DISCovering Authors Modules Copyright © 1996, Gale Research

SOURCE: Patrick G. Hogan, Jr., "Philip K. Dick," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers, edited by David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer, Gale Research Inc.,

1981, pp. 134-40.

[In the following excerpt, Hogan presents a profile of Dick’s career and individual works.]

From Philip K. Dick’s first sale of a story entitled "Roog" to Anthony Boucher of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1952 and his first published story, "Beyond Lies the Wub" in Planet Stories in the same year (both collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick, 1977), his publishing career has followed a curious course. Of his some one hundred and ten short stories, twenty-eight were published in 1953 and another twenty-eight in 1954, but beginning with the appearance of Solar Lottery in 1955 he turned primarily to the novel. Although his Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, his peak period for novels was perhaps 1964 to 1969, during which time sixteen volumes were published. Although it is not uncommon for a writer to progress from shorter forms to longer ones and although there was a scattering of stories from 1963 to 1967, Dick’s career has sometimes proceeded intermittently with some periods of creative activity greater than others, as well as intervals of relative silence. Either the progression from the short story to the novel or the number and variety of his novels seems to have persuaded some science-fiction scholars that his short stories are lesser efforts. That opinion needs to be challenged, for some stories, such as "Autofac" (1955, collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick) and "Beyond Lies the Wub," to name but two, stand in a relationship to subsequent science-fiction writing not unlike that of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s much reprinted "A Martian Odyssey" (1934).

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in 1928, but he has lived most of his life in California in the San Francisco and Berkeley areas, one recent address being Fullerton. A longtime music lover, he worked while still in his teens as an announcer for a classical music program on station KSMO in 1947; he also operated a record store from 1948 to 1952. He attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 but dropped out because the required ROTC conflicted with his "anti-war convictions." In recent years he has frequently lectured on college campuses. In early 1975 he was invited to participate in a series of lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, organized by anthropologist Ted Polhemus, but was unable to attend because of illness; his contribution, "Man, Android and Machine," was printed in Science Fiction at Large (1976). Evidence of his varied interests is provided by his memberships in organizations ranging from the Animal Protection Institute to the Science Fiction Writers of America, his authorship of radio scripts for the Mutual Broadcasting System, his work in antiabortion efforts and drug rehabilitation, and his discussions about religion with the late Bishop James A. Pike. These interests were in part summarized in 1975 by Dick: "My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’ Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I’ve written about fascism and my fear of it." Proof of the depth of his concern with drug abuse is his dedication of A Scanner Darkly (1977) to some fifteen "comrades" who are either deceased or permanently damaged as a result of drug abuse. On occasion, Dick has published stories under the Pseudonym Richard Phillips, and in addition to his vast science-fiction canon he has written a mainstream novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975).

Typical of introductory comments about Dick are those which decry the efficacy of his usual methods of approach or those which bemoan the lack of systematic progression among his stories and novels. As Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin phrase it, "His work is not easy to discuss, since it does not fall neatly into a few books of exceptional achievement and a larger body of lesser works. All his books offer ideas, situations, and passages of considerable interest. None quite achieves that seamless perfection of form that constitutes one kind of literary excellence." Two basic narrative situations recur in his work, and his existential treatment of the ideas or concepts implicit in these situations may leave the reader in a state of uncertainty and not uncommonly with a feeling of depression. One favorite plot device is that of alternate universes or parallel worlds, of which The Man in the High Castle is a prime example. He is also fascinated by what he characteristically calls simulacra, devices ranging from merely complex mechanical and electronic constructs to androids, and by the paradoxes created by their relationships to organic life, especially that of human beings. Typical examples are The Simulacra (1964), We Can Build You (1972), and the better-known Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

