The Twisted Worlds

of Philip K. Dick
This page intentionally left blank
The Twisted Worlds
of Philip K. Dick
A Reading of Twenty
Ontologically Uncertain Novels

UMBERTO ROSSI

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rossi, Umberto, 1960–
The twisted worlds of Philip K. Dick : a reading of
twenty ontologically uncertain novels / Umberto Rossi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-4883-8
softcover : 50# alkaline paper

1. Dick, Philip K.— Criticism and interpretation.

2. Science fiction, American — History and criticism.
I. Title.
PS3554.I3Z87 2011
813'.54 — dc22 2011004822

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

© 2011 Umberto Rossi. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

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without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover illustration by Kim D. French; (inset) Philip K. Dick

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A mio padre, che comprava gli Urania e i Cosmo Oro
 Acknowledgments

I could never have written this book without my 13-year interaction

with the people of the PKD list managed by Cal Godot. I also wish to
thank Andrew M. Butler, Russell Galen, David Gill, Frank Hollander,
Donald Keene, Perry Kinman, Gabriel McKee, Maurizio Nati, and
Chris J. Zähller for their help. I should thank Gabriele Frasca and Carlo
Pagetti because they showed me how seriously you can read Dick’s fiction
even if sometimes the author himself did not take it so seriously (yet,
being a master of self-contradiction, he took it all too seriously other
times). Special thanks to Fredric Jameson and Peter Fitting for the same
reason, but in an American context. I thank Luca Briasco, Domenico
Caiati, Mattia Carratello, Domenico Gallo, and Paolo Prezzavento for
numberless conversations about Dick and his universes that fall apart
(not to mention their translations); I thank Antonio Caronia for repeated
creative disagreements and for his Dickian encyclopedia entries. Last
but not least, I thank my wife, Franca Sinopoli, for her precious and
sustained encouragement and manifold support.

vi
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1

1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players): The Cosmic Puppets
and The Game-Players of Titan 25
2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us”: Alternate
Worlds in Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint 57
3. Obscure Admixtures: The Man in the High Castle Considered
as a (Cold) War Novel 78
4. A Maze of Lives: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, and
Clans of the Alphane Moon 96
5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation: The Simulacra,
Now Wait for Last Year and The Penultimate Truth 118
6. The Android Cogito: We Can Build You and Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? 143
7. Psychedelic Demiurges: The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch, Ubik, A Maze of Death and Flow My Tears,
The Policeman Said 173
8. Amateur Questers: VALIS and Its Quandaries 209
9. The God from Outer Space: Reconsidering The
Divine Invasion 234
10. A Counterfactual Counterculture: The Transmigration
of Timothy Archer 252

Notes 273
Bibliography 295
Index 303

vii
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 Introduction

...in February of 1974 I saw Christ the new Saviour, but discorporate...
Fat
Took drugs. Saw God. BFD.
Phil

Dick’s Twisted World

Maybe the best way to understand Philip K. Dick is by reading Robert
Sheckley. This most underrated science-fiction writer once depicted — in his
1966 novel Mindswap, one of the neglected masterpieces of both sf and post-
modernist fiction — a strange place, maybe a playful allegory of sf (and fiction
in general), called the Twisted World. It is described (à la Borges) by three
excerpts of imaginary books, the last of which, The Inexorability of the Specious,
has been written by the villain of the novel, the interplanetary confidence
trickster Ze Kraggash, who declares:
Remember that all rules may lie, in the Twisted World, including this
rule which points out the exception ... But also remember that no rule nec-
essarily lies; that any rule may be true, including this rule and its exception.
In the Twisted World, time need not follow your preconceptions. Events
may change rapidly (which seems proper), or slowly (which feels better), or
not at all (which is hateful).
It is conceivable that nothing whatsoever will happen to you in the
Twisted World. It would be unwise to expect this, and equally unwise to be
unprepared for it....
Do not expect to outwit the Twisted World. It is bigger, smaller, longer
and shorter than you; it does not prove, it is [Sheckley 174–6].
Sheckley, who evolved from witty (but often chilling) sociological sf to
postmodernist metafiction in the 1960s, is obviously referring to the inex-
haustible potentialities of the genre he practiced — but I would rather read
this as an involuntary prediction of the current state of Dick scholarship,1

1
2 INTRODUCTION

that is, the predicament of critics who are tying to measure a twisted fictional
world like Dick’s, which is bigger, smaller, longer and shorter than they think.
In other words, we have not come to terms with Dick yet, notwithstanding
the excellent scholarship devoted to this most beguiling writer by such brilliant
critics as Jameson, Suvin, Baudrillard, or Frasca.2 So far the attempts to find
an overall interpretation, a comprehensive assessment of Dick’s oeuvre have
fallen short of the author. There have been, as I have already said, good read-
ings of single works or groups of works, but whenever critics have tried to
tell us — if such a pedestrian idiom is allowed — what Philip Kindred Dick is
all about, they have offered unsatisfactory formulations.
The problem is that Dick is a most complex author: one who — like Walt
Whitman — used to unashamedly contradict himself. The strangeness of his
figure as a writer has been effectively captured by one of his non-academic
commentators, Jonathan Lethem:
There’s this writer who works with the pop-culture iconography of sci-
ence fiction but with such mad originality and verve — and emotional
intensity — that he created his own personal genre ... he deserves your seri-
ous attention as much as any realist writer ... he also wrote these eight puz-
zling and unforgettable novels in a dour, lower-middle-class realist mode ...
These too, deserve a look (despite, ahem, infelicities in the prose) [Lethem
82–3].
No wonder that Lethem ends this paragraph by admitting that “[t]hat
double reverse may simply be too much” (Lethem 83). He is not the only
commentator who noticed Dick’s strangeness. Douglas A. Mackey, who wrote
one of the first overall introductions to Dick’s oeuvre, said that his best novels
“seem to constitute some kind of topological form as in an Escher drawing,
with its own internal logic, completely self-referential, the equivalent of the
paradoxical logic loop: ‘The following statement is true. The preceding state-
ment is false’” (Mackey 95–6). Besides, the paradoxical character of Dick’s
fiction had been already highlighted by one of the earliest commentators,
Stanislaw Lem, who maintained that “Dick succeeds in changing a circus tent
into a temple, and during this process the reader may experience catharsis”
and adds “[i]t is extremely difficult to grasp analytically the means that make
it possible for him to do so” (Lem 1972, 74).
If grasping what is or are Dick’s dominating stylistic and imaginative
feature(s) is so hard, one should not be surprised if we have only had partial
portraits so far, which only capture glimpses of his oeuvre and world. The
only attempts to read Dick’s whole oeuvre are Robinson’s 1984 monograph
The Novels of Philip K. Dick, the work of a brilliant PhD student who could
not profit from many documents which had not been published yet (some of
Dick’s non-sf novels, his letters) and appeared when the secondary literature
 Introduction 3

was remarkably smaller than it is today; and Palmer’s Philip K. Dick: Exhil-
aration and Terror of the Postmodern, which is a collection of articles — some
of which stimulating and rich in precious insights — without an organic plan.
Portraying the whole oeuvre is admittedly a difficult task. Dick is not
just a sf writer, but he is also not just a fiction writer. He cannot be canonized
as a “simple” postmodernist novelist because he is also a realist, and his sf
output is not always a form of postmodernist parody/pastiche or Avantpop3
hybridization — it was quite often the production of a professional writer who
wrote sf to make ends meet. Besides, Dick’s relation to sf is also complex and
contradictory: his moments of pride in the sf genre notwithstanding (he even
proposed the community of sf pro writers as a model of utopian non-com-
petitive society in his essay “Who Is an Sf Writer?”), he — Lawrence Sutin’s
biography exhaustively proved this — repeatedly tried to escape the ghetto of
commercial sf to reach the respectable literary publishing houses as a realist
writer. Yet sf is not just a spurious element or a regrettable constraint in the
texture of Dick’s narratives. Though I do not agree with those critics who,
like Patricia Warrick (Warrick xiv), disparage Dick’s non-sf novels,4 I am well
aware that some of Dick’s most remarkable literary achievements are those
works, be they novels or short stories, where the particular fictional devices
of sf are used in a most original and usually astonishing way — or those which
play a rather different game, deliberately inserting sfnal elements in novels
having a substantially realistic texture (this happens for example in We Can
Build You and VALIS).
While the placement of Dick’s fictions on the map of late Twentieth
Century literature is problematic, it should be said that critics have been
mostly interested in the content of his novels, if such an old-fashioned term
is allowed. Robots/androids, virtual reality, simulation and simulacra, mass-
media, late capitalism, schizophrenia/paranoia, Nazism, American imperial-
ism, even post-colonial concerns: interpreters have found these and other
issues embodied in this or that figure, scene, or place in Dick’s fiction, and
have used his works as examples to be discussed according to their political
agenda, cultural curiosities, theoretical assumptions, etc. There have undoubt-
edly been attempts at understanding what is Dick’s writing strategy and what
sort of a writer he is, to put it bluntly, but also those attempts (Christopher
Palmer’s, for example) have been marred by some theoretical assumption:
often critics who support a certain critical or philosophical theory, be it Marx-
ism, postmodernism, or post-humanism, read Dick looking for a confirmation
of those theories, so that they only take into account what chimes in with
their theoretical/political agendas. Hence the many partial readings of Dick —
some of them brilliant (e.g. Jameson’s), some of them not — which do not
even try to offer overall picture of his fiction.
4 INTRODUCTION

Readers should be forewarned that this text will not attempt to cover
the whole oeuvre of Philip K. Dick, which includes more than forty novels
and a hundred short stories, plus a handful of essays and the cumbersome
Exegesis, Dick’s notes written during his disordered philosophical and religious
research in the 1970s, whose publication is imminent. On the other hand it
does cover in some detail twenty novels plus several short stories and novel-
ettes, in a reading based on a unifying interpretive hypothesis, and trying to
map the intertextual connections which tie these novels to each other and to
those I have not dealt with in detail. Though it is not an attempt to discuss
everything Dick wrote, it tries to mark off groups of interconnected works
and suggest thematic links that may be used by other commentators to work
on those texts which are not analyzed here.

A Matter of Style
The issue of Dick’s style is one that must be tackled in this preliminary
part. Some critics have so far disparaged Dick for the low quality of his prose
(a relatively recent example is Adam Gopnik’s review of the Library of America
publication of a selection of Dick’s novels on The New Yorker).5 This approach,
which may have contributed to hinder his canonization (especially in the
USA), is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what is a novel. In fact
a novel is not just well-crafted prose, possibly with a pyrotechnic display of
metaphors and other tropes. Finely wrought prose may often hide a very tra-
ditional narrative strategy and a quite primitive textual architecture. The art
of the novel is one of telling, and it is in the structuring of the plot, in the
architecture of the narrative that we may find Dick’s “added value.” His prose
is not always brilliant (though it may often be) and it is sometimes shoddy
(prevalently shoddy, or simply functional, in some of the weakest novels); we
should not forget that Dick was a pro writer who had to earn a living and
pay alimony to his former wives, unable to escape the sf ghetto and its scanty
remunerations — this brought him to produce as much as he could, using
amphetamines to write novel after novel.6 Such a situation sentenced him to
frantic hyper-production (between 1963 and 1964 Dick completed nine novels,
among which at least four of his most famous ones), which in turn did not
always allow him to chisel and polish his sentences.
If we want to focus on microstructures only we will find many unsatis-
factory passages and sentences which ask for the intervention of a professional
editor; yet we will also find impressive moments of prose like this one from
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, not one of the passages that are usually
quoted:
 Introduction 5

At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. The painting showed
a hairless, oppressed creature with ha head like an inverted pear, its hands
clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream.
Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into
the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become
contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound.
The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature
screamed in isolation. Cut off by — or despite — its outcry [100].

I have not read many descriptions which managed to capture the lacer-
ating intensity of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream so effectively, in
such a terse and compact manner. So, when a critic complained that “[a]t the
end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and
not a single one of his sentences” (Gopnik 82), I could ask whether the unit
that measures prose is the sentence or the paragraph; since there are good rea-
sons to believe it is the latter, Gopnik’s criticism seems definitely misplaced,
and based on a misconception. Besides, many memorable novels, which are
considered now canonized classics, do not contain any admirable sentence,
but manage to tell a story with miraculous effectiveness. If a critic is only
looking for admirable sentences he should probably read poetry, not fiction.
On the other hand, nobody seems to have tried to understand what were
Dick’s own ideas about prose, though they are explained in several passages
of his letters and interviews. A letter he wrote in 1973 is particularly inter-
esting, because it says that “[t]he entire fundamental basic line of English
prose ... makes its great impact not through soaring words — i.e. poetic
words — but by the strength of prose itself; one must not shift out of prose
when one’s head soars” (SL2 210). Dick’s conception of prose derives from
Herbert Read, as he admits in the same letter, and it is based on the idea that
prose is not poetry in disguise. Uncommon words (including those of the
poetic diction) should be avoided; unusual syntax is not advisable as “archaic
word-order of a poetic sort” (SL2 211) is self-defeating. In his letter Dick pres-
ents several examples of the turgid prose that he considers bad prose and bad
poetry: from these examples we may understand that he appreciated a linear,
essential style. In the letter he mentions Swift, Donne, Hemingway (SL2 210)
as milestones of English prose; on the other hand he considered Shakespeare
“a bore... because of the rhetoric” (Rickman 1988, 212), so the baroque, com-
plex metaphors and luxuriant vocabulary of the Bard did not attract him.
Some of his models are not even fiction writers: he appreciated Samuel Pepys,
and praised Thomas Paine “for powerful, direct prose” (Rickman 1988, 212).
The fact that Dick loved Joyce and extolled Finnegans Wake (Rickman
1988, 212) should not lead us to think he was interested in the linguistic fire-
works which characterize the prose of the Irish novelist. A cursory reading of
6 INTRODUCTION

Dick’s more painstakingly written novels of the early 1960s (Time Out of Joint,
The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip) shows that what Dick found
really interesting in Joyce was the technique of the inner monologue, especially
as it is used in the first two chapters of Ulysses. In Dick’s fiction we often find
a peculiar sort of lightweight stream of consciousness like this, mindful of
Joyce’s rhythm, taken from The Man in the High Castle:
Didn’t Diesel throw himself out the window of his stateroom? Commit
suicide by drowning himself on an ocean voyage? Maybe I ought to do
that. But here there was no ocean. But there is always a way. Like in Shake-
speare. A pin stuck through one’s shirt front, and good-bye Frink. The girl
who need not fear marauding homeless from the desert. Walks upright in
consciousness of many pinched-nerve possibilities in grizzled salivating
adversary. Death instead by, say, sniffing car exhaust in highway town, per-
haps through long hollow straw [35].
In a 1974 letter to his father Dick praises Edgar’s style: his parent’s letter
is “an example for all time of the absolute English prose model, such as they
used to have in the great era of simple and direct English, of Swift, of Pope”
(SL3 32). If we add his appreciation of Thackeray (Rickman 1988, 212) it is
clear that Dick’s model was the classical 18th-century prose, and it is against
such a model that his achievements should be measured. If we are looking for
a Don DeLillo or a John Hawkes, we have opened the wrong books.

Jameson’s Uncertainty
It may be proved, and this is exactly the aim of my monograph, that at
the core of Dick’s oeuvre there is something that I propose to call ontological
uncertainty. Such a condition was already described by one of the earliest aca-
demic essays on Dick, Fredric Jameson’s “After Armageddon,” published on
the March 1975 special issue of Science-Fiction Studies devoted to the Cali-
fornian writer.
Every reader of Dick is familiar with this nightmarish uncertainty, this
reality fluctuation, sometimes accounted for by drugs, sometimes by schizo-
phrenia, and sometimes by new SF powers, in which the psychic world as it
were goes outside, and reappears in the form of simulacra or of some pho-
tographically cunning reproduction of the external [Jameson 1975, 350].
Jameson makes an important distinction about the “nightmarish uncer-
tainty” we find in Dick’s works: Dick has a peculiar position in the dilemma
“which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of some con-
sequence” ( Jameson 1975, 350), that between a “literature of the self,” focused
on the subjective dimension, and the “language of impersonal exteriority,”
 Introduction 7

which counters subjectivity with some “stable place of common sense and
statistics.”7 Dick’s peculiarity, according to Jameson, is that he strives to retain
and use both dimensions, proposing “subjective and objective explanation
systems” at once.
Hence in Dick’s fiction there are two forms of purely subjective simulation
which find no place, and are never used as bases for his narrative architectures:
“sheer fantasy and dream narrative” ( Jameson 1975, 350), which were typical
of symbolism and high modernism (dreams being also a cornerstone of roman-
ticism). This does not mean that Dick’s characters do not dream or are never
lost in reverie; what Jameson is saying, and my survey of twenty novels by
Dick brings me to agree with him, is that neither reverie nor dream are used
as the narrative engine which propels the plots of Dick’s novels (and short
stories). As one can see in the twenty-seventh chapter of Flow My Tears, The
Policeman Said, Felix Buckman’s dream is treated as such (regardless of its
meaning in the novel), not taken for a real event; the same may be said for
Mr. Baynes’ reverie in Chapter 15 of The Man in the High Castle.
Hallucinatory experiences in Dick are usually explained with drugs,
schizophrenia or half-life, because, in Jameson’s opinion, it is
a way of affirming their reality and rescuing their intolerable experiences
from being defused as an unthreatening surrealism: a way of preserving the
resistance and the density of the subjective moment, of emphasizing the
commitment of his work to this very alternation itself as its basic content
[Jameson 1975, 350–1].
If the alternation between subjective and objective is the basic content
of Dick’s fiction, it should obviously be underscored by critics wherever it is
detected; it should be preserved in the interpretive discourse, not explained
away. Hence my decision to pursue that alternation, which I have called onto-
logical uncertainty, especially in those novels where it is not merely episodic,
but can be said to structure the whole text one way or another.8
Jameson’s formulation of Dick’s ontological uncertainty is particularly
important as it was somewhat endorsed by the author himself. A copy of the
1975 special issue of Science-Fiction Studies was sent to Dick, who discussed
it with Claudia Bush, a student of Idaho State University who was writing
her MA thesis. In his March 4, 1975, letter to Bush, Dick quoted several pas-
sages of the letter, and commented “this man Jameson who wrote this is bril-
liant” (SL4, 130), and goes on by interpreting Jameson’s discussion of the
character systems in Bloodmoney in a very personal way.9 The writer quoted
Jameson’s essay again in his speech “Man, Android and Machine” (1976),
where the passage of “After Armageddon” we have quoted, discussing Dick’s
peculiar inversion of the internal and the external ( Jameson 1975, 350), is
taken by Dick as validating his idea of external reality as a dokos-veil or veil
8 INTRODUCTION

of Maya, hiding the real world — a veil which was, in Dick’s opinion at that
time, spun by the right hemisphere of the brain (Shifting Realities 221). Dick’s
very personal interpretation of Jameson’s solid academic analyses might be
easily branded as a misreading, but since Dick’s unorthodox use of neurolog-
ical theories gave us one of his best novels, A Scanner Darkly, it should be
seen as creative misreading. Moreover, what is at stake both in Jameson’s
analysis and in Dick’s home-made epistemological theories is the difficulty of
directly grasping the world (as it is or as it is depicted in fiction) as something
immediately meaningful, as something evident in itself. Jameson worked with
Marxist and structuralist tools; Dick’s approach to the issue was based on a
rather unconventional mix of neurosciences, philosophy, theology and sf;
both however addressed ontological uncertainty, an issue (or problem) that
Dick found at moments more painful than Jameson could imagine when he
wrote his essay on Bloodmoney.
This is a concept that has often been tackled under different names by
different critics: shifting realities, construction of realities, only apparently
real worlds, schizoculture, universes falling apart. Brian McHale discussed
the issue of “ontological instability” in his fundamental essay on Thomas Pyn-
chon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1979, positing this condition as the key feature
of postmodernist fiction in general; he subsequently applied this category to
Dick’s Ubik in 1991, though the main focus of his essay “POSTcyberMOD-
ERNpunkISM” was cyberpunk, so that no detailed discussion of single Dick-
ian texts can be found in that critical analysis. McHale’s reading of Pynchon
can however be said to have paved the way for my reading of Dick. Jean Bau-
drillard’s 1980 essay on “Simulacra and Science-Fiction,” extolling Dick (and
J.G. Ballard) as the narrators of postmodern realities, or better de-realization,
is another milestone in the interpretation of Dick’s oeuvre:
Perhaps the SF of this era of cybernetics and hyperreality will only be
able to attempt to “artificially” resurrect the “historical” worlds of the past,
trying to reconstruct in vitro and down to its tiniest details the various
episodes of bygone days: events, persons, defunct ideologies — all now
empty of meaning and of their original essence, but hypnotic with retro-
spective truth. Like the Civil War in Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra; like a
gigantic hologram in three dimensions, where fiction will never again be a
mirror held to the future, but rather a desperate rehallucinating of the past
[Baudrillard 310].

The simulation of the American Civil War does not actually occur in
The Simulacra (where an actual civil war takes place, which can however be
seen as a resurrection of the historical War Between the States, cf. Ch. 5), but
in We Can Build You (Ch. 6). However, the reconstruction in vitro of the past
is something which undeniably characterizes Dick’s fiction: we could mention
 Introduction 9

the reproduction of Washington as it was in 1935 in Now Wait for Last Year
(Ch. 5), the historical characters used as teachers in Martian Time-Slip (Ch.
4), the technologically resurrected Abraham Lincoln in We Can Build You
(Ch. 6), the fake town of the American 1950s in Time Out of Joint (Ch. 2),
the bogus dictator resembling Mussolini in the short story “If There Were No
Benny Cemoli” (1963) and the reconstructed house of 1954 in “Exhibit Piece”
(1954). It is, after all, another version of ontological uncertainty, one in which
it is the past that can be only apparently real or unreal; and if we take into
account counterfactual versions of the past with their events, persons, defunct
ideologies, we have other works, such as The Man in the High Castle or The
Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which are undoubtedly hypnotic with ret-
rospective truth.
These insights of the earliest academic interpreters of Dick’s oeuvre chime
in with Robinson’s concept of a “reality breakdown” (35–7), even though
here the scope of such a breakdown is somewhat limited by the suggestion
that the protagonist’s “experience becomes not a reality breakdown, but a
breakthrough to ... [a] more basic reality,” i.e. “the law of entropy, the gradual
falling apart of all form” (Robinson 36)— though such a breakdown to reality
does not always take place in Dick’s fictions where reality breaks down. Bukat-
man is more persuasive in his reading of The Simulacra, one of Dick’s most
destructured postmodernist novels, which leads him to maintain that “Dick
constructs a decentered narrative structure wherein multiple characters interact
in a futile quest to fix reality, and therefore themselves, in place” (53)— an
acceptable formulation, provided we do not forget that the attempt to fix
reality may be futile, but the quest may yield something else.
These were the pioneer years of Dick scholarship. It is however interesting
that the four axes of ontological uncertainty as hypothesized by Jameson and
Baudrillard — drugs, schizophrenia, half-life, history — reappear as entries in
Caronia and Gallo’s recent Dickian encyclopedia, La macchina della paranoia,
which — having been published in 2006 — aims at summarizing thirty years
of critical debate on Dick and his works. The Italian critics felt they had to
include entries on Droga (drugs), Follia (schizofrenia) (schizophrenia),
Vita/Morte (life/death), and Storia (history), plus an encompassing entry on
Realtà/Illusione (reality/delusion) which proposed an anthropological discus-
sion of the issue, suggesting that “the question of the borderline between
reality and delusion in Dick could be the metaphysical disguise (or hypertro-
phy) of well identifiable material processes, which challenge symbolic struc-
tures and social relationships and compel us to redefine them” (Caronia and
Gallo 211, translation mine).
Since ontological uncertainty has been repeatedly suggested as one of
the fundamental critical issues in Dick’s fiction, it is time to use it as a guideline
10 INTRODUCTION

for an intertextual analysis of his oeuvre — which may cover a large sample of
his production. This is exactly what you will find in this monograph.10

Ontological Uncertainty
The use of the term “ontology” should however be explained. Since it
stands for the philosophical meditation on the nature of being, existence or
reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations,
one might think that what will be attempted in this book is a philosophical
reading of Dick’s oeuvre. It is not: this is a monograph of literary criticism.
The author does not want to suggest that a philosophical analysis of Dick’s
works is impossible or unacceptable; provided it is carried out by philosophers
(be they academic or not), it is a worthy endeavor which may yield a rich the-
oretic harvest. I can also accept the idea that some writings by Dick are
endowed with a remarkable philosophical value; Dick is neither Hegel nor
Derrida, but some of his essays and the Exegesis might offer useful insights
and a few brilliant ideas. But I am a literary critic, and I do not believe in
that muddled form of literary criticism often called “theory,” which is all too
often either lame literary criticism or incompetent philosophizing (or both,
alas!). Hence my decision to stick to the tools of literary analysis, with an
eclectic approach drawing from several sources, but never forgetting that even
a hybrid form of narrative like the novel, born of the fusion of theatrical dia-
logue and prose narrative in 18th-century England (plus other components it
would take too much time to list), aims at telling a story, after all — which is
not the main purpose of philosophy.11
Nobody could deny that “ontology” comes from philosophy, but when
it is used in the realm of literary criticism it necessarily assumes a different
meaning: it is the critical meditation on the nature of being, existence or real-
ity, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations, as they are found
in a piece of fiction. We might say that it is an ontology sui generis, a mutant
variety of ontology adapted to the needs of literary criticism when it has to
tackle the works of some writers, among which there is Philip K. Dick. The
use of a philosophical term to explain what happens in novels which were
originally marketed as cheap entertainment fiction seems to be particularly
appropriate as it chimes in with Lem’s remark that “Dick seems to foresee a
future in which abstract and highbrow dilemmas of academic philosophy will
descend into the street so that every pedestrian will be forced to solve for
himself such contradictory problems as ‘objectivity’ or ‘subjectivity,’ because
his life will depend upon the result” (Lem 1972, 79).
In Dick’s oeuvre the narration is mostly based on a special ontology, that
 Introduction 11

is, a condition in which characters (and readers) do not know what is real and
what is not in the text, and must frantically search for the fictional reality
behind the fictional simulation, often aware that behind the simulation there
may well be another simulation (a sort of succession or procession of simulacra,
which is unsurprisingly the key feature of The Simulacra). Yet in Dick’s nar-
ratives there must be a distinction between fake and real, even though reality
(or truth) is often out of reach. Reality has to be there, if only to be given
the lie, denied, or involved in some bewildering metamorphosis where all that
is real turns out to be bogus and vice versa. The uncertainty is so radical that
we might even find out that what looks only apparently real is actually real,
after all — a supremely paradoxical form of denouement, we might say (it is
what happens at the end of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). The use
of this term is not casual, as the fundamental scene of Dick’s narrative is
indeed that of denouement. One of the possible forms of denouement may
also consist in a character living in an alternate universe where Germany and
Japan won the Second World War who visits for a few minutes a strange world
where the Axis powers were defeated (ours), while another is told by the I
Ching that the world dominated by Nazism and Japanese imperialism is not
real — this is what happens in The Man in the High Castle.
In Dick’s fiction truth is not a state of things, something stable and fixed:
truth is an event. In fact Dick’s most famous definition of reality declares:
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (Shifting
Realities 261). Dick first enunciated this strange form of ontology in an
arguably never-delivered speech whose title is “How to Build a Universe That
Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” posthumously published in 1985 (as the
introduction to the short story collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon). Dick
downplays the importance of his saying, telling us that it is just what he
answered a girl college student in Canada who had asked him to define reality
for her (the girl, according to him, was writing a paper for a philosophy class).
It sounds more like a joke or a paradox than a meditated philosophical apho-
rism, yet Dick maintained in the essay that “[s]ince then [he hadn’t] been able
to define reality any more lucidly” (Shifting Realities 261). I think this is a
deeper definition of reality than it seems. Reality is something that does not
go away, regardless of our illusions, expectations, and wishes. Reality stub-
bornly remains; but above all it does not disappear, even when we stop believ-
ing in it. Reality is something that refuses to humor us. And we know it is
real only when there is a disappointment, when things do not happen or work
as we expect them to. Reality is not a full, glowing presence, an undoubted
certainty; it is more a nuisance, a trouble, an annoyance. Something which
refuses to agree, to go along. It is a dissonance, a gap, a swerve. It is a rip in
the fabric of the veil of Maja; it is a small accident which upsets all the num-
12 INTRODUCTION

berless routines of our predictable daily life, like the one which Dick chose
as an example of his ability (or compulsion) “to see the most improbable pos-
sibility in every situation” (Shifting Realities, 92)— in itself a handy definition
of ontological uncertainty — namely, that for him “a flat tire on [his] car is (a)
the End of the World; and (b) An Indication of Monsters (although I forget
why)” (92).
In Time Out of Joint one of the characters realizes that there is something
wrong in his world because in his bathroom the light switch is not where he
expects it to be (25). Reality gives the lie to his expectations; it refuses to clear
the field of its disquieting presence, to play up to the mental map of the world
that the character unconsciously uses to navigate his world. It is a moment
of bewilderment, but it is also a moment of truth; it is one of those brief
moments in which reality leaves a trace in our mind, gleaming through a rent
in the fabric of our ceaseless projections. Such moments are the hallmark of
Dick’s fiction, and they are moments of radical ontological uncertainty.
However, the fact that in Time Out of Joint the apparently real world
turns out to be faked does not imply that the denouement is always a reve-
lation, moving from false to authentic. The most improbable possibility in
certain fictional situations created by Dick is not that we are actually living
in another world which — its unlikeliness notwithstanding — is true; or that
it is impossible to decide which world is authentic; sometimes the story dizzy-
ingly shows us that both (or several) worlds can be authentic. This is what
happens in some neglected novels like The Crack in Space, where explorers
from an overpopulated future Earth discover a parallel universe where Earth
seems to be depopulated: there the two worlds coexist. Not to mention the
multiple realities visited in Eye in the Sky (Ch. 2), none of which is the “authen-
tic” world where the group of protagonists comes from, not even the one they
reach at the end of the story (they have to content themselves with a slightly
unauthentic world in the end). A further possibility is the one explored in
The Penultimate Truth, where the war-torn world of the Americans imprisoned
in the underground shelters is bogus, while the world of the privileged elite
living in luxuriant mansions on the surface is authentic; yet both worlds coex-
ist, and none is dismantled at the end of the novel (Ch. 5). It may be that we
have to keep living in a bogus world for the time being (an idea also present
in Ubik and VALIS).
In Dick’s fiction what seems real may be imaginary; individuals may
seem sane while they are deranged; on the other hand, madmen may be wiser
than purportedly sane individuals; a realistic novel can turn into a sf novel
(Time Out of Joint), and a potentially fantastic story may turn into an absolutely
realistic one (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer); men are actually androids
and androids are more human than us; and so on. We may discover that the
 Introduction 13

world conjured up by the Californian writer is bogus, or that it is real though

it seems bogus, or that it is as real as another world which seems to be in
opposition to it. The category of simulation does not help to sort out all these
possibilities. This is why I propose to talk about ontological uncertainty, a
wider and more open-ended category which may accommodate the whole
gamut of narrative solutions devised by Dick in his short stories and novels.
Dick’s ontological uncertainty could be useful in the philosophical dis-
course; maybe it might lead to a new form of ontology proper, or to a revision
of some existing ontologies. This will not be discussed in this book. We will
try instead to understand to what extent ontological uncertainty shapes the
narrative architectures of twenty novels written by Dick. Readers are in any
case free to use my conclusions for philosophical purposes, for literary theory,
for political analyses, for sociological surveys, or simply to understand what
Dick is all about, provided they take responsibility for their usage of my mod-
est proposal.

