Philip K. Dick: Paranoid Android or Postmodern prophet (original) (raw)

'Philip K. Dick: Prophetic Healer or Alienated Psychotic?'

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and influential SF authors of the 20th century. However, Dick’s literary success did not come without major biographical pitfalls. While Dick published thirty-nine novels in his lifetime, many of which were ground-breaking, radical reimaginings of the SF genre (such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip) many were trashy, underdeveloped and rushed (Vulcan’s Hammer, Dr. Futurity, and Our Friends from Frolix 8). On closer inspection, this literary division corresponds closely to issues in Dick’s own personal life. Dick was a torn individual. On the one hand he was a literary-SF genius who pushed the boundaries of the genre by redefining postmodernism as a spiritual phenomenon (as in Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?). On the other hand, he was an alienated failure who had numerous mainstream works rejected for publication. Interestingly his moments of literary genius correspond to high points in his life when he was doing well with family, friends and spouses, and his trashy lows link closely to struggles with amphetamine abuse, the death of friends and psychotic episodes. This paper will address the fluctuating mental health of Philip K. Dick by deconstructing the narrative dynamics of A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. I will show how these texts represent forms of biographical self-exploration where Dick addresses the material causes of psychological ill-health in postmodernity (and himself), at the same time as generating transcendent salvific responses to fragmentation and alienation through creating his own postmodern theologies.

Perturbations in the Reality Fields: Logos, Gnosis, and Aletheia in Philip K. Dick's Late Works

Jesuits in Science Fiction: The Clash of Reason and Revelation on Other Worlds, 2022

Although they primarily occurred in February and March of 1974, science fiction author Philip K. Dick continued to receive what he variously characterized as transmissions of information, religious experiences, and audio/visual anomalies for the next several years. In addition to visions of abstract art, intense light, and geometric shapes, these experiences included intense Christian imagery and putative communications with early, persecuted Christians. Over the next eight years, Dick’s 2-3-74 experiences, including what he termed his “pink beam” events, motivated the creation of his massive treatise The Exegesis, the infamous eight-thousand-page exploration of philosophy, religion, and autobiography, and influenced his semi-autobiographical final novels Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick

2001

effective aspect of the Hebrew dabar that lies behind the Greek logos of the prologue to the Gospel of John. In response, I have argued that certain clues in TOJ indicate that Dick understood the logos not as the linear descendant of dabar, but more in its sense as the hypostasis of the intelligible world, whose function is primarily akin to a vector through which revelatory information is communicated (see "X6yoC'). If this is correct, it would mean that Dick used logos in a way mirrored by a number of early Christian and Jewish dualistic philosophers and theologians. It also means that TOJ is in some ways an immediate precursor to MHC, and so ought to be considered as an early vehicle for the categories that would later find greater development, complexity, and consistency in that novel and in his later works. Despite its rough presentation in TOJ and the complete lack of a supporting philosophy, the "word" of this novel is one of the earliest explicit manifestations of a peculiarly Dickian way of interpreting events, a way that, with respect to his fiction and to his life, would reach its full flowering in the Zebra/VALIS phenomenon.'

Philip K. Dick's Unconventional Dystopias

Extrapolation, 2014

Since the earliest days of P. K. Dick scholarship the SFnal works of the Californian writer have been repeatedly labelled "dystopian," even though such a categorization sounded more like a critical commonplace than the result of a painstaking and detailed analysis of his oeuvre. This article focuses on one of the most important novels written by Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977), and a less celebrated one, Radio Free Albemuth (1985), as the most interesting examples of his dystopian imagination. While skeptical about the contention that Dick's SF is mostly dystopian (as dystopia theories help us to tell the difference between dystopian and pessimistic narratives), these two novels show that their author reinterpreted the dystopian tradition stemming from Huxley, Orwell, and Zamjatin in a most original way through the figure of the informant, which becomes central both in Scanner and Albemuth, and constitutes one more embodiment of the characteristically Dickian split subjectivity. He couldn't say what grievous chain of circumstances led from the innocuous genetic novelty to another crushing totalitarian regime. (J. Lethem) There is a widespread feeling that Dick is basically a dystopianist, to put it in Lethem's terms. One of the earliest commentators, Darko Suvin, went so far as to declare that "up to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch the novels by Dick that are not primarily dystopian […] are better forgotten" ("The Opus" 7). It is a strong statement, as one can expect of Darko Suvin, but, even though Suvin is one of the top experts when it comes to utopian writings, his remark suffers from a certain vagueness. A more recent and more focused suggestion to read Dick's SF as dystopian is found in David Seed's compact introduction to the genre, where he sees Time Out of Joint (1959) as a novel in which Dick manages to apply his typical and disquieting ontological interrogation (usually summarized by the question "what is real/reality?") to the deconstruction of an already existing regime which, according to Seed, usually structures the plot of dystopian narratives (Seed 88-89). Besides, M. Keith Brooker has argued that the American 1950s, the decade in which Dick's apprenticeship as a professional writer took place, were

ON PHILIP K. DICK (1975, 8,060 words) (2002, 15,050 words)

2002

On Philip K. Dick: Philip K. Dick's Opus: Artifice as Refuge and Worldview (1975) Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating within the Later P.K. Dick (2002) D. Suvin, Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism, 2 Vols. Ed. Eric D. Smith. Oxford: P. Lang, 2021. chapter 9 The chronology of Dick’s publications, taking into account only his books, looks as follows:1 Though I rather enjoy some of Dick’s stories, from ‘The Preserving Machine’ (1953) and ‘Nanny’ (1955) to ‘Oh To Be a Blobel’ (1964), they are clearly secondary to his novels, where the themes of the most interesting stories are developed more fully. The novel format allows Dick to develop his peculiar strength of alternate-world creation by means of arresting characters counterposed to each other in cunningly wrought plots. Therefore, after 1956 Dick returned to writing notable stories only in his peak 1962–5 period; his later tries at forcing himself to write them are not too successful, e.g. the story in Dangerous Visions. In this chapter I shall concentrate on discussing his novels.