An excellent example of an early novel on the theme of alternate worlds is Eye in the Sky (1957), one of Dick’s most meaningful and satisfying works. In this novel the defective proton beam deflector of a bevatron (an installation that produces a six-billion-volt beam for investigating the properties of artificially generated cosmic rays) plummets eight people into a series of bizarre experiences. The eight include sightseers, the research director and the security chief of a nearby guided missile facility, the researcher’s wife (accused of communist leanings), and a black physicist whose race bars him from any more meaningful work than acting as the plant’s tour guide. These characters find themselves in a strange new dimension where each is in turn the creator or god of a universe reflecting his or her personal obsessions. Always hovering in the background are the issues of scientific research in instruments of death, real and imagined problems of national security, racism, and the questions raised by the Eye in the Sky, a godlike presence which may or may not be more powerful or durable than the fantastic "creative" powers exercised by the characters in their alternate realities. Additional worlds, however, such as those of an old right-wing veteran, a paranoid businesswoman, and a communist spy, are in the end no more frightening than the real world, in which a red scare can throw innocent people out of a job and racism can keep others from jobs. Jack Hamilton, the young electronics researcher who is the central character, finally abandons research in instruments of destruction for research in high-fidelity audio equipment, having learned a lesson that reveals the purpose behind Dick’s manipulations of realities: "I like to call it awakening conscience.... I’ve seen a lot of aspects of reality I didn’t realize existed. I’ve come out of this with an altered perspective. Maybe it takes a thing like this to break down the walls of the groove. If so, it makes the whole experience worth it."

Eye in the Sky introduces by way of the image of the Eye a question corollary to the problem of alternate worlds, a question developed further in Time Out of Joint (1959): who or what controls reality? The time is 1998 and a state of war exists between the One Happy Worlders on Earth, to whom the main characters Ragle Gumm and Victor Nielson owe allegiance, and the Lunatics, as Earth’s colonists on the Moon are called. Gumm’s special ability to exercise the Law of Probabilities to foresee what sites will be bombed by the Lunatics is endangered when his sympathies begin to shift to the other side, and he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. The One Happy Worlders contrive an environment which duplicates in detail the Earth of 1959. There Gumm acquires a reputation as a solver of newspaper puzzles, the purpose of which, unknown to him, is to locate the areas which may be bombed by the Lunatics in 1998 and to make possible the advance evacuation of the inhabitants. As both Gumm and Nielson begin to question the reality of the world they are supposed to be in, the objective evidence of reality and unreality tends to be associated with vehicles, which begin to acquire symbolic import. One example, as David Ketterer has pointed out, is a bus trip experienced by Nielson in which "the sides of the bus became transparent." As "the passengers fade away," the driver does not change, but he is "driving a hollow bus." Nielson later describes the experience as "a look at how things really are." The novel’s story line, concerning the war between the One Happy Worlders and the Lunatics, becomes secondary to the novel’s real purpose, which is to encourage the reader to toy with the idea that, as Ketterer phrases it, "The world around him may be artifically created by outside manipulators for unsuspected purposes."

Dick’s classic alternate world novel is The Man in the High Castle, which may more accurately be described as an alternate present novel. The story is set in a United States that lost World War II, with the West Coast, where most of the story takes place, dominated by Japan, the East occupied by Germany, and a semiautonomous area, the Rocky Mountain States, acting as a buffer between. The reader’s interest is gripped by Dick’s imaginative and detailed account of several characters who attempt to live and carry on personal and business activities in a pseudodemocracy on the West Coast under the supervision of Japanese officials such as Mr. Tagomi, who has a high position in the Trade Mission and who is interested in the artifacts of American popular culture. Of special importance are Robert Childan, an American tradesman who panders to Japanese tastes and mimics their manners and culture while he reveals a racist attitude sympathetic to the worst of Nazism, and Frank Frink, a Jewish-American craftsman who struggles to be an artist at the same time he tires to avoid a Nazi program of extraditing Jews and other unacceptable races from Japanese-controlled territory for extermination, a program already complete in German-controlled parts of the world. In addition, the novel contains something of the high intrigue of a spy thriller, revealing a Nazi plan to exterminate the Japanese in a surprise atomic attack, a counterplot of more moderate German officers to overthrow the war party, and a smaller-scale Nazi plot to assassinate the Man in the High Castle, the author of a popular but subversive science-fiction novel portraying an alternate present in which the United States won World War II.