Todorov Reconsidered
The concept of ontological uncertainty is actually a development (hope-
fully an improvement) of one of the most contested definitions of the fantastic
in literature, the one introduced by Tzvetan Todorov in his 1970 essay The
Fantastic. Here is a detailed description:
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text
must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of
living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural expla-
nation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experi-
enced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a
character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes
one of the themes of the work — in the case of naïve reading, the actual
reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a
certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as
“poetic” interpretations. These three requirements do not have an equal
value. The first and the third actually constitute the genre; the second may
not be fulfilled. Nonetheless, most examples satisfy all three conditions
[Todorov 33].
Todorov’s definition has been repeatedly criticized,12 and it is difficult to
deny that its greatest limit is that it is so narrow that it only covers very few
literary works, such as Guy de Maupassant’s story The Horla [La horla] (1887)
and Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). To accommodate the
most important non-realistic genres of the 20th century, science-fiction and
fantasy, Todorov must introduce two other categories, the uncanny and the
14 INTRODUCTION

marvelous. The latter should explain science-fiction, but it does this in a very
unsatisfactory manner (cf. Lem 1974).
Yet Todorov’s idea of pure fantastic as a hesitation between two different
explanations of a certain event could be quite useful if we applied it to Dick’s
oeuvre. It should be changed, however, because the alternative between a nat-
ural and a supernatural explanation is just one among those that Dick’s novels
present us with (it is the one that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and
VALIS are pivoted upon). If we substitute factual for natural and counterfac-
tual for supernatural, we will have what is at stake in The Man in the High
Castle: we are presented with a parallel universe where Germany and Japan
won World War II. But there is a doubt about that alternate history: a novel-
within-the-novel is set in a world where the USA and the British Empire won
the war (which is not exactly our world, where the USA and the USSR were
the winners). Here the hesitation is between two counterfactual realities. In
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, those who use the hallucinogenic drug
CHEW-Z enter pocket universes which may appear real but are not, and may
have visions related to those universes even after they have exited them (so
that they are not sure that they are really out of Palmer Eldritch’s pocket real-
ities); thus we have an uncertainty about several realities, not just two, which
are all different from ours. In two novels, Ubik and A Maze of Death, a group
of people witness weird events and gradually discover that they are not living
in the real world, but in a virtual reality (more precisely a post mortem collective
hallucination in Ubik): here, after an explanation that — in Todorov’s terms —
would take us to the territory of the scientific marvelous, something happens
which makes us hesitate again (the apparition of the coins with the face of
Joe Chip in Ubik, the manifestation of the Intercessor in A Maze of Death).
Uncertainty remains, but between two supernatural realities.
Uncertainty is however not necessarily applied to whole worlds: we are
often uncertain about the ontological status of single beings or objects in
Dick’s counterfactual, sfnal, or realistic worlds. There are forged Colt guns
and the Zippo lighter in The Man in the High Castle; an android president in
The Simulacra (where the first lady is actually an actress who impersonates an
immensely popular First Lady); a forged Neanderthal skull in The Man Whose
Teeth Were All Exactly Alike; fake human beings in Do Androids Dream of Elec-
tric Sheep?; ersatz animals can be found in the same novel; bogus documen-
taries play a key role in The Penultimate Truth.
What should be clear is that we are not simply talking about suspense
here. It may be that ontological uncertainty was used by Dick to achieve sus-
pense, but it is quite different from what we have in a thriller: there suspense
is caused by a psychological uncertainty (what are the real intentions of this
or that character, who is the murderer, or — as in many noir novels and
 Introduction 15

movies — will the culprit manage to get away with it?), while in Dick the
uncertainty is ontological, because it is about what worlds, people, objects
are. A classical example is the short story “Imposter,” where the plot is pivoted
on the uncertainty about the real nature of Olham: is he a man or an android
who perfectly simulates a man? An android, moreover, who does not know
that he is an artificial human being? This is quite different from asking whether
a certain character is guilty or innocent, friend or foe.

The Game of the Rat

However, ontological uncertainty can also be used to produce suspense.
This is mostly done through a series of twists or coups de théâtre which make
us hesitate about the ontological status of the reality that the characters inhabit,
or some element(s) of it. Thomas M. Disch already noticed this interrupted
narrative strategy adopted by Dick. He called it the Game of the Rat:
There is a form of the board game Monopoly called Rat in which the
Banker, instead of just sitting there and watching, gets to be the Rat. The
Rat can alter all the rules of the game at his discretion, like Idi Amin. The
players elect the person they consider the slyest and nastiest among them to
be the Rat. The trick in being a good Rat is in graduating the torment of
the players, in moving away from the usual experience of Monopoly, by the
minutest calibrations, into, finally, an utter delirium of lawlessness. If you
think you might enjoy Rat a bit more than a standard game of Monopoly
then you should probably try reading Philip Dick [Disch 16].

Changing the rules of a game while playing is quite similar to changing

the ontological status of the/a world, a place, a character, an object while
telling a story. The game of the Rat may be a useful model of Dick’s approach
to science-fiction (actually to fiction in general), surely more interesting than
the one proposed by John Huntington; that is, the 800-words rule of putting
in the story a new idea (a twist or coup de théâtre) every 800 words. Hunt-
ington maintains that “the 800-word rule is an explicitly acknowledged device
for van Vogt,” and though he admits that he does not know “of any such
explicit acknowledgement on Dick’s part,” he thinks that such a technique
can explain Dick’s fiction because of “the central importance of van Vogt’s
practice for Dick’s sense of SF is easily documented” (Huntington 172). Hunt-
ington’s hypothesis was then uncritically adopted by Suvin (Suvin 2002, 393).
The connection between Dick (especially his earlier fiction) and A.E. van
Vogt, one of the most popular sf writers of the 1940s and early 1950s is made
by Huntington due to the simple fact that Dick admired van Vogt: his novel
The World of Null-A was one of Phil’s favorite SF classics (Sutin 82); Dick’s
16 INTRODUCTION

first novel, Solar Lottery is heavily indebted with van Vogt’s fiction (to put it
in Thomas M. Disch’s words, “Solar Lottery is van Vogt’s best novel” [Disch
20]), and the same might be said of other works of the same decade. Dick
met the older Canadian writer at the SF Worldcon in 1954; ten years later he
respectfully portrayed the Canadian writer in his short story “Waterspider”
(1964).
There could be some relation between Dick’s shunts and what van Vogt
might have told him at the SF Worldcon in 1954. The modal verbs are nec-
essary inasmuch as we do not know what van Vogt actually told Dick — we
just know what the fictional character of van Vogt tells the fan (who might be
a fictional avatar of Philip K. Dick) in Dick’s short story: “I start out with a
plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot
to finish the rest of the story” (224). This is van Vogt’s method in Dick’s own
words; however, what is interesting is the idea of a discontinuity, of an inter-
rupted plot that must be superseded by another in order to complete a story.
Did Dick faithfully — albeit not literally — report van Vogt’s words, or did he
put in the character’s mouth a statement that reflected his own modus
operandi?
My analysis of Dick’s fiction (Rossi 2004), proves that the game played
by Dick is more complex than the mechanical application of the 800-word
rule suggested by Huntington, which is in any case something Van Vogt rec-
ommended to apprentice writers, not something that has been found in a
detailed analysis of his science fiction. Yet it is true that the game of the Rat
works by means of discontinuities (some of them radically affecting narrative
conventions) that are deliberately inserted in the plot, what I have called
shunts (Ch. 1), as these often — though not always — shunt the narrative from
one genre to another (it happens in Time Out of Joint, The Cosmic Puppets,
VALIS, and in several short stories).
We might say that the Game of the Rat, which is a radicalization of the
ordinary techniques and strategies used by genre writers to heighten the sus-
pense of a story, necessarily complements the idea of ontological uncertainty.
A succession of twists or shunts creates that condition of ontological uncer-
tainty, of radical doubt that is the hallmark of Dick’s most valuable fiction.

How to Produce Ontological Uncertainty: Towards a

Map of Dickian Uncertainty
Ontological uncertainty is achieved through different narrative devices,
and is found in Dick’s fantasy, sf and realistic fiction. In the works we are
going to discuss ontological uncertainty is generated by different devices,
 Introduction 17

many of which belong to the tradition of sf. By showing how Dick achieved
ontological uncertainty by using different devices, or by using the same device
in different ways, I also propose an intertextual network which should hope-
fully organize Dick’s oeuvre in small groups of interrelated works.
A typical device is that of the alternate worlds, also known as alternate
realities/histories, or parallel universes, that is paramount in many of Dick’s
works, such as The Cosmic Puppets (where its treatment is particularly interesting
as it occurs within the genre of fantasy, not science-fiction), The Man in the
High Castle, The Divine Invasion, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. A subtler
variety of this device has been used in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer,
where the Zadokite scrolls might totally change the religious history of the
West. Surely this device was not invented by Dick, because its sfnal applications
ultimately derive from historians’ mental experiments about alternative out-
comes of decisive historical events. Alternate worlds in Dick sometimes belong
to the old historical counterfactual variety, like The Man in the High Castle,
where a different world stems from the murder of F.D. Roosevelt by Giuseppe
Zangara well before the outbreak of WWII. In other novels like Flow or Inva-
sion, the event which should explain the difference between the alternate world
and ours (or the one depicted as the “normal” world at the beginning of the
story) is not indicated. This device is discussed in chapters 1, 3, 7, 9 and 10.
Another fictional device which may create ontological uncertainty is a
peculiar form of alternate reality which Dick elaborated by drawing from sev-
eral psychiatric and psychoanalytical theories (Freud and Jung, but also Bin-
swanger, Luria, Laing, etc.), which was called “Finite Subjective Reality” by
one of Dick’s pupils, Jonathan Lethem (who based his novel Amnesia Moon
on this device [Rossi, “From Dick to Lethem”]). FSRs may be (a) pocket par-
allel universes who are projected by the minds of single individuals thanks to
drugs or VR technologies (usually these pocket worlds are much smaller and
less permanent than the alternate words described above), and/or (b) delu-
sional realities which are projected by the deranged minds (be they paranoid,
schizoid, etc.) of one or more characters in a novel or short stories. FSRs are
present in such novels as Eye in the Sky, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
Ubik, Clans of the Alphane Moon, etc. The difference between parallel uni-
verses/alternate worlds and FSRs is that world/universes are forms of koinos
kosmos, or “common universe” (to quote a Greek phrase that Dick often used),
while the FSRs are a form of idios kosmos, or “private universe.”13 FSRs are
threatened by solipsism and madness, as we can see in one of Dick’s bleakest
short stories, “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (first published in Playboy in 1980
as “Frozen Journey”). Here the use or abuse of virtual reality makes a man
become so desensitized during an interstellar trip that, once he has reached
his destination, he believes reality to be just another loop of his memories
18 INTRODUCTION

projected by the AI of the starship. Solipsism and madness also threaten the
characters who are trapped in the FSRs created by Palmer Eldritch hallucino-
genic drug CHEW-Z in Stigmata, as they are never sure that they have really
exited the drug-created pocket worlds, and are only dreaming that they are
again in the real world. Moreover, the idea of a delusional world projected
by a deranged mind may be combined to that of a parallel universe, as one
of the characters of The Man in the High Castle suspects that the Nazi-dom-
inated world depicted in the novel is a projection of Hitler’s insane mind.
FSRs will be especially discussed in chapters 2, 4 and 7.
Sometimes the situation of ontological uncertainty derives from another
sfnal device which may in any case lead to the creation of an alternate history:
in Dr. Futurity, as well as in relatively more celebrated novels like The Penultimate
Truth or The Simulacra, or short stories like “A Little Something for Us Tem-
punauts” (1975), time travel may allow individual or governments to alter the
outcome of certain key historical events so that the subsequent historical devel-
opment may be changed and humankind can find itself in a different world. In
The Simulacra, for example, a future American government (the USEA, which
also include West Germany) wants to contact Nazi party bosses to negotiate
the survival of the Jews so that the Holocaust may be avoided. I have tackled
Dick’s highly idiosyncratic use of time travel in chapter 6.
Ontological uncertainty may also be embodied in the figure of the
robot/android which looks human but is not (and sometimes may even believe
it is human), an element of Dick’s fictional worlds that has often been discussed
and interpreted by connecting it with Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra (a
word he probably took from the title of Dick’s novel The Simulacra). Here
the uncertainty might be defined regional or local, as it is not a whole world
or reality which is suspected to be fake, or only apparently real: here characters
are uncertain about the real nature of other human beings, or themselves.
This device plays a pivotal role in We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep, analyzed in chapter 6.
Another form of ontological uncertainty is the presence of faked objects,
such as the Colt pistols in The Man in the High Castle, or the bogus Neanderthal
skull in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, or Gottlieb Fischer’s his-
torical documentaries in The Penultimate Truth, the regrooved tires in Confes-
sions of a Crap Artist, the fake police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, the counterfeit typewriters in In Milton Lumky Territory, etc. Sometimes
these objects have a great importance for the events told in the novels, so that
their authenticity or falseness can change the sense of what is happening. This
device is so widespread in Dick’s oeuvre that it is discussed in all chapters.
Ontological uncertainty can also be produced by the use/abuse of drugs,
as in Now Wait for Last Year, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, or A Scanner
 Introduction 19

Darkly. The sfnal drug in Wait (Ch. 5) allows characters to access alternate
realities (something which connects this novel to those dealing with alternate
worlds); in Tears, the use of another imaginary drug, KR-3 (Ch. 7), does not
only alter the perceptions of the drug user, but also “objectively” changes the
world she lives in, trapping one of the characters, TV star Jason Taverner, in
an alternate reality where he does not exist; on the other hand, Scanner presents
us with a drug addict, Bob Arctor, who is also an undercover nark, S.A. Fred,
because the SD drug he is using gradually separates the two brain hemispheres,
thus generating a split personality. Here identity itself is uncertain, and this
is a form of doubt which is more radical than that suggested by Descartes in
his 1634 Discourse on the Method.14 Drugs as generators of ontological uncer-
tainty are discussed in chapters 5 and 7.
Obviously, since we are talking about a writer who mostly practiced sci-
ence-fiction, two more devices that may generate ontological uncertainty are
typically technological ones: virtual reality, which is found in some novels
and stories by Dick, such as “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” but also Androids,
with the Mercer machine (Ch. 6), Maze, with the polyencephalic fusion (Ch.
7), or the scenes of Herb Asher’s life that he has to re-live while in cryonic
suspension in The Divine Invasion (Ch. 9), or the delusional realities that may
be produced by electric/electronic media such as radio, television, cinema:
e.g. the android presidents in Simulacra and The Penultimate Truth (Ch. 5)
are broadcast via TV waves or cable. A remarkable example of theatrical fake
reality can be found in Time Out of Joint (Ch. 2).
Another device that creates ontological uncertainty is amnesia, something
that Dick surely derived from an older sf writer, A.E. Van Vogt; loss of memory
often hides crucial knowledge, thus beguiling the amnesiac characters (and
readers), as in Time Out of Joint, The Game-Players of Titan, “We Can Remem-
ber It for You Wholesale, Inc.,” or The Divine Invasion, where God himself
suffers from amnesia. This device has been discussed in chapters 2 and 9.
All these devices can be used by Dick to achieve the condition of onto-
logical uncertainty enabling him to play what we have called the Game of the
Rat. It should be added that such a narrative game may be played with one
or more of these devices, as Dick often achieves the most bewildering narrative
effects by associating different sfnal or non-sfnal uncertainty-generating
devices; in Now Wait for Last Year, for example, the drug JJ-180 apparently
allows characters to travel back and forward in time and alter the course of
history, an alteration which could obviously cause massive ontological uncer-
tainty (the same may be said for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch where
FSRs are complicated by time travel and its consequences).
Dick’s Game of the Rat also asks for certain narrative techniques. Surely
one of these is strictly connected to the idea of finite subjective realities, that
20 INTRODUCTION

is, that each individual lives in a different world, or idios kosmos: it is the mul-
tiple plot technique (possibly derived from Dos Passos), where a third person
narrative is coupled with multiple narrative foci. This is what we have e.g. in
Time Out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Sim-
ulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Dr. Bloodmoney, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, but above all in his real-
istic fiction, e.g. in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Puttering
About in a Small Land, Mary and the Giant.
There is something to be said about the realistic novels, which should
not be taken as an assessment in terms of lesser literary value. In these novels
we have the multiple plots and multiple narrative foci which, according to
some critics (e.g., Suvin and Robinson) were the hallmark of Dick’s most
important achievements (Ch. 4); yet these novels have received scant critical
attention so far, with few exceptions (cf. Carratello’s). From our perspective
these novels must necessarily be considered as peripheral works, because they
show a weaker form of uncertainty — we might call it a relational uncertainty
which is basically limited to interpersonal relations, something which can be
also found in other authors, even in the realistic novelists of the 19th century.
There are a few exceptions, such as Confessions of a Crap Artist, where the
unreliable narrator does generate a condition of ontological uncertainty — in
fact this novel will be discussed and quoted in some parts of this monograph.
Then we have some interesting occurrences of what I have called regional
ontological uncertainty, that is the presence of meaningful fake objects, such
as the counterfeit skulls in The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, which
will be also mentioned. However, I have mostly left out the realistic works
out of the picture, though I think that there are other approaches to Dick’s
fiction where his sf output and the realistic works should be read together,
such as the treatment of mass media (cf. Rossi 2010).
However, the technique of multiple plots/foci is not at all exclusive; the
only realistic novel where we have a form of ontological uncertainty (generated
by insanity), Confessions, features a first-person narrative: Dick also used this
technique in such major sf novels as We Can Build You, VALIS, and The Trans-
migration of Timothy Archer, where the presence of a single narrative voice
with a single point of view does not prevent the author from achieving his
characteristic condition of ontological uncertainty.

The Map
The chapter structure of this essay bears relation to the interpretive
hypothesis I have tried to argue. The first chapter presents two case studies
 Introduction 21

focusing on two relatively obscure novels by Dick, The Cosmic Puppets and The
Game-Players of Titan. The former shows ontological uncertainty at work, an
uncertainty which besets both the main character of the novel and the world
surrounding him (a microcosm, actually, embodied in a small provincial town);
the latter shows the workings of Dick’s Game of the Rat with a blow-by-blow
analysis of the plot, showing how uncertainty may move (or shunt) the text
from one subgenre to another. The unifying element of this chapter is the
idea of Dick’s fiction as a rigged game, where the “master game-player,” namely
the author, can change the narrative rules while playing with the readers.
The second chapter aims at discussing two novels of the 1950s where
Dick shows a higher mastery of his game, Eye in the Sky and Time Out of
Joint; the former introduces the device of FSR, and works with alternate real-
ities, but it also deals with the hallucinations that may be generated by mental
derangement, thus complicating what we have found in the first two texts.
The latter reuses the idea of Puppets, with the main character calling in doubt
the reality of his world (a nameless small town), but here the setting is
absolutely ordinary, without the preternatural events occurring in Puppets’
Millgate; the town will be however unmasked as a peculiar sort of FSR, not
generated by hallucinations but by a large-scale theatrical simulation. Here
we can also see how Dick could move from one genre to another in Joint, and
what are the relations between the different textual levels (and alternate worlds)
in Dick’s novels and the koinos kosmos of his readers —our shared world,
whose reality is covertly called in doubt by these texts.
The third chapter discusses Dick’s most celebrated specimen of alternate
history, that is, The Man in the High Castle, a novel which asks for a detailed
discussion due to his complexities but also the wealth of scholarly analyses of
its labyrinthine structure. This chapter deepens the discussion of the relation
between the worlds inside the novel, and its readers’ understanding of the
world they live in.
The fourth chapter reads Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney and Clans of
the Alphane Moon, three novels where the technique of multiple plots and nar-
rative foci is connected with the device of madness as a generator of idioi kosmoi,
and allows us to see how a plurality of points of view and the FSRs generated
by insanity may produce bewildering effects of ontological uncertainty.
The fifth chapter deals with three novels, The Simulacra, Now Wait for
Last Year, and The Penultimate Truth, which achieve ontological uncertainty
also by means of time travel, considered as a device which may led to an alter-
ation of what is usually considered unchangeable, the past (and history). These
three novels are also characterized by a strong political content.
The sixth chapter discusses the issue of “limited” ontological uncertainty
by focusing on two novels, namely We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream
22 INTRODUCTION

of Electric Sheep? where some characters have an onytologically uncertain sta-

tus: the androids, or simulacra, as opposed to real human beings.
The seventh chapter, possibly the core of this monograph, explores three
of Dick’s most important novels —The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said— and a purportedly minor
novel —A Maze of Death— highlighting how the use of FSRs/alternate realities,
be they generated by drugs (Stigmata, Flow) or virtual reality technologies
(Ubik, Maze), is underpinned by a metafictional subtext: the creators of the
FSRs are narrative archons which conjure up imperfect worlds, and can be
read as portraits of the artist as a sfnal demiurge.
The three final chapters are devoted to a detailed discussion of the VALIS
Trilogy, where the three novels are structured according to new applications
of narrative devices Dick had already used: VALIS oscillates between realistic
fiction and religious sf, The Divine Invasion reinvents alternate realities and
half-life (the post-mortem virtual reality in Ubik), The Transmigration of Tim-
othy Archer oscillates between realism and fantasy, but also destabilizes our
koinos kosmos with an alternate history of Christianity.
Discussing Dick’s novels in this or that chapter, since each chapter dis-
cusses a different narrative device, means suggesting an intertextual network
which might help future interpreters to somewhat organize Dick’s oeuvre not
just based on genre borders (science-fiction, realism, fantasy), but along the-
matic faultlines. This is precisely what this monograph aimed at, and it is
plain to see that those works which have not been listed above could be linked
to those which have. Some novels, though not analyzed in detail, have been
discussed in this essay: for example Solar Lottery (Ch. 1), The World Jones
Made (Ch. 9), or Dr. Futurity (Ch. 5). On the other hand, Counter-Clock
World being based on a temporal inversion (dead people resurrect, life flows
from the tomb to the womb), achieves ontological uncertainty by reversing
our temporal coordinates; it is thus close to the time-travel novels in chapter
6 (and Martian Time-Slip, if we privilege the aspect of narrative time manip-
ulation). The Crack in Space surely belongs to the group of alternate
worlds/histories novels, discussed in Chapter 3 and 915; Lies Inc., being char-
acterized by drugs-induced hallucination, bears relation to the novels in chap-
ter 716; the same may be said for a much stronger novel like A Scanner Darkly,
where the protagonist, an undercover police officer, hallucinates another per-
son who is actually his assumed bogus identity as drug-addict Bob Arctor.17
Similar relations of derivation or kinship can be found for the remaining
minor works.
Then we have Galactic Pot-Healer, occupying a somewhat isolated position,
as it is the novel where Dick tried to anatomize artistic creation with a complex
symbolic and psychoanalytical allegory. The attempt was not successful, but
 Introduction 23

this does not mean that it does not deserve more critical attention than it has
received so far.

