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Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age
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Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd iv
Philip K. Dick
Canonical Writer of the Digital Age
Lejla Kucukalic
New York London
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd v

First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
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marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kucukalic, Lejla.
Philip K. Dick : canonical writer of the digital age / by Lejla Kucukalic.
p. cm. — (Studies in major literary authors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-96242-1 (acid-free paper)
1. Dick, Philip K.—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Science fiction, American—
History and criticism. I. Title.
PS3554.I3Z74 2009
813.54—dc22 2008023501
ISBN10: 0-415-96242-0 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-88684-4 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-96242-1 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-88684-7 (ebk)
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd vi

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
1 Introduction: Philip K. Dick, Canonical Writer

of the Digital Age 1
2 Biography of a Writer 26
3 Martian Time Slip: “Interplanetary Greed and the Survival

of Otherness” 47
4 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: “Mechanical Universe

and Its Discontents” 69
5 A Maze of Death: “Life Is A Dream,

But Is It Better That Way?” 91
6 A Scanner Darkly: “The Reel Identity” 117
7 The Search for Truth as an Antidote for Suffering in Valis 132
Notes 149
Bibliography 169
Index 175
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd vii

Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd viii
Acknowledgments
I am an avid reader of acknowledgments, even in books whose contents I

only briefly scan. There is something attractive and satisfying in discover-
ing the variety of ways in which authors express their thanks; these brief
statements give the author a chance to break out of their solitude and
acknowledge the collective that supported them. So it is with pleasure that
I express my own thanks.
My gratitude goes to the wonderful group of scholars, editors, librar-
ians, friends, and family who have nurtured my work on this book and
made it possible. My advisor and role model, Professor J.A. Leo Lemay,
shared with me his vast knowledge of American Literature and of writ-
ing while I was working on my doctorate, the basis for this book. My
other valuable reader, Professor Lois Potter, ventured graciously into the
curious subject of science fiction and my even more curious treatment of
it, and stayed there with me, patiently providing her comments; Susan
Goodman and Richard Doyle offered their time and expertise to the
initial project. To this list of scholars I must add Darko Suvin, as I am
grateful to him for looking at some very early drafts of my work and
encouraging me to continue.
In the process of researching and writing, I received an enormous amount
of help from a number of librarians and curators. I am most grateful to
Linda Stein, University of Delaware Library, for her enthusiastic support of
my work on Philip K. Dick; to Sharon Perry, California State University,
Fullerton, Special Collections Library, for resourcefulness and efficiency
while I worked on the Philip K. Dick Papers; and the staff of Syracuse
University Special Collections Research Center for considerate assistance
while I worked with the Mercury Press papers and several other collections
and books there. Librarians at Indiana University’s Lilly Library and the
Huntington Library also provided beneficial assistance.
I am grateful to professor William E. Cain, editor of Routledge Stud-
ies in Major Literary Authors series for the interest in and review of my
manuscript, and mediation of my fi rst editor Max Novick upon whose ini-
tiative this book started to emerge; it ended up a better work because of the
patience and understanding of my fi nal editor, Erica C. Wetter.
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd ix

x Acknowledgments
A decoration of some sort is due to my husband Gerald Cloud for read-
ing and commenting on the entire book, as well as for keeping his patience
and humor before my impetuous ways. My sister Suzana and nephew Adi
are always in my heart, too, and always there with their love.
Unfortunately, I cannot mention all who have helped me, but all the
faults in this book, as the phrase goes, are indeed my own.
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd x

Preface
This book joins the attempts of scholars and writers to illuminate Phillip K.
Dick’s writing in the place of hasty, perhaps less informed analyses of the
author and his work. Many commentators have found it necessary to label
Dick, often unfavorably and more often uselessly. The unqualified portray-
als of the writer that have appeared in recent years occur particularly in the
mainstream journalism and magazines. David Gill’s essay, commenting on
Dick’s recent revival, reviews a “string of articles that announced Dick’s
arrival as a literary Golden Boy [only to] rehash the same accusations he
endured from critics for most of his life” (1); there, the interested reader can
fi nd further references to this type of journalism.1 I discuss some portrayals
of the author and the major events in Dick’s life in Chapter Two, “Biogra-
phy of a Writer.”
The bias against science fiction and its writers, and Philip K. Dick in
particular, reflects the need to continue changing the public and academic
perceptions about the science fiction genre, as its position in the literary
canon has been contested since the mid-twentieth century (before that,
science fiction was clearly placed in the pulp fiction category). In popular
culture, science fiction has been obfuscated by the misconceptions about
its scope and failed to gain recognition for its serious literary and intellec-
tual significance. Instead, literary science fiction became overwhelmed by
the misrepresentations in television, fi lm, and through social activities that
stem mostly from fantasy, not science fiction. 2 While the scope of this book
does not allow for a detailed discussion of science fiction in general, Chap-
ter One, “Philip K. Dick, Canonical Writer of the Digital Age,” discusses
Dick’s ambivalent relationship to the genre, evident both in his contribu-
tions of original ideas and plots and the authorial freedom he gained from
writing science fiction. Suffice it to say that commentaries of science fiction
writers on the possible scientific, social, and cultural developments—their
reflection on both the present and the future of advanced technological
society—has never been more relevant than today, when fiction and reality,
thanks to the scientific developments and emergence of digital industries,
increasingly overlap with one another.
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd xi

xii Preface
The structural and thematic patterns in Dick’s five novels discussed
here—Martian Time Slip (1964), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
(1968), A Maze of Death (1970), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and Valis
(1981)—show that his fiction has three major outlets: philosophical
inquiry, science-fictional extrapolation, and the critique of the contem-
porary world. The three earlier novels, Martian Time Slip, Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep, and A Maze of Death, belong to the science fic-
tion genre, while the later two are realistic novels (Valis actually making
fun of the science fiction devices). This grouping does not directly reflect
Dick’s development as a writer—he attempted realistic novels earlier in
his career and wrote a “straight” science fiction novel after Valis (Divine
Invasions 1981). In Chapter One, I show how Dick takes up ideas from
our historical cultural and collective knowledge, and synthesizes tradi-
tional with the scientific knowledge, popular culture, and facets of mod-
ern identity.
Chapters Three through Seven, each treat an individual novel, highlight-
ing the shaping elements and themes of each. Beyond being among Dick’s
most important novels, these works share clusters of overlapping themes.
Pondering the nature of reality, insidiousness of death on individual and
cosmic levels, and exploring human perceptions and identity, these nov-
els deal with issues such as living with artificial intelligence machines, the
nameless and fictionalized faces of corporate capitalism, the deterioration
of genuine human relationship in favor of appearances and profit, and the
impending hardships of space travel. The work of Philip K. Dick presented
here expresses both our cynicism and our concerns about the present and
the future and, a facet often forgotten about Dick’s fiction; they offer humor
and an inkling of hope about the future.
Chapter 3, “Interplanetary Greed and the Survival of Otherness” focuses
on the 1964 novel Martian Time Slip and the struggle of Manfred Steiner,
an autistic boy, who attempts to survive the harsh realities of his mental
condition, the difficult life on Mars, and the greed of the capitalist entre-
preneur Arnie Kott. I show how Dick’s representation of Manfred’s psyche
announces important changes in the attitudes toward autistic children
in 1960s America, as well as theoretical and philosophical connections
between Dick’s novel and the mid-century works of philosophers Michel
Foucault (1926–1984) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). By creating
the textual representation of an autistic mind, Dick represents the Other
in the text, together with the exhilarating experimental narration of “time
slips.” The thematic focus in Martian Time Slip is on the prevalence of
decay, the inevitability of entropy, the moral treatment of the disabled, and
the relationship between the objective world and its subjective representa-
tions in the mind (koinos/idios cosmos).
Chapter 4, “Mechanical Universe and Its Discontents” focuses on the
1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the existence of
artificial life in a world plagued by entropy. The narrative of Do Androids
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd xii

Preface xiii
repeatedly crosses the line between humans and androids, between arti-
ficial and organic, and between coldness and empathy, thus addressing
moral, philosophical, and scientific issues of human life when closely inter-
twined with machines and intelligent agents. The novel also is a shocking
illustration of a post-war environmental disaster on Earth and our loosing
struggle with entropy. I show the ways in which Dick’s novel was influenced
by the Hungarian-born mathematician and philosopher, Norbert Wiener
(1894–1964), the inventor of the science of cybernetics. Dick’s vision, at the
same time, includes the older, more rooted concepts of individual faith, of
spiritual experiences in the midst of adversity, and love for others.
Chapter 5, “Life Is A Dream, But Is It Better That Way?” examines A
Maze of Death (1970). The novel follows a group of colonists trapped on
an orbiting spaceship and dreaming their time away in the virtual world of
Delmak O; its themes revolve around the inaccessibility of truth, the episte-
mological nature of virtual reality, the inevitability of death, and the mean-
ing of salvation. A Maze is Dick’s meditation on the tenets of existentialist
philosophy, theology, and psychiatry and the position of human beings in a
limited existential realm. The novel’s connections are to mid-century exis-
tential thinkers, among them Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), Rollo May
(1901–1994), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).
I especially highlight the relationship between the theories and study cases
of existential psychiatry and A Maze of Death, emphasizing their common
concerns with the human subjectivity in the objective world.
Chapter 6, “The Reel Identity” presents a discussion of the 1977 novel A
Scanner Darkly and the struggles of its protagonist Bob Arctor/Fred, spin-
ning down the vortex of an identity crisis and brain damage caused by drug
use and by the predicament of having to spy on himself. For the setting of
this novel, Dick drew on his life in Southern California in the early 1970s,
also characterized by drug use. I show that, while Dick is unapologetic
about the negative consequences of drug abuse, he also records the lack of
cultural authenticity and interpersonal consideration in the world that his
characters inhabit, conditions that seem closely related to Dick’s experience
of contemporary Southern California. The chapter also briefly highlights
the connections between cultural theories of Jean Baudrillard on simula-
tion and Umberto Eco on hyperreality.
Chapter 7, “The Search for Truth as an Antidote for Suffering” focuses
on Dick’s magnum opus, the 1981 novel Valis. Including allusions to over
two hundred works, Valis is not only Dick’s attempt to account for the
religious experience that he had in 1974, but his attempt to say something
profound about “true reality.” In Valis, Dick tried to describe in words
the dimensions beyond everyday experience. The novel revisits most of the
sources of Dick’s work and suggests an intellectual erudition, preserved in
collective memory, as a solution to the problem of death.
I did not include at least two of Dick’s most well-known novels: The Man
in the High Castle (1962) and Dr. Bloodmoney (1965). I excluded the former
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd xiii

xiv Preface
because it has already received a fair amount of critical attention and I believe
that other Dick’s novels also need further study. The latter is, in my opinion,
not a successful novel, although many critics would disagree.
Dick established multiple connections between writers, periods, and
concepts—many of which are outlined in the following pages—thus par-
ticipating in and reinforcing the at times obscured American intellectual
history of the twentieth century and its shared pool of knowledge. Dick
believed in Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, which he described as a force
“at work in human history which evolves us upward through a dialectic
process toward greater and greater human freedom” (SL 5, 22). He found
this notion confi rmed also in Jung’s conception of collective conscious-
ness, another principle of shared knowledge among generations of human
beings. Dick alluded to a diverse range of writers and ideas, in order to
elucidate and clarify these multidisciplinary, historical connections into a
meaningful structure.
The most important aspect in Dick’s fictional and intellectual rendering
of the digital age is the focus on the humane strengths of his characters and
the possibility of improvement of their situations. The benevolence advo-
cated in his writing, often under the term “empathy,” is a central notion in
Dick’s oeuvre. When he considers the implication of the human-machine
messaging and communication theory, our experience of virtual reality,
or the (un)friendly devices that increasingly enter our daily interactions,
Dick consistently considers both the advanced scientific and the mundane
emotional aspects of technological change. Even when he does not delve
deep into his protagonists’ character profiles, Dick carefully considers
their predicament in the new situations that he extrapolates and imagines.
(“Extrapolation” here referring to the method is science fiction used by
writers to root their ideas in current, realistic trends and events and develop
them into their possible outcomes.)
As masterful as Dick was at creating exciting plots and engrossing
characters, he focused even more on the personal and emotional impact
of experience undergone by the ordinary human beings that are his main
characters. No matter how experimental or challenging his fiction, Dick
always kept human beings at the center of his discourse. Therefore, it is
not surprising that the character Horselover Fat/Philip Dick in Valis makes
contact with the “great Dutch humanist and scholar” Erasmus. “I’ve been
writing your stories and novels for you all these years,” Erasmus tells the
character named Phil Dick. Their dialogue underscores the most crucial
aspect of Dick’s position—humanism—a value that seems to be increas-
ingly forgotten in the emerging future.
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd xiv

1 Introduction
Philip K. Dick, Canonical Writer of
the Digital Age
PHILIP K. DICK’S UNUSUAL APPEAL
Having transformed from a relatively marginal writer who, early in his

career, was ashamed to say he wrote science fiction, Philip K. Dick today is
a literary figure of significant importance to artists, filmmakers, academ-
ics, scientists, and a vast readership. Dick’s forty-five published novels have
been translated into twenty-five languages, while in the United States, an
almost complete series of novels and stories have remained in print since his
death in 1982. In 2007, the Library of America recognized Dick’s achieve-
ment by bringing out four of his novels in a volume edited by the American
novelist Jonathan Lethem, a leading member of the current generation of
writers and a longtime fan. In addition to the nine movies, three biogra-
phies, and several bibliographies, twelve major scholarly works have been
published, together with hundreds of articles and interviews, a memoir
by Dick’s wife Anne Dick, and a special issue of Science Fiction Studies
(devoted exclusively to Dick and Ursula LeGuin, a fellow science fiction
great and Dick’s friend).
Dick’s fame is not, however, due to posthumous recognition; he was a
successful, popular, and influential science fiction writer during his life-
time.1 Writing only short stories for the fi rst three years of his career, Dick
sold them steadily to various science fiction and fantasy magazines: If, The
Worlds of Tomorrow, Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, and oth-
ers. He lived from his writing since the beginning of his career, although he
did not have success with publishing realistic, “mainstream” fiction, as he
called it. His skill, however, with imaginative plots, innovative characters,
and fast-paced action, combined with realistic dialogue and underlying
philosophical investigations, appealed to Dick’s contemporary editors and
readers as much as it attracts readers and film producers today. Even some
of his more philosophically oriented early stories, such as “Beyond Lies the
Wub” (1952) or “Roog” (1953), his fi rst sale, found their way into print
soon after they were written. Although he lived through several periods of
poverty and at times had qualms about writing science fiction, Dick’s only
occupation after 1950 was his writing. 2
Kucukalic 3rd pages.indd 1

2 Philip K. Dick
Today, Dick’s ideas have permeated popular culture, especially in mov-
ies. Three novels and seven stories have been turned into movies in the
past ten years, starting with the movie Blade Runner (1982), based on
the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968).3 Dick’s ideas and
concepts are disseminated in print and translated into movie images and
scenarios, even when his fiction is not a primary source. Movies such as
The Matrix (1999), Existenz (1999), and The 13th Floor (1999) share nar-
rative and thematic elements with each other and with Dick’s fiction: the
cognitive uncertainty of characters and the audience about which reality
is “real,” the layers of truth often created in conjunction with or solely by
machines. Characters in movies that are both direct and indirect adapta-
tions are immersed in an alternative universe, at “play” with their reality,
and fighting for their survival under circumstances made murky by external
powers—usually facing a murder mystery in the technological milieu—all
elements central to Dick’s works such as A Maze of Death, The Three Stig-
mata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and, to an extent, Flow
My Tears, the Policeman Said.4
While some adaptations are more successful in relating Dick’s intel-
lectually powerful concepts—Minority Report, for example, has inspired
reflection on preventive law and preventive crime penalties—others focus
primarily on the excitement of the conundrums in Dick’s fiction, such as
Paycheck and Total Recall, while some movies, as in the case of Blade
Runner, have taken a life of their own.5 In 1981, on the eve of the Blade
Runner release, Dick noted the price often paid in the conversion of the
science fiction prose to moving pictures, pointing out that in the making
science fiction films in Hollywood, “graphic, visual impact has replaced
story” (Shifting Realities 104). “What my story will become,” Dick noted
about Blade Runner, “is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown
up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very excit-
ing to watch” (Shifting Realities 104). 6 And Dick also suggested, in keep-
ing with one of his great philosophical preoccupations, that Hollywood
fabricated the veil of illusion with increasing sophistication: “Like the veil
of maya, your special effects department down there in Hollywood can
now simulate anything the mind can imagine . . . and you thought it was
all real” (Shifting Realities 103). Although humorous, even this comment
on movie production shows the centrality of Dick’s concern with fabricated
reality, an issue that is also one of the most relevant for our digital age: the
construction of reality by media, commerce, and politics.
REALITY
Critics agree that two questions are central to Dick’s work: what is human?
and, what is real?7 Deceptive in their simplicity, these questions reach into
the core of human culture and our self-examination. Human beings have

Introduction 3
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 phi-
losophers such as Parmenides, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Bergson, and White-
head, religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism, and in modern science
and literature.8 The impulse to determine the nature of reality is further
evident today in the attempt of physicists, for example, to formulate the
“theory of everything” and explain all the processes in the physical uni-
verse in a holistic, unified way. It is also found in the theories of experts in
digital culture, who speculate that technological “singularity” will occur
in the near future, in which the “information based technologies” will
“encompass all human knowledge and proficiency” (Kurzweil, 8).
In philosophical 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 com-
pletely unreachable Other, an entity that is unknown to human beings, and
leaves us only with profound skepticism and no fi nal knowledge. Third is a
view that reality exists in a separate dimension from the quotidian, chrono-
logical world, as a Platonic form that can be discerned through insight,
revelation, and even intellectual pursuit.
On a smaller scale the model of the reality as changing and indiscern-
ible appears in The Cosmic Puppets (1957), where protagonist Ted Burton
is caught in a physical maze, loosing also the notion of time during an
increasingly disorienting experience. On a larger scale, the maze appears in
A Maze of Death, as an ever changing world that colonists create in a vir-
tual reality.9 And while colonists in A Maze wake up from their situation,
in Valis, the reality in its entirety is described as an unfolding process. In
Valis, the narrator ponders: “There is no route out of the maze. The maze
shifts as you move through it, because it is alive” (Valis, 40). In represent-
ing reality as a living, indiscernible entity, Valis connects the concept of a
shifting maze with the concept of logos, understood as rational thought
that permeates the universe. In the novel he describes reality as the sentient
code of information unfolding in our world and being equivalent to the
world. “Perhaps the pre-Socratic philosophers were correct,” wrote Dick.
“The cosmos is one vast entity that thinks” (Shifting Realities 234). In con-
structing this view, Dick again followed various sources, from pre-Socratic
philosophers to the 20th century process philosophers. Because reality is
constantly evolving, “there can never be a fi nal statement of exact truth
about this changing object,” wrote one commentator of Plato studied by
Dick (Cornford, 24). Dick’s own concept, the Vast Living Intelligent Sys-
tem, VALIS, served him as a model of reality covering a range of meanings
and topics in the book, from environmental (Earth as a living ecosystem)
to personal (dealing with the inevitability of death).
Dick recognized the descriptions of reality as an ever-changing godlike
mind in many non-philosophical sources too. Working toward a worldview

4 Philip K. Dick
inclusive of oppositions, “both this and that,” as he put it, of a number of
dualities connected to his thinking, Dick, for example, quoted Dante and
Virgil in several of his letters. The excerpt from Book VI of the Aeneid
particularly struck him as important:
“ . . . First you must know that the heavens,

The earth, the watery plains of the sea,
The moon’s bright globe, the sun and the stars
Are all sustained by a spirit within,
For immanent Mind, flowing
Through all its parts and leavening its mass,
Makes the universe work . . . ” (SL 3, 287; 290; 292–294)
Poetic insights such as Virgil’s strengthened Dick’s belief that we live in

a world overflowing with signs and messages, a universe rich with intel-
ligence and meaning and the divine omnipresence. Virgil’s is the picture of
an ever-changing cosmic intelligence, the Mind, logos, or VALIS, that Dick
saw at work in the world, always keeping its flux. The picture also reveals
the religious dimension in Dick’s thought, the sense of God who rules all.
At the same time, the passage highlights Dick’s interest in cosmogonies in
general and his continuous interest in how other sources—poets, prophets,
scientists and many others—describe the world.
Aside from consulting classical sources, Dick recognized the outlines of
unfolding reality in an array of shared cultural meanings, accessed through
modern-day visual media and popular culture, meanings that potentially
formed a message. Although critical of Hollywood’s lack of substance, Dick
admired movies such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and George
Lucas’ Star Wars.10 Commenting on the latter, Dick wrote to critic Eugene
Warren: “God speaks to us from popular novels and fi lms; [Star Wars] is a
supreme example” (SL5, 103). Dick alluded to his own novel, Ubik (1969),
in the same context of mundane revelation through popular culture: in
Ubik, according to Dick, the Word of God “appear[s] in the garbage and
rubble and trash of TV commercials, and in vulgar ads in general” (SL5,
103). In a circular process of movies informing his fiction, which in turn
reflected the popular culture from which they came, Dick included works
such as Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) into his own
writing in Valis (1981).11 This circular process, however, announces his sec-
ond view of reality as something forever obscured from our knowledge.
A second view, often overlapping with Dick’s other two concepts, is the
view that reality is ultimately unknown to human beings, that we are cap-
tive to our subjective perception and unable to discern objective reality.
Several of Dick’s novels represent characters who are occluded from true
reality, “seeing darkly,” and seeking unsuccessfully to discover their true
identities or circumstances. As a consequence, Dick sometimes created
worlds, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where “everything

Introduction 5
is true” because nothing is true. Valis, too, is a prime example of Dick’s
incessant speculation on different proposals as to what is true. While this
view is relativist and could potentially allow for nihilism and fatalism, Dick
believed that a relativist universe could nurture human agency: according
to Dick, the “universe is an idea in the minds of men” that human beings
need to refashion into a recognizable and livable form (SL5 8). “I have
never had too high a regard for what is generally called “reality.” Reality,
to me, is not so much something you perceive, but something you make”
(Shifting Realities 205).
An overlapping form of this subjectivist view of reality, is contained in
Dick’s koinos/idios view of the world, following Heraclitus and existential
psychiatrists (further discussed in chapters three and four), as a private
world against the absolute world dual view, evident in Dick’s fiction as early
as 1964 in Martian Time Slip. In 1978 Dick maintained a similar view. He
wrote that realization that “each human being lives in a unique world, a
private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by
all other humans,” led him to contemplate the existence of multiple realities
(Shifting Realities 261).
The third view presents everyday experiential reality as deception, an illu-
sion created through an appearance of change, false memories, media, drugs,
or digital industry products, covering the stable and unalterable, true dimen-
sion of existence. This view appears in various versions in nearly all Dick’s
novels, including A Maze of Death and Valis, but also A Scanner Darkly ,
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Ubik.12 Thus, the false reality in A
Maze of Death is created by virtual reality simulation, in A Scanner Darkly
by a deception of police informants and the influence of drugs, and in Ubik
and Valis by undefined cosmic forces. By describing reality as consisting of
two layers, the real and unreal one, Dick followed an array of thinkers who
also imagined world in dualistic terms: Heraclitus, Plato, Kant and others.
Other twentieth century American writers, from T.S. Eliot and Hem-
ingway to J. D. Sallinger and Don DeLillo, have also considered the ques-
tion of reality and its rupture, recording the civilization’s movement from
the organized limits of traditional understanding into the fractured and
fragmented bits of reality. Out of this process, the problem of constructed
reality developed in the American culture, evident as the lack of genuine
experiences. When Holden Caulfield repeatedly called some of his friends
and the world around him “phony,” he did not only voice annoyance with
posturing of his acquaintances and images he sees in a magazine, but he also
announced a trend of cultural behavior: in a society primarily concerned
with appearances, the pretence was becoming an integral part of all soci-
etal activities, from culture to economy. Today, the tremendous production
of fakes—from counterfeit purses and Barbie dolls to cosmetic surgery—is
greatly on the rise; appearances have been extended not only into a form
of entertainment: the production of the real is today a prime concept and
concern that has permeated every facet of our lives.

6 Philip K. Dick
In a 1974 letter, Dick emphasized his “preoccupation with Reality vs.
Illusion” to one of his academic correspondents and explained his sense
“that somehow there are all sorts of hallucinatory illusions spun around
and thoroughly surrounding the real world,” a sense that we are occluded
from true reality and unaware of our actual state (SL 3, 180). In the same
period, Dick wrote to his wife Nancy about “a deforming mist” that “has
come between us and the beautiful world which God created,” citing “the
Hindu Veda religion” as a source for the idea of the veil of maya (SL 3,
186). In both cases, Dick suggested “the Master of the Lie” as the entity
that prevents human beings from seeing the truth by obscuring the benign
dimension of existence. Although, according to Dick, insight into the world
beyond the fake one is possible through divine revelation , the processes of
fabricating of reality may be impossible to break through (SL 3, 186–7).13
Dick’s narratives are central to the problem of fabrication because they
describe the process not only as a philosophical problem of doubling,
(although this is an important facet of his stories), or as a social and cultural
tendency, but also as a scientific, environmental, and moral issue. Thus,
in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the reader encounters artificial
intelligence—lab produced, independent android entities—that cannot be
ignored or alienated, while even the protagonists’ pets are sophisticated
ersatz fabrications, very similar to a product increasingly available for pur-
chase today.14 In Do Androids, reality is obscured by artificial constructs,
at the same time, reality is whatever we believe is true. In A Scanner Darkly,
a nearly mainstream novel, reality is obscured through incessant surveil-
lance, mass produced goods from food to edifices, and people, especially
government officials, who turn out not to be who they said they are.
In short, Dick’s works show both a continuous interest and a deep grasp
of the issue of authenticity and the production of non-authentic experiences
and behaviors. Relying on a range of philosophical, scientific, and theologi-
cal ideas, Dick presented his readers with a series of narrative worlds that
focus on the constructions of reality. He showed how reality is created on
several levels: individual (dealing with our subjective perceptions of real-
ity), virtual (constructed by media or human-computer interactions), and
institutional (realities controlled by the groups with power).15
In agreement with Dick’s third view of reality as “fake,” Umberto Eco
observed, in the late 1970s, the cultural tendency in the United States
to reproduce reality, seeking the comfort of sameness (57). In A Scanner
Darkly (1977), Dick will repeat Eco’s sentiments: “the land became plas-
tic,” ruminates Bob Arctor about Southern California. “It didn’t make any
difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonald
burger place over and over” (30–31). Eco defi ned the impulse to reproduce
history and reality as faithfully as possible as American hyperrealism, what
he describes as the attempt to both make imitative artifacts “more real”
and to bring disparate historical persons and periods together on display.
He cited examples of hyperrealism ranging from holographs and photore-

Introduction 7
alism, to the Knott’s Berry Farm, together with by now clichéd examples
of Las Vegas and Disneyland, evangelical television programs, and Animal
Kingdom. Dick, who for years lived close to Disneyland, shared some of
his examples of fakes in America in his essay “How to Build a Universe
That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978). When writing about an
increased trend toward fakeness, “the bombardment of pseudorealities”
that we have to endure, Dick noted that the world “is just a very large
version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simu-
lacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is
true” (Shifting Realities 263–4). But the “How to Build a Universe” essay
was not Dick’s fi rst reference to fakeness. Six years earlier he cast a mel-
ancholy Lincoln android as one of the protagonists in We Can Build You
(1972) and before that, used a fake toad as a crucial item in Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep (1968).
Today, the sense that our daily life is constructed and overwhelmed by
fakeness has left the realm of science fiction/literature and cultural theory,
two fields that announced the trend ahead of time, and fi nally entered a
mainstream public discourse. Although a central investigation in human
culture, the question, “what is real?” has been sidestepped in contemporary
society and is increasingly replaced with a shared sense that we are lacking
authentic experiences, that it is all fake. The veil of Maya, the Buddhist
symbol of a life spent without insight into true reality, a metaphor often
evoked by Dick, seems to have entered more explicitly into contemporary
life with a heavy impact. Our experiences are increasingly fabricated and
processed, from food and products advertised as “authentic” to pre-pack-
aged experiences: alleged “adventures” in the wilderness, “true” records of
life in reality TV shows, and scripted moments of celebration and mourn-
ing. The participants and viewers are aware that these events are scripted
and planned “authentic” moments and accept them as the reality.
The domination of the constructed and the fake has become so prevalent
that counteracting falsehood is becoming a priority of the new economy.
In Authenticity (2007) James Gilmore and Joseph Pinet make an extended
case that “the vitality of advanced economies will flow directly from the
individual and collective ability of businesses to master the discipline of
authenticity” (6). Reviewing a large number of areas in which our lives
have become coded, scripted, and streamlined, or simply overwhelmed
with a long list of fakes, from fantasy sports to trompe l’oeil household
fi xtures, Gilmore and Pinet argue that reality is “a scarce resource” and
authenticity a new business imperative (18; 40–42).
The authors cite a range of works that treat authenticity as the signifi-
cant issue in today’s world, but the problem has become so predominant
that it is easily observed in a culture overrun by fake products. Since 2005,
for example, under their “Fakes Are Never in Fashion” campaign, Harper’s
Bazaar is publishing articles that reveal illegal activities such as designer
knock-offs produced by child labor, explaining the production steps

8 Philip K. Dick
entailed in authentic luxury goods, and encouraging readers to buy only
real goods and report the fakes.
The concern for the real spans beyond economics and media to politics.
An essay contest featured in Vanity Fair in 2006 is a very good example
of the situation in some American political affairs. The contest posed the
following question: “in a nation defi ned by video games, reality TV, and
virtual friendships, with a White House that has perfected the art of poli-
tics as public relations, what is reality to Americans today? And did we
ever have a grasp of it?” (September 2006, 145). The post quoted an aide to
President Bush, declaring that as an “empire we create our own reality.”
The current situation of fakeness propagated for political reasons was
not foreign in Dick’s time. Dick criticized Nixon’s “political tyranny” that
had “arranged to live with the cruel power of the most arrogant sort, while
at the same time lying to us ceaselessly through all the channels of com-
munication” (Shifting Realities 219). Dick, however, was hopeful about
the aftermath: “that black growth that shunned light, shunned truth, and
destroyed anyone who told the truth—it shows what can flourish during
the long winter of the human race. But that winter began to end in the ver-
nal equinox of 1974” (Shifting Realities 219–220). Dick’s description of the
political deceits and lies, nevertheless seems more appropriate description
of the present moment than his description of the political breakthrough,
“the vernal equinox” that ushered the post-Nixon era.
After thirty years of writing, Dick conceded that he did not give a defi ni-
tive answer to the question regarding the nature of reality, yet, he stressed
that the problem “is a real one, not a mere intellectual game” (Shifting
Realities 261). Dick’s fiction and essays show that the construction of what
passes for real is a serious cultural and ideological question that merits
deep consideration, particularly the way the phenomenon has entered so
many aspects of our lives. In “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall
Apart Two Days Later” (1978), Dick noted that “today we live in a soci-
ety in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by govern-
ments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups” (Shifting
Realities 262). Through immersion in certain messages, Dick explained,
we are influenced to believe that a particular version of events is true,
that the authorities are trustworthy and reputable, that big corporations
are benevolent, etc., and we are therefore reassured in our passivity and
cooperation with the government or simply devolving as creative, authentic
human beings. As “fake data” increasingly enter our lives, we eventually
become “fake humans” who end up “peddling [fake realities] to other fake
humans” (Shifting Realities 263–4).
But although he criticized the trend of fakeness, in his novels Dick
also suggests that fake people and animals may be preferable to the com-
plete deadness of the universe (in Do Androids) or that virtual reality is
a humane release from the crew’s spaceship confi nement (in A Maze of
Death). Dick’s view of reality is not fi xed to a few immovable dichotomies,

Introduction 9
but shifts constantly in order to encompass the complexity of modern exis-
tence. If Greek Olympian myths, with their slow-changing pantheon, were
sufficient to describe the existence of ancient individuality, Dick’s ever-
shifting system well accounts for the contemporary American intellectual,
moral, and spiritual identities. Driven by mass culture, applied science,
and a global economy, the typical inhabitant of the United States has to
come to terms with new knowledge and perspectives on a daily basis; the
shifting reality must be recorded and examined by both the writer and the
reader and, sometimes, it must be broken.
In order to send a distress signal to readers, encouraging them to ques-
tion authority, to show a sign that ostensibly ordered and proper worlds are
not what they seem, Dick exposes in his novels a perfectly believable and
seemingly stable reality as constructed one that eventually bellies reader’s
expectations as it literally falls apart. These shifts in reality field can pos-
sibly prevent us from seeing the kernel of truth by their constant change;
however, the breaking down of realities and change ensures renewal from
the staid and entrenched systems: “Do not assume that order and stability
are always good, in a society or in a universe,” Dick commented (Shifting
Realities 262). While it is painful to accept change, he pointed out, “[it]
is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate
change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwardly” (262). Furthermore, the
ability to absorb change is what makes one an “authentic human being,”
a quality that Dick sought to defi ne as much as he dealt with the attempts
to defi ne reality.
HOW HUMANS PERCEIVE REALITY
By placing his characters in situations that challenge the status quo of their
worlds and worldviews, Dick renders our search for meaningful and genu-
ine experiences as a primary impulse in a human being, instead of empha-
sizing our difficulty in reaching the fi nal, defi nitive truths. The protagonists
of the novels discussed here, Rick Deckard, Jack Bohlen, J.R. Isidore, and
two double characters Bob Arctor/Fred, and Philip Dick/Horselover Fat,
are a few amongst many Dick’s protagonists whose emotional and cogni-
tive worlds are in dissipation. Each of their stories deeply questions the con-
cept of reality as a stable and truthful reflection of life. The mysterious and
the speculative, the odd and the philosophical in Dick’s stories, however,
do not simply reflect the obscurity of human insight, but our need to under-
stand the world around us and grasp our individual and collective fate in
the changing, technology-laden world. The attempts of these and many
other Dick’s characters to survive in the unstable futuristic but easily imag-
inable worlds permeated by media, machines, and unreliable perceptions
are often on the brink of failure, however, all these characters do survive
and the trickle of hope, as minute as it may be, remains with the survivor.

10 Philip K. Dick
The survival story, for Dick, is also a part of the creative process. In
“Pessimism in Science Fiction,” Dick insisted that doom stories were not
meaningful. Instead, he advised writers to “make the ruined world of ash
a premise ( . . . ) rather than winding up with it at the very end. And make
the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve
the problem of postwar survival” (Shifting Realities 55). On the one hand,
Dick compared the literary representations of total destruction of reality
with “taking pictures of coal bins at midnight,” as an infertile writer’s
effort. On the other hand, he was assured that “our present social con-
tinuum is disintegrating rapidly; if war doesn’t burst it apart, it obviously
will corrode away” (Shifting Realities 56).
If there was hope for our world, Dick perceived it in ordinary human
beings. His novels describe the struggle and survival of the powerless and
vulnerable characters, standing at the crossroads of technology and psy-
chological change, and persisting despite the strong internal and external
forces that trouble them. In one of his biographical materials, Dick wrote
that he wanted to express the fight against “any tyranny, such as drug
addiction or a police state or manipulative psychological techniques.” In
this process, it was “the ordinary citizen, without political or economic
power” who became “the hero of all [my] novels, and is [my] hero, too, my
hope for the future” (Shifting Realities 23).
The relationship between subjective, individual perceptions of the world
and the objective, natural reality, the interplay between these two dimen-
sions, shape many Dick’s narratives. While The Cosmic Puppets has a literal
dark and light side, in other novels Dick sometimes found a higher truth
or the world above the two worlds, such as in A Maze of Death, and Valis.
Most often, however, faced with the duality of the world, the dichotomies
of good-evil, real-unreal, me-other, etc., Dick’s plots and characters focus
on the categories and spaces in-between these polarities. In Ubik, for exam-
ple, not only do the preserved semi-living exist in the dimension that is nei-
ther death nor life, but one of them, a teenage semi-lifer Jory, infiltrates the
borders of that world, interfering others’ wavelengths and imposing himself
upon the world of the living too. The truth, for Dick, is a dynamic category,
an ever-changing, Heraclitean experience. The search is the crucial part
of the existence, while a static ownership of the truth probably cannot be
reached. Taking a more religious approach toward the issues of relativity
and subjectivity, Dick shows, through the famous “glitches” that affect
everything from mechanical devices to people’s quotidian worlds to the
very narrative of his novels, the imperfection of the world and its beings.
WHAT IS HUMAN? HUMANITY AND HUMANNESS
The second major question explored in Dick’s writing is: “what is human?”
In answering, Dick focused on the essential ontological aspects of human

Introduction 11
existence, which he approached from the viewpoints of philosophy, psychol-
ogy, religion, and science. The twentieth-century authors important to Dick,
such as theologian Paul Tillich, psychiatrist Rolo May, scientist Norbert Wie-
ner, and philosopher Emanuel Levinas have, regardless of their discipline,
one common interest: the human condition and the ethical issues of human
freedom, integrity, and responsibility. Dick’s study of the mechanisms of exis-
tence illustrates the relationship between the self and the non-self. Each of his
novels describes the basic process in which the “I”—often in the form of a
double character—creates meaning out of the world surrounding it. In Mar-
tian Time Slip, that “self,” is embodied in two unusual, marginal individuals,
an autistic child Manfred Steiner, and a latent schizophrenic Jack Bohlen,
who are trying to survive in the climate of repression; in A Maze of Death,
Dick explores the possibility of the collective self, achieved through a virtual
reality experience generated by a group of colonists; in Valis, the “self” is des-
perately trying to explain the world, by connecting to other historical figures
and intellectuals. Dick is interested in showing a range of human experience,
but the most important question in his consideration of human beings is this:
what qualifies one as an authentic human?
For Dick, the vital distinguishing parameter between a genuine and an
inauthentic human being was the contrast between “the authentic human”
and “the ‘android,’ the reflex machine posing as a living being” (Shifting
Realities 22). Dick used the metaphor of the machine to describe human
behavior unconcerned with the destinies of others, cold and disengaged
from the world. “A mental and moral island is not a man” Dick emphasized
in “Man, Android, and Machine” (Shifting Realities 212). Thus, the deceit-
ful and unsupportive human being qualifies as android, which in Dick’s
universe referred both to the actual humanoid robots, and to the human
beings who lacked affect. Those who let themselves be manipulated are
also androids, they exhibit “pseudohuman behavior” allowing themselves
to “become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated” (Shifting Reali-
ties 191). Dick explored the topic both before and after creating his cold but
intelligent androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In We Can
Build You (written in 1962), Dick placed a melancholy, caring Lincoln with
in opposition to the cold-hearted and manipulative human Pris Frauenzim-
mer who created him. In Martian Time Slip and A Scanner Darkly it is
human beings who appear cold, robot-like, and inhumane.
If he used the metaphor of the android to designate those human beings
unconcerned for others around them, Dick also saw an increasing conflux of
human and machine entities. “We hold now no pure categories of the living
versus the nonliving,” Dick stated in 1976, pointing out “the momentum of
the living toward reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into
animation by the mechanical” (Shifting Realities 212). As will be discussed
here, especially in Chapter 4, ideas from contemporary cybernetics, which
described how human beings and machines function in an analogous way,
informed Dick’s ideas about the human-machine interactions. His novels

12 Philip K. Dick
deal with these new forms of life, from Hoppy, a character from Dr. Blood-
money (1965), who Dick described as a “human football within a maze
of servo-assists” (212) to Tibor McMasters a “phocomelus” with artificial
limbs and gripping mechanisms in Deus Irae (1976) as well as the semi-living
in Ubik. Given today’s state of medical affairs in the use of synthetic materi-
als, prostheses, and implanted electronic devices to improve the functioning
of the human body, the trend toward the integration of human beings and
machines, aptly captured by Dick, is only likely to continue.16
In a related commentary on the identity of human beings in the age of
technology, Dick represents his characters as often being utterly unaware
about some crucial aspect of themselves. Protagonists from Jack Bohlen
to Horselover Fat believe reality to be made of immovable categories and
truths only to fi nd out that they are, at best, questionable reference points.
This idea has been expressed most emphatically in Dick’s stories such
as “Impostor” (1953) and “Electric Ant” (1969) in which characters are
shocked with the realization that they are, in fact, androids. In these sto-
ries, androids are not self-aware robots as in Do Androids Dream of Elec-
tric Sheep, but rather, human beings living in epistemological darkness.
Later in his fiction, Dick represented the element of hidden or unrecognized
knowledge of one’s own identity as a philosophical and spiritual issue, not
technological one. Both A Scanner Darkly and Valis, for example, feature
a split character whose suffering is connected to their suspicions that they
are not who they think they are.
The novels discussed here show Dick’s strong interest in psychology and
psychiatry and what these sciences explain about human beings. Thus,
in Do Androids, Dick describes the mental challenges of J.R. Isidore, a
character whose mental abilities are decreasing due to radioactive fall-
out, as he struggles to comprehend the world around him. In the study of
human-android interactions, Dick explores the role of emotion in human
experience, an important facet of his fiction and one of the prime movers
in Valis. In Martian Time Slip, he discusses autism, schizophrenia, hallu-
cinations, and suicidal impulses, while in A Maze of Death he forms char-
acters on the basis of psychiatric cases described in Rollo May’s anthology
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958). In A
Scanner Darkly, another theme of lasting interest to Dick, the right-brain,
left-brain hemisphere functioning, is used in the portrayal of an increas-
ingly disoriented protagonist. 17
Dick himself saw therapists at different points in his life; his portrayals
of psychologists are often satirical and scathing. In a letter to fellow writer
Terry Carr, Dick wrote that he saw “analysts all the time,” calling one of
them “Dr. Smallfrontallobe” (SL 1 87). In another letter to Carr, Dick admits
to both the need to attend therapy in order to ease his neurotic behaviors and
focus on his creative efforts and to hating analysts. “At least I don’t chalk
signs on fences ANALYST GO HOME,” he added (SL1, 89). His novels
portray a range of psychologists from Wade Frazer in A Maze of Death; Dr.

Introduction 13
Glaub in Martian Time Slip; the psych-technicians in A Scanner Darkly; and
a hilarious psych ward guard Maurice in Valis, to name just a few.
But if he had shown himself as tinged with madness and his characters
with a range of psychological states and malfunctions—and a detailed dis-
cussion of Dick’s application of psychiatric research in his writing can be
found here in Chapter 5—Dick also shows human beings as intrinsically
good and often as carrying a streak of the divine. Many characters have
essences of the divine in themselves, sometimes permanently and sometimes
through their good deeds. Thus, in Valis Horselover Fat believes that sev-
eral characters in the novel—Dr. Stone (another psychiatrist), Fat’s friend
Stephanie, the North Ward patient Debbie—are “a micro-form of God”
(Valis 52; 66). The unnamed black man in Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said helps General Felix Buckman in his moment of utter despair, by simply
talking to him (220–222); while in The Divine Invasion (1981) God liter-
ally enters the body of Rybys Rommey. Conversely, in A Maze of Death,
Tony Dunkelwelt meditates upon the impurity of himself and Susie Smart
and “the fractured light which she gave off” (118), recalling the Judeo-
Christian concept of shekinah, the dwelling of God and the Spirit of the
Lord, as God’s light present in each individual, that in this case is perceived
by Dunkelwelt as broken.
Even when he is highly critical of human beings, Dick is in the end hope-
ful about them. His characters are vulnerable and flawed creatures, that
are nevertheless intrinsically benevolent and worthy (Martian Time Slip is
a good example; see Chapter 3). Dick’s meditation, for example, in “Man,
Android, and Machine,” on the differences between the unfeeling android-
human and the benevolent human ends up focusing on the larger cosmic
“players,” the forces of good and evil that cause negative human behavior,
not humans themselves. What is hidden in the heart of our universe is “a
vicious slayer of men’s souls,” and if human beings behave in an evil way,
Dick is more likely to interpret their behavior as a “mask” of evil pulled
over the face of goodness, than the evil itself (Shifting Realities 213–214).
Describing his creative process, Dick expressed regret at having to leave
his narrative world, revealing the attachment to his characters and a writer
immersed in creation of his story:
When I’m finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world for-
ever—that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They
no longer move. ( . . . ) I promise myself: I will never again imagine
people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this . . . and,
secretly and cautiously, I begin another book (Shifting Realities 19–20).
Dick’s confession underlines the writer’s loneliness, as well as important

characteristics of his writing: his preoccupation with the humane and ordi-
nary, and his investment in the survival of his protagonists in the hostile
settings they inhabit. He wants his characters to thrive, to survive, and win

14 Philip K. Dick
against the odds; his attachment to the protagonists seems genuine. Dick’s
characters are not anachronistic or nostalgic individuals whose “tradi-
tional values” are wiped out by technology and change, nor are they über-
human or at least über-modern individuals, forming a new paradigm for
the new century. Rather, these characters are us, standing at the crossroads
of morality, religion, and lifestyles, with Dick’s novels opening vistas both
into the past and the future.
In his fiction, Dick recognized, understood, and repeatedly illustrated
the pressures that modern humans face in the modern age, from psycho-
logical and cognitive difficulties that have become one of the taboos in a
society thriving on “normalcy” and mediocre performance, to our mishaps
in the world of machines. (A humorous and often cited instance of the latter
is the case of the smug talking door in Ubik that refuses to let protagonist
Joe Chip out of his apartment without the obligatory payment for the use
of the doors). In providing this amalgam of traditional ideas and the imagi-
native and modern ones, Dick reiterates the basic, fundamental questions
about human beings and human psyche, thus brining the human ontology
into the literary and philosophical canon of the digital age.
WRITER AS AN AVANT-GARDE CULTURAL RECORDER
Before placing Dick within the age of “digital culture,” I want to offer a
brief defi nition of what digital culture entails.18 Digital age is the age of
information, the concept newly conceived in the 1940s as the ones and
zeroes of the binary code, an alternative to natural analogue signals.19
Following the advances in information processing and transmission, dig-
ital technologies emerged together with hardware for electronic compu-
tational machines, such as transistors and microchips (1947; 1958). The
computational power of machines improved greatly with the invention
of these integrated circuits to speed up their processes. The development
of programming, languages, and mathematical algorithms that enabled
machines to solve problems and deduce solutions lead to the emergence
of artificial intelligence in the 1950s. More sophisticated operating sys-
tems helped with the creation of the personal computer; in the 1980s,
the Internet, or the World Wide Web, emerged as the new information
infrastructure, creating not only virtual, but material and human net-
works, making networks a central organizational principle in society
and science. 20
Our culture, our behaviors and practices influenced by the advance-
ments in computation and information processing, has thus become digi-
tal. It is significant that many processes enabled by the technologies of the
digital age fall into the category of “fakes,” a concept that was so intellec-
tually intriguing to Dick. The early 21st century is the moment in the digi-
tal age when the borders between physical and virtual reality, the actual

Introduction 15
and the simulated self, and humans and machines are starting to blur—all
phenomena prominent in Dick’s narratives. Identity, another central Dick-
ian theme, came once gain under scrutiny as interactions in digital space
enabled both fabrications of the self (through avatars, virtual models, and
forums) and various breaches of privacy from identity theft to the transpar-
ency of personal information. Intelligent agents, learning machines, sophis-
ticated robots, even video-games and the processes associated with these
entities, now embedded in the culture, add to the changing landscape of
human relationships to other humans and the very nature of reality.
Increased use of simulations of data and processes for scientific purposes,
alterations of images by computer graphics, and our individual and collective
existence in the digital dimension is leading us into a changed perception of the
world. From a philosophical point of view, with the increased sophistication
and use of fabricated scenarios, notably for training soldiers through immer-
sion in war scenarios, we seem to be hastening the creation of a new realm
that will introduce another layer of obscurity into a reality already murky
with deceit. If we are to keep up with these changes, the art and literature
must follow and incorporate the human experience in to the digital age.21
Dick is a relevant and effective commentator on digital culture because
his view of reality reflects the changes wrought by technology: multiplying
the amount of information and the systems that expose us to it, our world
is filled with both increasing signals and noise. Parallel to this is Dick’s abil-
ity to account for diverse cultural signs and practices, bringing science and
culture together by way of his narratives.
On one hand, Dick recorded the relevant portion of American culture
during the mid- to late-twentieth century, providing a sometimes subtle but
steady commentary of cultural critique. His characters often belong to the
contemporary world, even if they are colonists on Mars (in Martian Time
Slip), android hunters (Do Androids Dream of Electris Sheep), or employees
of a psychic agency (in Ubik). All three novels, for example, feature famil-
iar domestic scenes of married couples with varying degree of closeness; Do
Androids and Martian Time Slip both portray a husband and wife growing
apart in the course of the story then reuniting in the end, while Ubik features a
man who lovingly confers with his deceased wife with the help of a “half-life”
technology. A Scanner Darkly is transparently set in 1970s Southern Califor-
nia, strewn with strip malls and hamburger joints, and Valis is a compendium
of cultural references, from TV programs and politics to electronic music. In
these works, and in novels such as Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1981),
California culture circa 1960–1980, emerges: the change from private to cor-
porate capitalism, the drug scene, anti-establishment political movements, the
changing and entrenched gender roles and family structures, and—perhaps
most important of all to Dick—the culture of complacency and consumerism,
are all recognizably reflected in Dick’s novels.
On the other hand, Dick took under consideration many advanced sci-
entific concepts and ideas that were unexplored by general audiences at the

16 Philip K. Dick
time his novels were written. One reason why Dick is increasingly meaning-
ful to the readers of his texts and the audiences of movies based on his texts
is the connection that he established between the intrinsic psychological
and cultural values—archetypal symbols, belief in fate or fateful living,
ethical and moral laws, religion, and the ‘new’ world of technology, the
laws of physics, as well as statistical mechanics and cybernetics, the alien-
ating forces of economy and “progress.” In his narratives, Dick defi nes our
quickly growing relationship with technology, describing in his novels cur-
rent scientific trends, from artificial intelligence and machines that respond
to emotional cues (Do Androids) and our experiments with virtual reality
(A Maze of Death), to the innovative scientific concepts of time and space
(Valis) and the changing awareness about the treatments needed for autism
(Martian Time Slip). His narratives describe the world that is radically
changed by technology, but with vulnerable human subjectivity at its cen-
ter; the existential loneliness and epistemological uncertainties sometimes
allayed only through humans’ interaction with machines.
It is no wonder that digital revolution, together with other contemporary
scientific advances, appealed to Dick’s sensibilities. New paradigms in the
way the physical world was described and processed in Shannon’s view of
information, Bergson’s view of time, or Ornstein’s view of psyche facili-
tated Dick’s constant search for the fuller, more advanced representation of
our existence and the world that we inhabit. In his fiction Dick captured the
issues that we face today: networked society, automated response phenom-
ena, and spatial representation of information—illustrated in A Maze; rep-
lication of genetic material, synthetic replacements for organic tissue, food,
and fabric in Do Androids and A Scanner; living with machine parts, as
cyborgs in Martian Time Slip (and Deus Irae); and radically changing our
views of the physical universe, in Valis. But more than merely extrapolating
scientific and cultural trends, Dick has concerned himself with a humanist
perspective on the digital age: what will happen to us in the midst of all
these changes?
THE CONTESTED FUTURE
Dick combines fundamental cosmological and ontological questions with

the plots and situations that increasingly apply to the experiences of the aver-
age Westerner. Sitting in front of her/his computer, trying to keep her job,
her identity, and her personal rights and freedoms in the times of increased
surveillance capabilities, decreased democratic dialogue, and increasingly
stronger power structures of corporate and political worlds, this character/
person is not a hero, transgressing the borders of the ordinary human expe-
rience. Dick’s protagonists often participate in their culture and society,
trying to carry the burden of everyday existence and responsibility, but
they also are facing failure, anxiety, and the hostilities of the world. The

Introduction 17
paralell between the author and his characters is striking. Pressures of com-
merce and commercialism, the invasive and impersonal nature of modern
business, and lessening of political freedoms today parallel the pressures
that Dick felt himself, from having to write saleable fiction to visits from
FBI agents seeking information about writers and activists in and around
Berkeley, California (Sutin 83; Rickman 239).
In an Introduction to the 1980 edition of his novel Dr. Bloodmoney, origi-
nally published in 1965, Dick points out that his predictions on the society’s
future were wrong (although he agreed with many science fiction writers that
the genre was not supposed to predict future), but adds that he “sensed an
accuracy in [the novel]—an accuracy about human beings and their power to
survive. ( . . . ) I am proud of the people in this novel. And, as I say, I would
like to number myself as one of them” (Shifting Realities, 83). Dick does
include himself in the list of people who inspired the characters, mentioned
as the casualties of the drug-taking lifestyle at the end of A Scanner Darkly, a
semi-autobiographical novel written in 1977: “for a while I myself was one of
these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play
instead of being grown up, and I was punished” (A Scanner Darkly, 276).
Dick’s ethos, his focus on common human traits and his humane interpreta-
tions of both strengths and weaknesses of his characters, combined with his
imaginative skills, and his inquiry into human ontology, is what makes a
lasting impression on generations of Dick’s readers.
Numerous fellow authors from older generation such as Stanislaw Lem,
Ursula LeGuin, and Roger Zelazny, to younger generation such as Jona-
than Lethem, Norman Spinrad and Kim Stanley Robinson have paid their
homage, too, to Dick’s skill and his dedication to writing. In his turn, Dick
described the community of science fiction writers as an antidote to and a
scarce reward for the solitude of writing and the fi nancial poverty in his
life (Shifting Realities 87). He considered Spinrad, Thomas Disch, Roger
Zelazny, Ted Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt and even Harlan Ellison and Robert
Heinlein, with whom he had some disagreements, friends, his “fraternity
of writers” (87). 22 Even though he did not attend many conferences, Dick
was a part of a broad circle of intellectuals and writers with whom he
exchanged ideas either in person or through his letters, including writers
John Brunner, LeGuin, and James Blish. And a contemporary writer today,
Rudy Rucker, stated in his Philip K. Dick Award acceptance speech: “I’d
like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the
same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-philosopher-SF-writer form, if you
like” (PKDS Newsletter #4).
Why, then, is Dick and his work so often viewed in the negative, simplis-
tic context of paranoia, critique of his prophetic impulses, or his uneven
style despite the wide acclaim and adulation of the author and his science
fiction?23 And why simplistic attitudes toward science fiction in general that
one witnesses so often in both popular and academic culture? Ignorance of
the genre plays an important part as the uninitiated fail to recognize the

18 Philip K. Dick
range of expression that is “science fiction” today. But the love-hate atti-
tude toward both the writer and the genre may also reflect our refusal to
look into the future with some degree of responsibility or foresight, beyond
the planning for our next acquisition or a career move. The importance
of the cooperative cultural examination of the future has never been more
urgent than in today’s global society, when contemplation of larger pat-
terns of development may indeed make the difference between sustained
survival and a planetary disaster.
Literature, and especially science fiction, play an important role in this
process of imagining the future as well as understanding of the present. In
her influential “psychological study of imagination,” Archetypal Patterns in
Poetry (1934), Maud Bodkin summed up the need to refine our views of real-
ity by entering a cycle of imaginative exchange between literature and cul-
ture, best achieved by using the non-representational, imaginative, sublime
language of literature. Bodkin argued that: “it is in the process of fantasy
that the contemplated characters of things are broken from their historical
setting and made available to express the needs and impulses of the experi-
encing mind” (7). Contrary to the bulk of contemporary literary criticism
that rarely discusses emotion and literature, Bodkin sought to describe and
identify emotional patterns and situations in different literary genres, devel-
oping parallels between fictional works and culture’s archetypes.
Bodkin’s method describes two aspects of literature’s significance that
are also evident in Dick’s fiction: fi rstly, Dick himself was interested in
observing emotions and the diapason of their manifestation in his char-
acters, and secondly, Dick drew on what Bodkin terms “the fantasy of
the community,” referring to the interactions of the collective imagination
that in turn influences the stories articulated by an author. When Bod-
kin describes the course of understanding a great play, such as “Hamlet,”
she talks about the work gaining its impact through recurring reading and
watching. “The powerful emotional impression,” becomes clarified “while
the play is read and recurred to again and again,” intertwined both with
“the reflective results of scholars and critics,” and “the emotional experi-
ence of one’s own life” (9). Bodkin, and Dick, too, believed in the potency
of the human imaginative past and our shared archetypal imagination,
however, Dick’s impact, his ahistoricity, is not turned toward the cultural
past or present only, but also toward the future.
The complexities underlying Dick’s fiction, from his reading of the cul-
tural and scientific trends of his time, to his contemplation of the lasting
philosophical and psychological questions, renders his influence not only
on the level of a fictional work unfolding in the reader’s mind on repeated
performance, but as something that unfolds in real time and actual world,
and that people end up seeing all around them. One of the most frequent
references to Philip Dick in articles that comment upon a range of present
day phenomena is that they closely resemble a Dick novel. The reality of the
digital age is best captured by science fiction, especially Dick’s science fic-

