Philip K Dick Research Papers (original) (raw)

THE SPEECH METZ 1977
Guest of honor at the 1977 International Science Fiction Festival, the famously unpredictable American writer upheld his reputation. While his exceptional presence in Lorraine captured all the attention, his lecture, both mystical and predictive, disconcerted the audience.
Considered an author who had participated in the creation of a counter-culture since the sixties, French literature was no stranger to him, he recognized that he had been enormously influenced by Flaubert, Stendhal and Balzac, in particular.
The “Philip K. Dick lecture was very bizarre. It was a mystical speech that put people off. I saw the room empty gradually… ”indicates Phillipe Hupp, the organizer of the festival in 1977 (https://www.republicain-lorrain.fr/culture-loisirs/2020/09/23/le -speech-by-philip-k-dick-is-still-in-the-story)
Guest of honor at the International Festival of Science-Fiction and Imagination in Metz in September 1977, the reputedly unpredictable author “capsizes” his audience during a conference as brilliant as it is openly mystical and paranoid and sometimes in many ways prescient.
Between a relatively confidential but nevertheless historical moment, the author offers a vision of his orthogonal time through a reference to God and to technology as magic or as a prophecy of our world in a Matrix suggesting the place of man. , of the writer of his universe and of an environment that he thinks of as a world ultimately shaped by powers both so near and so far from human comprehension.
Orthogonal time.

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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Philosophy of Time, Virtual Worlds

Review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

- by Sandra Piñón Gonzaga
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- Religion, Mythology And Folklore, Sociology, Mythology

In Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, humanity invents androids to use them as slaves. The most updated version of these android slaves is called Nexus-6. Humanity’s aim is to invent androids that are more human than human: “The Nexus-6 android types surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence” (12). Therefore, the main question that the novel raises is: What it means to be human? Is it about cogito, empathy, collectivism or memories? In this paper, I will interrogate the concept of ‘human’ through post-humanist theories and discuss the novel’s social hierarchy by equating key terms with today’s main economic ideologies such as Capitalism and Marxism. The more technological improvement is made, the less the ethical life standards are paid attention and whole world is built upon no relation but a self-interested one. The self-interest lacked empathy and human-centered ideologies prioritized certain human beings.

- by Serkan Kasapoğlu
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- Technology, Marxism, Post-Human, Philip K Dick
- by Frank C Bertrand
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Bruce Gillespie, SF Commentary

This essay explores the representation of the human relationship to technology in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by incorporating Heidegger’s conception of technology in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” to argue against the claim that Dick’s novel protests against the dehumanizing effects of technology. The essay argues that the novel instead protests against the dehumanizing effects of individualism and demonstrates how technology can be used to reclaim the essence of humanity.

- by Christopher Sims
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- American Literature, Technology, Literature, Philip K Dick

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is one of Philip K. Dick's most acclaimed and striking novels. The narrative is set in an alternate reality where the Axis powers have won the Second World War and occupied the United States, dividing the country into three regions: the Nazi ruled greater Reich, the Pacific Japanese States and the neutral zone. As a result of this partition, Americans have become foreign in their own country. This article examines the master-slave dialectic and master-slave morality in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. The master-slave dialectic is a theory proposed by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel outlines a mutual relationship where he assigns specific roles to two parties that engage in a struggle for desire to achieve self-consciousness. In direct connection with the master-slave dialectic is Nietzsche's master-slave morality which was developed upon Hegel's original conception. The thinker describes a binary opposition where particular values have been ascribed to master and slave/servant morality to establish a sustainable and reciprocal relationship. This study aims to analyze Dick's The Man in the High Castle from a philosophical perspective, attempting to expose the master-slave dialectic and morality in the work of fiction and thus revealing the author's covert messages implied in the subtext of the novel, while at the same time comparing and contrasting these with the television adaptation.

