Did Philip K. Dick ever take a vacation? From reading him you wouldn’t think he strayed far from his thoughts. On my vacation I just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. These are two classics of his pantheon.
I had to ask myself, why had I waited so long to read any of his work? As a child of the 80s, I grew up with Bladerunner and Total Recall and lived through the senseless, breathless Tom Cruise working of Minority Report in 2002, which informed so much of the consumer tech that much of the following decade or so tried to foist on us. Remember iBeacons and Google Glass? Blame Cruise et al. This 2022 article from the BBC sums up Dick’s legacy well.
Having said that, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is not a great starting point for understanding Dick’s world. Ubik brings Dick’s universe into a better focus. Putting them together you can start to see that Dick had a plan. His idea is as clear and solid as his heroes and villains are interchangeably feckless in the face of the ongoing corruption of their universes.
That is the point. In Dick’s universe, humans are at the whim of powers greater than they can understand. Some ascribe this to fate, some to a god or even godlessness. Most have no clue; they have no beginning and no end, they just appear and disappear as Dick weaves his story around them.
Where did Dick get this attitude from? A clue is in this Brief Interview with Dick:
To me the truth was first uttered (in so far as we know) when Xenophanes of Colophon, an Ionian, stated, “One God there is…in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that. But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind.”
From Dick to Vonnegut dicing with Douglas Adams – the heroes in their tales are helpless.
What level of paranoia is healthy in our increasingly technical and baffling world? Have we forgotten the power of cynicism and dreaming in an effort to free ourselves from the predictable patterns we see around us?
I’m certainly guilty of having been positively toxic in the past. I have believed that if we all just pull together for a goal, we can make it. But often, we don’t ask ourselves if the goal is something that we truly believe in.
Philip K. Dick gives us that paranoia back. He gives us the gift of helplessness. And just like another late 20th Century doyen of acerbity – Terry Gilliam. We should keep our boundless positivity in check by occasionally embracing thoughts of helplessness, emptiness and despair.
From that, we derive meaning.