Some Fallacies
There are two reviews — not of Dick’s works, but of two monographs on
Dick’s fiction — that must be mentioned inasmuch as their authors, Gary K.
Wolfe and Peter Fitting respectively, pointed out two serious issues in Dick
scholarship. Wolfe, who reviewed Warrick’s Mind in Motion, politely rebukes
her because “she does not want to deal with Dick as an SF writer” (Wolfe
238). Her intent is noble, as “she wants to achieve for Dick what he could
never achieve for himself— namely, to liberate him from the stigma of SF”
(238), but it is faulty criticism. We might call this the Ennoblement Fallacy,
which often plagues Dick scholarship; it happens when commentators think
they have to demonstrate Dick’s literary value by showing he is a respectable
writer, and comparing him to the classics. Two recent contributions on Dick
fall prey of this fallacy, that is Kucukalic’s Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of
the Digital Age, and Vest’s The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick.
On the other hand Fitting, who reviewed Mackey’s Philip K. Dick, crit-
icized the attitude of those commentators, including Mackey, “for whom the
work — particularly in the last years — is the expression of conscious vision,
one which has moral consequences and which even ... contains something
akin to religious truth” (Fitting 1989, 243). This could be called the Prophetic
Fallacy, which then bifurcates in two questionable critical approaches: believ-
ing that Dick’s fiction can only be understood by delving into his letters and
interviews (244), and looking for “some message that Dick was anxious to
transmit” (245); Fitting evidently meant the ethical/religious message pur-
portedly vehiculated by Dick’s last works, especially the VALIS Trilogy.
I hope I have escaped the Ennoblement Fallacy by discussing Dick’s fiction
as science-fiction when it was written for that market, and by acknowledging
Dick’s complex dialogue with other sf authors (Fitting 1989, 244), “his relations
with other SF and fantasy writers and editors” (Wolfe 238). As for the Prophetic
Fallacy, my initial warning that this is a work of literary criticism, neither theory
nor philosophy nor theology, should show that I am well aware of the problem.
However, there are two more fallacies which have plagued PKD schol-
arship, which could be seen as the twins of those denounced by Wolfe and
Fitting. I shall call them the Hack Writer Fallacy and the Crackpot Novelist
Fallacy. The latter is easier to explain: it is the stance of those critics who, like
Eric Rabkin, think that Dick “did go insane” (Rabkin 186), so that they may
elegantly solve any interpretive problem we encounter in reading any of his
24 INTRODUCTION

works, especially those of the last phase of his activity. As for the Hack Writer
Fallacy, it turns the Ennoblement Fallacy upside-down: while those who wish
to nobilitate tend to forget that Dick was a commercial fantasy and above all
sf writer, those who resent the ennoblement tend to forget that Dick had
undoubtedly read Van Vogt, Hubbard, and Ballard, but also Vaughan, von
Hofmannstahl, and Beckett — just to quote six authors whose names occur
(some not just once) in the first volume of Dick’s Selected Letters.
To avoid these four fallacies that have struck several critics I have adopted
a comparative approach derived from comparative literature studies. I have
tried to read Dick’s works by connecting them to each other (something Jame-
son has already done, but only for a few novels), and to other writers’ works,
regardless of national or genre boundaries. I have tried to read Dick’s oeuvre
as a constellation of texts where Dick used the same devices and tackled the
same quandaries in different ways; a constellation which does not shine in the
sky alone, but among many others, against the background of that textual
milky way we call literature.
Moreover, I have linked Dick’s works with music (his lifelong passion)
and the electric/electronic media, because his (and ours) is a multimedia cul-
ture, where writers are not always inspired by other writers, but by films, TV
and radio programs, even comics.18 But the comparative approach also asks
for a careful examination of Dick’s historical context, because numberless
hints at what was happening or had happened in the koinos kosmos around
him can be found in his fiction. I have tried to put Dick in the context of the
1960s, following Freedman’s brief but insightful reconstruction of his deep
connections with that decade (Freedman 1988, 147–52); but, since I do not
share Freedman’s belief that Dick’s “essential masterpieces ... are all products
of the most eventful decade in postwar American history [i.e. the 1960s]”
(Freedman 1988, 147), I have linked his subsequent fiction to the different
historical background of the 1970s and early 1980s.
History did not stop in 1982, of course. But Dick’s interrelation with
American (and world) history continues, as we can see thanks to one of Dick’s
commentators, Aaron Barlow, who decided to end his uneven but passionate
monograph, How Much Does Chaos Scare You?, with a chapter whose pro-
grammatic title is: “What’s Going Down: Lessons of Philip K. Dick’s Short
Fiction for the Post-9/11 World.” This is not to say that we should read Dick’s
sf as the prediction of things to come: I am all too aware of the dangers of
the Prophetic Fallacy. But I do believe that writers somewhat manage to see
the seeds of the future in the folds of the present; and it takes a maker of
twisted worlds like Philip Kindred Dick to tell us how twisted this world we
live in really is.
 Chapter 1

The Game of the Rat

(and Its Players):
The Cosmic Puppets and
The Game-Players of Titan

“’Sblood, do you think I am

easier to be played on than a pipe?”
William Shakespeare

Our discussion of ontological uncertainty in the fiction of Philip K. Dick

will start from a novel which has not been considered very important in the
Dickian canon so far. In fact The Cosmic Puppets (1957) has been rated quite
low by Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, who gave it just three points out
of ten (Sutin 292); while Andrew M. Butler deemed it barely sufficient, rating
it 3/5 (Butler 2007, 28).1 There is no doubt that such ratings, subjective as
they may be — though expressed by authors with an exhaustive knowledge of
Dick’s oeuvre — cannot be taken as the ultimate scholarly assessment; yet they
somewhat mirror a widespread lack of interest of literary critics towards this
novel. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge, something that could explain Kim
Stanley Robinson’s idea that “the appearance of evil aliens” (Robinson 20) in
this and other works by Dick is the “sign of a weak book,” a rather puzzling
statement because there are no aliens in this novel, as we shall see. All in all,
browsing the bibliography of this volume one will not find monographs or
essays specifically devoted to The Cosmic Puppets, and critics who tried to offer
a comprehensive view of Dick’s fiction, like Patricia S. Warrick, contented
themselves with a passing mention (Warrick 120).2 Mackey, the only com-
mentator who devotes a few pages to this work, finds several faults in the
novel, and considers it interesting only because it “stands as a remarkably
clear paradigm of the essential Dick myth” (Mackey 16) of a fundamental

25
26 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

cosmic dualism which will take more successfully form in the novels of the
1960s (Mackey 15).
The explanation of such neglect is quite easy for anyone who is knowl-
edgeable with the history of Dick scholarship: the first wave of Dick criticism
was written by scholars who were interested in science-fiction as a literary
genre and a form of imagination (possibly with a strongly utopian/dystopian
component, and/or a remarkable political subtext), and those critics, be they
those tied to Science-Fiction Studies or others, were busy reading science-
fiction as allegories or critiques of sociopolitical realities and definitely not
interested in fantasy novels; while The Cosmic Puppets is correctly described
by Butler as “a contemporary fantasy which shows a cosmic battle over reality
being fought out in a mundane present day” (Butler 2007, 28).
When the first Marxist — or however politically engaged — pioneering
critics were followed by the postmodern wave (in the mid-eighties), there was
a change in the appreciation of Dick’s fiction, but not one that could reha-
bilitate Puppets. Critics who read Dick through the lenses of Baudrillard or
Jameson looked for simulacra, virtual realities, posthuman or android iden-
tities; the fight between two ancient godheads belonging to Zoroastrianism/
Mazdaism, a relatively obscure religion in the West at that time, was surely
not in the agenda of any critic interested in the quandaries of the postmodern
age. The situation has not improved till today.
Yet there are good reasons to pay attention to this hitherto neglected novel.
First of all, though Dick’s first published novel is Solar Lottery (1955), we know
that Puppets had been completed in 1953, almost a year before Lottery3; so Puppets
should not be considered as an occasional and unimportant foray into fantasy
of a science-fiction writer, but the beginning of Dick’s activity as a genre writer.
The only surviving novels written by Dick before Puppets are two posthumously
published realistic works, Gather Yourselves Together (1994, but written in 1949–
53) and Voices from the Street (2007, written in 1952–53), and this tells us
that in 1953 he was trying different genres and had not concentrated on sci-
ence-fiction yet. After the success of his first sf novel, Solar Lottery, Dick still
kept writing realistic fiction that his literary agent regularly sent to respectable
publishing houses, and these attempts continued till the early 1960s.
As I have already argued in the Introduction, we cannot read Dick’s sf
output if we overlook those works of his that do not belong to sf: his realistic
fiction, and his only fantasy novel. We should never forget that he was a writer
who managed to express himself in different genres, and often he managed
to do that by crossbreeding them (something which is particularly important
in works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Martian Time-Slip, or
VALIS); in any case, Dick did not consider fantasy something extraneous or
marginal in his oeuvre. In 1957, writing to his literary mentor Tony Boucher,
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 27

he said that Puppets was “its pure fantasy, which as you know has always been
my favorite” (SL1 35). External factors seem to have prevented him from writ-
ing other fantasy works, as he tells one Mr. Haas in another letter: “As you
know, my own private love is fantasy, but fantasy is disappearing from the
marketplace. Boucher tells me that he does not dare print a long fantasy; only
a long science fiction is tolerated by his readers.... Gradually, I and other fan-
tasy writers, have been discouraged from continuing” (SL1 32–3). In the same
letter he said that he called Kafka’s works “fantasies,” and Kafka was a writer
he identified with (in a 1973 letter Dick maintained that the middle initial of
his name should stand for Kafka [SL2 126]); in 1960 he stated that he had
been influenced by “the fantasy writers such as Kafka” (SL1 56) and that “fan-
tasy was once [his] field.” Moreover, Dick also affirmed in 1970 that he was
still writing “psychological fantasies” (SL1 269). Surely not everything Dick
wrote in his letters can be taken at its face value, yet these statements should
be read in connection with the undisputable fact that Dick wrote a fantasy
novel and several fantasy stories in the early 1950s. Among the pure fantasy
stories we have “The King of Elves,” “The Cookie Lady,” “Beyond the Door”
and “Out in the Garden” (all completed in 1952), plus “Of Withered Apples”
and “Small Town” (both completed in 1953); then we have “The Preserving
Machine” and “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford” (published in
1953 and 1954 respectively), two fantasy stories barely disguised as science-
fiction, and “Expendable” (1953) which might be read as science-fiction, but
was considered a “short fantasy story” by Dick (CS1 403). Another short story,
“The Great C” (completed in 1952), has a stronger science-fictional compo-
nent, but is undeniably a rewriting of the Biblical narrative (or better hints
at the narrative) of the god Moloch and the human sacrifices it required (as
in e.g., Leviticus 18:21): it is thus endowed with a powerful mythical/religious
subtext, which is a typical feature of fantasy fiction.
Dick clearly told Gregg Rickman that when he wrote Puppets he had the
sort of fantasy fiction published on Unknown Worlds in his mind (Rickman
1988, 115). Though Unknown, which had started in 1939 and was directed by
John W. Campbell, had ceased to exist in 1943 — probably due to wartime
paper shortage — Dick wrote his novel in such a way that it could have been
published by the extinct pulp magazine; the models he quotes are Cleve Cart-
mill, Heinlein, Lewis Padgett (Rickman 1988, 116)— all of them authors who
had written stories published on Unknown. In particular Lewis Padgett —
which actually was the pseudonym of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore — was
one of the most famous fantasy writers of the 1940s. When he was asked about
Puppets by Rickman, Dick replied: “I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoy reading
it” (Rickman 1988, 116). He did not disown his fantasy novel, and proved to
be well aware (and knowledgeable) of the genre it belongs to.
28 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Besides, Dick did not consider fantasy very different from science-fiction.
In one of his last letters (May 14, 1981), he explained:
... to separate science fiction from fantasy ... is impossible to do.... Take
Psionics; take mutants such as we find in Ted Sturgeon’s wonderful MORE
THAN HUMAN. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he
will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that
such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be
possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which
general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which
general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in
essence a judgment-call, since what is possible and what is not possible is
not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the
author and the reader [SL6 153].

Dick is not speaking as a scientist or a philosopher, but as a professional

writer who knows the workings of a narrative text from the inside.4 It is not
a matter, as in such critics as Suvin, of defining an objective criterion to dis-
criminate between those imaginary worlds that belong to fantasy and those
belonging to science fiction proper; it is a matter of what may be found in a
text which tells readers that they are reading fantasy or science fiction — pro-
vided they care. In other words, it is a matter of literary genre as a reading
protocol.
There is a difference, says Dick, but it is very thin. The borderline
between fantasy and science-fiction may be blurred; that barrier may be highly
permeable. Moreover, there may be an uncertainty about the genre a narrative
belongs to: it may be fantasy to some readers and science-fiction to others.
No wonder then if Dick moved so quickly and easily from fantasy to science-
fiction after finishing The Cosmic Puppets: in fact his next novel, Solar Lottery,
is unmistakably a work of science-fiction, which respects many of the clichés
of the genre, and can be even said to be derivative (Thomas M. Disch ironically
called it “Van Vogt’s best novel” [Disch 20]).
However, fantasy offered Dick one of his most important narrative tools,
which he subsequently applied to his science-fictional works: the parallel uni-
verse or alternate reality. It is one of the narrative devices which he used with
a dazzling originality, like probably no other writer inside science-fiction.
Before we try to understand how fantasy fiction (and cinema, as we shall see)
offered Dick such a powerful narrative tool, we should see how it is used in
Puppets.
The novel is pivoted upon the bewildering experience of Ted Barton, an
ordinary man who visits Millgate, the small Virginian town where he was
born and grew up, with his wife Peggy. It is an ordinary trip of ordinary
people visiting a town in the heart of the Appalachians which is “sleepy and
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 29

ordinary like a hundred other little towns” (8); Ted is simply driven by nos-
talgia, as he has not visited Millgate for eighteen years. But when Barton
reaches the ordinary small town he finds out that it is not the one he remem-
bers, being totally different from the Millgate he grew up in (10). It is not just
that the town has changed: it is another town. Besides, Ted soon discovers,
browsing old issues of the local newspaper, the Millgate Times (whose name
is not Millgate Weekly, the one he remembers [15]), that there is a substantial
reason why nobody seems to know him: in the 9 October 1935 issue he finds
an article about the death of Theodore Barton, 9 years old, due to scarlet
fever (16).
This discovery casts Barton in an abyss of radical uncertainty. His mem-
ory tells him the Millgate he grew up in is not the town he is in now; his
memory also tells him he left the town with his parents. But documents (the
newspaper) tell him Ted Burton never left Millgate, and died in 1935. “Maybe
he wasn’t Ted Barton. False memories.... The whole content of his mind —
everything. Falsified, by someone or something.... But if he wasn’t Ted Bar-
ton — then who was he?” (17).
This is already a typical Dickian situation. The protagonist is not sure
of his very memories; he is not even sure he is Ted Burton: the uncertainty
about his personal history brings about a radical uncertainty about his identity.
This is what we will find in Dick’s subsequent major works: uncertainty about
reality dominates Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint (Ch. 2), The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik and A Maze of Death (Ch. 7), The Penul-
timate Truth (Ch. 5); uncertainty about one’s memories is paramount in Time
Out of Joint, A Scanner Darkly (Ch. 8), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(Ch. 6), “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale Inc.” The rest of the novel
stages Barton’s quest for his own identity and past, his thwarted attempts to
understand why he remembers a different town and how he can be at the
same time dead when he was 9 and still alive and 27 years old. If something
has been falsified, what is it? The whole content of his mind (which should
mean Ted is insane) or the town around him (which should mean that some-
thing very strange is going on in that only apparently ordinary town)?
In a short sf story Dick sent to his agent in February 1953 (that he may
have written while he was working on Puppets, as the novel was completed in
August 1953; or after finishing Puppets, if we trust Dick when he says that his
fantasy novel was ready in 1952), “Imposter,” a similar problem of uncertain
identity is treated in a different context: the protagonist, Olham, might not
be a human being but an android, a perfect replica of the real Olham, who
might have been killed by the aliens at war with Earth, and replaced with an
intelligent weapon. The android simulacrum of Olham in fact contains a pow-
erful bomb which will detonate at the end of the story, when it will be all too
30 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

clear that if Olham is dead (his corpse is ultimately found) then the protagonist
must be bogus.
However, there is a fundamental difference between the short story and
Puppets. The former remains a science-fiction story whether Olham is a real
human being or an android5; while the authenticity or falsity of Barton’s
memories in the novel changes the genre of the text itself. If Barton’s memories
are false, and the real Ted Barton really died when he was 9, the novel could
be the description of a case of insanity; Barton might well be a madman who
persuaded himself that he is somebody else, and the solution of the mystery
should be psychiatric. This would bring the novel and its readers into the
field of realistic fiction, maybe close to a novelette that had strongly impressed
Dick, Ron L. Hubbard’s Fear (1940). Dick mentions this work twice in his
letters, in 1954 (SL1 33), when he compares it to Puppets, and in 1970,6 when
he says “Fear ... impressed me very much, and still does. Without Fear I would
never have come up with what I do” (SL1 269).
Hubbard’s novelette tells the story of an anthropologist, James Lowry,7
who has published an article on a magazine which rationally explains demons
and other supernatural entities as delusions. This leads to his being fired by the
president of the college where he teaches, because his denunciation of pagan
religions might ultimately pave the way to an attack on Christianity (Hubbard,
107–8). After being expelled by the college, Lowry suffers from temporary amne-
sia and forgets four hours of his life; this episode is followed by a series of hal-
lucinations which might be interpreted by readers as the demons’ revenge on
Lowry for his denial of their existence. Fear thus reads until the last few pages
as a fantasy novelette where a man who has denied the existence of supernatural
beings must face the wrath of those very beings, but it is ultimately revealed
to be a crime narrative when we discover what really happened in the four lost
hours: Lowry killed his wife Mary and his best friend Tommy Williams in a
fit of homicidal mania (possibly triggered by the stress of his expulsion plus
jealousy). His hallucinations are actually distorted memories of moments of
the slaughter and the subsequent hiding of the corpses in a cellar; when Lowry
confesses his crime to a policeman, we are also told the real meaning of an
enigmatic message he has repeatedly received from the shadows: “if you find
your hat you’ll find your four hours, and if you find your four hours then you will
die” (Hubbard 129). The hat was left by Lowry in the cellar where he hid the
two corpses; to find it he should get back to that place and discover his crime;
but by discovering it he might easily expose it, and be subsequently sentenced
to death for murder. Hubbard wrote in the Author’s Note that “this story is
wholly logical, for all that will appear to the contrary” (Hubbard 100): it is a
crime novelette disguised as a fantasy tale, and the demons are no more than
metaphors of the destructive, murderous drives in the main character’s mind.
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 31

Dick was impressed by this “psychological fantasy” (we should interpret

this phrase as meaning that whatever is fantastic in Hubbard’s Fear is actually
caused by psychological processes, however deranged those may be), but he
turned it upside down in Puppets. Though, as we have already said, the psy-
chiatric explanation of Barton’s plight in Millgate is at least suggested in the
second chapter of the novel (“Maybe he wasn’t Ted Barton” [17] implies that
the protagonist might be somebody else who only believes he is Burton, maybe
a madman), as the story proceeds the fantastic elements prevail, so that if Fear
moves from fantasy to crime fiction,8 Puppets moves from mystery to fantasy.
The novel decidedly enters the field of fantasy at the end of chapter 6,
when Barton finally finds someone who remembers the old Millgate, the same
town that the protagonist remembers, and can confirm that the town has been
replaced (61). But we have already discovered at the end of chapter 4 that the
Millgate Barton has not recognized is not at all an ordinary town: it happens
when, in the porch of Dr. Meade’s house, “two shapes, faintly luminous,
emerged” (39); two shapes of a man and a woman, walking together and
apparently talking, though no sound is heard. The shapes are indifferently
met by the people on the porch, until they disappear, stirring no attention or
curiosity. Dr. Meade comments: “Seems to me there’ve always been Wander-
ers.... But it’s perfectly natural. What’s so strange about it?” (39). This tells
us that Millgate is not a normal place, after all.
After Ted Barton meets a bum called William Christopher who remem-
bers Pine and Central Street, the streets of the old Millgate (61), his memories
are confirmed. To use a terminology that Dick derived from existential psy-
choanalysis (which in turn took it from Heraclitus), Barton’s idios kosmos, his
individual world, is different from the koinos kosmos, the world where all the
inhabitants of Millgate live; until his idios kosmos remains private, personal,
it may be easily explained as the product of a delusional syndrome, caused by
trauma or psychosis. But when Ted and William Christopher meet and are
thus able to compare notes, and realize that they share the memories of the
disappeared Millgate, they have an alternative koinos kosmos, no more an
idios kosmos.
It is then a matter of alternate realities, and we are well inside the territory
of fantasy fiction. In fact Dick probably took the idea of two alternative Mill-
gates from a famous American fantasy film, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946). That this film may have had an impact (direct or indirect) on Dick’s
fiction is a hypothesis that was already proposed by an Italian scholar, Gabriele
Frasca, in his 2007 monograph L’oscuro scrutare di Philip K. Dick, where he
connects Dick’s presentation of ordinary life in provincial America as hiding
something alien, uncanny, possibly threatening, to Orson Welles’ The Stranger
(another film which premiered in 1946) and Capra’s comedy (Frasca 40–1).
32 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Frasca does not overtly suggest that Dick saw Capra’s movie and was struck
by it, but this is what may have happened if we take into account some inter-
esting similarities between Puppets and It’s a Wonderful Life (which Dick might
have seen when it was originally shown in movie theatres in January 1947; at
that time he was eighteen and not yet suffering from agoraphobia [SL1 64–
5]).9
Capra’s film tells, through a series of flashbacks, the life of George Bailey,
an ordinary (we might say even representative) middle-class American man
who has spent his whole life in the provincial town of Bedford Falls. He has
missed several opportunities to leave his home town and travel to exotic places
(he is an avid reader of National Geographic and dreams to visit Africa and
Asia); he has devoted his whole life to the Bailey Building and Loan Associ-
ation, the little building society which has allowed many citizens of Bedford
Falls to have a house of their own. But on December 24 George, due to an
omission by his uncle Billy, finds himself on the verge of bankruptcy, and suf-
fers a nervous breakdown which makes him almost commit suicide; he is
saved (and this places this mostly realistic film well inside the territory of fan-
tasy) by the intervention of a well-meaning — albeit bungling — angel second
class, Clarence Odbody, who subsequently shows George Bailey what the
world would have been if he had never been born.
Bailey is thus brought to an alternate reality, a parallel world which is
similar to the one he comes from, with the only difference that he was never
born. And the alternate reality is visually materialized by Capra as a different
town, which is no more called Bedford Falls but Pottersville, after the name
of the wealthiest man in town, Henry Potter, an avid and ruthless banker and
slum lord. The alternate town where capitalist greed is unrestrained is shown
as a dismal place: it is mostly a slum, with its Main Street dominated by pawn
shops and sleazy bars. Bailey Park, the tidy model neighborhood financed by
George’s loans, was never built. There is no doubt that the world where George
never existed is remarkably worse than the one we have been presented with
in the first part of the film. In Pottersville all the characters surrounding
George live a miserable life; some of them are not even alive (George’s brother,
Harry, died when he was a little boy because his brother was not there to save
him after he fell in a pond through the ice; he didn’t grow up to become a
fighter pilot and save the crew of a US cargo ship in W.W.II, so also the sailors’
lives have been lost due to George’s non-existence); people are generally
unfriendly, selfish, often hostile; the only place where some lame form of
socialization takes place is the sleazy bar where George meets Mr. Gower,
who is an alcoholic in the alternate reality because George couldn’t prevent
him from accidentally poisoning a boy.10
After visiting Pottersville, George comes to understand the numberless
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 33

relations which tie him to other people and ultimately to the world, and real-
izes how important he has been to others; this brings him to beg Clarence
(and God) to let him live again. He is granted this second wish, and can thus
get back to Bedford Falls, where he will manage to save his building society
thanks to the gratitude of all those he has helped, directly or indirectly, in his
life. Thus we have a happy ending which puts the film in the tradition of
Christmas edifying tales, whose most famous representative is probably Charles
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). This novella may have influenced Philip
Van Doren Stern, the historian and writer who wrote “The Greatest Gift,”
the 1943 short story which was turned into the screenplay of Capra’s It’s a
Wonderful Life by a pool of screenwriters which also included Capra himself.
In fact when George Bailey is shown what the world might have been had he
never been born, we are presented with an alternative present: a parallel uni-
verse, we might say, which is not so different from the possible future that
Ebenezer Scrooge is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Dickens’
novella. In both Capra’s film and Dickens’ tale showing an alternative reality
(be it a possible future or a parallel present) is a way to teach a lesson about
the meaning of life, a narrative device through which the main characters
may understand what could be or have been the ultimate consequences of
their choices. In Dickens, Scrooge is shown what will be the effects of his
insensitivity, selfishness and greed; in Capra, George must understand that
his generosity, unselfishness and socially responsible attitude have changed
the world around him.
We might say that in both works the projection of an alternate reality
is a thought experiment, a what-if which allows characters and readers/watch-
ers to meditate on the interconnectedness of human lives. This is not very far
from what Brian Stableford quoted as one of the earliest examples of alternate
worlds in the homonymous entry of The Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction, that
is, “If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo” (1907), a short essay written
by G.M. Trevelyan, one of the most prestigious historians of the Twentieth
Century. Alternate histories or “what ifs” have often been used by historians
as thought experiments, but they — as we have seen — have also been used by
popular genres, be they fantasy or science-fiction.
In Dick’s case the presence of two alternate realities (the Millgate Ted
Burton remembers and the one he finds when he visits the town where he was
born) also provides an opposition between two genres: fantasy and realism.
Such a peculiar articulation of his narrative will become more evident in
another novel of the fifties that will be discussed in the next chapter, Time
Out of Joint, and will be developed into one of Dick’s last literary achievements,
VALIS (Ch. 9), but there is no doubt that its testing ground was this obscure
and neglected fantasy novel. There is a striking difference, though, between
34 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Dick’s novel and the two other previous works, A Christmas Carol and It’s a
Wonderful World; while the novella and the film are clearly aimed at teaching
a moral truth, extolling the virtues of generosity and solidarity, it is more
difficult to pinpoint an overt moral in Dick’s novel.
There’s no doubt that the Millgate where Ted Burton died in 1935, the
town we are presented with at the beginning of the novel, is worse than the
town Ted remembers. As soon as he arrives, he enters a hardware store to ask
for information, and the description of the business is quite eloquent:
It was old, an ancient wood building, leaning and sagging, its yellow
paint peeled off. He could make out a dim interior, ... faded calendars on
the walls. Behind the fly-speckled window was a display of fertilizers and
chemical sprays. Dead insects lay in heaps in the corners. Spider webs.
Warped cardboard signs. It was an old store — old as hell [11].
Later on, when Ted talks with Will Christopher, he is told that Pine
Street was replaced by Fairmount, and that “Pine Street was a nice place. A
lot nicer than Fairmount” (61). Christopher reveals that the town was
“replaced” abruptly, overnight, eighteen years before, and complains that
“[e]verything is worse” (63); we might doubt this, since this judgment is
uttered by a drunkard, yet also Ted realizes that the part of the town where
Will lives is more decayed than the one he remembers. Surely the change has
worsened Will’s life: “I wasn’t all run-down like this. I was hard-working.
Had my shop and my ability. Led a good clean life” (65). Now he must live
like a bum in a “packing crate” which took the place of his “nice little three-
room cabin” (64). His plight is quite similar to that of the characters in It’s a
Wonderful Life whose life depends on George Bailey’s intervention: I have
already quoted Mr. Gower, the druggist, but one might also mention Mr.
Martini (who does not own the bar in Pottersville) or Violet (who is reduced
to be a pickpocket and possibly a prostitute). Another example of how the
“new” Millgate is worse than the Millgate Ted and Will remember is the park,
which has been replaced by Dudley Street, that is, “a row of drooping, decayed
old shacks. Ancient stores, no longer used. Missing boards. Windows broken.
A few tattered rags fluttering in the night wind. Shabby, rotting shapes in
which birds nested, rats and mice scampered” (79).
Other examples might be quoted, but what is important here is to under-
stand that the qualitative difference between the two alternate realities (here
two alternative towns) has another meaning from the Bedford Falls vs. Pot-
tersville opposition in Capra’s film. It could be in fact easily argued that behind
the two alternative towns in It’s a Wonderful Life there are two different political
and economical visions of the United States (Frasca 146): Bedford Falls is the
America of the New Deal, where social solidarity prevails and the third of
President F.D. Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the freedom from want, has been
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 35

