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“I
Rather Suspect My Experience is Not Unique”: Philip K. Dick and the Mid-Century American
Experience
Sabrina
Louise Crane
[Robert Usry
Prize Winner, Fall 2007]
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IN AN INTERVIEW conducted a few weeks before his death,
Philip K. Dick declared that he had contributed only a "few original
ideas…to science fiction." His interviewer disagreed.
As one of the most prolific—and least respected and acknowledged—fiction
writers of the twentieth century, Philip K.
Dick truly did hold a monopoly over numerous themes and ideas
central to the science-fiction genre in which he wrote. Door and food production machines that
talk to people, expanded by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quintology, animated
photographs, adopted by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series, and man finding out that he is really an
android, as in the SF blockbuster Alien,
all began in the tortured mind of Dick.
But Dick's fiction extends far beyond the typical limitations of SF,
encompassing a wide range of socio-cultural commentary and critique, a fact
overlooked and unappreciated by all but the most astute readers.
Consciously or not, PKD's fiction stands as a
direct reflection of his personality, his mind, his life, and his
environment. However, his writing
was not so much of a reflection of the time in which he wrote, but the time
in which he rose to social consciousness.
Characters in both his novels and his short stories often inhabit in
semi-alternate parallel universes extraordinarily similar to the
contemporary American experience, and characters are often either people he
knew intimately or are a direct copy of himself. PKD struggled with the same sorts of
problems and dilemmas that nearly every human has to contend with at some
point in their lives, though generally to a far greater extent. Themes of "what is human?" and
"what is reality?" occupy the vast majority of his fiction. But to fully comprehend PKD, his novels,
his short stories, and even his musings in his diaries and journals need to
be placed within their historical context of American politics, society,
and culture. Too often literary critics
read so deeply and symbolically into a piece of fiction that they distorts
the author's intent and message.
Instead, one should focus on the personal, historical, and
socio-cultural context within which the novel was conceived and written in
order to better understand the author and his intentions. PKD's fiction can be split into two
distinct genres—the first genre of fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s
depicts "the psychotic state where world disintegrates into hurtful,
hostile splinters and shards which clash with one another," through
fiction "exploring capitalist-fascist-bureaucratic structures"
and the second genre, written during and after PKD's religious
hallucinations of the 1970s in which "the world became unitary, alive,
purposeful, benign, and highly intelligent."
In this paper, I will argue two separate points:
first, that PKD's fiction should be read within the historical context of
the post-WWII, Cold War, and Counterculture periods, and that his fiction
can be read as a reflection or a commentary on 20th century American
popular culture. His commentary on
American popular culture is equally as relevant today as it was thirty and
forty years ago. Following those
discussions, I would like to address an issue that some scholars have
occasionally hinted at or danced around, but that no one has (to my
knowledge) effectively argued—that PKD might have suffered from a mild form
of autism or an autism-spectrum disorder, perhaps Asperger's Syndrome. In order to properly address these points,
however, it is necessary to discuss the history and importance of the
science-fiction literary genre as well as give a brief biography of
PKD. In understanding PKD's
socio-political-cultural commentary, it is first necessary to understand
the role of science fiction in American literature. As a general rule, science fiction (from
here, SF for short) has really never been seen in a positive light. From its inception as a separate genre in
the early twentieth century, SF pulp magazines and novels targeted
adolescent and young adult males, therefore only reaching a small minority
of the American population. It was
then—and often, still is—seen as dorky, geeky, or nerdy, a genre for social
misfits or awkward intellectuals. It
also generally bears absolutely no resemblance to reality, let alone to
science. Dick once proclaimed that
SF authors "can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is
limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful…we longed to be
accepted."
Though SF began as a literary form, it has since become primarily
television and motion picture based.
However, despite its supposed failings, SF fulfills an important
function in popular culture. It,
much more so than any other genre of popular literature, functions to stimulate
"our repressed hopes and fears," challenging us to think about
the possible repercussions of our actions and decisions as individuals, as
states, as societies, and as humans.
SF as a distinct genre emerged around the dawn of the twentieth century
despite existing in more primitive forms since the late 1800s. By and large, SF has gone through periods
of dormancy marked by massive spurts of popularity, often coinciding with
major technological innovations and inventions or important world
events. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, and Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth
and Around the World in Eighty Days
typify the earliest SF literature in which many of the genre's conventions
were established. By the mid-1900s,
SF's popularity had blossomed thanks to the reputation of cheap pulp
magazines that published short stories or novels in serials and were
centered around certain genres—Westerns, romances, and of course, SF. Among the most popular of these early SF
pulps were Astounding (Science
Fiction), Amazing Stories, and Argosy.
However, it was not until the immediate post-WWII period that SF literature
began to arouse popular interest. As
technology improved at an alarming rate, a veritable proliferation of SF
emerged. New "cultural products
and genres" added to the discussion of "the revolutionary and
explosive cultural impact of the atomic bomb."
Obviously, SF became intertwined with the ideas of World War III, nuclear
holocaust, and nuclear apocalypse, eventually becoming its own separate
sub-genre within SF as more popular fiction authors were wary to discuss
such Earth and humanity-annihilating topics. At the same time, robots, cyborgs, and androids
entered the lexicon of SF and popular culture at-large.
PKD successfully combined both these central themes in his novels and short
stories. Unfortunately, SF motion
pictures pushed SF literature further into obscurity during the 1940s and
1950s, with films such as Them, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, and The Beast of Yucca Flats. SF films became an exceptionally popular
means of addressing American politics and culture, but SF novels have not
been paid the same respects though they do an equally good job of
addressing the same problems.
SF films, more than SF literature or any other form of film, "best
expressed emotional feelings about Cold War America" to the masses.
By the 1990s, SF television shows such as the various incarnations of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate
found widespread popularity among demographic groups that typically would
not enjoy SF literature. In a
related trend, SF literature largely succumbed to a new genre title in the
1980s, that of 'cyberpunk,' of which PKD likely would have been classified
if he had lived longer. Regardless
of its incarnation, science fiction "serves to maintain the status quo
by stimulating our repressed hopes and fears…draining off those threatening
emotions."
Because SF literature did not truly achieve widespread popularity in America,
it could thrash out taboo or delicate topics that authors of popular
literature dared not discuss. SF
authors felt free to criticize the American government and political policy
without fear of reprisal, even as the House Un-American Activities
Committee investigated celebrities and blacklisted prominent Hollywood screenwriters. The American federal government, and by
default, most forms of institutionalized government, came under fire. Some SF authors attacked the Manhattan
Project and the nuclear scientists associated with the program for the
impending destruction of America. Others railed against American nuclear
policy with vivid descriptions of nuclear war and the annihilation of
humanity or attacked America's
civil defense Cold War-era policies.
Occasionally, SF literature of the 1950s and 1960s poked fun at
religion, as with Mercerism in Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or the god-head Elron in "The
Turning Wheel."
PKD successfully mocked, satirized, or addressed all of these issues in his
fiction. In fact, it is quite lucky
that PKD stumbled almost accidentally into writing SF, as it is the only
literary genre in which his absurdity and socio-political criticism would
not be shunned. PKD rather hated
writing SF and consistently complained about how his realist stories were
always turned down by publishing houses, but he admitted that he was
addicted to the genre after finding his earliest successes there. The environment in which PKD grew up and
rose to social consciousness had a profound impact on both the style and
the content of his literature. In
December 1928, only a few months before the Stock Market collapse and the start
of the Great Depression, Dorothy Dick gave birth to a set of twins—Jane
Charlotte and Philip Kindred.
Unfortunately, Jane died in January 1929 of malnutrition. The loss of his sister played a
profoundly devastating role in PKD's life, a fact that he would not come to
terms with until his late 40s.
Shortly following Jane's death, Edgar Dick moved his family to Southern California where he worked for the
Department of Agriculture, making visits to local farmers to ensure
compliance with federal regulations.
Occasionally PKD would join his father on work trips where he saw
the impact of the Depression first-hand.
When Edgar and Dorothy Dick split up in the mid-1930s, Dorothy and
PKD moved to Washington,
D.C. before returning to California,
this time settling in what would become Dick's spiritual and cultural home—Berkeley. Dorothy took a job with the Department of
Agriculture, which gave her an office on the campus of the University of California
at Berkeley.
Due to severely debilitating agoraphobia and panic attacks that even
psychotherapy and medication could not manage, PKD struggled through middle
and high school. It was in high
school that Dick began hearing voices.
At first, they only directed him towards the correct answers of
physics exams; as he grew into adulthood, the messages would become weirder
and more cryptic.
To ease his pain, PKD began writing short stories after reading Astounding, even publishing his own
newspapers during World War II.
Despite increasing anxiety attacks that caused PKD to complete his
entire senior year of high school with a personal tutor, Dick enrolled in
the University of California, Berkeley
to study philosophy; however, he vehemently objected to mandatory ROTC and
weapons training that the school required, leading him to drop out of UCB
before the end of his first semester.