- by Cenk TAN
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- Philosophy, Adaptation, Film Adaptation, Philip K Dick
- by Lívia Pinent
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- History, Philip K Dick, Science Fiction Film, Cinema Studies
- by William Yarrow
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, 20th Century American Literature
- by Timothy Shanahan
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- Philip K Dick, Film and Philosophy, Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

- by Nicola Zengiaro
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- History, Ontology, Ethics, Epistemology

In this article, I relate Wendell Berry’s “Preserving Wildness” (1987) to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), an unlikely pairing that brings to light the importance of upholding the nature-culture binary in ecocritical debates. By attending to the discourse of the wild, I argue that an environmental ethics grounded in a planetary conception of wilderness emerges in these writers. Ultimately, I contend that Berry and Dick underscore the urgency of preserving the wild—those parts of nature that cannot be made or subsumed by human culture—for the sake of human and other forms of life.

- by Aleksandra Hernandez
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- Wilderness (Environment), Environmental Ethics, Philip K Dick, Wendell Berry

hrough a compared analysis between the narrative of Philip K. Dick and the filmic imagery of Steven Spielberg, the present article explores the forms in which dominant ideas around surveillance and preventive justice are portrayed in Minority Report. The author examines the links between literary fiction and audiovisual representation, focusing on the notions of narrative and spectacularity in order to establish up to what point does the film adaptation interpret de innovative and challenging ideas that identify Dick's visionary science fiction writing.

- by Noemí Novell
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- Privacy, Political Science, Civil Rights, Film Adaptation

This is the published version of the paper of which I posted the typescript version here some time ago. The paper examines Philip K. Dick's novel in light of Heidegger's view of authenticity, including whether one can be "authentic" and... more

This paper demonstrates the question of utopia and dystopia, the issues of human conflicts with technology, deterioration of society and nature vis-à-vis fanciful technological worlds, dystopian dominance of technology over humans, and searching for redemption in Philip K. Dick’s novels. It also says about disadvantages of mechanization of life and high-technology as a disastrous advancement which leads to dystopian world. Technology is known as a double-edged sword and human usually thinks about the beneficial and utopia-making edge of it, but Dick’s novels show his fears of war, social failure, emerging of military technology and political struggles; and he portrays turning of life which is looking for a utopia into a dystopia on the other edge of this sword.

- by ALI MIRENAYAT and +1
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- Dystopian Literature, Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Utopian Literature
- by Eduardo Prado Cardoso
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- Totalitarianism, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K Dick, Second World War

To evaluate Ubik, written Philip K. Dick, in terms of postmodernism, this paper is going focus on the characters, their conflicts, experiences and on the general chains of events in the book. In addition to this, this paper is going to examine the main subjects such as reality, existence, perception. Two questions are central to this work : What is human? And, what is real? Deceptive in their simplicity, these questions reach into the core of human culture and our self-examination. Human beings have been puzzled by the nature of existence and intent on reaching an ultimate reality throughout the history; the inquiry is evident in the works of philosophers. In philisophical terms, at least three types of “reality” are prominent in Dick’s work. First is reality as an evolving, continually changing process without a set point. Because of its changing course, we cannot discern the world, yet, we can participate in it. Second is the view of reality as a completely unreachable Other, an entity that is unknown to human beings, and leaves us only with profound skepticism and no final knowledge.Third is a view of reality exists in a separete dimension from the quotidian, chronological world, as a Platonic form that can be discerned through insight, revelation, and even intellectual pursuit.