achieved; Pottersville is obviously the projection of the mentality of Henry

Potter, the local banker and slum lord, the embodiment of unrestrained lais-
sez-faire capitalism, a place of alienation and ruthless exploitation. Capra’s
film is thus a cautionary tale that should teach both an ethical and a political
lesson.
In The Cosmic Puppets the lesson to be learned seems to be metaphysical:
once Ted discovers that there are greater powers at work in Millgate than it
may seem, and is told who the two “cosmic towers of being” (49) are who
loom large over the town (104), it is quite clear that behind the strange events,
the replacement of the town with a degraded version of it (and its original
inhabitants), the isolation of the place by means of uncanny barriers (52–7),
the acts of witchcraft performed by Peter, a weird and hostile boy, there is
the struggle between two ancient and mysterious godheads, Ormazd and Ahri-
man (104). Millgate was invaded by Ahriman, the god of “darkness, filth and
death,” who replaced the real town with its distorted replica; obviously worse
than the original Millgate, as Ahriman is the wrecker (104), forever struggling
to undo what has been created by Ormazd. A psychological reading of these
“cosmic polarities” is not very difficult: behind these two godheads, which
Dick derived from Zoroastrianism, there are two conflicting principles that
are quite familiar even to those who ignore the 2,500-years-old Persian reli-
gion. In Dick’s novel Ormazd is life and Ahriman is death, not just from a
biological point of view, but also psychologically. In his 1954 letter to Mr.
Haas Dick explained that the novel started with a “natural, factual, normal”
(SL1, 33) situation and then progressed “into greater and deeper levels of fan-
tasy; a trip into the dream-region of symbolism, the unconscious, etc. as one
finds in Alice in Wonderland” (SL1, 33). Dick then adds that “all human
minds, sick or well, have regions of dream-symbolism,” and this means that
Puppets was meant to be an exploration of this symbolism, and that the god-
heads in the novel should be explained as psychic symbols. One might then
wonder whether behind Ahriman and Ormazd there are the Zoroastrian god-
heads Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda, or the Freudian concepts of Eros and
Thanatos.
Surely Dick’s version of Zoroastrianism is quite original. While it is true
that a certain interpretation of the relation between Angra Mainyu and Ahura
Mazda posits them as peers, dialectical forces whose contrast animates the
universe (they are even considered twins by the Zurvanite branch of Zoroas-
trianism), so that Dick’s bi-theistic system can be said to be faithful to at least
one tradition of the ancient Persian religion, it should be also said that the
writer only chose to include in his novel those figures which somewhat fit his
own psychological symbolism. Armaiti, for example, who first appears in the
novel as Mary, the daughter of Dr. Meade (who is actually Ormazd’s “cosmic
36 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

puppet”), is the daughter of Ahura Mazda also in the Zoroastrian tradition,

but she is not just “the essence of generation. The bursting power of woman,
of all life ... the energy behind all growing things ... an unbelievably potent
aliveness that vibrated and pulsed in radiant, shimmering waves” (136); in
Zoroastrianism Armaiti is associated to earth, so she is the goddess of both
fertility and the dead, who are buried in the earth. This second association
was omitted by Dick; besides, he does not say that Armaiti is one of the seven
Amesha Spentas, divine beings that belong to Ormazd’s retinue, nor are any
of the other Amesha Spentas mentioned; and while Ormazd fights against
Ahriman, first through the two human embodiments or puppets (Peter and
Dr. Meade), then directly (132), in the novel there is no trace of Nanghaithya,
the archfiend which is the usual opponent of Armaiti in the Zoroastrian tra-
dition.
It is safe to say that here Dick is using Zoroastrianism, including in his
narrative only those figures which may symbolize the psychological drives he
was really interested in; it is quite different from the anxious interrogation of
religious ideas, narratives and figures which will take place in his final works,
from A Scanner Darkly (Ch. 8) to the VALIS Trilogy (Ch. 8–10), when Dick
was frantically trying to make sense of the strange experiences he had or
declared to have had in February–March 1974 (the so-called 2–3-47 experi-
ences).11 Behind the decaying Millgate there is the real Millgate of Ted Barton’s
memories; the whole novel is pivoted upon the protagonist’s struggle to recover
the aliveness of his childhood memories against the pernicious, deadening
entropic process of ageing. When Barton manages to rescue the real Millgate,
he also manages to get free from his dead and deadening marriage (when he
leaves Millgate at the end of the novel we are not told that he is going back
to his wife Peg). It is true that Ted cannot live with the attractive and fasci-
nating Armaiti, as she belongs to a different ontological level; but once he has
seen her, he will never forget her.

Armaiti wasn’t gone. She was everywhere. In all the trees, in the green
fields and lakes and forest lands. The fertile valleys and mountains on all
sides of him. She was below and around him. She filled up the whole
world. She lived there. Belonged there.... He’d be seeing reminders of her
just about everywhere [143].

So, though the embodiment of aliveness disappears as a person (or char-

acter), Ted Barton does not lose contact with the vital force that she represents.
We should not underestimate the fact that the god of light, life and order,
Ormazd, lives in Millagate, under the domination of Peter/Ahriman, disguised
as a doctor. If the decayed Millgate is “cured” by Ted and Will (who act on
behalf of Ormazd, even if they are not aware of this, as Ted has been “manip-
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 37

ulated” by Armaiti [134] since the beginning of the novel), and restored to its
pristine condition, it is difficult to deny that a parallel process of healing takes
place in Ted’s mind, who is cured by the alienation and despair which strikes
him at the beginning of the story, when he discovers that he is actually dead
(a death which can be read as a symbol of emotional paralysis and/or mental
derangement).12 Maybe the full psychological implications of Puppets can only
be understood if we take into account those psychoanalytical essays Dick rec-
ommends to his literary mentor Tony Boucher in his long April 25, 1960
letter, among which there is the collection of essays Existence, edited by the
American psychiatrist Rollo May (SL1 64), which introduced existential psy-
chology in the United States.13 It is in the essays of Existence that Dick first
met the concepts of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos,14 which are equivalent
to Eigenwelt (individual psychological dimension) and Mitwelt (social dimen-
sion) in existential psychology; these are the concepts that Dick nonchalantly
applies to the description of a personal experience in the same 1960 letter (SL1
66), and that I have applied to Ted Burton’s situation in Puppets. Other key
concepts of existential psychology, such as the tomb-world (which will reap-
pear in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [Ch. 6]),15 play an important
role in this psychological fantasy; the false, decaying Millgate created by Ahri-
man might be an example of such a tomb- or grave-world.
But there is another aspect of The Cosmic Puppets that should be analyzed
in this opening chapter of our exploration of Dick’s fiction, as it sheds light
on the literary workings of this and other, more celebrated works of the Cal-
ifornian writer. It is the role played by the two Zoroastrian godheads in the
overall structure of the novel, which is illuminated by some remarks that Dick
wrote in a letter dated October 26, 1967. At that time he was discussing the
possible plot of a novel he wanted to write with another sf author, Roger
Zelazny. Since we only have a fragment of this letter, and what Dick describes
in it is quite different from the novel he and Zelazny actually published in
1976, Deus Irae, it is not easy to outline what the proposed plot should have
been; but it is quite clear that it involved a game in which a group of characters
was placed on a sort of board and subsequently manipulated by unspecified
“Cosmic Game-Players” (SL1 226). In the novel the humans should then have
been unaware pawns (or puppets) of these Game-Players, though Dick sug-
gests that the two levels (the one of the pawns and that of the Game-Players)
“could merge in several ways.” The characters could ally with one of the
Game-Players; the Game-Players might manifest themselves, directly or indi-
rectly; one or more of the pawns might “catch a transcendental glimpse of a
Game-Player” (SL1 226). But from our point of view the last kind of inter-
ference between the two plans (human and cosmic) is the most interesting:
“one of the characters could change progressively until he becomes unhu-
38 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

man — reveals himself as one of the Game-Players, rather than a “pawn.” (Vide
my Ace book, THE COSMIC PUPPETS)” (SL1 226).
The connection between the hypothetical plot Dick was sketching and
Puppets is undeniable. There are three characters in the 1957 novel that reveal
themselves as cosmic Game-Players: Mary, who actually is Armaiti, who has
pushed Ted to enter Millgate to sabotage Peter/Ahriman’s domination of the
town; Peter, who is actually Ahriman (and is well aware of his real identity);
Dr. Meade, who is actually Ormazd, and seems to have been struck by a cos-
mic amnesia, as he is unaware of being one of the two Zoroastrian godheads
(a situation that will return with a vengeance in one of the last novels, The
Divine Invasion [Ch. 10]). But what is more important is that whatever hap-
pens in the novel is part of a game, the “eternal struggle” between “the cosmic
polarities” (104). All the characters in the story are ultimately cosmic puppets,
pawns manipulated by the cosmic forces of light and darkness embodied in
Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. No wonder then that one of the first displays
of Peter’s magic powers is the creation of small clay golems at the beginning
of the third chapter (19): the cosmic polarities fight by proxies in Puppets, and
the story ends soon after they strip themselves of their human husks (Dr.
Meade and Peter) to resume a struggle that is “much bigger than anything
[we] can experience” (135), as Armaiti explains to Ted.
Besides, the novel begins with a scene of children playing while Peter
watches them; they are “carefully kneading and shaping brown lumps of clay
into vague shapes” (5), something that Peter will do much better and with
startling results. This innocent scene of daily life can be said to metonymically
represent, pars pro toto, the whole novel, where humans are no more than clay
figurines in the hands of angry gods. The initial scene ends with the beginning
of the game, when Peter says “I’ll play” (6) and starts reshaping the clay ani-
mals molded by Mary. Here we actually have Ahriman declaring that he’ll
play the game of deceit and simulation which will involve Ted Barton and
the other characters of the novel: the game he is going to play is nothing more
and nothing less than the novel itself.
It is quite interesting that in an earlier version of this short novel, “A
Glass of Darkness” (published on Satellite in December 1956) the beginning
was different, as the story started with Ted’s arrival in the secluded Appalachian
valley where Millgate lies, a scene which in the 1957 paperback edition follows
immediately the passage where the children play with clay figurines. In this
first version of the novel the plot begins when Ted enters the valley and ends
when he leaves it. If readers are expected to identify with the protagonist and
his gradual discovery of the cosmic game played in the enchanted valley of
Millgate, it is clear that entering and exiting the space where magic forces are
at work is equivalent to entering and exiting the text itself, crossing the border
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 39

between the real koinos kosmos where we all live and the space of narration,
an idios kosmos created not by Zoroastrian godheads, but, in a Blakean fash-
ion, by a much lesser god, or creator: the writer Philip Kindred Dick.
Then there is a metatextual dimension in Puppets: if the plot is the manip-
ulative game played by the two Zoroastrian godheads of light and darkness
(symbolizing eros and thanatos, but also perhaps the whiteness of paper and
the blackness of ink), it is also, undeniably, a game of telling where the creator
(Dick) manipulates fictional events, places and characters to play with readers
and their expectations. Behind the glass of darkness of the false Millgate (a
place of sorcery) lies the real town where Ted was born (a place of real life);
the interplay of the two towns, which metonymically stand for two alternative
realities, is the game readers have to play, being manipulated by Dick. One
might then suspect that Dick was inspired by Typewriter in the Sky (1940),
another novella written by Ron L. Hubbard, the text that admittedly inspired
Puppets. Since Typewriter was often published with Fear on pulp paperbacks,
Dick cold easily have read them both.
Typewriter is a rather odd fantasy novella where a 20th-century pianist,
Mike de Wolf, ends up in “Blood and Loot,” a swashbuckling buccaneer story
set in 17th-century Caribbean which is being written by his friend Horace
Hackett, a hack writer (the pun is surely intentional) who must quickly finish
his book to respect the terms of a contract he has signed with a pulp fiction
publisher. In the novel Mike becomes a Spanish admiral, Miguel Saint Raoul
de Lobo (an approximate translation of his real English name), the villain of
a story that must necessarily end with his defeat and death at the hands of
the protagonist, Tom Bristol. Mike is well aware of being a character in a
cheap fiction, also because he now and then hears the noise of Horace’s type-
writer coming from the sky; he knows that the author is now the god who
creates and governs the world he is living in. Horace may also be a shoddy
god, given all the historical inconsistencies which litter the botched 17th cen-
tury where “Blood and Loot” is set (including Steinway pianos and 18th-cen-
tury buildings), but he is omnipotent, as Mike finds out when he tries to
change the plot of the novel in order to avoid his dire fate, or at least to post-
pone it as much as he can.
Hubbard’s novella is a parody, clearly meant to poke fun at the world of
hack writers, who have to concoct stereotyped narratives to pay the bills and
satisfy the needs of easy-going readers. It was the same world that Dick
belonged to in the 1950s, by the way, and he could easily identify with Horace,
the hack writer typing his implausible yarn in a dirty bathrobe, but also with
Mike, the sophisticated artist (in real life he is a gifted classical pianist) who
is sufficiently learned to spot all the inconsistencies in Horace’s story, which
adds to the ironic atmosphere of the novella. When Dick wrote Puppets he
40 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

was at the same time Horace and Mike: he had to write fantasy and science-
fiction to pay the bills, but he yearned to become a “serious” writer, as he tells
Anthony Boucher in his June 3, 1957 letter (the year Puppets was published
as part of an Ace Double, a pulp paperback not so different from the ones
presumably written by Horace Hackett [SL1 35–7]).
It is then likely that Dick the fantasy writer was influenced by Hubbard’s
Fear, but also by the metafictional game played in Typewriter in the Sky. Both
texts had been republished together in a paperback edition in 1951, a year
before Dick managed to publish his first short story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,”
while he was busy writing The Cosmic Puppets. Besides, his first published
story has been read as a metaphor of the relation between writer and reader
(Barlow 2005, 3–5), embodied in a human who eats an intelligent alien, the
wub, who subsequently manages to emerge within the man who has ingested
him — continuing, by the way, a discourse on Odysseus, who has been for a
long time considered as the protagonist of the founding narrative of Western
Civilization.
If game and players, to be read as a metaphor of narrative, play an impor-
tant role in Puppets— and there are excellent reasons to say they do16— there
is a strong thematic connection between Dick’s only fantasy novel and a sf
novel he wrote in 1962–1963, The Game-Players of Titan (1963), which features
game-players in its very title. Like Puppets, this is one of Dick’s neglected
novels: already in 1975 Darko Suvin branded it as an unimportant work, as
“up to Palmer Eldritch ... the novels by Dick which are not primarily dystopian
(The Cosmic Puppets, Dr. Futurity, The Game-Players of Titan) are best for-
gotten” (Suvin 1975, 7). Unsurprisingly, the fundamental collection of essays
On Philip K. Dick, which contains all the PKD-related articles that were pub-
lished on Science-Fiction Studies from 1975 to 1992, simply ignores it. Sutin
gave Game-Players a rating of 6/10, that is the mark of mediocrity (Sutin 301);
an even worse rating is Andrew M. Butler’s, who gave Game-Players 2 points
out of 5 (Butler 2007, 41). Robinson sees it as a weak novel due to the presence
of evil aliens (Robinson 28), because he believes that in Dick’s most successful
works “aliens are usually sages in disguise” (Robinson 28); Warrick thinks
that Game-Players “does not succeed in synthesizing all the parts with dramatic
economy” (Warrick 101). Such judgments undoubtedly tell us that the novel
I am going to deal with is definitely not considered one of Dick’s major works:
even Dick himself told Gregg Rickman he had “not a thing” (Rickman 1988,
146) to say about it.
Yet something in the title, i.e. the term “game,” hints at the textual strat-
egy Dick had already used in Puppets and then in his major works: a game
based on the uncertainty of the rules — a deliberate, purposeful uncertainty,
one should add, which is also ontological. Game-Players might then be
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 41

endowed with a somewhat “programmatic” value which has been “divined”

(and sometime outlined) by some critics, but not expressed at length yet. I
have already carried out a detailed analysis of the plot (Rossi 2004) that will
be summarized here, which could help us to better understand what is really
at stake in Dick’s fictional game (Bluff ) and in his textual game (the novel
itself ).
Unlike Puppets, The Game Players of Titan is a science-fiction novel. After
the Vugs, aliens from Saturn’s moon Titan, take over an Earth ravaged by
nuclear war, the surviving humans are governed by Bluff, a Titanian board
game that determines not only the land they own but also whom they will
sleep with. Since the war between America and China left most of the survivors
sterile, the Vugs have imposed Bluff to foster population growth by mating
humans randomly. The game is based on wagering deeds on the spin of a
wheel; luck is the principle that governs post-war, Vug-ruled Earth. Pete Gar-
den, the protagonist of the novel, discovers that the Vug dominion is not as
benign as everybody thinks, and that among his fellow humans there might
be metamorphosed Vugs which look like human beings. After a series of twists,
conspiracies and counter-conspiracies there is a big final game on Titan, where
a human team plays against the Vugs, using alcohol and amphetamines to
thwart the telepathy of the aliens and increase their own psi faculties. Terrans
win, but their victory is held back; at the end of the novel a breakaway faction
of the Vugs contacts Freya, former wife of Pete and team member, to ask for
her help in a rematch. This means the plot is left open, as in many other
novels by Dick.
Let us now see how the narrative is structured from the point of view of
genre conventions. The first five chapters of the novel describe the future soci-
ety ruled by the Bluff (and the Vugs who have imposed the Bluff ) by showing
how Pete Garden loses Berkeley and his wife in a night and strives to win
them both back. Here the plot is on the whole rather linear. The only twist
might be the moment that Pete discovers that Berkeley does not belong any-
more to Walt Remington, the man who defeated him, but has been sold to
Matt Pendleton Associates (15), a firm who operates on behalf of the strongest
(and luckiest) Bluff player in the world, Jerome Luckman. This is however a
twist which does not impact on the genre conventions of the text.
The novel in fact begins as a typical narrative of the sociological science-
fiction of the 1950s (Luckhurst 110–11, 115–6), something that might have
been written by the young Sheckley17 or Pohl & Kornbluth. We obviously
know that Dick’s apprentice period as a novelist lies in that decade, roughly
speaking 1955 to 1960; his first published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) does
belong to sociological sf. The most illustrious example of this trend is arguably
the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth, which — like other
42 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

works of the sociological sf— presented the readers with a “potentiated pres-
ent”: the beginning of the Game-Players is not much different. The readers of
1963 were well aware that they were going to be served a satire on the U.S.
middle class moved to a more or less imminent future, with futuristic gadgets
(talking handles, flying cars, etc.) set against the background of a way of life
which disquietingly resembles the “real life” in Eisenhower’s America Felix,
with its life in the suburbia, Peyton Place sociality, conformism, the con-
sumeristic obsession of status-symbols, etc.
That Dick was interested in this form of science-fiction (especially in
the 1950s) should not surprise us. We know that while he was writing his
sociological sf, which includes the novels Solar Lottery (1955), The World Jones
Made, The Man Who Japed (both 1956) and Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), plus
many of the short stories he published from 1952 to 1963 (approximately 80%
of his short fiction), he was also working on several realistic novels that his
agents failed to sell: Gather Yourselves Together, Voices From the Street, Mary
and the Giant, The Broken Bubble, Puttering About in a Small Land, In Milton
Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, The Man Whose Teeth Were All
Exactly Alike, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (all posthumously published with
the exception of Confessions: Dick managed to have it published in 1975 by a
small press). There are recurring issues in both his sf and fantasy texts of the
1950s and the unpublished realistic novels: troubled marriages, threatening
female characters, little men and businesses struggling to preserve their dignity
in the world of corporate economy, consumerism and status symbols, con-
formism and massification, life in the suburbs, the impact of the electronic
media on US society (TV first and foremost), the fear of the looming nuclear
holocaust, the changing roles in nuclear families. These are also some of the
most relevant issues in the USA after the Second World War, and characterize
the decade called “The Fifties.” Since his sf and realistic novels were written
on the same typewriter, in the same one-man literary workshop, characters,
themes, motifs, places that were originally created for realistic fictions were
recycled for science-fiction. Whole scenes may have been moved from lost
realistic novels to science fiction ones; characters which appeared in The Broken
Bubble and Voices from the Street reappear in Dr. Bloodmoney (Butler 2007,
61); no wonder then that Dick was interested in the sociological form of sci-
ence-fiction, which allowed him to depict the ordinary American reality he
was interested in through a glass of darkness which might transmogrify the
Northern California of the 1950s into Mars or some other planet — or a future
America, as in The Game-Players of Titan.
Sociological sf is however suddenly abandoned when Peter Garden finds
himself in his car, flying high over the Utah desert, without any knowledge
of how he got there (62). The protagonist’s interruption of consciousness and
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 43

mysterious amnesia lead us to a different kind of narrative, the fast-paced,

surrealistic sf of Alfred E. van Vogt, whose heroes have fractured or lost iden-
tities, and usually strive to recover their own past (such as the protagonist of
Null-A [1948], Gilbert Gosseyn).18 This hurls us from the reasonable socio-
logical sf into a frantic and intricate adventure typical of the 1940s — a more
“pulpish” sort of fiction. This discontinuity of the genre frame is coupled with
a discontinuity of the text: after Peter exits Patricia’s house, there is a blank
space and then he is in his car over Eastern Utah. What happens after the
moment when “Pete turn[s] and str[ides] out of the apartment, away from
her” (62) has disappeared, leaving a gap in the text. Here we have the first,
serious twist of the plot that makes Pete and us readers lose our bearings.
Such a strange interruption of the textual and fictional continuum might
make us ask what is the narrative game Dick is playing here. Previous critics
have asked another question instead, that is: “who are the game-players of
Titan?” This seems to be a question about the content of the novel, but we
shall see that it concerns its narrative strategies as well. We shall also see that
the question about the identity of the players turns into the one about the
nature of the game.
The first question to be asked is who are the game-players of Titan. The
group of Vugs which play against the Pretty Blue Fox team? The powerful
Vug extremists that cheat Terrans out of their victory in the end? The Earth-
men and -women who have been carried on Titan? Somebody/thing else? The
last is no idle question, since it drew the attention of those critics who —
unlike the ones I have quoted at the beginning of my discussion of Game
Players— deemed this novel worth discussing. We have then Pierce who won-
ders whether there isn’t “a Master Game-player [who] operates the game
according to rules they [the characters] do not come close to understanding”
(Pierce 118). And she is quoting Dick, because at least once in the novel “The
Master Game-Player” is mentioned by one of the characters (93).
Trying to identify the game-players just by focusing on this or that group
of characters might be totally misleading: in Dick’s novels the Master Game-
player is often Dick himself, according to Hayles, because: “[Dick], like the
Queen of Hearts, is changing the rules halfway through the game” (Hayles
53). And changing the rules in a novel is equivalent to changing the genre
(or sub-genre) it belongs to. In his Introduction to the latest Italian translation
of the novel, Carlo Pagetti wholeheartedly agrees with Hayles; he maintains
that Dick is a postmodernist writer who plays with the conventions of the
(sub)genre:
A parodic meta-narrative, The Game-Players of Titan is also the story of
a science-fiction writer who manipulates science-fiction’s most predictable
formulas, who uses his characters as puppets, who thinks he is allowed to
44 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

call in doubt his own ending with the tricks and the sleights of hand of a
juggler, a game player [Pagetti 2000, 14, translation mine].
So Dick’s novel is an exhibition of sf conventions, icons (and what is more
stereotypically sfnal than the alien, malignant blob?), rules and techniques.
The Game is science-fiction, and the game-player, or better, the Master
Game-Player is Dick himself.
This is also true for The Cosmic Puppets. The ontological uncertainty
that we have found at the beginning of that novel — when it is unclear whether
Ted Barton’s memories or the “new” Millgate are fake — is possibly stronger
than the uncertainty in The Game-Players of Titan: in Puppets the alternative
is between two very different genres, fantasy and realism, while here we have
moved from a form of science fiction to another, but always remaining well
inside the area of non-realistic fiction. We will however see that there are
other games Dick plays in this novel; other form of ontological uncertainty
will impact on the story of Peter Garden and his companions.
However, Dick’s game is here overtly rigged, we might say: the writer
repeatedly and deliberately thwarts the expectations of the readers, as we shall
see, and this is mirrored by the role played by cheating in the whole plot.
Both human and Vug characters cheat as much as they can. A fundamental
passage of the text might be quoted here:
In the center of the table he saw what appeared to be a glass ball, the size
of a paperweight. Something complex and shiny and alive flickered within
the globe and he bent to scrutinize it. A city, in miniature. Buildings and
streets, houses, factories...
It was Detroit.
We want that next, the Vugs told him.
Reaching out, Joe Schilling moved his piece back one square. “I really
landed on that,” he said.
The Game exploded.
“I cheated, Joe Schilling said. “Now it’s impossible to play. Do you grant
that? I’ve wrecked the Game” [156].
Cheating is in fact an integral part of the Game of Bluff:
“You certainly broke up The Game,” Doctor Philipson chuckled. “It
never occurred to them that you’d cheat.”
“They cheated first. They changed the value of the card!”
“To them, that’s legitimate, a basic move in The Game. It’s a favorite
play by the Titanian Game-players to exert their extra sensory faculties on
the card; ... You see, the Titanian Game-players believe in following the
rules.... Their rules, yes; but rules nonetheless” [157–8].