Dick then held a job at a local radio station and a records shop,
where he met and married the first of his five wives. In 1951, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published PKD's
first short story, "Roog," a story about household pets, robots,
and reality. This set the precedent
of starving-author that Dick would follow until he died. By 1953, PKD had become addicted to
prescription pain-killers, mainly amphetamines, which would continue to
spiral out-of-control for some twenty years, landing him in rehab after
several failed suicide attempts. In
the late 1970s, PKD admitted that A
Scanner Darkly, widely read as one of the most virulent pieces of
anti-drug propaganda, was the first book he had even written completely
sober and without the aid of speed or uppers.
Through the 1950s and 1960s,
PKD's mental condition continued to deteriorate as he diagnosed himself
with paranoid schizophrenia.
Official consultations with psychiatrists led to no official
diagnosis, however. Contrary to what
is commonly believed and what fellow writer Harlan Ellison perpetuated, PKD
only dabbled in illicit drugs once.
He swore off acid after one use led to an extraordinarily bad
'trip.' Following his single experiment with illegal substances and
following general anesthesia from minor dental surgery, PKD began having
bizarre religious hallucinations and visions. Through the 1970s, his visions grew
increasingly stranger and more frequent—at one point, PKD correctly
diagnosed a life-threatening birth defect in his young son; in another, he
truly believed that he was both PKD and 'Thomas,' an early Christian living
in hiding in Rome during the first century A.D. He remained "absolutely convinced
that [he] was living in Rome,
some time after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal."
These otherworldly revelations eventually led PKD to become a self-taught
physicist, cosmologist, and religious scholar. By the late 1970s, PKD honestly believed
that the time of the apocalypse was imminent and that mankind's salvation
lay with a messianic figure named Tagore.
In parallel with his new philosophy, PKD virtually abandoned writing SF for
religious commentary and semi-autobiographical realist fiction, though he
would argue that he had never intended to become a SF author. Unfortunately, years of drug abuse and
mental illness eventually caught up with PKD; he died in 1982 following a
massive stroke, never having regained consciousness. In 31 years as a professional writer, PKD
penned almost forty novels and some 120 short stories, though not all
have—or ever will be—published.
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Ridley
Scott’s “Bladerunner” was the first movie made from one of Dick’s novels,
in this case, Do Android’s Dream of
Electric Sheep?
Dick
reportedly got to see the completed film before his death.
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He was an astoundingly prolific writer—in 1953
alone, Dick had twenty-seven stories published and could write, edit, and
submit a novel in two weeks.
As of 2007, there have been eight major motion pictures and two television
series based (often quite loosely) on his novels and short stories, as well
as two opera and two radio adaptations.
A biopic directed by and starring actor Paul Giamatti is supposedly
in the works; a film adaptation of Radio
Free Albemuth is slated for release in late 2008, with rocker Alanis
Morisette playing the role of Silvia.
With PKD, normal rules of socialization and conversation not only did not
apply—they did not even exist. It
was not out of the ordinary for him to spout off one theory one day only to
vehemently recant or deny it the next.
In conversations, it was not unusual to discuss six different topics
at one time between three different people, none of whom really knew what
was going on.
While PKD's letters provide a more lucid and consistent view of his mental
state, his novels and short stories are the best—really the only—means to
truly understand the inner workings of PKD's mind. PKD himself acknowledged that "what
I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There is fun & religion & psychotic horror strewn about like
a bunch of hats." Like any good author, PKD wrote mainly about what he
knew, what he experienced. Near the
end of his life, PKD realized that what he wrote was "palpably
autobiographical" though that was never his intention in writing.
Much of this will be revealed through the course of this paper; however, it
needs to be noted that some aspects of PKD's literature cannot be
understood without realizing that it was written as a direct reflection of
his own life. One of the main themes
PKD wrote about was his struggle with various mental illnesses. From a very young age, PKD faced severe
agoraphobia. Dorothy ordered her
pre-teen son into psychotherapy while only in middle school.
While this severe social anxiety eventually calmed down in his adult years,
panic attacks and unrelenting paranoia replaced them.
Later in his life, PKD diagnosed himself as a paranoid-schizophrenic after
a homeopathic remedy of water-soluble vitamins designed to abate symptoms
of schizophrenia actually helped him.
In the 1970s, PKD came to the realization that schizophrenics simply
see "conflicting realities," solving all his problems with one
simple conclusion, and one he quite liked.
In this vein, PKD wrote three semi-autobiographical novels about
split personalities, Radio Free
Albemuth, Valis, and A Scanner Darkly. Radio
and Valis can even be read as an
inner dialogue between a PKD who knew he was schizophrenic and a rational
PKD searching for the inner truth. Clans of the Alphane Moon shows
different mental illnesses, each in their own microcosm of society. Freed patients of a mental hospital, the
humans divided themselves into small villages based on their respective
illnesses. In an interview shortly
before his death, PKD admitted to being manic depressive, mildly
schizophrenic and neurotic, all under a layer of extreme paranoia.
As Horselover Fat, PKD acknowledged that his life was not one to be taken
seriously, stating that he would "write a book about it but no one
would believe a group of human beings could be as irrational as we
are." As PKD himself said, "mental illness is not funny."
But it is this wackiness and this haunting realism that makes PKD's literature
so effective. One literary
critic-fan noted, "Dick's work derives much of its power form its
irrationality."
In addition to his self-diagnosed schizophrenia, PKD also suffered from
severe bouts of paranoia that began in his teens and lasted until the very
end of his life. While PKD certainly
experienced the normal fear that people or 'the government' were against
him, his fiction presents a belief that even inanimate objects can scheme
against human kind. PKD probably
would have been happy living like one of his characters, Herb Asher,
completely self-contained in a sealed bubble.
He even went so far as to phrase the Cold War in terms of a massive group
hallucination.
Following his wife Anne's court-ordered trip to a mental hospital, Dick admitted
to his shrink that he was sure
Anne had committed a murder and that his own mother had murdered Jane. He felt he was certainly the next target
of this massive assassination conspiracy.
On the phone, Dick made his friends prove their identities by quizzing
them. Numerous times, PKD truly
believed that his house had been broken into while he was out; the fact
that someone did break in is merely coincidental.
His phones were tapped, the television was recording his every move and
action, micro transmitters relayed every thought, and even his beloved cats
were stealing his possessions.
Shortly before his death, PKD said "the ultimate in paranoia is
not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you."
Dick acknowledged in Clans that paranoia,
classified by a complete lack of empathy, was the worst mental illness that
existed.
To him, the "perfect" paranoia would be a form that manifested
itself in a mind "totally free of moral and cultural bias…without any
empathic ability whatever" and completely lacking in all emotion.
He felt sure that conspiracies on the part of the ruling class are
inevitable to ensure the security of any political system.
Thus, PKD had no trouble rationalizing his paranoid beliefs as completely
normal to the American experience of the 1950s and 1960s.
Beginning in 1960s, PKD began having bizarre religious hallucinations. During the first of these visions, Dick
"saw Palmer Eldritch in the Sun—I saw God backwards," a vision
that led him to write a novel about the strange, mechanical face in the sky
that "peered down" on him.
He translated this image further in The
Divine Invasion where a policeman saw a face behind a plastic mask that
suspiciously resembled the WWI fortifications of the Maginot Line.
This experience was strongly rooted in PKD's past. He had one horrendous experience with a
WWI mask as a child—his father jokingly pulled on his gas mask, absolutely
terrifying the toddler PKD and earning the scorn of his wife for scaring
the child. The face he saw in the
sky was ultimately his father's gas mask, and became the inspiration for
Palmer Eldritch.
A similar face also appeared in "Fair Game," where nuclear
physicist Anthony Douglas is shocked to see a gigantic eye followed by a
gigantic face peeking down at him from the sky.
A religious voice allowed PKD to diagnose his young son with a potentially
fatal birth defect that had to be treated immediately with surgery. Following an experience involving seeing
a fish pendant that secretly symbolized the earliest Christians, PKD
suddenly realized that, like Bob Arctor/Fred in A Scanner Darkly, he had "begun to see the entire universe
backward," understanding the world in a completely different way, a
way that only a minute handful ever had or ever would.
The reality he saw, the reality of living in America during the 1970s was
only "reflections of reality." PKD realized that he really was
both PKD of 1974 and an early Christian named Thomas, living in Rome in 74 CE and
hiding from religious persecution in the labyrinths under the Coliseum.
He further explored this theme in A
Scanner Darkly during Bob/Fred's fall, realizing that Bob equaled Fred
just like Thomas equaled PKD.
This experience encouraged PKD to more fully explore the idea of "what
is real" in his final works of fiction. He eventually came to conclude that
"reality is a web of time and change" in which either space and
time did not matter or were interchangeable.
The semi-autobiographical VALIS trilogy, with additional clarification from
his diaries assembled posthumously in the Exegesis, chronicles PKD's religious visions from February and
March 1974. He truly believed that
"the universe had begun to talk to him," informing him that the
second, rather, fifth and final, coming of Christ was imminent.
He became a Gnostic Christian, believing in two separate Gods: one an
insane and blind creator deity and another far more sensible deity who took
over from the insane one. The insane
creator deity had "invaded our universe" to destroy us all.
The blind and insane creator deity created an evil and unreal world that
only the true deity could rationalize.