Obviously, the novel is a prime example of the multiple levels for which Dick’s narratives have been praised. Several characters are more carefully drawn than is the usual practice in science-fiction novels, and there are even touches of humor to relieve the grimness, especially when some of the "artifacts" so prized by Japanese collectors turn out to be elaborately contrived fakes. Perhaps the most chilling effect of the novel, however, is how Dick reveals to the America of 1962, still sure of its international righteousness, how easily this nation would have surrendered its own culture under a Japanese occupation and how compatible American fears, prejudices, and desires were with Nazism. The alternate present again makes significant comments on the real one. The point here is Dick’s clarification of an important aspect of his own prolific contribution to science fiction in one of his relatively few essays, "Who Is an SF Writer?" (1974). Dick says of the science-fiction writer: "Flexibility is the key word here; it is creating multi verses, rather than a universe, that fascinates and drives him. ‘What if—’is always his starting premise.... He wants to see possibilities, not actualities." Dick goes on to stress the writer’s need to avoid both the extremes of escapism and of presumed realism; in brief, he is explaining the process of dealing with possibilities whichare based in realities but not absolutely controlled by them.

More recently, in his article "Man, Android and Machine" (1976), Dick provides additional insights into the genuine complexities of the dream universes and the dream-universe people or beings which are the settings and the characters of many of his stories and novels. In Dick’s cosmology entities that see man’s plight but offer no help coexist in the universe with beings or visions of beings which, if they do exist outside the dreams of men (including Dick), are trying to help mankind. The aid may be in man’s struggles against tyranny of various kinds, against continued pollution of the environment, and against his own unwillingness to seek some form of human fulfillment. Much of Dick’s fiction has been addressed to such questions, and the very variety of his fabulations (the term made popular by Robert Scholes for "That modern body of fictional works which ... either accepts or pretends to accept a cognitive responsibility to imagine what is not yet apparent or existent, and to examine this in some systematic way") is a partial indication of both the potentials and the dangers an author must face in dealing with these problems or with problems-yet-to-be.

Problems both present and future are the subjects of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), a Nebula Award nominee which again concerns multiple realities, in this instance as they are induced by hallucinogenic drugs such as Chew-Z and Can-D, the very names of which reveal a touch of acidic humor. A central character is Barney Mayerson, an executive of P.P.Layouts, "from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated." Perky Pat is a kind of adult Barbie Doll that is sold with various toy settings, costumes, and characters; these layouts, when contemplated under the influence of Can-D, an illegal hallucinogen, provide an escape from reality for people who are trying to survive in the nearly intolerable environments of the colonies on Mars, Venus, and Ganymede. As a result, Perky Pat "had conquered man as man at the same time conquered the planets of the Sol system," and the doll had become "the obsession of the colonists." But Palmer Eldritch, a wealthy industrialist, has brought back from Proxima Centauri a new and apparently superior drug, Chew-Z, which seems to make possible a "trip" of potentially unlimited duration into a self-created reality. As the new advertisements read, "God promises eternal life. We can deliver it."

It is doubtful, however, that Eldritch is still a human being. In a conversation between Barney Mayerson and a persona in the guise of Eldritch, the persona claims to have been cast out of a distant star system and to have assumed the appearance of Eldritch in order not only to introduce Chew-Z to human beings but also to perpetuate itself. On the other hand, "the creature residing in deep space which had taken the form of Palmer Eldritch bore some relationship to God." Chew-Z is in some ways like a divine gift since its realities are largely self-created and therefore carry with them—unlike the predigested, mass-market world of Perky Pat—the potential for self-discovery. Like God, Eldritch emerges as a dominating presence in all the realities inspired by his drug; more and more humanity seems made in his image as individuals increasingly exhibit his three stigmata—an artificial arm with interchangeable hands, enormous steel teeth, and artificial eyes with wide-angle lenses. What these may symbolize becomes tied up with larger questions in the novel about the nature of God and his relation to man. Near the end of the novel, Leo Bolero, Barney’s superior at P. P. Layouts, describes Eldritch’s stigmata as symbolic of "the evil, negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality, and despair that Eldritch brought back with him," but the novel contains abundant evidence of the presence of such a trinity before the return of Eldritch. The stigmata seem more likely to symbolize the ambiguous mixture of knowledge and creative and destructive power present in man, God, and the universe. Like the original Satan, Eldritch renews the awareness of that knowledge and power, but in doing so he also seems—again like Satan—to function as God’s instrument in giving man the capacity to do greater good as well as evil. The novel therefore ends with the ambiguous hope that reality may be shaped not by drugs but—and here the ambiguity of an artificial arm with interchangeable appendages is especially significant—by eye and hand, by tooth and claw.