Playing a rigged game is what Dick deliberately does in his fiction, and
this is explained quite clearly by Thomas M. Disch with his Game of the Rat
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 45

(cf. Introduction), a form of Monopoly where the Banker can arbitrarily

change the rules in the midst of the game. If the Game of the Rat is a reliable
model of Dick’s approach to fiction in general, we might suspect that here
the Game metafictionally embodies literature, or at least Dick’s own version
of it. Thus, as I have already stated, The Game-Players of Titan is representative
of Dick’s narrative strategies, perhaps in a more blatant fashion than “deeper”
and more celebrated works, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or
Dr. Bloodmoney.
We should then focus on the points where Dick, our narrative Rat,
changes or sabotages the narrative rules; points like the one in chapter six that
we have already described, with its triple discontinuity.19 That seems to be
one of Dick’s favorite tricks: (sub)genre short-circuit, something that places
him close to postmodernist fiction.20 This shifting to one genre from another
has already been noticed by Christopher Palmer, who said that “Dick often
seems restless with the assumptions of sf as a genre and with the delicate
negotiations of reason and fantasy characteristic of sf at its best” (Palmer 173–
4); such restlessness may push him to move to crime, horror, or realistic
fiction.
I propose to call sub-genre switches, or shunts those crucial points where
genres or subgenres are shifted. The use of these nouns coming from railway
terminology seems appropriate to me since Bluff is clearly based on Monopoly
(cf. Dossena) whose original U.S. board features four railway stations, Read-
ing, B. & O., Pennsylvania, and Short Line (we might say that by referring
to Monopoly, Dick opened an intertextual link that is available to readers as
well as critics).21 The shunts Dick has placed in his narrative switch the plot
to another sub-genre, thus changing what is both in the foreground (charac-
ters, events and their meaning) and in the background (the sub-genre and its
conventions which consciously or subconsciously affect the reader’s expecta-
tions, and the way s/he deciphers the text).
Dick operates one of such sub-genre shunts when, at the end of the sev-
enth chapter (69), the corpse of Jerome Luckman is found, and the story is
switched to a non–Sfnal track. We are led in a proper detective story, relying
on all the conventions of the genre,22 good cop/bad cop couple included (97).
What makes this couple different from those we often meet in Hollywood
products is that one of them is human (Wade Hawthorne),23 the other is a
Vug (E.B. Black).
We have barely enough time to readjust our expectations, tuning to this
odd whodunit, before Dick operates his shunts again, routing us in van Vogt’s
territory once more. This happens when a twist in the plot suddenly changes
our understanding of the facts: because “six persons in this group show similar
lapses of memory. Mrs. Remington, Mr. Gaines, Mr. Angst, Mrs. Angst,
46 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Mrs. Calumine, and Mr. Garden. None of them have intact memories” (77).
This takes us back to the frantic Vanvogtian adventures where no identity
(and memory) is certain.
We are right in the middle of the novel when the plot is twisted again.
This time it is not an event but a revelation, when Dr. Philipson tells Pete
Garden: “You’re involved in an intricate, sustained illusion-system of massive
proportion. You and half your Game-playing friends. Do you want to escape
from it?” (105). Thus reality is not what the characters (and the readers) have
been living in till now. Dick ups the ante: the question is neither “who will
win the Bluff game?” nor “who killed Luckman?” but “what is real?”— or its
more paranoid version “are we being duped?” (cf. Ch. 2). These are — needless
to say — the fundamental Dickian questions.
Dick has thus led us, shunt after shunt, to his own, totally recognizable
version of sf, a maze of simulacra, beguiling realities and shocking revelations.
We are now close to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,24 Martian Time-
Slip, Ubik, what we might call his psychedelic sf, if we did not know Dick
was actually addicted to amphetamines when he wrote those novels; we might
then call it metaphysical sf, as ontological uncertainty dominates. The climax
of this segment of the novel is when Mary Anne McClain turns into a Vug
(that is, in a B-movie blob of the 50s): we don’t have the girl endangered by the
alien, malignant monster anymore, but the girl who doesn’t know she is a mon-
ster, the girl transubstantiated into an alien blob (110). We are not far from
the Christian symbology of the Eucharist, often quoted by Dick (cf. Ch. 7
and 11), though this is undoubtedly a sfnal narrative sleight-of-hand.
But Dick gets out of his territory when Peter Garden is kidnapped at
the beginning of the eleventh chapter (121). We are thus led well into a plot
of competing supermen which is classically Vanvogtian (cf. Suvin 2002, 374,
384). A new conspiracy, a new reversal; the vision of Mary Anne who turns
into a Vug is given the lie, the conspiracy against the alien invaders comes
back (129). Then there is a counter-reversal which takes us back to Dick’s
own metaphysical sf, when we discover that nothing is what it seems to be
and the conspirators are Vugs without their knowing it. Here is the moment
of the discovery, told by Dick in his usual deadpan tone:
He opened his eyes.
In the motel room, discoursing in shrill, chattery voices, sat nine vugs.
And one human being besides himself. Dave Mutreaux.
He and Dave Mutreaux, standing in opposition to the rest of them.
Hopeless and impossible. He did not stir; he simply stared at the nine
vugs [143].
Fredric Jameson posited an “android cogito” which equates real humans
and artificial human beings in Dick’s fiction due to a radical uncertainty (Ch.
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 47

6), expressed by the syllogism “I think therefore I am an android” ( Jameson

2005, 373–4); an alternative version we find in several novels and short stories
might be “I think, therefore I am an alien.” Soon after another revelation
makes clear that the survival of the human race is at stake: “The Titanians ...
are tinkering with our birth rate. On some technological level ... they’re
responsible for holding out birth rate down” (150). This further twist does
not anyway take us to another sub-genre: we remain in Dick’s metaphysical
sf, or better, in a field without rules, where everything may happen. We are
“trapped” in the Game of the Rat: all the twists of the plot after the revelation
in chapter 12 (the real nature of the nine conspirators) will not send us to
another fictional turf, but will maintain the atmosphere of uncertainty and
frantic struggle to understand what is actually going on and why.
We might say that Dick brought us into his deranged world, starting
from a familiar Sfnal territory, by means of a careful use of sub-genre shunts.
Once he has us where he wants, he can manipulate whatever element he likes
to propel his narrative. The following list of plot twists (that I distinguish
from genre shunts inasmuch as they do not lead us to a different subgenre
frame of reference) occurring after chapter 12 gives an idea of the intensification
of the narrative rhythm:
1. Dr. Philipson is a Vug (152)
2. Joe Schilling is abruptly carried to Titan to play against the moder-
ate Vugs (153)
3. Shilling wins by cheating and is immediately brought back to Earth
(156)
4. The bogus conspirators are exterminated by Mary Anne McClain
(159)
5. The Pretty Blue Fox team gets back into being, to play against the
Titanian Game-players (164)
6. Pete Garden leaves the team because he mistrusts Nats Katz, and
attempts suicide (174)
7. Mutreux has crossed over and joined the extremist Titanian frac-
tion; he tells Pete that Nats Katz is a Vug disguised as a human (177)
8. Patricia is forced to commit suicide by her daughter Mary Ann, Pete
is set free, Mutreux captured (184)
9. The Pretty Blue Fox team plays against a team of simulacra of the
Terran players (188)
10. The game is instantly moved to Titan, the simulacra crumble
revealing the Vugs inside (192)
After this barrage of coups de théâtre we have the sequence (192–201) of
the Bluff game which is finally won by the Earth team: this is obviously the
48 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

final climax of the novel. It might be argued that when we get into this
sequence there is another genre shunt, because in these pages the rules that
structure readers’ expectations and understanding are those of the Bluff, a
game invented by Dick — albeit largely based on Monopoly. So here the frame
is not a literary subgenre, a variety of science fiction or detective story, but a
board game, one so world-famous that it has been elevated to a part of our
collective imagery. (It might be objected that Bluff ’s rules, however resembling
those of Monopoly, are ruthlessly manipulated by Dick whenever he likes or
needs to, so that this is just another instance of Disch’s Game of the Rat. I
leave the matter open, and will insert this shunt in my table just as a proposal
to be discussed by critics and readers.)
However, the end of the game does not end the sequence of twists. Three
more should be mentioned, that is:
1. After the victory the team is abruptly returned to Earth and scattered
(200)
2. In a moment of supreme clarity Mary Anne McClain sees humans
through Vug eyes, thus understanding the prejudices of the aliens
(205)
3. Freya Garden Gaines is contacted by Dr. Philipson (an undercover
extremist Vug) who proposes her to work for his fraction against
other Terrans (214)
The last twist of the tale leaves the ending open, something which, as I
have already said, is typically Dickian. But what is really important is the
intensification of the reversals, the acceleration of the plot which can be easily
understood by confronting the previous lists with the following table of sub-
genre shunts:

Table 1.1
Dick’s sub-genre shunts
from to page
1 sociological sf à la Pohl & VanVogtian surrealistic 62
Kornbluth (sf as social satire) adventurous sf (amnesia)
2 VanVogtian surrealistic Detective story 69
adventurous sf
3 Detective story VanVogtian surrealistic adventurous 77
sf (fractured identities)
4 VanVogtian surrealistic Dick’s own simulacra sf 105
adventurous sf
5 Dick’s own simulacra sf VanVogtian surrealistic adventurous
sf (conspiracy, competing supermen) 121
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 49

6 VanVogtian surrealistic Dick’s own metaphysical sf 136

adventurous sf
(7) Dick’s sf Bluff (a Sfnal mutation of Monopoly) 192

What we have is a vortex-shaped architecture, where twists are less fre-

quent in the first three quarters of the text, with a sudden increase of frequency
in the last quarter. Moreover, there is a change: while the shunts or switches
listed in the table (those occurring in the first, longer part of the novel) lead,
as we have seen, from one sub-genre to another, those occurring in the last,
shorter part of Game-Players keep the action going but remain well inside the
same textual territory, where all expectations based on genre are suspended
(and that is probably why Dick does not need genre reference frames any
more): a fictional space where everything may happen, where the Rat (i.e. the
Author) rules.
As I have already said, I derived the term “shunt” (or switch) from
Monopoly, one of the “texts” Dick has phagocytized to build his novel. There
is also another reason: shunt appealed to me since trains and railroads appear
in an early short story by Dick which is endowed with a paradigmatic value:
“Small Town,” written in 1953 and published on Amazing in May 1954.
In this story we have a trodden-upon little man, Verne Haskel, who has
been disappointed by his job, his adulterous wife Madge, and Woodland, “the
rich, expensive little suburb of San Francisco” (CS2 432) he unhappily lives
in. His only consolation is the model town he has built in the basement over
years. It is a faithful scale replica of Woodland: every building, street, park,
house, facility has been painstakingly reproduced and carefully placed so that
the layout perfectly maps the territory.
At the beginning of the story it might seem that what is really important
are the trains that travel around and through the miniature town. Verne “had
always loved trains, model engines and signals and buildings” (CS2 431). It
is not just trains that appeal to him: it is the idea of reproduction, of simulacra,
of things made smaller but resembling the original. Dr. Tyler, Madge’s lover,
has a reasonable explanation for such a fascination, which starts with the
impact of trains upon infantile imagination.
Power ... that’s why it appeals to boys. Trains are big things. Huge and
noisy. Power-sex symbols. The boy sees the train rushing along the track.
It’s so huge and ruthless it scares him. Then he gets a toy train. A model,
like these. He controls it. Makes it start, stop. Go slow. Fast. He runs it. It
responds to him [CS2 434].
But Verne has extended his model to Woodland in its entirety. And,
since this is a fantasy story, the power on the simulacrum becomes a (magic)
power on the original: when Verne, utterly disgusted by his job at the Larson’s
50 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Pump and Valve Works, destroys the scale model of the factory, he triggers a
reversal of the relationship between town and layout. The model is no more
a passive representation of Woodland, but becomes the active tool of Verne’s
reprisal. He discovers he can change the world outside the basement by dis-
carding everything he hates from his model town and replacing it with some-
thing he likes. It is the application of something already found in Puppets,
where it is called M-Kinetics: “the symbolic representation is identical with
the object it represents” (115), which is actually the basic operating principle
of magic (Mackey 15). So he starts rebuilding Woodland according to his own
tastes:
The new Woodland looked pretty good. Clean and neat — and simple.
The rich district had been toned down. The poor district had been
improved. Glaring ads, signs, displays, had all been changed or removed.
The business community was smaller. Parks and countryside took the place
of factories. The civic center was lovely [CS2 441].
What we have at the end is a one-man utopia: Verne’s ideal town comes
true. But what is utopian to one may well be dystopian to others. Because,
as Verne tells to himself, “the new Woodland was going to be moral. Extremely
moral. Few bars, no billiards, no red light district. And there was an especially
fine jail for undesirables.” Of course the undesirables include Madge, Verne’s
wife, and her lover, Dr. Tyler. After having witnessed (and misinterpreted)
Verne’s disappearance, the couple of adulterers gets out of the house to discover
that the Woodland they knew has disappeared, and that they live in the
reformed Woodland Vernon has built in the basement. The territory has
mapped the scale model; and the adulterous couple is arrested by the Wood-
land police (CS2 444), because now Vernon R. Haskel is the town mayor.
All in all, this story is an elaborate self-portrait of Dick and his literary
activity. He played with science-fiction and fantasy (at that time childish gen-
res), like Verne plays with his trains and model town. His fiction can create
a faithful reproduction, a simulacrum of the “real” world (Woodland before
Verne’s intervention; or the “real” Millgate), but he can also build a model
which does not coincide with the real world of 1953, that is, the more or less
estranged, twisted, distorted USA we find in the sociological sf of the 50s (or
the Millgate with wanderers and golems). Verne substitutes a park for the
“sprawling business district” (CS2 440), substitutes two bedroom, one-story
dwellings for the ostentatious upper class mansions. Dick substituted flying,
talking autonomic vehicles for cars, rockets for jetliners, Mars for California
(that’s what happens in Martian Time-Slip, basically a realistic novel with a
more or less thin sf paint layer to camouflage it [Ch. 4]). Besides, the first
name of the protagonist hints at the origins of sf: we know that “Verne” was
one of Dick’s favorite names (we have the character of Verne Tildon in Gather
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 51

Yourselves Together), but could not it refer to Jules Verne the author of From
the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, one of
Dick’s (and sf ’s) literary forefathers?
However, what is important is the idea of the Sfnal fictional space as a
trap where readers may be snared. What happens to Madge and Dr. Tyler is
what happens to us readers. We get lost in the model town modified by
Verne/Dick; we get lost in the secluded valley there the replaced town, Mill-
gate, lies; we get lost in the Bluff game. Maybe this happens because there is
a power fantasy behind these narratives: Dick is the boy who gets a toy train,
controls it, makes it start, stop, go slow, go fast. Dick runs it, and the toy
responds to him. And the toy train is the narrative itself.
The idea that trains and/or railways may be metaphors of fiction (in par-
ticular of plots) is not new (cf. Ceserani). It is hidden in the opening scene
of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, “Pirate” Prentice’s dream of the rail-
way station full of refugees. The railway track hints at the linear plot; but it
may hint at the postmodernist multidimensional, non-linear plot too, if we
take into account the railway network as a whole (or Pynchon’s railway station,
since it is a knot of several tracks). That is what may be found in such an
experimental work as Geoff Ryman’s web-based hypertext 253, where the
London Underground becomes a model of the network structure of the hyper-
text and of a non-linear plot made of hundreds of interconnected character
descriptions. More recently the idea of train as symbols of narratives has been
extensively exploited by Richard Powers in his avant-pop novel Galatea 2.2
(1995), a text with noteworthy Sfnal elements.
Like Verne Haskell, Dick may operate the switches, or shunts, so that
the train of his narrative may change direction whenever he likes. And that’s
what Verne does in a scene at the beginning of “Small Town,” which expresses
all the frustration of the protagonist:
Haskel turned up the power. The train gained speed. Its whistle
sounded. It turned a sharp curve and grated across a cross-track. More
speed. Haskel’s hands jerked convulsively at the transformer. The train
leaped and shot ahead. It swayed and bucked as it shot around a curve.
The transformer was turned up to maximum. The train was a clattering
blur of speed, rushing along the track, across bridges and switches, behind
the big pipes of the floor furnace.
It disappeared into the coal bin. A moment later it swept out the other
side, rocking wildly.
Haskel slowed the train. He was breathing hard, his chest rising
painfully. He sat down on the stool by the workbench and lit a cigarette
with shaking fingers [CS2 431].
Isn’t this, after all a scene of power fantasy with striking sexual under-
tones? Increasing speed, hands jerking (Dick did know how to use double-
52 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

entendres when he wished to!), a climax of excitement, and then the penetra-
tion of the dust bin, an orgasmic moment followed by the traditional cigarette.
This adds another layer of meaning to the character (sexual frustration), but
let us not forget that the climaxing rhythm of the passage reflects Dick’s own
climaxing narrative rhythm, the acceleration of twists we have previously ana-
lyzed.
Verne maneuvers the trains and the narrative paths of the characters in
the story, but he also alters the miniature town, i.e. the setting of the story,
just like Dick: as we have already seen, his twists are very often not only
changes in the foreground (the characters, their actions, their aims), but huge
transformations of the background. Time travel stories, for example, are based
on abrupt changes of background, and this is a narrative sf device (also found
in fantasy)25 that Dick used e.g., in Dr. Futurity and Now Wait for Last Year
(Ch. 5), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Ch. 7) and in one of his best
short stories, “A Little Something About Us Tempunauts” (Ch. 5); this is
exactly what happens in Game-Players too when the Pretty Blue Fox team is
transferred to Titan during the final Bluff game.
Now, if we wished to summarize Dick’s literary Game of the Rat we
might say that basically it all boils down to putting a bunch of characters in
a familiar or alien setting, and then operating plot shunts and unexpectedly
changing the background (or the reference frame) at an increasing speed.
That’s the way most Dickian novels work: Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch, A Maze of Death, The Simulacra, but also such later works as Valis
and The Divine Invasion. Obviously this is what is normally found in most
popular genre novels or stories, be they sf, fantasy, crime, romance, etc. Twists
are what propels a narrative only meant to entertain, to keep readers’ boredom
at bay. Of course Dick started from genre fiction, and published most of his
short stories on pulp magazines, and several of his novels on pulp paperbacks,
the notorious Ace Double, which sold two compact novels together in dos-
à-dos binding, often nonchalantly cutting them to fit the size of the book.
Some of Dick’s novels underwent this brutal editing (even if it was carried
out by the author), among them The Man Who Japed (SL1, 35–6).26 But Dick
managed to turn plot twists into something else: the tool which allowed him
to achieve a condition of ontological uncertainty — an uncertainty that another
writer was able to create and sustain, though he never published on pulp mag-
azines or paperback. We are talking about a highly prestigious European
author, whose fiction has never been considered as merely aiming at enter-
tainment, the creator of such modern classics as The Trial and Amerika.
It is in fact easy to prove that Franz Kafka, a writer often mentioned in
Dick’s letters, one whose surname, as we have seen, Dick would have adopted
as his middle name, structured (or better, destructured) his novels by means
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 53

of a barrage of twists. One might consider the beginning of The Castle (1922):
late at night K., a land surveyor, arrives at the inn of a village. The innkeeper
tells him he cannot stay there without the Count’s authorization. K. replies
that he came at the Count’s command. A lackey of the Count comes to the
inn an threatens to throw K. out, in the icy winter night. K. tells him to
phone the Castle and check that he has been invited by the Count. The lackey
calls the Castle, but he is told that nobody knows K. The land surveyor is
going to be thrown out, but the telephone rings. The order is countermanded:
K. may stay for the night, the matter will be settled the next morning. It is
a tourbillion of interrupted actions, frustrated intentions, small coups de
théâtre — not as stunning (and sometime lurid) as Dick’s, but surely as bewil-
dering.
Thus this unsettling technique was not only used by literary hacks, but
also by respected (and imitated) masters of modernist fiction. It should be
added that Dick did not always manage to use it as more than a useful tool
to keep readers’ attention awake; but when he did, he could achieve impressing
results, even from an aesthetic point of view. What is in any case more impor-
tant is that the Game of the Rat might put readers in such a position as to
question some fundamental concepts of their culture, or history, or society —
concepts which may still apply.
In The Cosmic Puppets the effect of the alternate reality which hides the
real Millgate, and the struggle to dispel it, is a gigantic metaphor for the pass-
ing of time. Ted, in a wholly realistic fiction, might get back to his town and
find it changed, and say “it looks like another town altogether.” This would
be a metaphor, and it could be acceptable to realistic conventions. But by lit-
eralizing the metaphor, or better, by materializing it (something which char-
acterizes fantastic literature, as Todorov surmised in 1970 [Todorov 113–14])
we end up in fantasy or science fiction. Ted doesn’t find a changed Millgate:
he finds another town. Hence his dismay, because what he finds is an ageing,
decayed, wizened place, and that decay suggests that the passing of time is
deadly, that it takes you nearer to death (something that took Marcel Proust
a bigger textual apparatus to visualize; but, coming after Proust, Dick could
use a sort of textual shorthand). Retrieving the lost Millgate is something that
asks for a painful recherche du temps perdu which is surely shorter than Marcel’s
in Proust’s gigantic novel, a search which ends up when Ted gets in touch
with the principle of aliveness, a vitality which is always accessible (even for
elderly people like Will Christopher). Here any uncertainty is wiped out in
the end: the ending is indisputably happy, and may also be said to be conso-
latory (though it is poetic enough not to serve up a guy-gets-girl ending).
The dismal world of Ahriman is dissolved, and we are left with the happily
ordinary Millgate of Ted’s childhood.
54 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Things are rather different in The Game-Players of Titan. Here it is no

matter of alternate realities but metamorphoses: most of the shunts in the tale
deal with the opposition human vs. alien and characters who are able to move
from one term of it to the other; the girl turning into an alien blob, as we
have seen. This series of twists may be said to prepare the climactic moment
when Mary Anne McClain can see humankind through Vug eyes, one of the
most impressive — and unexpected — moments of literary grace in Dick’s
fiction:
Stunted, alien creatures, warped by enormous forces into miserably mal-
formed, distorted shapes. Crushed down until they were blinded and
tiny.... the waning light of a huge, dying sun lit and relit the scene and
then, even as she watched, it faded into dark red and at last utter blackness
snuffed it out once more.
Faintly luminous, like organisms inhabiting a vast depth, the stunted
creatures continued to live, after a fashion. But it was not pleasant.
She recognized them.
That’s us. Terrans, as the vugs see us. Close to the sun, subject to
immense gravitational forces [205].

Thanks to the series of shunts, which keep identities instable, we may

ultimately become Vugs and see a defamiliarized image of our species; and we
know that defamiliarization is — at least according to the Russian formalist
critics such as Shklovsky (who called it otstranenie)— the main purpose of lit-
erature. Surely the ability to make us adopt such a different point of view is
a remarkable feature of Dick’s fiction, and it can be said to be his main added
literary value.
This is something that was already surmised by Huntington in the article
we have already quoted, when he realizes that Dick’s fiction cannot be simply
dismissed even if we explain it — as Huntington tried to do — by means of the
mechanical workings of the 800-word rule that Dick might have been taught
by A.E. Van Vogt. Huntington then detected an open problem for critics:
[Dick’s work’s] contradictions are as often as not the result of arbitrary
and random reversals as of any conscious critique of bourgeois culture. But
the absence of conscious intent does not thereby render the thought of the
narrative trivial. In fact, it may well be argued that it is precisely this free-
dom from controlling rational structures ... that gives Dick’s writings their
value. This is not to say that the arbitrary is free: free association is enlight-
ening because it subtly responds to deep necessities of the author’s psyche
and of the culture. It reveals unknown structures not because it is free, but
precisely because it is determined [Huntington 176].

After having analyzed Dick’s Game of the Rat, I might rephrase some
of Huntington’s statements. In fact we might say that it is precisely the ability
 1. The Game of the Rat (and Its Players) 55

to short-circuit controlling rational structures (such as sub-genre reference

frames) that gives Dick’s writings their value. And what Huntington calls “free
association” should be read as metaphorical association, thematic interplay,
symbolic manipulation, something that has always existed in literature. Thus
we should ask ourselves if the matter of consciousness is so important: Hunt-
ington himself says that “the absence of conscious intent does not ... render
the thought of the narrative trivial”; I might as well add that the presence or
absence of conscious intent is difficult to ascertain in most literary achieve-
ments, inside and outside sf.
Then Huntington admits that
Dick’s approach to narrative renders conventional modes of evaluating
art and thought problematic. It would be inadequate simply to celebrate
him as a hack and therefore promote him as authentic. By the same token,
we cannot just denounce him as a fraud. Like something in one of his nov-
els, he is always on the other side of whatever posture or value we choose
[Huntington 176].
In fact the authentic/faked opposition is one that is ceaselessly questioned
and deconstructed in Dick’s opus (crammed as it is with forgers, simulacra,
dummies, stage props, con-men, conspiracies, etc.); we might as well say that
Dick’s fake-obsessed fiction is a form of metafiction (which is nothing new,
since Carlo Pagetti has been telling us that for about twenty years, and with
a huge amount of evidence), just because all fiction lies on the borderline between
authenticity and fakery. We might as well say that Dick’s fiction is postmod-
ernist (it depends on what is meant by that term, cf. Rossi, “From Dick to
Lethem”); but in his being always “on the other side of whatever posture or
value we choose,” Dick is also close to some canonized modernist novelists,
from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Franz Kafka.
So, is Dick a hack who casually stages the contradictions of late modernity
thanks to arbitrary and random reversals, or a respectable Author capable of a
conscious critique of bourgeois culture? Is his game based on luck or on delib-
erate, planned programming? Is he like Jerome Luckman, the Bluff champion
who wins simply because he is lucky, or like Joe Schilling, whose skills are as
big as Luckman’s luck (28)? Curiously enough, the matter discussed by Hunt-
ington — that is, the difficulty to ascertain whether Dick is just a lucky hack or
a skilled artist/artisan — is present in the novel itself. Does not Shilling say that
“Bluff ’s a fascinating game. Like poker, it combines chance and skill equally;
you can win by either, or lose by either” (28)? We might also say that the Game
of the Rat (Dick’s own fictional strategy) equally combines arbitrary, random
reversals and conscious critique of bourgeois culture; or perhaps it can criticize
late capitalist culture by means of a system of apparently arbitrary and random
reversals, or reversals which are sometime instinctive, but never totally random.
56 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

We might now ask ourselves whether a writer who shows in all these
strategic parts of his works such insights can be considered a hack who stages
a naïve show of narrative fireworks, or an insightful novelist whose sophisti-
cation has not been fathomed yet, who was compelled to work as a hack writer
to make ends meet, but could never stop being the complex, learned, sometime
absolutely brilliant writer he was. But one might wonder whether this is a
legitimate question. In fact, we should not forget an important lesson of a
past master, Northrop Frye, who warned us that
the assertion that the critic should confine himself to “getting out” of a
poem exactly what the poet may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of
“putting in,” is one of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of sys-
tematic criticism has allowed to grow up [Frye 17].
I suspect that if we keep on asking ourselves whether Dick was a hack
who hurriedly concocted his novels without being fully aware of their theo-
retical implications, we are guilty of that Frye called the fallacy of premature
teleology. It is a form of blindness that prevents us from understanding that
meaning in literary works is not simply something which “is there,” buried
under a variable number of layers of textual dirt, but something that happens
when the text is read, no matter where and when and by whom.
The potentialities of Dick’s Game of the Rat will be perhaps better under-
stood when we read two more important works in the next chapter, Eye in
the Sky and Time Out of Joint. Here alternate realities will not be applied to
psychological realms, but to a more complex and troublesome maze, Flaubert’s
multicolored nightmare, which is the same nightmare from which Stephen
Dedalus was desperately trying to awake: history.
 Chapter 2

“The Enemy That’s

Everywhere Around Us”:
Alternate Worlds in Eye in the Sky
and Time Out of Joint

“The paranoid style is not confined to our own

country and time; it is an international phenomenon.”
Richard Hofstadter

In his essay Science Fiction Roger Luckhurst summarizes his assessment

of Dick’s oeuvre by placing it in the area of sociological sf. In fact he maintains
that
Although Dick wrote a number of novels within ... Realist conventions,
he perceived himself as a genre writer ... To lift two or three Dick novels
into the ‘literate’ New Wave or into a separate tradition of SF-as-critical-
theory is to canonize by isolating those works from the confusing and con-
fused avalanche of SF he produced in the 1960s. The later phases of Dick’s
career deepened the resonances with structures of technological paranoia ...
but Dick’s vision remained absolutely continuous with the satirical and
psychological fictions typically associated with the works of Pohl, Korn-
bluth and Sheckley in the 1950s. Dick did not substantially depart from
that tradition [Luckhurst 163].
This is a questionable reading of Dick’s oeuvre: saying that Dick “per-
ceived himself as a genre writer” is an untenable oversimplification, and this
chapter and the next should prove it; as for departing from sociological sf,
one cannot imagine a more straightforward departure than The Man in the
High Castle, the subject of the next chapter. Yet we cannot deny that Dick
started his career as a sf writer in the decade that was dominated by sociological
sf: his fantasy novel The Cosmic Puppets is an unicum, after all; and though