Splitting of the Godhead created male and female, good and evil, yin
and yang, which is why opposing forces still existed. One could make the argument that these
two Godheads represented PKD and his twin sister.
The Torah—and thus, its Christian equivalent, as well as the New
Testament—was actually alive, a source of living information. A beam of pink light delivered this
information to Herb, Nick Brady, and PKD alike. God himself occasionally returns to
Earth, his spirit entering a chosen human body; PKD believed himself one of
these lucky chosen people, as Herb and Nick were in Dick's fiction. PKD suggested that God might be playing a
game with humanity, mimicking Einstein's infamous quote to Heisenberg that
"God doesn't play dice"; Dick even went so far to suggest that
God himself was cruel and lacking in empathy, a paranoid much like himself.
Dick had to become an amateur theologian in order to understand his own
mind. In addition, he developed a
number of truly strange theories. He
came to the conclusion that Jesus only ever intended to bestow salvation
and eternal life upon his twelve disciples, not the world at large.
Jesus was crucified not to save mankind but because mankind was
insane. God himself knew that his
son Jesus would fail in his mission to save humanity. The
Divine Invasion retold the story of creation and Jesus, filling in Ribs
Rommey for Mary, Herb Asher for Joseph, Elias as the Angel, Manny as Christ
reincarnated, and the flight from CY30-CY30B as the flight from Egypt.
PKD also theorized that Rybys-as-Mary resented her position as the mother
of Christ. The conclusion of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
startlingly mimicked the Book of Acts, completely unintentionally. At one point, PKD even believed that all
living Christians were descendants of the heretical Egyptian pharaoh
Akhenaton, whose descendants took his revolutionary monotheistic ideas to
become the first true Christians.
Christ himself was "an extra-terrestrial life form…living
information," working to pass on his knowledge to the human race.
Humans themselves descended from a race of extra-terrestrials from the
planet known as Albemuth or Formalhaut.
The earliest Eucharist, supposedly developed some 200 years before the
birth of Christ, used toxic mushrooms to create a group hallucination, a
fact that didn't really surprise Dick much.
However, PKD believed he was truly lucky to experience such visions, as it
allowed him to live in the past as an early Christian in Rome, in the
present as PKD, and in the future as a three-eyed alien cyborg.
Schizophrenia allowed him to experience multiple—and equally real—realities
simultaneously.
Through Horselover Fat, PDK acknowledged that he "no longer knew the
difference between fantasy and divine revelation."
Funnily enough, in the end it was his religious visions that convinced PKD
he had finally become sane for the first time in his life.
Readers who are not religious scholars, however, will probably have serious
problems understanding much of PKD's religious musings, as he often did not
understand them at first. When PKD
wrote The Three
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is probably the most overt
of Dick’s books with its religious or mystical themes, hallucinatory
drugs, psychosis, and questions about reality itself.
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Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch in 1965 and Ubik in 1969, little of the
religious undertones made sense to him at the time. It was not until his post-1974 religious
hallucinations that he began to find even the most basic understanding of
his own novels. The title character
of Stigmata is an inter-galactic
human voyager turned worker drone for aliens. Through the use of the new hallucinogenic
drug Chew-Z that he promotes, all those who ingest become Palmer
Eldritch. Chew-Z delivers users a
sense of immortality, eliminating dimensions of both time and space. Some takers of Chew-Z become Eldritch
permanently, taking on one of his three simulacrum characteristics. All people will slowly become "parts
of a cosmic living organism."
Thus, Eldritch becomes a parasitic God-head, a devourer of souls, much like
PKD's insane creator God.
The unfortunate small-man Leo Bolero is pitted against this "False
evil," much like PKD himself.
Upon rereading Stigmata
some fifteen years after its publication, PKD suddenly realized that the
book was actually a study in the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation in
the Eucharist, "reversing the bipolarities of good & evil."
In Ubik, an ever-changing product
manufactured by a company of the same name seeks total domination of the
world, much like Eldritch's Chew-Z.
Time distorts and moves backwards, but in a world that mirrors our
own in every other way. The novel
can be read as a valiant attempt to decode the religious visions Dick
experienced. Shortly before his
death in 1982, PKD admitted "all I know today is that I didn't know
when I wrote Ubik is that Ubik isn't fiction." In these
two novels, God, Glen Runciter, Palmer Eldritch, and Ubik are all one in
the same. Ubik, in PKD's mind, was
Logos or the Holy Word. While
contemplating his visions, PKD came to the conclusion that he could not
have written his own books—rather, Holy Wisdom, the Logos, Saint Sophia
wrote all his books through him, which is why he did not understand many of
the themes they contained, sometimes not until ten years after they were
written.
It took one autobiographical novel, Radio
Free Albemuth, which eventually led to the Valis trilogy, for PKD to come to terms with his own mind and
his own experiences. In possibly the
most bizarre of his religious visions, PKD believed he had seen the final,
the fifth savior. In September 1981,
only six months before his untimely death, Dick saw a vision of Tagore—the
Maitreya, Christ, Lord Krishna, Buddha all rolled into one, living among
the people in Sri Lanka. He believed it was his own job to prepare
the world for the coming of this Christ-like figure.
Unlike Christ, however, who strove to save mankind from ultimate
destruction, Tagore strove to save both mankind and the environment
alike. PKD saw "the Mother
Earth suffering" and that nothing man could do could save the Earth.
However, Tagore was also the ecosphere itself. Thus, PKD believed, humans must save the
planet in order to save themselves.
He thus became involved in an ecological preservation movement, Deep
Ecology and various humanitarian causes to donate clean water and food.
PKD knew that Tagore was there, as did nearly everyone on Earth, but very
few realized it. PKD was simply
waiting for his Lord's return. His
King had never intended to be caught by the Romans, but the world got in the
way of His plans (but doesn't that defeat the point of an omnipotent God? PKD
wondered).
In the form of Tagore, He had been on Earth, in hiding, for years; he had
been present at the battle of Stalingrad
and helped turn the tide against the Nazis.
In order to unite the world to save the Earth, Tagore would cross
religious, economic, political, and social boundaries.
PKD also wrote about the people and the places he knew best. This fact is understandable when one
considers the amazing and alien worlds that PKD created in his mind; it
only makes sense that he would chose to populate them with something
familiar. In an interview less than
two months before his death, PKD pondered where his characters came
from. He eventually concluded that
his "brain is full of hundreds of sub-personalities" because he
could not understand that he had simply imagined them or created them from
nothing.
During the mid-1950s, PKD began caring for cats. One of his earliest cats had an
irrational fear of garbage collectors, which Dick used as the inspiration
for "Roog."
In a later short story, "Strange
Garden," Terran
humans who intermingle with more highly evolved humans are turned into
large lion-like cats.
Dick's religious-metaphysical VALIS
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The original
cover to Dick’s magnum opus Valis
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trilogy—Valis,
The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer—is
a semi-autobiographical novel series.
Most of the characters and locations that appear throughout the
trilogy are people and places Dick was intimately familiar with, though
usually with slightly altered names or characteristics. Bishop James A. Pike is transformed into
the fictional Bishop Timothy Archer; Pike's son did actually commit suicide
as a young adult.
Anne, PKD's third wife, was likely the inspiration for the manically
depressed psychiatrist Mary Rittersdorf; Dick probably also based the both
the megalomaniacal and demanding Rachael Rosen and Pris Stratton on
Anne. While living in Northern California in the early 1970s, PKD met a
woman named Sherri who was dying of lymphoma. Sherri appeared prominently in Valis as an antagonist to Phil and
Horselover Fat. Maren Hackett, the
mistress-slash-secretary of Bishop Pike, also suffering from cancer,
probably inspired the fictional Sherri, as well as Sadassa Silvia of Radio Free Albemuth. PKD's Sherri and Silvia also drew
influence from Doris, a cancer-stricken young woman who helped PKD through
some of his toughest times.
Religious cult-leader Claudia Hambro from Confessions of a Crap Artist seems based partly on PKD himself and
partly on movie director and PKD's friend Benjamin Creme with her belief in
Christ as an extra-terrestrial life form.
Claudia also appears as an alternate version of PKD because of her
schizophrenia and paranoid delusions.
In Valis, a young drug dealer
Donna steals cases of Coca-Cola from the back of a transport trailer,
drinks all the bottles, and returns the empty bottles for a recycling
deposit, just as PKD's friend—also named Donna—did in the late 1970s.
The KGB agent who ran the Bad Luck Restaurant in Transmigration really existed as a restaurant owner in Berkeley.
Various places that PKD lived also appear significantly in PKD's fiction,
Point Reyes Station and Marin
County being the most
notable.
PKD set the majority of The Divine
Invasion in Washington,
D.C., where Dick spent some
of his formative early years.
The most notable of the people PKD knew that showed up in his fiction was
his twin sister, Jane. When female
characters cannot be identified as someone PKD actually knew, they can be assumed
to be Jane. PKD thought that his
sister was somehow involved in revealing his religious visions. Through Nick Brady, PKD explained how it
was none other than Jane as a three-eyed sibyl who guarded the Roman
Republic he believed he lived in.
