honourable heritage, of which it is a manifestation arisingfrom the increasing impact of technology on human society since theIndustrial Revolution. Science fiction is fantasy in its most typical(though not exclusive) modern guise: it is that form of non-mimetic
fiction uniquely characteristic of industrial and post-industrial societies,
a form of fantasy that outfits itself with the garments of scientific/technological paradigms in order to explore age-old questions ofhumanity’s relation to the universe-at-large in terms suitable to themodern age.
Thus science fiction embodies the impact of socio-political processes not
only at the inter-personal level but at the intra-personal level as well: notonly in “outer” but also in “inner” space. Indeed, the interchange
between these two regions provides the basis for some of the mostinteresting and fruitful exploration presently being done in the field.
Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Barry N. Malzberg, andvarious other writers who deal fairly directly with psychological matters
can yet be labelled writers of sf, for they explore the dialectical
relationship between the human essence and the changing physical-social
landscapes through which the human spirit journeys. Dick’s special
province has been the estrangement of the human being from theirauthentic nature under the reign of modern social organization, and thestruggle to regain authentic being and establish a viable world-view in theface of new revelations about the world brought about by the radical
impingement of the unknown.
What follows is essentially an overview of Dick’s fiction, as I see it. I have7

Introduction
not been concerned to do a detailed story-by-story analysis of thisauthor’s voluminous work; nor have I attempted much in the way ofassessing literary merit. It has seemed to me that the first necessity in thetask of impressing upon a largely uncomprehending public thesignificance of Dick’s work is to discover and lay forth the basic themes
and style that unify his writings and reveal his world-view, and thus todissipate the cloud of ignorance and misconception that at this time
prevents a wider appreciation among readers.

8PART ONE
Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
Birth, I decided, is not pleasant.
It is worse than death; you canphilosophize about death – and you
probably will: everyone else has. But
birth! There is no philosophizing,no easing of the condition. And theprognosis is terrible: all your actions
and deeds and thoughts will only
embroil you in living the moredeeply.
(We Can Build You, ch. 7)

Horace Denfeld, once the evolved New Man, his mind now
broken by the alien power from the stars, gazes at theconclusion of Our Friends from Frolix 8 with childlike wonder
at a small plastic statuette of God, and affirms his faith that “every living
thing will fly or anyhow trudge or run” up and up forever. “All of themwill make it eventually, no matter how slow they go. Leaving a lot behind;that has to be done.” (ch. 27) As Horace Denfeld has left a lot behind,
now that the fantastic has shattered the familiar realm in which he moved
for so long.
Although it is often noted that Philip K. Dick is concerned with “thenature of reality”, the assumption is usually that he is merely playing
parlour tricks, that he is a clever sleight-of-hand artist whose entertainments are conjured out of thin air and exhibit little philosophy other thana fashionable nihilism or despair in the face of a universe thought toolarge and unregulated for comprehension. Yet Dick is far from being theunrelenting pessimist he is often considered. Rather, through his often
dark vision he assumes a critical stance against the world-view that
informs modern society; beyond this he presents a vision of a brighter
world not beyond the reach of those informed of its possibility. But
between unexamined reality and affirmed possibility lies an arduous
journey: from the destruction of one world of knowledge to the creationof another. Dick’s fiction is the story of this journey.

10Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
Since at least Mary Shelley’s time, science fiction has displayed adistinctly ambiguous attitude toward humanity’s drive to impose its willon nature. The image of Frankenstein’s monster, the creature, born ofscience, that assumes a life of its own and threatens to destroy its creator,
still haunts today’s world, where critics like Jacques Ellul can argue thattechnology has assumed a life and logic of its own that puts it beyond
effective human control. If the adventurous spirit of Verne seems moresuited to the last century than the image of the monster, it is because theambiguities of technology were at that time less apparent. By the middleof the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution in full
explosion, even the great English romantic visionary painter J. M. W.
Turner could celebrate in Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844) the accelerating
union of technology and nature. Soon after this the theories of Darwin
and Marx were to lend new credence to the idea of universal change andprogress. The evolution of the biological and social realms pointed theway to the millennial state; the inevitability of perfection was a notion
well suited to the generally optimistic spirit of the times.
But the subjugation of the environment marked both the triumph andthe failure of imagination. By the end of the century the Victorian world
had folded in upon itself, near to exhausting its particular possibilities.
Perhaps it is too fanciful to see in The Sleeping Gypsy, an 1897 painting by
French naive Henri Rousseau, and in the initial appearance of H. G.
Wells’ The War of the Worlds that same year a synchronistic significance.
Yet both partake of a contemporary mood; in their sombre fusions of
inner and outer space they portend the coming of a new, larger, and lesscertain age.
“God is dead,” Nick said. “They found his carcass in 2019.
Floating out in space near Alpha.”“They found the remains of an organism advanced several
thousand times over what we are,” Charley said. “And it
evidently could create habitable worlds and populate themwith living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn’t
prove it was God.”“I think it was God.”(Our Friends from Frolix 8, ch. 7)
Wells’ fin de siècle scientific romances strikingly illustrate a rejection of
the dominant order of mind. The Time Machine, peopled with decadent
Eloi and subterranean Morlocks, and with its final chill vision of the endof the world, stands the old optimism on its head. But it is in The War of11

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
the Worlds that Wells gave the world his most vivid depiction ofhumankind bombarded by the unknown. The image of Earth invaded bystrange beings from another world has embedded itself so deeply in the
public psyche as to suggest that some deep subconscious chord has been
struck. With all corners of this planet filled to overflowing with the worksof the human race, new terra incognita must be found: a new void isrequired. Outer space is that void, and the alien is its denizen.
The coming of the alien is not the cause of a loss of innocence, but theawareness of it. The desire and trembling inspired by the being beyond
suggests the longing for contact with the divine in a world that hasbanished the sacred and the mysterious from its consciousness. In fiction,and increasingly in the public mind, the gods and demons of yesterday
have become the aliens of today. Aliens are symbols of the intrusion of
the unknown into the realm of the human – meteorites of mystery andunease buried in the collective human psyche. 6 If the image of the alien
plays so large a role in the fiction of Philip K. Dick, it is because he deals
always with humanity’s fallen state; and it is the realization, often sudden
and unexpected, of this condition that initiates the frightful but necessary
struggle toward a new reality. Dick opposes the mechanization of social
relations to being on a higher, more authentic, plane. When the common
people of Earth are subjugated to incomprehensible new forms ofpolitical and technocratic tyranny in Our Friends from Frolix 8, Thors
Provoni seeks salvation in the sky. But the quest is fraught with fear anddanger. Often the alien from outer space is the stern and all-knowing
father-figure come to save or punish errant humanity. Though, of course,
who is to be saved and who punished depends on one’s point of view. As
Jane Gaskell’s narrator puts it in A Sweet Sweet Summer: “The As is allthings to all men . . . and an excuse to all of us every last one.”
The ambiguous role of aliens in science fiction is to be understood interms of the self’s relation to the other: the unintegrated, whether
opposed to the individual or the collectivity. The alien Provoni contacts
informs him: “Your race is xenophobic. And I am the ultimate
foreigner.” (ch. 17) This is the other side of the coin from that describedin James Tiptree’s short story “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on theCold Hill’s Side”. In Now Wait for Last Year, as in The Lathe of Heaven
by Ursula K. Le Guin, the non-humanoid aliens, contrary to human
expectations, prove to be friendly, helpful, and wise. The alien tends tospeak in proverbs and platitudes, not because of its own inherent
limitations, but because of the inherent limitations of inter-species
12Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
communication. The alien partakes of the very essence of a divinity thatlies beyond the merely human. Even when on familiar terms withhumans, aliens are infused with an aura of otherness and are associatedwith powers normally denied humans. Lord Running Clam, a telepathic
slime mould from Ganymede – who is incidentally an accomplishedbusinessman and a passionate collector of postage stamps (including
early U.S., with special emphasis on mint blocks of four of the Columbusset) – lays down its life for the human hero of Clans of the Alphane Moon,
only to resurrect from its own spores.