From the time Dick wrote Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint to the publication of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, he produced some nine novels that developed not only themes associated with mysterious outside control of man and his activities but also themes such as time-travel, multiple dimensions, the logic and illogic of the laws of chance, simulacra, game theory, the effects of various drugs, and the nature of reality. Even Dick’s first novel, Solar Lottery, is thematically sophisticated; it introduces a future world whose societal and political forms are determined by Minimax, a kind of lottery of power and wealth. Implicit in humanity’s surrender to randomness is a terrible negation of morality. In the end there is some hope that men can once again become free to realize their dreams and aspirations—through personal initiative rather than chance.

Though Dick rarely varies his themes, he hit his stride as a novelist in the 1960s, and several of these works merit a glance. In Dr. Futurity (1960) a physician named Jim Parsons finds himself in the remote future among tribesmen who oblige him to play a role in which he must tamper with destiny. This novel was followed by The Man in the High Castle; The Game-Players of Titan (1963), a further development of game theory and other standard Dick themes; Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964); and The Penultimate Truth (1964). The last, another story of rulers and the ruled, is further evidence of Dick’s concern with fascism and oppression of any kind. In The Penultimate Truth, set in 2025 A.D., most people live in underground factories to construct robots that are being used in World War III. Actually, the robots are necessary for the maintenance of the rulers’ vast estates on the supposedly radioactive surface. The politicians do not mention to the underground populace that the war has been over for ten years; instead, they claim that enemy bacteria will cause the death of anyone who comes to the surface. Dick’s point seems to be the extent of mankind’s willingness to submit to oppression, whatever the time or circumstances.

In The Simulacra, as the title indicates, Dick gives emphasis to another of his major themes, that of mechanical, electronic, or other simulations of organic life. These simulacra range from insect-sized "commercials," futuristic advertising devices which invade one’s privacy, to der Alte, the "consort" of Nicole Thibodeaux, the latter having nominally ruled in the White House for almost a century, apparently without aging. In addition, there are devices such as "the living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system." This "Ganymedean life form did not experience pain and had not yet objected to being made over into a portion of an electronic system...." This novel, like Solar Lottery and The Penultimate Truth, concerns a power struggle. Among those caught up in it are the last practicing psychiatrist, Dr. Superb, and a famous psychokinetic pianist, Richard Kongrosian. Among other developments, Nicole turns out to be an imposter, an actress (thus one of the simulacra), and National Police Commissioner Pembroke tries to seize power. Nicole escapes, transported by Kongrosian’s developing talent to a community of chuppers, a radiation-spawned subrace which is either a genetic reversal or the prospect of a regressive development of the future. The real power seems to be in the hands of cartels such as the Karps; escape from conditions on Earth seems to be possible only in the vehicles available at Loony Luke’s "jalopy jungles" for those who can afford such transportation to Mars. In an ostensibly happy ending the story concludes with the army of the United States of Europe and America in temporary power, the plants of the Karps and the pharmaceutical cartel A. G. Chemie blown up, and the National Police overcome. But as so often in Dick, the ending is ambiguous, for the question of who is really in charge remains unanswered as fewer and fewer individuals—not to mention phenomena—can be identified as anything other than simulacra.