He experienced "the figure of the beautiful women who I met &
whose voice I kept hearing." Philip and Jane were always in telepathic
contact in a bizarre, mutually beneficial symbiosis.
Like Zina and Herb, Jane whispered directions and instructions to PKD in times
of need.
During a 1979 interview, PKD finally came out to admit that "the Valis
mind" was his twin sister, someone who "has been with my all my
life."
It was Jane, not God, who had been sending him religious visions for so
many years and directing him to the 'inner truth.'
He hoped that one day, he and Jane would be reunited as Manny and Zina
were, back into their original state, a condition he called syzygy.
Jane provided her brother with the introduction to the VALIS
"intergalactic communications network" that connected across
space-time, beaming pink-tinged information to PKD as one of his
conceptions of God.
But most important, PKD inserted aspects of his own personality, his own
experiences, and his own life into his stories. Most of his life, PKD struggled to
understand himself; he never fully grasped any comprehension of the world
in which he lived. The most obvious
of these is, of course, the VALIS trilogy
(Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The
Transmigration of Timothy Archer) where PKD attempted to document and
explain his religious hallucinations of February and March 1974. The predecessor to the VALIS series is an anti-communist,
anti-police state, anti-drug novel entitled Radio Free Albemuth.
Two of the main characters of the novel, Nick Brady and Phil, are obviously
PKD himself. Nick's mother belonged
to the American Socialist Workers Party and worked for the US Department of
Forestry, positions which PKD's own mother held. Phil is an emerging and constantly broke
SF writer struggling to make it by in Berkeley. Nicholas experiences PKD's assorted
religious visions, admittedly slightly out-of-context, though he refuses to
read Phil's SF literature because it has nothing "serious to
say."
Because PKD applied so many of his own experiences to his fiction, his
writing comes across as bleakly and starkly realistic in a way few other
writers have ever accomplished.
However, it was his inclusion of a historical context as the
background for his literature that makes PKD's works so surprisingly
real—though he would probably disagree with that. Even before the formal conclusion of
World War II, the United
States entered into a new and very
different war, one that would last some 45 years: the Cold War. The Cold War was not simply a titanic clash
of military and political might between two of the world's most powerful
nations. Rather, it was a clash of
drastically different ideologies—capitalism and Marxism, democracy and
totalitarianism, West and East.
Against a former ally, the US prepared itself for the
atomic World War III, the war to truly end all wars and quite possibly, the
world as well. It was at the dawn of
the atomic age that PDK came to social consciousness—he was only sixteen
when the first nuclear bombs were dropped, when WWII ended, and the when
the Cold War began. He was only
twenty when the Soviet Union tested the
first thermonuclear device, a massive bomb resulting in a fireball some
three miles wide. Thus, it comes as
no surprise that themes surrounding nuclear war played an integral role in
PKD's earliest literature. July 16,
1945 marked one of, if not the greatest, turning point in American and
world history—the explosion of the first atomic weapon. American excitement over the
possibilities of clean and abundant atomic power almost immediately gave
way to fears of nuclear annihilation.
While most Americans accepted the necessity of the nuclear bomb in
causing Japan to
surrender and in holding back the Soviet Union,
they did not want to see the destructive weapons used again. Atomic power had the possibility to
become "both mankind's
scourge and benefactor," but as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s,
Americans increasingly began to fear the destructive power of nuclear
warfare. This comes as no surprise,
as the Truman administration "insisted on denying…the most basic
information about how many atomic bombs were available, or on what their
effects would be if employed." During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962,
a group of American military officers hacked into a federal computer bank
and did some minor reprogramming, thus allowing them to bypass the chain of
command for launching nuclear weapons.
Eisenhower continued to promote building up the nation's nuclear stockpile
to avoid war with the Soviets, threatening massive retaliation to scare off
potential attacks.
American mass-production of atomic and thermonuclear weapons ramped up when
the US
realized they had lost not only the atomic monopoly, but the atomic
advantage to the Soviets. In his
book By the Bomb's Early Light,
Paul Boyer argued that American consciousness towards 'the bomb' cycled
through periods of activism and apathy, much like SF cycled through times
of popularity and dormancy.
Following a brief but intense spurt of activism immediately
following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans settled down into a period of
nuclear apathy that lasted until the first tests of the hydrogen bombs by
both the Soviet Union and the United States in 1959, followed shortly
thereafter by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President Truman largely refused to assert America's superiority in
nuclear weapons because he feared their destructive power, but President
Eisenhower proudly proclaimed their power as instruments of world
change. Nikita Khrushchev, on the
other hand, was more than willing "to risk war," though only as a
last resort, as evidenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
PKD's short stories mirror this cycle of
involvement in American society, with his earliest short stories of the
1950s expression strong anti-nuclear sentiments, giving way to much more
restrained opinions by the 1960s and 1970s.
While many Americans accepted nuclear weaponry as a necessity for
ensuring American world dominance, for many, it symbolized disorder,
dissent, and entropy in American society.
It did not take long for Americans to begin questioning America's
sense of righteous atomic power.
Dick truly believed that, because of the horror of WWII, the world truly
"woke up" in 1945.
Most SF literature and films, really literature and film in general, of the
immediate post-bomb period did not explicitly address nuclear war. Instead, most SF authors concerned
themselves more with the aftermath of such war. As a child and teenager, PKD remained
convinced that nuclear apocalypse was imminent and that the United States
would meet its end in his lifetime.
Fears of a nuclear apocalypse, both in popular literature and popular
culture, were widespread by the early 1960s, putting PKD quite a few years
ahead of his time.
|
 
Dick’s
initial published works included paperback original novels that were part
of Ace Books’ “Doubles.” His novels proved extremely popular and most
were reprinted in single, stand-alone editions.
|
PKD in particular addressed more of the long-term
consequences of widespread nuclear war.
In his novels and his short stories, he included themes such as
radiation sickness, the changing climate, and the abandonment of Earth for
lunar and inter-galactic colonies.
PDK did not simply create issues in American popular culture: he
merely reflected the atomic fears prevalent in American society in the
post-WWII period. One of the most
pronounced and widespread side effects of PKD's fictitious atomic warfare
has been the sterilization and/or mental instability of a majority of the
American public. PKD's John Isidore
in Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (not to be confused with the semi-autobiographical character of
the same name from Confessions of a
Crap Artist), written in 1968 shortly before American attention turned
from nuclear warfare to Vietnam,
characterizes the devastating effects of nuclear warfare. If the current state—or complete lack
thereof—of animals is any indication, the human race has only a very slim
chance of long-term evolution and survival.
Even in the largest cities, only a smattering of humans
remains. In a massive experiment of
social Darwinism, the weakest humans died immediately while stronger humans
who survived the short-term affects of the bomb faced long, drawn-out
illnesses and inevitable extinction.
The few humans remaining on Earth following waves of radiation
poisoning and mass emigration have been rendered infertile,
"biologically unacceptable." They are classified as "specials"
or "chickenheads" as an insult that indicated their complete lack
of human functioning. In order to
function like what we would consider 'human,' the humans on Terra must
resort to artificial mood organs that stimulate emotions.
On the Terra of Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said, the world is divided among genetically mutated
"Sixes" and "ordinaries." However, the distinction
between the two is never elucidated, and only confounded further when one
of the character calls a Six "chickenshit."
Similarly, the "phocolems," or limbless humans born in the
aftermath of a disastrous atmospheric nuclear test, are called
"funnies" because of their bizarre evolutionary traits and they
way they look. Many of these humans
must live symbiotically in order to survive, sometimes living in groups of
up to six humans connected like Siamese twins. In an idea straight out of SF, Edie
Keller's under-developed twin brother lives inside of her abdomen, fully
alive, but lacking all senses and the ability to move. The few who managed to survive the
explosions and immediate aftermath of the hydrogen-bomb war eventually fall
victim to the clouds of radiation that covered the planet.
Clans of the Alphane Moon tells
the story of an entire moon of mentally ill humans, a result of hydrogen
warfare.
War can, literally and figuratively, turn the average human into mindless,
emotionless vegetables. Other
physical and mental problems ultimately result from nuclear warfare that
affects primarily the United States
and the Soviet Union. "Faith of our Fathers," one of
Dick's most atypical short stories, depicts the disgusting skin cancers
that can stem from radiation poisoning, cancers that cannot be treated or
cured by any known medication.
Children that survived the nuclear holocaust and successive nuclear
winter have all become sterile in "Second Variety." Children all
have "arms and legs [were] like pipe cleaners" and
"radiation skin" that chaps and flakes off. They are forced to live in underground
tunnels and caves, like Polish resistance during the Warsaw Uprising, to
avoid further radiation damage.
"Ash sickness" causes hallucinations and delusions on a grand
scale.
Clouds of radiation boil the skies of Earth post-World War Terminus, making
survivors certifiably insane. The
ever-accumulating radioactive dirt and dust buries humans alive. Radioactive dust in the air always
manages to make its way into the human brain, causing mass insanity.
Any humans that survived the atomic war in "Precious Artifact"
lost their hair and their teeth, turning in wrinkled and withered almost-humans.