But not all aliens are so friendly toward humans; some may act in
opposition to them, like the “vugs” who come into conflict with humansin The Game-Players of Titan. In this story the inhabitants of Earth, evenwhen on speaking terms with these creatures, keep “vug sticks” in theirapartments, with which to poke at unwelcome extraterrestrial visitors.
The vug stick is a construct at once ludicrous and appropriate in terms of
Dick’s fiction, and suggests a double aspect to the symbolism of the alien.
For aliens may be seen on occasion not only as representatives of a higher
order, but also as projections of the human psyche, reifications ofunconscious fears or imaginings. Carl Jung has described flying-saucer
sightings in terms of unconscious archetypes projected into the void, andhas even interpreted Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud as depicting asymbolic encounter with the unconscious. 7 In The Emotional Significance13

Monsters from Outer and Inner Spaceof Imaginary Beings Robert Plank has written: “The mental process ofcreating imaginary beings is in essence a duplication of a relationship of
crucial emotional significance in life, a relationship that the person who
does the imagining has experienced, or believes he has experienced, or
wishes or fears to experience. Forces in his emotional economy push theresources of his imagination in this direction. Whatever has remained
unfulfilled and unresolved clamors to be lived over in fantasy, in aheightened, mended form – a better, grander father to him, to still thelonging that he has never perceived reality to satisfy – or in a worse form,
to banish the terrors that a real relationship, as he perceived it, has left
lurking in the shadows of his soul.”8 The split in the modern psyche, thedivorce from any conception of an integrated universe or an integrated
and authentic personal life, plays a central role in Dick’s fiction, and it isas an aspect of this theme that the alien assumes significance.
In his study, Plank contrasts the attitudes of Pascal and Kant toward therealm beyond Earth, noting how the contemplation of an empty universe
inspires fear, while the thought of an inhabited one serves to overcome
fear. More specifically, as Le Guin imagines nicely in “Vaster than Empires
and More Slow”, it is the unintegrated other that troubles the self. “The
eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” wrote Pascal, and it
is interesting to find this cry echoed at one point by Michael Moorcock’s
protagonist in The Black Corridor, a tale of xenophobia and hallucination
on an interstellar voyage. Pascal’s cry, as Plank notes, is an example ofexistential anxiety, radiated out into a universe that remains silent.
Provoni raged and roamed the outskirts of the galaxy,searching, in his wrath, for something vague, something evenmetaphysical. An answer, to so speak. A response. Thors
Provoni yelled into the emptiness, dinning out his noise inhope of a response.
God help us, Weiss thought, if he ever finds it.
(Our Friends from Frolix 8, ch. 1)
J. G. Ballard reveals the discovery of a cosmological response on the partof the universe in “The Voices of Time”, a response that brings a strange
peace to a dying man. Similarly, Plank notes the peace and pleasure Kant
found in the “starry sky”, which he peopled with planetary beings which
the immortal souls of earthly persons might meet in future wanderings.
In Dick’s “What the Dead Men Say” the connection is actually madebetween interstellar space and the realm of afterlife, when what seems tobe the voice of a recently deceased tycoon is picked up coming from14

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
beyond the solar system by radio telescope. Typical of Dick is the factthat messages from beyond should announce themselves throughscientific instruments, and other technological devices like radios andtelevision. (Typical also of Dick is the fact that in this particular story acharacter should wonder irritably if this metaphysical interference withnormal communications channels violates government regulations.)
Beyond the well-charted territory of normal human experience, then, isthe undiscovered country that puzzles the will. If the alien presence isoften the manifestation of a higher order, then the higher order, thatreality lying beyond satisfactory human comprehension, is notnecessarily hospitable to the human traveller.
“Fragile Earthmen, venturing out here, go back to your own
system! Go back to your little orderly universe, your strict
civilization. Stay away from the regions you do not know! Stay
away from darkness and monsters!”(Solar Lottery, ch. 9)This concept, which plays a prominent role in The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch, is made even more explicit and dramatically concise in“Faith of Our Fathers”, where God is portrayed as evil, or at least utterly
inhuman, and is identified with the forces of destruction. This story,
undoubtedly one of Dick’s best, is set in a future when Asian
communism has triumphed over U.S. imperialism. Yet despite thesupposed defeat of the secular forces of evil, the security of the humanworld is undermined by metaphysical evil, for the Absolute Benefactor of
the People turns out to be (literally) an evil deity. In the process ofundermining his hero’s stable world, Dick uncovers layer upon layer ofillusion. Though the public believes the Benefactor to be Asian, he is
known by the initiate to be a white man, whose television image is“refined” when he addresses the masses. Thus it is suggested that theforces in the world that have supposedly been defeated – that is, white orimperialist – have in fact triumphed, though their triumph remains
invisible to most. And even the image of the leader as human ismaintained only by keeping the populace’s drinking water saturated withhallucinogenic drugs, so that the entire structure of normal everyday
reality is fictitious. Furthermore, a drug taken to counteract the effect of
the hallucinogens reveals not a single “true” image of the Benefactor, but
a confusing variety of forms, varying from viewer to viewer. Beyond thewhole outward appearance of unquestioned society is a chaos inimical tothe human spirit.
15

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space“You founded the Party?” he asked.
“I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and theParty that isn’t a Party, and those who are for it and those
who are against it, those that you call Yankee Imperialists,
those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly. I founded
it all. As if they were blades of grass.”
The fear of being used, of being a pawn under the control of some greater
entity, is similarly apparent in the relation of Barney Mayerson and Leo
Bulero to Palmer Eldritch, and raises the question of Dick’s preoccupation with forms of schizophrenia. Writing on the subject, R. D. Laing
has noted that “if one experiences the other as a free agent, one is open to
the possibility of experiencing oneself as an object of his experience andthereby of feeling one’s own subjectivity drained away. One is threatenedwith the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of theother, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself.” 9Palmer Eldritch, the higher entity, possessed intrinsically of greater
freedom of action, threatens to turn those of lesser possibility into objects
in its scheme of things. What Dick is doing is carrying the concept ofalien-ness beyond the societal level, into the region of personal
subjectivity. The concept of the alien, which makes its initial appearance
in outer space, is carried to its logical conclusion in inner space, where it
reappears as alienation. It is Dick’s compelling fusion of inner and outerspace that lends his work much of its power.
In Now Wait for Last Year, the Prime Minister of the ’Starmen, the true
aliens in the story, induces a sense of anomie in those he confronts:
Facing Freneksy, they became as they were born: isolated andindividual, unsupported by the institutions which they were
supposed to represent. …facing Minister Freneksy, thenaked, hapless, lonely man reemerged – and was required tostand up to the Minister in this unhappy infinitude. The
normal relativeness of existence, lived with others in afluctuating state of more or less adequate security, hadvanished.
(ch. 9)The ’Starmen also employ the drug JJ-180 to destroy the capacity ofhuman beings to relate usefully to the non-self. Under the influence of
JJ-180 the individual experiences the reification of the environment in amanner suggesting schizophrenia:

16

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
Now, in the familiar environment of her office, she
experienced a transformation of reality along the lines of an
ominous progression: ordinary things, whichever way she
looked, seemed to be gaining density. They were no longer
susceptible to being moved or changed, affected in any way,by her. … The objects had lost their heritage of the familiar;
by degrees they became cold, remote, and – hostile. Into thevacuum left by the decline in her relatedness to them thethings surrounding her achieved their original isolation fromthe taming forces which normally emanated from the humanmind; they became raw, abrupt, with jagged edges capable ofcutting, gashing, inflicting fatal wounds.
(ch. 6)
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb provides anothergood example of the fusion of inner and outer space. Scientist Bruno
Bluthgeld, whose miscalculations have led to one worldwide nuclear
catastrophe, suffers from paranoia and the belief that he possesses thepsychic power to release further nuclear blasts against those trying toharm him. And subsequent destruction in the novel does indeed coincidewith Bluthgeld’s fantasy, though it is not possible to say whether he issupposed “really” to be the cause of it.
What has happened is this, he decided. They weredeveloping their arrangements to injure me but they hadn’t
counted on my ability, which in me seems to lie partly in thesubconscious. I have only a dubious control over it; itemanates from suprapersonal levels, what Jung would callthe collective unconscious. … Are they aware that I am theomphalos, the center, of all this cataclysmic disruption? Hewatched the passing people, and presently he knew theanswer; they were quite aware of him, that he was the sourceof all this, but they were afraid to attempt any injury in his
direction. ... You have learned a hard, bitter lesson. And sohave I. I must watch myself more carefully; in the future I
must guard my powers with a greater awe, a greater
reverence at the trust placed in my hands.
(ch. 6)Laing writes: “If there is anything the schizoid individual is likely tobelieve in, it is his own destructiveness. He is unable to believe that hecan fill his own emptiness without reducing what is there to nothing. He
regards his own love and that of others as being as destructive as hatred.
… He descends into a vortex of non-being in order to avoid being, butalso to preserve being from himself.” 10 We Can Build You provides
17