Introduction 19
tion. Future is our most contested field and Dick’s fiction serves as a space
in which the future is contemplated with relevance and prescience.
DICK’S SCIENCE FICTION
Although Dick almost gave up on science fiction and had a lifelong

ambition to be a “mainstream” writer, the genre was the best form of
expression for Dick’s idea-driven speculative fiction and his experimental
characterization and plots. Science fiction’s keen focus on societal and
cultural behaviors and examination of collective and individual ethics
enabled Dick to portray the lives of his characters from the perspective of
the need for change fought not in the extreme conditions of an isolated
heroic individual, but in the everyday life, under realistically described
systems of economy and politics. Although cautious in his statements,
Dick criticized governmental institutions, and, more openly, the media
and the technological developments of modern society that his characters
had to face.
In the process of writing science fiction Dick has expanded the genre,
contributing his particular approach to narration: not only extrapolat-
ing, but actually describing the current culture while refracting its pieces
into the future. The degree to which Dick used realistic elements (married
couples and marital affairs, small-time businesses and big corporations,
increasingly commercialized lifestyles, lonely suburban groups of friends
or individuals, the increasing sway of technology, and the mediocrity of
media) and the skill with which he merged the realistic with the invented
or possible elements (the married couple using “mood organs” for a quar-
rel, big corporations cooperating with United Nations to profit on Mars,
and TV personalities that both lack and transcend real life, because they
are either androids or completely given over to their public personas), are
elements that made Dick an exciting science fiction writer.
The unmistakable presence of the real in Dick’s most imaginative and
perceptive scenarios is part of his appeal and his challenge. When, for
example, in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Jason Taverner, a famous
TV personality, wakes up one day unable to prove his identity and is con-
sequently unable to move around through the strict government security
checkpoints (established to control rebellious student population), the
reader is only a step away from today’s celebrity culture (including the
unrealistic physical standards promoted by celebrities, echoed in Jason
Taverner’s status as a Six, an enhanced human being); we are reminded of
the increasingly complex identification systems and controls, from ID chips
to enter buildings to the notorious FBI application Carnivore, and strict
post 9/11 checkups.24
Dick’s science fiction is a constructed genre, intertwining scientific and
social speculation, philosophical ideas, realism, experimental fiction, and

20 Philip K. Dick
the author’s subjective ideologies. Dick used the genre of science fiction,
often misunderstood as unrealistic, to explore the kernel of our beliefs and
concepts about the world. He fictionalized the present moment as it could
be: not a projection into the future, but a reflection of an all-encompassing
present—working with facts that we are unable to process simultaneous to
their occurrence and speculating on their potentialities—thus examining
the unfolding directions of the now.
Brian Aldiss, in his sf history Trillion Year Spree, organizes the genre
into “high” and “low” cultural categories, citing writers such as Chapek,
Kafka, and Huxley as representative authors of “haute sf” (181), as opposed
to the “sweat-shop” fiction of sf pulps from the early 20th century (177).
At different points in his massive history, Aldiss marvels at the attempts of
sf writers in the 1970s and the 1980s to synthesize “such opposed modes.”
Philip Dick stands at the top of this trend, as a writer who brings together
the high and low, the esoteric and the mass, the entertaining and challeng-
ing. The critical reader, therefore, should not look at the ‘pulp elements’
in Dick’s fiction—sex with androids, the talking doors, the drug induced
episodes—as a shameful ‘slip’ on the part of a serious writer, but rather as a
synthesis of elements that reflect or may reflect our reality. “The anxiety to
press on with the story,” as Aldiss put it, the emphasis on plot characteristic
of pulp magazines is one of the many elements that survives the high/low
division in the form of irresistible pacing of a plot. “I love science fiction,
both to read it and to write it,” wrote Dick. It is “the magic that grips us”
(Shifting Realities 18–19).
Dick’s essays and letters reveal his attitudes toward science fiction as
a vehicle for creative production as well as the vehicle to describe every-
day reality. Dick understood the need for original and peculiar elements
in the imagined part of his science fiction, needed perhaps as an antidote
to reality. But unlike fantasy or fairy-tales, science fiction and Dick’s fic-
tion insist on the imminent threat of an unhappy end and they ask: what
is our responsibility in such a development? In the 1955 essay “Pessimism
in Science Fiction” Dick states: “to avoid the topic of war and cultural
retrogression, as some schools of science fiction writers and editors have
done, is unrealistic and downright irresponsible. Such pollyanna noises are
designed to increase circulation. They shouldn’t fool anybody who reads
newspapers.” (Shifting Realities 56).
At the center of Dick’s creative process is always the consideration of
ways in which human beings can and do survive in modern conditions, a
humanist gesture in the age of machines. It is true that, like Dick, many
other science fiction writers consider the nature of the position of human
beings in the universe of possible futures, often with pathos or concern
about modern day anxieties. The degree of removal, however, is often
larger and the setting less relevant to actuality. Science fiction narratives
often place their characters in abstract fictional worlds that are a separate
innovative artistic creation. Dick’s novels, although they, too, exists in the

Introduction 21
alternative universes, possess connections with the experiential world that
constantly allude back to the life of the reader or the life as it may be with
accuracy that is still relevant today.
SOURCES AND UNIVERSALS
Dick’s influence upon and ability to extrapolate from contemporary culture

stems not only from his visionary impulse, but comes as a result of his astute
erudition, his poring over literature from science, religion, cognitive psychol-
ogy, historical studies and writings, poetry, classical literature, philosophy,
biology, anthropology, and other sources. Books ranging from Pascal’s Pensées
to Morse Peckham’s history of nineteenth-century Europe, Beyond the Tragic
Vision were among the long list of sources that Dick read and incorporated
into his novels. He was influenced by “mystic religious poetry produced in
England” and authors such as John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and his favorite
Henry Vaughan (SL 1 217). Another favorite poet was James Stephens, whose
poetry Dick repeatedly copied and sent to his correspondents. Mentioning
Proust, Pound, Kafka, and Joyce, Dick commented: “I was not educated on SF
but on well-recognized serious writing by authors all over the world” (Shifting
Realities 14). His interest indeed extended into cultures beyond his own, an
affinity evident in a lifelong interest and learning about German writers and
philosophers such as Schiller, Goethe, Heine, and Brecht.25
Dick’s writing was influenced also by cosmological systems from various
historical periods, from Plato to Bergson, when he sought theoretical and
scientific support; and when he dealt with the quality of everyday Ameri-
can life and culture, Dick explored social sciences and humanities, and his
own analysis of contemporary society. He also studied several historical
periods: Nazism, American South and North, and The Thirty Years War
(1618–1648). Dick’s highly successful experiment in the novel Man in the
High Castle in which the outcome of the WW II is inverted and assigns
defeat to the Allies, shows Dick’s interest in history as malleable record of
events, something that can be altered in the narrative.
The books that influenced Dick, such as Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Con-
sciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Rollo May’s Existence:
A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, and Norbert Wiener’s
Cybernetics, have earned a central place in their respective disciplines. They
are pivotal books of important thinkers, a clear illustration of Dick’s involve-
ment with the main currents of intellectual thought in America. It is impor-
tant to note that Dick often anticipated relevant cultural trends, culminating
in some of these seminal books. A good example of Dick’s timeliness can be
found in Chapter 3 and the discussion of the relationship between Dick’s ideas
in Martian Time Slip and those of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas.
Informed by a wide range of works, Dick’s ideas in turn fueled his meta-
physical fiction: action unfolding parallel with the search for the essence

22 Philip K. Dick
of things, examining the fundamental principles of the universe. Thus, the
narration in Do Androids focuses as much on the nature of divinity and the
principles of belief as it does on the renegade androids; A Maze of Death
is about existential limitations and the nature of miracles as much as it is
about virtual reality; A Scanner Darkly treats the problem of identity and
memory as much as the problem of drug use. Within the constant search
for truth realized in his fiction, and with an array of intellectual views to
choose from, Dick took a skeptical position, and avoided committing to a
particular doctrine regarding reality or human experience.
When the historian Peckham, seeking a stable intellectual vantage point
for his study of the past, observed that “events and patterns are equally
reliable and equally unreliable” in a world that “we can never know but
only experience” (19), adding that “the world changes as the way we look
at it changes” (24)—all relativist premises of contemporary humanities
studies—Dick responded with evolving narratives: in A Maze of Death,
we encounter a group of characters constantly wondering (and wander-
ing) about their purpose or direction; in Do Androids, Rick Deckard con-
cludes, in true Descartian manner, that “everything that anybody has ever
thought” is true (227), under the blue painted sky and in the presence of
an alcoholic actor who is nevertheless a transcending, divine figure of Mer-
cer (214), while in A Scanner Darkly, a character “Arctor-Fred-Whatever-
Godknew” asks himself and the reader “What is identity? Where does the
act end? Nobody knows” (29).26 However, like Descartes himself, Dick
used the skeptical inquiry in order to discover, rather than fully deny the
irrefutable knowledge about the world and ourselves.
Dick today is important not only to writers, entertainers, and a range
of readers, but also to artists and cultural theorists. Artistic responses to
Dick’s fiction build upon his ideas in two major directions: artworks that
contemplate and represent the interplay between artificial and genuine
objects and artworks that contemplate and represent alternative physical
and spiritual dimensions. The fi rst group comments on the increased pres-
ence of artificial materials and substances in our daily life, our ability to
reproduce natural processes, and inability to distinguish the genuine and
the fake. A good example of this type of response is an exhibition that
featured a work of fifteen artists replicating flora and fauna, UnNaturally
(2004), and whose catalogue included a reprint of a Dick’s story “Piper in
the Woods,” describing a very limited, virtually illicit space afforded to
nature in a future world. The focus of artistic works in UnNaturally is on
the complicated and often negative relationship between Nature and its
replicated artifacts, whether they are fake birds in Disneyland (Dick) or
fake plants in corporate offices (curator Mary Kay Lombino).27
The second response is artistic representation of experiences and spaces
beyond the limited, ideologically forbidding dichotomies such as real-unreal,
dream-awake, abstract-concrete, privileged-marginalized. In 2006, Norde-
hake Gallery in Berlin mounted a group exhibition, featuring Christian

Introduction 23
Andersson’s work “Soft Drink Stand” (2001) projecting text from Dick’s
Time Out of Joint (1959) onto a wall, a work intended to offer the viewer
“a glimpse of a kind of third reality, a place that is neither really physical
nor knowable” (Gallery Nordehake). In another exhibition, Scott Teplin
creates a series of drawings entitled Kipple (2001), using Dick’s concept of
“the uncomfortable, unappealing leftovers, the dust, and decay of everyday
life” to create his artwork (Jessica Murray Projects). Summer Institute of
Film and Television (SIFT), of Canadian Screen Training Centre, based its
2002 exhibition concept on the passage from Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth.
Like Dick’s literature, the curators concluded, “contemporary art func-
tions as another treasury for complex intelligence” (Indepth Arts News). 28
Critic Aaron Schuster noted that: “we will soon see more shows organized
around this ‘minor’ genre [of science fiction], with Philip K. Dick figuring
as an essential reference” (1).
CONCLUSION
The place that Dick has earned as a “canonical writer of the digital age”
stems from the fact that he had something essential to say about his con-
temporary culture and that he is still saying something essential about our
culture today. Present in Dick’s works and their adaptations are narratives
that are becoming the modern cultural tropes: the protagonists navigate per-
plexing realms created by the human-machine interaction, trying and often
fighting to discern which, if any, is the entrance into a genuine human uni-
verse; these characters, like ourselves, are often disoriented by the automated
world around them and by hard to reach power hierarchies. The characters’
identities are compromised by the alienation in the world of constantly shift-
ing, brief human relationships and simulated events and behaviors.
At the same time, Dick presented his characters and stories with humor
and a glint of hope. “I remember especially his sense of humor,” said Dick’s
daughter Isa Dick-Hackett in a recent interview. 29 For his part, Dick stated
in 1980, recounting a dissipation of another marriage and sadness over
being away from his son Christopher: “It’s like the whole of reality: You
either laugh or—I guess fold and die” (Shifting Realities 89). His novels are
filled with hilarity, too frequent to recount here.
Dick has been both criticized and admired for his incessant search for
truth, his many speculations as to the fi nal answer of the mystery of human
life; his many plots, hypotheses, and reversals both exciting and exasperat-
ing to his contemporaries and readers. The main reason for this approach
is that Dick saw the evolution of truth, and of human beings together with
it, as the central action in life, whether the realm was political, spiritual,
or intellectual.
While the linear view of history, combined with the faith in progress has
resulted in characterization of our current circumstances as postmodern

24 Philip K. Dick
and posthuman, often understood as an entirely new era in human history,
Dick in his fiction creates an amalgam, and thus established continuity,
between traditional ideas and their existence in the face of the advanced sci-
entific discovery and intensifying economic, global, and cultural change.
When he talks of his dynamic entity Valis as “Zebra,” Dick explains
that “truth and life are the same, because truth is another name for real-
ity, and there is no life that is cut off from reality” (SL 5, 40). It is in this
unfolding of the human spirit that, according to Dick, we all make the
choice to participate or not. And, as he points of Sadassa Sylvia, a Valis-
related character that ended up as protagonist of Radio Free Albemuth, we
are all responsible for what we chose to believe in, to see as the truth. Dick
uses the possibility that only one answer to the nature of Zebra is possible
and acceptable to show how our beliefs are wrongfully prescribed to us by
those in power, especially the government. In the face of a possibility that
divine Zebra does not exist and that all signals received by humans were
coming merely from a satellite “as the world-tyrannical authorities believe,
THEN WE HAVE LOST AND THE TYRANNY HAS WON” (emphasis
author’s, SL 5, 40). Dick then describes Sadassa Sylvia’s willingness to stay
with that one truth that she believed in all along. “Incredibly,” continues
Dick, “Sadassa would rather believe that—have that be the truth—than to
cease to be, herself, the “carrier of the Truth’” (SL 5, 40). The search for
truth, according to Dick, was a life-long, unceasing process. Rather than to
consider the changeable point of view as morally inconsistent, Dick saw it
as the only way to try and understand our existence in the complex world
of nature, human psyche, and society; his skepticism was directed toward
a discovery.
The dynamics of Dick’s search for the truth are similar to the process
of canon formation. Literary canon and its borders have been widely dis-
cussed, especially amongst the 20th century scholars and critics, but its
defi nition generally refers to an authoritative list of works and authors con-
sidered highly influential and central to the history of literature. As such,
canon, although it involves institutionalized works and social values, is an
evolving category. Canon represents a changing, growing body of work
that is renewed and extended over time; often, works that are essential
and in some ways standard for the culture that canonizes them are added
into the pool. Philip K. Dick, as has been briefly recounted in this chapter,
is a canonical writer of the digital age because his fiction functions both
as a record and a reflexive medium for the culture of the digital age. Dick
addressed the central issues of Western culture in the 20th and 21st centu-
ries, showing us, at the same time, the challenges and possibilities of those
issues. He did so while engaging both popular and academic culture, his
readers and colleagues, artists and entertainers.
Dick is preoccupied with elemental issues, at the same time, he found the
way to not only combine them with the real-time events but also liberate
them from various ideologies and canons. In the digital age, fragmentation

Introduction 25
caused by cultural development and sheer volume of events, and fragmenta-
tion caused by the attempt to deconstruct the hierarchies of power, encour-
ages us to focus on details, to follow the maze-like structures of influence,
and to observe the world in sections. The idea of universal truths, or fun-
damentals, is often shifted into a cliché, a token reference to “human alien-
ation,” “the crisis of the subject,” and “technocracy.” By combining life’s
small events with larger forces, by placing ordinary characters in the midst
of unstable realities and fabricated universes, Dick makes the challenging
fact that “the future is now” both more exhilarating and more humanely
manageable. The complicity of the reader is nowhere as strong as in the
science fiction genre. The reader has to co-create the story because the text
often does not rely on conventions of reality or everyday experience, but
rather seeks to invert and shape those circumstances. In his narratives, Dick
encourages us to examine our notions and standard expectations from the
digital age in which we live.

2 Biography of a Writer
Attempts to characterize Philip K. Dick range from that of a paranoid, psy-

chotic individual and writer to the most important American post-WW II
author and philosopher. A few critics, like Carl Freedman and Eric Rabkin,
hold both views: Dick as the paranoid and masterful writer. Freedman dis-
cusses the author’s paranoia as a function of his literary and philosophical
viewpoint rather than a psychological trait, while Slusser’s understanding
of Dick as either paranoid or mad, points to the utilization of paranoia
“as an ever present potentiality for systematic thinking” (207) .1 Ursula Le
Guin and Daniel Fondanèche see Dick as a literary and cultural prophet; in
Europe he is a widely translated and influential voice. Others see Dick as a
mystic, or as an important Gnostic thinker.2
Disparate, often sensationalist portraits of Dick abound, many of them
taxing, and unsubstantiated.3 The writer Tim Powers summarizes the
complexity of Dick’s identity well: “Like Byron and Hemingway, Philip
K. Dick has an image—a sort of caricature, two dimensional but gaudy,
that springs to the minds of people who have heard of him but didn’t know
him” (“Foreword” x). Powers, who did know him, describes Dick as a per-
son utterly devoted to his writing.4
It would be easy to conclude that Philip K. Dick was a fusion of all these
personae. But, just like the dynamic ideas in his fiction, and like any real
person, Dick should not be carelessly labeled, but must be understood on
his own terms. The prominent elements in his life include his relationships
with women, his writing talent, his psychological anxieties, his faith, his
drug use, and his erudition. Despite the negative portrayals of Dick’s life
and behavior, he has positively influenced large numbers of people profes-
sionally as a writer, and privately as a parent, lover, and friend. His per-
sonality is as intriguing and fascinating as his work, and many testimonies
show that he was admired and loved by those close to him.
In his overview of Dick’s later writing, Darko Suvin cautions against
making simplified conclusions about Dick’s mental states: “while the civic
persona of Phil Dick may have hovered very near psychosis and was most
probably at moments deep within it, the control and clarity largely evi-
denced in his work disallow using this as a key to their interpretation: the

Biography of a Writer 27
writer’s persona, the implied author, was for all relevant purposes not psy-
chotic or crazy” (374). 5 Andrew Butler, in his analysis of Dick’s novel Lies
Inc., takes Suvin’s attitude one step further, urging the separation of Dick’s
“fictive creations” and his real life.6 If one chooses to read Dick’s fiction in
terms of his biography, the best approach, in my opinion, is a precise and
specific comparison of particular moments in Dick’s life to his fiction. Fol-
lowing such closely matched and carefully selected parallels will lead to a
better understanding of Dick’s work.
EARLY YEARS
Philip K. Dick was born December 16, 1928 in Chicago, twenty minutes
ahead of his twin sister Jane Charlotte. Parents Dorothy and Edgar Dick
had problems caring for the newborn babies. The twin sister died from
malnutrition, several weeks after her birth, on January 26, 1929. Her
death marked Philip Dick’s psyche and writing for life. In a 1970 letter
he described the results of a psychological test he once took: “the tester
in her report said that the strongest drive in me was to fi nd my twin sister
who died about a month after she and I were born” (SL 1: 315). In a 1974
interview with Paul Williams Dick expressed remorse over Jane Charlotte’s
death, showing that it negatively affected his relationship with his parents:
“I never forgave my parents for negligence like that. It’s unforgivable” (Wil-
liams, 59). Dick’s third wife Anne wrote that Dick confided: “He felt that
somehow he carried his twin sister inside of him” (17), indicating, perhaps,
that Dick shared a sense of guilt over his sister’s death, but certainly imply-
ing his connection to the lost twin.
Several critics have written about the meaning of twinhood and the lost
twin in Dick’s works. Samuel Umland and Patricia Warrick interpret the
character of Silvia in the short story “Upon the Dull Earth” with an empha-
sis on the lost twin experience (Umland 88), while biographers Rickman
and Sutin argue that Jane’s death was one of the most influential experi-
ences of Dick’s life, and one he returned to over and over. The twin motif
is most obviously developed in Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), in which the char-
acter Edie Keller carries an unborn twin brother inside of her and com-
municates with him, and in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)
where Police General Felix Buckman and his lesbian twin sister Alys have a
complex love-hate relationship. Neal Easterbrook, however, rejects Dick’s
“obsess[ion] with the spectre of his twin sister Jane” as a plausible way to
read Dick’s fiction, and more specifically his short story “Impostor” (23).
While certainly a significant event in his life, Jane’s death did not take an
obvious precedence over other events and persons in Dick’s life.
In 1933, Dick’s parents divorced. His father Edgar visited him regularly
for a year, until a custody battle forced mother and son to leave Berkeley
for Washington, D.C., in 1935. They returned to Berkeley in 1938, allowing

28 Philip K. Dick
intermittent encounters between father and son until the early ‘40s. After
that, Edgar Dick was transferred out of California by the Department of
Agriculture, leaving his son with a feeling of abandonment and loss (Sutin
25–6; 30–33). As an adolescent, Dick had to cope with a family breakup
and frequent illnesses. At the same time, Dick showed promise as a writer.
As early as 1938, the ten-year old Dick put out a newspaper called “The
Daily Dick” (Rickman 87) and another in 1943 called “The Truth,” filled
with science fiction and a tongue-in-cheek promise that “nothing but the
truth!” would be published in its pages (Sutin 37).
During his Berkeley high school years, 1943–47, Dick continued reading
and writing science fiction and fantasy. He saved clippings from his high
school newspaper, the Berk Gazette, featuring his stories, “The Magician’s
Box” and “The Slave Race”—both of which earned favorable comments
from the paper’s editor “Aunt Flo.”7 These early writings clearly announce
the author’s later themes and interests.8 In “The Magician’s Box,” the pro-
tagonist who has just seen a magician’s performance spends some time in
an inexplicably disorienting and dark realm that he had entered through
the magician’s box, while “The Slave Race” develops the motif of a man’s
god-like creation of machines, which over time become ready to produce
their own creations. Dick’s holographic notes to the newspaper clippings
seem critical of the editor, although in her commentary Aunt Flo praised
and encouraged his efforts.
After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his moth-
er’s house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art
Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my longtime love of music rose to the surface,
and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen
I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera” (“Self-Portrait” 13).
Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick’s lifelong
passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner’s Got-
terdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart’s Magic
Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. A classical music connois-
seur since high-school, “he adored Wagner, Schubert, and Bach,” according
to Anne Dick (33); “Phil listened to music all day long,” she wrote (43). His
second wife Kleo, who met Dick while listening to records in Art Music,
noted “the fi rst thing he ever gave me was a record of Bjoerling’s recording
of ‘Che Gelida Manina’ from La Boheme” (Rickman 231). Throughout his
life, Dick would own top-of-the-line stereo equipment and a large collec-
tion of classical music, alongside the popular albums of the time, from the
Beatles to the Grateful Dead.
In 1948, Dick was married for the fi rst of five times. At age 19, he wed
Jeanette Marlin, who asked for a divorce after only six months of mar-
riage, citing “extreme cruelty” (Rickman, 183). Second marriage was with
Kleo Apostolides (1950–1958), third with Anne Rubenstein (1959–1965),
fourth with Nancy Hackett (1966–1970), and fifth, with Tessa Busby
(1973–1976).9 Of his former wives, Anne Dick left the only memoir, Search

for Philip K. Dick, 1928–1982: A Memoir and Biography of the Science
Fiction Writer (1995), a warm personal portrait of the relationship’s ups
and downs. Another woman, Doris Elaine Sauter, Dick’s romantic interest
in the late 1970s and close friend into the 1980s, co-edited (with Gwen
Lee) and published a book of interviews with the author, What If Our
World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick (2000).
Both women, together with other wives and friends, served as character
models in Dick’s works. Anne Dick, for example is the source for Fay in
Confessions of a Crap Artist (w. 1959, p. 1975), and Doris Sauter served
as a model for the character Sheri in Valis. Dick’s letters, biographies, and
interviews with friends show him as a person who fell in love often, flirted
more often, and pursued his love interests.
After the dissolution of the fi rst marriage, in the fall of 1949, Dick
attended UC Berkeley for one semester. Dick’s biographers agree that his
reasons for dropping out were broader than his “antiwar convictions,” as
Dick put it (“Biographical Material” 23). The University had an obliga-
tory ROTC training, of which Dick disapproved, but he also seems to have
experienced both social and academic anxieties, feeling that classes did not
have pragmatic value (Rickman195–6) and undergoing physical discom-
fort from being in public (Sutin 62–3).10
Although leaving the school worried him, Dick was an avid learner and
reader. “One of the ways Phil Dick found to resist the high school authority
he found so oppressive was to read—and write,” wrote Dick’s fi rst biogra-
pher (Rickman 140). In late 1949, Dick wrote to Herb Hollis the manager
of the Art Music store: “At 21, I have been married and divorced, shave
every day, and read James Joyce & Herodotus’ “Persian Wars,” & the
“Anabasis” of Xenophon for entertainment” (SL 1: 17). Dick was probably
not exaggerating about his serious reading. His letters to fellow science
fiction writers, Anne Dick’s descriptions of his library, and other evidence
show broad learning and engagement with authors and ideas from many
periods and cultures.
The end of 1949 and the beginning of 1950 was a period of transition.
Dick’s letters to Hollis and to fellow employees in the Art Music store show
that he felt a change was necessary, and that he needed to find a radically dif-
ferent outlet. Although his job in the music store was enjoyable, Dick turned
to writing. Between 1947 and 1950, he partially drafted the novel The Earth-
shaker, which survives in a fragment, and completed an unpublished novel
Gather Yourselves Together, both written as realistic novels (Sutin 291).
ANTHONY BOUCHER
In 1949, Dick met Anthony Boucher (born William Anthony Parker White,
1911–1968), a prominent mystery and science fiction writer, critic, and edi-
tor. Boucher greatly influenced Dick’s early career and work, becoming

30 Philip K. Dick
his friend and literary mentor. He co-founded and edited The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1949 and 1958, while simultaneously
maintaining a career as a writer and critic of science fiction, mystery, and
detective fiction. With his vast talents, writing everything from short stories
to plays and radio-plays to numerous Sherlock Holmes episodes for NBC,
as well as years of reviewing and editing both mystery and science fiction,
Boucher left a deep mark on both fields.11 His ability to combine science
fiction and mystery in his writing is echoed in the intensity of Dick’s page-
turning prose, motivated by science fiction’s famous “what if?” question.
Boucher and Dick met at Art Music Store in Berkeley. The two discov-
ered that they shared a taste in classical music and a love of science fiction.
Dick wrote in his “Self Portrait” that Boucher made him feel that a person
can be both “mature and educated” and still love science fiction (14). Soon
after their encounter, during 1949–50, Dick attended a writing workshop
held by Boucher. In “Memories Found in A Bill from a Small Animal Vet,”
Dick’s homage to Boucher, he wrote that, for one dollar, Boucher “read
your whole manuscript. He told you how rotten it was, and you went away
and wrote something good” (25). In “Self Portrait,” Dick recalls the weekly
meetings and Boucher’s earnest, diligent efforts to read and respond to all
manuscripts, but also to launch a writer’s career. “To my surprise,” Dick
wrote, “he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy, which I had done; he
seemed to be weighing it in almost terms of economic worth” (14).
Remembering his friend, Dick also wrote: “Tony taught me to write, and
my fi rst sale was to him. I still can remember that nobody understood the
story but he, even after it was printed. It’s still in print, twenty-two years
later” (“Memories” 25). The story, titled “Roog,” depicted vaguely menac-
ing garbage collectors and a lonely dog who unsuccessfully battles them.
Dick felt that Boucher perhaps responded to an undefi ned fear that charac-
terizes the story: “Tony loved the universe and the universe frightened him,
and I think I know where his head was at” (“Memories” 24–26).
Inspired by Boucher’s encouragement, Dick started writing science fic-
tion stories intended for publication in 1951, and submitted them enthu-
siastically to various science-fiction and fantasy magazines, such as If ,
Imagination, and Fantasy and Science Fiction. He submitted at least 35
stories to the latter magazine, six of which were published in the 1951–
1954 period: “The Little Movement” (November 1952), “Roog” (Febru-
ary 1953), “The Preserving Machine” (June 1953), “Expendable” (July
1953), “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford” (January 1954), and
“The Father Thing” (December 1954). “By 1954 I was known as a short
story writer;” Dick wrote. “In June 1953 I had seven stories on the stand”
(“Notes,” 18).12 “Roog” was published with a two-year delay in The Mag-
azine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In February of 1953, Dick wrote
proudly to Boucher and his co-editor at The Magazine, Francis McComas:
“I’ve sold 28 yarns in all, now. In just 15 months” (SL 1, 29).

Although they rejected more stories than they accepted from him, McCo-
mas and Boucher supported Dick and recognized his talent. In 1952, they
wrote to the New York agent John Schaffner, asking him to take Dick as his
client. The letter recommended “this chap” heartily and described him as
“amazingly talented,” pointing out also that the editors did not make many
such recommendations.13 In the end, Dick became a client of the Scott Mer-
edith agency that represented him, except for a brief period in 1974, for the
rest of his life. Anne Dick wrote: “Phil was Anthony Boucher’s protégé”
(Search 52), while Sutin states that Boucher was one of the “two persons
who guided [Dick] through the solitude and uncertainties of a writer’s life”
in the early 1950s (67). Boucher himself was not particularly fi nancially
stable in this period, was not in very good health, and had his own family
to support, but he gallantly shepherded his younger colleague through the
challenges of a science fiction writing career.14
The Mercury Press records show that the stories unsatisfactory to edi-
tors Boucher and Francis J. McComas did not go to waste. Popular fic-
tion magazines published in the 1950s had each its own specialized area of
interest, focusing on fantasy, gadgets, horror, etc. Several of Dick’s stories
were published in these other magazines, Planet Stories and Fantasy Fic-
tion, for example. Dick’s fiction, which combined elements of everyday life
in small town and suburban America with the outlandish, speculative, and
technological tropes of traditional science fiction, appealed to readers who
recognized their own milieu in the quotidian details, but also allowed them
to explore the thrills of the uncanny and the unexplored.
Dick was excited about becoming a professional writer. “I knew then,”
wrote Dick, “that I would never give up trying to build my life around a
science fiction career” (“Self Portrait” 14). His success in the science fiction
field, however, did not translate into social respectability or financial suc-
cess. Science fiction was marginalized literature, and Dick’s autobiographical
writings and letters show his struggle with over-ambitious editorial interven-
tions and a meager income. In 1957, Dick wrote to Boucher, disappointed
with the severe cutting of his novel The Man Who Japed, so it could fit into
the format of an Ace double edition (SL 1: 35). Stories were freely revised too,
as in the case of Dick’s submissions to journal Galaxy when the editor altered
Dick’s stories for publication without prior consultation (Sutin 75).
The cutting of the stories was only a part of the problem. “Where the
real crying-on-shoulder comes in is at the money point,” wrote Dick in a
letter to Boucher. Dick’s wife Kleo recalled that she and her husband at the
time had to sneak into the theatre to watch a movie (Sutin 77). The story of
the couple having to buy horsemeat as their food in the Lucky Dog Pet Store
and being scorned, according to Dick, by the storeowner, has become leg-
endary.15 The difficult conditions, together with the social stigma attached
to the profession of writing science fiction, and Dick’s ambition to write
mainstream literature, caused a serious crisis early in his career.

32 Philip K. Dick
Boucher, with his support and advice, encouraged the struggling writer,
and his letters to Dick reveal a constructively critical, encouraging, and
kind friend. Publicly, he offered the same type of honest appraisal. In his
1957 “Introduction” to Dick’s Ace paperback collection The Variable Man
and Other Stories, Boucher himself pointed out that Dick was not only a
talented novelist but also a writer of short stories “appealing to (and sat-
isfying) every conceivable type of reader.” He commented on Dick’s “fer-
tile speculative mind” and “almost extravagant love of wild melodramatic
action,” concluding that “you’ll fi nd reflections of our own society in these
pictures of the future” (Boucher n.p.). The volume contained, aside from
the short novel of the title, four stories: “Second Variety,” “The Minority
Report,” “Autofac,” and “A World of Talent.” The editors touted them on
the book’s back cover: “Great Science Fiction by a Great Imagination.”
In the same year, in his June letters to Boucher, Dick complained of the
editing practices, pay rates, and the struggle to publish his mainstream work,
five novels at the time, circulated and unwanted by the agents (SL 1: 35).
Although he was glad to receive Boucher’s praise for the recently published
science fiction novel Eye in the Sky (and the letters indicate that Boucher
encouraged the writing and submission of this novel), Dick felt isolated from
the publishing and literary agent network, felt confined to publish only with
Ace, and disheartened despite Boucher’s favorable reviews of him in news-
papers and magazines and inclusion in various “best of” lists. Instead, Dick
informed Boucher that he “[had] ceased to write s.f. or fantasy” (SL 1: 36).
Boucher’s letter, dated only two days after Dick’s (June 5, 1957), shows
both his sympathetic support and his acute sense of the publishing market,
“God knows I am aware by now of all the reasons why no rational man
[should] contemplate taking up writing as a profession” (Boucher/White
Ms). Furthermore, he advised Dick to stay with science fiction, even if it
meant only adding the elements of science fiction into an otherwise realis-
tic narrative. “As you probably know” warned Boucher, “straight” fiction
is risky as hell,” offering his protégé a plausible alternative: “I don’t know
if you’re aware of how often nowadays straight fiction appears under the
mystery-suspense label, provided it has any element at all of crime or nar-
rative suspense” (Boucher/White Ms).
Although, according to Williams, “Phil wrote no science fiction at all in
1956 and 1957” (89), Boucher’s encouragement to keep engaging science
fiction motives if not science fiction itself inspired Dick in a moment of crisis
and probably for his entire career. In a letter dated June 6, 1957, he wrote:
“your encouragement has got me thinking in terms of ONE MORE S.F.
NOVEL” (SL 1: 37). And for the rest of his career, Dick wrote fiction that
we today recognize as a typical hybrid, experimental writing that engages
science fiction motives together with realistic, metaphorical, philosophical,
and other imaginative elements.
The Dick-Boucher friendshiop was respectful and tender. In a letter to Cyn-
thia Goldstone, Dick describes Boucher as an eternal adult: “I didn’t realize

Avram [Davidson, a fellow writer] had a mother. It can’t be. As, in my article,
I questioned whether Tony Boucher could be imagined as a fifteen-year-old
boy. It’s like talking about Moses’ aunt. Absurd.” 16 Dick made this senti-
ment public in his article for the fanzine Lighthouse in 1966: “I’ll give anyone
fifteen cents who can imagine Tony Boucher as a small boy. But even more
difficult to imagine is the strange truth that once there was no Tony Boucher
at all” (Shifting Realities 59).17 And when his friend died in 1968, Dick wrote:
“what sort of universe is it that causes a man like Tony Boucher to die of can-
cer?” (“Memories” 24). Dick suffered the death of his friend and missed him,
dedicating Ubik (1969) to Boucher. To Paul Williams, he recalled in 1974:
Tony “was a multifaceted and educated, brilliant and humane person” (97).
1960S: THE TIMES FOR FABRICATION
In 1958, as his writing career was slowly taking off, Dick and second wife
Kleo moved away from Berkeley and its political and cultural excitement,
which had included visits from the FBI in the early ‘50s (Sutin 83; Rickman
239). Their arrival at Point Reyes Station, however, was the beginning of the
end for Dick’s second marriage. Soon after the move, the couple met Anne
Dick, “a thirty-one year old very recent widow,” as she described herself in
1958, of the poet Richard Rubenstein (Anne Dick 8). A well to do intellectual
mother of three girls, Anne impressed Dick. He fell in love quickly and soon
asked Kleo for a divorce in a fairly ungentlemanly way (Sutin 99–100).18
If he was concerned with the artistic direction of his fiction and status of
his mainstream fiction, Dick now became obsessed with publishing enough
novels to support the seemingly lavish lifestyle of his new family. “Anne
was no raging spendthrift,” wrote Sutin “but there were three daughters,
a house, a horse, banty chickens, and black faced sheep, and, yes, an occa-
sional luxury” (103). During the six years of their marriage, 1959–1964/5,
Dick wrote 16 novels, including the Hugo Award-winning The Man in the
High Castle (1962), and other, not so well received novels such as We Can
Build You (1969), Martian Time Slip (1964), and Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch (1965). Anne described Dick’s method of writing (which was con-
fi rmed by several other friends throughout Dick’s life): the author tended
to think about a novel for several months, write the fi rst draft in a continu-
ous effort that lasted from six weeks in the 1960s to sometimes a few days
in the 1970s, and revise very little for the fi nal draft. To his wife, Dick
boasted of the speed with which he created and typed his novels, to other
friends, he complained about being pressured to write (Anne Dick 52).
Dick was a good father to Anne’s three daughters and to their own child,
Laura Archer Dick, born February 25, 1960, and a caring husband, but he
nevertheless felt trapped by the confines of a financially demanding mar-
riage and by his own fears and preoccupations. While he made disparaging
comments about his life with Anne, complaining that it prevented him from

34 Philip K. Dick
producing “anything except hack work” (“Self Portrait 15), Dick had other
problems too. In his 1967 letter, Dick refers to “the layers of petty compul-
sive-obsessive neurosis” which had stopped him from living fully, especially
during 1964: “all the unlived life . . . all the avoiding of this or that, and the
fear of this or that” (SL 1: 213). Both his fellow writer Harlan Ellison and
friend Iskandar Guy, noticed “paranoia” in Dick’s behavior, characterized by
“a very peculiar way,” as Ellison put it, of looking at the world (Sutin 122).
It was probably a combination of his psychological experiences and external
pressures that lead Dick to increased use of amphetamines.
Dick’s abuse of amphetamines and antidepressants marked a tumultu-
ous period of his life, characterized by hyperproduction of fiction, bitter
quarrels with Anne, and his vision of a frightening face in the sky. The
later event occurred in 1963, when Dick saw a face towering over him as
“a visage of perfect evil” (Sutin 126–7). The vision, combined with seeing
the Ken and Barbie dolls of his four daughters, served as the inspiration for
the plot of Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. “I believe now,” wrote Anne
twenty years later, “that Phil was trying desperately (and he failed) to work
out a major inner conflict in this book and in his life” (Anne Dick 129).
The period also marked Dick’s realization of other experiential realms,
the formation of his belief that his visions were something beyond hallu-
cinations and that they pointed toward other realms accessible to human
experience. Anne Dick wrote that in this period Dick discovered Existential
Psychiatry (i.e., Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychol-
ogy), a volume edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger
and “became overly involved with the case histories” (Anne Dick 94).
One basic idea in Existence was the postulation of several psychologi-
cal realms: the Umwelt, “the world of man in his biological environment,”
the Mitwelt, “man in personal relations with fellow men, and the Eigen-
welt, the sphere of man in relation to himself” (May 34). It is no wonder
that Binswanger’s and May’s ideas appealed to Dick. The three-tiered world
notion called for a more complete, individualistic approach to the human
psyche, against the limitations of culture and science. In a 1962 letter to
Boucher, Dick mentions Existence as one of the books that “saved him” (SL
1: 64). He analyzed his own fears and “inner restlessness” in terms of the
imbalance between his existence within the three worlds (die Welten). Dick’s
unsettling psychological experiences, combined with his vast reading, and
use of drugs, shaped the worldview that would be expressed so forcefully
(and sans drugs) in Valis (1981)—that is, the view that it is politically and
spiritually essential to look for alternative ways of existence.
But, in the early sixties, Dick was on the dark side of life. The drugs, as
he mentioned to Boucher, may have caused some of his psychological agita-
tion and discomfort. At the time, however, he thought that they helped: “I
stumbled on a stimulant drug called semoxydrene, the fi rst 5mg which I
took cleared away the cobwebs from my brain, restored the clarity of view-
point which I had progressively lost over fi fteen years” (SL 1: 65). Anne

Dick’s recounting of this period reveals a peculiar discrepancy between
their daily life and the fictional portraits created by Dick. After seeing the
manuscript for Confessions of A Crap Artist (p. 1975), she recalls feeling
“somewhat puzzled and uneasy,” recognizing many details of their daily
life in the book, but finding both her and Dick’s portraits unflattering and
distorted (56). In several places, she reiterates the incongruity between her
view of Dick and his identification with the character of Jack Isidore, “that
weird, provincial, sexless fellow with a head filled with trivial science fan-
tasy” (57). Spurred perhaps by what Anne Dick came to recognize as “that
dark facet in Phil’s nature” (58), Dick was “on the verge of a series of events
that would spin him to the very opposite social pole than what he now
enjoyed in West Marin; he’d be dead broke and on the run from real, or
imagined, enemies” (Rickman, 380).
Together with all his troubles, Dick felt that Anne was a menacing pres-
ence in his life: “cold, hard, tough and smart, she can cut me to ribbons,
to tatters, through words and intonation” (SL 1: 82). After several unpleas-
ant episodes of varying degree, from giving away Anne’s possessions to
casual guests to briefly committing her to a mental institution (Anne Dick
124; Sutin 123), Dick, in 1964, fi led for divorce. In the process, he became
cruel and enraged. As he was coming and going from their house, how-
ever, Anne felt that “it was more like a ghost than Phil who arrived” (131).
Her description of events mentions drugs only at one point. She relates her
surprise upon receiving “a very large bill from the West Marin Pharmacy
for various pills and drugs: Sparene, Stelazine, Preludin, an amphetamine,
and other that I hadn’t known anything about” (130). Dick’s letter to fel-
low writer James Blish, is a particularly harsh reflection on marriage, also
containan expression of things to come: “if I leave her,” wrote Dick “I have
no place to go; I leave cat, dog, children, her, the house, my rose garden . . .
everything I value” (SL 1: 84).
As he left the middle-class life and started a relationship with Grania
Davidson, with whom he lived in East Oakland, his mood swings and
fears continued. Grania described the various dark states that Dick inhab-
ited: “of course he was crazy—as a hoot owl. But Phil was also so far
beyond that—a rich and complex person. Crazy is merely one facet of this
incredibly complex man—brilliant, a genuine mystic, very human” (Sutin
135). At the time of their relationship, Dick did not feel so appreciated.
His letter to Terry and Carol Carr expresses three important reactions to
Grania’s point of view. First, he felt that those who knew him the least
believed the most and the worst of the gossip about him, allegedly circu-
lated by Grania (S.L. 109–110). Second, Dick ascribed Grania’s opinions
to her jealousy, and never considered Grania’s comments to have been well
meant. Third, although he admitted that “there is no doubt I am fucked
up,” Dick never took responsibility when others excluded him, a behavior
he labeled as the “closed door” treatment (SL 1: 109). Instead, he placed
the blame on Grania.

36 Philip K. Dick
Dick and Grania’s relationship ended in October of 1964 (SL 1: 114) and
he soon started courting 21-year old Nancy Hackett. He wanted a com-
panion and stability, and at the same time, he was beset by strange moods
and visions. His letters to Carol Carr, although humorous and eloquent,
also reveal a sense of defeat. His comment after Christmas mass held by
his new friend, Bishop James Pike, is revealing: “one can go on losing for-
ever, I guess; I hope Bishop Pike knows about it” (SL 1: 171). A couple of
months later: “it is strange; the universe is eerie, can become so suddenly,
but I guess some design and purpose underlies it, eh?” (SL 1: 175), and the
next day, “I think I somehow got into a wrong universe” (SL 1: 179). Dick
continued using drugs throughout this period, and even took some LSD,
but did not use it or like it very much (Sutin 141). As before, his sense of
the strange universe was not exclusively derived from his drug experiences,
although his drug use was on the rise.
By 1967, Dick and Nancy were married and had a child, Isolde Freya (Isa),
born March 15, 1967. Their relationship was, according to friends inter-
viewed by Sutin, successful, even though the focus shifted to the child (157).
Dick started writing more, and in 1966 produced the novels Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Ubik (1969), which he dedicated to Tony
Boucher, and in 1968 A Maze of Death (1970), amongst several others. He
thus overcame the writer’s block that lasted from 1964 to 1967.
In a February 1967 letter, Dick described his domestic situation in an dead-
pan manner: “Things here are going strangely. Nancy is now about a week
away from having the baby” (SL 1: 200). In the same letter, he articulated the
existence of something larger, a fate or destiny, that leads our lives onward,
despite the “alienation” and “melancholy”—the feelings he suffered—and
despite the fact that “the distinction, the division, between living and being
dead has become dim”—an idea that will form the philosophical background
for Do Androids and Ubik. Dick’s letters to Rich Brown describe not only his
continued interest in the Swiss existential school, coming after Freud and led
by Ludwig Binswanger—“new theories (emanating mostly from Switzerland)
that deal with the hitherto unexpected range of subjective worlds in which
each of us lives”—but also insist on the strange, non-drug induced experi-
ences as “psychedelic” too (SL 1: 211).
At this time, Dick wrote about a “psychotic interlude” in which he “saw
the baby as the horrid vegetable. Had Nancy (my wife) hide my .22 pis-
tol. Bees in head. Helplessness” (SL 1: 212–13). Dick goes on to diagnose
himself, with references to Jung, as having “redemptive psychosis” that
helped him to “break down the old self” and feel the joys of life once again
(213). To Avram Davidson, he wrote a more domestic description of events:
his difficulty of working around a small child, and his tendency to “hate
babies. The competition, I suppose” (210).
Neither the trials nor the rewards of family life stopped Dick from con-
tinuing the use of amphetamines. If he started at the fringes of prescription
drug use and experimentation, he was now in the midst of California’s

lively drug scene. “Phil’s fondness for speed led him to street dealers as
well,” writes Sutin. “They were a ubiquitous presence by 1967” (159). Dick
felt that a lot of organized, well-to-do life around him was evil, the ‘estab-
lishment’ as he called it, had a wrong set of priorities and that the drug
counter-culture was a viable alternative. Describing his intention to buy a
house in Santa Venetia, a site of many a party in early ‘70s and of a mys-
terious burglary that fi nally forced Dick to leave Northern California, he
criticized friends who insisted that he buy a new expensive desk for the
house. “Who cares? I’m using my deceased grandmother’s little desk right
now and it’s fi ne.” As if to make his stance clear, he emphasized: “the love
of money is the root of all evil. The scent of possible big money is the root
of all manic insanity” (SL 1: 237). Part of his own atypical behavior came
as a reaction to his perceived environment.
In his “Afterword” to The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), a selection of
his stories, Dick wrote that “the basic premise dominating my stories is
that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence I would fi nd I had more to
say to it than to my next-door neighbor” (443). He sees a very limited num-
ber of activities in his neighborhood—lawn-mowing, mail collection, and
TV watching—which leaves him wondering about the habits and mean-
ingfulness of his immediate environment (443). Dick turned to writing, to
friends (many of whom were fellow science fiction writers), women, and,
for the part of his life, to drugs, as a counter-solution to the failed societal
behaviors, his own and that of his fellow Californians.
In 1968 Dick visited his second major science fiction convention, Baycon
in Oakland, California.19 At Baycon he met writer Roger Zelazny, with
whom he already had started collaboration on the novel Deus Irae (1976).
Dick and Zelazny admired each other’s writing and ideas, and Dick felt the
encounter was the most important part of the conference: “I do not mean
of course to put down the importance of my meeting Ray Bradbury, Fritz
Leiber and Phil Farmer, not to mention Norm Spinrad and Bob Silverberg”
(SL 1: 238). But despite the inspiring meeting and conversations with major
science fiction authors, Dick stopped his own writing and continued using
drugs. In 1969, he was hospitalized due to “pancreatitis and acute kidney
failure” from “some nastily cut street speed” (Sutin 164).
Nancy’s attempts to curb Dick’s drug use were unsuccessful, and in
1969 she and Isa prepared to leave. 20 The grief of loosing a wife and
a child, again, (the fi rst time, this happened with Anne, who left with
their daughters) caused a most difficult period in Dick’s life, marked by
drug-use, desperation, a suicide attempt, and a notorious break-in into
his San Rafael house. In a 1970 letter, he wrote: “There is no one and
no thing to talk to in this dead, empty world” (SL 1, 275). Although he
immediately questioned his statement, Dick is deeply sad that Nancy and
Isa, then three and a half years old, are going to leave (275). “I am ter-
ribly sorry to see her go; I genuinely love her, more so than anyone else
in my life” (277).