Humans in "The Golden Man" exhibit at least eighty-seven known
genetic mutations as a result radiation poisoning, from women with eight
breasts or wings to men with wings, all called "deeves" for
deviants or deviations.
Some humans born after the outbreak of war are mutants more like worms than
human children. However, this has
turned out to be a rather positive genetic mutation, as it allows humans to
live underground as is often necessary.
"Foster, You're Dead" and "Faith of Our Fathers" bring
to life a world of biological and chemical warfare where enemies poison the
water supply with an LSD-like drug called JJ-180, an idea not terribly far
away from the minds of a post-9/11 American society.
The few humans who retained the biological capability to procreate and thus
ensure the survival of the human race have been forbidden from doing so,
and by the United Nations, no less.
Sadly, Earth (always called Terra by PKD) suffers the same grave
consequences as those who inhabit it.
Humans' home becomes completely uninhabitable. Antarctica's
glaciers melt, leaving behind sandy beaches on the frozen continent; at the
same time, the oceans are evaporating.
Increasing cloud cover is so rapidly altering Earth's climate that
it will soon become unlivable for the human race.
Even the air has become radioactive.
Instead of chemical or pollutant -laden 'dirty rain,' Terra instead
experiences radioactive rain.
The atmosphere retains far too much heat, virtually eradicating the
ecosystem. These environmental
impacts stand as more than just a bit ironic, as in the late 1940s, nuclear
scientist John O'Neill proposed bombarding the Arctic with atomic weapons
to melt polar ice caps to give the world a warmer, more tropical climate at
all latitudes.
On the various Terras marked by atomic warfare, North America and Europe generally cease to exist. Occasionally, parts of Asia
disappear too.
Androids depicts a truly
nightmarish future where all but the hardiest animals have become
extinct. In their place, various
companies invent mechanical constructs of extinct animals, but none can
exactly replicate an animal's true nature.
Mankind's ultimate weapon, the E-bomb, will cause the Earth to
explode in one final nuclear fireworks show after the V-bomb destroys Venus
and shortly before the S-bomb annihilates the entire solar system, promptly
followed by the G-bomb and finally, the U-bomb.
The theme of ultimate nuclear annihilation also appears in PKD's short
stories of the 1950s.
"Breakfast at Twilight" shows a world in which America has been under Soviet attack for
eight years, reducing most of North America
to slag and ash.
In "Imposter," nuclear weapons in the form of uranium bombs are
disguised as humans (read: androids), but with no set trigger.
One of the most haunting depictions of American nuclear war occurs in PKD's
"Upon the Dull Earth." In the short story, the characters all
fear the imminent and inevitable nuclear holocaust. Middle-class, prosperous Americans feared
the nuclear war, not simply because of death, but because they could lose
their new-found prosperity and happiness in the blink of an eye.
|
|
Cover from the original printing of Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle, which subsequently won the Hugo Award for
Best Novel from the World Science Fiction Convention.
|
PKD's first successful novel, The Man in the High Castle, depicts
an alternate history where the Axis powers defeat the United States in World War
II. World War III, however, looms on
the horizon in the form of German h-bombs, threatening to destroy mankind
once and for all. When Herr Goebbels
becomes Chancellor of the Nazi Reich, he plans to institute "Operation
Dandelion" that will complete the Aryanization of the human race
through nuclear holocaust.
"World War Terminus" in Androids
was the war to end all wars, the war to eliminate the weak and unworthy.
Through the early 1960s, in fact, a large majority of PKD's work deals with
warfare, and in nearly every war situation, 'war' refers explicitly to nuclear
weaponry. Another major
nuclear-related theme that PKD addressed is the need to abandon Earth/Terra
because of radiation, disease, destruction, and annihilation. Both lunar and Martian colonies appear
throughout his works as humans flee Earth en masse. Following their wide-scale destruction of
America, Africa, and Europe, the Nazis of The Man in the High Castle make the first sojourns to the moon
and to Mars. "Autofac," a
short story concerning the automation of all industry following nuclear war,
shows an Earth so destroyed by hydrogen bomb warfare that only a few human
colonies remain on the planet.
The few Terran war survivors residing in Martian colonies in both "The
Days of Perky Pat" and The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch still live in underground hovels, taking
hallucinogenic drugs in a collective attempt to return to Terra's
civilization and society.
Similarly, in "Precious Artifact," humans carefully construct
Martian colonies to replicate Earth as closely as possible. However, Mars has also become home to
other emigrants fleeing destruction, aliens from the star system Prox, as
well as humans fleeing overpopulation.
Human survivors of World War Terminus fled Earth to avoid becoming a
biological dead-end.
Unfortunately, humans on these Martian colonies, despite their best
efforts, have no culture and no society, and are wholly desolate and barren
(in both senses of the word).
Lunar colonies fare no better, serving more as bases for exploration and
colonization missions than long-term settlements.
Humans also flee to other planets and moons, including Venus and Ganymede,
to escape certain nuclear death as war ravages the first colonies.
Ironically, PKD also tells stories where humans are leaving Earth/Terra not
necessarily because their home planet has been eradicated. Lester Herrick, the main character of
"Human Is," travels to distant star systems to learn about
ancient cultures and societies.
However, the story ends in a typically Dickian way as evil,
plotting, devious aliens take over Lester’s body and mind.
Humans who left Terra for the Alphane system find their new home subject to
the same problems they faced on Terra.
The various aliens who make their life on Terra, far from their own
planets and moons, are easily assimilated into the stratified Terran
society.
In an odd twist of fate, visitors from both inside and outside the solar
system have come to Terra in "If There Were No Benny Cemoli" in
order to resettle a destroyed planet.
Headquartered in the ruins of New
York City, the inter-planetary organization CURB
seeks to mould planet Terra into something suitable for life in 2170.
However, none of PKD's short stories or novels ever presents any reason for
nuclear war. No political or
military actions are ever discussed.
Whether the war was instigated on purpose or by accident is not
important to the story line; what is important is simply the idea that
humans have unleashed their own destruction through their quest for
knowledge and power. The short story
"Breakfast at Twilight" tells of a radioactive world where war
simply "grew," almost organically.
In Androids, no one
"remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had
won."
Following a Soviet offensive in "Second Variety," North America "had been blasted off the
map," though not with an official cause.
Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, the title character of Dr. Bloodmoney, supposedly unleashes a hydrogen-bomb nuclear
holocaust, not just over the United States, but the entire
world; however, PKD never reveals whether Dr. Bluthgeld really can be held
responsible or whether the nuclear war was merely the result of a computer
"miscalculation."
Readers eventually learn that Terra has faced large-scale thermonuclear
warfare at the hands of the alien Alphanes but never learn what exactly
caused the war. Humans engage
beetle-like aliens from the Betelgeuse system; one hundred years into the
armed conflict, war has spread, engulfing other nearby star systems, but no
one can remember why it began.
In the one case where a definitive cause for war is known, the information
regarding the war is prohibited to all except the highest-ranking military
officials and political leaders.
In the mid and late 1950s, the American government instituted a policy of
civil defense to prepare American citizens for the inevitability of 'the
bomb.'
The main component of this civil defense system was underground shelters,
both public and private. Companies
like the Peace-O-Mind Company from Texas
built shelters designed for the private sphere. While the government thought these
shelters were the best, really, the only, way to protect the American
public, the American public itself was slightly less than confident. Few Americans felt the need to construct
and install the expensive shelters. Many
Americans believed that it was morally and ethically acceptable to kill
others in attempt to save yourself and your family during nuclear war. The civil defense movement brought out
the worst in humanity as humans reverted to a more animalistic state,
preparing to live underground in artificial bunkers. Some critics argued that civil defense
possibilities only increased the probability of war by heightening tensions
and suspicions and rationalizing the escalation of violence.
PKD's short story "Foster, You're Dead" depicts the
anti-preparedness, or "Anti-P" American mindset that civil
defense was nothing more than a hoax by money-grubbing businesses and
governments.
The dash for public underground shelters when the hydrogen war begins in Dr. Bloodmoney begins does no more
good than hiding in underground rooms.
Those who managed, miraculously, to survive the war and its
long-term consequences wished they had "died on E Day" so they
would not have had to see "the freaks and the funnies and the radiation
darkies."
Nat Johnson, father of a three-child family, is simply not interested in
bomb-proof houses springing up in his neighborhood.
"Foster, You're Dead" is set in the early 1970s as atomic war
spirals out of control. The Soviet Union continues to develop increasingly
unconventional weapons of mass-scale destruction, including bullets that
could easily pierce standard underground shelters. All Americans either had to own a private
shelter, installed in their homes, or obtain a license to inhabit a public
shelter in the case of nuclear attack.
In response, electronics magnate General Electric introduced a super
heavy-duty underground bomb shelter for private family use, complete with
elevator, refrigerators, and a radiation- and pressure-proof "triple-layer
hull." But such massive civil defense spending drastically increased
the federal debt, not that it did any good, because the Russians
continually develop new weaponry that defies American preparation.
According to PKD, then, Americans either viewed civil defense preparation
for nuclear war as a joke or as an exercise in futility. Following the First World War, Americans
became ensnared in the idea of defining the world—and everything in it—in
terms of light and dark, good and evil.