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
another illustration of this; it is a novel concerned very consciously withthe descent into schizophrenia and with love “as destructive as hatred”.
Schizophrenia is also a central theme in Clans of the Alphane Moon inwhich Dick constructs a whole society divided among groups exhibiting
various forms of mental illness, in Martian Time-Slip, and on ametaphoric level in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
This recurrent use of the schizophrenia theme illustrates Dick’s concern
with the mechanistic reduction of human relations to states of being thatare unable to maintain themselves against the destructive forces ofnature. For Dick, the natural tendency of a universe stripped of creative
human meaning is entropic regression toward a state of chaos andanomie, and he sees the tendency everywhere, even in the steady
accumulation of “kipple”, or useless objects, like junk mail or empty
match folders, in an apartment. In A Maze of Death the antagonist is theForm Destroyer; in Ubik the breakdown of the rational order of theworld occurs in a state of “half-life” after death, where a malevolent entity
preys on the life force. The world of Nazi ascendancy in The Man in theHigh Castle is a metaphoric transformation of our own world – a magicrealist mirror in which we may perceive more immediately the partiallysubmerged forces of disintegration on this side of the glass. Dick
recognizes in Nazism a collective death-wish, a longing for the ultimate
destruction and universal chaos foretold by Germanic mythology. Of the
Nazi rulers in this novel it is said:
It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here,
the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging.
And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be nolife; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hothydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is
an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying
on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; thewheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And these – thesemadmen – respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of
the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.
(ch. 3)
Jason Taverner, famous television personality in Flow My Tears, thePoliceman Said, awakes one morning to find that no one else remembers
who he is, that he has no secure legal status in society, and must live by
his wits from moment to moment. The bottom has dropped out of theworld he always accepted as reality and took for granted. Into his life has

18

Monsters from Outer and Inner Space
come the unknown, the unexplained, the primal chaos and isolation that
underlies the Augenblick of stability that humans have imposed onnature. Throughout Dick’s work there is this continual opening of theabyss, which recalls the intention of the Surrealist movement, announced
in its “Declaration of 27 January 1925”, to prove to human beings “howfragile their thoughts are, and on what unstable foundations, over what
cellars they have erected their unsteady houses.” 11
The presence of the abyss reveals Dick’s position as fundamentallyexistential. Sartre’s dictum that the individual is “condemned to be free”
neatly sums up Dick’s view of our place in the universe. This is the
position from which Dick begins, the starting point for his fictional
explorations. The social order is not predetermined, fixed, or constant;the elemental, impersonal forces of the cosmos itself militate against themaintenance of any secure human reality. All roads in his fiction lead tothis apocalyptic revelation (though they do not end there). When“objective” social reality breaks down, the individual is starkly confronted
with the problem of dealing anew with the outside world, of coming toterms with the non-self. The individual divided from their social andphysical surroundings is likely to become increasingly divided against
themselves. Alienation implies a lack of integration with an environment
perceived as unrelated to oneself and beyond control. “It is a splitting
apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on theother.” (Martian Time-Slip, ch. 11) More specifically, this lack ofinteraction is at the level of personal experience or the animate; theexchange between inner and outer space has been reduced to the simply
mechanical.
He did not feel any hostility from the forces overhead. They
were not vengeful or motivated; they were empty, hollow,
completely cold. It was as if his car had run over him; it wasreal but meaningless. It was not policy, it was breakdown andfailure, chance. … The impersonal, Doctor Stockstillthought, has attacked us. That is what it is; attacked us frominside and out. The end of the co-operation, where weapplied ourselves together. Now it’s atoms only. Discrete,
without any windows. Colliding but not making any sound,just a general hum.
(Dr. Bloodmoney, ch. 5)

19

PART TWO
The Willing Extension of Disbelief
A small man, wearing a stylish but
somewhat gaudy Ionian purple
snakeskin jacket with illuminatedkummerbund and curly-toedBrazilian pigbark slippers, Mini
looked exactly what he was: a dealer
in wholesale dried fruit.
(The Crack in Space, ch. 14)

Unlike many other writers, Philip K. Dick has not hesitated to
inject his science fiction with a liberal infection of chaos. The
return of alienated Thors Provoni or Palmer Eldritch from theinterstellar void shatters the statistical regularities of the familiar solar
system; the alien presence announces the intrusion into human affairs ofa different order of existence, manifesting itself as fate or divine will. In aliterature that has prided itself on rational extrapolation and shunned thechaos implicit in more outright forms of fantasy, such a quantum leap
into the unexpected strikes a note very close to heresy. This is not to saythat flights of fantasy, manifestations of the divine, auguries of new
universes have been absent from science fiction, but that their relevanceto the field has tended to be downgraded as technicians have set aboutcarefully graphing themselves into the future or churning out
entertaining re-runs of plots signifying little.
Dick is not the first to understand the importance of the improbable as amethod of casting light on the possible. Wells understood implicitly thatthe real purpose of science fiction, apart from its value as entertainment,
was to describe the evolving potentials of the social individual, and thattechnology stood at the nexus between humans and their continuallychanging relationship with the world around them. But Wells had no use
for the juvenile, and ultimately boring, Gernsbackian preoccupation withtechnology-for-the-sake-of-technology; in his quest to tell humankind
more about itself, his fecund mind showered the public with tales of time
travel, alien beings, animals transmuted into humans, invasion fromouter space, parallel worlds, invisibility, atomic warfare, and just about
21

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
every other improbability so dear to later sf writers. If science has been“catching up” with science fiction in the interval, it is only because, or to
the extent that, the field has tried too hard to be respectably “scientific”.
The wholesale extrapolation of present trends into the future leads
nowhere but back to the familiar present. The “objective reality”
expounded by respectable technocratic culture rests on a misconceptionof the nature of science, which exhibits over time the subjectivity ofsucceeding paradigms. 12
Yet even Wells maintained that the kind of fantasy he wrote should bebased on a single fantastic premise; apart from this the author should
strive to make the details of their story as realistic as possible. It was only
by keeping the rest of the story as close to everyday reality as possible thatthe fantastic aspect gained credibility. Otherwise, the story would
inevitably degenerate into senseless contrivance. Science fiction, which
has tended to look upon itself as the kind of “realistic” literature referred
to by Heinlein, has generally been loath to stray far from the pathprescribed by Wells.
Not so Philip Dick. Dick everywhere violates Wells’ prescription of asingle fantastic premise. And if there are sf writers not bound by the oldprinciple, few, if any, are willing to go as far as Dick in denying thenecessity of anchoring one’s fiction in a reality the reader can believe. In
fact, Dick generally goes out of his way to prevent the reader fromaccepting the fictional world before them as “normal”, “ordinary”, or
believable in any everyday sense. For Dick, the details of everyday reality
are fantastic. Everyday reality does not remain constant, either
subjectively or objectively, and therefore it is not the implications of asingle trend or occurrence he is investigating, but the implications ofcomplex trends or multiple occurrences. Dick is a pioneer of the “postWellsian system” of multiple-premise “fantastic realism” anticipated by
Julius Kagarlitski. 13
Dick’s blending of the objective with the subjective serves to break down
the artificial barrier dividing science fiction from more traditional
fantasy. Indeed, the “six elements of form necessary to fantasy fiction”
delineated by Jane Mobley14 are not in the least inconsistent with most of
Dick’s work, despite the fact that Mobley specifically excludes science
fiction from fantasy fiction thus defined. The Man in the High Castle is
Dick’s one traditionally “rational” science fiction novel, revealing awonderfully wrought, finely detailed parallel world, in many respects so

22

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
like our own; yet even this story deliberately undermines its own realism,
which is suggested to be less than complete. As in “Faith of Our Fathers”
we have confusion as to the ultimate nature of reality, and the problem ofchoosing the correct path of action from among obscure alternatives,
these two being reflected in the problem of authenticating humanartifacts – in one case, antique art objects and in the other, politicalexamination papers. Again, We Can Build You, which is uncharacteristically realistic in tone, concerns mental illness and regression into nonreal private worlds.