38 Philip K. Dick
1970S: THE TIMES OF TRIAL
In 1970, Dick wrote a draft for Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, a novel
in which drug use by one character (Alys Buckman) leads to the distortion
of another person’s world (Jason Taverner). The novel’s plot line is a telling
forecast of the 1970–72 period, when Dick entered one of the most difficult
phases in his life: a two year bout of drug use, no work and no money,
and the off-beat company of drug dealers, runaway teenagers, and street
people in his San Rafael house. Dick saw the cycle as an inevitable pattern:
“During each marriage I was the bourgeois wage-earner, and when the
marriage failed I dropped (gratefully) into the gutter of near-illegal life:
narcotics and guns and knives and oh so many crimes . . . I embraced truly
vicious people, I suppose as an antidote to the middle class safe rational
spineless world my wives had forced on me” (SL 2: 303). Dick’s other let-
ters show that he believed he tried to hide his psychological dysfunction
by using drugs and ascribing his strange behavior to their influence (SL 3:
219). Finally, his interviews with Paul Williams reveal deep suffering over
his failed marriages and not being able to see his daughters, Laura and Isa
(62–63). Regardless of Dick’s motivation for choosing a lifestyle of heavy
drug use and seclusion, the consequences were dire.
Many of the drug-scene experiences are described in A Scanner Darkly
(1977), a difficult homage to the losses caused by the careless and naïve use
of drugs. Dick spent his days and nights mostly indoors; his social anxieties
and lifestyle choices made him alternatively afraid of and uninterested in the
outside life, and he turned to living intensely inside his physical premises and
inside his imagination.21 His attitude remained congruous with his earlier
position about life—seemingly difficult and unpromising—and yet, possibly
hopeful, as reflected in an already quoted letter: “there is no one and no thing
to talk to in this dead, empty world. Or is that really so?” (SL 1: 275). Dick’s
acute sense of life’s fruitlessness and his belief that there is hope produced
some of the most engaging characters and plot lines in science fiction, and
some of the most intense and unpleasant personal experiences.
His behavior became highly erratic, interspersed with paranoia and suicide
attempts (Sutin 175–6). As much faith as he had in the anti-establishment,
Dick’s letters from the 1970 reveal three major patterns: one, the feeling of
being exhausted and old to the point of readiness to die: “I feel as old as
yonder elm, as it says in FINNEGANS WAKE,” Dick wrote in a November
letter (SL 1: 323). And, “my heart is dead with too much scheming, waiting,
hoping, needing” (S.L. 1 328). The second emerging pattern is that of love,
universal love for human beings. Interspersed with his fl irting, complaints,
a sense of confusion, or exhilaration, the letters make constant references
to loving others. In a letter to his ex-wife Anne, for example, whom he
refused to see and had written several disparaging letters to before, Dick
now expressed two attitudes: one, that he was tired of life (“I don’t want
to live much longer”) and two, an overwhelming sense of love “for you,

love for the children, love for Nancy’s boyfriend, for the two guys with me
in the house, for other friends both male and female” (SL 1: 297). Another
letter, written several months afterwards to a female friend, in an autobio-
graphical, confessional tone finishes with the statement: “something terribly
important is happening in my life. I do not know quite what it is but it has
to do with people and my love of them” (SL 1: 347).
The third pattern is that of drug use: doing speed and enjoying the
moment; doing speed and being aware that “it may kill us;” and being
either quite happy, or depressed, or confused, depending on the drug’s cycle
(SL 1: 316–17, 319, 323, 346). The fourth, and perhaps fi nal and over-
whelming pattern was that of a loss of control, to which Dick refers in a
December 1970 letter (SL 1: 327).
No published letters or articles by or about Dick exist for the year 1971,
except those that he wrote in retrospect in 1972 and 1973. According to
Sutin, Dick was hospitalized three times during that difficult year: records
in the Hoover Pavilion, a psychiatric ward in Stanford, show that “Phil
said he was taking one thousand Methedrine tabs per week”; however, his
doctor described him as “optimistic, friendly, and compassionate” (Sutin
176). He was admitted to two more psychiatric hospitals in 1971, in the
meantime attempting to continue his friendships with drug-scenesters in
Santa Venetia (Sutin 180–1). “It was the stilyagi (the teen-age hoodlums)
that I lived with and associated with,” wrote Dick in 1973 (SL 2: 303). Even
after the destructive events of 1971 and 1972, and despite Dick’s awareness
of crimes committed everywhere around him—some by his friends—he
expressed a staunch belief that the anti-establishment scene was much bet-
ter than the establishment.
Part of this existence involved an “intense anticipation” of “a hit of some
kind on the Santa Venetia house” (Sutin 181), which eventually did happen.
Dick’s house-safe was blown up and the residence was trampled. “Virtually
everything of value was taken,” wrote Dick later, “and the house so dam-
aged that I could not live there for a time afterward” (SL 2: 44). Despite his
efforts to gather information from the police and the FBI, Dick never dis-
covered the culprit’s identity nor could he gain access to the police records
regarding the burglary (Sutin 183). After the hit, he abandoned his house to
scavengers and left, bereaved, for the Vancouver SF Convention (or “Con”)
in 1972, to attend as a guest of honor. The letter that Dick wrote to Paul
Williams suggests that Dick’s move to Canada may have been enforced by
the police: “I did what [the officer in charge of the case] suggested. I moved
out of the county, all the way to Canada” (Williams, 20).
In Vancouver, Dick initially felt refreshed and cleansed from the Marin
County events. At the conference, he delivered a lecture entitled “The
Android and the Human” which resonated for several years afterwards
with the science fiction community.22 In it, he again argued that conformity
and obedience makes one robot-like, akin to an unfeeling android, and that
humanity can only be attained through acts of rebelliousness, particularly

40 Philip K. Dick
by the young. He also modified his outlook on drug use: “while he hadn’t
yet given up amphetamines (inhaling, during Con rounds, speed mixed into
menthol nose drops), he had abandoned all romanticism as to drug explo-
rations” (Sutin 189). In letters to friends, Dick tried to describe the stay in
Canada as fi lled with public adoration, new friends, and “foxy chicks” (SL
2: 2). His post-conference Canadian hosts, however, saw him as “manipu-
lative and controlling, probing the weak spots of others’ psyches” and, at
best, an intense and demanding personality (Sutin 191).
Dick, in fact, felt lonely and defeated, alienated “in a strange country
in an unfamiliar city.” Finally, from grief and aftershock he “flipped out”
(SL 2: 19). On March 23, he attempted suicide and barely survived. He was
taken to X-Kalay, a Vancouver rehab clinic with a work program (Sutin
192–3). The staff in the clinic made sure that Dick ceased all his former
social contacts, and broke his behavior patterns, including drug use (SL 2:
18). Traumatized by the suicide attempt, his self-destructive impulses, and
the invasive X-Kalay therapy regime (group meetings based on hostile rap
sessions), Dick stayed for three weeks and fi nally stopped taking speed,
“this after nearly twenty years of steadily increasing doses” (Sutin 194).
In a later meditation upon his condition, Dick wrote, following Freud,
that Thanos, the death drive, has overpowered and replaced Eros, his life
drive: “it is not so much that [we] want to die; actually [we] want nothing”
(SL 2: 302). Dick added the Eros/Thanos duality to his other dichotomies:
Being vs. NonBeing, and Human vs. Android, inherent everywhere. Such
dualities resonated strongly with Dick, “‘Two hearts burn in my breast,’
Goethe has Faust say, and surely this is true” (SL 2: 302). But Dick eventu-
ally felt a change in himself that brought the opposed sides closer together:
“I had dreadful anxiety attacks night after night . . . it was because my
entire personality was reshaping itself in order to cut out a new style of
life, a new approach to reality, new person entirely compared to what I had
been” (SL 2: 185).
It was a time of recovery for the weary writer. Correspondence with
Dr.Willis McNelly, then Professor of English at the California State Univer-
sity in Fullerton, prompted Dick’s decision to move there and deposit the
bulk of his papers in the University’s Special Collections, where they are
today. Dick returned to the United States in mid-April of 1972 (SL 2: 38).
He became a part of campus life through class visits and lectures and started
re-connecting with people again. Throughout 1972 and 1973 Dick re-estab-
lished contacts and started new correspondence with many friends and
family: his daughters, former wives Anne Dick and Nancy Hackett, writer
Ursula LeGuin, critic Paul Williams, his French publisher Patrice Duvic . . .
In all his letters, a sense of a newly awakened person returning to life is
strong. “I’m not crazy any more,” he wrote to an old pen pal Carol Carr.
During 1972, Dick met two women, a Fullerton student, Linda Levy,
and an eighteen year old Tessa Busby. With Linda he had a brief relation-
ship which ended up in a physical argument when Dick “begun punching

[Linda] in the face,” although not really hurting her (Levy qtd. in Sutin
197). The relationship with Tessa, according to Linda, was no less tumul-
tuous, although it lasted longer. As several critics have pointed out, Tessa
was Dick’s “Dark-Haired Girl,” his ideal female lover, whom he described
in a compilation of love letters and notes of the same title. Tessa and Dick
started living together a week after they met in July of 1972, were married
in April, and their son Christopher was born in July, 1973 (Sutin 206).
Life with Tessa and her attempts to care for him gave Dick domestic
stability and a boost he needed to write again. He entertained and admired
Tessa, but he also kept her close to the house, preferring that she not leave
at all (Sutin 198). Despite the attitude of confinement, which did not make
Tessa happy, Dick felt the pressure of becoming the ‘establishment’ again,
entering the middle class life in a ‘plastic apartment’. The experience of
spending New Year’s Eve at home alone with Tessa prompted Dick to write:
“I hadn’t realized how fucking dumb and dull and futile and empty middle
class life is” (qtd. in Sutin 235). His reactions were sometimes violent: Linda
Levy attested to Dick physically assaulting Tessa, who was frail and petite,
and who showed up at Levy’s house bruised and in tears (Sutin 199).
In the late 1972, Dick wrote to Roger Zelazny that Tessa had a habit
of provoking him with mean remarks in order to get him out of depressive
states and into the “rap session” that diverted his attention from hopeless
thoughts and excessive vulnerability (SL 2: 116). He further explained that
“Tess is so kind and sweet” and the quarrels happened only to help them
endure the boredom of “[their] plastic motel type living room,” Dick con-
cluding in the end: “I don’t know where the violence in our life together
comes from, maybe from me” (SL 2: 116).
Dick only partially succeeded in re-establishing his life again, and his
troubles were not only with Tessa. The consequences of his tumultuous
Marin County drug years—the long term effects of drug abuse—also
became evident in the series of events known as 2–3-74—visions, dreams,
and incidents in February and March of 1974 that appeared uncanny to
Dick and Tessa, and became highly significant for Dick. The experiences
prompted the creation of an eight-thousand-page journal, Exegesis—a
project that Dick would continue to work on until the end of his life. Two
novels came out of Exegesis, Valis and Radio Free Albemuth, initiating
years of speculation as to the exact nature of his visions, the nature of real-
ity, and the inquiry about the existence of a higher being. 23
Dick understood his visions primarily as a religious experience, although
he never stopped speculating on their possible source, guessing at every-
thing from Soviet psychic experiments, to a specific form of time-travel.
These experiences included an eight hour vision of what appear to Dick like
abstract art paintings, an episode that “inaugurated all this” (Exegesis, 20).
Sometimes he called the visions a “phosphene activity” and sometimes “the
dazzling 8-hour-long display of nonobjective graphics being the Kundalini
Fire,” the latter referring to the physical sensation of enlightenment by the

42 Philip K. Dick
Love of God, as described in Kundalini tantric and yoga teachings (SL 3:
167). His frequent dreams, Dick believed, provided him with all kinds of
information, including his past lives, and information about the nature of
the world, often projected within the dreams as pages of manuscripts in
languages other than English (Exegesis, 8). “The best way to describe it,”
Dick wrote, “is to say at night my mind is full of the thoughts, ideas, words
and concepts that you’d expect to fi nd in a highly educated Greek-speak-
ing scholar of the 3rd Century A.D., at the latest, living somewhere in the
Mediterranean Area of the Roman Empire” (Exegesis, 10).
Dick also noticed changes in his personality, and believed that a dor-
mant “divine seed” had been awakened in him. The divine or semi-divine
creatures that contacted him in his dreams ranged from Asklepios [Greek
god of medicine and healing], to the Cumaean sybil, to a divine essence
that Dick called “Firebright” (Exegesis, 22). He frequently entertained the
idea of time-space dysfunction as a possible cause for all the unusual expe-
riences that befell him. In a July 31, 1978, letter to Patricia Warrick, for
example, Dick states that his experience “lasted eleven months before it
totally died away” (SL 5: 178). In this letter, he describes the experience as
a “dysfunction” of time and space, a revelation given to him by God, made
visible through a “mistake” in the functioning of the world (SL 5: 179).
Initially, however, Dick was hesitant about sharing his experience of these
visions. The first reference in his correspondence comes from an April 23,
1974, letter to Ursula LeGuin: “Ursula, I recently underwent a religious con-
version, which I am sure I mentioned on the phone” (SL 3: 69). The next
reference comes from a June 28 letter to critic Peter Fitting, in which Dick
described the flood of “colored graphics which resembled the nonobjective
paintings of Kandinsky and Klee”(SL 3: 142). Dick offered Fitting two scien-
tific theories as possible explanations: one, changing levels of GABA fluid in
the brain, which cause firing of certain neural signals and a “preprogrammed
sequence” in the brain, and two, Arthur Koestler’s tachyon theory, which
postulates existence of faster-than-light particles which move in the reverse
time direction. Dick concluded the letter by pointing the changing way—
from religious to scientific—that we label natural phenomena and posited the
final, and hopeful explanation for everything that was going on with him:
“The future is more coherent than the present, more animated and purpose-
ful, and in a real sense, wiser. We are being talked to, by a very informed
Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time” (SL 3: 142–144).
As Dick’s visions and experiences eventually became public, a reaction-
ary controversy ensued that keeps contributing to the hasty dismissals of his
sanity or work or, at best, generates doubt about Dick’s stability and cred-
ibility. Many of Dick’s friends and acquaintances felt the necessity to com-
ment upon 2–3-74 and support Dick in his efforts to discern the truth about
his experiences. Interviewer Charles Platt, the fi rst person whom Dick chose
to publicize his experiences, admits to having gone to Dick with prejudice
about his controversial reputation (Platt, 275). Platt’s impressions, however,

changed as he engaged with an “erudite, intimidating, well-read” host (148).
“Foolishly,” he writes in an interview preface, “I went looking for objective
clarification from a man who does not believe in objectivity. A few hours
later I came away feeling as if my mind had been warped. Like a character in
one of Dick’s paradoxical, unresolved novels, I was left with more questions
at the end than I had at the beginning” (Platt 148).
Dick’s friend Norman Spinrad tried to incorporate the 2–3-74 with
his impressions of Dick. In his book on science fiction, Spinrad honestly
addressed Dick’s drug use in the ‘60s and ‘70s, adding: “as for the pink light
[another experience Dick claimed to have had], and the possession, and the
Exegesis, I don’t really know” (215). Dick spoke to Spinrad about his various
experiences and theories, as varied as those that he wrote down in Exegesis.
Added Spinrad: “given the subjective reality in which Phil had found himself,
his reaction to the experience was as sane as could be: to hypothesize vari-
ous theories to explain it without necessarily believing that any of them were
true” (215). Dick, indeed, could never subscribe to one ideological explana-
tion for his experiences and kept speculating until his death.
The entire 2–3-74 stage was full of turbulent events. In this period, Dick
wrote a number of letters to the FBI that further enhanced a controversy
around his character. A staunch opponent of the government and its agen-
cies, and a long-time believer that he was being watched (Sutin 134, 139,
169), Dick now reported to the authorities on what he believed were covert
activities: a strange letter that he received and thought was sensitive “Soviet
Bloc” material; covert activities of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (whom
Dick unjustly accused of trying to steal his Polish royalties for Ubik); and
denunciation of a mixed group of American and French “Marxist critics”
who visited Dick to discuss his literature (SL 3: 31, 36–7, 54, 62). FBI sent
a form letter in response to all of Dick’s correspondence and no investiga-
tions ensued. “But by the act of proclaiming his loyalty,” writes Sutin “Phil
obtained a great measure of comfort and calm” (217).
Surprisingly, Dick also wrote to President Nixon, whom he ordinarily
considered a tyrant. The comparison is drawn both in Valis and Radio Free
Albemuth. In the latter novel, Nixon is the evil president Ferris Fremont. In
Valis, Dick expressed the belief that American government under Nixon was
a decadent Empire similar to the Roman, or an evil metaphysical Empire
that occludes its inhabitants from the truth.24 Nevertheless, Dick expressed
his empathy for Nixon in the fi rst letter (SL 3: 64) and his disappointment
in the second, as the Watergate crisis went public. “For almost one full year
I have been personally upset by the ordeal you’ve been going through,”
Dick wrote to Nixon. “Now the transcripts are being published that you
turned over the other day. I can’t believe it, what you’ve said and done that
they show. No wonder you haven’t been able to sleep” (SL 3: 78).
Throughout the apparent shifting of his political alliances, Dick persisted
in one attitude, described by him in the statement: “the greatest menace of the
twentieth century is the totalitarian state” (Platt 150). Dick, who did exten-

44 Philip K. Dick
sive research on Nazi Germany and other wars, explained that totalitarian-
ism has both political and psychological forms and that it always involves
power and manipulation on either collective or individual levels. That is why,
Dick continued, he made all his characters weak and powerless to reflect this
situation, adding: “yet I try to equip them with qualities by which they can
survive” (Platt 151). Dick’s identification with the defenseless in society is
evident in many of his characters and plots as much as it shows in his life and
sometimes contradictory behavior. His critique of the dominant state, insti-
tutions, or individuals is at the root of Dick’s staple “little man” character,
acknowledged both by the writer and his critics.
As he worked through his metaphysical puzzle, Dick’s popularity and
earnings grew steadily in the United States and especially in Europe where
more and more publishers translated Dick’s novels. At the same time, Tessa
and Dick’s relationship grew more laborious—he now enjoyed periods of
sociability—and flirting, without Tessa’s company, while still demanding
her attention and care at home (Sutin 237). As Tessa insisted on more oppor-
tunities to visit friends and family, Dick also grew restless. He claimed that
she was leaving him; Tessa stated that she was asked to leave. According to
Sutin, in the end it was Dick who, after several Tessa’s comings and goings,
broke the marriage in the summer of 1976 (238).
The consequence of Tessa and their son Christopher leaving was dev-
astating: in February 1976 Dick tried to commit suicide by taking a large
number of medicines with wine, slashing his left wrist, and leaving the
car running. He survived by accident: “the wrist bleeding coagulated, the
Fiat stalled, he vomited up some of the drugs” (Sutin 240). He stayed in
the hospital for ten days and recovered fully (SL 4: 267). His recuperation
marked yet another move and relationship in his life: moving from Fuller-
ton with Doris Sauter into a Santa Ana apartment. Their friendship lasted
until Dick’s death, but their relationship ended soon after it started. In early
1977 Dick wrote in a letter: “I had a very hard time adjusting—Tessa left
me in February and then [Doris] left me in September. I checked into a very
good psychiatric hospital and got a lot of good therapy” (SL 5: 2).
Dick continued to write, including a number of short stories, although
the period is marked by two longer projects—the publication of A Scanner
Darkly and its marketing as a ‘mainstream’ novel and Dick’s prolonged, dif-
ficult process of turning 2–3-74 into a book. While he worked on the versions
of Valis, Dick also took part in the science fiction community, socializing with
writers Tim Powers, K.W. Jetter, and Robert Silverberg, and visiting Metz,
France, for a SF Festival at which he was a guest of honor (Sutin 250). Joan
Simpson was his partner at the time and the two lived together in Sonoma in
1977, but their reluctance to move together permanently caused a break in
the relationship (Sutin 248, 252; SL 5: 123–4). And, earlier that year, Dick
wrote: “I’m out of the dope world entirely and plan to remain that way. Like
Nancy [his former wife] I’ve gotten into a religious space . . . my Bantam
novel deals with my religious experiences, disguised as SF” (SL 5, 70).

In 1978, with the help of Russell Galen, a new employee at the Scott
Meredith Agency, Dick at last finished his “religious” novel, Valis, contin-
ued speculating in Exegesis, and eventually turned to writing his second to
last novel, The Divine Invasion (1981). 25 While it featured religious figures
and ideas, The Divine Invasion had more science fiction elements and more
action (something that, as Dick mentioned, editors asked him to include in
Valis). Dick’s writing received increased attention from the popular media
and academics, and he liked it, but remained preoccupied with the relation-
ship between his novels and reality. He believed that Valis and his other
books described the near future or events that Dick could not know about,
he puzzled over its significance. 26
One of his earlier fears was that he had inadvertently uncovered govern-
ment secrets in his plots; the other that the government will force him to
write specific kind of fiction, or—half-jokingly—that they would replace
him with a hack writer who would then pose as Philip Dick and write his
novels. Now, Dick was nearly obsessed with his “epistemological” ideas as
he called them, and seeking satisfactory explanations. His remark, “there
are three books being written about me right now,” is just a side note to a
discussion of whether Ubik, as a form of god, really exists in the world, and
its relationship to Valis (SL 5: 209).27 To daughter Laura, he wrote that he
became “a machine which thinks and does nothing else” (SL 5: 232).
1980S: AN APOGEE AND THE SUDDEN END
Although the ‘70s were the time of his gradual recovery from drugs and sui-
cide attempts, Dick felt the decade amiss: “1979 is a good year because the
seventies are almost over and there’s no action but disco dancing. Nobody
blows up the authorities and destroys draftboards any longer. I fi nd it dull”
(SL 5: 199). He gave his support to the cause by frequently donating to vari-
ous charities and supporting his local church. “One must give to the poor
if one is to be a real Christian rather than just a professed Christian,” he
wrote to Nancy Hackett (SL 5: 202). He also became a shrewd commenta-
tor on the popular culture of the time. While his earlier novels extrapolated
social trends and translated them into imaginative concepts of his science
fiction, his last novel is ‘mainstream’ observation of the United States in the
late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Dick’s fi nal completed novel, Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
deals with the death of Dick’s friend Bishop James Pike and its aftermath,
set against the background of the America seen through the eyes of Dick’s
only main female character Angel Archer. The fi rst Chapter of The Trans-
migration fi nds Angel Archer on her way to the spirituality seminar. The
cost, Angel informs us, “to find out why we are on this Earth,” is hun-
dred dollars. “You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day” (7).
The action is dated to 1980 by the reference to John Lennon’s death; the

46 Philip K. Dick
public reaction—playing “all the Beatles songs ever written . . . on every
frequency”—makes Angel feel like she is “back in the Sixties,” when pre-
sumably Beatles were over-played too (7). In the atmosphere of cultural
reiteration, media saturation, and New Age-ism, the hero in the novel,
Bishop Timothy Archer, based on Bishop Pike, is dead because he searched
for truth. “Had he been content with the phony,” Angel ruminates, “he
would still be alive. Lesser people, accepting falsehood, are alive to tell
about it” (Transmigration, 11).
Dick continued working after The Transmigration, drafting several out-
lines for novels, and a partial draft for The Owl in Daylight, his unfi nished
novel. He kept up with Exegesis, his friendships, and his family relations,
but his health was failing. As early as 1979, Dick suffered high blood pres-
sure and small strokes. In 1979 letter to Patricia Warrick, Dick actually
predicted, based on his family history, a stroke as his cause of death. In the
early 1981, the movie contract on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
which will become Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, was fi nally closed. 28
Although the Blade Runner project went through several more changes,
Dick visited the Hollywood studio in November 1981, for a private show-
ing of the movie clips (Sutin 286). In February of 1982, he noted his dete-
riorating health. He suffered a severe stroke on February 18, followed by
a series of others (Sutin 289). On March 2, 1982 Philip Dick died of heart
failure. Some of his friends and fellow science fiction writers still like to dis-
cuss whether he really died, liking him to the characters in his novel Ubik
who exist in artificially supported half-life, soupy elevator music the only
sign that something may be wrong with their world.29

3 Martian Time Slip
“The Mindset of Otherness”
DICK AND MARTIAN FICTIONS
Martian Time Slip (1964) originally appeared in 1963 as a three-part serial

in the bimonthly periodical Worlds of Tomorrow. The novel belongs to the
succession of science fiction works set on the slippery ground of Mars, a
planet often conceived as part myth, part Earth in many of its fictionalized
versions. Mars refers to contemporary Earth as much as to the red planet,
whether it functions as a metaphor for social inequities, as in H. G. Wells’
War of the Worlds (1898), or expresses the author’s views about human
disregard for peace and foreign cultures, as in Ray Bradbury’s The Mar-
tian Chronicles (1950), or when it reflects popular culture’s tendencies and
desires, as in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Martian
Time Slip is no exception to this tradition. Dick uses the possibilities of a
Martian setting to create a dramatic story that features two earthly charac-
ters whose comprehension of the world is at odds with the ‘normal’ vision
of those around them.
Martian Time Slip is a novel that condemns discrimination of human
beings in general, but focuses especially on those considered mentally ill,
and implies that the concept of normalcy is a means of societal control, the
sign of conformity to that standard, or plain ignorance of others. The novel
makes visible the psyche of an autistic child, Manfred Steiner, and tells the
story of the latent schizophrenic Jack Bohlen, both of whom are fighting for
survival in the meager conditions of a Martian colony. Manfred and Jack
are pressured to work for the profit of Martian businessman Arnie Kott, a
heartless, intolerant, and powerful leader, “a feudal baron” in charge of a
multi-million dollar water empire (105). Kott derives his enormous power
on Mars from his rule over the Union, combining a hypocritical and nepo-
tistic management system with cruelty toward outsiders.
As many writers before him, Dick in part followed Percival Lowell’s
Mars (1895) to create his novel, an important astronomical work that had
an influence on the scientific and artistic communities, describing Mars as
a red, dry planet.1 In the chapter on “Canals,” Lowell remarked that Mars
was so “badly off for water” that its inhabitants “would have to irrigate

48 Philip K. Dick
to live” (Lowell 127–8). Dick’s novel opens with an irrigation scene: the
UN dispatched “ditch rider” services the households of Martian colonists
and neighbors, Jack Bohlen and Norbert Steiner, to deliver the scarce and
strictly rationed water distributed by the UN. However, when Steiner fails
to wheedle the water distributor into replenishing more of his depleted
reserves than allowed, it becomes clear that Dick’s Mars is far from Low-
ell’s poetic “red globe,” which stands as a symbol of human progress and
new discoveries, “blissfully destitute of weather” as Lowell described it
(Lowell, 8; 58). The scarcity of water becomes in Dick’s hands a powerful
metaphor for the inequities of resources and power: the way people spend
and withhold water indicates their moral character. 2 Ownership—of peo-
ple and their lives, of assets, land, and water—is the primary background
in the novel.
While Dick acknowledges the imperfectability of any given individual,
there are degrees of evil and intention in his human moral universe, which
designate the difference between right and wrong. The morally troubled
capitalism of Dick’s Mars is particularly expressed in the actions of the
local overlord Arnie Kott and his Water Workers’ Union. The way Kott
manipulates or punishes those whose labor he buys and owns, emphasizes
the colonists’ helplessness and vulnerability before institutional and indi-
vidual powers on Mars. Early in the novel, we see Kott both refusing to help
the indigenous Bleekmen tribe, who are in need of water, and flaunting his
appalling waste of water. In the opening of Chapter Two, Kott is off to his
steam bath on Mars, with his posse ready to protect his “mineral rights.”
As his orders are issued, Kott’s party enjoys a bath intentionally designed
“so as not to preserve the run-off” (15). Kott encounters the novel’s sec-
ond protagonist, Jack Bohlen, during the Bleekmen rescue operation, into
which he is fi nally and reluctantly drawn.3 Kott becomes Jack’s patron, not
out of benevolence, but rather to help achieve his own goal of getting closer
to Manfred, and take advantage of his apparent ability to see the future.
This simple but exploitative goal becomes the basis for the moral and psy-
chological battle whose actors are Kott, Jack, and Manfred.4
Both Jack Bohlen and Manfred Steiner have disorienting psychological
experiences that isolate them from the rest of the human community, yet,
no matter how radically different their points of view are from others,
neither of their perspectives can be easily discredited. When Jack Bohlen
sees people as machines, “composed of cold wires and switches” (109),
the narrative establishes his perceptions as belonging to “absolute reality”
or an “aspect of eternity” (109; 112). While having a different perspective
scares and exhausts Jack, his experiences are not presented as delusional.
Kott’s mistress Doreen Anderton observes: “maybe there is something in
your vision, however distorted and garbled it’s become” (111). The most
striking character in the novel, Manfred, cannot effectively communicate
with others and suffers in isolation. He is a nimble, extraordinary child

Martian Time Slip 49
with “dark, enormous, luminous eyes and curly hair,” looking like “a
despairing creature from some other world, some divine and yet dreadful
place beyond [colonists’] own” (56). Manfred is possibly altered by expo-
sure to harmful interplanetary radiation, but his condition and behavior is
that of an autistic child. As the novel will show, Manfred’s vision is central
to the world of the protagonists, rather than marginal or unimportant.
By placing an autistic child at the center of the narrative and showing
how dependent Manfred is on the good-will and ethical behavior of the
adults around him, Martian Time Slip deals with two very real contem-
porary issues: 1) the lack of treatment and care for autistic children in the
1960s, coupled with the misunderstanding that they, or their families bear
the responsibility for their condition—an attitude that started to change
only late in the decade; and 2) the philosophical and cognitive problem
of paths that connect and disconnect an individual to and from normally
perceived reality. In the latter case, Martian Time Slip is a metaphysical
novel that examines the relationship of inner and outer worlds of any given
individual existing in a given environment, a relationship that Dick will
formulate in Heraclitean terms for two realms, koinos and idios cosmos,
the shared and private reality.
By contemplating and representing Manfred’s and Bohlen’s conditions
in language, and imagining their possible experiences, Dick transforms the
alien into the humane and invites the reader to re-examine her attitudes
toward mental disabilities. Just as he transforms distant Mars into a recog-
nizable earthly world, Dick also places the condition of mental otherness
into a context for understanding, especially for those who do not share the
same worldview. Ultimately, Dick proposes the existence or the creation of
koinos logos, a community of thought that unites human beings with each
other and with the divine, thus reflecting the contemporary, philosophical
and scientific trends of reaching toward others. Dick’s philosophical con-
cerns are parallel to other contemporary thinkers: Martian Time Slip is in
dialogue not only with works of psychiatry and psychology, such as Exis-
tence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958), but with
two contemporary philosophical and sociological works, Michel Foucault’s
study Madness and Civilization (1961) and Emmanuel Levinas’ philosoph-
ical work Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961; English
translation 1969). Each work, in its own way, calls for the equal treatment
of individual human beings.
To his fellow writer James Blish, Dick described Martian Time Slip as
“dealing with childhood schizophrenia—and my own, via the protagonist,
Jack Bohlen” (S.L. 1, 72).5 The novel describes schizophrenia and autism
from several viewpoints: as a religious phenomenon, suggesting Manfred’s
divinity as he is isolated in a world of his own making; as a science fiction
concept, showing Manfred and Jack’s experiences as the result of inhabiting
alternative time streams; and from an emotional perspective, as it highlights

50 Philip K. Dick
Jack and Manfred’s suffering and the (lack of) compassion in other charac-
ters. Further, Dick made his views clear in an interview with Paul Williams,
calling the notion that we cannot empathize with a schizophrenic person’s
point of view “a bunch of bullshit” (Rickman 206). At length, Dick rejected
the presumption that schizophrenia is a “concrete entity” that stands in
opposition to us, as well as rejecting arbitrary judgments of people’s behav-
iors and motivations (Rickman 206). When writing about Manfred Steiner,
Dick insisted, he was writing about all of us (Rickman 207).
Dick continues to build the moral and ethical universe in Martian Time
Slip by introducing the way characters relate toward each other as central
to their survival on the hostile planet. Cooperation and willingness to help
others is a more important trait of survival, but colonists are compromised
in achieving this goal by the difficulties of colonization. On the surface, the
novel portrays the behaviors of human beings on Mars as unprincipled and
scheming as they are on Earth. Norbert Steiner lies about the water loss
to the UN guard; Silvia Bohlen appears a pill abuser who shuns her daily
household ‘duties’ and eventually cheats on her husband with Otto Zitte,
described as a lascivious small-time black marketer. The human community
is, as Silvia Bohlen’s internal monologue reveals, reduced to “pettiness,”
and “bickering and tension, this terrible concern over each drop of water,” a
“barbarism” caused by broken promises made to the colonists (6). Life is an
everyday struggle on “a colony which still ha[s] difficulty growing its own
radishes and cooling its own tiny yield of milk,” as the narrator informs us
(9). In this stark Martian environment the characters, mostly American and
Jewish settlers, stoop under the burden of life on another planet, and the
burden of their own needs and weaknesses.
Mars is thus a place of struggle and scarcity in which individual sur-
vival is left to the colonists, as the narrator informs us, “the survival of the
colony having been assured” (Martian Time Slip, 9). The colony’s fathers
and husbands work to sustain a wife, kids, a dome, and a fenced garden;
they are “gone all week long” (172) while disgruntled, stay-at-home house-
wives and mothers are “bored to death with sitting in some other woman’s
kitchen drinking coffee hour after hour” (173). Carlo Pagetti remarks that
“all the characters in the novel are implacably impelled toward neurosis,
madness, homicide, suicide, adultery” (183). While the protagonists are cer-
tainly flawed and at times tragically so—Manfred’s father Norbert Steiner
commits suicide—Dick has compassion for his characters. Silvia and Jack
Bohlen and others make mistakes of common human beings—Silvia cheats
on her husband, but it is clear that she does it for the fi rst time, out of loneli-
ness, and that she later feels remorseful; her lover Otto Zitte turns to illegal
employers and works as a repairman for a food smuggler because he was
not given any other work opportunity on Mars. Jack Bohlen aligns him-
self with Arnie Kott largely because Kott buys his contract from Mr. Yee’s
Repair Service, without Bohlen’s approval. Beyond attempting to overcome
mere physical and moral limitations, is the colonists struggle to get free

from the system that takes advantage of human labor and individual free-
dom and hoards the natural resources.
While they may commit mistakes, the behavior of Dick’s characters are
neither acts of inexorable evil, nor the result of higher existential forces (as,
for example, in A Maze of Death), rather, they are caused by harsh colo-
nizing efforts and global governing powers.6 Lured to Mars with the help
of Arnie Kott-created advertisements, colonists are placed in environmen-
tally hostile settlements and employed in “work gangs” on reclamation of
the Martian desert, instead of performing their intended jobs (35). As the
narrator explains, “the catch in the ad was simply that, once on Mars, the
emigrant was guaranteed nothing, not even the certainty of being able to
give up and go home” (20). Under such conditions, the characters in Mar-
tian Time Slip reflect the author’s perception of the contemporary ordinary
human being as a working class individual divested of political and fi nan-
cial power, a vulnerable and flawed creature, that is nevertheless intrinsi-
cally benevolent and deserving of freedom.
The major element, after water, of the ruthless Martian economy, is real
estate. The intended construction of giant condominiums on Mars and the
ensuing real-estate competition motivates the schemes and fears of all the
major male characters.7 Jack Bohlen’s wealthy father Leo speculates on the
Martian land needed to build AM-WEB, as the condominium is called,
and Kott is obsessed with thwarting Leo’s land acquisition scheme in order
to reap the AM-WEB profits for himself. Manfred has constant visions of
AM-WEB as part ruins and part a senior citizens home, where he is bound
to a bed, helpless and voiceless. Jack, who has had a nervous breakdown in
a similar building on Earth, is forcibly transferred to the service of Arnie
Kott, in order to help reach Manfred, and provide Kott with the land-spec-
ulating information that he needs. The meaning of the co-op’s acronym—
Alle Menschen werden Brüder (144)—is heavily ironic, emphasizing the
building’s divisive nature; that all men are not brothers is one of the central
criticisms that Dick makes in Martian Time Slip.8
The characters with atypical mental conditions—a latent schizophrenic
Bohlen, an autistic boy Manfred, and the telepathic Martian Bleekmen—
are throughout the novel exploited and marginalized by the world around
them. Noting the state of the characters’ mental mindsets, Brian Aldiss
interprets the “web” in AM-WEB as a metaphor for the novel’s three main
themes: “the web of civilization stretched thin over utter desolation”; “the
web of human relationships,” and “the web connecting all the good and
bad things in the universe” (198–9). But the “ultimate enemy” in the novel,
according to Aldiss, the one weaving “the maledictory web,” capturing
everyone, is mental illness, “the maledictory circle within which Dick’s
beings move and from which they have to escape” (202).
Bohlen’s schizophrenia and Manfred’s autism are certainly disturbing,
however, Dick’s main message is that we should not treat mental illness
as a “maledictory” force, but rather that we should re-consider the labels

52 Philip K. Dick
placed upon and attitudes taken toward those whose perception of real-
ity is radically altered, even when the alteration fits our understanding of
“illness.” In Bohlen’s case, the reader can sympathize with his psychosis
(even if we may not condone his marital cheating) because he is a likable
and honorable character who helps the stranded Bleekmen. The reader also
feels Manfred’s vulnerability and innocence as he, indeed, is drawn into the
malevolent web of Kott’s scheming, and later, when the lack of freedom and
helplessness strikes him in his old age. Madness is not, Dick argues, a state
of wrongness, a border-line state separating healthy from the unhealthy; he
instead shows that the non-standard or dysfunctional human psychology
has more complexity and portent, and in some cases more meaning, than
society customarily allows.
In presenting a new mentality born out of inter-planetary life (Manfred),
Dick focuses on the isolating, challenging, and disappointing elements in
the fictional Martian setting, but he also provides rescue and salvation for
some of his characters’ suffering. Throughout the novel, Dick places individ-
ual human beings against a collectively perceived objective reality, in which
he constantly re-examines the relationship between sense perceptions, indi-
vidual consciousness, and nature. Dick represents Manfred through stream
of consciousness narration, revealing the boy’s perpetually hostile, night-
marish world, populated by meat-eating birds and crawling worms, and
where entire dimensions split apart and rot as Manfred interacts with them
(129). Captured inside of himself, Manfred perceives the world’s decaying
nature—the entropic force of the Universe—in all the people and events that
surround him, a world filled with “gubble.” Through the inner movement
of Manfred’s thoughts, we see his environment dissipating, as he fi nally
ends up perceiving nothing more than a “cavity, dark, cold, full of wood so
rotten that it lay in damp powder, destroyed by gubbish-rot” (129). Seeing
the horrific reality as Manfred sees it, and the world of entropy divested
from the contraptions of life, may naturally cause us to recoil. Facilitated
by the sheer act of reading, Dick, however, wants us to try to embrace the
reality of Manfred’s inner life, epitomized in the recurring phrase “gubble,
gubble.” The horror of Manfred’s vision, and its representation of decay,
does not seek to encourage us toward ignorance of such visions and spills;
rather, we are invited to re-evaluate our identities and our relations toward
others upon encountering nothingness.
The tension in the characters’ relationship with Manfred, combined
with their failure to be a perfect community, addresses questions of inter-
action between the collective and an individual who is not “the same,”
and explores the difficulties associated with these dynamics. Because of his
inability to communicate, Manfred is placed in a special camp for “anoma-
lous children,” a term the narrator tells us “refer[s] to any child who dif-
fered from the norm either physically or psychologically” (35). Outside of
the community and at its mercy, Manfred elicits a range of responses. Miss
Milch, a caretaker at the special children’s “Camp Ben-Gurion,” pounds on

her piano, playing music “loudly and happily” after she notices a reaction
from an otherwise aloof Manfred (that in fact happens upon his father’s
suicide, 49); his father mistakes Manfred’s disability for apathy and decides
not to buy him a toy, because he believes the boy does not “give a damn”
(44), while the dictatorial Arnie Kott calls him “a little skizo fellow” (136)
and cares only for Manfred’s ability to see the future.
Unlike Kott, who is condescending and rude toward Manfred, Jack acts
as the boy’s surrogate father and tries to understand and protect him. When,
Manfred in tow, Jack and his father Leo drive out to survey Leo’s newly
acquired Martian land, Jack explains to Leo that Manfred cannot choose
his visions. After this conversation with Leo, Jack ponders the erroneous
idea that madness is a form of escape (145). When Leo is taken aback and
annoyed with Manfred’s crayon drawing that forecasts the decaying AM-
WEB building, with “great cracks radiating upward” (143), Jack’s internal
monologue reveals a humane understanding of Manfred’s condition. Medi-
tating about the burden that Manfred has to carry, Bohlen thoughtfully
wonders: “How can he live from one day to the next, having to face reality
as he does?” (145). In this scene Jack thinks of Leo’s land speculation strat-
egy as “insane,” particularly after Leo describes his plan for “mile after
mile” of buildings and shopping centers, which he considers “fi ne modern
structures” (137–8).
“Madness” and materialism are closely intertwined in Martian Time
Slip. The misunderstandings between Manfred and Bohlen and the rest of
the world parallel the clash of values between individual freedom on the
one hand and materialism and power on the other hand. Struggling with
constant visions of decay and death, Manfred has no investment in mate-
rial possessions. His view of the world is that of anti-production. When
he, looking out of the window, perceives a giant bug that gets squashed by
an unknown entity, the large insect is left “with its dead teeth sunk into
what it had wanted to eat” (146), a visual memento to the futile nature
of the constant urge toward consumerism; the gorging insect is squashed
by something much larger than itself. Manfred’s vision of Kott echoes the
dead insect scene; when Kott speaks to him, Manfred sees another scene
of decay, perceiving that: “Mr. Kott gubble[s] from both his eyes” (147).
Manfred’s preoccupation with matters beyond material acquisitions, his
“madness,” is as transgressive as it is inevitable.
Jack’s perceptions of the people and the industrial production all around
him are less extreme than Manfred’s. Jack at times sees his bosses as robots
made of switches and wires, however, his anxiety about the aggressive
development of Mars and the scheming involved in the process are better
understood as rationalizations. After he concludes that Leo’s land specula-
tion scheme is crazy, he corrects himself: “Jack knew that his father was
not insane, that it was exactly as he said: land speculators did this, it was
their way of going about their business” (140). Unlike his father, Jack is
satisfied to work for enough to live on, and opposes attempts of “gypping

54 Philip K. Dick
the entire population of Earth,” such as those that his father’s business
thrives on (139). In agreement with the older Bohlen, however, Arnie Kott
desires as much power and riches as possible and, taking his greed one step
further, tries to use both Manfred and Jack Bohlen to achieve his goals.
When he fi nally miserably fails to take advantage of Manfred’s condition,
Dick reminds us that, while there may be no way around unjust owning of
assets, the representation of reality cannot and should not be owned and
controlled by any one being or group of beings and that labeling of others
is the important part of the processes of control.
DICK’S VIEW OF KOINOS-IDIOS COSMOS
Dick uses the relationship between Kott, Manfred, and Bohlen to reflect on
one of the largest themes in the novel, as well as in his work in general: the
relationship between subjective and objective worlds, seen as the process
of making a subjective, internal mental model from the external reality.
Dick’s view of subjective and objective perceptions is focused in Heraclitus’
formulation of the universe as consisting of private idios cosmos and the
collective koinos cosmos, the two realms that determine our existential
position in the world. Originally, the description of the world as consist-
ing of idios and koinos cosmos appears in Heraclitus’ Fragment I, which
states: “but although Logos is common, the many live as though they had
a private understanding” (Kirk, 57).9 The fragment, like other remnants of
Heraclitus’ writing, is open to a range of interpretations. In a letter to Bruce
Gillespie, Dick explains his understanding of the private and public worlds:
“No person can tell which parts of his total worldview is idios kosmos and
which is koinos kosmos, except by the achievement of a strong empathic
rapport with other people” (31–2/263).10 “In all of my books, well virtu-
ally all,” continues Dick, “the protagonist is suffering from a breakdown
of his idios kosmos—at least we hope that’s what’s breaking down, not the
koinos kosmos” (31–2/263).
For the schizophrenic, the idios, the private world, will always falls apart,
according to the author (Dick 32). In Martian Time Slip, Dick interprets
the tension between internal and external experiences as an occurrence
provoked by the pressures of civilization and industrial production. When
Jack Bohlen experiences a nervous breakdown in the midst of his co-op on
Earth, the attack is largely brought on by the enormity of the building and
the isolation that its very concept entailed: “I had to move out of a complex
urban environment and into a simpler one,” Jack explains to one of the
robots that he is charged with repairing in the Martian Public School. “The
pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad” (85). Although
more intense, Manfred’s vision—“ruin and despair, a ponderous, timeless,
inertial heaviness” (143)—is, for Dick, real: “it is entropy at work, decay
of the meaningful (form) into the meaningless (entropic formlessness). This

force, intruding itself is objectively real; this is not the hallucination—and
much of what in my books are regarded as hallucinations are actually
aspects of the entropy-laden koinos world breaking through” (Dick 33).
The communication between Manfred and those around him, who see a
different aspect of reality, usually facilitated through language and common
behavioral patterns, occurs in three alternative ways: through ritual, telepa-
thy, and most importantly, through the text of the novel. In the first case,
Kott allows his psyche to be overtaken by Manfred. Unwilling to wait for the
technical solution to communication with Manfred, Kott enacts a Bleekmen
ritual in order to communicate with him; in the process, he receives a terrible
gift: the ontological and epistemological disorientation that causes him to see
the world as a malicious and decaying place. The insight into Manfred’s mind
leaves such a strong impression that Kott dies believing he is still ‘caught’ in
Manfred’s subjective reality long after the event.
In the second case involving alternative communication, Manfred is
saved through the telepathic contact with Bleekmen, connecting himself
to and fi nding peace through communication with the underprivileged
telepathic Martians. In the third case—the representation of Manfred’s
consciousness through Dick’s text—the depiction is so radically different
that our knowledge of Manfred’s thought processes does not aid our
understanding of him, but makes us acknowledge him as a tangible human
being. Dick’s text makes us reconsider and respect Manfred’s Otherness, his
world revealed as an experiment in the narrative, a fiction of communication
between two subjects.
Announcing the doppelgänger relationship of J.R. Isidore and Rick
Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Jack Bohlen’s
and Manfred Steiner’s characters are closely intertwined, to the extent that
Jack view of reality is influenced by Manfred’s view, presumably through
empathic sharing during one of the two “time slips” featured in the nar-
rative. A textual experiment at its best, time slips depict reality affected
by a character’s subjective point of view. The effect is achieved by inter-
twining together the two streams of narration, one conventionally rep-
resentational—with omnipotent narrator describing an evening spent by
Arnie Kott, his mistress Doreen Anderton, her lover Jack Bohlen, Kott’s
Bleekman servant Heliogabalus, and Manfred Steiner—and the other a
repetitive, decay-ridden version of identical events featuring (Manfred’s)
subjective point of view. During the time-slips, Bohlen realizes that he “had
imbibed, on some level, Manfred’s worldview” (169). In the second slip,
Manfred influences Arnie Kott’s worldview, provoked by the ritual that
Kott performs. Kott, Jack, and Manfred thus form a trinity of perspectives
that is central to the narrative.
The active principle in both koinos and idios realms is entropy, the insid-
ious force of “the form destroyer” or, in Martian Time Slip, the Gubbler.
The reason why Bohlen and the reader are wary of the koinos objective
realm: what awaits us there is the Absolute, the force of decay constantly

56 Philip K. Dick
at work. Manfred’s vision of his old age is unusually concrete: at age 83,
he is tied to the bed because “he tried to pull out the catheter”; his legs and
arms are eventually removed because “those parts of him had decayed,”
and when he is, much later, given “grapefruit juice he could only work one
[artificial] arm, the other never worked again ever” (146–7).
Manfred’s visions of decay represent an insight into the human destiny
as well as the psychological reality of some individuals. As Manfred sees the
awful decay everywhere, and Arnie Kott laconically comments: “I don’t see
why this kid never laughs,” his sardonic attitude toward Manfred is echoed
only by the terrifying universe’s response: “gubble, gubble” (147). This is
a moment of utter consummation by the affi rmative life force, showing
the nothingness of the world as it has entered the present. Dick, however,
does not dwell on the state, but rather on Manfred’s constant suffering. An
insight into the decaying nature of the world is made particularly obvious
during the slips; however, Dick’s intention is not to frighten readers, but
encourage them toward compassionate embrace of others.11
Dick’s interest in the state of total epistemological uncertainty regarding
an individual’s perception of the objective world is, in fact, informed less by
Heraclitus and more by the school of existential psychology and the anthol-
ogy Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958),
edited by American psychologist Rolo May with colleagues Ernest (Ernst)
Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger.12 Existence, discussed at greater length in
the next chapter, had a central role in formulation of Dick’s descriptions
of both reality and the psyche. Several Existence contributors referred to
the notion of koinos and idios kosmos to advocate as the proper attitude
toward human beings with troubled or inoperative worldviews the com-
prehension derived from within those views. Rather than labeling patients’
experiences from the external point of view of the therapist, their person-
alities and values need to be comprehended from within. In “The World
of the Compulsive,” V.E. von Gebsattel explains the importance of “an
encounter with an unexplainable other being” that produces deep wonder
about the others, different than oneself (May, 171). Gebsattel’s compulsive
patient feels separated “from the koinos kosmos of average waking reality”
but this dimension is not completely destroyed “as sometimes happens with
schizophrenics” (May, 182).
In Martian Time Slip, the ideas from Existence serve as an entry point
into the novel’s two most important subjects: first, the mistaken treatment
of autistic children, together with the new theoretical approaches to the
idea of “madness,” both of which prominently changed in the 1960s. Sec-
ond, the textual representation of mental otherness through Dick’s skillful
fictional creation, the “time slips.” Dick explores Heraclitus’ and existential
psychiatry’s principles further by imagining the possibility of an objective
reality being overwhelmed by a subjective one; and the subjective, individ-
ual vision being overwhelmed by the objective. Jack and Manfred develop
an unusual relationship that unfolds on the psychological level: proximity

to Manfred apparently can bring instability to Jack’s perceptions. Jack
struggles to retain his individual world(view) but is influenced by Manfred,
already completely given over to the koinos. Manfred’s ability to invade
Jack’s and Kott’s visions in the two slips illustrates the entrance into the
world of the mentally different, as our perspective is literally changed
through the language of representation.
THE TIME SLIP
Time is an important factor in the construction of Manfred’s character.

Both Dr. Glaub and Jack Bohlen understand Manfred’s condition in terms
of altered temporal perceptions. Early in the novel Dr. Milton Glaub, a
resident psychiatrist in “a special camp” for “anomalous children,” where
Manfred must reside, informs Manfred’s father Norbert about a new the-
ory that “assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic indi-
vidual, so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot
cope with it, in fact, he is unable to perceive it properly” (44). Manfred
experiences his surroundings as extremely speeded up, too fast for him to
comprehend or notice; Dick suggests that Manfred inhabits an alternative
time stream. Jack Bohlen explains Manfred’s state to his father by show-
ing a movie of a sprouting seed, “five days compressed into seconds” (134).
Leo Bohlen eventually understands that Manfred probably has the ability
to “go out in the yard and sit down and watch the plants growing, and five
days for him is like say ten minutes for us” (134). When he fi nally estab-
lishes the contact with the Bleekmen, Manfred may be communicating
with the tribe not only through a telepathic connection, but also because of
their alternative understanding of time.13 While natural rhythms call Leo
Bohlen’s conclusion about the boy into question, Manfred’s subjective sense
of time and constant preoccupation with his entropic vision remind us not
only of the necessity of death in time but of the insignificance of the goals
held by those around Manfred.
The subjective use of time is described both as a matter of perspective
and a matter of ethics. “To the Bleekmen,” Jack ruminates, “we Earthmen
may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity,
expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all” (141).
Although he seems to have the ability of temporary time reversal, Man-
fred nevertheless suffers under the duress of his chthonic vision. His ability
to transgress the time-boundaries of ordinary human experience and to
infi ltrate others’ subjective world, as well as his constant visions, in Dick’s
interpretation suggest Manfred’s divinity. Caught forever “in the next”
(129), Manfred is isolated in a world of his own making. An example of
this occurs at the end of one of his visions, in which Manfred perceives his
head to be bitten off by circling vultures and then again by sharp shark’s
teeth. He belongs to “a world where gubbish ruled, and he had no voice,”

58 Philip K. Dick
and yet, out of this dark, dying existence Manfred concludes, “I am Man-
fred” (130), echoing the Biblical God’s response to Moses—“I am who I
am” (or, “I will be what I will be”)—in Exodus 3:14. Manfred, however,
is not simply omnipotent or flawless: he is forever caught in his own ‘self,’
troubled by visions of decay and putridness, and helpless before the burden
of the future. Thus, he represents the darker side of being the One, isolated
in imploding visions, unique, akin to the Biblical God whose identity does
not translate toward others. The God of the Absolute, as it overwhelms
Manfred and becomes him, questions our relationship to the external
world on the primal, intuitive level.
Manfred’s terrible visions during the time-slip and their invasion of
other people’s subjectivity arrestingly represent the uncanny in the human
psyche. On another level, Manfred’s visions are a revelation—he sees the
force of decay inherent in every living moment and creature—his agony is
also the agony of the world. Manfred’s role is two-fold: he invites a more
humane attitude toward fellow human beings but, as he is unable to have
“a complete view of time” that brings “new things into existence” (145),
Manfred also highlights the pessimistic viewpoint of existence, generated
by the belief that human life is limited by the realm of the mind.
The slips generated by Manfred are described through the move from
the realistic narrative into the hallucinatory, the experientially disorienting
sequences that presents Manfred’s point of view. The slips occur in chapters
10 through 12 and in chapter 15, when the objective reality and its time-
space continuum is imbalanced by the subjective, decay-ridden vision of
Manfred. His vision influences Jack during the fi rst and Kott during the
second time slip.
The fi rst time slip sequence opens from Manfred’s point of view,
expressed in short, somewhat repetitive sentences that describe Kott, Jack,
and Doreen Anderton and their interactions as perpetually under the influ-
ence of death, their entire environment rotting and filled with “gubble.”
The point of view then changes to the omniscient narration of the evening’s
events, indicating that Kott, Bohlen, and Doreen Andterton are spending
an evening together, drinking and socializing, only to return again to Man-
fred’s view of the events. Eventually, what objectively looks like a fleet-
ing kiss and chatting between Doreen and Jack, to Manfred appears as
two decaying figures, one asking “gubble me more. Gubble, gubble gubble
me” (168). The same event is told several times in a row, each time with a
decreasing level of disintegration present in the scene, the effect eventually
spreading to Jack Bohlen. Manfred sees everyone as creatures “with dead
bones, shiny and wet”—a phrase that marks each new cycle in the re-telling
of the same event.
The same scene is retold from Jack’s point of view, which is changed
from an objective vision of the events to one filled with increasing decay,
as his vision becomes overpowered by Manfred’s. As he eventually realizes
Manfred’s influence, Jack feels that “time had collapsed and left him here,

for eternity, caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature
who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again
and again” (169). As he manages to wrestle himself away, physically and
psychologically, from Kott’s house, Jack realizes Manfred’s influence. A
troubled human being suffering delusions that leave him unsure which set
of impressions is real, Jack seems caught between Kott and Manfred, two
archetypal forces. Kott’s perspective is a stable subjectivity, a private vision
that he projects upon the world; however, he is eventually absorbed by
Manfred’s vision, one that can only be equated with the absolute cosmos.
The second ‘slip’ occurs during the disturbance in chapter 15, one that is
produced by an interaction between Manfred and Kott. Manfred is taken
by Kott to the sacred Bleekmen rock where, according to instructions
given by Kott’s Bleekmen servant Heliogabalus, a ritual is performed. Kott
resorts to this attempt at communication with Manfred in order to travel
back in time and buy the AM-WEB land before Leo Bohlen. The ritual
involves Kott taking the drug Nembutal in a sacred Bleekmen cave at the
Dirty Knobby mountain, playing radio static and burning sacred herbs,
as instructed by Heliogabalus. Kott then asks Manfred to “regress back
around three weeks” (235). The process disorients Kott’s vision, as it facili-
tates Manfred’s psychic ability to impose his sense of time on Kott.
The slip is a textual experiment that functions both as a linguistic mech-
anism and a narrative statement. Kott wakes up, significantly, in his steam
bath, and experiences a progressive decay and increased maliciousness in
what used to be his life three weeks ago. The articles in the newspapers
he is reading “devolve into nonsense” filled with “gubble-gubble words”
(240), his secretary frightens him so that he hears “her breath, which was
thick and unpleasant . . . ” (242). Kott’s perceptions are so altered that he
is unable to see the world as a pleasant environment that he used to rule,
instead, he receives from Manfred a terrible gift of seeing the dark aspect of
life. Kott’s attempts to take advantage of Manfred are rewarded with this
torturous alteration of his mind’s eye. For the interpretation of moral con-
sequences of Kott’s attempt to use Manfred, it is significant that Kott does
not change any of his attitudes in the re-iterated time—he is still vengeful
toward Jack Bohlen, cruel toward human tragedy (Japanese colonists lost
in space) and relentless about buying the AM-WEB land.
Manfred’s intervention, orchestrated by profit-seeking Arnie Kott, rep-
resents the focal point of the narrative, and brings about the resolution of
several intertwined plot-lines. The fi rst of these is the battle between two
opposing forces, represented by the isolated, tortured Manfred on one side
and the unscrupulous Kott on the other. In their fi nal clash, Kott’s values, or
the lack of them, are staked against two forces which ultimately defy com-
modification: entropy and the subjectivity of the human mind. While Kott
is interested in seeing the near-future and getting the information required
for successful land speculation, Manfred’s vision is not a product that can
be bought or acquired, nor can his view of the world be commodified.