No 'gray areas' existed—America very clearly and
precisely drew the line between right and wrong. This trend continued through the 1920s
and 1930s, and found new life following World War II, where the United States was inherently good while
Nazism, communism, fascism, totalitarianism, East
Germany, the USSR were evil. PKD's views on the evils inherent in Europe emerged early in his life. He recounted how his father, Edgar, would
talk about fighting in WWI, during which he fought in both the Battle of
Verdun and Battle of the Marne. PKD admitted growing up on All Quiet on the Western Front and
stories of WWI that pitted the free Western world against the murderous
'Krauts,' permanently shaping his view of Germans.
Dick's first literary novel—which he still considered a SF novel—The Man in the High Castle deals
explicitly with the widespread evil of the Nazi Third Reich and Hitler's
terrible regime. Following their
widespread success in eradicating the Jews of Europe, Hitler moved on to
annihilate the Jews of the United
States.
Africa has been wiped off the map
after some sort of military experiment went dreadfully wrong, though
readers never learn exactly what transpired. Ironically, as PKD's friend and fellow
writer Patricia Warrick argues, "the winner is the loser"—though
the Nazi regime won WWII, they must continue to fight to preserve their
victory, leading to inevitable defeat.
This did happen in the novel, as squabbles about who would head the Third
Reich brought them down from the inside.
PKD could, however, sympathize with the Germans who supported Hitler
and the Third Reich, as they saw Hitler as their apocalyptic prophet come
to save them. Hawthorne Abendson's
home, the high castle of the title, is modeled after a medieval German
castle Hitler knew well The challenging novel-within-a-novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,
encourages readers to consider the fact that America, and in fact the
world, would have been much worse off if Germany and Japan had lost WWII in
Europe, as it would have resulted in a full-scale Slavic and Eastern
European war.
In this sense, while the Nazis were certainly evil, they might have been
better than the alternative.
However, different levels of 'evil' certainly applied. In Man
in the High Castle, Dick perpetuates the theory that evil is not a view
but rather a fact of life. Through
framing the Cold War in terms of 'Good' and 'Evil,' the US found justification for
continuing the war against communism and against the Soviets. This theory allowed PKD to propose the
idea that Nazism was not as evil as Americans made it out to be, at least
not in comparison to Soviet communism.
Nazism stands as a symbol of all fascism, all totalitarianism, and all
dictators, "be they German, Japanese, American, or Russian."
As a form of fascism, Nazism causes even the most peaceful philosophies and
religions revise their views on the role of evil in the world.
Hitler and his followers aspired "to godhood and so follow the banner
of Lucifer." The world in which Nazism exists—regardless of whether Germany
won or lost WWII—is "a world in which evil and good are so
inextricably mixed" that it is impossible to separate them. But it was not just humans that were
evil. Palmer Eldritch's android face
in Stigmata symbolizes
"Absolute Evil" incarnate.
Critic-fan Hayles goes on to note that "evil is ultimately unreal,
Dick reasons, because a world where evil is real is itself unreal."
Androids too represent the ultimate evil, a fact that has been largely
discussed in relation to PKD.
Rick Deckard, the android-hunter of Androids
acts much like "a boorish SS-like killer," hunting androids down
without thinking, making humans and androids equally evil.
PKD accepted dictators, understanding that sometimes such authoritarian
leaders are necessary, but he despised Hitler, as did almost everyone of
his generation.
In The Divine Invasion, evil
comes in the form of Satan, also known as Belial, who has shrouded Terra in
ultimate evil that keeps God away. Humans
are kept imprisoned in the Black Iron Prison, forbidden from entering the Palm Tree
Garden (of Eden).
Evil also emerges when humans lose touch with reality, letting Satan
take control of them.
Through the 1940s and 1950s, conceptions and definitions of evil found
their focus in one main target: the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, a common saying in America
was "better dead than Red." Soviets and communism were inherently
evil, the worst threat American had ever faced. Americans saw their new rival "working
to frustrate America's
quest for its own happy ending…the very embodiment of the evil Truman had
sworn to fight."
However, contrary to what was thought at the time, those beliefs were
anything but new. America had long seen Russia as backwards, repressive,
regressive, and autocratic; thus, flipping back to sentiments of hostility
was rather simple. The two
diametrically opposed countries had a long history of dislike. Americans reacted with great fear as the
Bolshevik Revolution spread from Moscow,
quickly enveloping the entire country.
Following WWI, the US
sent troops to parts of Russia
in a military exercise that ended terribly.
Mistrust of Russia
pre-WWII easily evolved into mistrust of the United Socialist
Soviet Republic
post-WWII. The only difference in
the Cold War dealt with communism and its inherent threat to democracy,
liberalism, and the American way of life—and even those sentiments were not
new, as communism had been an established fact in Russia for some thirty
years. Americans were generally
supportive of revolutions to overthrow corrupt or inefficient dictators,
but did not apply these sentiments to the revolution in Russia.
This is not to say, however, that the Russians liked the Americans any
better than Americans liked the Russians.
Soviets saw Americans as "culturally-barren, a nation of
gum-chewing, Chevy-driving, DuPont-sheathed philistines." Russian
propaganda exploited American race relations and the push for civil rights,
accusing the world's bastion of freedom and liberalism of ostracizing
minority groups.
Because of the association between communist and
the Soviet Union, any and all things
Russian became suspect. Communism
rapidly became associated with everything wrong in American society, including
civil rights, homosexuality, and violence.
It was a "disease that threatened to degenerate freedom, democracy,
religion, and the American Dream."
With each change in Soviet leadership, the American fight against Soviet
communist changed drastically.
As the United States
created, built, and tested their first atomic weapons, the federal
government began to fear that Soviet espionage would bring down the
Manhattan Project from the inside.
The FBI became the headquarters of the Cold War in America, with J. Edgar Hoover, a man known to be a
transvestite, ironically as the image of the perfect American.
PKD addressed anti-communist sentiments in line with contemporary American
thinking, sometimes violently, but rather subtlety at other times. He laughingly admitted that he "got
thrown out of the only meeting of the U.S. Communist Party" he ever attended—he
only went to see what they were like.
Not liking what he heard, he "leapt to his feet" and
rather angrily expressed his opinions.
He was promptly removed by force from the meeting hall.
PKD himself once had horrific hallucinations of Soviet technicians aiding
aliens attempting to take over Earth.
In his journals, he wrote that "sometimes I would think it was the
Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave
telepathic transmitter" to brainwash him. Other times, PKD was sure that the
Soviets were "using their research into psychic ESP powers for
long-distance mind control."
Soviet transmitters, in addition to broadcasting brain-washing
pro-communist propaganda, also sent out messages of "filth and garbage
and kinky suggestions, God knows what." At one point, they transmitted
the entire portfolios of artists like Klee and Kandinsky to PKD through
their superior technological powers.
He blamed the communist government in Poland for trying to steal
royalties from the publishing of Ubik;
he also believed that French intellectuals who were on the same
religious-metaphysical ground as Dick were under the influence of the KGB. He admitted that "everything having
to do with the Soviet Union"
absolutely terrified him.
Following his 1974 religious visions, PKD mused "so many of my
dreams…contained elements pertaining to the USSR." He continued along
this vein, thinking that "they [the Soviets] think I am 'one of
them.'"
Christianity and communism were diametrically opposed and could not
possibly co-exist in a real reality.
Communism was atheistic, marred by social unrest while Christianity
had held back all socio-economic progress since the Renaissance. The two ideologies were completely
incompatible—and PKD preferred it that way.
Possibly the most explicit anti-Russian beliefs come from the rather long
short story "Second Variety." The story opens with one of the
never-ending series of skirmishes between Soviet and American troops,
though neither when nor where the conflict takes place is ever addressed—it
is not important. American soldiers
derogatorily refer to the Soviets as "Ivans," calling to mind the
tortuous reign of Ivan the Terrible.
New weaponry capable of destroying what little is left of Terra
emerges on a regular basis in rapid escalation, but the Americans knew that
"if we hadn't invented them, the Ivans would have." PKD later
reveals that the Soviets had begun the war, possibly commenting on how the USSR developed the hydrogen bomb before the
Americans; however, these so-called technological advances destroyed nearly
all of North America and Eastern and Western Europe
in one fell swoop. American soldiers
were simply waiting underground to hear when the Politburo "decided to
throw in the sponge" and admit defeat to the American superior
firepower and weaponry. In the end,
however, the Russians begin to turn on each other, bringing themselves down
from the inside.
Most of the surviving Russian soldiers turn out to be robot weaponry
disguised as humans and either are killed or self-destruct, but not without
taking down as many American soldiers as they could. Most of PKD's fiction only briefly
mentions or alludes to the dual Soviet-communist threat America faced
during from 1940s through the early 1960s—but it is nonetheless
present. New American weapons
technology called "claws" band together to create "the ideal
perfect state…all citizens interchangeable" like a communist society.
The haunting "Breakfast at Twilight" cannot even call Soviet
troops by their proper name, resorting to calling them "geeps"
for 'general purpose troops.'