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on theoutskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate
breakfast indifferently while, with something greater thanindifference, he glanced over the morning homeopape’s
weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.
The key glacier, Ol’ Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables
during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day’sby 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans
evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were
hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on,
and toward what?
(The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, ch. 1)
Where is the reader to locate such a world? In what context of rationallyexplainable, scientifically-extrapolated reality is this world where people
keep “Venusian ming birds” as pets, where “truffle skins” are the units of23

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
currency for interplanetary trade, where the social elite undergo
treatment by German doctors who stimulate the individual’s “Kresy’s
Gland”, which controls the rate of evolution – this world where themorning “homeopape” announces the imminent arrival of a sinister
intelligence from another star and the man beside you on the“thermosealed interbuilding commute car” is likely to be wearing “thegray pith helmet, sleeveless shirt, and shorts of bright red popular withthe businessman class” (ch. 1)? Surely this world, even before it istransformed by hallucinogenic drugs into something even lesscommonplace, is already distinctly dreamlike.
This dreamlike quality is accentuated by the interchangeability andmutability of Dick’s landscapes. Places are seldom described in detail – orat least not in any characteristic detail that might lend them an air of
uniqueness. Zurich, Switzerland, is indistinguishable from Marin
County, California, in Dick’s techno-dreamworld of the future. Or, tolook at it another way, it might be said that the transient massproduction artificial environment of California has swallowed up theentire world in most of his stories. It is a lack of permanence, ofrootedness – a lack of solidity – that marks the settings of these stories.
The material world is almost wholly human-made and is locked in adialectic with the human consciousness. Here, where fiction exists in adialectical relationship with reality, the outrageous can be commonplace.
In Counter-Clock World Dick does not hesitate to conceive a world inwhich metabolic processes run backward, so that persons greet eachother with “good-bye” and bodies rise from the grave, revitalized, to growyounger. The merging of the literal and the symbolic infuses the world
with new meaning, so that inner experience is writ large upon the face ofouter environment. Dick’s work is characterized by what John Brunnerhas called “an almost hallucinatory sharpness of detail” 15 – but it is a
sharpness of detail that extends beyond mere enumerative naturalism tothe very quality of objects themselves: a magic realism in which things
are seen double, simultaneously familiar and unexpected.
The Theodorus Nitz commercial squeaked, “In thepresence of strangers do you feel you don’t quite exist?
Do they seem not to notice you, as if you were invisible?
On a bus or spaceship do you sometimes look around you
and discover that no one, absolutely no one, recognizes youor cares about you and quite possibly may even – ”
With his carbon dioxide-powered pellet rifle, Maury
Frauenzimmer carefully shot the Nitz commercial as it hung24

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
pressed against the far wall of his cluttered office. It had
squeezed in during the night, had greeted him in themorning with its tinny harangue.
Broken, the commercial dropped to the floor. Maury
crushed it with his solid, compacted weight and thenreturned the pellet rifle to its rack.
(The Simulacra, ch. 9)
It is pointless here to ask which aspect is true and which is false. A radioor television commercial assumes a super-clarity when it is given a threedimensional mechanical form and the mobility to seek out and harangue
audiences far from more conventional communication devices. Such an
artifact not only reifies consumer perception of modern mass-media
advertising, but also presents a concise vision of advancing technologicalmanipulation of the human environment. Talking doors, suitcases thatact as psychiatrists, newspapers that publish themselves, “creditor jetballoons” with articulation circuits, rats clutching crude weapons – it is aworld subjectively anthropomorphized and at the same time notanthropomorphized, but merely displaying its objective dialecticalresponse to the human. If Dick’s stories are filled with objects andmachines that mimic life, and life forms that more specifically imitate
human forms, this is neither more nor less than the imaginatively logicalextension to the world at large of the common robot figure in theliterature.
The robot in science fiction is not simply a mechanism, nor is it, simply,
a human being in disguise. It is both and neither. In addition to its
morphological and functional relatedness to its organic analogues, it
assumes a symbolic role in the literature. It speaks in riddles and offers
new insights, as Gully Foyle discovered. It puts one in contact with themysterious. Asimov’s robots are not simply chess-playing computers; theThree Laws are never quite enough to explain the fascination they holdfor us all. The telepathic robots and superhuman machines of Clarke’s
The City and the Stars are part of a larger order of things, a greater design
than the inhabitants of Diaspar can, or want to, understand. The robot isa channel to the divine, and yet, unlike the alien, it maintains an essential
unity with the human. Willis, the hero’s robot acquaintance in Galactic
Pot-Healer has written in his spare time an exhaustive theologicalpamphlet, which he sells to the human for ten cents. Robots in science
fiction may not usually be into theology as heavily as Willis, but they
nevertheless often act to reveal, even if ambiguously, hidden knowledge
or to dispense bits of wisdom. In A Maze of Death a spaceship’s
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The Willing Extension of Disbelief
computer is transformed into a pseudo-organic oracle, delivering
statements reminiscent of the I Ching, in a programmed dreamworld
shared by the ship’s occupants. (Willis’s real ambition, by the way, is tobecome a free-lance writer – a suitable profession, perhaps, for an
oracle.) Dick has simply infused his entire panoply of fictional props with
intimations of this larger significance. Thus, like the robot, other objects,
natural or artificial, may participate with human beings in a single
universe.
“Considering you’re a robot,” Joe said, “I don’t see what
you have emotionally involved in this; you have no life.”
The robot said, “No structure, even an artificial one,enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of
everything, and everything resists it.”
(Galactic Pot-Healer, ch. 10)
Ursula K. Le Guin has noted that because the writer’s vision is everything
where there is no borrowed reality to fall back on, style is of fundamental
importance in fantasy. “There is no comfortable matrix of thecommonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-madeemotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. Thereis only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nailexposed. To create what Tolkien calls ‘a secondary universe’ is to make a
new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the actof speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is thecreator’s voice. And every word counts.” 16 Dick’s voice is remarkable ingeneral for its lack of natural scenery. His characters move throughintensely manufactured landscapes, built primarily upon humaninteraction, and devoid of solid external furniture. In their fantastic
secondary worlds, without matrices of the commonplace, they are
constantly blundering, appalled, against the ragged edges of nothingness.
Jory’s incomplete half-life stage-front world in Ubik can be taken as aparadigm of Dick’s fictional constructions.
Even social scenery partakes of this quality. Bruce Gillespie notes: “There
are no babies born, for instance; almost no sex scenes, although somebrilliant scenes of acrimony between husbands and wives; no children
except freaks; no sense of teeming life, of the man in the street; not evenmany deaths other than melodramatic murders – most of Dick’s heroes
survive by the skin of their teeth and do not die, even when completely
tragic conclusions are called for, as in Ubik. It’s a strange, constricted,
claustrophobic life; and the constriction is contained in the language.” 1726

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
Dick’s language, besides being usually quite colloquial, also contains
some delightful quirks, such as exhibited when his characters occasionally correct each other’s grammar or assist each other in recalling
literary quotations.
Lack of scenery promotes detachment from even a fictional “objective”
reality and enhances the argument for the subjective. Even the objectivity
implied in viewing events consistently from the standpoint of a single
character falls by the wayside in many of Dick’s stories, as he shifts thefocus among his several protagonists – and this is made a deliberate
narrative ploy in A Maze of Death. (We Can Build You is unusual in thisrespect, being told entirely in the first person.) Style reinforces vision at
this point, and what may appear as serious defects in style from one
critical vantage become logical moves from another, given this particular
writer’s will to his particular vision.
In degrading the solidity of his scenery Dick waves a red flag in thereader’s face. He undermines the illusion that sf can be entirely divorced
from fantasy, that it is futurology, extrapolation, or prediction. He
undermines the plot in its superficial aspect by throwing roadblocks inthe way of the smooth succession of events, and asks us to divert ourattention, to search out and accept the poetic core of the work; he tries tofocus our attention on the plot as a “net” for catching something strange
and otherworldly. The difficulty many readers have in accepting Dick’s
fiction may thus spring from their extrapolative bias, and their lack ofinterest in sf as a form of poetry. Where other authors may clothe their
poetic themes in relatively “realistic” or futurological plots – perhaps
bowing, however unconsciously, in the direction of the naturalistic
standards that have dominated literature until recently – Dick is moreunashamedly aware of sf’s intimate association with fantasy.
Dick’s style is inextricably tied to his world-view, his conception of auniverse laced with a good dash of existential absurdity. Asked about
criticism of A. E. van Vogt, a writer he regards as a major early influenceon his own work, he has remarked: “Damon [Knight] feels that it’s bad
artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall throughthe floor. It’s like he’s viewing a story the way a building inspector would
when he’s building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it’s
exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how
happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he