- by Ömer Bozkurt
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- Philip K Dick, Postmodernism, Postmodern Fiction, Postmodernism (Literature)
- by Frank C Bertrand
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, John Donne, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In analysing adaptation, the first rule is to look for equivalencies between the "original" and adapted text, the book represents an event this way and the film another, but this is only the beginning of the analysis. For the difference between the texts is not simply one of directorial or authorial choice, it is also determined by cultural value, technological changes and, most importantly, the nature of the medium itself. In this article, I take as my subject the adaptation of the short story Minority Report into film and use this to speculate on the limits of each medium. I do not limit my analysis to the adaptation of the story but to those concepts embedded in the story which have themselves been adapted into narrative form. This is central to the understanding of science fiction texts, which often speculate on the future through exploring the limits of scientific and philosophical concepts. The works of many science fiction authors are generated by the concept itself rather than character, plot or setting. In Minority Report, the concept is precognition and its use in law enforcement. The examination of how precognition is adapted into film and book is further complicated by the fact that science fiction itself functions as a form of precognition. There is a certain reflexivity involved in the representation of precognition, where we are shown images of the future within a medium that is itself creating a future world. In following the representation of precognition from one medium to another we also have cause to reflect upon the medium itself and how it delimits the precognition. Each medium develops different techniques for speculating upon and articulating a conception of the future. Film adapts the literary description of events into a visible world. In Minority Report, the broad meaning of precognition in the book is restricted to the concept of foreseeability, where the future is visualisable, rather than predicted or foretold. To highlight the cinematic function of the foreseeable, I adopt Henri Bergson's criticisms of the belief in a foreseeable future. Bergson's critique allows the experiential aspects of foreseeability-what does it mean to experience an actual future-to be contrasted with the structural features of cinematic narration. Through examining the experiential aspects of future prediction, the article broadens its scope to include an examination of the expressive limits of cinema, unlike logico-scientific examinations of precognition where the emphasis is generally on the

- by Paul Atkinson
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- Film Adaptation, Philip K Dick, Adaptation (Literature), Science Fiction Studies
- by Hansel Raphael
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- Dystopian Literature, Posthumanism, Philip K Dick, Science Fiction
- by James A Landrith
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Film, Science Fiction Studies

This essay looks at The Pale King's representation of three bureaucratic technologies—paper documents, punch cards and computers—and describes its intertextual relationships with John Barth's 1979 novel LETTERS and the films Blade Runner and The Terminator. The Pale King is “a portrait of a bureaucracy”, but it is also a novel which wrestles with the idea of self-reference. Its imitation of bureaucratic documents, by the use of cross-referencing, footnotes and the section symbol (§), means that its self-references constitute an unexpected kind of mimetic realism. Its representations of newer bureaucratic technologies—punch cards and computers—involve strategies for escaping narrative linearity borrowed from LETTERS: spatial organization of data, alphabetization and automation. The Pale King uses these bureaucratic textual strategies to explore the analogy between reflexivity in fiction and the Science Fiction trope of consciousness arising in artificial technologies, an analogy David Foster Wallace propos...

- by Simon de Bourcier
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- Philip K Dick, Postmodernism, David Foster Wallace, Metafiction
- by Frank C Bertrand
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology
- by Lapoujade David
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- Philosophy, Cybernetics, Philip K Dick, Science Fiction

THE METZ SPEECH 1977
Guest of honor at the 1977 International Science Fiction Festival, the famously unpredictable American writer upheld his reputation. While his exceptional presence in Lorraine captured all the attention, his lecture, both mystical and predictive, disconcerted the audience.
Considered an author who had participated in the creation of a counter-culture since the sixties, French literature was no stranger to him, he recognized that he had been enormously influenced by Flaubert, Stendhal and Balzac, in particular.
The “Philip K. Dick lecture was very bizarre. It was a mystical speech that put people off. I saw the room empty gradually… ”indicates Phillipe Hupp, the organizer of the festival in 1977 (https://www.republicain-lorrain.fr/culture-loisirs/2020/09/23/le -speech-by-philip-k-dick-is-still-in-the-story)
Guest of honor at the International Festival of Science-Fiction and Imagination in Metz in September 1977, the reputedly unpredictable author “capsizes” his audience during a conference as brilliant as it is openly mystical and paranoid and sometimes in many ways prescient.
Between a relatively confidential but nevertheless historical moment, the author offers a vision of his orthogonal time through a reference to God and to technology as magic or as a prophecy of our world in a Matrix suggesting the place of man. , of the writer of his universe and of an environment that he thinks of as a world ultimately shaped by powers both so near and so far from human comprehension.
Orthogonal time.