Simulacra figure prominently in two other important books of the late 1960s, Now Wait for Last Year (1966) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Residing in the former Gino Molinari, ruler of Earth, may be a robant, a kind of hybrid robot; the survival of Earth hinges on his problematic death. Meanwhile a major character named Eric Sweetscent (the names of Dick’s characters are often humorous) is faced with the personal problem of his relationship with his wife, who has received irreversible drug damage to the brain. He is advised at one point to stay with her "Because life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such." Like so many of Dick’s books, Now Wait for Last Year is an extended meditation on the nature of reality and on the necessary distinctions between the real and the merely simulated. Yet there is always an ambivalence about Dick’s attitude toward simulacra, as is seen in the sympathetic treatment of the persecuted androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In this novel, nominated for the Nebula Award in 1968, androids originally used in the colony worlds develop increasingly human traits; some escape to Earth and pose as human beings, although they are subject to destruction by bounty hunters. The central character is Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who slowly comes to a new opinion of androids. The problem posed is the proper evaluation of nonhuman life forms in an age when human life forms are becoming increasingly prized as the polluted Earth becomes increasingly barren. What, the book asks, is the real meaning of humanity? Earth has been depopulated by war and its attendant ills, and in order for there to be sufficient diversity the survivors have devised electric sheep and even tiny electric spiders. Yet however hungry for the presence of life forms they become, humans look upon the androids, for which they were originally responsible, as enemies. But if androids can dream—whether man provided them with that capability or whether it was independently developed—to what extent does that human trait equate them with real human beings? Dick has written a modern version of Frankenstein, for the ambivalence of man toward his own creation tends, in Dick’s novel as in Shelley’s, to travesty the divine creation. Although Ubik (1969) has its partisans, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is probably Dick’s most important work between The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and such recent works as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974, another novel involving drugs, alternate realities, a police state, and what has been called a "parody of dystopia") and A Scanner Darkly.

In A Scanner Darkly Dick arrives at what one reviewer has called his "enigmatic best." A detailed account of a future drug culture, it weaves a plot in which Fred, an undercover narcotics agent, and Robert Arctor, a user, are one and the same more-or-less human being until the irreversible brain damage caused by Substance D leaves only a lesser being called Bruce, who at the end of the story is working in a cornfield which conceals the "lovely little blue flowers" of Mors ontologica ("Death of the spirit. The identity. The essential nature."), the apparent source of Substance D. The central enigma of the novel is Dick’s insistence that "There is no moral to this novel," when the book so obviously attacks the drug culture; and the answer to this enigma sums up much of what Dick’s work has been all about. When a modern satirist like Dick attacks an aberration like the drug culture, he runs the risk of seeming to side with the forces of conventional morality which also attack it. In fact Dick attacks the manifold efforts to evade reality so common to the modern world, including those efforts sanctioned by society. Dick’s excursions into alternate realities have all along been minimally escapist, for he has always sought to adumbrate the possibilities for human beings to choose their own reality, to choose one more congenial than those favored by various dark forces all around them in society and government. In A Scanner Darkly he charges society with a particularly blighting form of escapism—and pointedly implicates governmental authorities along with addicts, who are always more victims than villains. Dick means to shock the bourgeois guardians of a culture in deadly stagnation; to do so he must make statements like "There is no moral to this novel," lest the bourgeois accept it and interpret it as some kind of endorsement of the values they hold sacred. A Scanner Darkly, along with Dick’s other works, is eminently didactic, but only on a plane far above the apprehension of the mindless forces of conformity and stagnation.

Dick’s works have been highly praised by his fellow writers of science fiction, ranging from Anthony Boucher to Harlan Ellison, from Michael Moorcock to Robert Silverberg. John Brunner, himself a master of parallel universes, has repeatedly called Dick "the most consistently brilliant science-fiction writer in the world." Such an estimate deserves serious consideration, but the ultimate evaluation will be that of the ever-increasing number of readers of science fiction. Dick is entitled to a better fate than, say, an Olaf Stapledon, who continues to be more praised than read. There is little doubt that Dick’s own fame will continue to grow.

Copyright © 1996, Gale Research