27

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is
not to be feared.” 18
Indeed, Dick’s works are not unrelated in tone to that group of novels
produced by Van Vogt, Alfred Bester, and others and characterized by
Brian Aldiss as “Widescreen Baroque”: “Their plots are elaborate andgenerally preposterous, their inhabitants have short names and short
lives. They traffic as readily in the impossible as the possible. They obey a
dictionary definition of baroque; which is to say that they have a bold andexuberant rather than a fine style, they are eccentric, and sometimes
degenerate into extravagance. They like a wide screen, with space andpossibly time travel as props, and at least the whole solar system as their
setting.” 19 Dick’s fictions, while they may delight some and baffle others,
are characterized by a wonderful inventiveness, unencumbered byconvention, and limited only by the demands of internal logic. The range
of invention in his stories, his extravagant style, his outrageous humour –all attest to a developed sense of play. Bruce Gillespie has aptly referred to
Dr. Bloodmoney as one of Dick’s “circuses” 20 and it is truly a three-ringatmosphere of marvels that is conjured up in many of his stories.
If the world is worth examining, then it is worth examining with aslightly jaundiced eye. For Dick, a sense of the ridiculous is inseparablefrom a true vision of the startling, everyday world. Admittedly, there may
be a tendency to get carried away sometimes. In We Can Build You, forexample, it is casually remarked of a minor character: “It was always
disappointing to the Rosen family that Chester’s eyes are set beneath his
nose, and his mouth is up where his eyes ought to be.” (ch. 2) Such a
description might be quite in order in one of the “circuses”, but We Can
Build You is no such novel, and here, despite reference to radiationinduced birth defects, it seems merely a gratuitous intrusion – anexample of the lack of restraint that must tempt the writer who
specializes in the bizarre. But in general Dick’s madcap antics work, forhe has a deft sense for the absurd amid the commonplace of life. Hisstraight-faced wackiness may seem incongruous in the context of theissues he tackles, but then he has always worked through juxtaposing
seemingly incongruous elements and making of them multifaceted
wholes.
This approach can be seen in his attitude toward science fiction in
general, of which he has said: “Without being art, it does what art does,
since as Schopenhauer pointed out, art tends to break free of the reality

28

The Willing Extension of Disbelief
around us and reach a new level of gestalting. The virtue of its approach,too, is that it can reach persons who do not have a developed esthetic
sense, which means that it has a higher degree of sheer communicability
than great art.” 21 His own work belies these words only in the sense that
his commitment to his own vision of science fiction has demonstrated aconsiderable artistic potential in the field.

29

PART THREE
The Umbrella of Light“You know, doctor, you’re here tofind out what’s making Gino sick. I
say that’s not the issue. It’s obvious
what’s making him sick: the wholedarn situation. The real question is:
What’s keeping him alive? That’s thereal mystery. The miracle.”(Now Wait for Last Year, ch. 8)Though Dick has grown more accomplished and outrageous in
his style over the years, thematically his fiction has remained
fairly consistent. Even in an early short story like “ThePreserving Machine” he is concerned with the ephemeral nature of thehuman world, with change and adaptation. A Doctor Labyrinth attempts
to defeat time by designing a machine to process the musical scores of thegreat composers into living forms, the better to survive. But once created,
the animals begin to change, to follow a course of development theircreator is unable to control:Music would survive as living creatures, but he had forgotten
the lesson of the Garden of Eden: that once a thing has beenfashioned it begins to exist on its own, and thus ceases to be
the property of its creator to mold and direct as he wishes.
God, watching man’s development, must have felt the samesadness – and the same humiliation – as Labyrinth, to see
His creatures alter and change to meet the needs of survival.
Dick seems fascinated by the concept of the self-stabilizing or selforganizing system; here is evidence for survival in the face of entropy.
Homeostatic devices abound in his stories, from mobile vermin traps totalking taxicabs. “Autofac” presents what is almost a textbook picture of
the operation of goal-directed self-organizing systems. And when such
systems assume human or quasi-human form, as in “Second Variety”, weare plunged into the world of the simulacrum, where illusion and reality
begin to masquerade as each other. In Dick’s fantasy-realist landscape wefind the merging of the psychical and the physical, human and non31

The Umbrella of Light
human, animate and inanimate at a time in history when thetechnological externalization and universalization of the human nervous
system is recreating that “reciprocity of perspectives, in which man andthe world mirror each other” 22 that existed formerly in lithic times. This
technological reintegration of humanity and the universe, apparent tovarying degrees in the work of numerous sf writers today, is nowhereconfronted in such explicit terms as in the work of Dick, who notes that“our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic
components – all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what
the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment:
animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or atleast quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous toourselves.” 23
The infusion of the environment with animation is a movement awayfrom natural chaos. Technology is thus seen as the potential instrumentof reconciliation between the human and non-human worlds. Though ofcourse this is not to say that such is the inevitable role of technology:
both The Man in the High Castle and Dr. Bloodmoney illustrate the megalomaniacal misuse of technology that leads to death and destruction. For
if artificial entities can become more like natural entities, natural entities
can in turn become more like artificial ones.
“Doctor,” I said, “I’ll let you in on it. Pris is playing a cruelprank on you. She sent me in here. I’m a simulacrum, likethe Stanton. I wasn’t supposed to give the show away, but I
can’t go on with it any longer. I’m just a machine, made outof circuits and relay switches. You see how sinister all thisis?”
(We Can Build You, ch. 5)
The drug JJ-180 in Now Wait for Last Year renders the addict “less thanhuman”, like “the lizards of the Jurassic Period .… Creatures with almost
no mentalities; just reflex machines acting out the externals of living,
going through the motions but not actually there.” (ch. 6) It is thisacquisition of mechanical behaviour patterns by human beings that is at
the heart of Dick’s metaphor of the android: the artificial person. The
android in most sf stories – Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass being only
one of the more recent examples – is clearly an analogue of the oppressed
human being, discriminated against because of race (usually) or perhaps
economics. 24 Here the oppression or alienation – in short, the artificiality

32

The Umbrella of Light– is external in origin, and is to be rectified by recourse to direct external
action of some kind. In discussing the android-human relations of Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Stanislaw Lem asks, “...did Dick intend
to present a model of discrimination, such as the kind of persecution of
the Jews administered under the label of a ‘final solution’?”25 Apparently
Lem feels the answer to this question is probably yes, for he proceeds todemolish the novel’s logic on this basis, and concludes by labelling thestory “nonsense” and “a counterfeit coin”.
In fact, however, the answer to Lem’s question is no. No, Dick does notintend to present a model of discrimination. Dick uses the android inquite a different way. For Dick the android represents the internallyalienated human being: the schizophrenic or anyone else who lives anartificial life because they are withdrawn, unable to establish contact withthe “real” world – the world of human involvement and feeling. Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a wonderfully constructed allegoryon this theme, and considered from this new vantage, the flaws andcontradictions noted by Lem dissolve away, and it becomes no longer
illogical to think that androids can be at once innocent and malicious, on
different levels conscious and unconscious of their own natures, and ingeneral beings who are human and yet an insidious threat to humansociety. Thus the use in the story of the “Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test”.
Whatever may be the ultimate causes of the individual’s divorce fromreality, whatever the links with external politics, the focus for Dick is on
subjective personal experience, the level of “inner space”. Thus at one
point in We Can Build You the narrator can declare: “It was my own
feelings which harried me, not the enemy. There was no enemy. There
was only my own emotional life, suppressed and denied.” (ch. 5) It
appears to me that in this regard Lem fails to notice what he elsewhere socorrectly points out: Dick’s ability to transcend the “trashy” clichés oflowbrow science fiction.
In general, then, it can be said that for Dick robots represent machinesthat are becoming more like humans, while androids represent humans
that are becoming more like machines. Garson Poole of “The ElectricAnt” is an “organic robot” – flesh and blood on the surface, wires andcircuits beneath. His construction suggests he exists in a state half
android and half robot, poised between the authentic life and theartificial life. After some inquiries he is informed that “The punched taperoll above your heart mechanism is not a programming turret but is infact a reality-supply construct.” Poole realizes that by asserting control
33

The Umbrella of Light
over the tape, which all his life has supplied him with a reality he hastaken for granted, he can take control of his own existence:. . . if I control that, I control reality. At least as far as I’mconcerned. My subjective reality . . . but that’s all there is.
Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with ahypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective
realities. My universe is lying within my fingers, he realized.
If I can just figure out how the damn thing works.
Eventually Poole goes so far as to cut the tape, which functions like
Aldous Huxley’s reducing valve, whereupon he experiences total reality –a confusing welter of impressions, too much for him to cope with. With
his death the world of his personal secretary, who is strongly attached tohim, becomes more and more insubstantial to her. In Dick’s universe the“normal” orderly reality of the human world exists only precariously; thisdelicately constructed negentropic reality exists only through thesystemic configurations of human society. Persons who allow themselves
to become separated from the society of their fellows are in that much
more danger of having their individual realities undermined.
In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading
out, becoming strangely like the inert television set which hehad just unplugged. You have to be with other people, hethought. In order to live at all.
(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ch. 18)
The failure of an individual to integrate with reality as defined throughlearned cultural values results in the breakdown of their perception ofthat reality.
The reality which the schizophrenic fell away from – ornever incorporated in the first place – was the reality ofinterpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given
values; it was not biological life, or any form of inherited life,
but life which was learned.
(Martian Time-Slip, ch. 5)
The cultural patterns of separate social systems reveal the codifications ofseparate views of reality held collectively (“a hypothetical universalizationof a multitude of subjective realities”) by their respective members. In
The Game-Players of Titan, radically different world-views generate
conflict between humans and aliens, each species seeing the other in anegative light, each able to perceive only a partial truth about the other.