This implies the perceived anonymity of Soviet communists. Professor Anthony Douglas blames
left-wing students, all invariably communists, for his bizarre
hallucinations.
Similarly, Edward Loyce remains convinced that either communists or
fascists are trying to pull the wool over his eyes, making him see things
that are not really there.
Terra of Palmer Eldritch is in danger of being invaded by a pseudo-human
race, which can certainly be read as a fear of America being taken over by
Soviet communists who were merely human-like. Palmer himself can be seen as a communist
agent working within the American government, one who desires a complete
takeover of the world according to this ideology.
Ubik frames the Cold War in new,
Dickian terms—Runciter and his "inertials" versus Hollis and his
"pre-cogs," each faction trying to wipe the other out.
"Faith of our Fathers," much like Man in the High Castle, imagines a world where the Communist
Party completely defeated America. This fall of America leads directly to the
collapse of capitalism, the ultimate goal of communism.
However, in this instance, Red hatred is more directly the result of
Chinese communism rather than Soviet communism, but addressing Sino
communism is outside the scope of this paper. But PDK did not only resort to the
obvious in representing anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiments, as
widely expressed by Americans at all demographics. "The King of the Elves," PKD's
only true foray into the world of fantasy literature, illustrates US-USSR
tensions metaphorically. Elves stand
for the mighty, strong, and beautiful Americans, while their (im)mortal
enemies, the Russian trolls, are backwards and dense, always watching and
always plotting. The elves call in
for assistance, and eventually beat the Soviet trolls after a protracted
and deadly battle.
Ubik depicts a conflict between
two diametrically opposed forces the 'inertials' and the 'pre-cogs' each
threatening to "decontaminate" the other. Hollis and his pre-cogs attempt to
prolong the war in small steps that will eventually result in
mutually-assured destruction. Two
forces continually battle for primacy: decay or destruction, representing
the Soviets and communist, and self-preservation, or the noble goal of the
Americans.
Through the use of the hallucinogenic drug Chew-Z, aliens become
communists, slowly brainwashing Terra's survivors to create an
intergalactic domino theory. Aliens
are compared to communists in that both groups are backwards and
undemocratic.
The Sol System, where Terra makes its home, functions as a strict communist
state, restricting immigration and emigration to and from American
inter-galactic colonies much like the Chinese communist urban registration
requirements.
The Anarchy League that sponsored a coup against the American federal
government began with organized marches in Eastern Europe, beginning in East Germany and spreading to Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy,
and France. Russia
and the United States
were the last to fall.
The strongest metaphor of PKD's and America's anti-communist
beliefs comes with the title character of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Eldritch returns from a ten-year journey
outside of the Sol System as a mechanized human under the control of
aliens—an agent under the dominion of Soviet communists. Through the use of the hallucinogenic drug
Chew-Z, Palmer and his alien controllers seek to completely take over and
dominate the human race. Chew-Z
traps human drug users into hallucinations controlled by Palmer himself,
hallucinations they cannot escape from without Palmer's consent. Through this mind control game, Palmer
will slowly but surely take over the world, converting humans one by one to
his worldview. Americans feared
communism worked much the same way, with the idea radiating outward slowly
from one person but gradually completely taking over, spreading like a
virus. Through anti-communism and
anti-Soviet sentiments initially focused on different groups of people, the
two outlooks became inherently linked.
In Richard Nixon's mind, Soviet communists were 'Reds,' but American
intellectuals and liberals were "pinks." Communists in academia were producing a
generation of selfish, angry, anti-authority Americans.
One McCarthyite went as far to suggest that Harvard professors were the
Americans most likely to turn to communism and were doing so en masse.
Eisenhower argued that Democrats were socialists, linking the political
'enemy' with the Soviet enemy.
According to Stephen J.
Whitfield, Americans turned to the American Communist Party in the
1930s when "the Great Depression had dramatized the twin failures of
free enterprise and the ethos of individualism." The majority of ACP
members were minorities—African-Americans, Jews, immigrants of various
backgrounds—as well as the economically devastated. ACP membership topped out at no more than
100,000 during the early 1930s; it never presented any substantial threat
to anyone or anything. When the
federal government expressed reluctance to commit American forces to an
offensive war against the Soviet Union in Eastern
Europe following the end of WWII, American sentiments turned
to vicious anti-communism, attacking anything that might possibly be or be
related to communism or Soviets.
As a response, federal legislation approved the creation of the Central
Intelligence Agency, the CIA, in 1946 to collect peacetime intelligence and
co-ordinate a modern-day American crusade.
While American communists never found any significant support among the
general public, communists ranked highly in academia and the mass media,
namely among Hollywood screenwriters and directors. By 1950, only 32,000 Americans were
registered members of the party.
Despite their small numbers—32,000 out of a total population of some
150,000,000—Americans reacted violently to the mere thought of communism in
the haven of American democracy and freedom. President Eisenhower illustrated this
vicious hatred by proposing to strip citizenship and all its associated
rights from American communists in 1954, and Americans widely agreed. Federal legislation set up 'concentration'
camps for communists, suspected communists, and communist sympathizers in
five states.
Obviously, anti-communism in America was a more widespread
and serious problem than many realized.
McCarthyism tarnished the fist few years of the Cold War era,
keeping American attention focused on supposed communist espionage from
within the government instead of on rapid nuclear proliferation. Admittedly, there almost certainly were
communist spies within the FBI and the federal government, but no American
ever committed an act of treason.
In the first quarter of McCarthy's anti-communist purge, the federal
government fired some 1450 federal employees—but no verified communists.
Ironically, those targeted were statistically far more likely to be
homosexuals afraid of expressing their sexual orientation from fear of
being fired. The FBI and the CIA
collected information on authors, intellectuals, screenwriters, and those
with liberal and thus, possibly communist, sympathies.
Through the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government accused Leonard
Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer, and Langston Hughes, among others, of being
communists. At one point, Pablo Picasso
was denied a visa for a US
visit, becoming a suspect of America's desire to root out
communism both within the country and the world at large.
Ironically, Manhattan Project scientist J.
Robert Oppenheimer saw his security clearance denied by President
Eisenhower after opposing the H-bomb in the 1950s, as he was known to have
been at least a communist sympathizer if not actually a member of the
ACP. The chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials was viciously proclaimed "a
red" after stating that the post-war America
he returned to in 1949 was very different from the pre-war America
he remembered. However, the issue
was not nearly as widespread as Senator Joseph McCarthy led Americas
to believe. Nonetheless, fear of
communist spies and informants rapidly became a theme that both books and
film would widely address. The trial
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early 1950s marked the height of
American obsession with communist espionage.
After the federal government upheld the Rosenbergs' execution ruling in 1953, American
fears of spying began to slowly diminish from the American
consciousness. However, these fears
never quite left the realm of SF.
The most central spy-related fear in American popular culture was
the widely held belief that absolutely anyone could be a Soviet or
communist spy in disguise. Spying
worked both ways—Soviet spies within the FBI, and FBI spies inside the
ACP. PKD's massive anti-drug
propaganda novel, A Scanner Darkly,
symbolically links the American authorities, here the Los Angeles police force, with
communists. Police agents of Los Angeles wear
"pink waffle-fiber suits," implying that they are communist
sympathizers if not actual communists in disguise. Communists also act as the drug dealers
of Los Angeles,
slowly bringing down the city, beginning with the weakest and most
vulnerable.
The Rosen Corporation's Nexus Six android line takes on the role of Soviet
communists, a constantly-evolving threat to be rooted out at all levels of
society, from garbage collectors to opera singers. They begin recruiting followers from
among the weak, the delusional, the destitute, in order to propagate their
ideology.
Barney Mayerson in Stigmata acts
as a spy on Marsh, working to bring the Terran colony down much like a
communist spy would.
American shrinks, much like the ones PKD and many of his characters visited
regularly, conducted "fascist therapy" on their unwitting and
unknowing patients.
UN officials, despite their best efforts, could not sufficiently deal with
"domestic subversion" within the United States.
Soviet agents worked prominently in the Bay Area of San Francisco, even in
high-end restaurants. These American
KBG agents circulated "disinformation" designed to confuse the
American public.
Rudolph Wegener acts as a truly bizarre spy with multiple identities—a
German fascist in America,
but one working to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Anyone could be a communist spy, thus
everyone was being watched by someone in a truly Orwellian world.
Even the most "ordinary citizens" could stumble onto evil
communist conspiracies or find a communist spy within their own
neighborhoods.
PKD's posthumously published novel Radio
Free Albemuth stands as a vicious and violent protest against an
American communist government state.
Radio began as PKD's first
attempt to explain his religious visions and hallucinations of 1974, and
can be read as an introduction or companion to Dick's VALIS trilogy. In many
ways, it presents a much clearer and more concise account of the events in
the VALIS trilogy. In Radio,
the United States
has become a communist-fascist state ruled by forced military
inscription. The FAP, a
military-police organization hauntingly similar to the German Wehrmacht, hunts down suspected
communists in all walks of life. As
an identifying mark, FAP members wear colored armbands like the red
swastikas of various Nazi groups.
They offer record producer Nick Brady a flat fee of $100 for every
communist folk musician he turns in to the federal government; the FAP
fears that communist musicians are infusing their protest-song lyrics with
subliminal pro-communist sentiments.