60 Philip K. Dick
In the end, it seems that, through the powers of Manfred’s mind and his
conducing of entropy, his intrinsic freedom has overwhelmed materialistic
forces represented by Kott.
Kott dies unaware of which world is real, believing himself still inside
Manfred’s reversing mind. The truth is that Kott is killed not by gradual
entropy or by “[the] goddamn schizophrenic hate and lust and death” as he
complains to Jack Bohlen, as the latter attempts to rescue him (252), but
rather by the disenfranchised Otto Zitte, “the feeble little black-market
operator ( . . . ) the one [Kott] gave that lesson to” (251). Kott does not
only pay for his mistakes with his life, he is lost ontologically, has lost the
actual connection with himself and reality forever, after being temporarily
displaced by Manfred’s intervention.
Second narrative resolution is Manfred’s apotheosis, when he is fi nally
released, literally and psychologically, from his precognitive nightmares
and fi nds comfort in the company of Bleekmen. Through his sympathetic
portrayal of the suffering autistic child and the indigenous “Bleekmen,” a
deprived and marginalized Martian community with human genealogy,
the author reminds us that the collective kosmos created by humans can
uphold an isolated individual. Those who impose the exclusion onto others,
however, must face a false, unreal kosmos of illusion, as Arnie Kott does
when he tries to take advantage of Manfred.
The third narrative strand that reaches resolution is the reuniting of
the Bohlen family, the husband and wife admitting their disloyalty and
embracing one another; Jack’s problematic relationship with his father Leo
also improved. After the time slips, all the characters in the novel are flung
back into “mainstream” reality, back to the Martian exterior: the colonists’
lives are cognitively stable again and grounded in the mid-century Terran
values, focused on the nuclear family with the father at its helm. In the
last scene, Silvia Bohlen has prepared dinner and is waiting in the house,
while Jack Bohlen and his father are looking for Manfred’s upset mother,
their voices “business-like and competent and patient” (262). But before
the reader is delivered to “ordinary reality”—and left pondering whether
to rationalize or to fear the time slips—the author takes us into the heart of
darkness, conjuring for us the horror of experientially distorted existence
as a mental and metaphysical state bound by the Absolute, koinos cosmos,
and expressed in Manfred’s, Bohlen’s, and Kott’s intertwined experiences.
When we see Manfred for the last time, he is half man and half machine.
Ancient and wheezing, Manfred returns to what for him is his “distant
past,” surrounded by Bleekmen, to “say goodbye to [his] mother” (260–
261). Erna Steiner and Silvia Bohlen are both shocked and horrified with
Manfred’s appearance, but Jack is unperturbed and communicates with
Manfred. As Jack looks upon Manfred and the Bleekmen, he concludes that
“he might, with the wild Bleekmen, discern a style of living which was gen-
uinely his and not a pallid, tormented reflection of the lives of those around
him” (253). Although, as Warrick points out “Manfred has become what

he feared” (76), a wheelchair-bound cyborg, he is happy to have escaped the
AM-WEB and he seem to have found a stable psychological niche through
his contact with the Bleekmen. Dick’s claim that empathic contact with
other individuals brings salvation, that this is the only meaningful cosmos
for human beings, is confi rmed in Manfred’s fi nal appearance.
AUTISM IN THE REAL WORLD
In 1960s America, the relationship toward mental illness and autism in par-
ticular was still quite unsophisticated. Medical professionals in the first half
of the twentieth century believed that autism originated from family dysfunc-
tion and inadequate parenting and that autism was a form of schizophre-
nia.14 In describing Manfred’s family, Dick reflects these widely believed, but
misconstrued attitudes of shame attached to the condition. When Manfred’s
father is introduced, he is compelled to visit his son in secret. “To have an
autistic child,” Norbert Steiner feels, “was a special shame, because the psy-
chologist believed that the condition came from a defect in the parents, usu-
ally a schizoid temperament” (35). The narrator adds that “in his own mind,
Steiner blamed it all on his wife” and her “intellectual, matter-of-fact atti-
tude, inappropriate in a mother” (36). The shame and guilt that Steiner feels
“because of his defective son” (37) are palpable throughout the visit, thus
illustrating a situation that would be typical in the contemporary world.
To the realistic echoes of erroneous diagnosis and the ill treatment of
autistic children and their families, Dick adds fictional elements that fur-
ther his meditation on the harsh consequences of human neglect of those
with mental conditions. During his visit, Norbert Steiner receives news
from Mrs. Esterhazy, another parent of an “anomalous child,” about the
impending UN resolution that would result in closing of the camp and the
euthanasia of “the children [who] would be put to sleep” (40). Learning
that the resolution intends “to keep the race pure” and stop the “defective
stock [from] appearing on the colonial planets,” completes a traumatic,
anxious journey that Steiner has been making with his son; his behavior
becomes erratic, alternatively hateful and gentle toward Manfred, aggres-
sive toward Dr. Glaub, until, unable to face the implications of the news,
Steiner kills himself (49).
Relying on articles from Existence and most certainly other sources for
the scientific background information and his own creative story-telling for
the imaginative content, Dick’s novel opens up a scientific and imaginative
space for more accurate and humane representation of autism. By creating a
deeply empathetic portrayal of an autistic child in Martian Time Slip, Dick
takes up a condition that in both popular imagination and among 1960s
psychologists was considered incurable, institution-worthy, and a fault of
the parents. “The field of autism,” writes Dr. Laura Schreibman, leader of
the Autism Research Program at UC San Diego, “is rife with examples of

62 Philip K. Dick
the negative consequences of uncritical acceptance of ideas” (8). Schreib-
man refers particularly to the unchecked assumptions about autism, whose
effects on both the children and the parents were made worse by frequently
unsympathetic medical assumptions. Dick’s novel consciously counteracts
attitudes such as these. The author’s portrayal of Manfred, an autistic
child, considered an unreachable mystery at best, presents the reader with a
graspable, identifiable human being, brought before us in all the complexity
of the psyche’s workings. 15
In 1964, the same year that Dick published Martian Time Slip, Dr. Bernard
Rimland published his seminal book Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and
Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior that showed autism as a
biochemical, neural and metabolic condition with a vast range of symptoms.
Rimland’s book exonerated parents’ guilt about their children’s condition
and encouraged the shift from the subjective, imprecise diagnosis based on
socioeconomic factors, family situation, and a set of assumptions that proved
incorrect through empirical research (Schreibman, 52–5; 68). Dick may not
have been familiar with Rimland’s research, since Martian Time Slip appeared
before Rimland’s book and Dick vindicates autism with an unorthodox expla-
nation, as a disorder in the perception of time. The principle behind Dick’s
characterization, however, presciently represents a gradual shift in medical
circles, from diagnostic assumptions that involve shame, blame, and hierarchy
of power (the diagnosed liable to be judged by the diagnostician) to a more
humane, all-encompassing approach to individuals with disorders.
Martian Time Slip thus represents an imaginative intermediary between
the two points in the history of humane treatment of mental patients: the
late 1950s insistence on the therapeutic “encounter” between the psychia-
trist and the patient, (expressed in Existence), and the modern attitude that
“[each patient] is his own disorder,” an individual with a specific world-
view (May 119; Iversen 4). From his imaginative explanation of Manfred’s
condition to his suggestion that Manfred carries within himself a streak of
the divine, Dick expresses his belief that individuals with different mind-
sets, such as Manfred and Jack Bohlen, should be well within, not on the
margins, of the human collective. As Ludwig Binswanger pointed out in
Existence, mental illness is “the new form of being in the world” (201). In
representing Bohlen’s and Manfred’s extraordinary vision, Dick criticizes
the perception of mentally different people as the unreachable or powerless
‘other,’ and reminds us that they are individuals in their own right. We are
urged, in Binswanger’s words, to “delve lovingly into the nature and con-
tent of the single phenomenon” (200).
THE CORRESPONDING INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE
Dick’s conception of Manfred’s character and Martian Time Slip also reso-
nate with wider intellectual ideas of the time that deeply re-evaluate the

prohibitive and negative assumptions toward differences between human
beings, pointing out the power relations inherent in our attitudes toward
each other. Two works in particular present the intellectual and ethical
arguments that resonate closely with Dick’s novel, Michel Foucault’s study
Madness and Civilization (1961) and Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical
work Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961).
Translated into English in 1970 and 1969, a couple of years after the
publication of Martian Time Slip, Foucault’s and Levinas’ works share
Dick’s idea that we must relate toward others with moral and intellectual
responsibility and with effort to understand the world and the individuals
around us. Foucault, tracing “the formulas of exclusion” applied to the
mentally ill in seventeenth and eighteen century Europe, maps the array of
meanings that madness attained in European culture, from foolishness in
the face of death to a secret kind of knowledge to an insignificant phenom-
enon. Levinas uses his concept of autrui or “the Other,” to describe one’s
relationship with the world as a continuous moral challenge: instead of sup-
pressing the world and its objects, Levinas insists, we must relate toward
otherness with moral responsibility.
Dick combines the familiar and the uncanny elements in his narrative,
from Martian setting to Manfred’s visions of decay and time slips, with
allegorical overtones in order to make an emotional and ethical appeal for
the humane treatment and inclusion of those unable or unwilling to vie
for power and possessions, as well as those either considered or labeled
as marginal and different.16 He evokes the concept of Otherness when he
represents Manfred’s peculiar view of the world in the narrative, reflecting
Levinas’ claim that only in language can we engage with otherness, formu-
lated as our speaking to the stranger (Levinas, 16). When Dick shows the
behavior of Arnie Kott in a negative light, condemning his manipulation
and misunderstanding of not only Manfred, but also of Jack, Kott’s servant
Heliogabalus, and others, Dick is in agreement with Levinas not only in
his preoccupation with the relationship between idios and koinos, but also
in criticizing the tendency of human beings “to think of other individuals
either as the extension of the self, or as the alien objects to be manipulated
for the advantage of the individual or social self” (Wild, 12). Arnie Kott’s
magnificent failure to pressure Manfred into altering time for his benefit,
resulting in the altering and derangement of Kott’s personal vision, is the
fictional highlight of Dick’s advocacy for respect of individual differences
and freedoms.
In Totality and Infi nity, Levinas, Heidegger’s one-time pupil, develops
the concept of “the radical alterity of the other” which, as long as it can
be interpreted and comprehended, becomes “the same” (Levinas, 36; 38).
Instead, Levinas argued that the relation with the rationally unknow-
able and incomprehensible other goes beyond ‘knowing’ and becomes
an ethical relationship toward the other, our striving in the direction of
Otherness and infi nity (26). 17 Levinas in many ways responded to, and

64 Philip K. Dick
contradicted, Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time (1927) and in “Iden-
tity and Difference” (1957), by claiming the necessity of differentiation,
and the importance of subjective vision in the face of objective “totality.”
Out of the system organized around the self emerges totalitarianism that
subsumes it (Levinas, 17). Like Dick, Levinas is interested in the relation-
ship between “the same and the other” (28), the subjective world of the
individual and the objective world of others, “the world of alien things
and elements which are other than, but not negations of myself” (Wild
12). It is important, according to Levinas, to recognize the integrity and
freedom of those we encounter, “the [other] I, the Stranger” who is both
free and different from oneself: “we are the same and the other. The con-
junction and here designates neither addition nor power of one term over
the other” (39).
Levinas considers the absolute Other to be the Invisible (35), an other-
worldly entity in the range of Platonic ideas (37). Our attempt to understand
the realm of not me is ultimately a relationship toward God. By implying
Manfred’s connection to the Absolute, the entropy of the universe, Dick
suggests Manfred as the absolute Other, a divine being toward whom
human beings strive even if understanding is impossible.
In lieu of Levinas’ claims about language as the primary means of
communication with the unknown, it is significant that the realm of sci-
ence fiction allows Dick to express Manfred’s alternative worldview in an
affi rmative manner. In his argument, Levinas advocates for the multiplic-
ity of truths, expressed in language, the subjective truth of being opposed
to the objective “plastic forms of the epic” (22).18 Instead of the problem-
atic, negative depictions of disability as deranged humanity—a trope most
commonly identified and criticized in the literary history of disability, (the
“miraculous healing” trope taking a close second place), Dick portrays his
mentally disabled characters without patronizing them yet insisting on their
respect and civil rights. The characters speak for themselves—not through
the voice of an omniscient narrator.19 Their unique voice is often reflected
in specific narrative structures that reveal disability as radically different,
yet inherently and fully valid facet of human experience. Here is created
the condition of literary Otherness that is in constant process of revelation
and disclosure, through characters that are clearly different but also cen-
tral to mainstream reality. Dick agrees with Levinas that this condition of
Otherness, philosophical, social, and literary, saves us from the harshness
of objectivity (Levinas, 24).
In a parallel attempt to defend human differences, in 1961, Michel Fou-
cault published Madness and Civilization, manifestly articulating a his-
tory of labeling and marginalizing certain individuals as “mad,” showing,
through the changing parameters of the process, the arbitrariness (and
often cruelty) of such selection and condemnation. “Men would have to
wait two centuries,” writes Foucault, “until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche—
for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its

power as revelation for unreason to cease being merely the published shame
of reason” (79). Foucault’s discussion of the cultural (mis)treatment of mad-
ness and Dick’s novel—originally published around the same time—thus
demonstrate similar concerns with the ethical treatment of others. 20 Like
Dick, Foucault criticizes “the merciless language of non-madness,” chal-
lenging its truth (ix). Like Levinas, Foucault criticizes expulsion and exile
as a primary relationship toward others (Madness and Civilization, 9–10).
In his study, Foucault shows the changing representation of madness as
alternatively dangerous, foolish, sinful, unproductive and idle, beastly, and
morally evil. By fi nally equating madness with moral deficiency, “the ‘scien-
tific psychiatry’ of the nineteenth century became possible” (158). Madness
was, according to Foucault largely silenced, lacking its own truth (198). 21
In dealing with the psychological realities of modern humans, Dick par-
ticularly explores the nature of the condition today named “mental illness”
that has famously undergone various historical interpretations, from reli-
gious trance to criminal insanity to moral impropriety. In Martian Time
Slip, Jack Bohlen ruminates about the power-laden standards for treating
mentally different individuals during a visit to the Public School, which is
filled with android teachers such as the Angry Janitor (“he was in fact, as
near as Jack could tell, a combination of Socrates and Dwight D. Eisen-
hower” 71).22 The school, which contains no reference to its Martian envi-
ronment, “peddle[s] the culture, in its entirety, to the young” and claims
that “a child who did not properly respond” is autistic:
Autism, Jack reflected, as he unscrewed the back of the Angry Janitor,

had become a self-serving concept for the authorities who governed
Mars. It replaced the older term “psychopath,” which in its time re-
placed “moral imbecile,” which had replaced “criminally insane. (73)
This section, in which Jack is highly uncomfortable, just as Philip K. Dick

was, with being in school and in public, encapsulates the institutional
neglect and disenfranchisement of anyone deemed maladjusted, reflecting
the intellectual climate of the 1960s, especially toward the mentally ill.
While Emanuel Levinas focused on approaching the Other, which is
always separate and the proof for the existence of God, Dick created the
textual Other. Through Manfred especially, Dick establishes the fictional
account of a radically different, yet unavoidably human mentality. His
novel represents the Other itself, as it speaks for itself, exploring both the
limitations of Otherness and its centrality for the realization of the living
deemed human, or humane. Martian Time Slip describes a battle for Man-
fred’s being, enacted within Manfred, in his darkness and gubble, and on
the outside, through the powerplay that surrounds him, but whose internal
life is mediated through narration. 23
Madness, for Dick, does not obscure truth, but can sometimes contain it
and it deserves to be free. Although Manfred’s vision is chaotic and decayed,

66 Philip K. Dick
Manfred’s fi nal destination is not death and loss but rather freedom. When
Manfred does, in the end, establish contact with the native Martian Bleek-
men, through their telepathic powers offer they Manfred the freedom and
security that the human community has denied or was unable to proffer
throughout the novel. Manfred’s release from suffering ultimately offsets
the unethical, profit-driven, irresponsible behavior of other characters in
the novel.
It is important to mention, in this historical analysis of Martian Time
Slip and the intellectual climate of the decade, that the novel precedes
and coincides with the Civil Rights activism struggle in the 1960s and
1970s, including the realm of disability rights. In 1973 the Rehabilitation
Act was established, confi rming that “No otherwise qualified individual
with a disability in the United States, as defi ned in section 705(20) of this
title, shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the
participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimina-
tion under any program or activity receiving Federal fi nancial assistance
or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by
the United States Postal Service.” In 1977, protests in San Francisco and
Washington D.C. lead to the signing of the 1977 Health, Education, and
Welfare (HEW) regulations implementing the Rehabilitation Act and thus
ensuring more humane and inclusive treatment for individuals with physi-
cal and mental disabilities.
CONCLUSION
As in Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), the vastness of Mars

shown in Martian Time Slip, fictional and real, makes human beings
appear as mere passers by, visitors on the very surface of events, with short
history, short memory, and with an attachment to the land that is limited to
exploitation. 24 The novel presents a series of disparities between its charac-
ters, addressing unequal distribution of power, resources, and benefits. Out
of these inequalities also emerges a higher moral ground: values of close(r)
family relations, and individual freedom against profit-obsessed behaviors.
The struggle that Manfred Steiner and Jack Bohlen wage against Arnie
Kott and Leo Bohlen, although it possesses mythic and metaphysical quali-
ties, is primarily a fight between disparate sets of values—individual sov-
ereignty (Manfred’s and Bohlen’s) against close-minded profiteering (Leo
Bohlen’s and Kott’s).
In Martian Time Slip, Dick is interested in the lives of human beings
on the verge of a physical void (the deserted planet Mars as new frontier),
who are also psychologically struggling with the deadness of the universe,
its inherent entropy. Although his novel is set on Mars in the colonization
era, Dick’s interest in narrative speculation and in the relationship between
literature and nothingness—literature’s ability to describe and inscribe

nothingness—echoes early twentieth century modernist literature, its inter-
est in textual experiment, and the movement’s preoccupation with the rav-
ages of the world. Martian Time Slip focuses on the inner consciousness
of its characters, attempting the psychological expansion of the narrative,
akin to similar attempts in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Dick repeated
several Joycean experiments, including the Molly-like dreamy monologue
of Jack’s wife Silvia Bohlen (128–9), recalling the closing of Ulysses, and
Manfred’s inner monologues.
Furthermore, the representation of a radically different consciousness,
created by Faulkner through Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury
(1929), is revisited by Dick through creation of the inner self of an autistic
child Manfred Steiner in Martian Time Slip. Like Benjy, Manfred has an
extraordinary sense of time or space, but instead of the disorientation within
the past, his thoughts race toward the future. Both writers give inner life
through their narratives to individuals otherwise considered lesser human
beings: Benjy an “idiot” and Manfred “the skizo little fellow” (136). Writer
and critic Ursula LeGuin drew the following parallel between modernist
Virginia Woolf and Dick:
“The risk Virginia Woolf took in writing Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway,”

Le Guin wrote, “is the risk Philip Dick took in writing Manfred in
Martian Time Slip” (177).
Manfred Steiner’s and Jack Bohlen’s visions of decay show the physical
corruption of the human universe, analogous to the modernist views of the
world. The nothingness that threatens Dick’s Mars and its inhabitants, for
example, is the nothingness that ruptures Hemingway’s writing. Manfred’s
absolute preoccupation with the deadness of the world and aging, his vision
of “gubble” that destroys the universe until “it rained gubbish, now; all was
gubbish, wherever he looked” (130) recalls the threat and fi nally the erup-
tion of nothingness in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (1926). When Man-
fred fi nally sees “a hole as large as a world,” where “the earth disappeared
and became black, empty, and nothing” (197) he invokes the “our nada
who art in nada” from Hemingway’s story, the “thy kingdom nada thy will
be nada in nada as it is in nada” an apt prophecy of Manfred’s state, the
“nothing that he knew too well” (Hemingway) describing also Manfred’s
horrible visions.
Hemingway’s NADA moment, Faulkner’s idiot child, and the artwork
of Dali, obsessed with and producing images of decay, of cracks opening
in the seemingly perfect world, and time bursting through deserted land-
scapes, are echoed thirty years later in Martian Time Slip. We fi nd the
concern with that same modernist vision, now removed to Mars, the milieu
of Dick’s explorations and imagination, but enriched with the reflection on
mid-century America, suburban men and women caught in their mundane
dreams and yearnings.

68 Philip K. Dick
Aside from Jack’s relative amorphousness as a character—his destiny
failing to produce a concrete, rounded fable in the novel’s narrative—the
question remains whether readers should draw from Martian Time Slip the
moral point that strivings such as those of Arnie Kott, for more wealth,
more land, and no compassion are much less significant than those of Man-
fred Steiner for normalcy, stability, and sovereignty, or if we should focus
on the devilish, otherworldly figure rendered within the cycle of the Mar-
tian time slips. A strange vision of reality is made apparent, shocking and
powerful, but rendered in the form of a slip—loosely defi ned, disorienting
experience so otherwrodly that it allows the ordinary mind to bypass it.
The answer remains with the reader.
Caught, like Manfred, within the “next moment” forever, the reader
and the artist must face the void and, Dick pleads with us, must draw
moral and ethical conclusions from the encounter. Instead of merely
recording the deformation of the world or accepting it as a norm, we must
act, like Jack Bohlen and Bleekmen do, with courage and turn toward
others with compassion.

4 Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep
“Mechanical Universe and Its Discontents”
The theosophical and scientific concepts in Do Androids Dream of Elec-

tric Sheep (1968) converge, on one hand, on the ancient Greek and Chris-
tian understanding of life as existence controlled and determined by forces
larger than the individual, understood as destiny, or the power of god. On
the other hand, the novel incorporates a modern scientific view, particularly
cybernetics, which does not privilege one kind of being, but suggests the
parallels between humans and machines, especially human and artificial
intelligence, a notion central in the work of mathematician and philoso-
pher Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) whose ideas about cybernetics notably
influenced Dick. The characters of Do Androids hover on the borderlines
that distinguish “the machine”—or, in Dick’s case, “android”—and “ the
human,” struggling to make sense of the existence of artificial life in a
world plagued by death and entropy.
The fundamental narrative themes in Do Androids are the omnipresence
of entropic decay, described in the second law of thermodynamics as the
loss of energy; Mercerism, a Christian-like religion dependent on and medi-
ated by machines (empathy boxes); and the existence of mechanical life—
androids and electric animals—infused into the world and emotions of
humans. Each theme encompasses ancient and modern worldviews, and all
draw on theosophical and scientific concepts to create a re-defi ned notion of
life in the face of nothingness. The novel poses an ontological question, the
question of being, to all its protagonists: human beings, religious and media
figures, androids, and even animals. The question of authenticity extends
throughout the novel: genuine and televised lives, genuine and invented reli-
gion, and genuine and artificially induced emotions and perceptions make
up the cosmogony of Do Androids. In such a set-up, human life occupies a
dubious position in close interaction with machines.
Dick’s main source for human-machine analogy is Norbert Wiener,
whose influence on Dick’s work has been pointed out by writers such as
Patricia Warrick, N. Katherine Hayles, and Joseph Slade, but their analysis
of the interconnections is brief.1 In his groundbreaking study, Cybernet-
ics (1947) and its general audience version, Human Use of Human Beings
(1954), Wiener discusses his insight that machines, like human beings and

70 Philip K. Dick
animals, function in a related manner. Wiener explained that machines
and humans are analogous mechanisms that process stimuli from the
environment, adjust their behavior (through feedback), and interact with
the environment in a continuous flow of information (Cybernetics 54).
Building on Wiener’s work and the ideas of researchers in the field of arti-
ficial intelligence (such as Alan Turing, whose famous Turing test prob-
ably inspired Dick’s Voight Kampff test in this novel), Dick conceptualizes
a new technological existential entity: an intelligent android resembling
human beings so much that it is impossible to tell the difference. 2
By combining the elements of the Christian-based theology of Mercer-
ism, philosophical ideas about the mind-body relationship, and the modern
understanding of machine behavior, Dick’s novel suggests the existence of
a mechanical god in the novel’s world, the narrative and phenomenologi-
cal deus ex machina. 3 The notion of the “mechanical god,” defi ned not
as a machine-like analogue to a monotheistic divinity, but a universally
present machine intelligence, suggests the author’s extraordinary solution
for the fate of his created world. In the Earth’s rapidly depleting environ-
ment, as the characters experience depression and disappointment, and
as the official religion of Mercerism is denounced as fake, the presence
of a mechanical god is the last glimmer of hope. When, at the end of the
novel, the despondent and discouraged Rick Deckard fi nds an electric toad
in the desert which was California, the artificial animal is a token sign
of machine intelligence, of animation in an otherwise dead world. The
apparent intervention of the novel’s divinity, through the appearance of
the electric animal, brings the cessation of Deckard’s suffering and his
renewed fate in life.
In the world of Do Androids, entropy threatens humans, androids, elec-
tric animals, the physical, and even the spiritual world. Critics often focus
on Dick’s statement that he wrote the novel to portray “the dehumanizing
effect that android hunting has on Deckard” (McCarthy 351), but con-
tinuous references to entropy’s devastating effect on the characters and the
environment—both degenerating under the influence of radiation—illus-
trates Dick’s continuing preoccupation with death as a physical, spiritual,
and emotional crisis.
The beginning of the novel introduces “the taint of death” (8), caused by
the radioactive fallout after the global war, the entropic force that will keep
spreading throughout the novel and invading the world of Do Androids.
The story’s backdrop, “World War Terminus” and its consequences, ush-
ers in the general “force” that has altered the lives of every being in the
novel, organic and non-organic. The novel’s central characters—Iran and
Rick Deckard, J. R. Isidore, and androids Roy and Irmgard Batty, Pris, and
Luba Luft—all have problems existing in a rapidly decaying environment:
they experience the universe’s loss of life as an existential crisis in their
own lives. The force of death that is overpowering the world through the
radioactive dust and garbage, represents both a physical and metaphysical

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 71
trend.4 Those remaining on Earth suffer entropic influence that ranges from
biological damage to emotional isolation.
Do Androids is also Dick’s most environmentally aware novel, offering
an unflinching portrayal of the consequences of radiation and the ensu-
ing natural disaster. The novel’s opening and closing scenes, for example,
question the chance for human survival in the environmentally polluted
planet that has been partly re-populated by machines: in this society, artifi-
cial pets are particularly valued while artificial humans are persecuted and
destroyed. Real fauna has become so rare that it is bought and sold in a
catalogue, “Sidney’s Animal & Fowl” that features crickets, mice, and cats
as cheaper options and horses, sheep, and ostriches as expensive, hard to
obtain possessions (13–14).
In such a world, artificial emotions become a valuable asset. The opening
and closing scenes feature interactions of a married couple, Iran and Rick
Deckard, who in the course of the novel undergo transformation from strife
and marital misunderstanding to a fragile peace. In the opening scene, Rick
and his wife Iran both alter their moods with a “Penfield” machine. Their
interaction with the “mood organ” is so close that it becomes an intrinsic
part of their marital fight: “If you dial for greater venom, then I’ll dial the
same,” Iran threatens before Deckard leaves for work. “I’ll dial the maxi-
mum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now
seem like nothing” (4).
In contrast to this machine-aided behavior, the closing scene depicts Iran
“fi x[ing] herself at last a cup of black, hot coffee” (244), after she puts her
mentally and physically exhausted husband to bed. Instead of “a six-hour
self accusatory depression,” (4) which is Iran’s mood of choice in the begin-
ning of the novel, she seems ready to bear the future with perhaps more
optimistic mood organ choices. Deckard, for his part, has fallen asleep
without the customary aid of the Penfield machine. Finally, all seems well
in the land of artificial life, but the topics considered in the novel are far
from reassuring.
Following Wiener, Dick fi rst re-defi nes the notion of ‘life’ not as the
privileged existence of the organic, but as any patterned and ultimately
sentient communication with the world. The expanded notion of what
‘life’ is works on the level of the electric sheep and other true to life replicas
of animals which populate the novel, and on the level of the novel’s entire
universe. Although it addresses abstract philosophical issues, the narrative
of Do Androids does not leave the realm of the material and places the
physical conundrum of the androids’ existence, together with the general
force of entropy/decay, at the center of the novel. Although “everything
anybody has ever thought” (227) is the reality of life in the novel, that
same reality must be negotiated around two major issues: the existence of
the religion of Mercerism, compromised by its public denunciation, and
perhaps further compromised by its dependence on technology, and the
existence of androids and “ersatz” animals, or, artificially created life.

72 Philip K. Dick
Regarding the latter, Eric Rabkin and Robert Scholes describe the android
as a literary device, “a modern streamlining of the image of Frankenstein’s
monster” which serves as a focal point for questions about “the real lim-
its and meaning of humanity” (Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision,
180). In describing androids as a self-governing organism closely modeled
on human cognitive abilities, Wiener and Dick fascinate the reader with
the fundamental underlying suggestion that a distinction between human
beings and machines, especially machines with artificial intelligence, is fluid
and ultimately undetectable. For both authors, the related way in which
machines and human beings function is the core quality of nature.
In “The Android and the Human,” a 1972 lecture given at the Vancou-
ver science fiction convention, Dick discusses Wiener’s work in cybernetics,
and his “meaningful comparison between human and mechanical behav-
ior” (Shifting Realities 183–4). Dick’s remarks show that he contemplated
Wiener’s scientific ideas and their consequences for everyday life. In his
lecture, Dick suggests that the machine behavior will reach such complex-
ity that we should look into ourselves for the model of understanding it
(Shifting Realities 184).5
Dick was apparently aware of Wiener’s argument regarding machine
creativity, and the notion of a potentially autonomous machine. He applied
two of Wiener’s ideas: that, because machines were created by humans, our
activity toward them can be seen as analogous to God’s creative power held
over humans. Second, that machines will be able to create other machines,
further raises the question of a machine’s potential divinity. Ann Dick, the
author’s third wife, writes that “we read the Tao Te Ching, and, coinciden-
tally, a book on cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, which described machines
of eight different orders. A machine of the eight order would be one that
could create its own material” (Search 75–6). In the Vancouver lecture,
Dick presented at first a more frivolous version of the mechanical divin-
ity, the sewing machine god that appears before a feminized audience of
“merely metal and plastic sewing machines [ . . . ] Himself, no doubt,
able to sew buttonholes and fancy needlework at a rate that would dazzle”
(186). The novel, however, develops a more substantial portrait of the arti-
ficial God.
Rick and Iran Deckard, J. R. Isidore, and novel’s androids all face the
harsh influences of artificial forces: the conditions of their lives are the
artificial constantly on the brink between hope and utter absurdity. Thus,
Deckard returns from a suicidal trip into desolation only after he discov-
ers what he believes is a real toad. Dick sets up the toad’s significance
early in the plot when the animal is described as one of the extinct spe-
cies “most important” to the novel’s divinity, Wilbur Mercer (24). When
Deckard spots the toad in the desert, “his heart lugg[s]” from “the shock
of recognition” (236), and his fi rst thought reveals the toad as “the critter
most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey” (236). In the early
draft of the novel, titled “The Electric Toad,” which Dick later crossed and

wrote the word “sheep” above (Fullerton MSS, Box 3), the author went so
far as to state that “Wilbur Mercer had planted” the animal, so that Deck-
ard could have “something to hang onto, to go on” (Fullerton MSS, Box 3).
Deckard realizes that the toad is artificial only after he returns home, and
he accepts the fact.
Deckard’s ‘weaker’ double, “chickenhead” J. R. Isidore, also receives
a token animal “given to him by Mercer” (217), a spider whose impor-
tance for Isidore, as the scene in which the androids mutilate it shows,
is far beyond its fi nancial worth (206). But given the fact that Deckard’s
toad, and most likely J.R. Isidore’s spider, are artificial, that Mercer is den-
nounced as a fake, and given the possibility that even Deckard may not be
human, the higher force or causality that places the animals in front of the
characters and that provides “life” in the face of planet’s death is not an
antropomorphic organic, but Dickian mechanical god. Although both J.R.
Isidore and the androids believe that Isidore’s spider is real, Deckard, upon
realizing that his toad is artificial, concludes: “the spider Mercer gave the
chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter”
(241). Deckard’s acceptance of artificial life, his conclusion that “the elec-
tric things have their lives too” (241) is not a projection that he applies to
artificial constructs, but rather a fundamental trait of the machines. Later
in the scene, however, Dick addresses the relationship between humans,
androids, and God, and the question of androids’ soul, by paraphrasing
the Bible: “Who knows if the spirit of men travels up, and the breath of
androids travels down?,” exchanging the word ‘beast’ for ‘android’.
DO ANDROID SOULS GO TO HEAVEN?
Wiener’s understanding and description of the world as a constant flow

of information, susceptible to entropy (or disorder), led him to make two
major claims regarding the behavior of new machines. First, he felt “that
the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some
of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analo-
gous attempts to control entropy through feedback” (Human Use of Human
Beings 15; “Cybernetics in History” 54). Wiener drew the parallel between
the human nervous system and the machine’s feedback system, stating that
human beings and machines process external reality in an identical way. In
this sense, Wiener’s idea is reflected in the troubles that both human beings
and androids face in the decaying world of Do Androids.
Secondly, anticipating the current development of multimedia, Wiener
claimed that “society can only be understood through a study of messages
and the communication facilities which belong to it; in the future . . . mes-
sages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between
machine and machine are destined to play an ever-increasing part” (Human
Use of Human Beings 9). Following Wiener, the narrative of Do Androids

74 Philip K. Dick
represents reality as a system of messages, the uninterrupted communica-
tion between humans and a variety of mechanical devices, including the
empathy boxes used by Mercerism and the TV announcements of Buster
Friendly.6 In this way, human-machine communication becomes a process
of coagulation, blurring the borders between the two.
In the course of his hunt, Deckard himself begins to question his judg-
ment and the nature of androids as artificial human beings. The killing
of Luba Luft, an android opera singer and Deckard’s third victim, shakes
the bounty hunter’s faith in the rightness of his actions. “She was really
a superb singer,” Deckard tells himself. “How can a talent like that be a
liability to our society?” (137). As he kills the six members of the resurgent
android group, Deckard’s actions test his humanity and sense of reality.
“Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that
only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had
not worn the aspect of a simulation” (141).
Deckard’s crisis is significant because it reflects both his personal trans-
formation and the creed of Mercerism. “Do you think androids have
souls?” Deckard asks a fellow bounty hunter (135). The answer to this
question does not come from Deckard’s crucial insight, gained at the end
of the novel, in which he fi nally recognizes mechanical constructs as alive.
Nor does it come from the division between humans as beings with emo-
tions and androids as cold machines. The answer to Deckard’s question
about androids’ souls comes from his other insight, given as a reply to his
wife when she shares “the most shocking news on TV” with him (227).
When Iran asks him whether “it could be true” that Mercerism is a fake
religion, Deckard answers that: “everything is true. Everything anybody
has ever thought” (227).
Deckard at this point becomes a philosopher in a double sense. His
name is a close homonym to the French philosopher Descartes (1596–
1650), whose “rule of truth” is reflected directly in Deckard’s statement.
Discussing our knowledge and self-awareness, Descartes expresses the rule
of truth in Meditation III: “So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a
general rule that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true” (69).
Deckard’s response that “everything anybody has ever thought is true,”
is Descartes’, who establishes our intuitions and perceptions as a genuine
method of processing the world. Descartes starts with the rule of truth
in his ontological argument for the existence of God. In Meditation Five,
Descartes writes: “But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought
the idea of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly
perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible
basis for another argument to prove the existence of God?” (110).
Descartes famously postulated the existence of mind and body as two
different substances, but did not resolve the problem of their interaction.
Instead, as his follower Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) points out,
Descartes and his pupils introduced a deus ex machina, a reality “continually

produced by the power of God” (150).7 Leibniz himself responded to the
question about the mind and matter by concluding that material substance
is irrelevant for the existence of the soul because mind and body correspond
with one another (the concept known as parallelism). Leibniz writes: “Fur-
thermore, by means of the soul or form, there is in us a true unity which
corresponds to what we call ‘I’; this can have no place in artificial machines
or in a simple mass of matter, however organized it may be. Such masses
can only be thought of as like an army or a flock, or like a pond full of fish,
or like a watch composed of springs and wheels” (148). Although Leibniz
argued that machines cannot have consciousness because they don’t have
the mind, he in fact supports Descartes/Deckard’s positions that androids
do have souls, since they are not a material substance, but, in Dick’s repre-
sentation, do posses an “I,” a mental substance.
For Descartes, the soul is in relationship with the body and with the
intellect (the main criticism of his dualism stemming from his failure to
defi ne the relationship); the soul’s “passions” direct one’s behavior. “Des-
cartes’ central thesis,” writes Rutherford, “is that the passions originate in
bodily changes, which are communicated by the animal spirits to the pineal
gland, and thereby cause affective states in the soul–affections which are
referred to the soul itself and not to the body” (“Descartes’ Ethics”). By
connecting the truth with the perceptions and workings of the mind, both
Descartes and Deckard classify the androids as creatures with souls, exist-
ing fully on account of their intelligence.
As the androids become more humanized—their abilities and integra-
tion into the world are shown throughout the novel—their sentience trans-
lates into substance; as a creation that gains a measure of independent
thought, they force humans to face responsibility for the ignorant politi-
cal decisions and for technological progress driven primarily by the desire
for economic gain. In Human Use of Human Beings Wiener describes the
modern impulse, the belief in “the virtuous rapidity of progress” or “a
continual ascent to Bigger and Better Things” (35; 27), which ushers in the
modern age as “the age of consistent and unrestrained exploitation” (35).
Among the many references he drew on, Wiener points to the invention of
synthetic materials (42) as an uncertain attempt to avoid falling “into the
clutches of universal want” (38). In Do Androids, the android is in fact the
Synthetic Freedom Fighter, produced for the war, has already survived “the
progress” and is now facing, together with humans, the universal depletion
on the deserted planet.
Another implication of producing and naming androids as “Synthetic
Freedom Fighters,” is that it denotes a deceptive attempt to justify political
aims (by producing artificial soldier and obscuring their violent purpose
with a deceptive title) and betrays the impersonal attitudes of the policy-
makers toward soldiers. The designation “Synthetic Freedom Fighter” car-
ries the message that not only does freedom come at the price of violence
and strife, but also that its fighters are reduced to a position of non-agency,

76 Philip K. Dick
as manufactured synthetic servants. Clearly referred to as slaves, and re-
modeled to become “the mobile donkey of the colonization program” (16),
androids are depicted from a compassionate authorial stance: as peons
in the game of human violence and heedlessness. Critics point out Dick’s
negative attitude toward androids in two essays, “The Android and the
Human” and “Man, Androids, and Machine” (1976), but his statements
can be read as a criticism of humans and not machines.8
Dick’s portrayal of androids as servants, and “the ultimate incentive of
emigration” into space, provided by the government to anyone willing to
leave the post-war destruction of Earth, (Do Androids 16) further echoes
Wiener’s discussion of the ultimate development of “the modern ultra-rapid
computing machine” (Cybernetics 36). “This new development,” Wiener
warns, “has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. . . . It gives the
human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to per-
form its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties
of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct
demoralizing effects of human cruelty” (Cybernetics 37)
In Do Androids, the language of the TV commercial hawking androids
to the Earth’s émigrés makes the parallel between slaves and androids
clear: “The TV set shouted, ‘duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil
War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the cus-
tom tailored humanoid robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE
NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE . . . ” (17). Written in the lan-
guage of modern advertising, the passage is a scathing commentary on
human attitudes toward the powerless Other, toward an outsider who
can be either organic or mechanical. The allusions to the Civil War draw
a parallel between African-American slaves and androids, and make the
idea that androids have no feelings particularly poignant. Machines are
used unethically showing that, for Dick, the source of evil does not come
from androids themselves, but from humans and their mistaken actions.
The androids, Deckard realizes during his hunt, are not simply unfeeling
machines, but an organism driven to seek “a better life without servitude”
(184). Their insurrection and aggression come from the violation of their
self-determination and not their inherent malice.
Deckard’s plight, describing his pitiable efforts to do his job and keep
his marriage going, is almost sufficient in masking the fact that humans are
hunting down and killing self-willed androids. Even the simple plot device
of giving the androids full proper names—Roy Baty, Rachael Rosen, and
Pris (no second name)—instead of a friendly “R2D2” or a menacing “Hal”
from Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey respectively, shows androids
as beings beyond the mere assemblage of artificial materials. As is often the
case in Dick’s fiction, human beings are presented as aggressive and cruel
defenders of their status at the top of the evolutionary chain.
Furthermore, the Earth’s government is described in Chapter Two as a
force of oppression toward individuals, both organic and artificial alike. It

is an institution that discriminates systematically against all its subjects, by
forcing the healthy to “emigrate or degenerate” (8), condemning the sick
such as “the chickenhead” J.R. Isidore to remain on the dying planet, and
turning the androids into a new kind of slave—from warriors in a point-
less conflict to servants in the colonization program. The unspecified Earth
authorities, through a large corporation (“Rosen Association”), produce
androids in order to fight a war, destroy the planet, and turn to the new
spaces of cosmos for dubious salvation. Androids and humans both are
victims of governmental policies.
The big corporations which, in accord with the government, mass pro-
duce simulated humans, are represented in the novel by the Rosen Asso-
ciation. Like the government, the Rosen Association is described as an
impersonal force. “It possesses in fact,” Deckard concludes, “a sort of
group mind . . . His mistake, evidently, had been in viewing them as indi-
viduals” (55). When Deckard’s boss Henry Bryant suggests that the World
Police Organization should fi le “a formal written complaint” (28) against
Rosen Association, because of the uncanny resemblance of androids to
humans, Deckard’s response demonstrates the powerlessness of the indi-
vidual against the technology produced and sponsored by corporations:
“We had better just accept the new unit as a fact of life, he said. It has
always been this way, with every improved brain unit that’s come along,”
reminding his boss that “every police agency in the Western Hemisphere”
complained about androids without success (29). An updated rendition of
the Frankenstein myth, Do Androids moves the responsibility away from
the scientist and on to the “mammoth corporation,” as Deckard refers to
Rosens (55), whose company policies shape the problematic existence of
androids and misuse technology on a large scale.
When Deckard confronts Eldon Rosen about the android threat to
humans because of their success in passing the Voight-Kampf test, designed
to distinguish androids from humans, Rosen uses business logic to justify
immorality with market demand: “we produced what the colonists wanted.
If our fi rm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other fi rms
in the field would have” (54). Eldon Rosen’s comment also reiterates that
the police system has arbitrary authority over life and death, since the deci-
sion of who is and who is not an android cannot be determined in absolute
terms (55). Rosen turns the accusation, back on his accusers: “your posi-
tion, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn’t,” pointing out the
arbitrary authority of the police, who may have killed “authentic humans
with underdeveloped empathic ability” (54).
The narrative of Do Androids, however, focuses less on the institutional
policies that cause wide-spread deprivation of androids’ and human rights,
instead, the focus is on the ensuing individual dramas of both human and
android protagonists. Their destinies are rendered with pathos and com-
passion. In the opening chapters, Dick’s description of androids reflects
an instinctive human reaction toward the towering potential of robots.

78 Philip K. Dick
As intelligent beings, androids “evolved beyond a major—but inferior—
segment of mankind” (30). The implication that an elite human group
remains superior to the “pragmatic, no nonsense” android intelligence
reveals the attitude that machines, no mater how intelligent, will not assim-
ilate innately human abilities. Furthermore, by representing androids as an
organism incapable of religious fusion with Mercer, as “a solitary preda-
tor” (31) lacking “group instinct,” Dick introduces the concept of empathy
as the distinguishing factor between the human and the machine. The
frequent references to the difficulties of distinguishing the human from the
android, even with the Voight-Kampf test, the description of Rick Deckard
as a merciless predator himself, and the abusive attitude of other humans
toward the helpless J.R. Isidore, indicate that humans may be becoming
androids, compassion-less shells of response and information processing.
Because there is a doubt that human beings are human at all—Isidore
being a representative of the divine forces in the novel and possibly embody-
ing Mercer, and Deckard possibly an android without compassion for oth-
ers—the human/android parallels repeat the question: what is human? Or
rather, what are the limitations and transcendent points of human experi-
ence? Equally important, however, is Dick’s insistence on androids’ actual
substance, on the qualities of “life” that the androids possess.
MACHINE RELIGION FOR HUMAN BEINGS: MERCERISM
Dick raises the question of authenticity and of the consequences of human

interaction with technology not only by comparing human beings and
androids, but also by comparing traditional Christianity to the Christian-
like religion in the novel. Together with the insurgent humanoid robots,
artificial animals treated as living pets, and TV talk-show hosts who exist
primarily in front of camera, the religion of Mercer is a key phenomenon
that helps explicate the meaning of sentience in the novel’s decaying world.
By making the empathy box indispensable to the religious experience of
Mercerism, Dick places a mechanical device at the source of the religious
movement, making technology the prime mover of the religion, where new
social and historical conditions are usually found.
Based on the immersive experience supported by the empathy boxes,
Mercerism was fi rst introduced in Dick’s story “The Little Black Box”
(1964). However, while “The Little Black Box” represents Mercerism pri-
marily as a subversive political force in a world jointly ruled by the United
States and its Communist counterpart, without giving much detail about
the religion’s principles, the imagined religion in Do Androids is a power-
ful but elusive religious movement based on the resurrection myth. Mer-
cerism has two key elements: the shared experience of Mercer’s suffering,
or the participant’s total identification with Mercer, and the technology
that facilitates the experience. Mercerism’s technological dimension—its

dependence on the transmission of empathy boxes—places the human reli-
gious experience on an equal level with the novel’s other technological
hybrids: the mechanical animals and people (androids), and the ubiquitous
mass media.
In this set-up, the main religious leader, Mercer, emerges as a semi-
mechanical entity. It is not by accident that he is compared to the ubiqui-
tous and artificial media personality, Buster Friendly, as both figures rely
on the shared, ritualized behaviors of their spectators. More than a TV
announcer, Buster touches the lives of all the characters, from Iran to Isi-
dore. With his constant artificial chatter, Buster embodies the impersonal
nature of the machine-generated reality of the global media. Opposed to
Buster, or perhaps alongside him, is Mercer.
Dick develops a series of images of God in the novel: as a performa-
tive figure of Wilbur Mercer, repeatedly climbing the difficult ascent (his
experiences are shared, via empathy boxes, by his believers); as the leader
of the Mercerite faith whose rules for behavior form the religion’s prin-
ciples; as an unidentifiable force determined by one’s subjective experience,
as when Mercer appears before J.R. Isidore and Deckard apparently with-
out the aid of the empathy box; as an artificial, self-created entity, amor-
phous, but crucial presence in the decreasingly human world, and even as
an alcoholic actor Al Jarry who somehow transcends the physical world
and becomes Mercer. By running the gamut of divine manifestations, Dick
explores, as he will do in Valis, the various possibilities for representa-
tion of God informed by philosophical and religious teachings, supported
with his own ideas. Thus, the narrator speculates that Mercer might have a
“time-reversal faculty” that he is not allowed to use, alluding to Jesus’ abil-
ity to rise from dead (24), while J.R. Isidore informs us that Mercer is “an
archetypal entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture by a cosmic
template” (70). Based on a moment of total immersion, the “fusion” with
the anthropomorphic and elusive figure of Wilbur Mercer, religion trans-
ports the “participant” into an alternate cycle of time (following Mercer’s
ascent) and into contact with other participants.
Mercerism is described as both the ordained creed and the rules of con-
duct followed by the ‘believers’ in the novel: the characters of Iran and J.
R. Isidore and the rest of the Earth’s dwindling population. Thus, when
Deckard, toward the end of the novel, buys a black goat from the money he
earned from “retiring” the androids, Iran insists that they fuse with Mercer
and share their joy with others, since it would be “immoral” not to do so
(173). With its formulaic rules about the importance of sharing through the
empathy box and the sacredness of all life, Mercerism is a symbolic rep-
resentation, a socially constructed outlook on the world, however, it also
seems to be a phenomenon that transcends the world. As his crisis regarding
android hunting escalates, Mercer communicates with Deckard although
he is, a renegade Mercerite who is reluctant to engage in the fusion experi-
ence. Deckard’s increasing compassion toward androids and his realization

80 Philip K. Dick
that he is acting against the intrinsic good inside himself brings, instead of
salvation, a growing challenge to his sense of identity.
A significant correlation exists between the religious principle of love for
all beings and the scientific claim of the androids’ existence as authentic. The
notion is presented in Mercer’s address to Deckard. In the moment of his cri-
sis, as he impulsively grabs the handles of the empathy box, Mercer appears
to Deckard in his usual form, as Wilbur Mercer, an old man ascending the
hill in a desert as rocks are thrown at him (178–9). Mercer’s creed finally
orients Deckard’s actions and thoughts. Wilbur Mercer explains:
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic
condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some
time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow,
the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on
all life. Everywhere in the universe. (179).
Mercer’s statements pointedly treat humans and androids alike. While

he alleviates Deckard’s conflict regarding bounty hunting, Mercer does not
condone violence or condemn human nature as inherently evil, rather, he
describes our suffering in the cosmos as a condemnation itself: “this is the
curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe”
(179). Because it insists on the sacredness of all life, Mercerism places androids
within the moral requirement to respect all intelligent beings, regardless of
their origin. “Nothing is alien to [Mercer],” Deckard ponders on his way into
the desert, desperate and disillusioned by his killing of androids.
The redeeming quality of Mercer’s message exculpates the bounty hunter
and the androids alike. Regardless of the mutual animosity and differences,
the android and the human both emerge in the novel as a ‘cursed creature,’
left incomplete by their creator. The androids’ main downfall, their appar-
ent lack of empathy, is in fact the decision of their human creators. We
learn, from the police sheets examined by Deckard, that android leader
Roy Baty attempted to invest androids with empathy, in “a group experi-
ence similar to that of Mercerism” (185). Deckard fi nds Roy Baty’s des-
tiny pathetic: “a rough cold android hoping to undergo an experience from
which, due to a deliberately built-in defect, it remained excluded” (185).
Human beings are thus directly responsible for android suffering; ironi-
cally, eternally in search of absolutes, humans deprive their own creation
of the chance to bond religiously and collectively, condemning the androids
to cold isolation.
Wiener’s discussion, in God and Golem Inc., of creative relationship
between God, man, and machine focuses on the limitations of the “created
creature” in connection with the creator (16–7). By describing the machine
and man as limited creatures in the chain of creation, Wiener probably tried
to allay fears from intelligent machines. The idea relates to Dick’s descrip-
tion of androids as a limited creature, unable to win the game against its

creator. Furthermore, Dick follows Wiener’s insistence that religion should
be re-examined in terms of “the new engineering and physiological tech-
niques” (God and Golem 3). Human beings and androids function in Do
Androids on two levels: as characters brought together in an identical pre-
dicament of physical and existential arrest, overwhelmed by entropy, and as
representatives of two kinds of being, of categories increasingly present in
the modern society: organic and mechanic ones. Above them, in the novel’s
universe, is the divine being which itself may be a mechanical entity.
If “life” artificially produced is life nevertheless, then “God,” too, can
be artificial. As Deckard acknowledges to Rachael Rosen, recognizing also
“the artificial life force” that moves some androids, “legally you’re not
[alive]. But really you are” (198; 132). While Deckard here refers to Rachael’s
“organic” body, the “artificial God” covers a range of possibilities in the
novel: from actor Al Jarry who plays the role of Mercer and interacts with
Mercerites through empathy boxes, to the intelligence that inhabits the pol-
luted, dying world created in the novel. Androids fend off total emptiness;
mechanical God provides the only hope for the environmentally destroyed
world. If God is traditionally identified with logos (broadly defi ned as intel-
ligence), then the existence of artificial intelligence (A. I., a real branch of
science today) can be identified with the mechanical, artificial god. Dick
also relies on Biblical interpretation, in which, “according to [the Gospel]
of John, Jesus pre-existed as the Word—the Greek Logos—the immanent
reason of the Stoics made incarnate in Christ” (Bainton, 33). The notion of
logos as the creative intelligence of the world is further developed by Dick
in Valis (which is a self-replicating entity, as in Wiener’s God and Golem);
in Do Androids, the logos may be an A.I.
Dick’s meditation on the nature of God, based in the consideration of
the physical characteristics of the universe and the new theological ques-
tions and answers spurred by the scientific view of the universe, places Do
Androids within the continuum of writings in natural philosophy that con-
join religion and science, sometimes with atheist, instead of deist results.
Dick’s fictional creation of artificial-intelligence-as-God is reminiscent of
the two historical arguments regarding the nature and existence of God
that came out of the new scientific views in the late seventeenth century and
then in early nineteenth century, the mechanistic universe view, based on
the Newtonian laws expressed in The Principia (1687), and William Paley’s
argument for the designer God, described in Paley’s watchmaker analogy
(1802).9 Deckard’s reminiscence about the rules of Mercerism show that
the empathy boxes came fi rst, then communication, and fi nally the full-
blown religion: “You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the
year empathy boxes fi rst appeared on Earth” (31). Although Dick provides
a disappointing scientific explanation for the mechanical functioning of the
box and its interface with the user (21), he offers an essentially different
view of the religion in which technology plays a crucial role by precluding
the appearance of religion and the artificial God is at its center.

82 Philip K. Dick
The validity of the religious fusion experience is seriously undermined
by Buster Friendly’s allegation that Mercer is represented by a human
actor. Buster makes the announcement in the moment when J.R. Isidore
has become a hostage to the renegade androids Pris, and Roy and Irmgard
Batty, awaiting the arrival of the bounty hunter Deckard. As the androids
torture the spider that J.R. Isidore has found, snippets of Buster’s newscast
are interspersed with their action: “In other words, Buster Friendly broke
in, Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all. . . . Yes, folks, swindle. Mercer-
ism is a swindle!” (207; 209). The difference between human beings and
androids is distinguished in this scene, as the lack of empathy. Even the
androids recognize that Mercerism will not disappear, despite the “scien-
tific proof” that Mercer is a fake. When Isidore encounters Mercer again
he admits: “I am a fraud. They’re sincere; their research is genuine,” but
he also informs Isidore that nothing will change. “I lifted you from the
tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest
and want to quit” (214–15).
Dick re-iterates the power of the religious narrative as Isidore and Iran,
and even Deckard, accept Mercerism as a way of life, even if its divine sta-
tus has been disproved. The characters’ faith in and devotion to the simple
sequence of events—Mercer’s climb, suffering, death, and resurrection—
leaves open the question whether the cognitive and spiritual value of Mer-
cer’s plight lies in the story itself, or in the fact that the message represents
the true Word of God. Mercer and his religion transcend the physical world
and represent the aspect of faith that does not conform to rational explana-
tions. “They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed,”
Mercer tells Isidore of Buster Friendly and the androids. “Because you’re
still here and I’m still here” (214).
The fusion with Mercer is fi rst introduced through the merging experi-
ence of John Isidore, a mentally impaired “chickenhead” who is banned
from leaving the Earth. Isidore turns to Mercer for comfort and an immer-
sive experience, seeking to escape the drab emotions of his solitary living.
Isidore rejoices in human company provided by Mercerism, described as a
telepathic merging of “many individual existences. They—and he—cared
about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities. . . . the need to ascend”
(25). Isidore “experiences himself encompassing every other living thing”
(25) during his Mercer session, which is focused on the ascending fi gure of
the Wilbur Mercer. Similarly, when Deckard’s wife Iran urges him to grab
the handles of the empathy box, she insists that Deckard should “transmit
the mood [he is in] to everyone else” (173). “One day,” she explains, “I
found myself receiving from someone whose animal had died. But others
of us shared our different joys with them . . . and that cheered the person
up” (173). Dick suggests that sharing of pain and joy, the necessity to be
interconnected with others, represents the highest value of the religious
experience and is the force that makes Mercerism transcendental.

Deckard’s transformation from ignorance and cruelty to his understand-
ing of the revelation, and the uniting, emphatic experience of Mercerism
felt by Isidore, Iran and others, alludes strongly to the biblical story of 1
Corinthians, were Paul explains: “there are many members, yet one body”
(12:20) for the community of believers. Thus, Chapter 12 of Paul’s fi rst
letter to Corinthians (“One Body with Many Members”) has strong paral-
lels with the experience of unity that Mercerites undergo.11 The sharing,
just like sharing of Mercerism, brings unity and relief to otherwise isolated
individuals: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one mem-
ber is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:26).12
If entropy is the force that swallows the world in a progressive, linear
fashion, Mercerism’s force is a cyclical experience which runs from an
ascent through the worldly suffering, followed by a descent into the “tomb
world,” and then renewed ascent, countering entropy’s one way motion.
Although he is mentally impaired, Isidore is not insensible to the disas-
trous conditions around him; before he approaches the experience-inducing
empathy box, Isidore realizes that “he was not ready for the trip up those
clanging stairs to the empty roof where he had no animal” (21). By fusing
with Mercer, Isidore is resisting the all encompassing nothingness which
is slowly eating up the Earth, a planet that is literally caving-in under the
weight of dust and garbage. During his fi rst encounter with the female
android Pris, Isidore presents his world—which consists of an apartment
in an empty building—as a “kipple-ized,” garbage-strewn, decaying space,
where his only relief comes from his participation, via empathy box, in
“the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer” (66). Although Isidore’s explanation
to Pris has a distinctly simple-minded tone, Isidore’s description of Mercer
shows him as a sentient being, moving in a counter-direction away from the
world’s movement toward decay. The notion of the passage of time, and the
reversal of time, is thus an integral part of Isidore’s faith.13
It is significant that the second component of Mercersim relies not on
external devices or truths, but primarily on the subjectivity of the mind.
Both Isidore and Deckard have two fusion experiences with Mercer which
are described as complete immersion. In these episodes the narrative moves
from external description to the characters’ subjective experience without
announcement or transition. In the beginning of the novel, we learn about
Mercer through the description of direct fusion with his memory as experi-
enced by J. R. Isidore; Mercer is a persecuted figure with extraordinary abil-
ities and a vision into the world’s decay. Like the characters in The Cosmic
Puppets, or Valis, Mercer somehow contains the universe within himself,
his mind holding the (reality of) cosmos. Toward the end of Do Androids,
Isidore reaches the tomb world after androids have mutilated his spider, and
sees decay, “Pieces of animals . . . the head of a crow, mummified hands.”
The passage concludes with Isidore’s own view of things: “I will be down
here a long time . . . because nothing here ever changes” (213).

84 Philip K. Dick
In a moment reminiscent of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, Isidore calls out
to Mercer: “Where are you now?” and receives comfort and a restored spider
from Mercer himself (214). Isidore thus identifies with Mercer, but remains
apart from him, following the Christian tradition of a tripartite deity, simul-
taneously human and divine. As in Martian Time Slip written prior to Do
Androids, Dick is further developing the idea of the suffering cosmic mind
capable of containing reality and of fusion with the psyches of others. For
Isidore, religion is a subjective state. While on one hand he can reach the
divine being, on the other he is restricted by his own metal capacities, which
do not allow him to make ordinary distinctions in his life (between androids
and humans, real and fake animals). However, Isidore feels strong compas-
sion for all beings and is “a highly moral person,” as Mercer tells him (215).
This validates Isidore’s existence and humanity, standing in opposition to
the intellectual abilities of the androids. (In another connection to Mar-
tian Time Slip, Dick again takes an altruistic position toward the “mentally
impaired”.) But, although he is critical of the androids’ unfeeling nature,
by locating Isidore’s humanity in his gift for empathy and compassion for
all beings, artificial and organic alike, Dick shows the absence of the clear
moral or ethical division between the human and the machine categories
and underscores Isidore’s inability to make an objective judgment.
Deckard’s encounters with Mercer are as transcendent as Isidore’s. In
his last venture into the desert, Deckard “becomes Mercer” without the
aid of the empathy box. When Rick Deckard fi nally transcends into Mer-
cer’s world, he becomes Wilbur Mercer. The position of Deckard and J.R.
Isidore is of inhabiting the divine being, of becoming one. “I am Wilbur
Mercer,” Deckard tells his secretary Miss Marsten. “I’ve permanently
fused with him” (233). His transition, as noted earlier, parallels St. Paul’s,
changing from Saul the outspoken persecutor of early Christians, to Paul
the evangelist, undergoing a conversion experience in the desert on the road
to Damascus (Acts, Chapter 9). Deckard, who relentlessly persecutes the
androids, fi nally fi nds his own conversion through the mechanic toad in the
desert of what used to be Northern California.
The act of Deckard’s salvation in the desert can be interpreted as his
encounter with the mechanical god of Mercerism who rules over all its
creatures, mechanic and organic alike, and who sends the token mechani-
cal animal to the exhausted bounty hunter. At the same time, like Isidore’s,
Deckard’s deception may be complete, with the mechanical animal an
empty, incidental gesture in a world where there is nothing organic left—
except the prohibitively expensive Sidney’s catalogue species. The moments
in which Isidore and Deckard transcend the narrative, in which their reli-
gious experience overwhelms all others can be seen as self-contained,
momentarily pervasive instances of divine truth which falls outside the bor-
ders of “good and evil” and “real and fake” dichotomies. Whether this god
is real or artificial, or whether it comes from external or internal source, is
impossible to know.