57
58 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Dick wrote both fantasy and sf stories in the early fifties, the works he pub-
lished in the first decade of his activity as a professional writer mostly belong
to the second genre. From 1955 to 1960 Dick managed to publish eight novels,
and six definitely belonged to science-fiction; as we shall see, one of them,
Time Out of Joint (1959), starts as a realistic novel set in a nondescript town
of the 1950s (just like Puppets), but then moves to a sfnal futuristic setting.
And there is no doubt that the six purely sfnal novels are typical representatives
of sociological science-fiction.
This area of science-fiction has been painstakingly and persuasively ana-
lyzed by Luckhurst in a sub-chapter whose title is “Science Fiction as Social
Criticism” (109–19); its features are still clearly recognizable in the initial
chapters of a novel written and published in the early 1960s like The Game-
Players of Titan (Ch. 1). If this variety of sf aimed at “envisioning transfor-
mation ... through the lenses of sociology, psychology and political economy”
(Luckhurst 110), and if its tone is fundamentally satirical, as in its most rep-
resentative novel (Scholes & Rabkin 66), Pohl & Kornbluth’s The Space Mer-
chants (1952), then it is easy to read Dick’s purely sfnal novels of the 1950s as
specimens of this trend.
His first published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) replaces elective democracy
with the random selection of the Quizmaster, i.e., the president of the Solar
System, and depicts a world where people belong to corporations and social
status has turned into a caste system; surely the plot derives from the adven-
turous sf of the 1940s, especially from A.E. Van Vogt’s narratives of intrigue
and amnesiac supermen (Disch 19–20), but the numerous hints at the status
obsessed U.S. society of the Eisenhower Era are easy to detect. Dick’s subse-
quent works of this decade are even easier to place in the sociological trend:
The World Jones Made (1956), by depicting a future Earth falling under the
rule of a theocratic, intolerant dictatorship, satirizes the intolerance and xeno-
phobia of the years of senator McCarthy, HUAC and black lists against the
background of Cold War; The Man Who Japed (1956) presents us with a world
dominated by Moral Reclamation, where any deviation from moral behavior
is immediately repressed and everybody is under strict surveillance (also thanks
to spying robots), a situation which may remind us of Orwell’s 1984, but is
strongly connected to the atmosphere of conformism and paranoia that dom-
inated Eisenhower’s America; Dr. Futurity (1960) is a tangled time travel story
whose complicated plot is pivoted upon the issue of the colonization of North-
America by Europeans and the subjugation of Native Americans, that is, a
matter of race or ethnicity which was published only five years after the Mont-
gomery Bus Boycott and three years after the bombings in the Alabama town;
Vulcan’s Hammer (1960) shows another repressive and regimented society,
ruled by a computer, Vulcan 3, and an elite of men-in-grey-flannel-suits
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 59

which can be said to embody the outer-directed individual theorized by David

Riesman and other sociologists of the post–World War II years.
All these stories might be somewhat summarized by the title of Dick’s
1953 novella “The Variable Man”: they all set independent and nonconformist
characters against a technocratic society which strives to enforce total control.
The protagonists of these novels — from Solary Lottery’s little man Leon
Cartwright (and space expansion prophet John Preston) to unconscious japer
Allen Purcell (in The Man Who Japed), from open-minded and tolerant Fedgov
agent Doug Cussick to technicians Jim Barris and Jason Dill — are all Variable
Men, struggling to overthrow a system which turns humans into predictable
quantities or cogs. Once again, it is the opposition theorized in such classics
of U.S. sociology as Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), between inner-
directed and outer-directed individuals.1 They are also Little Men, like the
protagonist of a German novel published in 1932 that Dick loved (SL1 64,
79), Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now?, where a young couple strives to
survive in Berlin during the difficult years of the economic crisis triggered by
the Wall Street Crash.2
However, these novels are fundamentally aimed at entertainment and,
as Dick complains in some of his letters (Ch. 1), they were often drastically
shortened in such a way that their convoluted plots could be barely followed
(this is especially true for The World Jones Made [SL1 40]). Unlike other classics
of sociological sf, Dick’s main aim was, to put it in Andrew Butler’s words,
write adventure novels which “paid the rent” (Butler 2007, 51). We know that
in those years Dick devoted most of his creative energies and resources to the
writing of those realistic novels that publishers invariably rejected: from 1949
to 1960 Dick completed nine manuscripts that have survived and have been
posthumously published, plus others which have been lost. Dick was well
aware of the limits of the sf novels that were published in DAW’s Ace Doubles:
he wrote that Vulcan was a “botched job ... one of the worst of [his] efforts”
(SL1, 51); in the same letter he explains that Dr. Futurity was basically an
expansion of a short story (“Time Pawn” [1954]). We have a letter to James
Blish where Dick praises The Man Who Japed, saying that “it has genuine lit-
erary worth” (SL1 41), but Blish had written a positive review of the novel,
and Dick usually tended to humor the addressees of his letters. Besides, he
did not seem to have much to say on these novels in the following years.
There are, however, two more novels of the fifties that can compare
favorably to Puppets, and they are Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint. These
two novels were both already discussed in one of the most important articles
on Dick’s sf output published in the pioneer years of PKD scholarship, Peter
Fitting’s 1983 article “Reality as Ideological Construct,” and this shows that
critics detected their higher quality and maturity quite soon. Also Dick indirectly
60 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

told us that those two novels were different from the rest of his early produc-
tion, because he kept finding new meanings in them in his Exegesis (Pursuit
177, 186), where — at least in the published parts — he does not bother to men-
tion, say, Vulcan’s Hammer or Dr. Futurity.
The higher quality can be easily explained for Time, which was sold to
Lippincott, a more respectable publishing house than DAW, and printed in
hardback edition in 1959 not to be sold as sf, but as a “novel of menace”; we
should think that Dick wrote it more carefully than the other genre novels,
and it shows. On the other hand, Eye was hastily written in two weeks in 1955
(Butler 2007, 32), and was published on one of the notorious Ace Doubles.
However, it was an ambitious work, as it should have been preceded by a
prologue where the characters of the novel commented on it, which was sub-
sequently edited out (Butler 2007, 32–3). In both novels, however, Dick
develops his narrative techniques to achieve ontological uncertainty, and shows
a greater mastery of the Game of the Rat.
This is easy to prove if we compare those two works to Puppets. In fact
the 1957 fantasy novel features a limited ontological uncertainty. As I have
already said in the previous chapter, we are unsure if this is a realistic or a fantasy
novel until Ted meets Will Christopher; then the novel solidifies as full-blown
fantasy, which ends when Ahriman leaves Millgate (and Earth) and the original
Millgate returns once and for all. This is the moment when the world of fantasy
dissolves so that Ted (and us readers) may get back to the ordinary world, to
our shared world where there are no wanderers and no golems. The interplay
between these textual levels (each standing for a different reality) can be then
schematized by means of this table (Rossi “Fourfold Symmetry,” 405):

Table 2.1
Fictional levels “Real” (Historical) Level
PRIMARY TEXT: Millgate I “accepted” levels
(Ted’s — and Ormazd’s — ZERO TEXT
town) (historical reality
of 1957)
SECONDARY TEXT: Millgate
II (Peter/Ahriman’s town) alternative levels

The terminology I am using here (Primary, Secondary and Zero Text)

is taken by Carlo Pagetti’s introduction to the Italian translation of The Man
in the High Castle (Pagetti 1977, 139), which will be discussed at length in the
next chapter. Such a terminology can be nonetheless applied to other works
by Dick, and it will be done wherever possible in this essay. We could then
say that Puppets takes us readers from a normal world (Millgate I) and realistic
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 61

fiction to an abnormal reality (Millgate II) and fantasy, but ultimately takes
us back to the primary text, to the Millgate Ted expected and remembered,
and this means that after our visit to the world of fantasy we may safely get
back to our familiar world: the zero text is not called in doubt.
We cannot say that this is the case in Eye. The novel begins in a slightly
futuristic setting, as its first sentence declares that “The Proton Beam Deflector
of the Belmont Bevatron betrayed its inventors at four o’ clock in the afternoon
of October 2, 1959” (5). The Bevatron was not a fictional machine (it was a
particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which began
operating in 1954, the year before Dick wrote the novel), and it did accelerate
protons, though its location was not Belmont but Berkeley (a place Dick knew
well, as he had attended the University of California there). However, the
particle accelerator is no more than a device Dick uses to conjure up not just
one secondary text (and alternative reality) but four. The accident described
in the first chapter involves eight persons, including the main character of the
novel, Jack Hamilton, who has been just fired from a missile manufacturing
plant because of his wife Marsha’s leftist leanings (6–14). Marsha is another
victim of the accident; on the platform incinerated by the six billion volt
beam there are also Charley McFeyffe, head of the security at the missile plant,
Arthur Silvester, a former Army officer, Edith Pritchet, a middle class matron
with her eight-years-old son David, Joan Reiss, a withdrawn spinster, and
Bill Laws, an Afro-American physics student who works as a guide to the
Bevatron plant.
After the accident the eight characters soon find out that they are no
more in the normal world where the story started, which is basically the world
of the 1950s with the Cold War and witch-hunting ( Jack and Marsha are vic-
tims of the latter, and Jack’s position in a missile plant directly connects them
to the former), plus the sfnal Belmont Bevatron and the accident it causes.
The world they find themselves in is one where God exists and blatantly inter-
venes in everyday matters: the angels of the Lord suggest the correct answers
to the faithful (63) and confound the heathens (62); engineers “are mainly
preoccupied with the job of piping grace for every Babite community the
world over” (53); those who build mosques, temples, altars are struck by light-
ning if they make mistakes (53–4); God can be reached flying with an
umbrella (it just takes the right prayer) and he is an immense eye in the sky
(90–6); “big, brutish, masculine angels” (120) emerge from television screens
to punish those who express heretic opinions. But the first alternative reality
that we visit in Eye is not, like the secondary text in Puppets, the embodiment
of a historical religion (be it Zoroastrianism or Christianity). This strange
world is dominated by a fictional religion, whose sacred text is the Bayan of
the Second Bab (49); this imaginary cult is loosely based on the Bahá'í Faith,
62 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

founded in 19th-century Persia, and the version which is shown at work in

the first secondary text of Eye is the superstitious and mean one projected by
the mind of Arthur Silvester, one of the victims of the Bevatron accident, “a
crackpot old soldier who believes in his religious cult and his stereotyped
ideas” (110).
In his biography of Dick, Lawrence Sutin explains that A.A. Wyn (the
founder of Ace Books) forced Dick to call Silvester’s God “(Tetragrammaton)”
and to mould his religion as a small and non-existent crackpot cult based on
Islam, not Christianity, because he did not want to offend “the American
Legion and fundamentalist Christians” (Sutin 92; see also Rickman 1989,
196).3 This tells us that the world of Arthur Silvester could easily be read as
a satire of Fundamentalist Christianity, which already was a powerful force
in U.S. society; no doubt then that the interplay between primary and sec-
ondary text remained within the scope of sociological science-fiction. What
Dick did in this novel was to take the idios kosmos of a typical fundamentalist
(righteous, bigot, narrow-minded, superstitious) and turn it into the limited
koinos kosmos where the eight characters are trapped. We might also say that
Silvester’s Babite world is a Finite Subjective Reality.4
This is the name that Jonathan Lethem gave the pocket worlds in his
1995 novel Amnesia Moon, a deliberately Dickian pastiche. There the United
States are fragmented in a myriad of small cities or even neighborhoods, each
one surviving by itself, and bearing the signs of an enigmatic catastrophe
(shattered buildings, abandoned cars, lack of communications, no functioning
radio or TV, etc.) which has not only erased all individual and/or collective
memories of the past, but has also torn apart the fabric of reality itself. Each
city visited by Chaos, the protagonist, in his journey form Hatfork, Wyoming,
to California is a Finite Subjective Reality (Lethem, 200). People in different
places experience a post-catastrophic reality, but each place seems to have
been stricken by a different catastrophe. The differences are explained once
we discover that each Finite Subjective Reality is subjective inasmuch as it is
the projection of an individual mind, a dreamer who creates and controls it
to a certain extent.
Amnesia Moon is a brilliant rewriting of Eye, so that we may apply the
concept of FSR to the worlds projected by Dick’s characters in his novel.5
The most relevant difference between the two novels is that in Eye the FSRs
do not coexist; the characters (and the readers) can only visit a new FSR once
they have neutralized the individual who is projecting (or dreaming) the
pocket world they are in. Moreover, while there is no more “normal” reality
in Amnesia Moon (the catastrophe has made it disappear just by fragmenting
it into a myriad of FSRs), in Eye there is a real world which is repeatedly
glimpsed by the characters, as at the beginning of the ninth chapter, where
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 63

we are shown the eight victims “strewn across the floor of the Bevatron” while
“like snails, medical workers crept cautiously down ladders into the chamber”
(125). The eight characters are living not only in a sort of virtual reality, a
shared FSR, but also in an accelerated time, because they are actually lying
in a state of unconsciousness where they fell due to the annihilation of the
platform.
The problem is that getting back to the genuine koinos kosmos is
definitely not easy. Even if they manage to knock down Silvester and interrupt
the projection of the FSR of the Bab, they move to another FSR, this time
projected by Mrs. Pritchet. It is a puritanical world where women are sexless
and all tasteless things have been removed; it is a world where “Sigmund Freud
developed the psychoanalytic concept of sex as sublimation of the artistic
drive” (134), in an ironic reversal of sublimation according to the founder of
psychoanalysis. A world where electronics industries “continue the search for
the ultimate communication medium, the device ... by which all living humans
will be faced with civilization’s cultural and artistic heritage” (135). If the first
FSR was the projection of a religious fanatic, the second is the creation of a
sex phobic mind, with the aggravating circumstance of a philistine (and ulti-
mately snobbish) conception of art (and life). Mrs. Pritchet is prudish, glut-
tonous, posh, but what is important is that she is as intolerant as Silvester;
but while Silvester does not tolerate those who do not conform to his bigoted
morality (though in his world some venial sins are tolerated, as we are told
and shown in the hilarious scene in the bar [72]), Mrs. Pritchet does not
accept all those things and people who annoy her — and she is quite easily
annoyed. She eliminates Silky because she is a prostitute (153), all snakes so
that her son cannot set out his snake trap (168), “old farmhouses with tottering
windmills” (169) because they spoil the landscape, seagulls (176) because they
are “evil-minded birds” and cows (177) because one of them “did something
unmentionable,” that is, defecated. Other categories are wiped out of existence
due to Mrs. Pritchet’s dislike, until, in a frenzy of annihilation, she makes
chemical elements disappear one by one (183), causing her FSR to collapse.
This moves the eight characters to another world, the one devised by
Joan Reiss, who suffers from paranoia: “everything she sees has some signifi-
cance, part of the plot directed against hers” (192), we are thus plunged into
a nightmarish display of “predatory horrors” (200), like the transformation
of Silky in a horrible spider-like creature in the basement of Hamilton’s house
(195–99) or Joan Reiss’ house which turns into “a house-creature ... ready to
feed” (210) on the group of characters, in a remarkably horrific and surrealistic
sequence (208–12) which stands comparison with Dick’s more celebrated psy-
chedelic phantasmagorias in Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
After Joan is brutally slaughtered by Silvester, Bill Laws and David
64 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Pritchet, turned into monstrous (and obviously predatory) insect-like creatures

by her hallucinatory paranoid syndrome (214–7), the narrative moves to
another secondary text (we might call it a quaternary text, but probably this
complication is not necessary) or FSR, which is this time believed to be pro-
jected by Marsha Hamilton, because it is a caricature of the world as it might
be seen by a tremendously dull and fanatic Communist militant: a place where
capitalists are robber barons, protected by merciless thugs, and workers must
defend themselves with any possible means, including violence. It is “the
Communist idea of America — gangster cities, full of vice and crime” (229).
Such a black-and-white (actually black-and-red) FSR is however too crude,
too simple, too moronic to have been projected by a sophisticated woman
like Marsha, but Hamilton discovers this only after having knocked his wife
unconscious. Then McFeyffe undergoes a miraculous and grotesque meta-
morphosis, turning into a heroic, god-like figure (241). Dick’s ironic comment
is that “the resemblance to (Tetragrammaton) was startling. McFeyffe had
clearly not been able to shed all his religious convictions” (241).
It is interesting to notice that Hamilton has been fired because McFeyffe
reported on Marsha’s political activism (described in the first chapter [10–1]);
the “rabid patriot and ... reactionary” which Marsha calls “a dangerous fascist”
is actually a closet Communist (30). Dick’s explanation for his behavior is
voiced by McFeyffe himself, when he says that “People like [Marsha]— they’re
more of a menace to the Party discipline than any other bunch. The cult of
individualism. The idealist with his own law, his own ethics. Refusing to
accept authority” (243). Once again, this is a fictional embodiment of the
opposition between the inner-directed and the outer-directed individual; the
former can be represented by the homogenized men-in-grey-flannel-suit like
colonel T.E. Edwards (one of the managers of the missile plant) or the sub-
missive member of the Communist Party (or, in the Soviet regimes, the so-
called apparatchik) like Charley McFeyffe. However, whether they work for
the Military-Industrial complex of the United States or the Cominform they
are both not specimens of what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional
Man in his homonymous 1964 essay, a stark criticism of both capitalist and
Soviet societies. Once again, the world projected by one of the characters can
be easily interpreted in sociological terms.
This has been done by Fitting, who reads the “four subjective realities”
as “ideologies,” totalizing views of the world that reject consensus, “the U.S.
as a harmonious blend of differing cultures, beliefs, and philosophies which
is governed by the will of the majority” (Fitting 1991, 96). But that consensual
democracy, Fitting warns us, hailed in the 1950s as “the end of ideology” can-
not be said to be embodied in the “normal” world we are presented with at the
beginning of the novel, where Hamilton is fired because of his wife’s political
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 65

activism (1–26). When Hamilton gets back to the koinos kosmos after his
(and his companions’) travel through the four versions of idios kosmos, he
desperately tries to unmask McFeyffe (246–9), but fails because in that only
apparently consensual world, “a group of extremists attempts to impose their
construction of reality on others, and they succeed” (Fitting 1991, 97)— those
extremists being symbolized by McFeyffe and the management of the missile
plant, who stand for Senator McCarthy and the various witch-hunting com-
mittees then in action (one of them, HUAC, also included the man who will
become Dick’s political nemesis, Richard Nixon). Thus Hamilton and Laws
have to “reject a koinos kosmos that before their terrifying experience seemed
reasonable” (Robinson 16) and invent a new job, which in a typical Dickian
fashion will be a small business building hi-fi equipment (252–6).6
But there is more to be said about the ending of Eye. The return to the
“normal” world of 1957 — its disquieting ideological implications notwith-
standing — might look similar to what we have at the end of The Cosmic Pup-
pets, according to this scheme (which may help readers to grasp the overall
architecture of Eye):

Table 2.2
Fictional Worlds Projected by Pages
Objective reality
The World of Eisenhower (political intolerance) Consensual 1–26
Finite Subjective Realities
The World of the Bab (religious
fundamentalism) Arthur Silvester 26–122
The World of Puritanism (sexual intolerance)
and Philistinism (class discrimination) Mrs. Pritchet 122–182
The World of Fear (paranoia) Joan Reiss 182–217
The World of Class Warfare (political
intolerance) Charles McFeyffe 217–245
Objective reality (?)
The world of 1959 (?) Consensual (?) 245–256

Yet some commentators questioned the reality of the world where the
characters live at the end of the novel. Butler suggests that “the ending is
ambiguous: they assume they are back in the real world, but there is no evi-
dence for this,” and pinpoints an asymmetry between the number of the vic-
tims of the Bevatron accident and the FSRs that are visited in the novel: “after
all, they haven’t been in eight hallucinated universes yet” (Butler 2007, 34).
Fitting had already noticed this in his 1983 essay, but he explained it in another
way, consistent with his Marxist interpretation of the novel, saying that “there
are three ... characters who ... are excluded by definition from participation in
66 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the elaboration of a consensus” (Fitting 1991, 97): Marsha, because she is a

woman; David Pritchet, because he is a boy; and Bill Laws, as he is black.
The underprivileged are not entitled to their own FSRs, to show us their
weltanschauung.7 But Butler reads this asymmetry as a clue to a different inter-
pretation: why should we believe that the final world is the same where the
characters live at the beginning of Eye?
Maurizio Nati noticed another tell-tale detail in the ending, that is, the
earwig which stings Laws when he tells Mrs. Pritchet that she will get back
the money she is lending him and Hamilton for their small hi-fi business
(255–6). Hamilton rushes to correct Bill: “We hope you’ll get your money
back” (256), as if the sting were a punishment for what Bill has said. In fact
Hamilton had said, a few pages before, “From now on I’m going to be perfectly
honest with everybody, say exactly what I think” (252). If somebody is stung
just because he was not perfectly honest with somebody, could it be that the
world at the end of Eye is just another FSR, this time projected by Hamilton,
the sensible and open-minded protagonist (Nati 139–40)? Also Nati notices
that four worlds are missing, and the small accident at the very end of the
story may be Dick’s indirect way to tell us that the odyssey of the characters
is not over yet.
If the stable and consensual koinos kosmos is not reached in the ending
(even though Hamitlon’s world seems to be less oppressive and unpleasant
than the previous ones), we should read this novel as the first full-blown
occurrence of ontological uncertainty in Dick’s fiction. As in other major
works, the ending is open (maybe not overtly, but, as we have seen, other
interpreters have noticed this, and that should mean that the openness is not
so difficult to be perceived); it is the same situation that we have in the last
pages of Dick’s “canonical” novels of the sixties, from The Man in the High
Castle to Ubik.
However, there is another element which should be highlighted. Though
sociological readings like Nati’s or political interpretations like Fitting’s are
not to be discarded, as this novel does belong to the current of sociological
science-fiction after all, a socio-political framework cannot account for all
the FSRs listed in the table above. It is quite interesting that when Fitting
lists the “contents” of the FSRs visited in the novel, he mentions only three:
“Silvester’s religion, Mrs. Pritchet’s moralism, McFeyffe’s politics” (Fitting
1991, 96). What about Joan Reiss? In the table I have called her FSR “The
World of Fear”— being well aware that, unlike other categories in the table,
fear is not per se political. The problem with Ms Reiss is that she suffers from
a paranoid syndrome, which forces her to see the world as a conspiracy of
“predatory horrors.” This may be the reason why while other FSRs are basically
funny or grotesque, Joan’s world is scary (already Nati has noticed that Eye is
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 67

“science fantasy with some trespassing on horror” [Nati 131, translation mine]);
satire works quite well with political contents, but when Dick stages the fears
and delusions of a deranged mind we enter a different genre, and the atmos-
phere is one of fright, not irony — closer to the gloomiest scenes of Ubik.
This should tell us that Eye in the Sky, though belonging to sociological
science-fiction, is also indebted to fantasy; and that it can be read politically
or sociologically, but its architecture based on a series of FSRs also lends itself
to a psychoanalytical reading, where the existentialist concept of Eigenwelt
(one’s own world) which Dick had surely found in Rollo May’s collection of
essays (as we have seen in the previous chapter) is sfnally embodied in the
FSRs projected by the characters.8 We should not then forget that the phrase
comes from Heraclitus’ Fragment B89, “The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” That fragment is
quoted by Ludwig Binswanger in the essay “The Existential Analysis School
of Thought” which was included in May’s collection (Binswanger, 196)— a
book Dick had read. For the ancient Greek philosopher the moment where
the idios kosmos is fully revealed is that of dreaming; and this adds a further
element to our reading of Eye, because there is probably no word in the English
dictionary which connects the political, collective dimension and the private
sphere like dream, especially when used in the phrase “American dream.” The
three FSRs projected by Silvester, Pritchet and McFeyffe are undoubtedly
American dreams, or better nightmares; but Reiss’ dream could be dreamt
also elsewhere — unless we accept Richard J. Hofstadter’s idea of a peculiarly
paranoid style in American politics (Hofstadter 1964).9 One should in any
case acknowledge that the paranoid discourses analyzed by Hofstadter are
quite different from the surrealistic visions conjured up by Dick in the third
FSR visited by his characters.
All in all, while in Puppets there is a koinos kosmos that the protagonist
and readers can get back to, Eye is closer to The Game-Players of Titan, inas-
much as the return to shared reality is at least problematic — though onto-
logical uncertainty casts its shadow on the ending of Eye in a less flamboyant
fashion than it does in Game-Players. Time Out of Joint, on the other hand,
can be said to be placed in a middle position between those two novels: the
ending does not seem to be uncertain, as the familiar reality of the 1950s is
unambiguously given the lie, and the story reveals itself as sheer science-
fiction.
The story begins in a nondescript U.S. small town in 1958. Ragle Gumm,
the protagonist, is a forty-year-old idler who has no job, no family and no
house of his own. He lives with his sister, Margo, who is married to the owner
of a supermarket, Vic Nielsen. Ragle’s only occupation, apart from attempting
to seduce his neighbor’s wife, Junie Black, is solving the quizzes published
68 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

every day by the local newspaper, the Gazette. The name of the contest is
Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?, and it consists in locating, on a
map divided in 1,208 squares, where and at what time will the little green
man be: the players have to decide what is the right square on the basis of a
semi-logical procedure involving deciphering some sibylline sentences and
taking into account the answers of previous weeks. Ragle has been the undis-
puted champion of the contest for years: he keeps finding the right answer
day after day, month after month, something that makes him and the editorial
staff of the Gazette quite happy. He wins, it must be added, thanks to his
records, his charts, his deductive abilities, but above all thanks to an almost
inexplicable intuitive talent.
Ragle is quite famous on a local scale. Every day the newspaper publishes
his picture above the contest grid. He is so popular that readers have grown
a bit fond of him: he’s like a family member, and they expect him to keep
winning week after week. This is the reason why the editorial staff exception-
ally allow him to submit more than one solution for each day’s puzzle, pro-
vided he indicates their order of value, i.e., which is the most probable
solution, then the second most probable, etc.
Surely the secret compact between Ragle and the people of the Gazette
is a bit odd, but it should be said that the nameless town he lives in is even
odder. In what should be an ordinary town of the United States in the late
fifties Marylin Monroe is totally unknown (63), Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book
that Vic has never heard of (8), there are no radios but only TV sets (20–1),
etc. All characters remember small details of their life, their homes, their
workplaces, that turn out to be false, or inconsistent: a switch that should be
there is not there, a step you remember is missing, and so on. And when we
are presented with the disappearing of a soft-drink stand in a public park, a
vanishing that leaves an astonished Ragle with a slip of paper in his hand,
with block letters saying SOFT-DRINK STAND on it, we cannot help think-
ing that there is something definitely rotten in that nondescript, would-be
ordinary town.
In fact there is a conspiracy going on. Ragle is not the man he thinks he
is, Vic and Margo are not his relatives, all the world we have been shown in
the first 50 pages of the novel is totally, bogus. The story takes place in year
1998, but not our 1998; Dick has imagined his 1998 in 1958, envisioning it
through the lenses of the SF of the fifties. Earth is ruled by a totalitarian
planet-wide government (called One Happy World) that has decided to ban
space exploration, the Moon has been colonized, the lunar colonies have
resented the domination of Earth and eventually revolted against it,10 subse-
quently adopting an attrition tactics to compel Terra to acknowledge the inde-
pendence of the Moon. Every day they launch a nuclear missile on a city of
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 69

Terra, choosing it on the basis of a randomized, unpredictable method. We

should say a would-be unpredictable method, because there is at least one per-
son who can foresee where the big H-bomb-carrying missiles will fall next.
That person is Ragle Gumm himself: thanks to his partly deductive,
partly aesthetic technique, Ragle can detect a pattern in the previous strikes
and locate the next target — with a certain degree of approximation — and
that explains why he is allowed to provide alternative solutions. While he
thinks he is following in the green man’s footsteps, he is actually following
in the missiles’ tracks.
There is not much to be said about why Ragle is imprisoned in a faked
town of the 50s and can solve his ballistic problems only if disguised as harm-
less prize contests: the government decided that, due his moral doubts about
the war, Ragle was too unreliable to be left free; then Ragle’s retreat syndrome,
triggered by excessive strain, helped the One Happy World to put him into
an artificial urban setting which reproduced the world of his childhood.
Ragle’s psychological problems contribute to the atmosphere of radical
uncertainty that dominates till he and Vic manage to hijack a truck and leave
the nameless town in chapter 12. In the first three fourths of the novel Ragle
asks himself what is wrong in his world — but he is not sure that there really
is something wrong. He oscillates between the feeling that a vast organization
is busy around him to cheat him and his relatives, and the atrocious suspicion
that the conspiracy is no more than the creation of a deranged mind: his.
Until the eventual denouement, Time might well be a realistic novel realistically
describing a case of paranoid syndrome (and that might also be what Dick
was originally aiming at, since another, almost contemporary novel of his,
Confessions of a Crap Artist 11 is pivoted upon a character who is really deranged
and only imagines aliens, flying saucers, etc. [Robinson 20–2]).
Fitting reads this novel as a denouement of ideology (the peaceful, happy,
and fake 1958 town) as opposed to a reality of conflict, militarism and fear;
Ragle’s amnesia should be then read as “ideology’s efforts to erase its own
traces, as it were, to ‘naturalize’ its own historical and class-based origins”
(Fitting 1991, 98). Here Fitting is using the idea of naturalization as it is pre-
sented in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (Barthes 140, 144), where the French
semiologist discusses cultural constructs that are universally (and erroneously)
considered natural, hence undisputable and unchangeable. If the quiet and
drowsy reality of an American suburb as Dick depicts it, “a sunny universe.
Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday
afternoon, while listening to the ball game of TV” (80) is the reality, why
question it? Why worry?
But the America Felix depicted in the novel is bogus. Behind it there is
an estranged future, a threatening world of totalitarian oppression and war.
70 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

I have suggested (Rossi “Fourfold Symmetry,” 405–6) that when Dick exposes
the archetypal small town of the fifties as a simulacrum, he is also saying
something about the decade which was ending at the time the novel was pub-
lished. As in Puppets, there are two towns here, the one where Ragle Gumm
lives in the fake fifties and the one he visits after he has escaped, and they
stand for two different worlds: but those two alternative textual levels in turn
stand for two very different images of the historical 1950s.