All Americans are forced to sign oaths of loyalty for themselves, as
well as for their friends and family, stating that they have never and will
never commit an act of treason or espionage against the United States.
In order to catch suspected communist agents within the United States, the federal
government, the FBI, and the CIA resorted to a variety of methods designed
to root 'commies' out. As early as
1955, Dick wondered if maybe, just maybe, he had ended up as a pawn in some
communist conspiracy. He thought
that the FBI, an agency he absolutely despised but nonetheless turned to in
a time of need, was probably controlled by a "crypto-Communist,"
most likely his hated enemy Richard Nixon.
A Scanner Darkly describes a
world where "every pay phone in the world was tapped."
The FAP asks PKD's alter-ego Phil to collect his friends' mail and forward
anything suspicious to the authorities.
On the Terra of Flow My Tears,
police and narcotics agents set up random checkpoints. While PKD never explicitly mentions what
the police agents are searching for, from the connection with radicals and
academia, it seems likely that the police are hunting down and eliminating
communists. An American paramilitary
organization, Friends of the American People, believe that Berkeley is full of
nothing but "atheists and commies," and thus focuses the majority
of their spying there.
The CIA admits to spying on its own employees, knowing full well that the
American public was terrified of them.
In short, spies can appear anywhere, at any time, in any career, even
within the government. However, in
addition to widespread anti-communist sentiments throughout PKD's work,
anti-McCarthy sentiments were also evident.
The American public generally accepted the restriction of some civil
rights in the pursuit of communism, but Senator McCarthy was seen as
crossing the line. US President
Ferris F. Fremont stands as a devil-like
combination of Nixon and McCarthy, linking communism to the evils of
liberalism and homosexuality.
The police force in "The Minority Report" has the authority to
strip away the rights of citizens, not only if they commit crimes but if
they are deemed mentally and/or physically likely to commit crimes. Dick mocks the idea of imprisoning
innocent people for the sake of the safety of the entire country, noting
that the government seeks to do what is in its own best interests, not what
is best for the people.
In Ubik, the government uses
telepathy to keep a constant watch over humans.
Americans living on Terra following the Terran-Alphane war lost all rights
to privacy fifty years previously and likely will never see it
returned. Bunny Hentman, a
world-famous comic, saw his career and his life completely ruined by CIA
investigations, much like screenwriters of the Hollywood Ten.
Humans unable to escape Terra and the Sol System are left with a complete
lack of privacy, in their own homes and in their own heads.
The most telling attack on McCarthy and his reactionary purge of the
federal government comes in Eye in
the Sky, where McFeyffe can easily be read as a parody of McCarthy
himself conducting witch hunts within the government. After the American government falls, a
KGB-like agency takes over, outlawing individualism and demanding
conformity.
In a sick perversion of Miranda's law, suspected criminals can be held
accountable for what they think,
not simply what they say.
During times of war, no one has or deserves any rights. By the mid-to-late 1950s, America's
focus in the Cold War turned from rooting out communists and communist
spies in the government to halting Soviet expansionism. The Cold War of the late 1950s and 1960s
was fought not just in America,
but across the world—Iran,
Guatemala, China, Lebanon,
the Middle East, and of course, Russia.
Hugh Gusterson even argued that the whole point of the US-USSR conflict was
"to assure the subjugation of smaller countries in the Third World."
"Faith of our Fathers" takes place in an alternate Asia where the Chinese communists have won. A ring of communist countries often
surrounds the Terran United States, threatening American education,
creativity, and individuality. Clans
shows Americans what would happen if the 'domino theory' proved
correct. While Cuba has fallen from the Soviet sphere of
influence, Canada has
since turned into a communist nation, more directly threatening the United States. After the loss of Cuba, international communist
officials turn to South American countries to spread their power.
A world where Leningrad has become a major
world city and the US
and the USSR
share global hegemony is one to be feared.
However, almost as soon as the American perspective on the Cold War changed
to dealing with Soviet expansion through Eastern
Europe, Americans were forced to deal with yet another major
alteration in the Cold War. Through
the late 1940s and 1950s, the threat of nuclear war never seemed too
real. With Soviet tests of
thermonuclear weapons, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and presidential claims of
a "missile gap," the idea of nuclear apocalypse became all too
imminent. In a March 1962 speech,
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced that following the Soviet
Union's blatant disregard of bans on atmospheric nuclear testing, the United States
would be forced to resume their own nuclear testing. It was in this environment of failing
disarmament and increasing atomic tension that PDK wrote many of his most
well known pieces of fiction, including the unforgettable Dr. Bloodmoney; or, How We Got Along
After the Bomb, likely written as a response to Stanley Kubrick's
infamous Dr. Strangelove; or, How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. As a result of Soviet advances and
supposed "gaps," an anti-technology movement began to
emerge. Luckily, however, these gaps
never existed. Nonetheless, the
Soviets held a noticeable psychological advantage over the American public.
Between 1949 and 1957, the United
States faced a series of devastating
blows to their technological supremacy.
Thus, a new ideological concept became inextricably entwined with
the Cold War: the US-USSR Space Race and technology race. Luckily for the United States, however, the
Soviets never had any substantial physical advantages, merely psychological
and emotional advantages. The Soviet Union successfully tested their first nuclear
weapon in the late 1940s, an achievement Americans believed would not occur
for at least another twenty years.
Then, the Soviet Union beat the US in the first test of the
dreaded and devastating hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. The American h-bomb reaction created the
biggest explosion ever seen on Earth—a three-mile-wide fireball and
mushroom cloud that completely enveloped the horizon.
However, the biggest blow came in October 1957 as the Soviet
Union announced the launch of the first artificial
satellite—Sputnik. America's first attempt at an
artificial satellite, Vanguard, exploded on the launch pad. In 1958, the Soviets tested their
"Big Bomb," the "single largest blast human beings have ever
detonated" with a 40-mile tall mushroom cloud. During the 1960s, the United States stationed Jupiter missiles in Turkey,
barely over the Soviet border. However,
from 1957 through 1961, from Sputnik to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet maintained
a psychological lead over their American counterparts.
Shortly before the successful launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet Union tested the world's first
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
These ICBMs could carry not just conventional weapons, but tactical nuclear
weapons as well, upwards of 4000 miles, placing them in striking distance
of New York City and Washington, D.C. .
Khrushchev once said that he did not want to instigate a war over Berlin—literally and
figuratively—but his actions and boasting did little to reassure
Americans. In response, the US
began U-2 spy missions over Soviet territory, which turned into a massively
humiliating disaster for the American government. Once again, the Soviets maintained their
psychological advantage despite their lack of arms. Popular film and fiction of the 1950s and
1960s linked Soviet communism with "vast, almost supernatural, powers
in the realm of science."
Government-sponsored surveys ask the average American to decide whether the
strength of the Soviet Union was
increasing or deceasing. They
obviously wanted Americans to answer that the Soviet
Union was posing an increasing threat, as the next question
asks about Soviet education and technology in comparison to American
education and technology.
In PKD's fiction, the Space Race is equated with a technological,
weapons-based arms race in which the Soviets take the first advantage and
continue to develop it fearsomely, leaving the US in their radioactive
dust. Like the hydrogen bomb, the
fictional USSR
invents new and more deadly weaponry that its American counterparts cannot
match. However, unlike in the real
world, Soviet advantages rarely, if ever, are nuclear; rather, Soviet
weapons are generally artillery and arms, nothing with nuclear
capabilities. Americans simply could
not understand how the 'backwards' Russians suddenly showed such massive
gains in education, science, and technology.
They reacted swiftly to counter their 'gaps' while the Russians worked to
exploit the 'gaps' in their favor.
PKD once admitted he "felt a vast weariness abut the space
program" and the arms race which had entranced him in the late 1950s
before falling apart before his eyes in the 1970s.
In "Breakfast at Twilight," a short story of time travel mixed
with Soviet warfare, the Soviets have created "roms," or
"robot-operated missiles." These robotically-made and controlled
missiles are "systematically destroying continental America mile by mile" as
Americans retreated into the mountains and underground bunkers.
Dick's "A Little Something for us Tempunauts" clearly redefines
the Space Race. In the story, a team
of American astronauts is lost, much like the early failures of the
Mercury, Apollo, and Soyuz space missions, though here after an accident in
returning to present-time Terra.
In Foster, You're Dead," Soviets unleash new weapons technology that
can pierce even the strongest shelters.
The "reegs" (read: communists) develop a homeostatic bomb they
intend to use at the first opportunity.
American scientists and government officials strongly deny that a Soviet
physicist is the first human to find any evidence of extra-terrestrial
life, arguing that the Soviets were only picking up satellite blips. Just in case they were proved wrong, the
Americans destroy the supposed satellite.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Americans would do nearly anything in their
power to protect their people, their government, and their country from the
threat of Soviet communist takeover.
From instigating nuclear war to strategically stripping away the
rights of suspected American communists, the federal government did
virtually everything in its power to ensure the United States' position as the
harbinger of freedom and democracy would never be challenged.
[Go to Part II]
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