THE FORCE OF ENTROPY
The force of entropy, which is defi ned by the second law of thermodynam-
ics as a measure of the disorder or loss of energy in a system, represents a
central concept for both Dick in Do Androids and Wiener in Human Use
of Human Beings. In the latter book, Wiener introduces entropy, along
with progress, as two notions “completely necessary for the understand-
ing of the orientation of man in the world” (16). Chapter Two of Human
Use of Human Beings, entitled “Progress and Entropy,” describes entropy
as a physical value of the universe and an absolute cosmic force (20–22).
In the cosmos interpreted as an enclosed system, entropy “represents the
amount of disorder,” explains Wiener, adding that “in an isolated system,
the probability that the entropy shall decrease is zero” (21; 22). Eventually,
the increasing disorder will lead to the equal probability that any event will
happen, or, the absence of patterns and total randomness (or sameness) of
the universe. “There will be nothing left but a drab uniformity” (23).
Wiener saw entropy as a basic condition of the world, however, in
accordance with the general tone of his book, he made it a point to call
the entropy-based scientific view of the universe an instance of “cosmic
pessimism” (22). While overall forces of entropy are undeniable, Wiener
emphasized that “it is necessary to keep these cosmic physical values well
separated from any human system of valuation” (22). This means that,
on the scale of human rather than cosmic experience (i.e. from a relative
point of view), entropy is actually not “gloomy” (25). Wiener makes two
important points: one, that individual human beings are “islands of locally
decreasing entropy” (25), and that we should honor the “accident of [our]
living existence,” even if it is temporary (26); two, Wiener insists that the
American blind belief in progress, resulting in the unbridled exploitation
of nature, represents a force more deadly and detrimental than entropy
itself (27 ff.). Furthermore, Wiener discusses the roles of machines in such
a system: they not only function in analogous ways to human beings, but
they also counteract the disorder of entropy. “By its ability to make deci-
sions,” Wiener concludes, a machine “can produce around it a local zone of
organization in a world whose general tendency is to run down” (24). And
for Dick, it is a world-run-down indeed.
By making the insidiousness of the death-force intrinsic to the novel, Dick
seems to have chosen Wiener’s “cosmic pessimism,” however, by suggest-
ing that androids do deserve a place in a world made ruinous by human
beings, Dick reiterates Wiener’s opinion about the role of machines in stav-
ing off entropy. Deckard’s position as the android hunter is correlated with
the workings of the death force. He is both the sufferer and the carrier of
annihilation. Although Deckard has no qualms about his job and appears
single-mindedly devoted to his duty: his “creative and fresh attitude toward
his job” represents his “innate approach without recourse to Penfield arti-
ficial brain stimulation” (7), his wife Iran sees him as “a murderer hired

86 Philip K. Dick
by the cops” (4), an individual with the “flattening of emotional affection”
that characterizes androids. As the novel progresses, however, Deckard’s
destiny unfolds in a chain of seemingly unstoppable events that transform
his agency from that of a destroyer to that of very nearly destroyed himself.
Deckard in the end feels like a killer and a suffering human being because he
is the representative of the uncanny, deadly forces of the novel’s universe.
Deckard’s fi rst realization that he is, “in a way, part of the form-destroy-
ing process of entropy” (98) happens during a moving scene in which Deck-
ard watches Luba Luft rehearse on stage. Deckard wonders not whether
but when he should kill Luba Luft, and concludes with an insight that will
by the end of the novel prove to be ironic: “he perceived himself sub spe-
cie aeternitatis, the form destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw
here” (99). Deckard fi nds Luba’s extraordinary ability all the more reason
for her death: “perhaps the better she functions, the better singer she is, the
more I am needed” (99). Deckard’s perception of his power is in striking
opposition to the exhausted, disillusioned wondering that he undertakes
in the end of the novel. When he sees himself as sub species aeternitatis—
“under the aspect of eternity,” an expression describing what is universally
and eternally true without reference to temporal portions of reality, Deck-
ard seems to recognize the power of the entropic force and its influence
upon him. However, he also unwittingly announces how overwhelming the
force of destruction will become in relationship to his identity.
But, while Deckard sees his actions as useful, Isidore’s impression is
pointedly more judgmental, and condemns the harsh process of destruc-
tion. For him, a bounty hunter is “a thing without emotions, or even a
face; a thing that if killed got replaced immediately by another resembling
it. And so on, until everyone real and alive had been shot” (158). Deckard,
whose understanding of the distressing function that he performs develops
only gradually, shares Isidore’s sense of his own expendability: “the out-
standing members of the illegal group,” Deckard concludes, are “doomed,
since if he failed to get them, someone else would” (185). As Deckard pre-
pares for the killing of the three remaining androids, an act that at this
point in the narrative appears ritualistic because of its inevitability, he is
assured by Mercer—or at least his vision of Mercer—that he must fi nish
what he started. The destruction, in Deckard’s thoughts, despite his grow-
ing empathy toward androids and despite his sexual affair with the android
Rachael Rosen, is the ruling principle: “Time and tide,” he thinks. “The
cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death.
He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete” (185). Wiener’s cosmic
pessimism, the acceptance of knowledge that death is inevitable, has been
enacted in Deckard’s attempts to complete his job.
Deckard, however, is not the only sufferer under the workings of entropy.
Although benevolent and helpful, J.R. Isidore also has to face the dying
world plagued by silence. In Chapter Two the reader learns that Isidore is a
lonely victim of the radioactivity that has impaired his mental faculties and

of the society that keeps him isolated on Earth, living in “a giant, empty,
decaying building which had once housed thousands” (15).14 Before Isi-
dore, silence “flashe[s] from woodwork and the walls,” and “smote[s] him
with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill” (20). Isidore’s
internal monologue describes the objective state of his world, and voices
the universal context of human longing and loneliness: “He lived alone in
this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments,
which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin
. . . He stood here in his stricken living room alone, with the lungless, all
penetrating, masterful world silence” (21). Condemned to slow death on
the depleted planet, Isidore is willing to spend long subjective time in fusion
with Mercer even when he fi nds himself in the virtual underworld or struck
by rocks. His voluntary suffering in the company of Mercer and others is
more acceptable than his solitary suffering before the overpowering silence
of the dying world.
The physical and metaphysical cycle of reduction of life applies to
androids and humans alike. “Do you know what the lifespan of a human-
oid robot such as myself is?” asks Rosen of Deckard. “I’ve been in exis-
tence two years. How long do you calculate I have?” (197). Entropy affects
each character in the novel: physical degeneration of the world is reflected
in the mental degeneration of the “chickenhead” Isidore, and the depres-
sion of Iran Deckard; the general state of nothingness, of deserted, radia-
tion-devoured landscapes, is reflected in the existential crisis of both Rick
Deckard and the androids, who teeter on the disconcerting edge between
life and death, but also have a limited expiration date. Even the ruthless
Rosens are affected. When Deckard visits their company, he perceives “the
hollowness in their manner” and feels that “by coming here he had brought
the void to them, had ushered emptiness and the hush of economic death”
(45). The novel connects the abstract idea of decay with the physical notion
of entropy, the “First Law of Kipple” (65), which Isidore invents to describe
growing piles of dead objects and debris in his surroundings, further echo-
ing the Mercerite commandment that “you shall kill only the Killers” (31),
to pose the theological and moral questions about the persistence and arbi-
trariness of death.15
TOWARD CONCLUSION
The themes in Do Androids develop on at least three narrative levels; fi rst,

as the story of its characters, Deckard, his peculiar double, the mentally
impaired J.R. Isidore, Iran, and the androids; second is the structural level,
representing the world as a set of governing principles, most notably as
entropy opposed to empathy; third is the level of the creative fabric of lan-
guage and narrative in which new concepts are brought to life and “every-
thing that anyone has ever thought” becomes the truth. As in Dick’s other

88 Philip K. Dick
novels, the characters in Do Androids experience reality as a composite of
uncanny forces beyond their control and technologically produced dreams
that allow them to escape temporarily. The surface phenomena of Dick’s
world point to deeper philosophical problems; androids pose questions
about human identity, and a total environmental disaster indicates the gen-
eral cosmic entropy.
Dick’s method in the novel brings together the historical and the imag-
inative, the philosophical and the particular; some elements are entirely
invented, while others refer clearly to the current social and past historical
phenomena.16 The conversation, for example, between Rick Deckard and
his neighbor Douglas Barbour, which closes Chapter One, reveals the typi-
cal mindset of middle-class Americans, a “man-to-man” conversation, in
which Deckard and Barbour are negotiating the sale and attainment of
coveted possessions. “Ever thought of selling your horse?” Deckard prof-
fers to Barbour (9). The familiar tone and theme—coveting objects and
establishing social and moral values around them—are juxtaposed with
experientially new situation—the existence of perfectly rendered electric
animals—to create the specific narrative dimension of the novel.
Androids themselves are not only a scientifically sound product based
on the theories of cybernetics, but an image of mechanized human nature,
an idea that has been growing since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Art movements such as Dadaism, futurism, and surrealism all express this
view of the human being. Dick builds upon this tradition by introducing the
android not as an artificially created and sophisticated machine, but apply-
ing the term to human beings who are cold and unkind toward others. “By
android,” explained Dick, “I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the
laboratory a human being” (Shifting Realities 211). Instead, androids are
human beings who do not care what happens to their fellow human beings,
selfish and detached, without empathic feeling. “These creatures are among
us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit
a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior” (211).
Although the division between unfeeling and feeling characters is not
emphasized in Do Androids, it is a theme present throughout the novel. In
this sense, the designation of someone like J.R Isidore as a human being,
comes from his care for all creatures around him. When Rick Deckard per-
secutes and starts interrogating android Luba Luft he confidently asserts “an
android does not care what happens to another android,” to which Luba Luft
about to be “retired” by Deckard, responds: “then, you must be an android”
(101), a challenge that is only gradually disproved as Deckard finally gets
tired from killing and starts feeling empathy toward his victims.
The focus is, thus, on the crisis for human beings as the race evolves,
not on the menacing threat of the machines, humanoid or not. Dick shared
concerns about our behavior in the age of machines expressed by Wie-
ner’s concerns in all of his writings: “we have modified our environment so
radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new

environment,” Wiener asserted in Human Use of Human Beings (46). If
there is any doubt that androids may pose a threat because of their lack of
empathy (Pris cutting the spider’s legs off, their “coldness”), it should be
countered by the central characteristic of the society that Dick built, the
society in which humans pine, pay for, and take careful care of the artificial
animals they own and in the unequal, hierarchically organized treatment of
those remaining on Earth.
The population of Earth is already divided into ‘regulars’, ‘chicken-
heads’ (called “subnormal” (30)), and ‘antheads’—it is important that Dick
is inventing alternative social structures and yet keeping the familiar ways
we classify (and discriminate) against one another. “Loitering on Earth
potentially meant fi nding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unaccept-
able, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race” (16). The bond that
Isidore and the androids form occurs partly because both types of being are
at the mercy of institutional power. As Pris assumes Isidore’s cooperation
in helping them elude the bounty-hunter, her comment to Roy and Irmgard
Baty sounds compassionate: “they don’t treat him well either” (164). The
institutional and individual cruelty of human beings and groups toward
one another, even more striking against the background of the dying Earth,
is a central concern of Do Androids.
Because it combines the two seemingly disparate worldviews, inter-
relating the religious and mythical narrative with the technological, Do
Androids challenges the categories of experiential and epistemological clas-
sification. This overlap of meaning is visible in the way human beings and
androids are represented. An android may indeed be consisted of “a frame
of metal, a platform of pullies and circuits and batteries . . . ” (159), but
it is the behavior of such an entity that determines its place in the larger
world, where it may, indeed, blend completely with the human world. The
three forces—religious, archetypal, and technological—interact to produce
a reigning outlook of the world, as the imminent entropy is momentarily
assailed by the exclusion of the subject from everyday reality and into the
Mercerite experience. The mechanical entities, too, are opposed to the loss
of animation. Although their existence differs from that of organic life,
most notably in their lack of empathy, both forms of artificial life bring
meaning, comfort, and hope to their human counterparts, within the fun-
damental existential frame of entropy.
Although self-renewing, as Nature is and machines may become, Dick’s
“mechanical god” is a god of entropy. It subsumes the expectations of
renewal or the second coming, presented in Christian myth and faith, but
it perhaps proffers benevolence for the duration of one’s existence—“there
is no salvation” Mercer declares to Deckard (179). In offering Deckard
the electric toad and giving him temporary hope, this mechanical god re-
affi rms physical death as the final human destination, but it also labels the
act of being as the supremely meaningful one. As Wiener pointed out about
life in the new technological age, if we recognize the need to adjust to our

90 Philip K. Dick
new environment, “it may be a long time yet before our civilization and
our human race perish, though perish they will even as all of us are born to
die. However, the prospect of a fi nal death is far from a complete frustra-
tion of life” (Human Use, 47). The existentialist theologian Paul Tillich’s
idea about our spiritual experience of time, is also a relevant subtext to the
narrative solutions in Do Androids. Tillich, in explaining the meaning of
the “eternal now” which exists above, rather than after the conventional
notions of past or future (125), offers a compatible view of human purpose:
“if nothing were given to us except the ‘no more’ of the past and the ‘not
yet’ of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the
time that is our time; we would not have ‘presence’” (130). While in Do
Androids Dick conjures the static and the vanishing, he is also interested,
as elsewhere in his fiction, in carving out a hopeful moment outside of con-
ventional time; in Do Androids, the extra-dimensional moments are expe-
rienced through fusion with Mercer, Deckard’s mechanical toad signifying
another such moment, reminding us of our own creative and destructive
ability in the way we experience the totality of life.

5 A Maze of Death
“Life Is A Dream, But Is It
Better That Way?”
THEMES AND IDEAS
While the setting of Martian Time Slip and Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep is characterized by the sparse environment of a near-deserted natu-
ral world, in A Maze of Death (1970) the narrative is set in two artificial,
isolated environments: one, a computer generated virtual reality created by
the fourteen-member crew, which they experience as the planet Delmak-O,
and the other the stranded spaceship where characters are physically pres-
ent, caught in orbit around a dead star. In addition to the two distinctive
settings, the narration presents the point of view of each of the fourteen
characters in the Delmak-O colony. As Dick explains in the Foreword,
“the approach in this novel is highly subjective; at any given time, reality
is seen—not directly—but indirectly, i.e., through the mind of one of the
characters” (n.p.).
Dick uses a limited setting and the limited options available to the char-
acters—their communications are broken and they cannot leave or land the
ship—and the instability of the virtual reality (Delmak-O) to emphasize
not only the existential limitations of the characters’ situation, but to show
the limits of human existence and knowledge in general. A Maze of Death
is possibly Dick’s most abstract novel, focused on philosophical and theo-
logical speculation that thoroughly examines the fundamental existential
questions: the purpose and meaning of life, the ways in which we perceive
the world, and the ways in which we respond to death. As in several of
Dick’s novels, the readers and characters in A Maze must solve a puzzle: as
the colonists one by one disappear or die in uncertain circumstances, the
reader is drawn into the suspense and problems encountered by the group.
Instead of a thrilling detective story, however, A Maze is a novel in which
the characters’ murders underline their helpless position: lost in the cos-
mos and fi nding the disappointing and flawed refuge in the virtual reality
world. The deaths and assassinations that occur during the virtual reality
simulation call attention to the ingrained interpersonal violence amongst
the crew and introduce death as one of the novel’s major themes. As char-
acters make their way through the maze of incomprehensible events—and

92 Philip K. Dick
the structure of the narrative, with its twists and turns, aptly mirrors that
situation—they grow increasingly disoriented and helpless navigating their
maze of death.
In A Maze, the colonists are unable to perceive or reach absolutes, even
when they establish the truth from their point of view. The group’s episte-
mological uncertainty translates into a narrative uncertainty: the charac-
ters’ physical environment becomes increasingly unstable; their dialogue
is repeated, especially in the beginning, with only slight variations; items
and places appear to be forgeries, from physical locations to the identical
copies reproduced by the tenches, Delmak-O’s indigenous life-form. The
characters perception of the world is fi ltered through their individual idio-
syncrasies, seeing that world as constantly in flux; and the reader, too, must
interpret events in order to determine what is real throughout the novel.
Depending on the reader’s belief systems, different strands of reality pre-
sented in A Maze emerge as the dominant view: the stunning difficulty of
the human condition; faith in the possibility of salvation; optimism or pes-
simism toward our ability to create meaning in the objective world.
The distinction between the private and the cosmic, or the way our mind
perceives the world, formulated in Dick’s understanding of the idios and
koinos kosmos doctrine (initially discussed in Chapter 3), is at the forefront
of A Maze of Death.
The characters are in the process of creating their own world of percep-
tions on several levels, in their own private worlds, through the use of ship’s
computer to create Delmak-O, and in the physical reality of the ship. Dick
found inspiration in existentialist psychiatry, particularly the anthology
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958), edited
by American psychologist Rolo May with colleagues Ernest (Ernst) Angel
and Henri F. Ellenberger, for the relationship between subjective (individ-
ual) and objective realms of cognitive experience, and ideas about human
psyche and perceptions. In order to contemplate the possibility of faith
in the stark existential conditions of human existence, Dick studied and
assimilated the principles of existential theology, particularly Paul Tillich’s
The Courage To Be (1952). As always, however, Dick combines a broad
range of philosophical and religious works, from Heraclitus to Zoroastri-
anism to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with his own original thought in
order to bring forth the ideas in A Maze of Death.1
The novel opens with an answer to an electronic prayer and a technological
glitch. We encounter Ben Tallchief, the protagonist of the first and third chap-
ters, as he transmits a prayer to the Intercessor for a new job. He sends his
plea by physically connecting himself to a machine, and the radio signal from
his “pineal gland” is further relayed through a system of galactic messaging
(A Maze 3–4). In response to the broadcasted prayer, Tallchief’s job transfer
order arrives, but the happy colonist cannot decipher “the punch-holes, letters
and numbers” that appear on his transfer papers (a phrase repeated several
times in the Chapter), omitting the kind of job he is supposed to have.

A Maze of Death 93
The story unfolds as each member of the group converges on the planet
Delmak-O in a manner similar to Tallchief’s quest for a meaningful job
more closely associated with their particular skills. One by one, Seth Mor-
ley, his wife Mary, Ben Tallchief, Betty Jo Berm, Roberta Rockingham,
Tony Dunkelwelt, Suzanne Smart, Bert Kosler, Ignatz Thugg, Milton Bab-
ble, Wade Frazer, Glen Belsnor, Maggie Walsh, and later, Ned Russell,
discover that they are without instructions—due to a faulty satellite equip-
ment—about their purpose or tasks on Delmak-O, and that they are also
unable to leave their new planet. Throughout the narrative, colonists can-
not fi nd defi nitive answers regarding the purpose and the meaning of their
situation. “What is the purpose of this colony?” asks Mary Morley, voicing
the concern of every character in the novel. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful for
all of us to know our purpose?” echoes Roberta Rockingham (35).
The essential element of the plot development occurs in the last two
chapters, which reveal that the group subsists in a series of virtual realities
such as the one described in the novel. Consequently, the reader faces an
epistemological uncertainty herself: everything read up to that point is a
product of the virtual reality, and is considered fabricated. We have, inad-
vertently, shared the point of view consisting of a computer simulation and
the subjective views of the characters; the ensuing confusion illustrates fluc-
tuating world of the mind attuned to more than its usual narrow percep-
tion. Thus, when the group wakes up and realizes that the major portion of
what they experienced is not real—which for the reader means the narra-
tive itself—it forces everyone to reconsider all of the events and principles
established during the story telling.
Through the colonists’ virtual reality dream, Dick explores two para-
digms central for understanding of the modern human being: 1) how objec-
tive reality is constructed from an individual point of view and how we
process information; and 2) the possibilities and challenges of inter-per-
sonal communication that would lift human beings from isolation from
one another. In the novel, Dick explores subjectivity as the bane of exis-
tence, but he also questions its deceptive nature, implying that there might
be an objective reality and the possibility of reaching it. At the same time,
Dick also entertains the possibility for the inclusion of all forms of think-
ing, facilitated in the medium of virtual reality. Collaborating on a series
of virtual reality scenarios on the stranded ship releases the colonists from
their suffering in loneliness and hopelessness but it also destroys them:
within their dreamt worlds, they become increasingly hostile toward each
other. Unable to create a benevolent illusion, immersed in the unreal and
volatile dream, the group becomes increasingly psychotic.
Utterly reductive in the options it offers to its characters, A Maze nev-
ertheless puts forward a hopeful solution that surpasses an existential or a
rational worldview. The opening scene introduces religion in the world of
A Maze; religion is partly a technological construct, and partly direct rev-
elation. God is revealed within the electronic signals and accessed through

94 Philip K. Dick
transmissions and prayers such as Tallchief’s; alternately, a tripartite deity
manifests itself physically. 2 In the colonists’ religious world, the Christian-
like Mentufacturer/Intercessor/Walker-on-Earth visits human beings regu-
larly, in the form of the Walker-on-Earth, and less often as the Intercessor
(6). The life of each character is defi ned as a relationship between two
forces: the positive, “life affi rming” Mentufacturer/ Intercessor/ Walker-
on-Earth and the destructive, pervasive death force of the Form Destroyer,
later defi ned as “the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of
Forms” (56).
Dick thus brings together the themes of religion, technology, and rev-
elation in order to contemplate the nature and vulnerabilities of human
religion and the (im)possibility of faith in Western culture. The aspect of
religious salvation is emphasized in the novel’s ending when the protago-
nist Seth Morley is literally lifted from his actual and existential situation
by the Intercessor. Divine salvation is concretely presented as the way out
of life’s limitations, a solution at odds with contemporary existentialist
and postmodern attitudes. By showing Intercessor’s intervention, the novel
explores whether the divine can be present in the material world. With the
solution that Dick offers, he questions the existentialist emphasis on the
unique ability of human beings to make their lives meaningful.
The authenticity of our perceptions, experiences, knowledge, and faith is
the central question for the characters and for the reader. Following the dif-
ferences in the subjective visions of each character, as they struggle to make
sense of the world around them, several scenes, and especially the novel’s
ending, are open to interpretation.3 Two general interpretive approaches
are possible. With the colonists’ fate outside the virtual reality realm, Dick
illustrates the bleak and limiting nature of human life, the existential view
that all human activity simply passes time and has no further direction
or higher aim. Opposed to this is the suggestion that a higher power and
another dimension do exist, creating a space if not for meaningfulness in
human life then at least for hope.
DIALOGUE WITH EXISTENTIALISM
In the United States during the 1950s, scholars from various disciplines,
such as theology and psychology, incorporated existentialist principles
when examining the fundamentals of the human condition.4 The charac-
ters’ situation in A Maze of Death and the nature of their questions echo
quite clearly the principles of existentialist philosophy. Before establish-
ing connections with existential psychology and theology and Dick’s
novel, a brief and useful literary and philosophical parallel can be drawn
between A Maze of Death and Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944),
which announced the themes and ideas in Sartre’s seminal philosophical
work Being and Nothingness (1956). The stark reduction of the colonists’

A Maze of Death 95
existential space and their hostilities toward each other closely resemble
the basic elements of Sartre’s play: the characters in Hell are confi ned to
a mirrorless room in which their growing animosities toward each other
play a central role. Like Dick’s colonists, the protagonists of “No Exit” are
trapped in a confi ned space and subsist in intensive, hostile relationships,
without the possibility of change. “You won’t get far. The door is locked,”
(40) Sartre’s Inez tells Garcin, as if directly commenting on the situation
aboard a spaceship in A Maze.
When the colonists wake up and realize once again their confi nement
to the ship, they are appalled by the mutual hostility of their dream. Mary
Morley confides to her husband: “I don’t know why, but this one really
bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before” (181).
Sartre’s answer, given in Inez’s response to Garcin, seems as if directly spo-
ken to the colonists: “But fear and hatred and all the dirty little instincts
one keeps dark—they are motives too” (38). By emphasizing the weak-
nesses and banality of their characters’ positions, both authors explore the
(im)possibility of human transcendence as individual beings and in their
relationships toward others.
Although the parallels with No Exit are striking, Dick significantly
shaped A Maze of Death and its characters upon the anthology Existence:
A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958) and, to a lesser
extent, Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be (1952).5 Existence deals with
describing and theorizing the idiosyncratic worlds of the patients whose
cases are included in the book, while Tillich’s book examines the possibility
of faith in the face of human mortality.
Two principles are prominent in Existence: honoring all subjective per-
ceptions and observing psychological health in relation to each patient’s
space-time perceptions. According to Rollo May, one of the book’s edi-
tors, Existence was written to address the lack of individualized analysis
of patients in psychotherapy outside of the rigid rules of any one “school”
(8). Instead, existential analysts focused on subjectivity and individualism
as a measure for determination of truth. Tillich also insists on the impor-
tance of individual response to the world, the strength to face mortality
with faith—the courage to be—exhibiting itself as the affi rmation of the
individual self against nothingness.
Like existentialist thinkers in these two works, in A Maze of Death Dick
emphasizes the problem of human beings to face the inevitability of death.
Through the maze of death metaphor, he protests our helplessness against
dying and evaluates life in terms of its inevitable ending. A Maze focuses on
the apparent meaninglessness and lack of purpose in life seem in its entirety
and the anxiety caused by the recognition of this human situation. But, like
Tillich, Dick in the end suggests that faith should be possible even under
such apparently bleak conditions.
In order to create the narrative conducive to exploration of these ideas
Dick experimented with the subjectivity of his characters as the primary

96 Philip K. Dick
point of view in the novel. Following the existentialist psychiatrists, who
reject objectivity and totalitarianism as the primary determinants of reality,
Dick tried to show the outside world as a highly unstable environment,
subject to individual interpretation. In this, Dick followed the assertion in
Existence that the systemic knowledge that tabulates and represents the
world in a generalized way, despite its logical or rational structure, does not
necessarily reflect the world as it is experienced by individual human beings
(May 24–6; 37–42).
Although they were wary of the cold logic of science applied to human
beings, existential psychiatrists did articulate and draw upon system-
atic ideas, which were also adopted by Dick. In a 1962 letter to Anthony
Boucher, Dick discusses his own life in terms of the tri-partite worldview
presented in Existence. That view consists of the three modes of the world:
an Umwelt, Eigenwelt, and Mitwelt existential structure which May
describes as: 1) Umwelt, representing the world that surrounds us; 2) Mit-
welt, the world of relationships with other people and 3) Eigenwelt, the
world of the self that subjectively processes its surroundings (SL 1, 64;
Existence, 61–63). In A Maze of Death, Dick renders the existence of each
of his characters within the three world modes, replacing the social world
of Mitwelt with the relationships established in the virtual reality realm
and adding a fourth, religious realm.
Following their theory of the tri-partite experiential structure, authors
of Existence argue that the spatial and temporal perceptions of human
beings also form a structure that differs according to one’s psychological
state. In his essay “Dream and Existence,” Binswanger establishes the con-
cept of “existential structure,” a type of world formation created by each
human being as they partake in the world. When the person who creates
the world structure is psychotic, their ideas become disordered and their
world becomes altered in its spatial and temporal dimensions (Existence,
194–5).6 By making Delmak-O and its locales changeable, Dick shows
that time and space may be subjective, individual categories, and that, as
Binswanger suggested, existing equals world-building. By describing the
colonists’ experience of space and time as erratic, Dick follows the idea
that neurosis reveals itself in the altered spatial-temporal perceptions. Dick
alludes, through his characters, to another theory that describes spatial
and temporal properties as properties only of our own representations of
things: Kant’s argument, presented in “Transcendental Aesthetic,” that
space and time are intuitive categories. “Nobody sees reality as it actually
is” Wade Frazer explains. “As Kant proved. Space and time are modes of
perception” (101).7
By combining the concept of virtual reality with the idea that human
beings may have difficulty discerning the world around them, Dick
addressed, as May put it, “the growing split between truth and reality
in Western culture” (11). Dick shares a preoccupation with “the predica-
ment of contemporary Western man” that Existence sought to address,

A Maze of Death 97
the discrepancy between the universal and/or abstract systems of knowl-
edge and individual knowledge, a symptomatic problem of the twentieth
century (May, 11;14). The “split between truth and reality” is illustrated
in A Maze through the various levels of deception and the fabrication of
events and objects in the novel. By interacting in virtual reality the crew
effectively creates their own deceptive reality as a compelling dream, and
life on Delmak-O passes for the truth. But the Delmak-O “truth” is merely
the colonists’ dream world; the Building, Specktowsky’s book, the object-
duplicating tenches are all artifacts of imitative life. A Maze belongs with
several of Dick’s novels that feature forms of reality that are not essentially
true: life after death in Ubik, juxtaposed time-space fields in Time Out of
Joint and Valis, artificial animals and people in Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, and Perky Pat sets for the reality-play in Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch—all forms of verisimilitude and examples of the “believ-
able dreams” that Dick creates.
In addition to the theories presented in Existence, Dick found inspiration
for some of his fictional characters in the case studies documented in the
anthology. When explaining the place that Existence had in Dick’s writing,
several critics have pointed out Dick’s reference to the case of Ellen West, a
well-known patient history of anorexia nervosa presented by Binswanger,
but its significance for Dick has not been explained. The obvious correla-
tion is lacking, although, like JR Isidore in Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep, Ellen West is diagnosed as living in an arrested developmental state,
or tomb world. Like the universe of A Maze, Ellen is given over to the
death force. By referring to her case in his correspondence, Dick may have
fulfilled West’s desire that “after hundreds of years her name should still
ring out on the lips of mankind,” an ambition that Binswanger noted in his
case study (240).
The case study that is much more closely related to the novel is Roland
Kuhn’s “The Attempted Murder of a Prostitute.” The study involves a
young Swiss butcher named Rudolf, who tried to shoot a prostitute. Dick
used Rudolf as the basis for Tony Dunkelwelt, the novel’s youngest charac-
ter, who succeeds in killing Susie Smart, the colony’s equivalent of a pros-
titute.8 Both youths have murderous thoughts and attempt/commit murder
as a result of their psychosis. Rudolf’s behavior and troubles are connected
to his experiences of death and dying in his family, including time spent
in the presence of his mother’s dead body when he was a child (Existence,
408). Dunkelwelt is similarly influenced by dark forces, and has “the prin-
ciple of evil all to himself,” being the only member of the crew in touch
with the Form Destroyer (88).
Dunkelwelt and Rudolf are both described as psychotic; while Rudolf
“daydreams,” Dunkelwelt experiences “trances” and has visions during
which he withdraws “from the regular world” (88). Rudolf was “sexually
seduced by women” (366), while Dunkelwelt is frequently visited by Susie.
Dunkelwelt, as we fi nd out at the end of the novel, has been immersed

98 Philip K. Dick
in virtual reality simulations since early childhood and has spent most of
his life in them (187); Rudolf reads “trashy literature” and is immersed in
“cheap movies on crime, often three in one day” (Existence 366; 372). Their
psychosis is partly caused by their immersions, and Rudolf’s diagnosis rings
true for Dunkelwelt: “the borderline between the two worlds was broken
and the phantasy world superimposed itself, as it were, upon the everyday
world . . . for Rudolf, this brought about a fundamental change in his entire
existence” (Existence, 418).
Rudolf and Dunkelwelt both feel special connection to the religious
milieu; Rudolf reveals that “for years he had phantasied being Christ and
doing miracles” (384) while Dunkelwelt, declares himself “a prophet, like
Christ or Moses or Specktowsky” and performs a miracle, “the opposite
of Christ’s,” before murdering Susie Smart (90–91). Dunkenwelt commits
foul murders in the virtual reality, however, Dick emphasizes the vulner-
ability that has grown in this young man during a life lived within fabri-
cated dream worlds.
While Dick is at times deeply involved with some of the existentialist writ-
ings, as shown above, and upholding especially the principle that mental ill-
ness is not a deviation from the norm, but another in a series of subjectivities,
“a new form of being-in-the-world” (Existence 201), he challenges and dra-
matizes existentialist analysis by questioning the precedence of human sub-
jectivity over an objective, collective outside reality. The overt subjectivity of
the characters is seen as an inability, and their failure to function as a group
is emphasized throughout the novel. The episode that most clearly illustrates
the deceptive function of the individual mind, of our subjective view of real-
ity, occurs in the first part of Chapter 9, featuring the seven-member expedi-
tion to the elusive ‘Building.’ As with the AM-WEB in Martian Time Slip,
the Building in A Maze is a source of anxiety and puzzlement for the charac-
ters, a mysterious object with multiple uses and an unknown identity. During
their expedition, as they try to locate and approach the edifice, each colonist
perceives the Building’s sign differently. Wade Frazer, the group’s psycholo-
gist, concludes that the building is a “WINERY;” in the second attempt to
read the sign, he sees the building as a “STOPPERY,” the place where “men-
tally ill” and “incurably sick” are “quietly and painlessly put to sleep” (110).
Ignatz Thug’s vision is more disturbed, as he interprets the building as a
“HIPPERY HOPPERY,” a kind of sex-shop kind where one can “watch a
horse and a woman make it together” (111). Maggie Walsh sees the building
as a spiritual place, a church or a temple where she “will learn all that man
can know in this interstice of dimensions” (109, 112).
Initially, this section appears formulaic and even fairytale-like. The mys-
terious structure, the Building, emerges seemingly out of nowhere, camou-
flaged by video-projections, blending in with the landscape; the din and
noise produced by the building disorient and confuse the characters. How-
ever, as each character strives to read the sign above the building and makes
her/his own interpretation of it, the fairy tale quality is lost to the gravity

A Maze of Death 99
of their perceptions. Each colonist believes that they are the only person
entitled to enter and that the rest do not belong in the Building. The text
of A Maze features each perceived Building’s title set in all capital letters,
followed by that character’s internal monologue.
With this episode, Dick is not only commenting on the individualistic
sense of entitlement to the truth, but emphasizes the irresolvable discrep-
ancies between subjective experiences of the objective world. On the one
hand, Dick suggests that indeed, an outside reality shared by all human
beings does exist. On the other hand, he shows his characters as sepa-
rated from the larger world because of their subjective visions and thus
builds on another concept presented in Existence: Heraclitus’ view of real-
ity as consisting of idios and koinos kosmos realms, the private world and
the world of logos, so formulated to demonstrate that life in one’s own
subjective world equates to isolation.9 In A Maze , Dick illustrates what
Binswanger, following Heraclitus, sees as life lived in a dream state “regard-
less of the physiological state of dreaming or wakefulness” (Existence, 98).
Binswanger explains that in dream states, “as in passion, emotional states,
sensuous lust, and drunkenness, each of us turns away from the common
world toward his own” (Existence, 197). In the novel, Ben Tallchief sinks,
after imbibing some Seagram’s VO, “into the privacy of his own mind, his
own being” (31), while Seth Morley expresses the following sentiment to
Susie Smart: “there is something the matter with all of you. A kind of idiocy.
Each of you seems to be living in his own private world” (76). Throughout
the novel, colonists are described as withdrawn from each other, retreating
into their private world. Like Heraclitus and Binswanger, Dick shows that
life, even when we are not sleeping, is sometimes spent dreaming.10
Dick builds upon existentialist ideas to explore the issues central to
his writing: the relationship between the individual and the universal (the
idios and koinos kosmos), the problem of authenticity of experience and—
specific to this novel—the problem of human violence. The murders that
destroy group’s collective dream echo another Sartre’s famous statement:
“hell is—other people!” (“No Exit,” 45). Dick’s novel, however, insists on
the necessity for collective cooperation to the extent that the ability to con-
nect to others has a redeeming value. Unlike existentialism, which views
human circumstances as individualistic, ranging from self-affi rmation to
negation of others, Dick wants to imagine human development toward col-
lectivity, empathic behavior, and better communication.11
A second important existentialist source for A Maze is Paul Tillich’s The
Courage to Be. Tillich introduces the idea of “God above god” in response
to the problem of existential terror before the inevitability of death. To con-
quer the non-being and affi rm God, Tillich explains, the individual must
have the courage to be, to exist in the face of knowledge of one’s frailty
and mortality. Because, Tillich points out, “the experience of nonbeing” is
dependent upon “the experience of being,” the two states are in fact insepa-
rable (177; 179). Thus, nonbeing is “that in God which makes his self-

100 Philip K. Dick
affi rmation dynamic” (180). To have the courage to be is a fitting response
because it “conquers the anxiety of faith [and] also conquers anxiety about
gods” (179). Doubt and guilt that are natural before the awareness of death
and meaninglessness can be, according to Tillich conquered with the cour-
age to be. The self-affi rmation leads to the affi rmation of “being-itself,”
and of the living God (181; 179). This God is “the ultimate source of cour-
age to be, the “God above God” (186).
Tillich’s preoccupation with “nonbeing” parallels A Maze’s preoccupa-
tion with death and the force of the Form Destroyer.12 Dick makes Dunkel-
welt a spokesperson of Tillich’s idea of the higher God. After Susie Smart
witnesses one of Dunkelwelt’s trances and manages to bring him back to
the present, Dunkelwelt shares his fundamental insight: “Specktowsky was
a great man, but there is a higher monistic structure above the dualism
that he foresaw. There is a higher God” (90). “What do you think about
that?” asks Dunkelwelt. “I think it’s wonderful,” Susie Smart replies, “with
enthusiasm” (90). In presenting the higher god, “a deity above the Deity
who embraces all four manifestations” (89), Dunkelwelt echoes Tillich’s
explanation of the relationship between being and non-being. Dunkelwelt
tells Susie Smart that “the Form Destroyer is absolutely-not-God” which in
itself is “a category of being” (90). The Form Destroyer and the non-being
are therefore a part of God.
While Tillich and Dick, through Dunkelwelt, seem to agree in the way
they describe God, one is left wondering why Dick assigns these theories to
Dunkelwelt, a character modeled on the individual who responds to death by
death, and relieves his suffering caused by death with murderous impulses.
Dunkelwelt’s vision of the higher God is a deranged vision, deceiving him
into perceiving that an old custodian is the Form Destroyer, whom he kills.
Dunkelwelt’s erratic and destructive behavior—murdering Susie Smart and
Bert Kosler—is closely connected to the Form Destroyer’s influence and illus-
trates the dynamics of evil as an overpowering, damaging force. Dunkelwelt
feels alone in the colony, “left here to fall into the terrible paws of the Form
Destroyer” (117). He enters another trance-like state seeking the “Sword of
Chemosh” with which to kill the Form Destroyer, “the Black One” (118). 13
Dunkelwelt’s insight represents a refined view of the relationship between
good and evil, compared to the more literal cosmic battle enacted in Dick’s
novel The Cosmic Puppets (1957). Dick is careful, throughout A Maze, to
make the Form Destroyer a force working within the main Divinity’s world,
instead of clashing with it. But Dunkelwelt’s behavior immediately following
and during his visions shows that Dick is not ready to leave the idea of one
God unexamined. Dick’s disagreement with Tillich’s non-orthodox solution
may come from the consequences of the view that there is a higher God that
subsumes good and evil. This principle can be seen as the way to reconcile
the two forces, but also as a morally dangerous equation of the two.
The Dunkelwelt episode is another illustration in the novel of the decep-
tion produced by the human mind, and its subjective nature. According

A Maze of Death 101
to Dick, the psyche can be inhibited by the impulses or forces hostile to
human moral existence. In his letters, Dick discusses Freud’s idea that the
death-force, Thanatos, replaces the life force, Eros, and causes the self-
destructive impulses in an individual. In Valis, Dick refers to the invasion
of reality itself by the destructive force. He alludes to Plato’s idea of the
“streak of irrational” inhibiting the soul of the world and deceives noos,
the rational force of the world (in Timaeus).14 Following Plato and Freud,
Dick represents the death force as something deceitful and taking on the
appearance of the life force.
Dunkelwelt’s behavior reflects Dick’s fictional insight into a particular
liminal space occupied by the mentally ill. Dunkelwelt’s behavior is on one
hand self-deceptive; his mind creates an entirely new continuum of events
(the Sword of Chemosh, his attempts to reach it, and his delusional killing of
the Form Destroyer); at the same time, these perceptions are falsified in such
a way that their source is unclear. Dunkelwelt’s murdering of Bert Kosler is
described as a mistake, a derangement possibly brought on by the intrusion
of the death force into Dunkelwelt’s individual perception of the reality.
In a similar procedure of bringing religious, scientific, and psychology-
based concepts together (used to represent Mercerism in Do Androids, for
example), Dick portrays Dunkelwelt’s experience with religious metaphors
of epiphany and prophetic visions, scientific concepts of virtual reality, and
psychological traits of Dunkelwelt’s character, suffering neurosis. Dunkel-
welt believes himself into possessing ‘the Sword’ for which he reaches into
“empty space, a million miles into the emptiness, the hollowness above
man” (118).15 Through references to immense emptiness, the light emana-
tions, and “the universal self” (118), Dick creates a separate dimension in
which Dunkelwelt operates. When Dunkelwelt reaches “into the awesome-
ness above him” (118) in order to obtain the murder weapon that he believes
is the Sword, he transgresses the established borders of space and experi-
ence; his “existential structure” is altered to provide for his own neurosis.
MANUFACTURED REALITY:
VIRTUAL REALITY AND TEXT
Dunkenwelt’s instability, however, has a specific source: he is the young-

est member of the crew and has spent most of his life living in the virtual
reality worlds managed by the spaceship’s computer: “For him, the proces-
sion of polyencephalic worlds had become a normal way of life” (187).
Left without a stable point of reference, Dunkenwelt behaves in an erratic
and destructive manner. The largest portion of the novel, indeed, is set in
the realm of experience that combines elements both psychological and
mechanical: the group-generated, machine supported virtual reality.
Although dreaming is an important aspect of the group’s Delmak-O
illusion, the dream is not the primary metaphor. The group’s experience

102 Philip K. Dick
is a “construct” (180), akin to the technological concept of “virtual real-
ity,” which may be defi ned as “a three-dimensional, computer-generated,
simulated environment that is rendered in real time according to the behav-
ior of the user” (Loeffler and Anderson, xiv). This 1994 defi nition closely
describes A Maze of Death’s concept of its constructed dream.
For Dick and the scientists and artists in the field of digital technol-
ogy, the concept of virtual reality represents more than a technologi-
cal achievement; rather, it represents a paradigm shift that alters both
our understanding of the surrounding world and our own capabilities.
Researcher Akikazu Takeuchi wrote in 1994: “virtual reality used to be a
fantasy envisioned only in laboratories. Now, computer technologies have
brought it to life. VR will soon be an endless daydream, truly an alterna-
tive reality” (xi). Although Takeuchi’s prediction has yet to materialize,
in a prescient understanding of the phenomenon, the Delmak-O virtual
reality is Dick’s innovative way of bringing separate minds together in a
constructed environment.16
The similarities between virtual reality and narrative function are strik-
ing. Fiction and the colonists’ dream are both counterfeit realities, a truth-
ful representation of the world that nevertheless adds a layer of obscurity.
Dick shows the connection in the scene when Seth Morley wakes up from
the Delmak-O virtual reality dream. After the series of mysterious deaths
of other members, Seth Morley is the last person to lose his dreamt idios
reality as he is witnessing the disappearance of the mysterious Building
in the rapidly disintegrating environment. After the emergency landing of
his ship and as his sense perception narrows, Morley hears only “silence,
except for the drip-drip of the rain of acid on him” (176). His reality dis-
sipates together with the narrative. “I am dying,” Morley reflects. “In emp-
tiness, meaninglessness and solitude” (177). Morley does not die, but the
breakdown of his private world leads to the temporary breakdown of the
koinos kosmos, which turns out to be a virtual, not an actual realm. “We
arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer . . . ” Morely
ponders. “We made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up.
An exciting adventure turned into gross murder” (182).
Virtual reality and its innate ability to deepen human experience paral-
lel what I call Dick’s “religiosity of the text.” Since “reality” cannot be
verified or be established through sense perception, it is created through
language; the unfolding of narrative events is “reality” or, in the case of
virtual reality, the story is produced and told by the interaction of technol-
ogy and humans. The narrated becomes the “true,” since the ability to
render events in logical sequence (through the work of logos) means bring-
ing them into existence. The text develops progressively, focusing on the
succession of characters’ actions and the potential of each discrete moment.
Dick illustrates the creativity of narrative in time through the group’s real-
time, psychological creation of their own “narrative”—the virtual reality
of Delmak-O—where there is presumably a direct feedback between the

A Maze of Death 103
crew and the events that they experience as described in the fourteen chap-
ters. In the end, the narrative reveals itself both as a construct and as a
medium of establishing reality.
The text is both a creative and a self-reflective medium. The structure
of A Maze of Death is self-referential, a technique that Dick used in sev-
eral works.17 The characters are forced to reconsider the fi rst sequence of
events (Chapters 1 through 14) based on the information from a second
sequence (Chapters 15 and 16), as are the readers. It is not clear which of
the two sequences in the novel, the representational narrative (the state of
wakefulness) or the imitative narrative (the machine-induced dream expe-
rience), is the dominant sequence. The two are connected in a continuous
loop of information and interpretation (sequence one informs sequence
two, and two alters the understanding of one). Like the reduced setting,
the self-enclosed narrative scheme represents a macrocosmic counterpart
to the microcosmic experience of the colonists, underscoring their limited
existential space or, alternatively, suggesting an infi nite regress.
Perhaps the most intriguing textual feature in A Maze is its chapter titles,
which are listed only in the table of contents. A Maze is the only Dick novel
in which the chapters are announced with sentence-long descriptions. The
relationship between the sentences and the chapters is puzzling, as the titles
and the content of the chapters appear quite unrelated. The description for
chapter one, for example, “In which Ben Tallchief wins a pet rabbit in a
raffle,” could be applied to the chapter’s events as a metaphor: Tallchief’s
successful prayer for the transfer to Delmak-O represents his raffle prize.
Similarly, when chapter 11 is described as “the rabbit which Tallchief won
develops the mange,” the relationship is still discernible: although Tallchief’s
death occurred much earlier in the novel, chapter 11 focuses on several
more deaths; the mange is spreading and the glitch in the creation of the
colonists’ world is starting to deteriorate further. Thus, Tallchief’s rabbit,
the winning trip to Delmak-O, is disintegrating; the possibly benign cos-
mic influence that granted his prayer is attacked by the disease-like Form
Destroyer, Tallchief’s and others’ lucky break is not so lucky after all.
The title of chapter 4, on the other hand, “Mary Morley discovers she is
pregnant with unforeseen results,” apparently does not bear any connection
to the chapter in which Mary Morley and her husband Seth arrive to the
new colony and meet with the group. Mary’s pregnancy is not mentioned in
the text or hinted in any way nor does the reader learn about any results of
the alleged pregnancy. Chapter 4 features the longest stream of conscience
section in the novel, Milton Babble’s observation of his bodily functions,
and also portrays the defeating discovery that all colony’s communications
are beyond repair. Except for the opening of the chapter, Mary Morley does
not even figure as a character; children are absent from the plot of the entire
novel. Mary, however, is one of the Dick’s meta-characters. The key passage
to deciphering the chapter description and the role of Mary’s character may
be Seth Morley’s innocent remark, made to Ben Tallchief in chapter 4:

104 Philip K. Dick
It is interesting to hear that you’re here because of a prayer. In my case
I was visited by the Walker-on-Earth at the time in which I was busy
fi nding and adequate noser for the trip here. I picked one out, but it
wasn’t adequate; the Walker said it would never have gotten Mary and
myself here. (39)
The Walker-on-Earth’s visitation takes another dimension beside its obvi-

ous personal significance to Seth Morley; the incident is reminiscent of the
Biblical story describing the visitation of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin
Mary and her husband, who will become the parents to the divine child. In
The Divine Invasion, Dick’s novel written ten years after A Maze of Death,
the protagonist Rybys Romey gives virgin birth to the child who turns out
to be a deity, thus enacting the part of the Christian creed; Rybys Romey
and Mary Morley may also be related to the character Mary who, in The
Cosmic Puppets, Dick’s 1957 novel, is a child playing with the boy Paul,
both children in possession of divine/supernatural powers.
Despite these inter-textual connections, the evident function and mean-
ing of the chapter titles remain a mystery. One of Dick’s Doubleday edi-
tors, Judith Glushonok, reacted with the same puzzlement and removed the
descriptions. But Dick, routinely accommodating the sometimes draconic
requests of various editors for textual alterations, insisted that the chapter
descriptions be reinstated: “I am very anxious to have this restored. Intrin-
sically, it is not absurd; it only becomes so when compared with the text
of the chapters. Again, I need it as counterpoint, this time as a method of
setting off the total volume itself” (Huntington Library, HM 53581).
Another layer of meaning/reality in the virtual dream is illustrated in
the existence of a book within a book in the novel, titled “The Book: A.
J. Specktowsky’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So
Can You” (5).18 Parallel to the much-studied fictional book in The Man in
the High Castle (1962)—Abendsen’s The Grasshopper—“Specktowsky’s
book” is central to the plot in A Maze’s.19 Each character in the group,
except Dr. Milton Babble, adheres to what they see as the seminal reli-
gious text for guidance of their beliefs. Specktowsky’s book provides a new
liminal space, because the characters consult it during their Delmak-O
sequence, but unlike the Walker/Intercessor, How I Rose From the Dead
does not cross into the waking reality of sequence two, thus remaining a
virtual text. 20 Upon waking, the crew realizes that they incorporated the
personality of their deceased captain, Egon Specktowsky, into the virtual
dream and into the invented religion (182).
In A Maze, the artificial creations that closely resemble real life, from
virtual reality of Delmak-O to Mentufacturer’s religion, underscore the
problem of determining which religion, reality, or experience might be
real. Chapter seven in the novel discusses several artificial items found by
colonists “the bees, fliers, printers and miniature buildings” (81), showing
different levels of sophistication in replicated objects. Grand tenches, the

A Maze of Death 105
“replicant organism” on planet Delmak-O capable of making exact copies
of objects put before them, are a telling metaphor for verisimilitudes of life,
and the “identical but not real” issue in A Maze.
By creating exact copies (123), tenches fake the world around them, rep-
resenting precisely the process that Dick is concerned with on philosophi-
cal, cosmic, and physical levels. Tenches allude to the nature of the virtual
reality, the psychological confusion of perception, and the “dreaming” of
our existence, revealing a preoccupation common to a long line of thinkers,
from Heraclitus to Binswanger, as discussed earlier. But the grand tench
also represents the work of the novelist who, in the narrative, replicates
the world. As with Ignatz Thug’s tench-produced watch, the novel as an
object may have “a dulled quality” in relation to the world, but it is “still
basically a success” in approximating the real (123). While the pen pro-
duced by tench turns into dust in a few days, its ink, as Seth Morley and
Glen Belsnor ascertain, does not disappear even after the pen is decayed
(77). While the tench’s behavior may be understood as a critique of built-in
obsolesce or waste—“I don’t want to be just a consumer,” Belsnor tells the
group (79)—it can also be a suggestion that one can write one’s way into
immortality in a world where things come into existence and disappear
into nothingness.
Several ideas are articulated through Dick’s treatment of the constructed
reality. The virtual reality of Delmak-O, produced by the crew’s interaction
with the ship’s computer, shows the attempt of a group of human beings to
exist in a composite world of their own making. Dick seems to highlight
both negative and positive aspects of human existence in virtual reality:
its value as an alternative form of experience and even therapeutic value
of purging the colonists’ hostile feelings toward each other, as well as the
disorienting aspect of such reality and the disintegrative effect it has on the
human psyche. His experiment of uniting the colonists’ minds in a positive
fusion through the mediation of virtual reality fails; neither member of
the group can forsake their individual selves and identities. Furthermore,
both virtual reality and fiction are seen as creative media. In Dick’s repre-
sentation, fiction is another counterfeit reality—one way of describing the
world—amongst several others (virtuality, physical replication, ideological
prescriptions, subjective decisions about what surrounds us). Recognizing
the hierarchy of these created worlds, A Maze shows, is our hardest task.
Narrative reality and experiential reality are both seen as a constructed by
the author, readers, and the person interpreting their world. The way we
process the world is a constant creative act.
TECH RELIGION AND SUFFERING
Although the narrative of A Maze incorporates philosophical ideas about

identity and reality and theological ideas about faith in goodness as well as

106 Philip K. Dick
descriptions of a range of psychological and subjective states, the scientific
and technological elements play an important role in the novel. The cosmos
inhabited by the colonists on the one hand seems filled with the uncanny
or at least inexplicable forces that have trapped the group on their ship and
determine their behaviors; on the other hand, their universe and situation
depend on an array of electronic signals and transmissions, on the ship’s
computer, and their transportation means. Both the novel’s religion and the
human beings are intertwined with machines.
Dick represents human beings as suffering individuals divested from
familiar dimensions and functions because these have been too far altered
by technology. The failure of the group’s communication system is what
leads to a tragic situation of their entrapment on the ship, further com-
plications with the equipment render them lost in space. Dick’s narrative
asks where our knowledge comes from and offers a possible solution: a
mechanical universe or a computational machine as big as the universe.
This “mechanical God,” however, may be impervious to the suffering of
the human world.
By transforming a technological problem (entropy and communications
failure) into the existential one, Dick illustrates both our gains and losses
with technological advances. The colonists emerge as victims of technol-
ogy as much as that of cosmic forces or their own minds. They are piti-
fully dependent on various tech-devices, transporting them deep into the
cosmic vastness and outside of their own physical and psychological abili-
ties. Their “noser” ships, for example, are constructed to carry enough fuel
for a one-way flight only; after reaching the destination, the machines are
obsolete. Delmak O is so distant and colonists have traveled so far that the
planet’s coordinates are not charted; the group is simply lost in the vast
expanses of space, a situation true of their waking state too (49; 186). When
he emphasizes that colonists’ problems are primarily caused by their faulty
equipment, Dick criticizes divestment from source questions and priorities
abandoned because of the unbridled faith in progress and technology.
Religion is part of this technological setting: the virtual reality of Del-
mak O is not the only phenomenon supported by the machines and a
computer. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep human beings com-
municated religious feelings through a non-invasive contact with technol-
ogy (the “black empathy boxes”); in A Maze of Death the colonists are in
a close, physical interconnection with the machines, through them, they
dream up the religion of Intercessor/Walker on Earth/Mentufacturer. Ben
Tallchief is again the fi rst to introduce the mysterious technological ways of
the tripartite divine being by going “to the ship’s transmitter” and attach-
ing “conduits to the permanent electrodes extending from his pineal gland.
The conduits had carried his prayer to the transmitter, and from there the
prayer had gone into the nearest relay network” (3).
The reference to “the permanent electrodes” in Ben Tallchief’s pineal
gland suggests that all colonists may be cyborgs, a new kind of human

A Maze of Death 107
altered to better merge with machines. The colony’s theologian Maggie
Walsh also mentions the “pineal gland emanation” (51) as the means to
transfer a prayer and when the group wakes up from their virtual reality
world, they disengage from the “polyenchepalic cylinder which enclosed
[their] brain and skull and scalp” (178), both details suggesting mechanical
alterations on everyone’s nervous system. 21 In light of the crucial role that
the ship’s computer, Persus 9, has in the co-creation of the colonists’ virtual
dreams, the human-machine integration is further emphasized.
During the same praying ritual, we learn that Tallchief “had addressed
the prayer, as a matter of course, to the Intercessor. Had it failed he would
have presently readdressed the prayer, this time to the Mentufacturer” (3).
Tallchief’s thought about re-applying to the higher-up divinity in case of
failure with the Intercessor is humorous, but the thought also suggests the
widening of human physical and spiritual space brought on by technologi-
cal advances. Tallchief looks, quite literally, into the immense space of the
cosmos for the answer to his problems. The “god worlds,” referred to sev-
eral times in the novel, are the outmost physical frame for the divine exis-
tence in A Maze. 22
The colonists quantify the relationship with the divine into mechani-
cal details of interplanetary communications. After the group learns that
their transmitter is not working and the communications are cut off, their
primary concern is not only to “prepare a joint prayer” but to effectively
send it into space (51). The group’s discussion becomes a strange mixture of
theology and technology. As Wade Frazer challenges Glen Belsnor’s skepti-
cism about their lack of equipment to successfully pray, Belsnor righteously
replies: “I have no faith in prayer that’s not electronically augmented. Even
Specktowsky admitted that; if a prayer is to be effective it must be elec-
tronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Mani-
festations are reached” (51).
Seth Morley supports his fellow colonist’s technological reverence by
giving a detailed account of the speeds of projection, forces of gravity, and
“the mathematical chance of the various Manifestations receiving [the
prayer]” (51). Such information, according to Morley, is found in one of
Specktowsky’s “addenda” making the main religious text of the future
part revelation and part science. The opening of the new tech-religious
dimension is particularly important for the introduction of the possibility
of divine salvation in the last chapter.
While the group’s technical discussion can be interpreted as the critique of
the lack of personal faith, a new version of the “how many angels can dance
on the tip of a pin?” question, criticizing the rationalized theology, there is
also, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a suggestion of a mechani-
cal god manifested in the work and systems of science and in the creativity of
machines.
Even the negative force in A Maze’s universe, the death-carrying Form
Destroyer, is described in mechanical terms, together with the philosophical