34

The Umbrella of LightOn the inter-personal or inter-societal level, the dis-integration ofrelationships means the dissolution of culturally-conditioned reality andthe emergence of more “primitive” modes of perception, often characterized by visionary or extrasensory experience.
Berger and Luckmann note: “Man’s self-production is always, and ofnecessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations.
None of these formations may be understood as products of man’s
biological constitution, which ... provides only the outer limits forhuman productive activity. Just as it is impossible for man to develop as
man in isolation, so it is impossible for man in isolation to produce ahuman environment. Solitary human being is being on the animal level(which, of course, man shares with other animals). As soon as one
observes phenomena that are specifically human, one enters the realm of
the social. Man’s specific humanity and his sociality are inextricablyintertwined. Homo sapiens is always, and in the same measure, homosocius.” 26 Human perception of the world is a function of social
interaction. And here we approach the heart of Dick’s work; in his fiction
he presents an unsystematic series of explorations into the sociology ofknowledge.
The need of humans for the company of their fellows is not only
perceptional, but spiritual as well. The detachment and introversion of
the schizophrenic reduces their ability to experience the presence ofothers in a meaningful way. The authentic human experience – “man’s
specific humanity” – is identified by Dick with the capacity for empathy.
Thus human society is seen not only as the basis of secure reality, but also
as the vehicle for the expression of authentic human nature.
“The measure of a man is not his intelligence. It is not howhigh he rises in the freak establishment. The measure of aman is this: how swiftly can he react to another person’s
need? And how much of himself can he give?”(Our Friends from Frolix 8, ch. 7)
Thus writes Eric Cordon, theoretician of the underground movement
fighting the strangely evolved ruling classes in Our Friends from Frolix 8.
The psychic powers of the Unusuals and the advanced logical systems of
the New Men do not make them better human beings; they are shownstill subject to all the old failures to deal properly with others or with
their own emotions; they are not better equipped thereby to change their

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The Umbrella of Light
personal lives and moralities. It is only after they are stripped of theirpowers and reduced, outwardly, to a more childlike level by Provoni’s
alien being that New Men like Amos Ild and Horace Denfeld, forexample, begin to understand the true path in life. The New Men havebeen building the Great Ear, an electronic device to monitor telepathically the thoughts of the masses, but instead it is the alien who monitors
human thought and takes action against the rulers. Charley, NickAppleton’s young girlfriend, sacrifices her life for him, and thus helps
him realize the importance of life and of giving to others.
“Is that important?” Nick asked. “Is that what it’s allabout, instead of invasions by aliens, the destruction of ten
million superlative brains, the transfer of political power –all power – by an elite group – ”“I don’t understand those things,” Amos Ild said. “I justknow how it’s wonderful, someone loving you that much.
And if someone loved you that much, you must be worth
loving, so pretty soon someone else will love you that way,
too, and you’ll love them the same way. Do you see?”(ch. 27)
The jolt provided by the intervention of the unexpected can radicallyalter an existing structure, may in fact be required for such alteration.
This is a concept common to many of Dick’s stories, and one that can beseen in as early a piece as “The Variable Man”. The character aroundwhom this story centres is “A man from two centuries ago. ... And with aradically different Weltanschauung. No connection with our present
society. Not integrated along our lines at all.” The variable man is one
about whom no predictions can be made, and his presence “knocks
everything else out of phase.” He is the addition that forces thetransformation of a society, opening up new possibilities. As
representatives of the unpredictable or the absurd in human affairs,
aliens can fulfill a similar role. Thus they may manifest themselves tohumans as creatures of bizarre appearance, and often act without
discernible motives. As alien ships invade the solar system, theprotagonist of “Top Stand-By Job” muses that “you never can tell about
unhuman life forms – they’re unreliable.” The aliens temporarily knockout Unicephalon 40-D, a “homeostatic problem-solving system” that has
been installed as U.S. President, thus unexpectedly catapulting its
redundant human stand-by into the position. The man later realizes thatmaking decisions gave a meaning to his life that is otherwise missing, andhe plans to get rid of the computer. “I mean, let’s face it; the aliens

36The Umbrella of Light
showed us how.” It is the coming of the unknown, the unexpected, theunforeseen that undermines existing order and confronts humans with
the need to adapt or perish.
Gino Molinari’s solution to the threat posed by the alien ’Starmen in Now
Wait for Last Year is to suffer acute illness in empathy with his fellow
human beings, and continually to “produce himself” existentially in amost literal manner: by employing the drug JJ-180, in conjunction with
its antidote, to pluck healthy versions of himself from alternative timestreams. “His whole psychology, his point of orientation, is to dabble withdeath and yet somehow surmount it.” (ch. 12) Similarly, Eric Sweetscent,the doctor sent to cure Molinari’s illnesses, must instead face a crisis of
his own, for he has been addicted to JJ-180 by his wife, Kathy. Thus thebreakdown of his marriage, which destroys the secure foundations of his
life, is reflected by the effect of the drug, which casts him adrift in time.
With his objective continuum destroyed, he must save himself in thesubjectivity of alternative time-streams. While gaining the antidote to
JJ-180 he, like Molinari, literally rescues himself from the grip of the’Starmen. The antidote to JJ-180 represents the power to survive
existentially; by being able to see beyond the structures of everyday social
life and yet remain in control of one’s being, the individual overcomes
the threat of anomie. But there is a price to be paid for taking the drug:
Nothing within him remained untouched; it had all beendisfigured and even the antidote had not stopped this. Aslong as he lived he would never regain the purity of theoriginal organism.
(ch. 11)
The person who has been confronted with chaos cannot return to the old
unexamined life. He is trapped between anomic disintegration andartificial organization, and the only solution is to create a new humanorder based on authentic relations. 27 In relating to others empathetically
we at least temporarily transcend the existential predicament in which weotherwise find ourselves. At the end of Now Wait for Last Year, Eric
Sweetscent, on the verge of suicide, his wife irretrievably ill, rediscovers,in the actions of two crudely-built automated carts battling for survival ina dirty alley in Tijuana, his own will to survive, and to find joy in the
struggle for survival. Boarding an autonomic cab, he describes his wife’s
condition to the machine and seeks its advice on whether to stay with
her.

37

The Umbrella of Light“I can see what you mean, sir,” the cab broke in. “Itwould mean no other life for you beyond caring for her.”“That’s right,” Eric said.
“I’d stay with her,” the cab decided.
“Why?”“Because,” the cab said, “life is composed of reality
configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be tosay, I can’t endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely
special easier conditions.”“I think I agree,” Eric said after a time. “I think I will staywith her.”“God bless you, sir,” the cab said. “I can see that you’re agood man.”(ch. 14)
Women are unusually prominent in Dick’s stories – unusually prominent by the standards of the vast body of science fiction, at least. Not only
are they numerous, but they are more than matchstick characters; not a
few are talented or powerful, many are highly intelligent, and almost all
are fiercely independent. In light of this situation, relations between men
and women are never to be taken for granted – indeed, are often difficult,even desperate. We Can Build You is the outstanding example here: a taleof frustrated love and the need for authentic relations, it contains some of
Dick’s most poignant and effective writing.
Whatever the roles of particular women, however, the concept of woman
fulfills a larger role in the scheme of Dick’s fiction: in this context woman
symbolizes the source of human life and the potential for an authentic
community of being. To quote Dick: “As Spinoza pointed out so clearly,
each finite thing, each individual man, eventually perishes ... and his only
true consolation, as he perishes, as each society in fact perishes, is thisreturn to the mother, the woman, the Earth.” 28 “I am life,” Charlotte tells
Nick Appleton in Our Friends from Frolix 8. “I’m life and when you’rewith me, some of it rubs off on you.” (ch. 7) The Cosmic Puppets, an earlystory, and a fairly straightforward allegory of the struggle between goodand evil, form and chaos, quite clearly makes this connection between
woman and the earth, or life.
The struggle between form and chaos rages through all of Dick’s work.
Life is a function of organization; the vital, creative force is negentropic,
in opposition to the entropic tendencies of the universe at large.
Glimmung, the great superhuman, yet mortal, creature struggling to raisea sunken cathedral from beneath the sea in Galactic Pot-Healer, is38