Table 2.3
Fictional Levels “Real” (Historical) Levels
PRIMARY TEXT: 1959 ZERO TEXT (1): “accepted” levels
America Felix Eisenhower’s America, Earth’s
Peace — Unity richest and most powerful
Mainstream literature country, the core of the Free
Ragle is a dropout and World
(probably) a “lunatic”
SECONDARY TEXT: 1998 ZERO TEXT (2):
One Happy World vs. loonies America is ruled by the alternative levels
War — Secession industrial-military complex,
SF literature in a continuous state of (cold)
Ragle is the saviour of war,doomed to nuclear
humanity and then its (heroic) destruction.
traitor: he becomes a loonie

This fourfold scheme provides a symmetry that allows for several effects
of signification (effect de sense).12 At the end of this novel we have two parallel
movements: Ragle, no more insane, gets “back” from the accepted — albeit
fake —1959 to the hidden — albeit real —199813; the reader reaches the alter-
native zero text of the U.S. in the 1950s, hidden behind the facade of nation-
alistic Cold War rhetoric, i.e., the daily life of a country which is already at
war, dominated by the industrial-military complex, divided by a conformist
and xenophobic conservatism on the one hand and those forces which chal-
lenged the status quo (e.g., the Civil Rights movement) on the other hand.
Ragle’s discovery that he is not living in 1959 but in the “future” (actually, a
psychologically removed present) corresponds to the denouement of the sim-
ulacral essence of U.S. daily (and historical) reality of 1959.
Such a reading might seem to counter Jameson’s interpretation of Time,
which stresses the positive capacity of the novel to show us the historicity of
the fifties by turning them into the past of a “conditional” future, what Jame-
son calls “a trope of the future anterior” ( Jameson 1991, 285). This allows
Dick to capture “the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the
small town, of normalcy and nondeviant everyday life” ( Jameson 1991, 280),
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 71

something that “high art” cannot deal with. Jameson seems then to suggest
that the device of the fake town enables Dick to achieve a surprising and par-
adoxical “authenticity,” moreover infusing historicity in his contemporary
reality, that is, “the perception of the present as history” ( Jameson 1991, 284).
This may be true for the two climactic epiphanies which take place at the end
of chapter 14, when two italicized paragraphs show us two key moments in
Ragle’s childhood, and show us in an estranged way the “present-as-past” (or
“future anterior”) of the U.S. fifties (180–1, 182–3).
Can such an authenticity be reconciled with our reading of the alternative
reality as a denouement of the normal and nondeviant daily life of the 1950s
as ideological construction? It should be said first that Jameson is using Time
to devise a theoretical framework which allows him to analyze two films of
the 1980s based on a postmodern representation of that decade. The critic is
well aware of the complexities of Dick’s novel, because he acknowledges that
“a twofold determination plays across the main character” ( Jameson 1991,
282): the fake village is at the same time the result of Ragles’ infantile regres-
sion, to be read then as “a collective wish fulfillment” ( Jameson 1991, 283)
and a deceptive manipulation, which may be interpreted as “the expression
of deep, unconscious, collective fears about our social life” ( Jameson 1991,
282). The nameless town is then a synecdoche for “the United States sur-
rounded by the implacable menace of world communism” ( Jameson 1991,
283) or any other external threat (which makes this novel so interesting in
our current age of terrorism paranoia). Even little Sammy knows that if some-
thing is wrong in the small town where he lives with his family, it must be
because someone is trying to dupe them; and that someone is obviously “the
enemy that’s everywhere around us” (63), possibly armed with “dupe-guns.”
Of course Sammy’s guess is that “they’re the Reds” (63).
Besides, if the issue is what the fifties were really like, we may accept
Jameson’s remarks but never forget that our shared image of that decade is
more Happy Days and Fonzie, or Grease, than the fifties themselves, or better,
that decade as it was daily experienced by those who lived through it (we have
then to acknowledge, and this is something that also Jameson is implicitly
doing, that there may be many different visions of that period, because — to
put it into Heraclitus’ terms — there are many idioi kosmoi in a complex rela-
tion to the koinos kosmos).
A more troublesome aspect of the novel is the unexplained episode in
the park, that I have already discussed in an article on this and other com-
ponents of the novel (Rossi 1996, 200–8). This episode was already quoted
by Fitting in his 1983 article, who did not suggest a detailed explanation (Fit-
ting 1991, 224). This scene begins as a rather realistic depiction of what could
become an adulterous affair, but then turns into a supernatural event. What
72 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

is remarkable is the series of overt literary references in this episode: in a novel

whose title quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and might have the story of the Dan-
ish prince as a subtext (Pagetti 2003, 15–6), literary quotations are undoubt-
edly worth considering.
It all begins when Ragle takes Junie Black to the public park; while they
are sunbathing, Ragle feels both Junie’s attractiveness and her disarming
immaturity. He asks himself: “Could I fall in love with a little trollopy, giggly
ex-high school girl ... who still prefers a banana split with all the trimmings
to a good wine or a good whisky or even a good dark beer?” (36). The dif-
ference of tastes marks a clearly defined semic opposition between Ragle and
Junie: he is characterized by the semes of maturity, age, manhood, experience,
moral awareness as contrasted to Junie’s immaturity, youth (or teenage), wom-
anhood, inexperience, moral irresponsibility. It could be argued that this is a
rather conventional sort of characterization (with a distasteful flavor of sexism),
but we must always remember that the episode is seen through Ragle’s eyes,
so these semic oppositions are part of Ragle’s weltanschauung; we are presented
with how he experiences his relation to the attractive younger woman or, bet-
ter, how he would like to experience it. Moreover, Ragle’s cultural pattern is
not just a manifestation of some (American) Male Ideology defining Real
Men on the basis of virile tastes (whether in wine, whisky, beer, or whatever
else): there is something alchemical in this irrational “meeting and mating of
opposites” (36). No wonder then that Ragle suddenly wears the ancient robe
of a Renaissance magician, turning his small affair in a scene of magical reju-
venation: “The old Doctor Faust sees the peasant girl sweeping off the front
walk, and there go his books, his knowledge, his philosophies” (36).
Ragle/Faust could become young again by mating with Junie/Gretchen;
the “trollopy, giggly ex-high school girl” then turns into something loftier,
an embodiment of the Ewigweibliche (Goethe’s ideal of transcendent wom-
anhood as it appears in the last lines of his poem); and such a quotation of
Goethian terminology is not out of place. Junie/Gretchen possesses a peculiar
kind of pre-human innocence that lets her remain unspoiled by time and
human intercourses; Ragle/Faust sees her as a female archetype of sorts:
No matter how deeply she got involved with men ... she probably
remained physically untouched. Still as she had been. Sweater and saddle-
shoes. Even when she got to thirty, thirty-five, forty. Her hair-style would
alter through the years; she would use more make-up, probably diet. But
otherwise, eternal [37].
That is why Ragle quotes Goethe’s poem, first in English —“in the begin-
ning was the deed” (36)— then in German, Im Anfang war die Tat: it only
seems that he is just seducing his neighbor’s wife, but the deed he is so inter-
ested in is presented as the philosophic principle of action, the noble Streben
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 73

that plays such an important role in Goethe’s masterpiece. Yet poetry must
be explained to the eternal woman: “That was poetry.... I was trying to make
love to you” (37), which is something Faust did not have to do; moreover she
refuses to kiss him — but this does not deter Ragle/Faust: “He knew that one
day he could have her. Chance circumstances, a certain mood; and it would
be worth it, he decided” (37).
But as soon as Ragle walks away toward the soft-drink stand, he muses
over the possible consequences of his deed: will Bill Black take his revenge
on him, “the trespasser of that most sacred of all a man’s preserves, that Elysian
field where only the lord and master dares to graze” (39)? He begins to under-
stand the moral and, more than that, practical implications of adultery. And
when he reaches the soft-drink stand, where children are “buying hot dogs
and popsicles and Eskimo Pies and orange drink” (39), the ordinariness and
banality of the scene completely changes his mood:

Stunning desolation washed over him. What a waste his life had been.
Here he was, forty-six, fiddling around in the living room with a newspa-
per contest. No gainful, legitimate employment. No kids. No wife. No
home of his own. Fooling around with a neighbor’s wife. A worthless life
[39].

The Goethian Streben and Ewigweibliche seem definitely out of tune with
the ordinary life of U.S. suburbia in the 1950s: Ragles realizes that he is
attracted to an immature woman because he himself is immature, notwith-
standing his virile tastes. Junie is not Gretchen: she is just the ideal partner
for a man who is living in a protracted childhood, and by conquering her he
is looking for a reconfirmation of his manhood. But the deed (Tat) Ragle/Faust
is striving to accomplish is no metamorphosis or rejuvenation; it is just irre-
sponsible (and ordinary) “fooling around with a neighbor’s wife.”
After these realistic pages, their insisted literary allusions notwithstand-
ing, Dick introduces a coup de theatre that unleashes ontological uncertainty.
The soft-drink stand fades away. And, what is even stranger, Ragle is not very
much shocked by this uncanny event, because he thinks: “It’s happening to
me again” (40). Once the stand has disappeared, Ragle picks up a “slip of
paper. On it was printing, block letters. SOFT-DRINK STAND” (40). Ragle can
just put the small sheet in a metal box, where there are already six slips of
paper with the names of other, already vanished objects: “DOOR FACTORY
BUILDING HIGHWAY DRINKING FOUNTAIN BOWL OF FLOWERS” (44).
The episode in the park may make us suspect that Ragle is not sane after
all (Vest 93), and the world of 1998 is a delusional construct; if we pursued
such an interpretation, we would have a more radical form of ontological
uncertainty than that suggested by the novel in a reading that simply accepts
74 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the sfnal world of 1998 (as it is depicted in the novel) as the real one, and the
nameless town as a materialization of Ragle’s idios kosmos. If we may suspect
that Ragle’s final flight to the Moon is a psychotic delusion, then the liberating
ending becomes dubious at least (such an interpretation has been suggested
ad absurdum by Rispoli [Rispoli 35]).
Yet a cursory survey of the text tells us that this is a 3rd-person narrative
whose focus is not always Ragle Gumm: episodes where he is not present
which confirm the falsity of the town are Bill Black’s visit to the Municipal
Utility District Office where he talks to Mr. Lowery about the danger that
Ragle is becoming sane again at the beginning of chapter 5 (54–6); Bill’s
phone call to Mr. Lowery, where he complains that a phone book of 1998 has
been left in the ruins next to the Nielsons’ house at the end of chapter 5 (66–
8); Vic Nielsen’s mental experiment which allows him to realize that the town
around him is mere scenery at he end of chapter 6 (81–2); the scene at the
beginning of chapter 8 where a young man is getting ready to play the part
of a highway policeman, and rehearses his lines (96–100); Margo’s final con-
versation with Bill Black where the woman discovers that Bill, not Vic, is her
husband (173–8).
All these small scenes are there to persuade us beyond doubt that the
world of the 1950s is fake and the war between Earth and Moon is true. But
what is the meaning of the slips of paper, then? In the interview that Charles
Platt Dick mentions this scene and maintains that he was trying “to account
for the diversity of worlds that people live in” (Platt 151). Dick adds that he
did not know Heraclitus at that time, and his distinction between koinos and
idios kosmos, but that is what should explain the disappearing of the soft-
drink stand. This does not really explain much: does it imply that the soft-
drink stand and the other disappeared objects are just figments in Ragle’s
mind? Since he is suffering from hallucinations this fits into the plot, but
what about the slips of paper?
An easy way (maybe too easy) to solve the riddle could be a metafictional
reading. But if we read Ragle’s “word is reality” as “my reality is made of
words, because I’m the character of a novel, and I know it,” all the complex
game of mirrors between Time and Eisenhower’s (and today’s) America gets
lost — we are left with a game with words which defuses itself by reminding
us that it has no substantial reality.
If we understand the original value of word in a Ragle’s meditation on
the slips of paper he has found (in the park and elsewhere), that is, “Words
don’t represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow” (44), we can see that
Ragle is not the metafictive character realizing he is just a character. Reality
is not denied. What is denied is the possibility of a naïve, irresponsible, imme-
diate access to the “Deed”: Ragle can’t have Junie, he can’t simply enjoy his
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 75

small world because it keeps turning into “printing, block letters” (44). In
other words, there is no naked truth (that is why the naked body of Junie is
ultimately not available); there is no immediate intuition of the world, of
himself, of anything. Everything Ragle is and will be is mediated by and into
the all-pervading speech, the Word.14 To reach his real identity, Ragle will be
forced to rediscover his (and the world’s) real history, deconstructing the sci-
entifically organized fakery surrounding him.
Word — considered as the sense-creating logos mentioned by John in his
Gospel — is reality. Sense is shared reality: the reality Ragle shares with Vic,
Margo, Sammy, Junie. To set himself free Ragle must regain his lost (both
personal and national) history. He has to renounce the illusory Faustian iden-
tity, he has to feel like Alexander Selkirk, a.k.a. Robinson Crusoe (noncha-
lantly mentioned by Ragle, but then recognized as a literary quotation with
an act of anamnesis [62]). The slips of paper he is left with are made of the
same substance (paper, from the scientific point of view; language, from the
philosophic and literary point of view) of the copies of Time from 1997 he
finds at the Keitelbein’s (119–20), where he begins to discover who he really
is. Ragle’s process of deconstruction of the fake reality includes a talk with
his brother-in-law Vic in which he reveals what the slips of paper really are:
Reality, ... I give you the real. ... Under everything else, ... The Word.
Maybe it’s the word of God. The logos. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ I
can’t figure it out. ... I think we’re living in some other world than what we
see, and I think for a while I knew exactly what that other world is [138].

The “other world” is reached when — after Ragle’s and Vic’s escape from
the nameless town — other people tell them the history of the world (and
America) after 1959; it is Ragle’s discussion with Vic that allows us to reach
reality, the shared history. We could also say that Time Out of Joint is the
story of the discovery of a hidden text; that text is the logos, the removed his-
tory/reality (while the fakery is a not-really-living, ineffective word).
All in all, Dick’s novel tells us that our real world is made of words; and
that words are necessary to give sense to it. Words have a strange substantiality,
which is particularly evident in some recent historical events. If the world of
the 1950s is made of words, and this may hint at the undeniable fact that the
fifties are also a myth of the fifties (cf. Jameson 1991), made of words, images,
icons, such as Montgomery Clift maybe, or Marilyn Monroe (quoted in the
novel), James Dean, saddle-shoes and soda fountains, souped-up cars and
rock-and-roll, we might well ask ourselves what is the substantiality of the
world we live in. What is the substantiality of those Weapons of Mass Destruc-
tion which started a substantial invasion of a substantial country, and the loss
of thousands of substantial lives, both American and Iraqi (with the occasional
76 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Italian)? Is not Dick telling us that words may be as substantial as things, in

our world of vicarious experience through the media? Even if a novel is made
of words, after all, it may play such games with words that we become aware
of the stories, myths, urban legends that we are relentlessly told to persuade
us that the large part of the world we cannot directly access means this or
that; and that even what we think we can “directly” access has this or that
meaning.
And those whose job is building texts (e.g., fiction writers) are well aware
of the verbal nature of the common world we live in. Ragle Gumm can be
seen as a self-portrait of the author as a sf writer (Robinson 20–2; Rossi 1996,
208); Mr. Lowery’s description of how he solves the riddles of the Little Green
Man contest hints at artistic creation:
You work from an aesthetic, not a rational, standpoint. Those scanners
you constructed. You view a pattern in space, a pattern in time. You try to
fill. Complete the pattern. Anticipate where it goes if extended one more
point. That’s not rational; .... That’s how ... vasemakers work [30].

The title of the contest itself, with the Green Man that may be easily
interpreted as a stereotyped alien, hints at cheap sf. Time Out of Joint could
be read as a vindication of sf, but it is above all the vindication of an unlucky,
underpaid sf writer who was trying to escape the sf ghetto. Is not Ragle Gumm,
losing time with a childish game, an alter ego of Phil Dick, wasting his time
with a literary form that had almost no cultural dignity at that time? Is not
the final condemnation of the 1959 reality the revenge of the loony Phil Dick?
Here is a short but poignant description of the status of sf writers in the 1950s
and 1960s,15 part of a never-delivered speech about science-fiction:
A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered
inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp
magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say to me, “But
are you writing anything serious?” meaning “Are you writing anything
other than SF?” We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed
[Shifting Realities 259–60].

If the contest of the Gazette is a childish version of sf, like Sammy’s

“Robot Rocket Blaster from the 23rd century, Capable of Destroying Moun-
tains” (84), then Ragle’s escape from the game and the fake world containing
it may be seen as an anamorphic image of a movement towards a more mature
form of fiction, where the devices of sf can be taken seriously as complex
metaphors of real concerns, maybe not capable of destroying mountains, but
capable of debunking the artificial image of Eisenhower’s America Felix (and
our current dreams of the 1950s as happy days). We know today that Dick’s
escape was not successful, that his realistic novels remained unsold in his life-
 2. “The Enemy That’s Everywhere Around Us” 77

time, that Time in its respectable Lippincott edition was a commercial failure
so that it was reprinted in 1965 as a garish Belmont sf paperback “with an SF
cover depicting spacemen and the moon falling out of the sky” (Sutin 94).
Dick had to stick to Sf to make ends meet.
Yet the complexity of this novel was not lost on another, more prestigious
American novelist: we know today (Rossi 2003) that Thomas Pynchon took
several elements from Time (Ragle’s ability to predict where missiles are going
to fall, his map, his paranoid state of mind, the conspiracy surrounding him)
to build “Beyond the Zero,” the first part of his postmodernist masterpiece
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Of course this could not be a consolation for Dick
in January 1963, when he witnessed the ultimate failure of his escape from
the sf ghetto (Sutin 118) embodied in a big package with all his unsold non-
sf manuscripts returned by his literary agent — but it is further proof of the
vitality of this novel and its ability to produce ever new and bewildering
effects of signification.
 Chapter 3

Obscure Admixtures:
The Man in the High Castle
Considered as a (Cold) War Novel

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

Thomas Pynchon

There is at least one unambiguously realistic novel among those Dick

wrote in the late fifties that was published in the author’s lifetime, and that
is Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975). The crap artist is Jack Isidore, a slightly
retarded young man who believes in UFO, ESP and whatever pseudo-scientific
body of knowledge we can imagine. His opinion on almost everything is quite
odd, yet, like other literary fools, he may see some truths better than ordinary
people. He may be a crap artist, but in his own very peculiar way he is an
artist like Ragle Gumm (we have already seen that Confessions is a companion
piece of Time Out of Joint in Chapter 2), who may be wasting time in an
apparently unimportant activity but can see things others cannot.
The novel starts with Jack’s rambling monologue about the problems
that beset humankind. The first is that we are made of water, and water can
be absorbed by the ground (3), a very original way to muse on mortality; but
there is a greater problem: “We don’t feel at home everywhere we go” (3). It
is a rather existentialist statement, but the explanation of that sense of home-
lessness is not based on Heidegger’s philosophy, but on an all-too-solid his-
torical event: “The Answer is World War Two.”
After this Jack tells us about the climactic moment when he heard the
news about Pearl Harbor on his home-made radio and called his schoolmate
Hermann Hauck to inform him about the startling event. Their subsequent
conversation immediately turns in an overexcited display of ruthless racism.
Here are Hermann’s opinions about the Japanese: “... they have no culture of
their own. Their whole civilization, they stole it from the Chinese. You know,

78
 3. Obscure Admixtures 79

they’re actually descended more from the apes; they’re not actually human
beings. It’s not like fighting real humans” (4). To this racist rant, Jack adds:
“Today we know that the Chinese don’t have any culture either” (5).
Traces of World War II can be found also in other realistic novels: we
have Leo Runcible, one the protagonists of The Man Whose Teeth Were All
Exactly Alike (published in 1984 though written in 1960, the year before Dick
wrote The Man in the High Castle), who is proud to be “the only Jew in the
world to sink a Jap sub on Yom Kippur” (15); in an earlier realistic novel, Put-
tering About in a Small Land (published in 1984 but written in 1957), Virginia
and Roger Lindahl move to California in the winter of 1944 to work in the
aircraft plants that ceaselessly produce airplanes for the war.
Dick’s relation to the war was necessarily indirect. He was only 12 when
Pearl Harbor was attacked and 16 when nuclear bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike other post-war U.S. writers (Norman Mailer,
Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), he could not take part in the war; while J.G.
Ballard, another, slightly younger sf writer who has often been compared to
him — all their remarkable differences notwithstanding — was imprisoned in
a Japanese concentration camp in Shanghai with his parents, Dick’s experience
of the war was totally mediated by the available media — newspapers, radio,
cinema.1 Moreover, Dick was a pacifist and intensely disliked the military.
Maybe this can also be explained with his indirect exposition to the horrors
of World War I, thorough the stories his father Edgar — a veteran of the 5th
Marine Regiment2— told him; Dick, then a boy, “felt a lot of anxiety listening
to [his] father’s war stories and looking at and playing with gasmask and hel-
met” (Sutin 14), culminating in the notorious moments when Edgar Dick put
on his gasmask and turned into a threatening alien creature in his son’s eyes.
Though the details of actual fighting were intensely disliked by Philip,
and he repeatedly expressed his anti-war opinions in interviews, letters and
his own fiction, he could not deny the overwhelming importance of World
War II in shaping the world he grew up in (the war took place in the years of
his adolescence) and the virtual war in which he lived as an adult and a pro-
fessional writer; not just World War II but the threatening World War III —
aka Cold War — plus the historical, albeit geographically removed, Korean
and Vietnam War.
However, even the most superficial survey of Dick’s short fiction of the
1950s might easily prove that one of his most common themes or motifs is
the Third World War. Jameson already noticed this in his 1975 article on Dr.
Bloodmoney, when he wrote that it “serves in one way or another as the pre-
condition and the premise of other books” ( Jameson 2005, 349). If this is
true, it is also difficult to deny that The Man in the High Castle, placed after
the huge corpus of short stories featuring World War III as precondition and
80 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

premise (two extremely interesting examples being “The Defenders” [1953]3

and “Autofac” [1955]) and before Dr. Bloodmoney, Dick’s most sustained and
original treatment of the nuclear holocaust (possibly the only text where World
War III is directly described and not just remembered or mentioned by the
characters), is strongly related to the Third World War because it deals with
the conflict which originated the bipolar world Dick lived in, torn by the
not-completely-virtual Cold War between USA and USSR. Questioning
World War II and its outcome meant questioning the post-war world with
its competing superpowers.
So, even if Dick disliked war, he was somewhat fascinated by World War
II; it appears in those realistic novels written before The Man in the High Cas-
tle, and is the main issue of his 1962 novel. But Dick tackled the war quite
differently from other writers of the 1960s, such as Mailer (whose popular
1948 novel The Naked and the Dead is based on personal experience and
belongs to a tradition of fictionalized memoirs or autobiographic novels deal-
ing with war and/or combat which started with Stendhal’s The Red and the
Black [1830]) or Heller (whose postmodernist novel Catch-22 was published
in 1961, when Dick was writing Castle). Mailer and Heller had fought in the
war (the former in a cavalry regiment in the Pacific, the latter in a bomber
squadron in Italy); Dick, whose involvement was mediated, did not directly
depict the war, but devised an alternative present in which the war is remem-
bered by those characters which took part in it.
In Castle Germany and Japan won World War II, with little help from
Fascist Italy. After defeating and invading Britain, the two powers attacked
the USA and divided them in three states: the eastern seaboard under German
influence; the West Coast, a satellite of Imperial Japan (called Pacific States
of America); and what lies in between turned into a buffer, the Rocky Moun-
tain States. Life in California (where most of the action takes place) and in
the Rocky Mountain States (where one of the plot lines is set) is totally deter-
mined by the outcome of the war; some of the characters took part in it ( Joe
Cinnadella, Frank Frink, Mr. Baynes). To define this novel as a war novel4
would not stretch that definition too much. By showing how different the
world would be if the winners had been other than the USA and the USSR,
Dick somewhat subscribes to Jack Isidore’s belief that our existential inqui-
etude is rooted in that macro-event who shaped the world we live in.
Dick’s decision to tackle World War II may well explain the success of
the novel in the science-fiction community, sanctioned by the Hugo Award
it won in 1963. This should not make us forget, however, that Dick had not
written this novel for the science-fiction market, but that it was sold to Putnam
(another respectable publishing house)5 and advertised as a political thriller
closer to Peter George’s Red Alert (1958) or Eugene Burdick’s Fail-Safe (1962)
 3. Obscure Admixtures 81

than to the hack novels Dick had been publishing on Ace Doubles (Sutin
118). Besides, there was at least one important literary forerunner of Dick’s
depiction of the USA under Nazism or Japanese imperialism, and that was a
novel written by a Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis, whose It Can’t Happen
Here (1935) describes the rise of a fascist regime in the U.S., whose leader
Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip has striking similarities to Mussolini and Hitler.6
Anyway, it should be said that — positive reviews notwithstanding (Sutin
118)—The Man in the High Castle was not very successful in terms of sales
outside the science-fiction ghetto. Like Time Out of Joint, it was the paperback
reprint in the Science Fiction Book Club that was commercially successful,
and paved the way to the Hugo Award.
So another failed escape from the science fiction ghetto, but one which
produced such a dense and striking novel that critics began to discuss it quite
soon; few novels by Dick have been read in so many different ways. Already
in the 1975 Science-Fiction Studies Darko Suvin praised Castle because here
“it is to be found for the first time the full Dickian narrative articulation”
(Suvin 1975, 4): “MHC divides into two parallel plots with these narrative
foci,” namely, Mr. Tagomi, Robert Childan, Frank Frink and Juliana Frink,
plus four less important foci, Baynes/Wegener, Reiss, Kreuz von Meere and
Wyndham-Matson. Those foci are also grouped in terms of what social class
or group they belong to, that is, an upper level of Axis officials, a middle level
of collaborationists (Childan and Wyndham-Matson) and a lower level of
humble Americans. Suvin’s reading is then interested both in narrative tech-
nique (multi-plot, multi-foci) and in socio-political stratifications.
Other critics followed soon. In 1977 Carlo Pagetti wrote a scholarly
Introduction to the Italian translation of the novel, stressing the symbolic
identification of Nazi Germany and American imperialism, and highlighting
the interplay of “external” historical reality and the two internal textual level
of the alternative defeated America and the novel-within-the-novel The
Grasshopper Lies Heavy (Pagetti 1977, 139) which will be further discussed in
this chapter. Patricia Warrick’s 1980 essay on Taoism and Fascism in Castle
underscores the mix of Eastern and Western cultural materials in Dick’s novel,
pointing out the moment of choice that each major character endowed with
a narrative focus must face; her reading is thus similar to Pagetti’s interpre-
tation, which outlines a threefold process of inner change of the main char-
acters (Tagomi, Juliana, Frink, Childan, Baynes/Wegener and Cinnadella),
who can reach an inner truth only by crossing the borderline between sanity
and insanity, authenticity and simulation (Pagetti 1977, 141–3). Robinson
devotes the fourth chapter of his monograph to this novel, pointing out the
weakness of the ending but praising its overall structure. Lorenzo DiTom-
maso’s 1999 article also deals with inner changes in the main characters, by
82 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