108 Philip K. Dick
and religious aspects of its nature. Dick uses mechanical and electronical
engineering’s defi nition of entropy, understood as the loss of information
during signal transmission, to explain the anti-eidos, or the Form Destroyer
force. Examples abound of the crew’s helplessness due to their heavy reli-
ance on technology that becomes synonymous with the insidiousness of the
death force. When the orbiting satellite erases the tape with their instruc-
tions, the group is struck by shocked silence, with “nothing to say” (47).
Having to interact with the satellite transmission system makes Belsnor
feel like “a rat in a cage,” dependent on mechanical call and response (50).
Later, Belsnor will reiterate this feeling by comparing the crew with rats
caught “in a maze with death” (96). Significantly, it is the loss of com-
munication, the mechanical failure to transfer the message that causes the
existential nightmare of the colonists.
The narrative detail of group’s endless orbiting underscores Dick’s emphatic
examination of the consequences and dangers of space colonization. The col-
onists are not bold, unstoppable explorers, but ordinary individuals facing
hostile environment, uncertainty, and depression. Their space journey causes
“the space illness of loneliness and uprootedness” (132). The possibility feared
by the colonists that the group is confined in an insane asylum and not on Del-
mak O is explained as a consequence of the colonization program’s harshness.
We learn that many do not survive the process intact: colonists designated as
mentally unstable “ostriches” are individuals who “crumbled under the enor-
mous psychological pressure suffered while emigrating” (132). Even those
who survive, like the fourteen member group, are left to their own devices,
abandoned in space and to the virtual reality dream.
Dick’s model of signal-based tech-religion and the loss of contact that
plagues the group from the onset probably relies on Norbert Wiener’s
communication theories, that significantly inspired Dick’s writing in Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, as shown in the previous chapter.
Within the context of his “theory of messaging,” Wiener explained that
society crucially depends on the carrying and exchange of information.
Wiener expanded the idea of entropy, understood as nature’s intrinsic ten-
dency toward disorder, to signify the basic undermining force of human
to human, machine to machine, and machine to human communication. 23
Within Wiener’s and Dick’s framework, the Form Destroyer reveals itself
as the universe’s entropic force, the noise in the information signal, the
tendency toward disorder. Wiener believed that entropy can be conquered
through feedback, while Dick personally had faith in love for human beings
and empathy toward others as the ways to battle the universal decay.
THE FEARED, SWEET DEATH
The problem of death is central to Dick’s cosmogony in general and in A

Maze of Death in particular. The constant advance of decay and death is

A Maze of Death 109
the most striking plot element. The disappearances and murders of charac-
ters, and their visions of old age, occur with the increasing frequency until
death becomes “the mainstay of [the colonists’] life” (137). The “Destroyer
of Forms” suggests a force that attacks not only the ephemeral but the
ideal objects; in addition to annihilating the organic matter, it lurks in the
folds of the universe to corrupt its very essence. Seth Morley presents the
cosmogony of insidious death in his explanation for the apparent injustice
of Ben Tallchief’s death:
“Specktowsky did not know that the Form Destroyer existed, or that
He’d be awakened by the concentric rings of emanation that make up the
universe. Or that the Form Destroyer would enter the universe, and hence
time, and corrupt the universe that the Mentufacturer had created” (86).
Unlike the ordered, tri-partite representations of the creator God, the Form
Destroyer is chaotic and menacing universal force.
Both Glen Belsnor and Seth Morley have visions of their fellow colonists
as old and decrepit, “fading away from inside” (94). Belsnor’s dream reveals
colonists as creatures “tottering about in a feeble, insect-like manner” (94).
He despondently concludes that “they will all die anyhow” and, upon wak-
ing up from his dream within a dream, (still in virtual reality), remembers
old age and death as ”the enemy within” (94; 98). Belsnor’s difficult dream
shows that the primary force at work in both the real and the dreamt uni-
verses is the the death force weakened only by the sporadic interventions of
the Mentufacturer.
During his vision, Morley, wounded and wondering around the desolate
planet, visits the planet’s mysterious “Building” and sees the entire group as
old and “hunched over, tottering, afraid” (175). Morley concludes about his
vision: “the Form Destroyer has seized them. And done this to them. And
now they are on their way back to where they came from. Forever. To die
there” (175). But the meaning of death remains a mystery.
When the fi rst murder occurs in the novel, the members of the group are
shocked and unable to determine the exact cause of Ben Tallchief’s death. A
passage read from Specktowsky’s book at Tallchief’s funeral equates death
with “the Curse” and thus the main burden of human existence and suffer-
ing (60). Susie Smart confi rms Specktowsky’s teaching by informing Seth
Morley that “we are always doomed. It’s the essence of life” (65). Although
the colonists seemingly accept death as a part of human condition they
nevertheless hope and pray for release from its clutches. The group’s prayer
asks that Tallchief be removed “from time” and granted immortality (60).
When Bety Jo Berm commits suicide by drowning, Maggie Walsh com-
pares Betty’s pasted black hair to “the wasps of death” that have attacked
the group (116). The aging of custodian Bert Kostler, the gradual dissipa-
tion of the tench-produced objects, the elusive nature of the Building, Tony
Dunkelwelt’s deranged behavior, all expose the pervasiveness and inevita-
bility of deterioration. The absence of stable points of reference indicates
the transitory nature of elements of Delmak-O’s world, and ultimately,

110 Philip K. Dick
the absence of being. In this, again, is reflected the existentialist view that
death is “the most obvious form of the threat of non-being,” and the one
absolute in human existence (Existence, 48).
The premise from the novel’s title is developed in the middle, eight chap-
ter. The group feels literally caught in a maze of death. Sudden and continu-
ous deaths make them feel helpless; the sense that someone “is doing this”
prevails in the group (96). Glen Belsnor, the elected leader of the group,
bitterly concludes: “as if we’re rats in a maze with death; rodents confined
with the ultimate adversary, to die one by one until none are left” (96).
Later, as the death toll increases, Seth Morley concludes: “death for us has
blotted everything else out; it has become, in less than twenty four hours,
the mainstay of our life” (137). While death represents a threat to human
existence in many of Dick’s novels, from The Cosmic Puppets to Transmi-
gration of Timothy Archer (1980), its representation in A Maze of Death,
together with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is at its bleakest.
The atmosphere of terrifying thoughts pervades the group, however,
despite their constant fear of death, facing death is indicated as a posi-
tive experience. This realization is fi rst evident in the descriptions of the
Building. In his Foreword, Dick explains that the Building in Morley’s and
Belsnor’s visions represents Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, that he based
on Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung.” In the novel’s outline, Dick con-
ceives of Valhalla as a focal point that reveals the Platonic ideal reality
beneath colonists’ confused dreams. Therefore, Belsnor’s and Morley’s
visions of colonists entrance into the Building, in their old age, suggests
also the entrance into genuine reality.
Existentialist psychiatrists also conceived of the awareness of death as a
potentially positive experience. Henri F. Ellenberger, one of the contribu-
tors to Existence, expresses the idea that death anxiety is a positive force,
shared by his colleagues, most clearly: “In order to pass from inauthentic
to authentic existence, a man has to suffer the ordeal of despair and “exis-
tential anxiety,” i.e. the anxiety of a man facing the limits of his existence
with its fullest implications: death, nothingness. This is what Kierkegaard
calls the “sickness unto death” (Ellenberger 118).
Ellenberger’s point of explanation indicates that a series of (imagined)
murders in A Maze do serve a purpose of an affirmative, ritual death. Glen
Belsnor, the group’s leader, echoes the psychologist’s opinion by speculating
that the group has released “the bulk of our hostilities” during the virtual
reality experience, or, as the group’s psychologist Wade Frazer points out, the
experience is “highly therapeutic from a psychiatric standpoint.” Dr. Babble
finally suggest that the group has undergone “a total catharsis” (181).
In a second parallel to Existence and its theories, the recurrent images
of dissipation and death in the group’s dreamt reality resemble the symp-
toms of the “anankastic” patient described in the V. E. von Gebsattel’s
essay “The World of the Compulsive.”24 Gebsattel’s anankastic patient
is a person obsessed with past and repetitive behaviors (178) and—like

A Maze of Death 111
the colonists—“set apart from the koinos kosmos of average waking
reality” (182).
Colonist’s obsession with different forms of death parallels Gebsattel’s
description of “the form-destroying powers of existence” (186) that over-
whelm the world of the anankastic. The two forces, Dick’s Form Destroyer
on the cosmic level, and Gebsattel’s form-destroyer on the existential level
“gain mastery over imagination and determine actions” (Existence, 187).
Because of the parallel between the psychiatric description of the compul-
sive patient and the behavior of the group, the entire novel, even the exter-
nal narrative frame (their orbit around a dead star), may be a compulsive
delusion, “the worry about their ability to be” as Gebsattel would put it
(187). 25 The hostilities and murders of the colonists reveal these attitudes;
the group’s dynamics are repeatedly portrayed as detrimental: the bicker-
ing, disjointed set of relationships stops the group from functioning in a
unified or purposeful manner. “We are as we were, a mob of twelve people.
And it may destroy us,” Seth Morley resignedly observes.
Perhaps the most disconcerting turn of events is the group’s decision to
continue dreaming, despite the possibility that their collective vision will
re-create the horrors of the Delmak-O. The gravity of their situation is
revealed in the desperate reactions of the ship’s police officer Ned Russell:
“As bad as it was, as bad as we acted . . . at least there was hope. And back
here on the ship—‘He made a convulsive, savage, slashing motion. ‘No
hope. Nothing! Until we grow old like Mrs. Rockingham and die” (186).
As the group is making plans about the new world in which to immerse
themselves, Seth Morley bitterly ponders: “how about a world in which we
lie good and dead, buried in our coffi ns? That’s what we really want” (188).
As morely considers, death as “their only comfort” (188), Dick introduces
the fi nal element into the group’s life. The group’s inability to move forward
reflects their collective lack of vitality, as well as the paradox, the curse-like
situation of human beings who are horrified by death and experiencing
a death-wish at the same time. Although despairing over our destiny to
live only briefly, Dick describes death not only as the enemy but as a step
toward salvation.
SALVATION THROUGH FAITH
Dick fi nds a solution for the confi ning levels of the crew’s life in the divine
intervention that literally causes Set Morley’s character to vanish from the
existential plane—he is visited by the Walker-on-Earth who takes him off
the ship. Faith and personal beliefs play an important role in what happens
to the characters in the novel. Just before his death, Ben Tallchief perceives
the whole universe as dying through entropy and then dies himself; the
atheist Babble becomes a killer. Significantly, Morley is among the colo-
nists who do not commit virtual killings. He is distressed with murders.

112 Philip K. Dick
Laying wounded in the vehicle operated by Ignatz Thugg, Morley ponders:
“A murderer for a pilot. And a doctor who’s a murderer. And my wife. A
murderess. He shut his eyes” (171).
While Morley is not superior to others, he is described as innocent,
compassionate, and faithful. Unlike the skeptical Dr. Babble, debating the
truth of the divine existence at every opportunity, Morley is a believer who
yearns for the manifestation of his god: “months, years—he had not seen
the Walker on Earth for a long time, and the weight was intolerable” (18).
Morley’s faith is almost naïve; he does not judge the doctor, but finds Bab-
ble’s lack of faith “very strange” in the age “when we have proof of Deity’s
existence” (86).
Walker-on-Earth fi rst appears to Morley during the dreamt phase, help-
ing him pack his possessions and giving a warning about a faulty rocket
ship. “Your noser, the Morbid Chicken, will not get you and your little
family to Delmak-O. I therefore must interfere, my dear friend” (18). Mor-
ley is deeply affected by the experience and relates it to the rest of the group
upon arrival. According to Morley, the Walker thinks of him as compas-
sionate person, pronouncing that “compassion is the basis of the person
who has risen from the confi nes of the Curse” (44). With this statement,
and through the act of Morley’s salvation, Dick once again emphasizes
the love for others, not for oneself, as the grounding force of any human
being.
When he wakes up from the collective misadventure, Morley is aston-
ished that the group has invented “the entire theology” (182). “We made it
up,” Morley ponders. “The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-
Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer” (182). Although Speck-
towsky’s theology appeared real to the group, they are quick to dismiss it,
upon waking up, as a fabrication of their minds and the data fed into the
computer. Ned Russell points out: “Now we’re back to reality Morley; once
again we have to face things as they are” (185).
The Walker-on-Earth, however, does appear in the second, superseding
section of the narrative. After awakening from the artificial reality and real-
izing the futility and hopelessness of the group’s situation, Morley decides to
commit a suicide by opening the spaceship’s hatch, an action which would
also kill the rest of the crew. As he is despondently heading down the ship’s
hallway, Morley sees the divine figure again, “bearded, with flowing, pale
robes” (188). The positive force appears as the Intercessor, who assures
Morley that he will not have to exist in a computer-generated, “polyence-
phalic” world: “you will be free; you will die and be reborn” (189). Morley
takes the Intercessor’s outstretched hand and literally disappears from the
ship, although the others cannot explain or believe his absence.
The disappearance of Seth Morley represents both a puzzle and one affir-
mative answer to the situation in the novel. The Intercessor’s intervention
is nothing short of a miracle. The divine figure who is allegedly the product
of the group’s imagination, a composite of the computer generated religion,

A Maze of Death 113
becomes a real presence in the group’s deprived world. The Mentufacturer’s
influence does not improve all the various levels of subjective (mental) and
physical confi nement, but it does transgress the levels of reality that char-
acters experience, and offers salvation on an individual basis. As the crew
is preparing to re-immerse themselves into another fabricated semblance
of the real, Morley is not found aboard the ship and he does not join the
group as they are hooking up into the machines. The colonists’ two worlds
are clearly separated through their engagement with the equipment; but the
assertion that god exists brings their two realities together.
Morley, however, also has to die in order to be reborn again. His destiny
is emblematic of Dick’s dual views about human condition. On one hand,
decay and death represent an awesome, overwhelming force that devours
both micro and macro cosmos. On the other hand, the supernatural phe-
nomena represent hope, nurtured and preserved within human heart. Dick
countered his strong belief in ‘the dark one’, with his faith in “the redeemer”
(Selected Letters 288). “He is the friend who ultimately comes . . . and in
time,” Dick wrote (SL 2: 228).
One last instant that needs examination is a statement from Morley’s
retelling of his first encounter with the Walker. Perplexed, Morley relates
that the Walker “said a strange thing” telling him that his compassion will
“enable you to save lives, both physically and spiritually, of others” (44).
While the divinity is apparently the only force that has transgressed colo-
nists’ two worlds in the novel, it is nevertheless possible that the entire epi-
sode of encounter with the Walker is told from Morley’s subjective point of
view. He is the only person on the ship who experiences salvation; therefore,
the decision to not open the ship’s hatch may have come not from the exter-
nal source, but from his own sense of compassion and responsibility toward
the lives of others, no matter how limited the colonists’ lives have become. As
Morley explained to Dr. Babble, who inquired in one of their earlier discus-
sions whether it is not possible that any human stranger would proffer help
to others, without the necessity of divine influence: “then [one] would have
been in the possession of the Walker-on-Earth; [one] would have temporarily
become him. It can happen to anyone. That’s part of the miracle” (85). In this
sense, Morley’s apotheosis is moral and not supernatural, but the question of
his disappearance from the ship remains unresolved.
THE LOCATION OF TRUTH
In the end, the questions from the beginning of the narrative and this essay
remain open-ended, too: what is the colonists’ purpose or fate? Which of
the myriad worlds inhabited by the group—their composite virtual dreams
and their supposedly awake world—is real? Should we honor our subjectiv-
ity or can we ever hope to fi nd the objective truth? After the story has been
told, the reader fi nds herself right where she started: the colonists unable

114 Philip K. Dick
to leave the ship and lacking meaning in their lives. Because of the ability
of human intellect to transcend its immediate surroundings, as Dick illus-
trates in his novel, it is impossible to clearly place the truth in one or the
other world because both can be considered real, or fake. 26
It is also impossible to establish a hierarchy of truths in which one form
of existence may be more authentic than another. Subjective perception is
taken to the extreme in the virtual dream of the world whose truthfulness
is impossible to disprove but which is nevertheless a pure product of the
mind, without base in physical reality other than the physical reality of the
colonists’ bodies. While in the early 21st century virtual reality is still on the
margins of our society, both scientists and artists continue to develop this
realm of experience.27 In A Maze, Dick uses the concept of the constructed
reality to undermine the borders between living and dreaming, reality and
artificiality, thus questioning and undermining the hierarchy of truth(s). The
human position in this mechanical universe is compromised: on one hand
is the stasis of meaning and existence in the cold cosmos; on the other is
the computer-generated daydream. The group’s machine-aided experience
shows that human beings can be occluded from the true knowledge by tech-
nology. Dick’s implicit question is: does that make the Delmak-O world less
real? In light of this, one must ask, can we ever comprehend the extent of
our situation in its fullness? Certain ethical and humanistic principles, how-
ever, especially honoring others’ lives under all circumstances, are a central
measure, for the author of A Maze, toward authentic existence.
To the colonists, the planet represents the only reality during the entire
duration of their virtual stay; if they were not dying in the artificial con-
struct their ‘lives’ in it could have continued forever. However, as their inter-
nal hostilities corrupt the joint dream and as the group members wake up
and realize their ‘true’ reality, they resemble Plato’s cave dwellers who live
in the shadows and, blinded by the truth of their hopeless situation, decide
to descend again, into the soothing illusion of another made up world.
Dick does not allow for the enlightenment of his characters, who should,
according to Plato, become more informed human beings through their
encounter with the truth. Instead, the author uses amnesia, the opposite of
Plato’s concept of anamnesis, or the sudden recollection, to explain how
it is natural for the group to immerse themselves into oblivion again.28
When Seth Morley is abducted by the mysterious men in black uniforms
and taken to the Building, one of them asks “You don’t remember this
place, do you?” (151). Morley has no recollection of the building, but later,
during his report to the group he ventures: “They say I was there, once. So
on some level I do know, he realized. Maybe we all do. Perhaps at some
time in the past all of us were there” (163). Despite the hidden knowledge
of memory, Morley’s inability to remember as well as the group’s artificial
life—their existence in an overwhelmingly realistic dream—is Dick’s meta-
phor for the total occlusion from the ‘true’ reality that human beings may
be experiencing in their everyday lives.

A Maze of Death 115
In A Maze, Dick explores the mysteries of human consciousness in
dialogue with the ideas from existential philosophy, psychiatry, and the-
ology. He employed the novel’s narrative—from the mystery plot to the
textual noise (repetitions, dream-like turns of events) and multiple subjec-
tive points of view—to illustrate the peculiarities of human psyche as well
as to consider our physical and cognitive limitations. A Maze, perhaps
most thoroughly amongst Dick’s novels, explores the psychological make-
up of human beings: the subjectivity of human mind and its relationship
to the collective and objective reality. 29
Dick’s imaginary theologian and Plato agree that we are “prisoners of
our own preconceptions and expectations” (101) and so do existential-
ists. The previous utterance, made by Maggie Walsh as the group faces
the apparently changing landscape, echoes the principle that existentialist
psychiatrists warned against: “the tendency to see the patient in forms tai-
lored to our own preconceptions or to make him over into the image of our
own predilections” (Existence, 8). In other words, our individuality may be
isolating us both from the world and the others.
One possible solution, according to both Dick and existentialists, is the
genuine encounter with the other person or patient, the “true communica-
tion from existence to existence” that can, according to Rollo May, “wake
or rekindle that divine “spark” in the patient” (Existence, 81). May and
Binswanger agree that the “light and warmth” of such communication is
needed to bring the person out of the “blind isolation, the idios kosmos
of Heraclitus, and to ready him for a life of koinonia, of genuine commu-
nity” (81), an attitude that probably spurred Dick’s criticism, throughout
the novel, of the group’s inability to function collectively. With the concept
of koinos and idios kosmos, Dick not only explores our relationship to the
objective world, but also critiques human failure to connect to others and
achieve intersubjectivity. Glen Belsnor encourages the inter-subjective rela-
tionship when he concludes about the group: it’s a mistake for us not to stay
together; death comes when one of us if off by himself” (97).
In Dick’s dramatizations, the lack of true knowledge is a part of the
spiritual condition of humans and possibly the work of the Form Destroyer.
In the universe of A Maze of Death, it is the Intercessor, as Specktowsky’s
book suggests, that can help the humans overcome their Curse by “lift[ing]
the veil for us” (101).30 In his salvation, Seth Morley is perhaps assisted in
leaving the trappings of our subjectivity, our spatial, temporal, and self-
perception as he is lead into the entirely new existential dimension.
Dick’s view is in many ways grounded in the second part of the twen-
tieth century, reflecting our knowledge of the scientific, physical picture
of the vast universe, the secular and humanistic worldview, and our fi rst
steps toward the interaction between the human and the machine. A Maze
of Death belongs to a particular historical position, after modernism and
into the postmodern emphasis on simulation, as it anticipates the new cen-
tury’s digital age, suggesting that humans may want to achieve collectivism

116 Philip K. Dick
offered by the mediation of machines. At the same time, the novel expresses
the concerns and beliefs of Christianity—especially the centrality of salva-
tion and agape—and Buddhism, aligning its fi nal representation of death
with the view of death as an experience of passageway and a release.
Despite the challenging, difficult elements that he saw as intrinsic to
human condition, Dick characteristically noted the bittersweet, if not
humorous, side of things. In the “Vague New Theology” developed in the
“Notes on the TENCH Novel,” Dick explains the relationship between the
Mentufacturer and Form Destroyer as essentially the process of evolution
and re-creation. The Form Destroyer, which has infi ltrated the Mentufac-
turer’s world, incurs decay not as a genuine part of the cyclic life-and-death
process, but an “unnatural” presence in the Mentufacturer’s universe.
God, therefore, has to keep working beyond the initially planned six days,
always improving its creatures and developing new ones in order to counter
their obliteration by the Form Destroyer. According to the author, for God,
“the work would require perpetual new activity on his part. His resentment
is well-recorded” (“Notes” 6).

6 A Scanner Darkly
“The Reel Identity”
Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly is a tale of an undercover narcotics cop,

code-named ‘Fred,’ who poses as the drug abusing addict Bob Arctor in the
1970s California.1 Arctor/Fred lives surrounded by outcast characters of the
world that he has infiltrated—dealers, other agents, addicts—women and
men suffering socially and physically from the devastating effects of vari-
ous drug abuses. The world they inhabit is that of outcasts: Jerry Fabin and
Charles Freck, Bob Arctor’s “junkie” roommates, consider themselves and
Bob ‘heads’ while the rest of the society are ‘straights.’ The group is on the
perceptual outside too: Fabin, Freck, and Arctor’s time and space perceptions
are distorted; they often get lost driving and “run fantasy numbers”—active
daydreams—as they move about the daily reality of Southern California.
Because of the prevalent drug abuse and Arctor’s increasing paranoia, the
parameters of “reality” in the novel fluctuate, leaving us unsure of believ-
able facts: Arctor and his friends entertain a series of casual visitors and a
series of delusions. The very opening of A Scanner Darkly is an exercise
in uncertainty, illustrating the psychological condition that plagues Fabin,
Arctor, and Freck. The scene presents us with a fantasy concocted by Fabin,
who sees aphids everywhere and spends hours catching and killing them.
The narrator informs us that Fabin eventually buys “spray cans of Raid and
Black Flag and Yard Guard” to spray the entire house, then himself, then
his dog. “The Yard Guard seemed to work the best,” the narrator explains
(3). He further explains that “as to the theoretical side, [Fabin] perceived
three stages in the cycle of the bugs,” revealing the elaborate nature of the
delusion.
When Fabin’s friend Charles Freck asks why he doesn’t see the bugs
too, Fabin offers to catch them in an empty mayonnaise jar. The narra-
tor explains: “[w]ithin half an hour they had three jars full of the bugs.
Charles, although new at it, found some of the largest” (6). The situation is
both humorous and precarious: the author reminds us from the beginning
that reality is consensual in nature and that, with a few more participants
like Charles, Fabin’s illusion becomes less unreal.
The aphid catching episode also shows that the physical-psychological
damage brought on by the advanced stage of drug addiction is intrinsic in

118 Philip K. Dick
Arctor’s household, as each member becomes increasingly involved in their
micro-world from which they can only “see darkly.” The novel’s title, A
Scanner Darkly, encompasses several references. The most common is the
invocation of the Biblical verse, I Corinthians 12:13: “For now we see in
a mirror, dimly” (translated also as “through a glass, darkly” in the King
James Version) and continues, “but then we will see face to face.” The verse
belongs to the chapter that describes love as the supreme force, despite the
partial vision and partial knowing of “now.” The title further echoes the
title of the Ingmar Bergman’s film, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), which
portrays a woman’s descent into madness, her demise not unlike Arctor’s.2
The novel describes the “murkiness” that eventually envelops the
minds and perceptions of all the characters. As Arctor increasingly uses
Substance D(eath), a damaging and powerful drug, he fails to distinguish
the real and unreal, and realizes that he is drawn into his roommates’
delusions fully: “We all got into it together that deep. Knowing what I
know, I still stepped across into that freaked-out paranoid space with
them, viewed it as they viewed it—muddled, he thought. Murky again;
the same murk that covers them covers me; the murk of this dreary dream
that we float around in” (101).
Seeing darkly depicts the incomplete vision of Arctor and his friends as
drug users, but also the limited vision of all human beings somehow stopped
short from breaking through the unsatisfying routines of life. Contrary to
the stereotype of the mind-expanding power of drugs, Arctor’s is a journey
without transcendent moments. In this limitation he is no different than
any other character in the novel, “straight” or “head.” The trope of seeing
darkly, of condemnation to incomplete reality, reflects a recurring theme in
Dick’s novels and the author’s belief that there is more available through
our perceptions than the quotidian, and that there is ultimately more mean-
ing in our lives, even if an epiphany is unreachable. In A Scanner there is no
saving grace or rescue-enabling character, save for the tentative suggestion
at the end of the novel that Bob Arctor may come back to normal.3
Arctor’s task is to live in this suffering, convulsing world of drug deals
and psychotic episodes, but also of friendships and affection—and to report
everyone’s whereabouts to his police-deputy supervisor, Hank. The factions
in this confl icted world, the good guys versus the bad guys, the police ver-
sus the drug abusers, and the identity of the establishment vs. the identity
of junkies are far from clearly distinguished. Bob Arctor-the user/Fred-the
police officer and the characters surrounding him in the novel develop into
individuals with multiple identities, with no certainty in nor awareness of
their behavior and actions. Ultimately, they lose their sense of what reality
is: a drug-induced trip, a surreal life of the suburbs, or an entirely different
level of existence reachable only from the fringes of ordinary life.
Another such fluid, changing character in the novel beside Arctor is the
menacing Jim Barris. His role in the novel develops from being a part of
Arctor’s group of friends to that of an informer. He reports Arctor to the

A Scanner Darkly 119
police, submitting fake tape recordings to denounce his friend. The reversal
of the roles between Arctor, who also reports on Barris, and Barris himself,
emphasizes the absurdity of the culture in which the surveillance methods
imposed by the government encourage such multi-directional spying; Bar-
ris’ and Arctor’s unstable relationship also emphasizes the drug induced
paranoia that plagues the characters.
Throughout the novel, Barris keeps Arctor on the verge of suspicion and
fear. The author makes us wonder whether Barris is just a clever, odd char-
acter who likes to say strange things, or whether he is actively working
against Arctor and his other friends. The incidents in the novel that are
open to such interpretation (several paralleling Dick’s real life) include the
breaking of an “Altec cephscope,” a machine that influences brain waves,
and Arctor’s most expensive piece of equipment (equating to Dick’s top-of-
the-line stereo in real life); Barris possibly giving the group deadly, poison-
ous mushrooms intentionally (the other possibility being that psychedelic
mushrooms, such as amanita muscaria, were of the naturally poisonous
variety); and the sudden malfunctioning of brakes on Arctor’s car (also a
real-life event). The portrayal of Barris as alternatively menacing and ordi-
nary figure—as a fluid personality—adds to the novel’s theme of uncertain
and distorted identities, a representation that is completed through the por-
trayal of the main female character Donna.4
The most sympathetic and positive character in the novel, Donna fulfi lls
several roles. She has the apparent ability to embody an affi rmative life-
force, lift Arctor’s spirits, and maintain defiance toward the social systems
around her.5 Arctor spies on Donna too, but cannot ever bring himself
to report her, and he confesses, “because there is something wonderful
and full of life about you and sweet and I would never destroy it” (149).
Donna poses as a small-time dealer, but is in fact an undercover agent her-
self. Seemingly simple-minded and careless, Donna is an object of Arctor’s
unrequited love, a woman who tells him that he is “too ugly” to be held by
her (152), but who provides comfort and, by the end of the novel, takes the
incontinent, vomiting Arctor to a rehab clinic without hesitation. Toward
the end of the novel, Donna’s internal monologue seems to represent Dick’s
analysis of the situation. As she is taking Arctor to the clinic, Donna rumi-
nates: “Somewhere, at the deepest level possible, the mechanism, the con-
struction of things, fell apart, and up from what remained swam the need to
do all the various sort of unclear wrongs the wisest choice has made us act
out. It must have started thousands of years ago. By now it’s infiltrated into
the nature of everything. And, she thought, into every one of us” (236).
The fact that Donna, too, has multiple identities, reflects the general
degeneration of “the construction of things”; her pose is only partly her
responsibility. Arctor doubts her despite his love, wondering what is
Donna’s “true” behavior when no one is watching. “Does, he wondered,
the gentle lovely shrewd and very kind, superkind girl transform herself
instantly into something sly?” (133). The “curse” of the world is placed

120 Philip K. Dick
universally, and the contemporary America described in the novel, with its
individuals and sub-cultures, is a product of the misgiving.
DRUGS DON’T HAPPEN TO OTHERS
In writing about the two specific worlds, the drug user’s and the “objec-
tive” Southern Californian one, Dick achieves a meaningful balance in
their representation. The two realms are not established as a duality, but
instead, Arctor’s personal demise is set against a structure that intertwines
the drug world and the straight world, showing that they operate under
the same rules. Dick demonstrates that drug dealers, cops, mall shoppers,
and ordinary citizens exist in the same environment, with one another.
He portrays Arctor as a fallen but “very good person” as both Donna and
their police supervisor Hank describe him (225; 234). He also presents
drug addicts as compassionate toward animals and—unless they are com-
pletely subsumed by their addiction—toward other human beings. The
sense of futility and confusion in the lives of both drug users and non-
users, suggest both groups may have meaningless lives, especially if they
are devoid of compassion.
The scene where Arctor is giving a speech on the dangers of drugs is a
parody of the establishment that contains multiple perspectives and can-
not be neatly resolved. When Arctor/Fred enters the stage in his “scramble
suit” that camouflages his features, he is greeted with: “Let’s hear it for the
vague blur!” and “mass clapping” from the audience (23). In his impromptu
speech, instead of a scripted pep-talk he refers to “pushers” who deceive the
innocent, “especially the girls,” and hints at the desperation with society
that drives people to drugs (28). The shocked reaction from the audience—
“they were looking at him as if he had pissed on the stage before their
eyes. Although he was not sure just why”—confi rms Arctor’s belief that
anti-establishment attitudes exists as an expression of disgust against the
“mainstream” life (27–8).
What the Lions Club audience lacks the most, it turns out, is compas-
sion. Arctor, who at this point in the novel is much closer to his honest cop
“Fred” identity than his addicted and disoriented “Arctor” identity, breaks
his pre-written lecture to urge the audience into having more compassion
for addicts, implying their lack of compassion in general: “don’t kick their
asses after they’re on it. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from
getting on it” (28). For Fred/Arctor the listeners are not collaborators,
helping to build up a “real” society; they are instead a bunch of unfeeling
‘straights’ ignorant of both the drug scene which threatens their material
possessions and of the people like him who try to both battle the dealers
and help the “little man.”
Acts of human kindness are strewn throughout the novel, from Jerry
Fabin’s selfless act of saving a street kid from a runaway car, despite his

addiction and his aphid delusions (19), to two “heads” spending hours
trying to save an injured cat (95), but these acts are not enough to redeem
the situation and significantly improve the condition of the characters in the
novel. Because the kindness is extended mostly by addicts, Dick seems to
insists that they are somehow more compassionate than the straights, who,
in reference to the injured cat, “would have had the animals ‘put to sleep,’
a straight-type term if there ever was one—and also an old Syndicate term
as well, for murder” (95). Opposite to Donna is Thelma Kornford, a rich
and elegant woman eager to kill a harmless bug. Her attitude leads Arctor
to conclude that Thelma’s heart is “an empty kitchen: floor tile and water
pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned
glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about” (94).
Dick’s belief that drug users have more compassion than “straight” peo-
ple is not, however, connected to their drug-use, but rather to their open-
ness to pain and suffering. In a 1972 letter to “Sue,” written while living in
Canada, downtrodden and recovering from his suicide attempt in a rehab
clinic, Dick expressed his appreciation that the X-Kalay clinic, which took
him in, was helping people get off drugs and live “productive lives.” On the
other hand, he expressed concern about the coldness, the detachment that
he saw around him. “In some ways the lessons in toughness that I’m learn-
ing here are perhaps not such a good thing. I don’t suffer because I am ceas-
ing to care. It’s easier on me, but—is this really the solution? I feel like they
are burning out a part of my brain, the part that listens to the heart-beat of
others” (SL 2: 23). The insistence that drug addicts care and straight ones
do not, seems like a clear polarization of the two worlds, but the author is
careful to point out that addicts eventually reach a truly horrifying state of
non-caring and non-being.
Dick explicitly addressed the issue of inhumane behaviors in his 1972
lecture “The Android and the Human” by raising the question: “what is
it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human?” Dick pointed out
that a large number of everyday behaviors falls into the category of “insect,
reflex behavior” (Shifting Realities 187). In the novel, Arctor has a sexual
relationship with “a cute little needle-freak named Connie,” indifferent to
the encounter and everything around her except the drug. Arctor compares
Connie to a vampire—a sentient being not truly alive—and makes a larger
observation about all “junkies”: they are no more than a machine “cranked
from position A to position B” on a daily basis, seeking drugs, following the
one urge left in them. “Every junkie,” Arctor concludes, “is a recording”
(159).6 In his lecture Dick focuses primarily on the limitations imposed on
ordinary people: “the production of such inauthentic human activity has
become a science of government and suchlike agencies”; but in the novel
Dick places drug addicts in the same category.
Ironically, Arctor himself ends up as one of the living-dead, sitting in a
rehab clinic (“New Path”) with his faculties at least temporarily, perhaps
completely ruined. As Arctor repeatedly zooms in on the minute details

122 Philip K. Dick
around him—the coffee steam, the grainy texture of the carpet—the group
therapy discussion focuses on the idea of what it means to be “seeing and
even knowing but not alive,” discussing two concepts at length: “living
and unliving things are exchanging properties” and “the drive of unliving
things is stronger than the drive of living things” (243, author’s emphasis).
The lines of dialogue from the group’s discussion mix with Arctor’s nar-
ration of his own sensations as he sits nearby, the two streams suggesting
the same state of nothingness, and ultimately, the inability to care. When,
several days later, Arctor gets exposed to the abuse therapy in which the
circle verbally assaults him, he fi nally responds to the prodding with a
dejected declaration: “I am an eye,” expressing once again his predicament
of the living dead, capable of merely seeing and perhaps enduring the world
around him.7
THE WORLD WIDE SCAN
Dick explores the issue of government and police surveillance to empha-

size the paradox of our, and especially Arctor’s, darkened vision: we see
“through a glass darkly” even though, and perhaps because, of the avail-
ability of constant camera and satellite surveillance. A major plot com-
plication occurs when Arctor, in his role as Fred the undercover cop, is
assigned to spy on himself and the house that he shares with Freck and
Barris is wired for surveillance. It is the one science fiction gadget in the
novel that enables this element of the plot: both Fred and his supervisor
Hank wear “scramble suits,” a piece of clothing devised to completely
disguise the identity of the wearer. Dick writes: “As the computer looped
through [the suit’s] banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair
color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial
bone structure—the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physi-
cal characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, and then switched to
the next” (23). The suit is used by all police agents as a security measure
against infi ltrators in the law-enforcement system, but it also becomes a
powerful metaphor of Fred/Arctor’s loss of selfhood: at fi rst physical, and
later spiritual and intellectual.8
In order to report on himself, Fred/Arctor has to play back hours of
tapes recording his actions as well as endure the constant surveillance.
His reaction, upon entering the house, as “the scanners, insidious and
invisible” record his every move is intensely negative, marking the initial
reference to the scanner darkly concept (184). Although he performs the
surveillance, Arctor is not a scanner himself. He feels estranged from the
project and the atmosphere of inspection leads him to conclude: “what-
ever it is that’s watching, it is not a human” (185). Arctor has a sense of
being observed by a thing, but—in a metaphysical transference of the
surveilling moment—nevertheless hopes that a scanner can see “clearly,”

rather than “darkly,” because Arctor himself can “see only murk” (185).
Enlightenment hinges on the scanner’s ability to see clearly. “Because, he
thought, if the scanners see only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are
cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up
dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong
too” (185). The spying eyes of the cameras, the scene shows, do not bring
knowledge, the ability to see may be lost, and the novel’s title may be
reinforcing the pessimistic outlook on the human community in general
and in the 1970s America.
In “The Android and the Human” Dick at length addressed the “passive
infrared scanners, the almost miraculously sophisticated sensor devices”
which, he believes, will soon be used to oversee and control the popula-
tion. In the speech, too, the author referred to law enforcement agencies
as “the evil process,” describing them as utterly dangerous and inhumane
with, most importantly, the growing capacity “to squash the individual”
through the use of technology (196). The scanners, like drugs, turn one
into an android, which Dick defi ned as allowing “oneself to become a
means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without
one’s knowledge or consent” (191).
The second reference in the novel to “a darkened scanner” is made during
Fred/Arctor’s psychological testing at the police headquarters and it engages
the idea of double identity: seeing oneself in the mirror, or rather a back-
ward reflection of oneself. Through the process, which creates an endless loop
of observing the observed, the changes in Arctor’s brain mimic his outward
actions—the testing shows that his right and left brain hemispheres are con-
flicted (212). As his world is collapsing—he finally realizes that he will loose
his job and will have to withdraw from Substance D—Arctor finally recalls
the Biblical passage on seeing darkly: “I understand, he thought, what that
passage in the Bible means. I understand but am helpless to help myself” (215).
Arctor wonders at this point which is the real and which the reversed image?
After following Arctor through hours of watching his own tapes in police
headquarters, the reader, too, is no longer sure whether Arctor’s real life is
merely an endless reel of tape, where people and events are put into motion
by pressing the “play” button, or whether there is a truth behind it all. We are
aware that Arctor is slowly getting lost within the maze of drugs and his fake
identities, or rather caught within a loop, “the eternity of time, like a loop of
cassette tape!” as one of Arctor’s testers excitedly observes (215).
The loop of endless time in which Arctor is caught reflects a larger view
of reality presented in the novel, the question of the quality of life, and
particularly American life, immersed in endless replication of items and
production of what modern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto
Eco have termed “hyperreality.” Dick uses several concepts—déjà vu,
rewinding time, the “flow” of time perceived by drug-addicts—to suggest
the idea of reversed time that could possibly make up for the “error” in the
historical development of society.

124 Philip K. Dick
THE ECONOMY OF DOPE
What makes Arctor’s tragic personal story especially distressing is the net-
work of influences in which he and his friends are caught. The physical
world of A Scanner Darkly is full of strip malls, fake, mass-produced food,
and endless rows of spray cans in the shop-windows. “In Southern Cali-
fornia,” notices Arctor, “it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you
went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like
a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere”
(30). The characters who live in this environment are poorly educated
and content to live their life in ignorance. Arctor’s friend and love interest
Donna can hardly write (although her identity is an act) and members of
the Anaheim Lions Club to whom Arctor is giving a lecture about drugs are
shown as “nitwits” and “mental simps” who responded best to the simpli-
fied, prepared speech and were only capable of “the assorted degrees and
kinds of asshole questions and opaque stupidity” (24–27).
For Arctor, the commercial nature of life in Southern California, the life
of buying and selling endlessly, lack of intellectual enlightenment, and the
lack of compassion are what drives people into the extreme opposite of the
“establishment,” the opposite that consists of drugs and “Dumbness and
Despair and Desertion,” as Arctor’s prepared speech ironically describes
(27). But although the members of the two subcultures have drastically
different lifestyles, the basic rules of the two world’s economies are the
same. The drug world and the strip mall world—“the McDonaldburger
stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels”
(28)—both rely on selling and buying, on quantities and profits, and both
seem to be mired in “a world of illness, getting progressively worse,” as
Charles Freck observes (38).
The theme of buying and selling and the theme of overproduction is
present from the beginning of the novel, when Jerry Fabin buys not one
but three poisonous sprays designed to kill bugs, “Raid and Black Flag and
Yard Guard” (3). In the next scene, when Charles Freck is driving around
trying to score “slow death” and is trying to remember what day and place
it is, he realizes it is “Wednesday, in downtown L.A., the Westwood sec-
tion” (10). Ahead of him is a giant shopping mall with armed guards who
are making sure that everyone has a credit card with which to shop, this
being the nature of the malls in A Scanner Darkly. Freck muses about the
population’s urge to shop at night, when the shops are lit “like a fun park
for grown-up kids” (11). The location from which Freck is observing the
mall and its visitors is also a cluster of shops. The women that he is ogling
are engaged either in shopping or window-shopping; he describes a scene
in which a girl, before entering a store, is “scheming on the purse, peering,
worrying” (11).
Although Freck thinks of the shoppers as ‘straights’ engaged in mean-
ingless activity, the drug world, too, is intrinsically based on the buying

and selling mechanism. Chapter Two features Arctor in his police officer
role: he is trying to buy “a thousand tabs of Substance D cut with meth”
(31). Arctor is buying increasing amounts of the drug from the larger deal-
ers in an attempt to reach the top suppliers and sellers by “thread[ing]
a path upward via Donna to the supplier she bought from” (31). Arctor
explains his transactions at length, showing that the police work consists of
buying his way to the sources: “Donna would assume he was reselling at a
profit per hundred, since he was buying a thousand at a time at least. This
way he could travel up the ladder and come to the next person in line” (32).
The language of the drug world is the language of economy: throughout
A Scanner Darkly we are reminded that the two worlds—the establish-
ment and anti-establishment—exist under the same rules and conditions
of buying and selling—the production of large quantities persistent in and
moving both worlds.
Overproduction and consumption of material goods are in the novel’s
center even when it focuses entirely on the drug scene. In the beginning of
the novel, as Charles Freck is driving around the Los Angeles strip mall, his
“fantasy number” regarding “slow death” includes the drug being available
in “the Thrifty Drugstore” and in large quantities: “they had a huge win-
dow display; bottles of slow death, cans of slow death, jars and bathtubs
and vats and bowls of slow death, millions of caps and tabs and hits of
slow death” (7). The language of Freck’s fantasy describes the endless line
and variety of products found in an ordinary drugstore, the overwhelming,
repetitious quality of production is an intrinsic part of his fantasy. Freck’s
strange, menacing friend Jim Barris also fulfi lls his drug fantasy in connec-
tion to mass-produced household products, taking Freck along to a 7–11
store to purchase Solarcaine sunburn spray, freezing its contents to extract
cocaine (41–47).
Barris explains to Freck that Solarcaine company buys “in large quanti-
ties,” underlying the commerce aspect of both the giant producers of ordi-
nary items and the producers and distributors of drugs. Freck reacts to
Barris’ explanation about coke being used in Solarcaine production with yet
another “fantasy number,” this time of “tons and tons of pure, unstepped-
on, uncut, high-grade cocaine” which is, mixed with other ingredients,
“stuck in little bright-colored spray cans to be stacked up by the thousands
in 7–11 stores and drugstores and supermarkets” (47).
The repetitious nature of Freck’s material drug fantasies points toward
the general picture of the world, and specifically Southern California, which
the characters inhabit. As Bob Arctor drives around in his double task as the
user and the police officer—a situation that forces him to ask himself “what
am I actually?”—he gruffly notices that “the land became plastic” and that
“life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed”
(31). As he is nevertheless preparing to “make a buy call” to Donna, Arc-
tor ruminates: “someday, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s
hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever

126 Philip K. Dick
from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside” (31). The
chain of commerce and the commerce of chains that Arctor is so rueful about
produce the culture of sameness and unoriginality and meaninglessness.
Arctor’s frequent references to the McDonald’s hamburger chain stands
in direct relationship with the concept of the “McDonaldization of society”
developed by sociologist George Ritzer in 1983, revised in 2004, reflecting
the trend’s continuing hold. Following the work of sociologist Max Weber
and others, Ritzer described social developments directly “affected by princi-
ples of the fast food restaurants” and isolated four fundamentals of fast-food
operations—efficiency, countability, predictability, and control—to describe
their subsequent influence on the way society operates (Ritzer, 13–15). On
the example of McDonalds and its scrupulously imposed standards of unifor-
mity and strict regulation of products, workers, and even customers—“lines,
limited menus, few options, and uncomfortable seats all lead diners to do
what management wishes them to do—eat quickly and leave” (15)—Ritzer
showed the growing limitations to human creativity and potential. His main
claim, that the rationality involved in McDonalds-like operations actually
ends up being irrational—that the uniform functioning of the system is
counterintuitive—is presented as a major concern of Dick’s in “The Android
and the Human.” Dick expressed a similar concern over “an inability of the
android mind to make exceptions” as the most dangerous consequence of
the newly developing control systems (201). In further concordance with and
anticipating Ritzer, Dick addressed the predictability as the force that “opens
gates for the wholesale production of the android life” (191).
Ritzer’s statement, describing the reasons for the ever-growing presence
of McDonald’s, evokes Arctor’s remark about “always the same McDon-
aldburger place over and over” strewn across Southern California (30).
Ritzer writes of the real-life America: “after ‘refueling,’ we can proceed
with our trip, which is likely to end in another community that has about
the same density and mix of fast food restaurants as the locale we left
behind” (9). Arctor notices the repetition, “always the same McDonald-
burger place over and over” and ruminates: “and when finally you got
hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald’s
hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that
and so forth” (30). Arctor’s remark relates to Ritzer’s description of the
predictability principle—“the Egg McMuffi n in New York will be, for all
intents and purposes, identical to those in Chicago and Los Angeles” (14).
Both Arctor and Ritzer agree that the environment simultaneously reflects
and negatively influences people’s lifestyles: “customers take great com-
fort in knowing that McDonald’s offers no surprises,” writes Ritzer (14).
“Nothing changed,” remarks Arctor. “The automatic factory that cranked
these objects had jammed in the on position” (31).
For Dick, changes expressed in McDonaldization are a part of “the
curse” that Donna mentions in reference to Arctor’s fall (236), showing
the demise of the human race on a large scale. Before Donna leaves Arctor

in a rehab, she hopes that, together with Arctor’s memory—of himself, his
identity, and purpose—something else will be restored: “when everything
taken away unjustly from people will be restored to them. It may take a
thousand years, or longer than that, but that day will come, and all the
balances will be set right” (234). The chains, sameness, and uniformity,
although a real social phenomenon, as illustrated by both Ritzer’s and
Dick’s narratives, is in the novel also attributed to the more fundamental
principle of universal regression.
Although Arctor believes that conformity forces people to choose a dif-
ferent option—that of drug use—Dick shows us that the alternative, too,
is hopeless. In the Afterword to the novel, Dick wrote: “In [the drug use]
lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but
the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory” (277).
Ephemerality indeed marks the lives of the cast of characters in A Scanner
Darkly. When Charles Freck chances upon Donna, he excitedly realizes
that she can be an additional supplier of Substance D and that he, in turn,
has “two weeks lying ahead of him, nearly half a month before he croaked
or nearly croaked” (16). This realization allows Freck a fleeting moment of
awareness, when he notices his surroundings and smells “coming in from
the open windows of the car, the brief excitement of spring” (16). After-
wards, Freck gets lost in another memory, only to have “the rerun of a now
gone moment wink[ed] out and die[ed] forever” (20). Time is deceitful and
fleeting for Arctor and his friends, a situation that will become especially
exacerbated for Arctor, when he starts viewing endless surveillance tapes
of his own household.
Critical attention has been paid to whether A Scanner was a drug novel
or an anti-drug novel. Some suggest neutrality, or even the lack of resolu-
tion on the issue (Suvin 374). In his “Author’s Note” to the novel, Dick
described the people on whom he based the characters as his friends,
including himself, who “were punished entirely too much for what they
did” (276). The author does not make excuses, pointing that “drug misuse
is not a disease, it is a decision” but he also insists that “there is no moral in
this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when
they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were” (276–7).
To Canadian friends Dick wrote, in a period after A Scanner Darkly was
published, that his life with Tessa Busby, his soon to be fifth wife, is “clean,
there is no dope down here, and I’m so anti-dope now” (SL 2: 120). He,
however, couldn’t refrain from mocking comments about the safety of the
area due to police patrols and the proximity of Disney world, “the Church
of Our Choice, as the saying goes; on Sunday we serve a baked mouse and
offer up prayers to Saint Walt, wherever he may be” (120).
The reference to Disney World in Dick’s letter is telling. The collecting of
imaginary aphids from the opening of the novel, also announces the theme of
fabrication of reality in the novel through different social mechanisms, from
mass production to the system of false appearances (used by law enforce-

128 Philip K. Dick
ment). Dick seriously questions the authenticity of “objective” reality by
pointing to the fake elements in it and in the systems that support fabrication,
including the police surveillance tapes and the manufacturing of items and
settings that are replicas. Even the drug experience, in this context, becomes
a replication. When Arctor thinks of his former friend Jerry Fabin—“him
and his billions of aphids”—when he is finally taken to the clinic, he observes
the phenomenon in terms of production and not compassion: “one more in
a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless
number of brain-damaged retards . . . A reflex machine” (65).
Jean Baudrillard, in his essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” uses the
example of Disneyland to show how “the real is produced” in America,
how items are perfect replicas without a reference point, intended primarily
to motivate people to buy more (167). Baudrillard’s explanation of Disney-
land’s offer of cheerfulness to the visitors, as opposed to the dreary parking
lot, with the control element similar to that described by Ritzer, recalls
Charles Freck’s remark about the shopping mall as “a fun park for grown-
up kids” (11). Baudrillard echoes this statement, calling Disneyland a “deep
frozen infantile world” that is in fact the real America: “Disneyland is pre-
sented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when
in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real,
but of the order of hyperreal and simulation” (172).9
Semiotician Umberto Eco uses similar concepts, including hyperreal-
ity and a case study of Disneyland, to express the view of America akin
to Baudrillard’s and Dick’s. Eco borrows Louis Marin’s designation of
Disneyland as a “degenerate utopia—an ideology realized in the form of
myth” (echoing Donna’s belief that something is lost in “the construction
of things,” that reality has degenerated) and explores the systems of con-
sumerism established within such settings (43). Disneyland’s production
of fake animals, historical settings, natural environments, etc. embodies
“the quintessence of consumer ideology” in which “the public is meant to
admire the perfection of the fake” and in which we are ultimately “dumb-
founded by verisimilitude” (44–5).
In A Scanner, the verisimilitude is acknowledged through a large number
of references to fake items in the novel: Jim Barris eats a sandwich “which
was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread”
(37), a reference that perhaps mocks the health/hippie culture in the midst of
a mass-produced one. When Fred wants to buy Donna some flowers, he won-
ders if they should be plastic or real (121). He thinks of the “plastic dog shit
sold in L.A.” during his psychological test, which leads the two technicians to
conclude that he has a sense of humor (121). Earlier in the novel, as Arctor’s
paranoia and disorientation start to take hold, he has to deal with the “fake
check” that he wrote for the locksmith. Initially, Arctor believes that the forg-
ery was Barris’ work, but eventually realizes that he wrote a check after a long
night of “dope” partying, after which “he must have turned in thirty names
and as many license plates” (176; 180).

Arctor’s fleeting and faulty memory represents, perhaps, another fake
item, together with the fake tapes that Barris submits to the police and
even the fake cocaine that Barris produces from the sunburn spray. The
cycle of physical fakeness stops with Substance D, which itself is a syn-
thetic, man-made drug (32). The material fakeness translates into the fake-
ness of identity. The characters’ double/fake selves—Donna’s, Barris’, and
Arctor’s—together with the scramble suits used by police are all directly
related to the structure created through the use of the drug. Even a brief
reference in Chapter Three to a major drug dealer, Spade Weeks, who uses
the New Path rehab clinic, which refuses to give its patients’ identities to
the police, to cover-up his identity shows the pervasiveness of the synthetic
existence: Arctor attempts to catch Weeks by faking to the New Path staff
that he is an addict too. Drug use becomes itself a fabrication, simply
another dimension of the partially realized reality or self. When Arctor’s
supervisor Hank advises him on flowers by saying that “plastic ones are
no good. They look like they’re . . . well, fake” (121), Hank’s comment
implies that an independent quality of “fakeness” is present in various
methods of production and, as other examples in the novel show, in vari-
ous human behaviors and lifestyles.
MORS ONTOLOGICA
Not being sure is the premise of A Scanner Darkly. Like Jerry, who sees
bugs everywhere, we are not sure what is real in Dick’s novel. Complicated
issues are reflected in Fred’s fragile identity. Dick writes of him as “Fred,
Robert Arctor, whatever”; Fred himself becomes confused. By depicting
Arctor’s gradually confusing sense of the self, as he is increasingly unsure
whether his posing as a junkie, including taking of drugs, fi nally made
him a junkie—whether he became the thing that he emulated—A Scan-
ner Darkly treats the problem of the fragile nature of identity when the
parameters by which we are recognized—physical appearance, given name,
or our subjective self-perception—are altered. All three alterations happen
to Arctor—he has no real name or appearance at his police headquarters,
and the task of spying on himself, combined with disorientation caused
by drugs, makes him lose his sense of self. Thus, the concept of identity
developed in the novel is not identical to the concept of being. Identity is
representation of the self, memory, and self-awareness, while being refers
to physical existence, one’s presence without particular awareness of one’s
self or one’s surroundings. This vegetable-like state is what awaits Arctor/
Fred in the end of the novel.
Further drug abuse on Arctor’s part leads him ultimately to become
a third person, a human “vegetable” named Bruce and hospitalized in
the New Path clinic. The dialogue between Donna and Mike Westway,
a worker at New Path and an undercover officer, reveals that Arctor was

130 Philip K. Dick
sacrificed in order to infi ltrate what is believed to be a drug processing
plant at the clinic. “They can’t interrogate something, someone, who
doesn’t have a mind,” Westway points out (256). To Donna, the fact
that Arctor’s supervisors allowed him to become brain-dead without his
knowledge represents the “mors ontologica” or the death of the spirit—
not only for Arctor, but also for everyone involved in the process (256).
Donna’s admonition to Westway—that “there is nothing more terrible
than the sacrifice of someone or something, a living thing, without its
ever knowing” (255)—relates directly to Dick’s defi nition of an android,
discussed above. Arctor is, indeed, made into “a means without [his]
knowledge or consent” (191).
In “The Android and the Human,” Dick suggested that one and perhaps
the only way to fight conformity and lack of vitality is through the irrever-
ence of youth. He talked at length about the “California kids” that he knew
who lied, stole, and cheated for reasons as varied as politics and amuse-
ment (191). “This thought may strike fear in the hearts of the establishment
people, but frankly it makes me cheerful,” he said (190). The explanation
Dick offered is that all material objects were replaceable, unlike people who
“when gone, cannot be duplicated at any price” (190). As long as we could
not be figured out, Dick urged, we would be safe from the “passive infra-
red scanner” that sees us, “darkly” (208). Dick’s final example in his lec-
ture described a female friend of his—“Kathy” in real life and Donna in A
Scanner—stealing cases of Coca Cola bottles off of a truck and returning
the bottles for the deposit. Dick commented: “God bless her. May she live
forever. And the Coca Cola Company and the phone company and all the
rest of it with their passing infrared scanners and sniperscopes and such-
like—may they be gone long ago” (209–10). To Bruce Gillespie, Dick wrote
in 1972 that he was in love with a girl whose name was Kathy, “she is the
girl mentioned at the end of the speech who stole the cases of Coke and then
turned in the empties for deposits,” and concluded that he lost her: “most of
my friends had become drug addicts, especially the girls” (SL 2: 69).
In the novel, Donna is even more outspoken than Dick in his lecture. Arc-
tor criticizes her for stealing the Coke cases and collecting the deposit for the
empties. In reply, Donna declares that “the Coca Cola Company is a capi-
talist monopoly” and that her stealing was actually a form of barter (209).
Donna’s claim goes against the buy-and-sell economy criticized in the novel.
“I give of myself,” Donna states to incredulous Arctor (210). Later, after she
leaves the hospital where she deposited “a corpse of Bob Arctor” with a silent
goodbye, ridden with sadness and guilt that she, too, is a phony, Donna tail-
gates another Coke truck and empties a clip of bullets into the bottles (237).
After her wasted attempt to shoot at the big corporation, Donna rams “with
her little car” into the Coke truck, futilely and pathetically. Dick apparently
could not bring himself to have Donna killed: even in this extreme situation
she survives, perhaps because of her vitality, and walks down the highway,
“a small figure on foot facing an infinity of oncoming lights” (238).