The Umbrella of Lightsuggested by a couple of non-humans to be in some respects like Goethe’sFaust, himself struggling against a flood:“The flood is a symbol for everything that eats away
structures which living creatures have erected. The water
which has covered Heldscalla; the flood won out many
centuries ago, but now Glimmung is going to push it back.”(ch. 9)Glimmung’s eventual triumph, even if it cannot be permanent, reveals to
the creatures it has brought to aid it the value of struggle. As it says to thehero when it recruits him on Earth: “You have never been, Joe
Fernwright. You merely exist. To be is to do.” (ch. 5) And though thestruggle is never over in this world, there are always glimmerings of newworlds waiting, and prophets like Wilbur Mercer of Do Androids Dreamof Electric Sheep? to point the way, however ambiguously – if not in the
direction of salvation, then at least toward a kind of self-acceptance andthe hope of a new start, in this life or the next. For though corruption
touches all the works of humankind, and the body itself must
disintegrate, perhaps the idea underlying the outward form is permanent,
and we can all be reborn:
Christ, I hope so. Because in that case we all can meet again.
In, as in Winnie-the-Pooh, another part of the forest, where a
boy and his bear will always be playing . . . a category, hethought, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up
with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.
(Ubik, ch. 10)
The setting for Ubik is a world after death, a world of “half-life”, where
the entropic process manifests itself as a regression in time of material
constructs into earlier, less organized forms – i.e., a decrease in thenegentropy laboriously built up over time in human society. With
characteristic inventiveness Dick describes the devolution of Platonic
idea-objects, with everyday objects regressing, not into earlier, newer
versions of their particular selves or constituent materials, but into
previous versions of the universal archetypes of whole classes of objects –so that, for example, a television set may turn into an old radio playing a
pre-World-War-Two soap opera. Joe Chip finds his whole world
devolving in this manner, reverting from 1992 to 1939.
This half-life world can, like the Nazi-dominated world of The Man in
the High Castle, be seen as a metaphorically transformed version of our

39

The Umbrella of Lightown world. But whereas the alternative world envisaged with the aid of
the I Ching by Hawthorne Abendsen, novelist-within-a-novel, is not infact the world we know, but a slightly different one, brighter and morecomprehensible, the alternative world in Ubik – that in which Glen
Runciter is supposedly alive, and our world in imagined future form –proves eventually to be also a world of half-life. In both cases the reader’sworld is suggested to be less than complete. The ideal world in Ubik issymbolized by the substance of the same name; in a televisioncommercial a housewife says, “I came over to Ubik after trying weak,out-of-date reality supports. ...”
“Yes,” Runciter’s dark voice resumed, “by making use of themost advanced techniques of present-day science, thereversion of matter to earlier forms can be reversed, and at a
price any conapt owner can afford. Ubik is sold by leading
home-art stores throughout Earth. Do not take internally.
Keep away from open flame. Do not deviate from printed
procedural approaches as expressed on label. So look for it,
Joe. Don’t just sit there; go out and buy a can of Ubik andspray it all around you night and day.”(ch. 10)
Runciter, who imagines himself to inhabit the “real” world, is forced toadmit that he does not know what Ubik is or where it comes from. But it
is significant that despite its obvious divine quality, Ubik is ultimately
revealed to have been invented by Ella Runciter and other threatenedhalf-lifers “working together a long, long time. And there still isn’t verymuch of it available, as yet.” (ch. 16) Ubik represents negentropy andpoints toward a world of Platonic form, beyond time; yet it is a humanconstruct. Conversely, the dissociation of Glen Runciter’s world and Joe
Chip’s world is symptomatic of their divorce from reality, from themutually-reinforcing bonds of human association – as in the schizophrenic’s retreat into a private world.
. . . no wonder he’s autistic; no wonder he can’t communicate
with us. A view of the universe that partial – it isn’t even acomplete view of time. Because time also brings new things
into existence; it’s also the process of maturation and growth.
And evidently Manfred does not perceive time in that aspect.
(Martian Time-Slip, ch. 9)
Explicit reference to a Platonic realm is also made in Counter-Clock
World, after resurrection of the Anarch Thomas Peak, leader of a major

40

The Umbrella of Light
religious sect. Peak is said to have discovered that death and time areillusions, and that absolute reality is to be equated with God.
“Evil is simply a lesser reality, a ring farther from Him. It’s
the lack of absolute reality, not the presence of an evil deity.
… Eidos is form. Like Plato’s category – the absolute reality.
It exists; Plato was right. Eidos is imprinted on passive
matter; matter isn’t evil, it’s just inert, like clay. There’s ananti-eidos, too; a form-destroying factor. This is what people
experience as evil, the decay of form. But the anti-eidos is aneidolon, a delusion; once impressed, the form is eternal – it’s
just that it undergoes a constant evolution, so that we can’t
perceive the form. … The problem is one of perception; ourperception is limited because we have only partial views.”(ch. 20)
Dick does not always hesitate to postulate the possible existence of an evil
deity, but his correlation of form, or organization (with its connotationsof system and harmony), with good, and formlessness or chaos with evil,
is consistent. Although gods, in the sense of deities or super-beings,
appear in many forms in Dick’s work, it is as Light, Form, and Beauty in
the Platonic sense that the concept of God dominates or suffuses thesestories. In Plato’s allegory of the cave the realm of real objects (eternal
forms) exists outside, but it is only shadows, cast by an unseen source oflight onto the cave wall, that prisoners inside can see. Plato’s two realms
are not mutually exclusive, but fit together: our world is like a mirror
image or shadow cast by the ideal world, since our world is one of change
and transience, in contrast to the fixed, eternal world. And it is throughLove that the transitory, imperfect human world can aspire to this realmof eternal Good. The divinity of Lord Running Clan of Ganymede is,after all, it seems, not irrevocably beyond human nature, but only beyond
human nature as presently manifested.
“Ganymedeans possess what St. Paul called caritas ...
and remember, Paul said caritas was the greatest of all thevirtues.” She added, “The modern word for it would be
empathy, I guess.”(Clans of the Alphane Moon, ch. 4)

41

The Umbrella of Light

Empathy or love, the ability of human beings to interact in a meaningfulmanner, is the foundation on which the ideal world can be constructed.
“The word isn’t print – the word is build,” says one of the characters in“Pay for the Printer”. Here people have abdicated their positions as
productive members of human culture in favour of relying for goods on
creatures that produce, or “print”, copies of existing objects. But society
is breaking down as entropy and reduplication steadily reduce the world
to formlessness. The assertion that it is possible for humans to fashion
cups, knives, and clothing themselves is regarded with incredulity: “‘You
made this knife?’ Fergesson asked, dazed. ‘I can’t believe it. Where do you
start? You have to have tools to make this. It’s a paradox!’ His voice rosewith hysteria. ‘It isn’t possible!’”Dawes arranged three objects on the ash. The exquisite
Steuben glassware, his own crude wooden drinking cup andthe blob, the botched print the dying Biltong had attempted.
“This is the way it was,” he said, indicating the Steuben
cup. “Someday it’ll be that way again ... but we’re going up
the right way – the hard way – step by step, until we get backup there.” He carefully replaced the glassware back in its
metal box. “We’ll keep it – not to copy, but as a model, as agoal. You can’t grasp the difference now, but you will.”
The three cups represent, respectively, the ideal state that is to be aspired
to, the imperfect but improvable world of human initiative, and theforces of decay that dominate when humans abandon their creative