- by PATRICE BALLESTER
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, Philosophy of Time, Time Perception

In this world of increasing integration with technology, what does it mean to be human in a technological era? Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) are two artistic works that directly address this question. In this paper, I make use of affect theory to address the connection between empathy and memory in defining what is human. Using these films—along with Blade Runner’s source novel—I conclude that mainstream science fiction is increasingly comfortable with technological integration and less inclined to rigidly demarcate a human-nonhuman boundary.

A menos que se faça uma reflexão acerca dos critérios que se usam para considerar algo perceptível e, por extensão, existente no mundo, os textos de Philip Dick não farão, em princípio, sentido. Sua ontologia — talvez o melhor termo para o caso — não é aquela a que estamos acostumados e, assim, ou fazemos um esforço para reconstituir esse novo quadro (esforço que o autor jamais empreende) ou deixamos de lado suas obras como um emaranhado inconsistente de descrições, situações e personagens.

- by Vittorio Pastelli
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- Philip K Dick, Epistemología, Filosofía, Crítica literária

Among all Borges’ brilliant ideas, the most famous is perhaps the one around which the short story The Garden of Forking Paths is constructed; in this short story is described the structure of an imaginary novel in which there is no selection between alternative possibilities and every possible thing is actualized in a different universe line: in some cases, these lines can rejoin after splitting and then break up again. However, even if the “forking paths” seem to be inextricably linked to Borges’ short story, in this case we can say that the Argentinian writer, rather than inventing something new, has contributed in great measure to fix in the popular imagination what appears to be an ancient topos. The main goal of this essay is to analyze how this topos is adopted and developed in its own expressive potential by a consistent number of postmodernist writers.

Evolving Dickian Criticism: The Exegesis and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (Book Chapter)

- by Michael O'Brien
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- Critical Theory, Philosophy, English Literature, Philosophy Of Religion

An analysis on alternate histories/realities in five novels by Dick, i.e. The Cosmic Puppets, Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, The Simulacra and The Penultimate Truth, aiming at enhancing Carlo Pagetti's critical approach... more

- by Umberto Rossi
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction, American Novel, 20th Century American

Este artículo analiza tres novelas de Philip K Dick, correspondientes a su
última producción literaria en la década del 80: La transmigración de Timothy Archer (1982), La invasión divina (1981) y Valis (1981). A partir de la descripción de las novelas y de la reflexión en ellas planteada queda en descubierto el contenido filosófico y metafísico detrás de la obra de Dick. En esta investigación se abren interpretaciones acerca del carácter místico de su obra, que se fundan principalmente en dos influencias: por un lado el uso de la droga, y por otro, los influjos de la doctrina del gnosticismo y la filosofía griega. De ese modo, se pretender leer la obra de Philip K Dick más allá de los
límites del género de la ciencia ficción.

Ceramic objects play a surprisingly important role in Philip K. Dick’s fiction. Surprising, perhaps, because Dick is one of the late-twentieth century’s pre-eminent writers of science fiction, a genre often associated with futuristic scenarios involving hyper-advanced technology, whereas ceramic objects such as jugs and pots are the product of some of the earliest technology known to humankind, the first evidence of which dates back to 20,000 BC. Mundane objects such as pots and jugs also don’t fit well within the common perception of Dick’s work, renowned for its bizarre, paranoid and often haunting narratives featuring mental illness, telepathy, drug use, the manipulation of memory, androids, and time travel, set in a near or distant future both familiar and yet alien to our experience of the everyday. Moreover, in the film versions of his narratives, some of the more eccentric and anachronistic aspects of his fiction are not given their full due, such as the religion of Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which did not make it into the final version of Blade Runner, thereby making his fiction seem more homogenous than it is on the page. The role of ceramicists and their work in Dick’s writing has received some attention in the scholarly literature to this date, for example in Aaron Barlow’s 2005 study How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, And Philosophy in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Unlike Barlow, here I concentrate less on the question of how ceramic makers express the ethical character of Dick’s thought, and more on how the objects themselves function within the fictional worlds the author creates.