In the world without a reference point or origin, where, as Donna con-
cludes, “justice and honesty and loyalty are not properties of this world”
(238), the closed loop of reflection, illustrated in Arctor’s peculiar task of
observing himself, illustrates a larger state of forced behaviors, qualified
by deadness and repetition. Dick saw the endless production and sameness
as indicative of both the “straight” and drug worlds of Southern Califor-
nia and feared the governmental and economic mechanisms that supported
such lifestyles. In his novel he used various forms of fabrication of reality,
from “reel” identity of images produced and edited on a tape to drugs, to
warn against the mechanical, automatic ways of living and behaving that
he saw prevalent in contemporary American culture. With these concepts,
Dick preceded several social commentators such as Ritzer and Baudrillard,
who expressed similar concerns about the future.
In the end of the novel, Bruce’s future has a glimmer of hope. Although
capable of merely repeating uttered phrases (“‘Mountains, Bruce, moun-
tains,’ the manager said. ‘Mountains, Bruce, mountains,’ Bruce said and
gazed.” (273)), Bruce seems to recognize his task of being a former narcot-
ics officer. The plantations of herbs that Bruce is to work in are, appar-
ently, nurseries of a powerful, government-raised drug. The last scene of
the novel, in which Bruce picks up and hides the plant for his friends, leaves
the reader wondering whether Arctor/Fred is permanently damaged by his
impossible life or merely enjoying the repose from his struggle, whether,
as agent Westway points out, he is only asleep, not dead in the spirit. The
obstructing fumes of drugs are present in the closing scene, warning that
the entire story, Arctor’s belief that he was a police officer, and the res-
olution, may be no more than a deceit in which the reader participated
(un)knowingly. Dick’s comment to daughter Laura, however, is a telling
memento of A Scanner and its real life background: “I am clean now, and
have been for years, but I carry the memories and the scars” (SL 5 167).

7 The Search for Truth as an
Antidote for Suffering in Valis
Set in late 1960s to mid-1970s California, Valis is narrated by a charac-

ter Phil Dick, whose alter ego, Horselover Fat, is the novel’s protagonist.
This split personality appears as two characters throughout the novel,
becoming “a whole person” only for a brief period of time, thus complet-
ing a long line of double characters in Dick’s fiction. Fat suffers over the
death of friends and undertakes a search for cosmic truths, joined by pals
Kevin and David who with Fat establish a “Rhipidon Society” in hope of
fi nding a new savior. The three are grieving over thinly disguised Nixon-
era oppression, and struggle to understand the events of drug-and-theory
ridden Berkeley. The plot of their search is intertwined with narrative
comments on Berkeley culture, and with constant allusions to insanity
and madness. The narrator informs us: “there wasn’t a sane person left in
Northern California” (17).1
The focus of the story, however, is on the theological and moral prob-
lems posed by Fat/Phil’s mystical vision of the true underlying reality
rather than on the problems of “this time in America—1960 to 1970—
and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California.”2 In the course
of the novel the protagonist/narrator Horselover Fat/Phil Dick has to
face the deaths of the three important women in his life, friend Gloria,
lover Sheri, and a little girl, Sophia. Much of the novel is written in
response to these deaths, the narrator equating the personal and the cos-
mic loss of the female principle. “If, in reading this,” the narrator states,
“you cannot see that Fat is writing about himself, then you understand
nothing” (37).
With their complex stories, the author and the narrator/protagonist in
Valis are communicating both the despair before spiritual and physical
death and the apparent solution: an immortal human being, achieved
through the intellectual and physical break from the bonds of time. With
its representation of reality and history as a synchronous, multi-dimen-
sional affair, Valis is a culmination of Dick’s aim to create a fictional
account with its own philosophical and historical space, an alterna-
tive to his contemporary environment and identity (post-1974 Southern
California).

The Search for Truth as an Antidote for Suffering in Valis 133
THE PROBLEM OF VALIS
Dick’s examination and integration of numerous sources—the novel con-

tains over two hundred cultural, historical, philosophical, mythic, religious,
literary, and scientific allusions—presents religious and secular narratives
as a counter-measure against nothingness and futility that threatens the
world and the individual. By incorporating large amounts of information
and references from a range of sources and historical periods, Dick offers
“textuality” as an implied answer to his question about life’s meaning
and the possibility of divine presence. “Textuality” implies the cycle of
mutual influence between the text and the subject-matter, the reader, and
the author, it reflects the belief that language is arbitrary and consensual,
but also that it is in the center of the authentic, rather than being misplaced
by it.3 Valis suggests that texts can and do have an intrinsic relationship to
experiential reality and the process of self-defi nition and suggests textual-
ity as the essential stance against both death and the lack of knowledge.
In writing Valis, which included a fictional re-writing of Philip K. Dick’s
real-life theosophical diaries known as “Exegesis,”4 Dick combined four
years of research—pouring over his Encyclopedia Britannica, Macmillan
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and a variety of books and articles—with a
writing technique that he called a “superimpositionary method,” the con-
flation of two or more plot lines together to form a master narrative (SL
5: 16). Valis was intended as a collaboration between the writer and the
reader. Dick enthused to his editor Mark Hurst: “It is the reader who, pos-
sessing both halves in the twin themes of the novel, can perhaps put it all
together” (SL 5: 15).
If Dick believed that his readers were to put the pieces of a puzzle
together, he did not make the task easy for them. Contrary to the author’s
hopes for the reader’s productive participation, critics have noted the chal-
lenging complexity of Valis. Patricia Warrick wrote that “Dick constantly
uses paradoxes, contradictions, and reversals—his dialectic of imagina-
tion,” calling his technique one of “assertion and counterassertion” (170).
Kim Stanley Robinson observed, “We can say that [Fat] offers a new expla-
nation that does not build on the previous one five or six separate times, or
once every few chapters” (114). John Huntington called Valis “disconcert-
ing,” while Gabriel Mckee cites an often quoted Valis’ line: “Fat must have
come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day
he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting, and more fucked”
(32; McKee 46). Christopher Palmer described the narrative as energized by
“postmodern restlessness” in which “nothing is fi xed or centered” (231).
Valis certainly addresses the postmodern condition, as noted by Palmer.
Its narrative is self-reflexive and self-referential, its protagonist broken into
multiple selves, its principles apparently fluctuating, and ever-changing;
yet, Valis is deeply anti-postmodern in its insistence that truth is available
through, and signified by, the interpreted and ordered chaos of everyday

134 Philip K. Dick
life. The truth, according to Dick, comes in layers, “in ascending orders,
rather than arranged as true-false” (S.L. V 26). The novel abounds in autho-
rial interruptions, explanations of the book’s real-life sources, and textual
notes; it consciously creates suggestion after suggestion of possible solutions
to the spiritual problems of Horselover Fat and his friends; it laughs at the
authorial self and the novel’s science fiction devices, simultaneously making
those devices a part of the plot (the beam of pink light, strangely equipped
Russians, etc.). But essentially, Valis is intent on describing eternity, which
it fi nds in the deep, subjective, and external connections between scattered
incidents that are both recorded and inter-connected in written texts.
The characters’ wild, mad search for explanations and a new religious
leader is in fact an attempt to present a new notion of reality, one in which
death can be overcome, and human life has larger spiritual and historical
significance. The incessant contemplation and production, on the part of
the author Philip K. Dick, and the narrator ‘Phil Dick,’ of various histori-
cal and invented cosmogonies in Valis obscures the fact that the novel is a
cosmogony itself—a modern attempt to explain a world made meaningless
by death.
The question of death in Valis is religious in nature, examined through
the viewpoints of Buddhism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. Unlike ortho-
dox believers, however, Fat cannot soothe his grief and emotions with the
Biblical life-after-death narrative. Horselover Fat imagines a God who is
truly monistic, for whom “life and death—protection and destruction—
are one” (177). God ultimately represents the category of the Other, non-
human and foreign to human beings. The divinity is simply playing “a kind
of terrible game. Which can go either way” (177). Thus, death becomes,
with all the horror and suffering that it induces in humans, no more than
one of the many “games” of God, which prompts Fat to conclude both that
“death hides within every religion” and that “there is a streak of the irra-
tional in the universe” (177).
Although critics have argued that Valis is a postmodern text or novel, in
view of Dick’s narrative method that attempts to forge connections from
apparently random events, the attention he gives to the power of language, and
his concern to show that ideal truth exists or can be reached , Valis demands
to be read in a broader perspective.5 The narrative features metatextuality,
a self-aware narrator, and an apparent lack of center—typical postmodern
devices. A look at the philosophies of Parmenides and Heraclitus, Dick’s ide-
ational bases in Valis, reveals a continuum of ideas about reality that could
easily pass as postmodern. Parmenides’ Realism and Heraclitus’ Skepticism
define the two poles of the following dilemma: is literally everything avail-
able to humans, unstable and changing, and always in flux (Heraclitus), or
is there a deeper reality hidden by appearances (Parmenides)? Valis’ narra-
tor believes in “supra-history,” a Parmenidian and Platonic world of ideas
beyond the realm of change, even though the path to it may lead through
skeptical inquiry.

Valis is narrated out of a sheer belief that, because it seems so utterly
inevitable, death and suffering must be a conceit of the well-concealed,
but nevertheless fake Universe. An ever-changing novel, Valis is given over
entirely to the Heraclitean flux, but the author does finally suggest a belief
in the Parmenidian view, a belief that it is possible to walk into an alterna-
tive, happier dimension.6 Although he refrains from offering a defi nitive
answer to the question of existential meaning for the human race, Dick
earnestly advocates the “deeper meaning” that stands in opposition to the
postmodern reflexivity and infi nite play of surfaces.
Like other Philip K. Dick novels, Valis holds the reader’s attention with
a mixture of humor, action, and mystery—what is VALIS? What really
happened to Horselover Fat? Is he just a fool? Does the Savior exist and
where can s/he be found?—and it also offers multiple layers for repeated
readings and extensive study. What brings the seemingly chaotic and mutu-
ally exclusive strains of the narrative together is the author’s, the protago-
nist’s, and the reader’s view of reality. Throughout the novel, the author
and the character Horselover/Phil insist that everyday life and history are
a synchronized, interconnected multiplicity of events, propagating in space
instead of in linear time. Engaging everything from scientific theories of
space-time to interpretation of dreams, Valis culminates Dick’s effort to
create an alternative representation of reality within a text.
The novel’s title refers to a shifting entity, Vast Active Living Intelligence
System, or VALIS, that has the power to contact and guide humans. As do
many other identities and events in the novel, VALIS undergoes re-inter-
pretation: it is interchangeably a metaphysical presence in the lives of cho-
sen individuals, an intelligent being that encompasses the entire Earth, a
physical, satellite-like device that projects beams of pink light loaded with
information, and even the title and subject of a Hollywood movie. VALIS
stands as a metaphor for the age in which the multiplicity of identity and
information is the norm, as well as proliferation of influences, connections,
and networks. VALIS may also be an apt symbol for the global view of life
on our planet as a dynamic and multi-dimensional process not bound by
linear time and discrete geographical positioning: a large global network.
The novel’s complexity is its necessary and redeeming feature. Valis’s
chapters each contain several episodes, each episode with polyvalent mean-
ing; they develop the themes of madness, truth, American life, and auto-
biography, depending on one’s level of interpretation. Critical views of the
novel range from Suvin’s proclamation that Valis is a “do it yourself phi-
losophy” with “major problems” (383) to Durham’s claim that “VALIS
does not criticize the real; it is rather the index of a reinvestment in it”
(182). Warrick and Robinson both tried to impose a structure on the text
by suggesting that it primarily consists of two parts, with a narrative shift,
in Chapter 9, from metaphysics to action (Warrick 176) and from realism
to science fiction (Robinson 112). In observing the novel in its entirety, I
suggest two other themes as crucial for understanding Valis: death and

136 Philip K. Dick
immortality, the latter achieved through connecting the self to the larger
continuum of historical figures and their ideas. 7
THE ETERNAL RIDDLE: DEATH
As stated in the opening of this book, Philip K. Dick chose two of the great
open-ended questions concerning human existence—what is reality? and,
what is the self?—as the prime-movers of his fiction. While he answered
these recurring questions through his fictional experiments, and often with
more questions, the author represented death and dying with a conspicu-
ous absence of speculation, as a destructive and anti-human phenomenon.
In Valis, death is a force that splits the protagonist into two personae,
Horselover Fat and Philip Dick, who are trying to cope, unsuccessfully, with
the deaths of the other characters around them. Death is the plot’s recurring
complication; the novel opens with a description of a suicidal friend, only to
be followed by Fat’s suicide attempt, other illnesses, and deaths.
The universe is, from Horselover/Phil’s point of view, tainted with death.
“Reality,” as he sees it, reflects the meaninglessness of existence burdened
by death, obliterating not only people, but their ideas too.8 In such a uni-
verse, humans are occluded from the truth, deceived about the nature of the
world and knowledge, and condemned to the physical descent into “the sort
of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe”
(Valis 11). Fat fi nds evidence of the mute acceptance of death everywhere,
from his friend Gloria’s husband who assumed her suicide was inevitable
(17) to the general public, who are portrayed as largely indifferent to death
and suffering, while “the world continu[es] as it always had” (216).
The “tyranny of death” (111) motivates the narrator to re-create the
world anew—the world is either “mad,” and as such, capable of hous-
ing death, or it is “fake,” a prison of time-space perception that can be
overcome. Horselover/Phil repeatedly insists that the world we live in is
somehow fake, imprisoning us with illusions of time and space and cre-
ating the detestable Black Iron Prison for our being (Valis 48–9, 60, 92,
130, 132, 134, 165). Alternatively, he believes, following Plato, that there
is a “streak of irrational” tainting creation.9 Without the intervention of
“Valis,” whether it is seen as an alien entity, a Savior, or a Russian satellite
transmission, it is almost impossible to break out of such reality, just as it
is impossible for Gloria—Fat’s suicidal friend—to break out of hers and be
saved. The apparently rational mind that controls the universe, according
to Horselover/Phil, is deranged, accounting for irreconcilable facts such as
death and suffering. Although they appear perfectly normal on the surface,
Gloria and the world are equally deranged, irrationally seeking death, and
underneath lurks the intimation of nonbeing.
The anecdote of Kevin’s dead cat is a humorous and moving illustration
of death’s inevitability and futility, both as a general force and as an

unresolved problem within the narrative. Kevin, the skeptical member of
the group whose “cynical ranting” come from his “zeal to defame God”
(29), casts doubt on Fat’s 2–3-74 religious epiphany with a simple question:
“What about my dead cat?” (26). Fat’s inability to answer Kevin’s “real
question” reflects his inability to answer a larger theological problem: why
do human beings have to die? “Kevin liked to say: ‘On judgment day when
I’m brought up before the great judge I’m going to say, ‘Hold on a second,’
and then I’m going to whip out my dead cat from inside my coat. ‘How
do you explain this?’ I’m going to ask” (26). Although Phil Dick retorts
that Kevin could have kept the cat on the leash, thereby preserving its life,
Fat himself faces the question: “He has a point. It’s been bothering me.
For him the cat is a symbol of everything about the universe he doesn’t
understand” (26). Fat’s and Kevin’s terminally ill friend Sherri points out
that, although Kevin has “the corpse . . . to refute the goodness of God”
there is “purpose” behind the death and thus the universe in general, an
answer which prompts Kevin to swear at her (36–7).
The problem of the dead cat becomes a major source of tension and
comedic relief toward the end of the novel when the Rhipidon Society—
Kevin, Phil/Fat, and David—visit the little girl Sophia, whom the group
and her parents believe is a new Savior. During a visit to Sophia, living on a
farm with her rock-star parents, the girl amazes the group with her behav-
ior and answers, but the parents Eric and Linda Lampton appear unstable
religious fanatics. Despite Sophia’s warning to the group to leave the farm
as soon as possible, Kevin makes a point to inquire about his dead cat and
receives an answer that mocks the group’s cosmic concerns. After the audi-
ence with Sophia, Kevin is forced to report to the group: “She said that MY
DEAD CAT . . . ’ He paused, raising his voice. “MY DEAD CAT WAS
STUPID’”(211). The answer provides some laughter for the tired group,
but Kevin’s insistence that “it was God’s fault” for making the cat stupid
enough to run under the car fi nally angers Phil: “You cynical asshole—you
meet the Savior and all you can do is rant about your goddam cat. I’m
glad your cat’s dead; everybody is glad your cat’s dead” (211–12). Unper-
turbed, Kevin concludes that Sophia cannot be the Savior, because his, and
the group’s, fundamental questions still remain unanswered. Kevin also
reinforces a major theme in the novel, that of Horselover/Phil’s madness
and what the author perceives as the insanity of the age and place, namely
California in the late 1960s: “She’s not the Savior. We’re all as nuts as you,
Phil. They are nuts up there; we’re nuts down here” (212).
The group’s visit to the farm, however, brings about a graver conclusion.
Soon after their departure, Sophia dies in a supposed accident, causing
a temporarily healed Phil to split again into the Horselover/Phil persona,
and the entire group to grieve. The death, as earlier in Gloria’s case, is
described as both a personal experience of loss and disorientation and
as a cosmic and historic tragedy. Moved by his experience—”And now
there’s another dead girl in another box in the ground—that makes three in

138 Philip K. Dick
all,”—Fat concludes that “the true name for religion is death” (219). Fat’s
alter-ego Phil must agree with the dismal conclusion; he refers to the killing
of Catharists, the deaths in the Thirty Years War, and the deaths of Jesus
and Asklepios as examples of the connection between death and religion:
“death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love—death”
(219). The conclusion of this Fat-Phil dialogue underscores the death theme.
“Sometimes I dream—,” attempts Fat, only to be brusquely interrupted by
Phil: “I’ll put that on your gravestone” (220).
Despite his pessimism, Fat’s realization that “death hides within every
religion,” prompts him to re-imagine history, the self, and fi nally God in
order to stay afloat in a seemingly irrational world. The novel suggests
three solutions: the intellectual concept of immortality, the absurdity of
conventional time, and narrative creation or textuality. The three notions
emerge from the complexity of details and references in the novel, asking,
as the author expressed in his letters, the complicity of the reader in order
to fi nalize the narrative.
“ONE IMMORTAL HUMAN BEING”
In Valis, there is a constant insistence on transformation of identities:

the narrator believes he is an early Christian, the Buddha, and “a per-
son with different memories, customs, tastes and habits” (Valis 122; 104).
Horselover Fat further identifies with many similar-minded thinkers, phi-
losophers, artists, and scientists, but also with his other selves—imagined,
past, and potential ones. The fluidity of personal identity illustrates the elu-
sive nature of the “self,” but also suggests Horselover/Phil’s desire to exist
outside the bonds of time and to transcend the identity he believes may be
imposed upon him.10
In Valis, Dick imagines personal identity as a composite and transcen-
dental, metahistorical phenomenon. Although Dick was interested in
reincarnation, he did not want to develop the concept in Valis. Instead he
resorted to alternative representations of immortality from “the new idea
of genetic (DNA) coded memories” (SL 5, p. 20), through Jungian con-
cepts of synchronicity and collective consciousness (Valis 225), to Platonic
anamnesis (or recollection of secret or forgotten identity; Valis 97) and,
often, through dreams of immortality.11
Early in the novel, for example, Fat paraphrases Yeats’ line from “Sailing
to Byzantium” (1927) as he attempts to persuade the “psych tech” crew in an
Orange County hospital that “I really have learned my lesson,” and deserves
a release after a suicide attempt. “I realize now that Yeats’s statement, ‘I am
an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal’ is diametrically oppo-
site to the actual state of affairs vis-à-vis the human condition” (45).12
This scene, like so many others, has several layers of meaning. The most
obvious one is humor and self-deprecation as Fat futilely attempts to pose

as healthy: “as he spoke he realized that nobody believed him. He could
have delivered his monolog in Swahili with equal effect” (44). More impor-
tant is the subtext of immortality. Fat renounces his and Yeats’ dream of
immortality in an apparent flash of “sanity,” but his use of the line of poetry
establishes a connection to Yeats, among many other connections, and the
journey described in “Sailing to Byzantium.”
Horselover/Phil denounces immortality in front of the ward staff, but
continues to seek it through Christian religion. Wandering the hallways of
the Orange County psychiatric ward, Fat inscribes a Latin phrase on the
wall, which, in translation, reads: “From God we are born, in Jesus, we die,
by the Holy Spirit we live again” (56). Although Fat’s fellow hall-walker
tells him that he is going “to be here ninety days,” the longest duration of
stay in the ward (57), Fat’s utterance shows his faith and the influence of
his encounter with God:
During his religious experience in March of 1974, Fat had seen an aug-
mentation of space: yards and yards of space, extending all the way to
the stars; space opened up around him as if a confi ning box had been
removed. He had felt like a tomcat which had been carried inside a box
on a car drive, and then they’d reached their destination and he had
been let out of the box, let free (49).
The experience gives him an ingrained sense of the transcendental, the

immortal realm of existence, despite tremendous personal suffering—his
loneliness and suicide attempt, his forced stay in a psychiatric ward—and
despite the appearance of decay in the world. Philip K. Dick and Fat do
not see such revelatory moments as a rupture, a break into an otherwise
ordered or insignificant experience, rather, they both insist on weaving and
reconciling the two disparate ways of being—the ‘truthful’ one disclosed in
an insightful vision, and the ‘fake,’ everyday, lived one.
Valis presents the idea of the ‘divine human’ not only in reference to the
Nag Hammadi codices and their teaching that human beings are divine,
but also in relationship to the Bible, 1 John 3:1–2, explaining that “man is
isomorphic with God” (68).13 That immortal man, as it will become clear
in the course of the narrative, is not apart from humans, but one with us,
through the divinity of human beings: Fat believes that several characters
in the novel—Dr. Stone, Fat’s friend Stephanie, the North Ward patient
Debbie—are “a micro-form of God” (Valis 52; 66). Sophia confi rms to the
Rhipidon Society that: “Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is
man himself” (198). The development of the notion that a human is a divine
being is a good example of Dick’s method in Valis: the apparently varied
and interchangeable sources—Nag Hammadi, Bible, Fat’s Exegesis, the
plot itself—all represent the same idea at different points in the narrative.
Together with interrelated sources, Dick creates interrelated personali-
ties, meta-characters who span both historical time and different texts,

140 Philip K. Dick
including Dick’s novels.14 Thus, Sophia appears as a ‘character’ in the Nag
Hammadi codices and in Valis, as does the character Thomas, who also
spans both texts.15 In subsequent chapters, both the narrator and Horsel-
over Fat further connect themselves with those who understood and tried
to describe time as a non-existent, deceptive phenomenon.
By representing Sophia, Elijah, and Horselover/Phil as meta-characters,
Dick suggests a way for a human being to become immortal, and divine.
Thus, Horselover/Phil identifies himself with a series of thinkers men-
tioned in the novel; the Fat-Thomas-Jesus chain including also “Apollonius
of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno”
(59); also, Buddha, Dionysus, Asklepios, Elijah, Dante, Hermetic alche-
mists, Pascal, Wagner, and others. The connection between these meta-
characters in Valis is ideological and biographical: many of the personages
mentioned have had a sudden religious or conversion experience, and held
beliefs in immortality and transcendence of self similar to Fat’s. Because
they are mentioned in relation to one another’s ideas about alternative time
dimension(s)—Wagner, Yeats, Minkowski, Eliade, and those mentioned
above—validate with their philosophies, and at times their destinies, the
notion of the immortal man and of “broken time.”
SEEING TIME AS SPACE
The identification with the ancient personality Thomas, inspired by Fat’s

vision, helps the author reinforce the central theme in the novel—the deceit-
ful nature of time and space: “space and time were revealed to Fat—and to
Thomas!—as mere mechanisms of separation” (110). The revelation, how-
ever, is established in Valis through the scientific idea of what Dick calls
“orthogonal time,” a fourth-dimensional concept of “time-space” based
on the ideas of physicist Hermann Minkowski and Dick’s source, Nikolai
Kozyrev, a Russian astrophysicist. In order to describe a radical, experi-
entially incredible movement from the individual “self” into the immortal
“other” at the center of Valis, Dick relied on Minkowski’s and his pupil
Albert Einstein’s radical conception of the universe. Conceiving of time
and space as interdependent, rather than separate dimensions, Minkowski
pronounced in 1908 that “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed
to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality” (qtd. in Barbour, 138).
Dick was drawn to a concept of time that advocated reaching into “inde-
pendent reality.” The release from the Black Iron Prison described in Valis
may be a metaphor for Minkowski’s “spacetime,” a four-dimensional space
where time and space do not exist as independent entities, so that a concep-
tual breakthrough in experimental physics parallels the individual libera-
tion from the Black Iron Prison. Minkowski’s view of time, distinct from
Newton’s uni-directional concept, that “the resulting space-time structure

. . . has no special ‘lamination’. It is more like a loaf of bread, through
which you can slice in any way” (Barbour 141), allowed Dick to speculate
on the possibility of being “in two places [at] two times” (205) or of the
divine-like “Zebra” as “the laminated totality of all my selves along the
linear time axis” (213).16
The concept of “orthogonal time” fascinated Dick (SL 4: 134–5; SL 5:
21). Although he refers to mathematician Herman Minkowski in his let-
ters, Dick also emphasized Nikolai Kozyrev’s concepts, presented in the
Soviet astrophysicist’s 1967 paper “Possibility of Experimental Study of
Properties of Time”.17 A letter from January 29, 1975 contains Dick’s pre-
paid request for a copy of “Possibility of Experimental Study . . . ” (SL 4:
39) and another, with the same date, describes Dick’s understanding of
Kozyrev’s theories, addressed to the critic Malcolm Edwards (SL 4: 45).
In his article, Kozyrev examines the notion of time as a physical quality,
closely connected to space (the cause and effect relationship between the
two being always separated by a minimal distance) and with its own den-
sity and substance: “it is possible that our psychological sensation of empty
or substantive time has not only a subjective nature but also, similarly to
the sensation of the flow of time, an objective physical basis” (Kozyrev
13). Making experiments and observations both in theoretical and statisti-
cal mechanics, Kozyrev concludes that “the causal-resultant phenomena
occurred not only in time but also with the aid of time” (Kozyrev 13).
Like Dick, Kozyrev moves between several physical systems (individual,
cosmic, atomic time), without confi ning his observations to a single system.
One of Kozyrev’s main assertions throughout the article reflects the nar-
rative approach in Valis: “time does not propagate but appears simultane-
ously in any material system . . . Time accomplishes a relationship between
all phenomena of nature and participates actively in them” (Kozyrev, 16).
Kozyrev’s postulates must have encouraged Dick’s decision to describe
his own, and his character’s revelatory experiences as a “dysfunction of
time,” manifest through a superimposition of second century Roman and
twentieth century Californian landscapes. In an early 1975 letter to his
friend, and eventual literary executor, Paul Williams, Dick discusses “a sci-
entific theory about [his] theological experiences” in which “time is viewed
as a field (as one Soviet astro-physicist does)” (SL 4: 31). In a 1977 letter
to his editor Hurst, Dick explains the immortal/collective identity as the
function of time: “[Horselover/Phil] didn’t once live in ancient Rome . . .
it is more of a transfer of identity along the fourth orthogonal axis that is
involved, not ‘memory of a past life’” (SL 5: 21).
The idea that “time has been overcome” becomes a spiritual and politi-
cal mantra in Valis. Fat claims that “we are back almost two thousand
years; we are not in Santa Ana, California USA, but in Jerusalem, about 35
C.E. What I had seen in March 1974 . . . consisted of an actual witnessing
of what is normally seen by the inner eyes of faith only” (209). While Dick
relied on fundamental scientific concepts of space-time in Valis, he also

142 Philip K. Dick
presented altered time as an emotional and mystical experience available to
human beings through sources alongside the science. Along with the novel’s
richly imaginative plotting, Dick develops the notion of eternity through
the multiplicity of philosophies and teachings, referring to texts as diverse
as Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Wagner’s Parsifal and Mircea
Eliade’s “Time Can Be Overcome.”
A philosophical description of space-time, for example, is formulated in the
exposition of Fat’s journal entry. The “Exegesis” excerpt describes the world as
a grid consisting of Form I and II of Parmenides: the lower realm is “mechani-
cal, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence,” and
the upper realm is “sentient and volitional” (47). God’s intervention, according
to Fat, may be our “extrication” from one realm into another (46–7).18
The narrator Phil Dick, usually taking a cynical attitude toward Fat’s
theories that he can transcend time, experiences a dream himself, in which
he is another person, happier, richer, and with a beautiful wife, a dream
which is “more real” than his waking life (Valis 113–117). After his admis-
sion about dreaming of a better life, he looks despondently around his
apartment in Orange County and is “struck dumb by the synthetic nature
of my life” (114). He looks at the objects in the room and perceives them as
artificial and unreal: “stereo (that’s synthetic); television set (that’s certainly
synthetic); books, a second-hand experience” (114). Real life is hardly bear-
able compared to the dream.
As the narrator wonders about “Fat’s” encounter with God and the pos-
sibility of existing in multiple worlds, it becomes clear that the (lack of) sub-
stance in everyday life compels Fat/Phil toward other dimensions. “I turn on
the TV,” the narrator continues, “morons and simps appear on the screen,
drool like pinheads and waterheads; zitfaced kids scream in ecstatic approval
of total banality; I turn the TV set off” (115). Instead of Hegel’s glorious
Absolute Spirit, culture here is perpetuated through mass media. Instead of
inner examination, there is entertainment, forming another layer of obscu-
rity, entrapping and enclosing people in the Black Iron Prison—Dick’s short-
hand for the space-time trap that affects our ability to see the truth.
Although the rich chain of historical persons who have transcended
time is broken by the figure of Christ—“He lived a long time ago but he is
still alive,” writes Fat, and by the plight of “the early, furtive Christians”
who fought against the “Black Iron Prison”—our ability to break through
deception and occlusion from the truth is only attainable through intel-
lectual effort. Because the real state of the world is hidden from us, man
“did not fall because of a moral error,” reads Fat’s Exegesis entry 29. “We
fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as
real. Therefore we are morally innocent” (Valis 97).
The generally impenetrable illusion of space and time, according to Horsel-
over Fat, leads to our imprisonment; on the other side is the chaos of human
ideas and history. Humans are enclosed within a structure where “[the deity]
causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed” (41).

One’s ability to see through the deception of the material world will lead one
to recognize that time does not exist. The solution is “the loss of amnesia”
in which “true memory spreads out backward and forward, into the past
and into the future, and also, oddly, into alternate universes,” permitting
the mind to overcome linear time and overthrow its illusion (121). Transcen-
dence seems to be achieved by combining the phylogenic memory of the spe-
cies with the ontogenic memory of an individual.
THE NARRATIVE ACT
The reader of Valis can fi nally either join the narrator Phil Dick, who
mocks Horselover Fat’s claims as the ravings of a lunatic, or move beyond
the outward irreverence of the novel. In the latter instance, the author’s and
the protagonist’s engagement with a multitude of theories and experiences
(supernatural, threshold, dream states) are understood not as a frivolous or
Don Quixotic search for truth, but as a self-determined, textual and intel-
lectual act. The ever changing identity of VALIS, the mysterious nature
of the longed-for Savior, the narrator’s split self, the shifting meaning of
events, and the overt inclusion of allusions and references, all reflect the
author’s conscious decision to depict a metahistory in Valis through a non-
linear, constructed narrative.19 Out of the turmoil of Valis arises textuality,
and the narrative’s ability to express and articulate existential and onto-
logical inquiry in writing.20
Dick’s departure from linear and purely fictional narration into theo-
rizing and hyper-referentiality can be seen as postmodern in its attitude
and method, as critics have argued. Christopher Palmer, as mentioned ear-
lier, reads Valis as a “postmodern novel” that “practices a very strange
form of subversion” between text and social reality (224); he argues, at
the same time, that Valis, as a reaction to postmodern condition, “retreats
into textuality” (230), but also that it “denies textuality” (235). Dick, in
fact, describes the world in terms of language which is “experienced by us”
(Valis 23), and connects the concept of world-as-logos with the concept
of world-as-information. It is “Fat’s growing opinion [that] the universe
is information” (22). 21 Thus, language has substance, and the subject, for
Dick, can and does invest language with meaning; this is the one power
exercised by Horselover, Phil, the reader, and Philip K. Dick.
Like other important concepts in the novel, the creative power of lan-
guage impacts the characters on both personal and cosmic levels: language
becomes a code for life in general, a cosmic force. “All creation is language
and nothing but a language,” Fat states in his exegesis. Because “the link-
ing and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not
a language like ours,” the material world in its everyday form is seen as
an illusion, a representation of a code (23). For Fat and the author both,
language becomes a way of creating and decoding reality—the spoken, in

144 Philip K. Dick
Biblical terms, becomes the existing. The immortal, divine, and suffering
human being—according to Valis’ worldview—can create the story of the
world, although we sometimes do not understand the world’s language and
are sometimes annihilated by it.
The act of speaking for Gloria and Fat signifies the power to create
meaning out of events, to formulate and articulate an otherwise meaning-
less, disconnected, death-ridden reality. In the opening of the novel, how-
ever, the act of speaking and writing reflects the gradual weakening of both
characters: Fat/Phil reveals that the split in his character occurs so that he
can write “in third person to gain much needed objectivity” (11), while
Gloria “talk[s] herself out of existence word by word” (13) making lan-
guage a vehicle for destruction of the stable, sane self. The author’s sense
of the importance of words is directly linked to the power of creation and
the potency of the medium. “I’ve always told people,” the narrator states in
Valis, “that for each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which
has the power to destroy him” (67). The novel as a whole provides an
example of a narrative which has the power to assuage, if not save.
Valis’ narrative reiterates the belief that text can and must shape reality,
bringing one not closer to the truth, but to the truth itself. Dick’s view runs
contrary to the postmodern tenets that “everything is in freeplay” and that
“language inscribes itself,” disconnected, in some fundamental way, from
objective reality. To Derrida’s claim that “this field is in fact that of free-
play, that is to say, a field of infi nite substitutions in the closure of a fi nite
ensemble” (Derrida, 289), Dick responds with Heraclitus’ principle that it
is Time or God who is at play. 22
The concept that connects language and objective reality is logos. Philip
K. Dick draws on the polyvalence of the term’s meaning in order to represent
his worldview. In classical Greece, “logos” referred to “word, story, reck-
oning” and further to rational thought itself (Hussey, 40; Roochnik 12).
Stoics saw logos as the “source of all the rationality in the universe,” while
later Christian teaching equates logos with Jesus Christ in St. John’s Gospel
(Flew 215). Dick continues to equate logos with Jesus Christ, or at least with
his understanding of Jesus as a “homoplasmate”—a higher being capable
of bonding with human beings—and updates the notion by defining logos
as a “living information . . . replicating as information” (60). The narrator
refers to the Fourth Gospel and its description of logos: “kai theos en ho
logos’ which is to say ‘and the word was God’” (Valis 67). Fat believes that
his “seeing and hearing words, pictures, figures of people, printed pages” is
“God’s Message, or, as Fat liked to call it, the Logos” (24).
Philip K. Dick’s letters show that Valis was a sort of theological testament,
an attempt to identify true faith. In a letter to daughter Isa, dated April 9,
1978, he calls Valis “ a book about God [that] you can’t make up. The book
has to be true and it has to be perfect” (SL 5, 163). To his daughter Laura,
Dick wrote: “if I am lucky I will be able to redefine divinity in such a way that
we can find the path back to the source of our being. Most likely I will fail,

but just the effort is worthwhile, I think” (167). Writing thus becomes a deed,
an action consciously performed, and in itself an experiential reality.
A concrete example, employed in the novel, of the textual as the spiri-
tually real is the example of Nag Hammadi codices. The codices strongly
attracted Dick with their mystical and alternate views of Christianity, and
their significance as an ancient Christian-Gnostic text. 23 The Nag Hamma-
di’s phantasmagoric, somewhat disconnected mode of narration—a result
of the obscure Coptic dialect and the damaged and incomplete manuscript,
as well as a challenging subject matter—is stylistically echoed in Valis: the
novel’s interspersed fragments, the “exegesis” entries, and the sweeping,
apparently disorganized references to various deities and creation myths,
reflect the eclecticism, narrative and ideational, of the Nag Hammadi.
Valis’ narrator Phil Dick describes the Nag Hammadi both as an impor-
tant information source and as a mysterious artifact, an object that holds
the essence of Christ or the Savior, both through its teachings, and lit-
erally, as a “dormant seed form [of] living information in the codices at
Nag Hammadi” (69). Because the Nag Hammadi laid dormant for fi fteen
hundred years, having been hidden around the 4th century (Robinson, 15;
19–21) and re-discovered in 1945, it also confi rms Dick’s concept of alter-
nate space-time: time is abolished through the teachings of Nag Hammadi,
which itself has undergone a long dormancy. The text is both the record of
reality and the reality itself, for the time being.
Texts, for Dick, generate reality analogous to religious creativity. Valis has
been written with faith, however, the novel is above all a secular and intel-
lectual construct. The connections between the novel’s various personages
are mirrored in connections between philosophical and religious systems
thus, an encyclopedic epistemology is included into the novel’s creative sys-
tem. The narrative structure of Valis shows the importance of Horselover/
Phil’s intellectual investigation, the importance of the connections between
different ideas and thinkers over time, where the subject who generates the
connections is the one who gains agency. Death, as mentioned above, may
not be conquered in this process, but a unique worldview is formed, seeing
the world as a multi-referential and multi-dimensional realm.
ONWARD, AGAINST DEATH
The fi nal scene in the novel, little discussed by critics beyond Palmer’s
“what do I do next?” analysis, provides a strong argument for the impor-
tance of religious and intellectual inquiry in the novel’s cosmogony.24 We
fi nd our split narrator in a strange predicament: Horselover Fat flies to
Europe and beyond “by Icelandic Airlines to Luxembourg, which is the
cheapest way to go” (Valis 220), while Phil Dick or perhaps at this point in
the novel, the author, Philip K. Dick, does “fi ne” back in the United States,
his books selling well (Valis 221). During his visits Fat brings home various

146 Philip K. Dick
historical artifacts, such as an ancient Greek vase with the double-helix
sign on it (223), or sends news, as when he announces that the A.I. (artifi-
cial intelligence) voice informed him that the Savior might be in Micronesia
(227). Fat’s reports and Phil’s response to them—looking the information
up in his encyclopedia—indicate that the search may be intellectual and
not physical. Phil, in the meantime, is trying to glean signals and meaning
from the scattered incidents of popular culture—TV commercials, books,
radio—occluded again, or perhaps hopeful that he will fi nd meaning in his
otherwise disappointing social environment.
Thus, the truth in Valis is constructed from the wealth of shared cultural
knowledge and the self that restructures that (hi)story is immortal and sub-
stantial. The principle is expressed in the very last line of Valis, with the
author’s emphasis: “But underneath all the names there is only one Immor-
tal Man; and we are that man” (241). Valis is revealed as a puzzle, a net-
work of influences put together from rich cultural knowledge and aided by
foolishness, a puzzle that is not solved by labeling it postmodern. It is a nar-
rative that describes the world from several perspectives: deeply personal,
neurotic, religious, intellectually networked, and humanistic. The subject
of this narrative, Horselover Fat/Phil Dick, is both an integral participant
and a subversive agent of memory, collective consciousness, knowledge,
and yearning.
Valis is one of the most ambitious twentieth century novels: it is a philo-
sophical work that uses narrative reflection, recollection, and construction,
to render the elusive concept of freedom in the context of its setting. Out
of the shards of madness and political and spiritual instability the author
emerges as the narrating agent who suggests alternative forms of reality.
The setting—contemporary America—is a blank canvas upon which the
authorial self cannot only speculate on events, but also recall them.
Valis is an attempt to step outside the habitual boundaries of thought. By
bringing the rich materials and complex problems together in a narrative
form, Dick created a work that resonates with an existential tremor of the
world wrought by suffering and mystery. This world is further conceived,
through intellectual and spiritual will toward transcendence, as extra-tem-
poral or as spatial-temporal reality, existing, perhaps, beyond the realm of
constant change.
Valis urges critics to read it as a novel that makes or breaks the SF genre,
leading to notably different conclusions. Kim Stanley Robinson sees Valis
as an indication of science fiction’s rising influence on the writing of general
fiction, while Scott Durham describes the novel as a distinct sign of the
“destruction of the genre” (Durham, 184). Indeed, Valis deserves an excep-
tional position in the literary canon, whether science fiction or mainstream,
because it is a tellingly hybrid form of literature, spanning science fiction,
realism, and experimental writing. It is also a novel that contains many of
the sources and notions central to Dick’s entire opus: his earlier writing can
be read through Valis with a new understanding. Valis is important not

only because it provides a look back into various pasts, including Philip K.
Dick’s, but also because it announces our present, consisting of systems,
networks, and webs. Valis’ forged realities, for example, that exist along-
side other subjective and objective worlds correspond with the phenomenon
of virtual and networked reality, while VALIS, the intelligent entity cover-
ing the Earth, strikingly resembles the World Wide Web.
Although there is no final answer, because that is the nature of the world—
”There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through
it, because it is alive” (40)—there are visions and a frantic impulse to move
toward the truth, a will to intellectual and spiritual salvation that animates
Horselover Fat/Phil Dick. Valis is a book that records that impulse.

Notes
NOTES TO THE PREFACE
1. Another recent review of the construction and labeling of Philip K. Dick as

“an acid-crazed visionary” is Andrew Butler’s article, discussing the prob-
lems associated with such portraiture. Butler, Andrew “LSD, Lying Ink, and
Lies Inc.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol 32, July 2005: 265–280.
2. Although science fiction scholars, writers, and fans argue at times that sci-
ence fiction and fantasy belong to the same genre, in many cases the two can
be clearly distinguished. Several effective distinguishing descriptions exist.
Ursula LeGuin, for example, describes fantasy as a genre that “includes or
invokes the supernatural” and features magic as “causes and effects pre-
sented as inherently inexplicable in terms of natural law, not answerable to
scientific question, miraculous” (28). In “Introduction,” The Norton Book
of Science Fiction. New York. Norton, 1993.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1 Especially in the fi rst part of his career, Dick’s “popularity” and sales were
not equal to those of the best selling science fiction authors such as Robert
Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, but Dick did sell his fiction steadily and had his
stories included in various “Best of” and other science fiction anthologies.
In 1974, for example, a figure given to Dick by a Doubleday editor for the
sales of Flow My Tears The Policeman Said was 7,500 copies printed, 4, 747
copies sold (Dick’s March 5, 1974 letter to Lawrence Ashmead).
2. In 1955, an Ace paperback copy of Solar Lottery went for 50 cents, and 1956
Ace paperback of The World Jones Made cost 40 cents.
3. Dick’s fiction was adapted as follows: “We Can Remember It For You Whole-
sale,” as Total Recall (1990); Confessions of a Crap Artist as Confessions
d’un Barjo, (1992); “Second Variety” as Screamers (1995); “Impostor,”
“Minority Report,” “Paycheck,” and A Scanner Darkly as movies with the
same title (2002; 2002; 2003; 2006), and others. According to the author’s
official website, philipkdick.com, movie rights for four more novels have
been sold (Time Out of Joint (1959), Valis (1981), Radio Free Albemuth
(1981), and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), while a 1954 story
“The Golden Man” became the movie Next (2007). The latest discussion of
Dick’s fiction in the movies is Vest, Jason. Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick
at the Movies. Westport, Praeger: 2007.

150 Notes
4. There is no doubt that cyberpunk novels, by writers such as William Gib-
son, Pat Cadigan, and Bruce Sterling, focusing on data transfer and human
interface with the computer network information systems, gave crucial scien-
tific and imaginative impulses for the development of ideas and movies that
represent the material world as information, or as the illusion consisting of
binary code. However, earlier science fiction works, including Dick’s, have
described the world as comprised of information and have suggested exis-
tence of multiple alternative reality levels that human beings can navigate
and inhabit.
5. The two most recent articles based on issues from “Minority Report” are
Sorensen, R. “Future Law: Prepunishment and the Causal Theory of Ver-
dicts.” Nous. V. 40, No.1, March 2006: 166–183 and MacNeil William.
P. “Precrime Never Pays!:Law and Economics in Minority Report.” In Lex
Populi. Stanford UP, 2007.
6. Interestingly enough, the last Dick-inspired movie, Next (2007), only loosely
based on his story “The Golden Man” and heavily laden with special effects,
reflects Dick’s remarks about fi lm industry: “It takes megabucks to match
the imagination behind sci-fi fi lms, and that money exists because the profits
are there. Not for the story line of the fi lm; that isn’t what Hollywood goes
for, now that Hitchcock has left us. Why do you need a story line if your
special effects department can simulate anything?” (Shifting Realities 104).
7. In describing Dick’s inquiry into the problem of reality, it has become a com-
monplace to say that the answer to question, “what is reality?” was given by
the author himself as, “whatever does not go away”—as Dick indeed once
replied to a classroom of elementary schoolchildren (Shifting Realities 261).
This illustration, however, is an oversimplification. As Dick also points out,
“over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I
have investigated those two interrelated topics [what is reality? and, what is
human?] over and over again” (Shifting Realities 260). Consider that in Dick’s
comments and letters, the two formulaic questions appear only in the 1970s,
after commentators and scholars have articulated them as the two main tenets
of Dick’s writing and philosophy. That is, Dick’s earlier writings do not express
the problem in these explicit terms, even though he did consider the nature of
reality from his fi rst to his penultimate novel. Dick’s last, The Transmigration
of Timothy Archer (1981) is a mainstream novel that engages metaphysical
questions in conventional story-telling mode and subject matter.
8. His letters and essays show that Dick was familiar with most of these sources.
He studied Zoroastrianism and Nag Hammadi, Parmenides and Heraclitus,
Plato and Kantian categories of time/space perception, Schopenhauer and
the process philosophers, Crick and Watson and Norbert Wiener. See Dick’s
essay “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976) for more on these sources. He
also studied less orthodox works, such as Brad Steiger’s Revelation, the
Divine Fire , John Allegro’s The Cross and the Mushroom , and Rosicrucian
Unto Thee I Grant, to name a few (SL 3, 214; 226; 240).
9. Both The Cosmic Puppets (1957) and A Maze of Death (1970) use the meta-
phor of a maze as an evolving multi-level experience of reality (which we nav-
igate without a fi nal goal), and describe a brief entrance into a dimension of
experience where time and space do not conform to ordinarily perceived laws
of the physical world. These incidents illustrate the impossibility of grasping
the stable moment of reality, partly because stasis does not exist. Thus, Ted
Burton, the protagonist of Cosmic Puppets, attempts to scale a log barricade
on his way out of the beleaguered city, but fi nds himself trapped in a shifting
pile of timber and unable to fi nd the way out; he afterwards learns that he
was in the maze for seven hours (56).

Notes 151
10. It is interesting that Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly has been in part inspired
by a movie, Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), before being turned
into a movie itself. In Bergman’s movie, Karin, a young woman recently
released from the psychiatric ward, slowly looses grip on reality, experienc-
ing hallucinations and a visitation from God.
11. Dick will fictionalize the real event of going to see the movie with his friends
as an episode in Valis. Writer K. W. Jetter, who was in the group with Dick,
said that “we were all pretty impressed with The Man Who Fell to Earth”
noting that Dick knew “the person who did the still photographs used in the
movie” (Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter # 5, December 1984, p. 2). As
another example of the author’s preferences, Dick’s fi rst wife Kleo, reminisc-
ing about their frequent visits to the movie theatre, told Gregg Rickman that
Children of Paradise (1945) was Dick’s favorite (Rickman, 235).
12. Aside from the reasons specific to the novel’s themes, director Richard Lin-
klater’s decision to fi lm A Scanner Darkly fi rst and then faithfully outline
over all the surfaces in animation (a technique known as rotoscoping), seems
a particularly well-suited, given this second, prominent view of reality in
Dick’s works: as both possessed of the unchanging Platonic reality beneath
the quotidian one and of the veil of obscurity that falls over everything in our
everyday life, causing us to “see darkly.” For more on Linklater’s technique,
see LaFranco, Robert. “Trouble in Toontown.” Wired. 14.03, March 2006.
13. Dick’s third world of reality is also in part indebted to Plato, who in Timaeus
describes the experiential world as “necessarily a likeness of something.”
In Timeaus the universe consists of two parts, one, the unchanging model
world of ideas that is “always real and has no becoming” and the world of
human beings, the experiential world that is “always becoming and never
real” (27d-28a, Cornford, p. 22). In 1974, Dick concluded: “we are in some
kind of pseudo-reality; Plato was right” (SL 3 248).
14. First Street company thus offers “Perfect Petzzz,” battery operated, synthetic
fur, “lifelike puppies and kittens that actually breathe.” These sleeping fake ani-
mals are offered for purchase on websites in both United States and Europe.
15. Some examples of institutional reality control include the police force and
government surveillance in A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the con-
trol over communications and virtual reality technology in A Maze of Death,
and the constant propaganda, broadcasted on Buster Friendly’s endless show,
to emigrate and own an android in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
16. For a discussion of intersection between animate and inanimate forms of
life relevant to Dick, especially Ubik, see Senior, Adele. “Towards a (Semi-
)Discourse of the Semi-Living; The Undecidability of a Life Exposed to
Death.” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research. Vol. 5:2,,
April 2007: 97–112.
17. Dick’s letters show familiarity with many works in the field of psychology,
including the works of cognitive scientist Robert Ornstein and neuropsy-
chologist Alexander Luria, as well as theories of Jung and Freud. For refer-
ences to Ornstein see SL 5 55–59 which include Dick’s letter to Julian Jaynes
regarding his book The Origin of Consciousness; letter to Ornstein himself
in in SL 4 127; the Voight Kampf test used in Do Androids is invented by
“Lurie Kampff” a probable reference to Luria (Do Androids 38).
18. A growing number of works deals with the array of changes and phenomena
of the digital age. In my own teaching on “Digital Culture”, I use an anthol-
ogy of primary materials, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality,
edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Being Digital by Nicholas Negro-
ponte, and The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, by
Norbert Wiener, supplemented by articles such as Susan Douglas’ “The Turn

152 Notes
Within: The Irony of Technology in A Globalized World” and “Does Hal
Cry Digital Tears? Emotion and Computers” by Rosalind Picard, that cover
some of the main features and developments of the digital age.
19. Claude Shannon’s Information Theory (1948) played a particularly impor-
tant role in this important paradigm shift from the analog to digital trans-
mission of data and the consequent development of telecommunications and
digital products such as CD ROMs or digital cameras as well as tremendous
developments in computing science and computer systems.
20. It is important to note that all the major elements of the digital age, from
computing machines to the Internet have decades of history before their
appearances in the public in their fi nal form. I refer to the latter moments
when I mention the decades and years of development. For more on net-
works, see Albert Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked: How Everything Is Connected
to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday
Life, a good general audience introduction to the science of networks.
21. Critics like Mark Roche have recognized the importance of technological
change for literature and literary criticism in the 21st century. Roche notes that
“the morality of literature and literary criticism” is closely connected to the
morality of technology (Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century p. 4).
22. Dick had had a famous quarrel over Ellison’s comments in his anthology
Dangerous Visions (1967) about Dick’s drug use. Dick described their jos-
tling at the conference in Metz, France, concluding: “But I love that little
bastard” (Shifting Realities 87). Although he pointed out a disagreement
between Heinlein’s and his “political ideologies,” Dick recounted in detail
Heinlein’s psychological and fi nancial support with a deep gratitude (Shift-
ing Realities 88). In his share of misunderstandings and disagreements
with other science fi ction writers, perhaps the most unfortunate was Dick’s
accusation that Stanislaw Lem tried to obstruct his royalties after publica-
tion of Ubik in Poland. Lem’s statement, explaining the details of this situ-
ation, is published in the third volume of The Selected Letters of Philip K.
Dick: 1974. Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1991. See also Sutin, The Divine
Invasion, p. 200.
23. Commenting on Dick’s work, Jonathan Lethem wrote that Dick was “that
species of great writer, the uneven-prose species: Dickens, Dreiser, and High-
smith are others” (Disappointment, 78). There is no doubt that some of
Dick’s writing is stylistically inferior. However, in his successful novels, the
cases of “bad writing” are limited.
24. For a detailed list of worldwide surveillance systems, including the United
States, see http://www.nsawatch.org/networks.html a part of the American
Civil Liberties Union website.
25. His 1973 “Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick” lists Schiller, Heine,
Goethe, Junger, and Brecht as works that he “greatly loves” (Shifting Reali-
ties 23). References to the above authors also appear in numerous letters, for
example SL 1, 64; 203–204; 207.
26. Another interesting source to text idea was the mimicry work that Dick used
to defi ne his shifting world intelligence VALIS.
27. In “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
(1978), Dick imagines the “horror the Disneyland officials would feel” upon
discovering that he replaced all the fake birds with real ones. “What if the
entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a
moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would
have to close down” (Shifting Realities 264). For the essay by the curator,
Mary Kay Lombino, see Unnaturally. New York: Independent Curators
International, 2003.

Notes 153
28. Examples abound of many other artists that found inspiration in the concepts
articulated in Dick’s works. At MOMA San Francisco exhibition No Ghost
Just a Shell (2003), in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (2002) (Even Electric
Sheep Can Dream), an animated character, Anlee, reads the entire text of
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Philip, published in a limited edition
of 100 copies in 2007, is an international, collaborative, Dick-inspired sci-
ence fiction work by an eight-member group of art critics, curators, graphic
designers, and artists. More information on the latter can be found at the
Project Arts Center Dublin’s website archives.
29. “Isa Dick : ‘Mon père, ce visionnaire’” Le Figaro. October 22, 2007. I am
grateful to Gerald Cloud for translating this article from the French.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. In “Not Quite Coming to Terms,” a review of Patricia Warrick’s book Mind

in Motion, Gary Wolfe remarks, “Dick’s passion and paranoia haunt the
book” (234). Carl Freedman, in “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science
Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” reveals Dick as a paranoid writer, whose literary
paranoia is the most appropriate answer to living in capitalist society. See
Umland and SFS vol. 15, 1988, also Neil Easterbrook “Dianoia/Paranoia.
. . . ” in Umland.
2. See: Fondaneche, “Dick, The Libertarian Prophet” in Science Fiction Stud-
ies vol. 15, 1988; Roger Bozzetto “Dick in France: A Love Story” Science
Fiction Studies vol. 15, for Dick’s outstanding reputation in France. Charles
Platt’s portrait in Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at
Work shows Dick as a mystic.
3. The list of reviewers who were quick to label Dick without substantial evi-
dence or illustration is long. John Michell’s review of Emanuel Carrere’s
biography of Dick is typical of the superficial “analysis” of the author and his
readers, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. See: Spectator, “The
Creative Use of Paranoia” (August 20, 2005): 43(2). Sensationalistic writ-
ing is well exemplified in Jeet Heer’s “Marxist Literary Critics Are Follow-
ing Me” Linguafranca, May/June 2001: (27–31.) Finally, Gregg Rickman’s
extended suggestion in his biography To the High Castle that Dick was an
abused child is a controversial, inconclusive claim. See chapters “The Wound
That Will Not Heal”(40–49) and “Tomb World” (49–63).
4. Suggested in Tim Powers’ “Foreword” to What If Our World Is Their
Heaven? Lee Gwen and Doris Elaine Sauter, eds. Woodstock: The Overlook
P, 2000: p. 3–6.
5. “Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating within the Later P. K. Dick” Extrapo-
lation, Winter 2002, 43:4, p. 368–397.
6. Butler’s article addresses the construction of Philip K. Dick as “an acid-
crazed visionary” and discusses problems associated with this portrait; see
especially p. 266–7, Butler, Andrew “LSD, Lying Ink, and Lies Inc.” Science
Fiction Studies, Vol 32, July 2005: 265–280.
7. Archived in Pollak Library, California State University, Fullerton, University
Archives and Special Collections, Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Collection
(hereafter: Fullerton Archive), Box 23E, “Miscellaneous MSS.” Gregg Rick-
man identifies Aunt Flo’s as Florita Cook (To the High Castle, 149).
8. See Ch. 15 “The Young Author’s Club” in Gregg Rickman’s To the High
Castle for discussion of the connections between Dick’s earliest writings and
his later work.