42

The Umbrella of Lightabilities. These three contrasting modes of being manifest themselves
throughout Dick’s work.
It should be noted, then, that the ideal, or Platonic, realm in Dick’s sense
is not given in the meaning of having been imposed from on high; rather,
it exists as a goal consciously set by humankind for itself. Out of theground of human association arise over time new cultural configurations,and today Dick sees us on the verge of another transformation: “Andnow, perhaps, what the Medieval pietas looked forward to: in the arms of
the Earth Mother, who still lives, the dead solar deity, her son, lies in aonce again silent return to the womb from which he came. ...what lies
ahead is new. ...the realization, the fulfillment, of the Medieval pieta, as aliving reality, our total environment, a living external environment asanimate as ourselves....” 29 The world uninformed with a vision of divine
animation is reduced to the level of the “merely” mechanical, but, when
informed, exhibits life and meaning at all levels, the mechanical included.
The concept of God is not to be confused with that of a transcendental
deity; it denotes instead the realization of the human potential throughthe creation of a better world – a dialectical movement whereby
humanity remakes itself and its environment in the process of becoming
reconciled to that environment. Dick’s position remains fundamentallyexistential, but not despairing: “Reality, to me, is not so much somethingthat you perceive, but something you make. You create it more rapidly
than it creates you. Man is the reality God created out of dust; God is thereality man creates continually out of his own passions, his own
determination.” 30 And so the symbolism of rebirth is everywhere in
Dick’s fiction, sometimes muted, sometimes calling attention to itself as
at the conclusion of Counter-Clock World:
And then, as he sat, he heard voices. He heard them frommany graves; he detected the growing into life of those below– some very close to it, some indistinct and far off. But all
moving in that direction. He heard them coming closer; thevoices became a babble.
(ch. 21)
Dick is concerned both with the individual’s relation to others and with
their relation to the universe. Human beings find themselves part of asocial reality that they construct among themselves, and a physical realitythat they confront as elements of the given physical universe. Humanperception of each of these realities is conditioned by the existence of the

43

The Umbrella of Lightother; but it is the power to act and interact that, though arising initiallyout of the given relation to the universe, ultimately determines theperception of the universe. For human beings reality is constructedsocially, and modified through social interaction or lack of it. The illusionof a rigid world, into which humans are simply thrust, contributing
nothing by unique creation, must be penetrated before it is possible toaspire to a better world. In The Unteleported Man a world that presents
itself through its propaganda to an unquestioning Earth populace as a
utopia is eventually unmasked as a fascist state, which must be defeatedin a long struggle before a truly better society can be established. At theend we are shown one of the newly awakened common people dreamingof the future, “But his awareness of the reality remained and ran parallelto the dream; he saw both at once and he put his arm around his wife andhugged her and was silent” – while the taxi carrying them “knew its way,
too. It, also, knew its task.” (ch. 9)
The quest for the new world, following as it does upon the destruction of
the old, taken-for-granted one, places Dick firmly within the apocalyptic
science fiction tradition, 31 though his vision tends to emphasize themetaphysics of inner experience to an unusual degree. Theology andmetaphysics infuse all areas of life in his stories, and his characters
discuss theological and metaphysical questions with a casualness andintensity generally reserved by people for last weekend’s football games.
So it should not surprise us to be presented in a prologue to The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch with a concise summation of Dick’s philosophy in the form of an interoffice audio-memo, which pronounces:
I mean, after all; you have to consider we’re only made out ofdust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t
forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad
beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally havefaith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with wecan make it. You get me?
As might be inferred from the tone of these stories, Dick gives us few
larger-than-life heroes. He says: “To me the great joy in writing a book is
showing some small person, some ordinary person doing something in a
moment of great valor, for which he would get nothing and which would
be unsung in the real world. The book, then, is the song about his valor.
You know, people think that the author wants to be immortal, to beremembered through his work. No. I want Mr. Tagomi from The Man in
the High Castle always to be remembered. My characters are composites
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The Umbrella of Lightof what I’ve actually seen people do, and the only way for them to beremembered is through my books.” 32 His heroes are relatively ordinary
folk, regardless of whether they can divine the future or possess telepathic
ability. The characters that populate Dick’s fantasies are everyday men
and women, together, adrift in an uncommon universe. How theysurvive, and what they make of their lives, depends to a very large degree
on how they relate to each other.
“The world of the future, to me, is not a place, but an event. A construct…in which there is no author and no readers but a great many charactersin search of a plot. Well, there is no plot. There is only themselves andwhat they do and say to each other, what they build to sustain all of them
individually and collectively, like a huge umbrella that lets in light andshuts out the darkness at the same instant. When the characters die, thenovel ends. And the book falls back into dust. Out of which it came. Or
back, like the dead Christ, into the arms of his warm, tender, grieving,
comprehending, loving mother. And a new cycle begins; from her he isreborn, and the story, or another story, perhaps different, even better,starts up. A story told by the characters to one another.” 33

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Notes1

See Heinlein’s guest editorial in Analog, January 1974.

C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, edited by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1967), p. 18.

2

Martin Green, Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry (London: Longmans,
1964), p. 127.

3

Willis E. McNelly and Leon E. Stover, eds., Above the Human Landscape(Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear, 1972), pp. 357–358.

4

5

See Darko Suvin, “Cognition and Estrangement: An Approach to SF Poetics”,
Foundation, No. 2, June 1972.

6

A brilliant fictional exploration of the ramifications of the relation between
human and alien is to be found in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris.

See C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).
7

Robert Plank, The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings (Springfield,
Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), p. 46.

8

R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books,1972), p. 47.

910

Ibid., p. 93.

11

Quoted in Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 50.

12Thomas S. Kuhn describes the formation and dissolution of scientific worldviews in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, while a provocative analysis of
the limitations of technocratic thinking can be found in Where the WastelandEnds, by Theodore Roszak.
13

See Julius Kagarlitski, “Realism and Fantasy”, in Thomas D. Clareson, ed.,
SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1971).

14

The six elements are: poetic quality, creation of secondary magical worlds,
multidimensionality, essential extravagance, spirit of carnival, mythic
dimension. See Jane Mobley, “Toward a Definition of Fantasy Fiction”,
Extrapolation, Vol. 15, No. 2, May 1974.

John Brunner, “The Work of Philip K. Dick”, New Worlds, No. 166, September
1966, p. 143.

15

46

Ursula K. Le Guin, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (Portland, Oregon:Pendragon Press, 1973), p. 27.

16

17

Personal correspondence.

18

Vertex Magazine, February 1974, p. 36.

Brian W. Aldiss, introduction to Charles L. Harness, The Paradox Men(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. v–vi.

19

20

SF Commentary, No. 1, January 1969, p. 48.

21

Quoted in “Profiles”, New Worlds, No. 89, December 1959.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970), p. 222.

22

23

Quoted from “The Android and the Human”, a speech delivered by Dick at
the University of British Columbia and at the Vancouver Science Fiction
Convention in February 1972, and published in SF Commentary, No. 31,
December 1972, and in Vector, No. 64, March-April 1973. This speech is of
considerable value to anyone interested in Dick’s views on life.

24

In Silverberg’s story androids are given bright-red skin to mark them off
clearly from normal humans. In Clifford D. Simak’s Time and Again each
android has its serial number tattooed on its forehead (a dehumanizing gesture
if ever there was one), while in J. T. McIntosh’s “Made in U.S.A.”, amusingly
enough, androids have this slogan stamped inside their decorative navels.
25

Stanislaw Lem, “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case – with Exceptions”,
SF Commentary, No. 35/36/37, July-Aug.-Sept. 1973, p. 26.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality(Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 51.

26

27

Steven Lukes writes: “Marx begins from the position that the independent or‘reified’ and determining character of social relationships and norms is precisely
what characterizes human ‘pre-history’ and will be abolished by therevolutionary transition to a ‘truly-human’ society, whereas Durkheim assumesthe ‘normality’ of social regulation, the lack of which leads to the morbid, selfdestructive state of ‘non-social’ or Hobbesian anarchy evident in unregulated
capitalism. Social constraint is for Marx a denial and for Durkheim a conditionof human freedom and self-realization.” See “Alienation and Anomie” in Peter
Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society: Third Series(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 142. While Dick places a great deal ofemphasis on the individual’s need for a secure social context, it seems clear that
he also maintains that such a context can only be one that is “truly human” andtherefore can only be achieved with considerable struggle.
28

Vancouver speech.

47

29

Vancouver speech.

30

Vancouver speech.

31David Ketterer writes: “The apocalyptic imagination may finally be defined interms of its philosophical preoccupation with that moment of juxtaposition andconsequent transformation or transfiguration when an old world of mind
discovers a believable new world of mind, which either nullifies and destroys theold system entirely or, less likely, makes it part of a larger design.” See New
Worlds for Old (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 13. Dick, however,
severely taxes Ketterer’s facile separation of the “believable” worlds ofapocalyptic literature from the “incredible” or “escapist” worlds of fantastic
literature.

32

Vertex Magazine, February 1974, p. 37.

33

Vancouver speech.

48