- by Anthony G. White
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- Theodor Adorno, Philip K Dick, Ceramics (Art History), Ernst Bloch
- by Jessica Wren Butler
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- American Literature, Emotion, English Literature, Technology

The paper presents a mutual permeation of, on the one hand, non-wakefulness in everyday life through, on the other hand, experiences of awakening through dreaming. It is explained with reference to two examples: (1) a short story called “Exhibit Piece” by the US-American science fiction author Philip K. Dick turned into the episode “Real Life” of the TV-series Electric Dreams, and (2) the much-commented dream of the “burning child” which Freud analyzes in chapter seven of "The Interpretation of Dreams". The author shows how reality, as that which is, results in a parallactic contortion of states of not-wakefulness on the level of our everyday consciousness. However, theses mental states rest, and this is decisive, on experiences of awakening through dreaming. The chiastic relationship of non-wakefulness during being awake and of awakening through dreaming is explained by Lacan with the help of the Aristotelian concepts of “tyche” and “automaton” and with reference to the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu. The paper shows how the psyche in her dream work can encounter truth values which, due to repression mechanisms in the waking state, maintain non-wakefulness in our everyday life.

- by Dominik Finkelde
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- Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Ontology, Epistemology

The journeys of the protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s novel Valis across different personalities, points in time, and realities become a penetrating exploration of the very fabric of the real through his heteromorphic cosmogony that can serve as a paradigm to understanding Dick’s literary-philosophical matrix. Whether a diagnosis or a profound insight into other realities, both insanity and schizophrenia in Valis develop into a means to diagnose the nature of reality by projecting the microcosm of an individual to the macrocosm of the entire universe and vice versa. Dick’s earlier major works of fiction are reflected in Valis as is Valis reflected in them in a way that shows the line between insanity and reason, and reality and hallucinations, is not only thin but often non-existent. Unlike many who consider themselves normal, Dick never recoiled from an opportunity to embark on an exploration of other realities, both in life and in his fiction, as is evident from the close and intimate connections among them.

- by Mladen Jakovljevic
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- Perception, Schizophrenia, Philip K Dick, Science Fiction

This essay examines Philip K. Dick’s often ignored and very early novel, _The Cosmic Puppets_. By studying the text’s representation of the human relationship to technology, I argue that much is revealed about Dick’s attitude toward technology, ontology, and the place of the individual in the emerging world of technoscience. Because Puppets is a fantasy novel, Dick is free to establish his moral and ideological stance on technology, humanity, and the gods in a way that his later and more fully explicated sf cannot. Technology and Ontology are central themes for Dick, and his engagement with these themes in a fantastic moral myth allows his message to move into the foreground. Understanding Puppets and its hero, Ted Barton, is a vital first step in understanding how Dick felt we should use technology, perceive reality, and
ontologically fight for truth.

- by Christopher Sims
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- Ontology, Technology, Zoroastrianism, Philip K Dick
- by David Robertson
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- Philip K Dick, Science Fiction

Lemma Mondi per il Dizionario dei temi letterari, UTET. Il termine ‘mondo’ (gr. ‘kosmos’; lat. ‘mundus’; fr. ‘monde’; ingl. ‘world’; ted. ‘Welt’) copre una vasta area semantica, della quale si ritengono significative per la presenza del tema le quattro accezioni riassunte di seguito: 1) ‘universo’, ovvero l’insieme dei vari pianeti (da cui l’idea di una ‘pluralità di mondi’); 2) una ‘parte o porzione geografica del nostro pianeta’ (in tale accezione freq. accompagnato da un aggettivo, v. ‘nuovo mondo’); 3) in accezione "filosofica" ad indicare una categoria concettuale (il ‘mondo intelligibile’; o anche l’‘uomo’, nell’accezione greca di ‘mikrokosmos’); 4) infine ampio è l’uso metaforico del termine, che si intreccia e si sovrappone frequentemente alle altre accezioni (si è perciò di regola evitato di considerarlo autonomamente).

- by Christian Rivoletti
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- Homer, Plato, Utopian Studies, Aldous Huxley
- by David Hyde
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- Religion, Popular Culture, Spirituality, Audience and Reception Studies
- by Andrew M Butler
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- SF History, Philip K Dick, Émmanuel Lévinas, Science Fiction