154 Notes
9. Dick started a relationship with Anne Rubenstein in 1958, but they were
married in 1959, separated in 1964, and divorced in 1965. His relationship
with Nancy Hackett ended in 1970, while divorce was fi nalized in 1972.
The relationship with Tessa Busby started in 1972; they married in 1973,
separated in 1976, and divorce was fi nal in 1977. Information was extracted
from Lawrence Sutin’s The Divine Invasion.
10. Both biographers refer to Paul Williams’ interview of Dick in Only Appar-
ently Real, New York: Arbor House, 1986, in which the writer describes
UC Berkeley classes as dissatisfactory and useless, driving him away in com-
pound with the ROTC troubles. To Williams, Dick explains that “dropping
out” allowed him both an access to the wider, non-academic world and to a
writing career (53; 55).
11. Although several tributary articles and collections of fiction were devoted
to Boucher, it is only Jeffrey Marks’ 2008 “biobibliography” of Boucher,
Anthony Boucher, that recounts Boucher’s life and accomplishments in a
longer, book form.
12. Records from the Mercury Press Collection in Syracuse University Special Col-
lections contain correspondence between editors of The Magazine of Science
Fiction and Fantasy and the writers who submitted to them, including Dick.
13. Mercury Press Collection, Box 18, Folder: May 1952; the letter is dated May
12, 1952, with two cards attached, showing that a copy was sent to Dick and
his grateful answer back to the editors.
14. Marks writes: “[Boucher’s wife] Phyllis remembers giving a multitude of par-
ties in the early days of the [Fantasy and Science Fiction] magazine, while
being worried that the electricity might be turned off at the same time” (25).
For Boucher’s fi nancial and health situation, see Marks, p. 26.
15. The storefront of the Lucky Dog Pet Store was photographed and noted both
by the Philip K. Dick Society’s Newsletter and by the authors of The Gospel
According to Philip K. Dick documentary. See: PKDS Newsletter No. 4, p. 9;
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (2000), Mark Steensland, director
and Andy Massagli, co-producer.
16. Unpublished letter in Fullerton Archive, dated “January 3, 1960 something,”
(probably 1964).
17. Dick will articulate the importance of another influential editor for his work
by giving him a slightly super -human quality. Upon meeting Donald Woll-
heim: “Gee, I thought you’d be seven feet tall” (Sutin 89). Wollheim bought
and edited a number of Dick’s novels for Ace, a major science fiction, paper-
back publisher.
18. Lawrence Sutin noted that Dick was not particularly nice to Anne either. In
the same year, he suddenly told her: “I had a perfectly good wife I traded in
for you.” He also felt he mistreated Kleo. In Exegesis, he wrote: “I am pun-
ished for the way I treated Kleo” (Sutin 102).
19. In 1964, Dick attended the 1964 Worldcon, also held in Oakland. Phil met
Ace editor Terry Carr and his wife Carol at his and Grania’s “convention
eve party” (Sutin 139). Dick Ellington, one of the Worldcon’s attendees,
describes the speculative nature of Dick’s conversations, his possession of
various drugs, and his normalcy (Sutin 140).
20. Dick’s letters claim that Nancy also had used drugs and had had a psychotic
break earlier in the year. Sutin writes that she “experimented (as did most
students in the sixties) with marijuana and other drugs” a couple of years
before meeting Dick (146).
21. The entire 1965–1972 period is notorious for Dick’s refusal to be outside and
engage with the ‘real life’ activities. In 1970, his brother in law and room-

Notes 155
mate Mike Hackett “handled errands,” while the other roommate described
him as fearful: “He was living in that one world—that house” (Sutin 169).
22. Dick’s responses to fanzine editors and sf critics show that the speech was
well noted and printed in several places; “The Android and the Human”
encapsulates Dick’s central ideas at the time as well as his private situation of
living surrounded by young outcasts.
23. Critics and friends both defended and challenged Dick’s visionary 2–3-74
experiences and his incessant writing about them, but the long term effects
of drug abuse were never explicitly offered as an important element in Dick’s
reactions. Given the fact that he used speed for over a decade, the changes to
his nervous system could have been semi-permanent. The “Research Report”
of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), cites the following long
term effects for metamphetamine (or speed): addiction psychosis, paranoia,
hallucinations, mood disturbances (especially confusion and violent behav-
ior), repetitive motor activity, stroke, and weight loss. All these symptoms,
except for the weight loss, Dick suffered, fi nally dying from a stroke. While I
have tried to point out that Dick’s unique view of life had to do as much with
his creativity and erudition as with the drug use, the incidents of his violence
over Tessa and the series of visual hallucinations in 1974 and 1975 lead me
to believe that his body needed some time to recover from the drug use and
stabilize his behavior and writing, the improvement of which became evident
in the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s. For more information on short and long
term effects of drug use see: www.nida.nih.gov/ResearchReports.
24. In the September 1, 1973 letter to Bruce Gillespie, his Australian critic and
friend, Dick calls the current American government “criminal” and com-
pares it to Nazi Germany, bemoaning the mistreatment of the U.S. citizens
at the hands of such government. Dick’s two novels are a powerful if cautious
testament against the political climate in the 1970s.
25. Dick’s December 1978 letter to Scott Meredith comments on Galen’s con-
tribution to the completion of Valis (SL 5, 194). A letter written in October
1979 to friend Sheri Rush, after Dick met with Galen, however, describes
him as someone interested solely in profits. According to Dick, Galen met
Dick’s confessions regarding his “religious mystical experience” with a cold
stare and silence. Dick concluded, “he didn’t think I was nuts, just unprofit-
able” (SL 5, 253).
26. Numerous letters detail Dick’s enthusiastic responses to authors of articles
about him, including SL 5 215; 219; 220; 225–6; 237; 239. The excerpts
from the 1980 Exegesis writing show Dick’s musings on the relationship
between his fiction and reality (see, for example, pp. 343–345 in The Shift-
ing Realities of Philip K. Dick and especially p. 166; and pp. 198–202 in In
Pursuit of Valis, the latter pages written in 1981).
27. Ubik is Dick’s 1969 novel and the name of the mysterious savior substance
featured in it.
28. The collection of essays Retrofitting Blade Runner : Issues in Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
deals with all aspects of the movie, from the evolution of the screenplay to
the genre analysis.
29. Uwe Anton, editor of Welcome To Reality: The Nightmares of Philip K.
Dick, discusses the possibility of Dick’s “half-life” in his Introduction. Wel-
come To Reality features short stories written by friends and admirers, most
of them well-known science fiction writers, that either feature Dick as a char-
acter or emulate his style, consequently, several stories deal with the “life in
death” idea. The collection is a warmhearted homage to Dick.

156 Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Comprehensive general-audience studies of Mars such as Mark Washburn’s

Mars At Last!, Oliver Morton’s Mapping Mars, and Robert Markley’s Dying
Planet all establish a connection between scientific exploration of the planet
and fictions about Mars. On the influence of Lowell’s ideas, Oliver Mor-
ton comments: “scarce water was the basis of everything from the despotic
power of the Water Worker’s Local, Fourth Planet Branch in Philip K. Dick’s
Martian Time Slip to the religion at the heart of Robert Heinlein’s hugely
successful Stranger in a Strange Land” (156).
2. In “Water, Entropy and the Million-Year Dream: Philip K. Dick’s Martian
Time Slip,” Andrew Butler uses the characters’ actions toward the water
shortage situation—the offerings and withdrawals of water—to illustrate his
point that the battle enacted in Martian Time Slip is a moral one.
3. Patricia Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg suggest that Herb Hollis, Dick’s
boss from the Art Music store in Berkeley is the real life model for Jack
Bohlen: “Service men keep things running in Dick’s fiction. As with many of
his characters, Dick draws on real life persons in creating the men who can
fi x anything” (Introduction, Robots, Androids and Mechanical Oddities:
The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.Southern Illinois UP, 1986. To Gregg
Rickman, Dick said: “I’ve always had a great regard for men who worked
with their hands. I guess it’s an element in me where I loathe snobbery, I
loathe elitism, and I loathe intellectuals who feel they’re superior because
they’re highly educated.” Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words. Long Beach:
Fragments West/Valentine Press, 1984.
4. Another capitalist, although represented as a relatively benign character, is
Jack’s father and real-estate speculator Leo Bohlen. In Bohlen’s steel smile,
flashed at Jack together with the suggestion of “buying in” (126) and his
capitalistic undertaking on Mars is contained another glimpse of the cosmic
anti-god Palmer Eldritch that Dick will describe a few years later in his novel
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). (In Three Stigmata, Eldritch is
the “Antagonist” from Dick’s private visions of absolute evil, a businessman
figure that manages to infi ltrate everyone’s objective reality.) When Mr. Yee,
Jack Bohlen’s boss, sells his contract to Arnie Kott without Bohlen’s input, we
are not much surprised. “It was hard working for Mr.Yee,” Bohlen informs
us, describing Mr. Yee as looking and acting “like something put together to
calculate” (8–9). It is perhaps no coincidence that the steel smile of Palmer
Eldtrich briefly flashes in the reference to Mr. Yee, too, who arranges to
“emigrate from Earth exactly as he would have gone about visiting a dentist
for a set of stainless steel dentures” (9). Between Mr. Yee and Arnie Kott,
people like Bohlen, Otto Zitte, another repairman, or Doreen Anderson,
Kott’s mistress, are treated and traded as private property.
5. Bohlen and his wife Silvia resemble Dick and his third wife Anne, while Leo
Bohlen, Jack’s father in the novel, is probably based on Anne Dick’s father. I
rely on Anne Dick’s memoir, Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928–1982, for the
descriptions of her family.
6. When Anne Esterhazy, whose child is also in a Special Camp like Manfred,
informs Norbert Steiner of the plan to close the Camp and “put the children
to sleep,” the resolution is made by “six members of the In-planet Health and
Welfare Committee,” a UN agency (41).
7. Wired journalist Richard Morgan, reporting in December 2007 on the
recently intensified squabbles between five bordering nations over the Ant-
arctic territories, describes these behaviors not only as typical for humans
accessing the virgin land, but also as a precedent to our behavior in “lunar

Notes 157
landgrabs” and in reaching further planets. The article, backed by the Inter-
national Law experts interviewed, suggests that a set of laws and agreements
is necessary to avoid serious future confl icts and neo-colonial practices.
8. Darko Suvin points out that the critique of capitalism and economic dispar-
ity, and the consequences that capitalism has for human beings, are central
to Martian Time Slip, which he characterized as a “masterpiece” of what he
marked as Dick’s “second period,” from 1962 to 1965 (p. 164). Suvin con-
nects “three variants of capitalism, classical laissez-faire, bureaucratic, and
demagogically managerial,” to, respectively, Leo Bohlen, Arnie Kott, and the
UN-supported housing cooperative. All three forms threaten Dick’s “little
man” (Suvin, 170).
9. In Kahn, this is Fragment III: “Although the account is shared, most men
live as though their thinking were a private possession” (p. 29). Although it
is not certain which edition of Fragments Dick might have used, Kahn’s was
published after Martian Time Slip, while Kirk’s was published in 1954, four
years before the volume Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and
Psychology, which, as we shall see, was a major vehicle for developing of
Dick’s koinos/idios cosmos understanding. I include Kahn’s translations as
an additional reference to sometimes obscure single translation fragments.
10. Dick’s letter was published in the Australian magazine SF Commentary and
later in Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd (1975), both edited by Gillespie.
11. The concept of “otherness” and “the Other” is frequently used in cultural
and literary criticism, usually to denote the social group or being ‘different
than the Self.’ The original concept of the Other, postulated by philosopher
Emanuel Levinas in his Totality and Infi nity (1969) will be discussed further
in the text.
12. For discussion of the influence of existential psychiatry and writings of Rollo
May, Ludwig Binswanger, Eugene Minkowski and other authors featured
in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (1958) see
Anthony Wolk “The Swiss Connection: Psychological Systems in the Novels
of Philip K. Dick” and my chapter here on A Maze of Death.
13. According to Lawrence Sutin, the “Kant-Durkheim theory shaped Dick’s
depiction of the Martian aboriginal tribe of Bleekmen” (Sutin 103). In Ele-
mentary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim analyzed “primitive”
religions to uncover what he saw as universal realities behind early rites and
beliefs. The Bleekmen’s access to the alternative time streams resembles also
the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigenes, understood as a spiritual and
literal dimension of non-linear time.
14. Especially prevalent was the “refrigerator mother” theory, explaining the chil-
dren’s developmental disorder as a reaction to cold, distant parenting (Mesi-
bov, 6–8; Shcreibman 8; http://www.autism-pdd.net/autism-history.html).
15. Infantile autism was fi rst described by Leo Kanner in 1943. Kanner’s
paper established social isolation, repetitive, ritual behaviors, and lan-
guage impairment as central elements of the disorder (Mesibov, et.al, 5).
Although Kanner remained cautious in his study, he expressed assumptions
about the origins of autism that went undisputed for at least two decades,
including the assumption that autistic children are best served if removed
from their parents (Mesibov, 6; 8). This assumption is evident in Manfred’s
staying in the “Special Children’s Camp” in “New Israel,” away from his
parents and sisters.
16. The argument that capitalist society subsumes all, from counter-cultural
politics to fashions to individuals, into its mainstream, on its way toward
implosion—a prominent view among cultural theorists of the 20th century—
does not enter the system of characters and themes in Martian Time Slip.

158 Notes
17. For discussion of Levinas’ major ideas in general, see The Cambridge Com-
panion to Levinas, Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi, eds.
18. Levinas does not discuss literary genres. Epic is the suitable expression of
war, which, according to Levinas, leads to totality and away from infi nity.
The implication of the Levinas’ statement quoted in the body of this essay
is that the epic articulates the meaning of war. “The ontology of war” is an
important starting point for the Levinas’ argument (“Preface,” p. 22).
19. I refer to two instances of “speaking”: Foucault’s intent to let the madness
“speak for itself” in Madness and Civilization (56), and Levinas’ idea that
we reach toward Otherness through language in Totality and Infi nity. “In its
expressive function language precisely maintains the other” writes Levinas
(73). Thus, Dick’s method of letting Manfred speak for himself, comes from
this tradition of ethical discourse.
20. In French, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’age classique, translated
into English in 1965, two years after Martian Time Slip was published and
three years after it was written.
21. Foucault draws numerous connections between the societal treatment of
madness and the shaping of its character. The nihilistic nature of madness,
that shows in Manfred’s representation too, can be understood both as its
intrinsic value and as a consequence of institutionalization of madness. “By
confi nement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing” (116).
22. This scene, described in Chapter 5, contains one of the creative seeds for
Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Observing the
life-like teaching machines, Bohlen concludes that “the teaching machines
demonstrated a fact that Jack Bohlen was well aware of: there was an aston-
ishing depth to the so-called ‘artificial’” (72).
23. For Levinas and Heidegger both, language and Speech are the seat of Being,
essential for communication with the self and the Other.
24. In a letter to his friend and collaborator, Roger Zelazny, Dick wrote that,
together with Zelazny’s novel Lord of Light, “The Martian Chronicles
should be read in every college English class.” (California State University,
Fullerton Special Collections, Philip K. Dick Collection, Box 22A “Corre-
spondence 1965–1969”; November 13, 1968 letter).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. In “Schizoid Android: Cybernetics and the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K.

Dick,” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 8, 1997: 419–42), Katherine
N. Hayles emphasizes the relationship between second-order cybernetics and
Do Androids. In her introduction, Hayles argues that members of the fi rst
wave, “Norbert Wiener and other participants of the Macy Conferences . . .
did not push [the implications of cybernetics] for a variety of reasons” (419).
Hayles intead chooses to connect ideas from Humberto Maturana’s book
Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, with Francisco Varela) to Do Androids,
drawing parallels between Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis and the more
general idea in the cybernetics of reflexivity and the “unstable boundaries
between self and world” illustrated in the concept of androids in Do Androids
(Hayles, 437). Thus, the relationship between second-wave cybernetics and
Dick is assumed: the works discussed in Hayles’ article appear after the
writing and publication of Do Androids. The author acknowledges, in the
later version of her article, the lack of direct connection between cybernetics
thinkers of the second wave and Dick (How We Became Posthhuman, 160–

Notes 159
61). While Wiener may belong to the conceptual period of “homeostasis” in
cybernetics (How We Became 15) , his commentaries in Cybernetics (1947),
Human Use of Human Beings (1954), and God and Golem Inc. (1964) make
clear that he was concerned with the further development and implications
of cybernetics, pondering its future impact and significance.
2. In 1950, British mathematician and computer expert Alan Turing proposed a
test to demonstrate machine intelligence, suggesting that a human questioner
should ask questions to a computer and to a human being, both hidden from
questioner’s sight, and, upon receiving written answers, try to discern which
was a machine and which a human being. Turing believed that there was noth-
ing unique to human “consciousness” and that it was possible to replicate it in
“digital computer.” The Turing test continues to be used and discussed in order
to research into and evaluate machine intelligence and consciousness.
3. Critics Eric Rabkin, Katherine Hayles, and Patric McCarthy read Do
Androids as a novel critical of the technological society and especially its
capitalist (or, in Rabkin’s case, “industrialist”) values, which are detrimental
to the novel’s characters. The focus of the inquiry in these critics is on the
human characters and the destabilizing consequences that their close inter-
relationship with androids and technology has for them. Androids, in this
set up, are seen as a token signifier, reflecting human deprivation or behaving
as antagonists in an over-industrialized world. Some of these commentators
redeem the novel’s bleak vision (“even electric sheep could fi nd greener pas-
tures,” wrote a Kirkus reviewer in 1968), by articulating the novel’s mes-
sages as the insistence on respect and empathy for all life. On the other side
of the argument are a handful of critics who insist on Dick’s paranoia, both
as a person and a writer, and emphasize novel’s utter hopelessness, or lack
of coherence. John Huntington, in “Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insin-
cerity,” argues that “Dick, like van Vogt, and like other popular SF writers
such as Heinlein or Herbert, has learned how to give the impression of deep
understanding simply by contradicting himself” (154). Building upon the
reference to van Vogt’s advice that the plot should be changed every eight
hundred words (153–4), the author concludes that Dick’s narratives, includ-
ing Do Androids, follow “creative formulas of pulp fiction” and represent a
“mechanical version of wisdom,” moving randomly from one idea to another
(152;159).
4. The force of necessity (noos) from Plato’s cosmology expressed in Timaeus,
the irrational streak eating away at the good god’s creation.
5. Wiener, in his passionate plea for more political and environmental responsi-
bility, suggested a comparably opposite trend: “the mechanization of man,”
the treatment of human beings as a repetitive labor tools as the malady of our
age (The Human Use of Human Beings, 16).
6. Mass media and communication systems, illustrated by the ubiquitous figure
of Buster Friendly and the soap-opera quality of Wilbur Mercer’s religious
plight, forms a worldview in the novel, a model for describing reality. Mass
communication in the novel relies on the system of signals and messages,
whether they come from the empathy boxes, television sets, or Penfield mood
organs. The description of the human community as the one based in the
exchange of messages through various media, echoes Marshal McLuhan’s
theories of “automation technology” and communication media, presented
in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
7. New System of the Nature of Substances and Their Communication, and of
the Union Which Exists Between the Soul and the Body (1695).
8. British science fiction author and scholar Brian Aldiss, in his history of SF
Trillion Year Spree points out that “the metaphor of machine-man,” which

160 Notes
expresses both “the social process of dehumanization” and “the estrange-
ments of technological societies” functions in both directions in Dick’s
fiction. Sometimes, Aldiss explains, it “can be reversed, so that machines
become more human than real people” (331).
9. Paley, William. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attri-
butes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Hallowell
[Me.] : E. Goodale, 1819. Since the world exhibits properties of a well func-
tioning mechanism whose elements are put together and into precise motion
in such a way, there must have been someone, “an artificer or artificers who
formed it for the purpose.” Newton’s physical laws were used to show the
mechanical precision and workings of the “clockwork universe,” which, in
Newton’s belief, were set down by God.
10. In Christianity, Roland Bainton asserts the central place of the death and
resurrection narrative for Christian theology: “the disciples were sure that
Christ crucified was Christ risen from the dead. Without this certainty there
would probably have been no Christian Church” (45).
11. “One Body with Many Members” is a subtitle provided by the editors of The
Society of Biblical Literature and following 12:12 of King James Version.
12. Like Deckard in the end of Do Androids, (and Phil Dick/Horselover Fat in
Valis), Paul underwent a transformation that turned him from the persecutor
of Christians to the protector of the faith; like Deckard, he receives a vision
in the desert which changes the course of his life.
13. Isidore’s experiences are reminiscent of another biblical passage: Corinthians
13, subtitled “The Gift of Love,” (“charity” in King James Version), which is
echoed in Isidore’s encounter with Deckard. In Corinthians, “we see in a mir-
ror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (13:12); as Isidore imagines Deck-
ard as a faceless predator, he “glimpses darkly” an impression of Deckard’s
unstoppable force. However, when Isidore fi nally sees Deckard face to face, in
an abandoned building where he and androids are hiding, he realizes that the
bounty hunter is “a medium man, not impressive . . . Not demi-god in shape;
not at all as Isidore had anticipated him” (218). Chapter 13 concludes with
the ultimate affirmation of the empathic gift: “And now faith, hope, and love
abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (13:13).
14. The setting is similar to “the enormous whale-belly of steel and stone,”
which houses the opera where Luba Luft, in Chapter Nine, participates in a
rehearsal (97), which in turn corresponds to the desert space of “the unin-
habited desolation” to which Deckard flees in Chapter Twenty. Throughout
the novel, Dick creates spaces which are overwhelmingly empty. In the vol-
ume Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology that Dick,
in his April 25, 1962 letter to Anthony Boucher, describes as having had a
“profound effect” on him, Henri Ellenberger discusses spatiality as one of
“the two basic categories of inner experiences” (101). In his contribution to
the volume entitled “A Clinical Introduction to Psychiatric Phenomenology
and Existential Analysis,” Ellenberger describes the subjective experience
of space which, according to Binswanger, is perceived according to “one’s
feeling tone or emotional pitch.” While “sorrow constricts attuned space,”
writes Ellenberger, “despair makes it empty” (110–111).
15. In an unpublished August 27, 1970 letter to Brian Aldiss, Philip Dick credits
a science fiction fan Miriam Knight with giving the word “kipple” the mean-
ing of “useless junk that clutters up the world.” Originally, Dick explains,
the word came from the joke: “Do you like Kipling? I don’t know, I never
kippled” (Fullerton Special Collections, Box 22A).
16. The references to the Civil War and slavery have been mentioned in the sec-
tion “Do Android Souls Go To Heaven?” Another interesting contemporary

Notes 161
reference that Dick makes is to science fiction. Pris tells J.R. Isidore that
she got interested in “pre-colonial fiction” while on Mars, “stories written
before space travel but about space travel” (150). A bit of Dick’s reworking
of the modern references can bee seen from the Electric Toad manuscript for
the novel. Pris’ last line is followed by: “In those days—up to the 1960—they
called it ‘science fiction’!” but it is erased in the fi nal manuscript. Later, while
they are hiding from Deckard, Isidore asks Pris for some of “those old maga-
zines” and intends to look for some in the library (160).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a popular text in the 1960s, with its focus
on the experiences of consciousness after death and before rebirth, provided
Dick with material regarding the relationship of death to life. In a 1966 letter
he writes, “the division, between living and being dead has become dim.” In
the same letter, referencing The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Dick explains
that “in the instant after death everything real will become apparent” (SL
1, 195). The passage in A Maze most closely related to this source is Maggie
Walsh’s after death experience, although Dick stated that he based it on an
“L.S.D. experience of my own” (“Author’s Foreword”).
2. Although, at the end of the novel, there is a suggestion that only God is,
miraculously, outside of any system known to humans, including streams of
information, time, and prayers, whether electronic or mental.
3. Critics Eugene Warren and Eric Rabkin, for example, interpret the novel and
its ending from opposing view points. Warren argues that the characters in
A Maze of Death “successfully penetrate the reality behind their illusory
experience” (170), suggesting the ending as hopeful, as “Morley’s experience
is somehow real” (174). Rabkin asserts that “there is irresolvable, irrational
ontological confusion in Maze” (170). Christopher Palmer argues A Maze is
an anti-space travel novel, “a pure allegory” with “a nihilistic power” (320).
4. The beginning of existentialist thought is usually connected to the writings
of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), whose refutations of Hegel and emphasis
on the existence of the individual human being influenced existential think-
ers such as Martin Buber (1878–1965), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and
Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Paul Tillich (1886–1965).
5. In “The Swiss Connection: Psychological Systems in the Novels of Philip K.
Dick” Anthony Wolk touches upon the influence of Existence: A New Dimen-
sion in Psychiatry and Psychology in two of Dick’s novels: Martian Time Slip
(in less detail) and Simulacra (at length). The main focus of this article is the
apparent influence of a 1939 collection of essays, Language and Thought in
Schizophrenia, edited by J.S. Kasanin on Dick’s writing of Transmigration of
Timothy Archer, Clans of the Alphane Moon, We Can Build You, and Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical
Interpretations, Samuel Umland, ed. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995.
6. For example, a person suffering from depression might perceive a given
space as smaller and darker while a happy person perceives spaces as open
and light. The reader should perhaps be reminded that the essential concept
used by existential therapists to describe the uniqueness of human existence
is Dasein, “composed of sein (being) plus da (there), Dasein indicates that
man is the being who is there and implies also that he has a “there” in the
sense that he can know he is there and can take a stand with reference to
that fact” (May 41).

162 Notes
7. In the “Transcendental Aesthetics” chapter of Critique of Judgment, Kant
argues that space and time are both absolute categories, the necessary con-
ditions that can be known a priori and that they are instinctual categories,
the contingent conditions known a posteriori (A23–4; B38–40). There is a
debate about which of Kant’s views of time-space perceptions is more promi-
nent, Paul Guyer writes: “Kant makes statements that can support each of
these interpretations; but proponents of the second view, including the pres-
ent author, have argued that it is entailed by both Kant’s argument for and
his use of his distinction, the latter especially in his theory of free will” Paul
Gyer (1998, 2004). Kant, Immanuel. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. April 30, 2008, http://www.rep.
routledge.com/article/DB047SECT5
8. “I’m the settlement whore,” Susie informs Seth Morley (66).
9. In Existence, both Ludwig Binswanger and Rollo May allude to Heraclitus’
concept in their essays.
10. The idea that, for human beings, it is impossible to distinguish the state
of dreaming from wakefulness has many other proponents, including those
studied by Dick, such as Pascal and Descartes.
11. Dick engaged with the theories and case studies presented in Existence, but
also with the book’s underlying philosophies, including those of Heraclitus,
Pascal, Schiller, Freud, Hiedegger, Tillich, and other authors referenced in
Dick’s fiction and correspondence. Common materials and ideas show the
shared network of ideas between the writers of Existence, Dick, and the wide
range of writers who explored the central and tragic tenets of human beings.
May points out the pervasive influence of existentialist thought, including its
expression in art (Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso) and literature (Dostoevski,
Baudelarie, Kafka, Rilke) (11). “In many ways [existentialism] is the unique
and specific portrayal of the psychological predicament of contemporary
Western man” (11).
12. While Dick’s religious views are often cited as Gnostic, his formulation of the
Form Destroyer as the malevolent divinity, the ‘bad god’ of Zoroastrian and
Gnostic teachings is the most subdued in A Maze, although he created the
names for the novel’s four divinities based on Zoroastrian and Manichean
god names. (As stated in the novel’s outline, “Notes on the TENCH Novel.”
Box 22B, Philip K. Dick’s papers in the Fullerton Archive.) Four years after
the publication of A Maze, Dick suggested that the novel is “shot full of
Zoroastrian doctrine, far beyond what I thought” (SL 3 173), but his com-
mentary is a speculation on a number of elements that may have inspired him
rather than a presentation of Zoroastrian doctrines and beliefs.
13. It is not clear whether the references to Christ in this passage and elsewhere
in the novel—when characters swear by Christ—are intentional or anach-
ronistic to the narrative. The Sword of Chemosh is probably a reference to
Jeremiah 48:7. This Biblical passage refers to the demise of Moab and of the
people of Chemosh.
14. It is interesting that Dick, in his 1973 letter to Marcel Thaon, misspells
Thanatos, a mythological character representing death, as Thanos, a Marvel
Comics character who appears in the Iron Man series for the fi rst time in
1973 (SL 2 302). Given his love for pulp magazines, it is quite possible that
Dick had read the comic book.
15. The scene is reminiscent of Ted Burton’s fl ight into space with god Ormazd
in The Cosmic Puppets.
16. Although the experiments in creating “virtual reality” were underway in mid-
sixties, in works of scientists such as J.C.R. Licklider and Ivan Sutherland,

Notes 163
they were not broadly publicized. There is no evidence in Dick’s letters or
interviews that he was directly aware of the developments in the field.
17. This technique of circular narrative through the connected beginning and
ending is used most obviously in the last chapter of Transmigration of Timo-
thy Archer where Angel Archer’s last thoughts return the reader to the begin-
ning of the novel.
18. The title is reminiscent of Mercer in Androids and his ability to rise from the
dead, with a good dose of humor and irony (but hardly disrespect) in the phrase
“my spare time”. The fragment “And so Can You” may be reference to Bishop
James A. Pike, whose influence is acknowledged in Dick’s Foreword to the
novel. In 1968, Pike co-wrote The Other Side, a book describing his attempts
to contact his dead son through spiritual séances. Pike “claimed that he had
made contact with his dead son and had a public séance on Canadian television
with Spiritualist medium Arthur Augustus Ford” (Religious Leaders, 2)
19. An April 18, 1969 note from the Playboy’s editor at the time, attached to
the article that Dick requested from them (Philip K. Dick papers, Fullerton
Archive), may be responsible for the name of the “great 21st century Commu-
nist theologian” Specktowsky: the Playboy editor’s name is A.C. Spectorsky.
20. Another tech-religion literary construct will appear as the ever-changing,
holographic Bible in Dick’s late novel, The Divine Invasion (1981).
21. The latest research on primate-machine and human-machine integration—
the brain signals to computer control—has made a significant leap since the
researchers were able to place electrode into the brain light enough to not tear
the gray matter, allowing for a successful electronic signal transmission. For
more information see: Kennedy, P.R.; Bakay, R.A.E.; Moore, M.M.; Adams,
K.; Goldwaithe, J. “Direct Control of a Computer from the Human Central
Nervous System.” IEEE Transactions on Rehabilitation Engineering, June
2000, Vol 8, No2 :198–202 and Vadim S. Polikov, Patrick A. Tresco and
William M. Reichert. “Response of Brain Tissue to Chronically Implanted
Neural Electrodes.” Journal of Neuroscience Methods 15 October 2005, Vol
148, No1: 1–18.
22. Dick suggests that beings on these planets are a benevolent non-terrestrial
race (pp. 85–6, for example).
23. Noise reduction/entropy remains the central problem of engineering and sig-
nal processing today.
24. Greek terms for Fate, ananke, and for form and anti-form, eidos and anti-
eidos, used by Dick in his novels and essays, all appear in Gebsattel’s article.
25. In Valis Dick will introduce the idea of the “irrational streak in the world’s
existence,” inspired by Plato’s cosmogony, Timaeus, describing the entire
universe as irrational. In A Maze, it can be argued that only a portion of the
novel/reality is sick.
26. The experiences of the colonists on Delmak-O—during their virtual reality
dream—are real to them, fi lled with events, emotion, even smells which Dick
is careful to describe throughout the narrative. When Seth Morley wakes
up, he tells the group: “at Tekel Upharsin,” (his imagined departure point),
“when the Walker-on-Earth came to me, it was so real. Even now it seems
real. I can’t shake it off” (185).
27. Some examples include Char Davies’ “Osmose” in art, and Infantry Immer-
sive Trainer in the army).
28. When Meno asks Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Meno, how can he look for
virtue without knowing what it is, he answers with the idea of eternal knowl-
edge, present in the soul, which we can recollect. The idea of anamnesis is
further developed in Phaedo. Dick uses the concept of sudden recollection or

164 Notes
anamnesis in Valis to explain some of the experiences that the protagonist
Horselover Fat/Phil Dick undergoes.
29. Almost ten years after A Maze was written, in The Origin of Conscious-
ness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) Julian Janes, another
author highly regarded by Dick as well as generations of psychologists, will
present the mind-body problem as central to understanding of what it means
to be human: “How do these ephemeral existences of our lonely experience
fit into the ordered array of nature that somehow surrounds and engulfs
this core of knowing?” (2). In his book, Janes connects the development of
metaphors (and our understanding of the world) from the primitive/literal
language to generative power of abstract language (and the emergence of
“consciousness” (48–59).
30. During the group’s attempt to make their way back to the settlement through
the perplexing Delmak-O’s landscape, Maggie Walsh explains that “one of
the conditions of the Curse is to remain mired in the quasi-reality of those
proclivities. Without ever seeing reality as it actually is” (101). Dick uses a
physical shifting maze in The Cosmic Puppets as the space where protago-
nist Ted Burton is caught in a spatial-temporal trap, which he can only leave
after a long struggle, this maze becomes a literal maze of death; in Valis Dick
makes references to the veil of Maya.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 6
1 The similarity between the double character Phil/Fat in Valis (1981) and Fred/
Bob in A Scanner is obvious; it reflects Dick’s concern, especially in 1974,
when he worked on A Scanner and started conceiving of Valis, with double
identity. In his 1974 letter he wrote regarding an acquaintance’s dream: “[it]
implies that there is an authentic PKD and an inauthentic me, which is prob-
ably the basic truth. I think there was a long-term split in me, not in the usual
schizophrenic sense but in some time space continuum sense” (S.L. 3, 101).
2. Dick referred to several Bergman’s movies in his letters, praising the direc-
tor’s work. See p.4 and p. 151 in this book.
3. In all other novels discussed here, a saving or at least promising event help
the characters out of an otherwise hopeless predicament: in Martian Time
Slip, Manfred is saved from life of isolation and confi nement by Bleekmen;
in A Maze of Death, The Walker on Earth takes Seth Morley away; in Do
Androids, Deckard gives up suicide upon fi nding an electric toad in the
desert, and in Valis, Fat is content to keep waiting for the Savior. That no
promising event occurs in the closing of A Scanner reflects Dick’s real-life
situation, as the novel captured the darkest hour of the author’s life and drug
use (see Ch. 1). The glimmer of hope that Fred/Arctor/Bruce may recover
from the brain damage, hinted at in the ending, is far from the resolute clos-
ing events from the novels as described above.
4. If there was a “real” Barris in Dick’s life, I was not able to identify him. Dick
seemed to have passing fears about a number of people, but not one arch-
enemy.
5. In 1973 Dick wrote to friend Goran Bengston “A SCANNER DARKLY will
tell you a lot, since it is autobiographical; the girl Donna in it is Kathy, of
course; remember Kathy? She never writes anymore . . . but I put her into
SCANNER although she’ll never take the trouble to read it” (SL 2: 215).
6. In a 1972 letter to Bruce Gillespie, Dick expressed his “strongly anti-dope”
sentiments through describing the non-Being quality of heroin addicts he

Notes 165
saw at X-Kalay: “two insect eyes, two lightless slots of dim glass, without
warmth or true life, calculate to the exact decimal point how many tangible
commodities you can be cashed in for. He, being already dead, views you as
if you were already dead, or never lived. Biological life goes on, but the soul
has been extinguished” (SL 2: 70). Dick goes on to describe horrible state of
some of the girls he had seen, teeth falling out, “arms like broomhandles, her
hair wispy and gray,” physically completely ruined by drugs, controlled by
the dealers, and forced into prostitution (70).
7. Notice that in Martian Time Slip, Manfred makes a similar asssertion at the
end of one of his visions: “I am Manfred.” Although Manfred, too, is suffer-
ing because of his condition, his and Arctor’s statement differ radically. When
Manfred announces, “I am Manfred, he is reaffi rming his identity amidst
the chaos of decay. When Arctor states, “I am an eye,” he alludes not only to
his passive position, but also to his task of watching himself and others on
the surveillance tapes. Arctor’s statement is reminiscent of Emerson’s experi-
ence of becoming an “transparent eye-ball,” famously described in his essay
“Nature,” but unlike Emerson who feels unity with nature and the Universal
Being, Arctor feels burnt out and absorbed into nothingness caused by drug
abuse: “He heard nothing now. And forgot the meaning of the words, and
fi nally, the words themselves. The Vacuum in him grew.” (251).
8. Because of the scramble suit, the character description, ever-present in
the realistic novel, is in A Scanner changed into a mystery. “In any case,
the wearer of the scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination,”
explains Dick. “ . . . hence, any description of him—or her—was meaning-
less” (23). The view that physical identity is something that is not worth cap-
turing because it is meaningless hints toward a pessimistic view of personal
identity presented in the novel. Identity is not an affi rmative force ordinarily
motivating our conduct, instead, the blurry scramble suit reinforces the trope
of ‘seeing darkly’.
9. Baudrillard’s essay on “Simulation and Simulacra” was originally published
in Paris in 1979. Baudrillard was aware of Dick’s writing, as his critical essay
“Simulation and Science Fiction,” published in Science Fiction Studies in
1991 shows. Here, the author develops and argument that Dick’s fiction itself
is “hyperreality,” that “the reader is from the outset in a total simulation
without origin, past, or future—in a kind of flux of all coordinates (mental,
spatio-temporal, semiotic).” According to Baudrillard in this essay, the most
difficult task of modernity is to distinguish between the three modes: imagi-
nary, productive, and simulating.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1. All unidentified page references in this Chapter refer to Valis, New York:
Vintage, 1991.
2. Dick’s experience, known as “2–3-74” the date on which it occurred, rep-
resents the author’s encounter with God, and his religious vision. It has
been noted by Dick, his biographers, and critics, and is described in Valis.
Unlike many other incidents in Dick’s life, 2–3-74 is uniformly described as a
moment in which the author was “blinded by a beam of pink light,” which to
Dick was an encounter with a divine, absolute being. The event was followed
by a series of unusual experiences and occurrences, which inspired Dick’s
8000-page theological-philosophical journal “Exegesis,” as well as an early
version of Valis, later published as Radio Free Albemuth (1985).

166 Notes
3. In (post)structuralist discussion of “textuality,” the common denominator is
perhaps the belief that text is either divested from its surrounding networks
or is hiding/hidden in them. Edward Said’s “The Problem of Textuality:
Two Exemplary Positions” discusses Derrida’s and Foucault’s approaches to
textuality as representing the opposite poles in the argument; Said himself
seems to suggest that both attitudes are necessary and should be used (673)
and sees the text as an effect, textuality possessing an “impressive constitu-
tive authority” (713). Said concludes that “[texts] must be correlated with
(not reduced to) other forms of impressive, perhaps even repressive and dis-
placing, forms of human activity” (713).
4. Dick wrote regularly in his journal until his death in March of 1982. Excerpts
of “Exegesis” were organized by Lawrence Sutin and published as In Pursuit
of Valis: Selection from the Exegesis. Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1991. The
author’s official website, PhilipKDick.com, has started posting unpublished
pages of the manuscript.
5. By “postmodern” I refer to the critical consensus that text subverts meaning,
that an indeterminate play is produced in and by language, and that ideology
and individual power are inevitably manifest in writing.
6. Dick invokes the act of walking toward the end of the novel, when a disap-
pointed Fat dreams about Linda Rondstat singing: “to walk toward the dawn/
you must put your slippers on” (Valis 214). Fat fi nds one possible interpreta-
tion for his dream: it is an allusion to “Empedocles, the pupil of Pythagoras.”
Empedocles mysteriously disappears and is never found, “instead, his golden
slippers had been found near the top of the volcano Mount Etna” (214).
7. The seven themes suggested by Patricia Warrick assist detailed examination
of the novel. Put in the order of importance they are: “the wound and the
quest for healing” (178); “the theme of Gnosis” (179); “the theme of evil”
(180); “a parallel between the macrocosm and the microcosm” (181); “anam-
nesis” (181); “androgyny” (182), and “the theme of games, play, and chil-
dren” (182). Although she discusses the importance of death for the narrative
(170), Warrick does not include it on her “themes” list.
8. “Reality” is an assumed category, an amalgam between the external ele-
ments, the protagonist’s specific point of view, and elements and perceptions
of non-consensual quality (i.e. visions, coincidences that give new meaning
to events, apparently supernatural experiences, etc.).
9. Plato’s cosmogony, described in Timaeus, represents a major source for the
notion of the irrational world. Dick relies on Plato’s explanation that Mind
persuades necessity (or chaos) into orderly existence, during which the strain
of the irrational enters the World Soul (Valis 25; 36; 40; 112; 220 Timaeus,
(47.E-48.E) p.160–165).
10. Critics Easterbrook, Durham, and Palmer have each observed the notion
of the ‘self’ as central to Dick. These writers see the fragmentary or double
identity in Dick’s fiction as a crucial commentary on the state of the post-
modern ‘subject,’ although their analysis is often shifted to a theoretical,
rather than a literary examination.
11. For comments on reincarnation and Valis see, for example, Dick’s February
18, 1977 letter to daughter Laura Dick (SL 5:17).
12. The exact lines paraphrased from “Sailing to Byzantium” are “Consume my
heart away; sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal.” The next two
lines are: “It knows not what it is; and gather me/Into the artifice of eternity”
(Yeats 193).
13. A compendium of Gnostic and mystical writings, dated to A.D. 350–400 in
their Coptic translation, the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered in 1945,
but reached the public decades later. Dick read and used the 1977 fi rst edition

Notes 167
translated by James M. Robinson. The later, 1988 edition, edited by Elaine
Pagels, was substantially revised and includes an “Afterword” by Richard
Smith. In his consideration of the series of thinkers who engaged with Gnos-
tic ideas—from Jung to Harold Bloom—Smith at length acknowledges Dick’s
treatment of Nag Hammadi in Valis and his 2–3-74 vision, explaining that
“The publication of Nag Hammadi only confi rmed [the author’s] revelation”
(547). “We should be called children of God” is stated in John 3:1.
14. The old wise man/prophet Elijah persona is a most apparent Dickian meta-
character. Elijah appears in The Divine Invasion, “Little Black Box,” A
Maze of Death and, as an old man Wilbur Mercer, in Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep. In each story, there is a strong suggestion that Elijah, in
appearance an old man, is the divine messenger.
15. The deity Sophia appears in “On the Origin of the World,” the Nag Ham-
madi text introduced by Dr. Stone in the novel. Sophia is often portrayed as
the most high divine being in Gnostic texts, or as a character of Wisdom.
Sophia is a composite creature Wisdom-Sophia- Zoe, mentioned as divinity
in “On the Origin of the World,” and as god’s companion in Philip K. Dick’s
Valis ‘sequel’ The Divine Invasion.
16. Using the playing cards analogy, Barbour describes the mind-boggling rela-
tionship between Newton’s and Minkowski’s ideas thus: “Newtonian space-
time is an ordinary pack; Minkowski space-time is a magical pack. Look at
it one way, and cards run through the block with one inclination. Look at it
another way, and different cards run with a different inclination. But which-
ever way you look, cards are there” (The End of Time 146).
17. Kozyrev was fi rst mentioned in the United States in Psychic Discoveries
Behind the Iron Curtain (1970), an anthology edited by Sheila Ostrander
and Lynn Schroeder dealing with both scientific and paranormal phenomena
(Sanderson, v-vi). Although the book would certainly have been of interest
to Dick, I do not have direct evidence that the author used it. Dick’s letters,
however, discuss Kozyrev’s article, which remains unpublished.
18. In “Possibility of Experimental Study of Properties of Time” Kozyrev sug-
gests that “instinctive knowledge” may be a consequence of the property of
time which “appears immediately everywhere” and allows for simultaneity
of information. Fat’s suggestion that his encounter with God may have
been due to a “dysfunction of time,” and his frequent dreams and visions,
reflect Kozyrev’s suggestion of the influence of more obscure properties of
‘time’ on humans.
19. Although Hayden White’s Metahistory, a study of the 19th century histori-
cal accounts and their constructed nature, was published in 1973, I have no
evidence that Dick read the book.
20. A number of critics have touched upon the centrality of textuality for Philip
K. Dick. “Beneath the web of complexities encountered on fi rst reading, one
fi nds a pattern of meaning dramatized in each novel” (Warrick, 170). “Dick’s
truth lies in his plot or fabula” (Suvin, 374). “Fat’s dealings with the divine,
which occupy so much of the novel, are best described as retreat into textu-
ality” (Palmer, 230). Neal Easterbrook and Christopher Palmer deal most
extensively with the idea of textuality in Valis.
21. Dick’s interest in cybernetics and reading of Norbert Wiener, strongly sug-
gests that Dick was at least aware of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory,
postulated in 1948 and still in use in telecommunications. Shannon revolu-
tionized the way in which information is understood and consequently sent,
by defi ning information as “only those symbols that are uncertain to the
receiver” and the information output as “a measure of the source’s entropy”
(“The Meaning of Information,” Lucent Technologies). Shannon’s work

168 Notes
enabled the understanding of information as an integral way to describe the
world. Scientists such as Wiener in the 1950s and writers such as William
Gibson in the 1980s regard the world as information, as does Valis, although
in a less machine-oriented way.
22. Gabriel Mckee’s analysis of Dick’s theology adds another dimension to the
metaphor of the play and the central place of textuality. “The Exegesis,” he
asserts, “was merely a game that Dick played with God. The goal of this
game was for God to have another place to enter the world in the endless
theorizing of Dick’s writing” (52).
23. In 1978, Dick wrote to Patricia Warrick: “The Nag Hammadi codices are
now available in abstract form published by Harper&Row; I await a copy of
the book eagerly” (SL 5: 160).
24. For Palmer, the inversion of the relationship between the reader, the author,
and the text becomes the principal achievement of the novel. According to
Palmer, “The reader may close Valis thinking ‘What do I do next?’,” assert-
ing that novel captures “the collision between ethical seriousness and a post-
modernist sense of the textuality of meaning” (236–7).

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Index
A Cosmic Puppets, The 3, 10, 83, 100,

Aldiss, Brian 20, 51, 159–160 104, 110, 150, 162, 164
Anamnesis 114, 138, 163–164, 166 Confessions of a Crap Artist 29, 35,
“The Android and the Human”: and 149
Do Androids 39, 72, 76; and A Courage To Be, The 92, 95
Scanner 121, 123,126, 130; 155 Cybernetics xiii, 11, 16, 69, 72, 88,
Autism 12, 16, 49, 51, 61–62; 65, 157 158–159, 167 ; Wiener’s Cyber-
netics 21, 69–70, 73, 76, 151,
B 159
Baudrillard, Jean xiii, 123, 128, 131,
165, 169 D
Bergman, Ingmar 164; The Seventh Seal Dali, Salvador 67
4; Through a Glass Darkly 118; Derrida, Jacques 144, 166
151 Descartes, René 3, 22, the rule of truth
Bergson, Henri 3, 16, 21 74; mind-body dualism 75; 162,
Berkeley: see California 173
“Beyond Lies the Wub” 1 Dick, Anne 1, 28–29, 31, 33–35, 40,
Bible, the 73, 123, 139, 163 156; Christopher 23, 41, 44;
Biblical: God 58; interpretation 81, Dorothy 27; Edgar 27–28; Jane
143; story/verse/passage 83, 104, Charlotte 27;
118, 123, 134, 160, 162 Dick, Jeanette Marlin 28
Binswanger, Ludwig xiii, 36, 62, 96–97, Dick, Kleo 28, 31, 33, 151, 154
99, 105, 115, 157, 160, 162 Dick, Nancy 6, 36–37, 39–40, 44, 154;
Blade Runner 2, 46, 155 nee Hackett 28, 40, 45, 154
Blish, James 17, 35, 49 Dick-Hackett, Isa 23, 36–38, 144, 153
Bodkin, Maud 18 Dick Tessa 44, 155; nee Busby 28,
Boucher, Anthony 29–33, 34, 36, 96, 40–41, 127, 154
154, 160, 169 Digital age 15–16, 18, 23–25, 115,
151–152
C Digital culture 5, 14–15, 151,
California 15, 70, 117, 130, 132, 137, Disability 53, 64; rights 66
141; Southern xiii, 6, 15, 117, Disneyland 7, 22, 127–128, 152
124–126, 131–132; Northern Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
37, 84; Berkeley 17, 27–30, 33, xii, 36, 69–90; and Blade Run-
132, 154 ner 2, 46; reality and 4, 6–8;
Carr, Carol 35–36, 40, 154 androids and 11–12, 15–16; and
Carr, Terry 12, 154 faith 22, and classical music 28;
Caulfield, Holden 5 doppelganger in 55; 91, 97, 101,

176 Index
106–108, 110, 151, 153, 155, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t
158–161, 164, 167 Fall Apart Two Days Later” 7–8,
Dr. Bloodmoney xiii, 12, 17, 27, 170 152
Human Use of Human Beings 69, 73,
E 75, 85, 89, 151, 159
Eco, Umberto xiii, 6, 123, 128, 170
Ellenberger, Henri F. 34, 110, 160 I
Ellison, Harlan 17, 34 “Impostor” 12, 27, 149
Entropy xii-xiii, and Martian Time Slip
52, 54–55, 59–60, 64, 66–67; J
and Do Androids 69–71, 73, Jesus Christ 79, 81, 84, 138–140, 142,
81, 83, 85–89; and A Maze of 144–145
Death 94, 106, 108, 111; 163, Joyce, James 21, 29, 67; Dick’s Joycean
167 experiment 67
Erasmus, Desiderius xiv Jung, Carl xiv, 36, 151, 167
“Electric Ant” 12
Eliade, Mircea 140, 142 K
Elijah 140, 167 Kant, Immanuel 3, 5, 96, 150, 157,
existential philosophy xiii, 94–101, 115 162, 171
existential psychiatry xiii, 34, 56, Kozyrev, Nikolai 140–141, 167
94–101, 157 Kuhn, Roland 97
existential theology xiii, 92, 94–101
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychi- L
atry and Psychology 12, 21, 34; LeGuin, Ursula 1, 17, 40, 42, 67, 149,
and Martian Time Slip 49, 56, 171
61–62; and A Maze of Death 92, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 74–75
95–99, 110–111, 115, 161–162; Lem, Stanislaw 17, 43, 152
and Do Androids 157, 160; Lethem, Jonathan 1, 17, 152, 171
Existenz 2 Levinas, Emmanuel xii, 11, 21, 49,
63–65, 157–158, 169, 171
F Logos 3–4, 144; koinos logos 49; in
Faulkner, William 67 Heraclitus 81, 99; as creative/
FBI 17, 33, 39, 43; Carnivore 19 artificial intelligence 81; 102,
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said 2, 143;
5, 13, 19, 27, 38, 149,151, 170
Foucault, Michel xii, 21, 63–65, 158, M
170 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Freud, Sigmund 36, 40, 101, 151, 162 Fiction 30
Man in the High Castle, The xiii, 21,
G 33, 104
Gebsattel, von V.E. 56, 110–111, 163 “Man, Android, and Machine” 11, 13
Gill, David xi, 170 May, Rollo xiii, 11, 34, 56, 62, 92,
God and Golem Inc. 80–81, 159 95–97, 115, 157, 162
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 40, Maya, the veil of 2, 6–7, 164
152 Martian Chronicles, The 47, 66, 158
Martian Time Slip xii, 21, 33, 47–68,
H 91, 98; and koinos/idios cosmos
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xiv, 5; and mental illness 11–13;
142, 161 and real world 15–16; notes
Heinlein, Robert 17, 149, 159 156–158, 161, 164, 169;
Hemingway, Ernest 5, 26, 67 Matrix, The 2
Heraclitus 5, 10 56, 92, 105, 134, 144, Maze of Death, A xii-xiii, 3, 10–13,
150, 162; and koinos/idios cos- 28, 36, 91–116; notes 150, 157,
mos 54, 99, 115 161, 164, 167; murder mystery

Index 177
in 2; and virtual reality 5, 8, Schizophrenia 12, 49–51, 61,161
151; and existence 22, 51 Spinrad, Norman 17, 37, 43
Maze 91; shifting 3, 123, 147, 150, 164;
of death 92, 95, 108, 110, 164 T
Minkowski, Hermann 140–141, 157, 167 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
Minority Report the movie 2, 149, 150; The 2, 33–34, 97, 156
the story 32, 149 Tillich, Paul xiii, 11, 90, 95, 99–100,
Modernism 115; modernist literature/ 162, 173
views 67 Time Out of Joint 23, 97, 149
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 28 Transmigration of Timothy Archer
15, 45–46, 110, 150, 161,
N 163
Nag Hammadi 139–140, 145, 150,
166–168, 172 U
Newtonian Laws 81, 140, 160, 167; Ubik 2, 14–15, 36, 43, 46, 151–152,
Principia 81 155; and God 4–5, 45; and new
Nixon, Richard 8, 43; the era of 132 realities 10, 12, 97; dedicated to
Tony Boucher 33;
O
Ontology: human 14, 17; of war 158; V
phenomenological 94 Valhalla 110
Ornstein, Robert 151 Valis 3–5, 24, 28–29, 41, 44–45, 81;
themes xii-xiv; multiple selves
P 10–13; and physical universe
Paley, William 81, 160 15–16, 34, 83; and Nixon’s
Pascal, Blaise 21, 140, 162 America 43; and God as logos
Paul of Tarsus 83–84, 140, 160 79, 97; and streak of irrational
Parmenides of Elea 3, 134, 142, 150 101; 132–147; notes 149, 151,
Peckham, Morse 21–22 155, 160, 163–168.
“Pessimism and Science Fiction” 10, 20 Vancouver science fiction convention
Plato 3, 5, 17, 21, 101, 136, 159, 163, 39, 72 ; speech 72; X-Kalay
166, 169; ideal reality of 64, clinic 40
110, 134, 150–151; cave of 114– Virgil 4
115; anamnesis 115, 138; Virtual reality xiii-xiv, 3, 5, 8, 11, 16;
Postmodern: era 24; text/textuality 134, in digital age 14; in A Maze
143, 146, 166, 168; tenets 94, of Death 91, 93–94, 96–98,
115,133–135, 143–144 101–102, 104–110, 114; notes
151, 162–163
R
Radio Free Albemuth 23–24, 41, 43, W
149, 165 Wagner, Richard 28, 110, 140, 142
Rimland, Bernard 62 We Can Build You 7, 11, 33, 161
Ritzer, George 126–128, 131 Wiener, Norbert xiii, 11, 69–73, 75–76,
Robinson, Kim Stanley 17, 133, 146 80, 85, 89, 108, 150–151,
“Roog” 1, 30 158–9, 167–168
Williams, Paul 27, 33, 38–40, 50, 141,
S 154
Sallinger, J.D. 5 Woolf, Virginia 67
Sartre, Jean Paul xiii, 94–95; No Exit
95; 161 Y
Scanner Darkly, A xii-xiii, 22, 44, 117– Yeats, William Butler 138–140, 166
132, 149, 151, 164; obscured
reality in 2, 5–6; split character in Z
11–13; and real world 15, 17, 38 Zelazny, Roger 17, 37, 41, 158

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PHILIP K. DICK’S UNUSUAL APPEAL

Having transformed from a relatively marginal writer who, early in his

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“ . . . First you must know that the heavens,

Poetic insights such as Virgil’s strengthened Dick’s belief that we live in

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HOW HUMANS PERCEIVE REALITY

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WHAT IS HUMAN? HUMANITY AND HUMANNESS

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Dick’s confession underlines the writer’s loneliness, as well as important

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WRITER AS AN AVANT-GARDE CULTURAL RECORDER

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THE CONTESTED FUTURE

Dick combines fundamental cosmological and ontological questions with