persuasively suggesting that each of them must experience a symbolic travel

which reaches a final redemption with strong Christian undertones (Di Tom-
maso is not so persuasive, however, when he tries to argue that this redemption
is a state of grace and not a moment of grace).
These approaches are implicitly challenged by John Rieder’s 1988 article
on the metafictive world of Castle, a typical example of the deconstructionist
approach which was fashionable in the eighties, which sets aside the powerful
political subtexts of the novel in order to illustrate and explore the aporia
between cognition and ethics in the text (purportedly depicting a “collectivity
without a center or a goal” [Rieder 231]); an aporia which does not really
appear to be specific to Dick’s novel. Laura Campbell examined Dick’s use
of time in the novel three years later, discovering a series of not-so-evident
inconsistencies which might be a mere effect of careless plotting, but could
also be read as meaningful distortions of time flux aimed at controlling the
pace of the narrative regardless of internal consistency. Cassie Carter’s 1995
essay focuses on “Mimicry, Parasitism and Americanism in the PSA,” by apply-
ing Said’s interpretive framework to racial/ethnic relations in the novels, with
mixed results; I have tried to correct some weak aspects of Carter’s reading
in my 1997 essay “All Around the High Castle,” where I have connected the
narrative technique of multiple points of view with the strong racial theme
developed in the novel. Carl Freedman focused on the issue of the novel-
within-the-novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavily, which is a sf novel in its own
right and gives Dick and readers a chance to meditate on “the fundamental
conceptual structure of the genre” (Freedman 2000, 180). Christopher Palmer
discussed the irrationality of history and the difficulty to reconnect individual
actions and the collective dimension in Castle in the sixth chapter of his 2003
essay7 on Dick, Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern, whose title “The
Reasonableness and Madness of History” tells us how it addresses the problem
of history in the novel based on postmodern theories typical of the 1980s. To
these contributions we should necessarily add the first chapter of Gabriele
Frasca’s monograph L’oscuro scrutare di Philip K. Dick (2007), “Su un fondo
nero” (On a Black Background), which reads Castle based on a complex analy-
sis of the presence and importance of media in the novel, also attempting an
economic interpretation (which can be said to be a huge development of
Suvin’s original insights).
This brief (and far from complete) survey of the critical readings of The
Man in the High Castle should show what a knot of issues and ideas can be
and has been found in this novel; vital issues and ideas, one should add,
because all these essays read our reality by superimposing Dick’s alternate
realities to it. Our world, where the USA and USSR won World War II (with
the British Empire as a junior partner, similar to Italy in Castle) seems to be
 3. Obscure Admixtures 83

fully readable only thanks to its negative image as a world where the losers
have actually won, and Nazism and Japanese Imperialism have shaped our
reality. But this is not at all something specific of Dick’s novel; all alternate
histories have aimed at better understanding the world as it is by showing
how it might have been, since G.M. Trevelyan’s “If Napoleon Had Won the
Battle of Waterloo” (1907), one of the first specimens of alternate history. No
wonder that it was written by a British historian, and dealt with the results
of a decisive battle which gave Britain world supremacy for about a century.
Thus the title of Dick’s novel might well be read as “If Hitler Had Won the
Battle of England,” though there is more to be found in a 250-page novel
than in a short essay.
Dick never mentioned Trevelyan’s essay in the novel or the letters he
wrote before the publication of Castle; he tapped another literary model,
implicitly acknowledged by the name of his character Hawthorne Abendsen.
Dick expressed his admiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne at least once, in 1960,
when he included The Scarlet Letter in a list of works exemplifying his “idea
of great novel” (SL1 56). Valerio Massimo de Angelis (De Angelis 169–70)
has persuasively shown that alternate versions of historical events can be already
found in Hawthorne’s short story collection Twice-Told Tales (1837); events
endowed with a highly symbolic value, as they all belong to the early years
of the American colonies, that is to say to the genesis of the United States.
Like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (one of the
Twice-Told Tales) is a foundational story, whose slight differences from his-
torical accounts allow Hawthorne to express a judgment on the origins of his
own nation (De Angelis 170).
Hawthorne also wrote “P.’s Correspondence” (1845), where P., an Amer-
ican would-be writer in London, talks about his occasional meetings with
British poets and politicians (but also Napoleon Bonaparte) who should be
long time dead in the year when the tale was published. It could be read as
the depiction of an alternate reality, even though the famous people P. meets
“have long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own” (Hawthorne 287),
and could just be the product of an intermittent form of insanity. What can
be already found in this story, and will be later typical of alternate histories,
is that whenever P. meets someone who should not be alive in 1845, such as
Byron, Shelley, or Keats, he discusses in detail what happened in their alter-
native life, usually depicting remarkable changes in their personality, opinions
and creative powers; in other words, the story may record the ravings of a
madman, but those ravings build up a whole alternate history of Britain from
1815 to 1845.8
However, Dick was aware of another, more mature specimen of alternate
history fiction: he mentioned a classic of alternate history, Ward Moore’s Bring
84 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the Jubilee (1952), in his October 29, 1952 letter to Francis McComas (SL1
24–7), a science-fiction editor and writer. Moore’s novel depicts what the
United States might have been if the Confederation had won the War Between
the States; Dick criticizes the novel because the alternate historical line it
presents is too unlikely, but he is subsequently persuaded by McComas (as he
admits in his November 22 letter [SL1 27]) that Ward Moore had good reasons
to hypothesize a world where the Confederate States are a world power and
the United States are a poor and underdeveloped country. Ten years before
the publication of Castle, Dick was already speculating on the outcome of a
decisive war (and the decisive Battle of Gettysburg) which had determined
the history of the country he lived in; in his 1962 novel Dick upped the ante,
by tackling a war whose outcome had determined the history of the world.
But Dick’s novel is also different from Ward Moore’s (and Trevelyan’s)
speculations inasmuch as it does not content itself with conjuring up another
history (meaning both what Romans called res gestae, the historical events
themselves, and historia rerum gestarum, the narration of those events), but
two. A very important feature of Castle is the novel-within-the-novel The
Grasshopper Lies Heavily, written by Hawthorne Abendsen, a scandalous work
of fiction (forbidden in Nazi-controlled East Coast) describing the world as
it would be if the USA and the British Empire had won World War II — a
world which is not, and Dick takes pains to make this clear, coincident with
his and our world where USA, USSR and Britain were the winners.
Carlo Pagetti already noticed this in his 1977 Introduction to the novel,
by distinguishing three textual levels: the fictional reality described (or built)
in the novel, the hyper-fictional reality that is alternative to that fictional reality,
and the reality of the reader — or, in Pagetti’s terms, primary text, secondary
text, and zero text (Pagetti 1977, 139). The first and second texts are such
because they are parts of a literary text; the zero text is virtual, and it is quite
close to Barthes’ Referential Code as it is introduced in his essay S/Z. Of the
five codes which, according to Barthes, structure a narrative text, the Refer-
ential code is that which refers to common bodies of knowledge, one of them
being the knowledge of the main events of world history.9
Pagetti’s model should be in any case enhanced.10 In its 3-level version
it does not take into account the process through which the duplication of
reality levels inside the literary text can trigger a scission of the zero text,
something which we have already postulated for Time Out of Joint (Ch. 2).
Let us get back to the three textual levels suggested by Pagetti for The Man
in the High Castle. The primary text is the one where Germany and Japan
won the Second World War; the secondary text is the hyper-fictional novel
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which tells how the Third Reich and Japan were
defeated by the British Empire and the U.S. Since the hyper-fictional world
 3. Obscure Admixtures 85

where the Western capitalist powers (not including the USSR) are the winners
is revealed as the real world in the ending, when Juliana Frink asks the I Ching
(which Abendsen used to write Grasshopper) why it wrote that novel and what
its readers are supposed to learn (246). The answer is hexagram 61, Chung
Fu, “Inner Truth,” which Hawthorne angrily questions thus: “my book is
true? ... Germany and Japan lost the war?” (247). Both questions are answered
by Juliana’s peremptory yes.
I have already suggested (Rossi “Fourfold Symmetry,” 406–8) that the
three texts might be thus tied by a sort of “veritative ratio”: A : B = B : C,
where A = zero text, B = primary text, C = secondary text. If The Grasshopper
Lies Heavy is true and Castle is false, Dick might be suggesting that our world
is false, and that his book is true. This would lead to a splitting of the zero
text: we would have an “accepted” zero text which tells us that USA e USSR
won the war and evil was defeated, so that a new age of peace and prosperity
has begun, with the USA as the leading power of the so-called “Free World”;
but this would be nothing more than an ideological construct hiding an alter-
native, disquieting zero text where the world lives under the menace of nuclear
war, USA and USSR waste their resources due to militaristic politics, Third
World countries are exploited and ultimately destroyed, and — notwithstand-
ing the apparent decolonization process — indirectly controlled by the great
powers, Nazi techniques of mass-indoctrination are widely used both in the
West and in the East (Rispoli 57; Proietti 35).
The relationship between the four texts or textual levels can be repre-
sented by this table:

Table 3.1
Fictional Levels “Real” (Historical) Levels
PRIMARY TEXT: ZERO TEXT (1) “accepted” levels
The Man in the High Castle USA and USSR won the war,
Japan and Germany won the and destroyed Nazism (evil)
war; total destruction of If and when Soviet Communism
Africa; possibility of a will be eventually defeated
nuclear war between the there will be an unprecedented
former allied powers. age of peace and prosperity.*
SECONDARY TEXT: ZERO TEXT (2) alternative
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy Japan and Germany are going levels
England and USA won the to be major economical powers;
war; economical and cultural USA and USSR still use Nazi
exploitation and colonisation military technologies, mass media
of Third World countries strategies, domination policies
(China); possibility of a and hypertrophied militarism;
nuclear war between the Third World countries are on
former allied powers. the verge of destruction; a (cont. next page)
86 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Table 3.1 (continued)

nuclear war is still possible (the
novel was written shortly before
the Cuban crisis).
“Inner truth”: if Nazism is a
collective psychosis, the world is
anyway trapped in Hitler’s
nightmare of mass destruction
and technological hypertrophy
*Other elements of the “accepted” text zero in this novel could be the same we found in the
scheme in Time Out of Joint. Basically, the “accepted” zero text is always the same for the
novels Dick wrote in the late 1950s-early 1960s, because it is based on the same shared history
(here one could venture to use a more compromised term as ideolog y). The difference among
the alternative zero texts might well be that different components of the virtual History Book
are used (or, in more structuralism-tainted terms, “made pertinent”). For example, the historical
figure of Dwight D. Eisenhower is more important in The Penultimate Truth while social life
in the suburbia of the 1950s is more important for Time Out of Joint though both are relevant
parts of the complex historical (zero) text whose title could be “Postwar America.”

Such a reading may have its attractive symmetry,11 yet it would not have
been accepted by Dick. In his August 7, 1978 letter to Joseph Milicia he
overtly said: “I have never meant MITHC to be deconstructed to indicate
that the Axis “really” won the war. This is a favorite interpretation. It is not
one I intended” (SL5 182–3). This indicates that Dick was well aware of the
effect of meaning which the textual levels present in his novel could generate,
an effect which Robinson already analyzed in his 1984 dissertation, where he
maintains that also the zero text (our koinos kosmos) is dystopian for readers
who have traveled through the primary and secondary texts (Robinson 43–
4).
We might object that by refusing that interpretation of his novel as one
he had not intended, Dick falls prey of Northrop Frye’s fallacy of premature
teleology: it is a widespread but questionable idea that an interpreter (even a
non-professional one, such as someone who reads a novel “just for fun”) should
confine him/herself to extract from a literary text what its author may be
assumed to have been aware of putting in it (Frye 17). Moreover, in this letter
Dick seems to have forgotten that the world described in Grasshopper is quite
different from the zero text where he and his readers lived (the survival of the
British Empire after World War II and the humane and well-meaning Amer-
ican colonization of China being its most glaring counterfactual elements).
Dick corrected himself in a subsequent letter (August 21) evidently written
to answer Milicia’s objections; there he says that what is true are “all worlds
in which the Axis lost” (SL5 183). According to Dick, Abendsen’s novel “got
the one essential idea correctly,” i.e., the defeat of the Axis, but “the vague
manner of the I CHING would never make possible accuracy in detail.” This
should mean that the final revelation is valid even if Abendsen’s book is not
 3. Obscure Admixtures 87

set in our world; the writer-within-the-novel managed to glimpse the real

world in speculum, per aenigmata (to quote St. Paul, one of Dick’s favorite
writers), and offered his readers a blurred image: an ontologically uncertain
one. A typical Dickian situation indeed, which however does not simplify the
task of the critic.
If the world where most of Castle takes place is false or unreal, what is
it then? A collective hallucination? A vast FSR, projected by the deranged
mind of Adolph Hitler? Madness does play an important role in the symbolic
structure of the novel: after all, Hawthorne used madness to justify his alter-
nate history in his “P.’s Correspondence.” Madness is somewhat suggested by
Juliana’s inner monologue, when she envisions her world as the projection of
Hitler’s mind: “And the horrible part was that the present-day German Empire
was a product of that brain. First a political party, then a nation, then half
the world” (40). This is echoed by Baynes/Wegener’s musings about the “psy-
chotic world” he lives in, where “the madmen are in power” (44); the German
secret agent wonders whether the broad masses “guess, glimpse, the truth”
(45). And this is what Juliana and Abendsen are offered in the ending scene;
no more than a glimpse at the truth. A truth which is as ambiguous and
elusive as the I Ching hexagrams that have guided Abendsen while he was
writing Grasshopper, a procedure Dick knew quite well because he repeatedly
declared that he too had written Castle by interrogating the Chinese oracle
(another element which encouraged several interpreters to identify Dick with
Abendsen, though Dick told Milicia in his August 7 letter that he did not
intend Abendsen to resemble himself [SL5 182]).12
If the world where Germany and Japan won is simply an illusion, and
the real world is the one where the Axis is defeated, we are back to The Cosmic
Puppets. The alternate reality depicted in the novel is as unsubstantial as the
Millgate where Ted Barton died at nine. Dick’s parallel universe is a self-
denying or self-erasing fictional construct, whose evaporation takes us back
to our reality, to the history we know: it is an universe falling apart whose
stabilization, according to Rispoli, is doomed to failure, like the other mega-
lomaniac enterprises attempted by the Nazi in the novel (Rispoli 63). If we
accept this interpretation of the novel, its narrative core is quite similar to
that of Bring the Jubilee. In that alternate history novel Ward Moore wipes
out the world where the Confederates won the War Between the States by
having the protagonist, historian Hodge Backmaker, travel backwards in time
and reach the battlefield of Gettysburg, thus involuntarily triggering a small
accident which will change that course of the decisive battle and history. The
Southern army will be defeated at Gettysburg; the ancestor of Barbara Hag-
gerswell, the physicist who invented the time machine, will be killed in that
epochal battle; the alternate world will inexorably disappear — or better, seen
88 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

from the final perspective of our 1877 (the year in which Hodge writes his
memoir), will never be.
But in Puppets the ending unambiguously shows us the original Millgate
replacing once and for all the illusory town conjured up by Peter/Ahriman;
in Bring the Jubilee there is a detailed final explanation of the temporal paradox
which causes the alternate history to be totally erased by somebody who was
born and grew up in that world. On the other hand the ending of The Man
in the Castle may well announce a truth, but the fact it is only glimpsed makes
it quite uncertain. Ontologically uncertain, we should add, as this is a matter
of what world really exists, and what is only apparently real. Dick himself was
not satisfied with the ending, as he wrote in his letter to Joe Milicia “I really
would have liked to have finished MITHC with a stronger, better ending,
but even now, so many years later, I am mystified as to what should have been
done to it that I didn’t do. One reader said charitably that it was ‘Open ended,’
which is true in a sense, because I wanted to go on with a sequel” (SL5 182).
Dick even wrote two chapters of the projected sequel in 1964, which were
posthumously published in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, a collection
of essays and other non-narrative materials, but never really tried to complete
the novel.
So we are left with an open ending and a masterful example of what
Dick’s strategy of ontological uncertainty can accomplish. Because it should
be clearly said that this extreme form of uncertainty operates here on so many
levels that the overall effect is almost disturbing. The interplay among the
three textual levels (four if my interpretive hypothesis is acceptable, Dick’s
opinion notwithstanding) already creates a suspension of our certainties, forc-
ing us to ask ourselves to what extent our world is real, and who was really
defeated in World War II. But there is ontological uncertainty also due to the
fake objects which circulate in the plot, such as the “original” 19th-century
American revolvers bought by collectors like Tagomi and sold by antiquarians
like Childan — weapons which are actually manufactured by the artisans work-
ing for Wyndam-Matson, a mix of entrepreneur and con-man. “Is it possible,
sir, that you, dealer in such items, cannot distinguish the forgeries from the
real?” (59) is the overwhelming question Frank Frink asks Childan, and the
consequences of forgery are devastating if one thinks how much of our ability
to reconstruct the past (and to write history) is a matter of authenticity of
documents and objects. This is the argument of an important conversation
between Wyndam-Matson and his mistress Rita (64–7), where the historicity
of two Zippo lighters, only one of which belonged to F.D. Roosevelt, is ques-
tioned. It is highly ironic that the shady businessman declares of the authen-
ticity of one of the two lighters based on a certificate of the Smithsonian
Institution which might be faked as well (66).
 3. Obscure Admixtures 89

But antiques are not the only elements of the novel which obey the
maxim “[t]hings are seldom what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream”
(26), actually two lines from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore remembered
by Mr. Tagomi when the first line reaches him as a coded cable from Tokyo.
Coded messages do not mean what their literal sense proclaims; they are mas-
querading, as the skim milk in the maxim, or the characters of Castle.
In this novel Caucasians masquerade as Japanese (like Mr. Ramsey,
Tagomi’s secretary, who darkens his skin [24]); Frink is a bogus Caucasian,
as he is a Jew under false pretences, who in a scene of hyper-simulation also
pretends to be a representative of a non-existent Japanese admiral commanding
an aircraft carrier which was actually sunk during the war (57); Joe Cinnadella
pretends to be Italian, but he is actually a German SS (maybe Swiss) who
dyed his hair black13; Mr. Baynes is not a Swede and a businessman, but actu-
ally a German, captain Wegener of the Abwehr; Mr. Yatabe, the elderly retired
gentleman who meets Baynes/Wegener in the climatic scene of Chapter 12 is
actually general Tedeki, the former Imperial Chief of Staff (179). We might
also add Wyndam-Matson to this list, as he pretends to be a respectable busi-
nessman, but is actually a hoodlum; Robert Childan who wants to be accepted
by the Japanese and imitates their lifestyle14; and Hawthorne Abendsen,
because everybody believes he lives as a recluse in a sort of fortress while actu-
ally Juliana finds him in a rather ordinary suburban house, surrounded by his
guests.
Uncertainty also rules on a collective level. There is a secret plan of the
Nazi regime to wipe Japan out with a massive nuclear attack, Operation Dan-
delion; opposing factions in the regime may hinder or favor the plan. Doctor
Goebbels, apparently the most sensible Nazi hierarch, is an advocate of the
plan; S.S. General Heydrich, head of “the most malignant portion of German
society” (183), opposes Operation Dandelion, so that he has to be supported
by those who want to avoid World War III. Also here things (and people) are
not what they seem. The atmosphere of intrigue is heightened by Joe Cin-
nadella’s mission aimed at eliminating Hawthorne Abendsen.
This might answer an objection raised by Christopher Palmer to a pur-
ported “lack of fit between the local, the sphere of individual actions by unim-
portant people, and the epochal” (Palmer 131), that is the great historical
events which are dominated by the Nazis, “that element of evil and irrationality
in global history which shocks the mind into uncertainty” (Palmer 131). The
opposition between the world of little men and women in the foreground
(Tagomi, Frink, Juliana and the other characters endowed with a narrative
focus in the novel) and the great events in the background (the death of Chan-
cellor Bormann and the ensuing struggle in the Nazi Party; the threat of a
nuclear attack against Japan) has been noticed by other critics, and Palmer is
90 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

right in underscoring it as one of the key architectural elements of the novel;

but his examination of how Dick tried to bridge the gap between daily life
and history15 does not tackle a structural feature of the novel, the most impor-
tant textual device that keeps those two spheres or realms together, that is
intrigue — or better paranoia.
It is easy to show how intrigue is typical of spy stories and a certain sort
of science-fiction, namely Van Vogt’s narratives about competing supermen,
clashes of empires and almost superhuman conspiracies; we have already seen
how Van Vogt was an important and acknowledged model for Dick. Intrigue,
conspiracies, secret identities, more or less hidden power struggles abound in
Dick’s fiction before The Man in the High Castle; one might mention accom-
plished works like Time Out of Joint, but also novels that are completely inside
the conventions of commercial science-fiction, books Dick wrote to make
ends meet like Solar Lottery and Vulcan’s Hammer.16 In Time Out of Joint (Ch.
2) an only apparently realistic depiction of ordinary U.S. suburban life in the
1950s is actually the result of a complex conspiracy set in a disquieting future
of interplanetary warfare; the apparently unimportant life of an idler, Ragle
Gumm, is actually the most important life in the word. Individual life and
history are connected by intrigue, and this is something that may be found
in different forms in other novels and stories by Dick; we might also say that
they are always connected by paranoia. Dick once wrote that for him “a flat
tire on [his] car is (a) The End of the World; and (b) An Indication of Monsters
(although I forget why)” (Shifting Realities 92); surely the remark is a fine
specimen of his deadpan humor, yet it is hints at a poetics of sorts. Small
events are actually cosmic; God is in the gutter; trash (be it science fiction,
or any other mass product of cultural industry, or actual rubbish) is actually
the most precious thing in the world: such sudden reversals have been endlessly
highlighted as the hallmarks of Dick’s fiction, and sound a bit too much like
critical commonplace. Yet paranoia as a poetics is something critics cannot
get rid of, also because this is possibly the most important common feature
which links Dick with at least one of the major postmodernist novelists, that
is, Thomas Pynchon.
We have already dealt with complex but quite visible recycling of Time
Out of Joint in the first part of Gravity’s Rainbow (Ch. 2). However, paranoia
plays an important role in both Time and Castle, and it is an important theme
in Gravity as well. The connection between paranoia, history and individual
life is quite clear in Time: Ragle can be an ordinary person who hallucinates a
conspiracy (and only has an indirect connection to the great historical events),
or an extraordinary person whose private life (the typical space of “the local”
in Palmer’s terms) is directly determined by larger historical events (the war
between the One Happy World and the Lunar rebels). If paranoia is just a
 3. Obscure Admixtures 91

mental disease, the former interpretation applies; but if it is turned into a

gnoseologic method, by which small anomalies in daily life may be read as
the direct effect of much greater (and threatening) events, the latter applies.
In Gravity the alternatives are the same: Tyrone Slothrop may be the victim
of a conspiracy started when Laszlo Jamf subjected him to a Pavlovian con-
ditioning, he may be able to predict where V-2s will fall, and there may be
a secret plot pivoted upon the special 00000 V-2 missile, masterminded by
Captain Blicero; or he is simply paranoid. Castle, on the other hand, is not
interested in paranoia as a mental condition, but paranoia as an interpreting
device: there is no doubt that the lives and actions of little men and women
are directly connected to the greater momentous historical events through
intrigue (or conspiracy).
The harmless business meeting of Mr. Yatabe and Mr. Baynes is suddenly
unveiled as a momentous contact between agents of the Japanese Imperial
Staff and a faction in the power struggle taking place in Berlin. The absolutely
unimportant trip of Joe Cinnadella and Juliana to Cheyenne turns into a secret
mission aimed at eliminating a famous and troublesome intellectual. One
might wonder where is the gap between the local and the epochal if the vast
impersonal forces of history burst into ordinary daily life with devastating
violence; it is true that Juliana manages to survive almost unscathed17 and
Frank Frink is released, but Tagomi’s death tells us that intrigue cuts both
ways, that small acts of courage and integrity may jam the deadly engine of
history, but individual lives may also get lost.
The atmosphere of intrigue is in any case necessary, and fitting, once we
read Castle as a war novel; but — like Gravity’s Rainbow— it is only partially
about World War II. Dick’s novel, like Pynchon’s, is mostly about the Cold
War. This undeclared war was mostly a matter of secret agents, secret strategic
and tactical planning, secret research and development of deadly and then
deadlier secret weapons, often a conflict by proxy (Vietnam, Angola, Korea,
Afghanistan, and other “small” wars), always on the verge of the ultimate
clash. The Cuban missile crisis took place a year after the publication of Castle,
but the Bay of Pigs invasion was attempted and failed in April 1961; the build-
ing of the notorious Berlin Wall started on August 13, 1961; both events took
place when Dick was writing his novel, which was completed in November
of the same year. We have already said that intrigue is a key element of spy
stories; and much of what takes place in Castle is a spy story, inasmuch as
Wegener is a member of the German military intelligence, Kreuz vom Meere
is the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst in the West Coast, and Joe Cinnadella is
a secret agent and killer sent by the S.S. Robert Childan may complain that
he is stuck on “the West Coast, where nothing is happening” and that
“[h]istory is passing [him] by” (118), but it is difficult to deny that a lot of
92 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

extraordinary events take place in this novel, though most of the action takes
place in the last chapters.
The very ontological uncertainty which operates in this novel has much
to do with Cold War and the ensuing obsession with secrecy, but we should
not forget the situation of uncertainty caused by witch-hunting, carried out
by senator McCarthy in the Tydings Committee in 1950 and the Senate Per-
manent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953–54, plus the investigations
into Communist influence on the motion picture industry in 1947. Uncer-
tainty about personal identities dominates in Castle, as it had dominated the
U.S. media in the preceding decade; one might just mention the 1951 trial of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,18 or the persecution of the Hollywood Ten, a
group of movie industry professionals whose affiliation to the Communist
party was proof enough — according to HUAC — that they were Soviet agents
or propagandists. The atmosphere of intrigue and conspiracy had directly
touched Dick at least once in 1953–4, when two friendly FBI agents contacted
him and his wife Kleo Mini, offering them the opportunity to study at the
University of Mexico “all expenses paid, if they would spy upon students
activities there” (Sutin 83–4).
Intrigue and paranoia dominate the American fifties; no wonder that
Richard Hofstadter published his “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
in 1964, just two years after the publication of Castle. One might object that
there is no paranoia in Dick’s novel as the momentous events that occur in
the plot (the attack of the Nazi commando, Joe Cinnadella’s mission, the
arrest of Frank Frink and his threatened deportation) are real, at least in that
fictional space; but such an objection fails to acknowledge that the plot was
developed with the help of the I Ching, but above all by Dick’s paranoid nar-
rative imagination, which had produced such a masterpiece of paranoid cre-
ativity as Time Out of Joint just three years before.
However, though both Gravity’s Rainbow and Time Out of Joint are (non-
realistic) Cold War narratives, they articulate in a quite different fashion the
relationship between the virtual Third World War and the already-happened
Second World War, and this allows them to offer different interpretations of
the conflict which never took place: by setting his novel in 1944–1945, Pyn-
chon wants to show that the Cold War and the threat of mass extermination
by means of nuclear weapons carried by intercontinental missiles have their
roots in Nazi Germany, so that its science and technology are somewhat
tainted by the collective madness which seized that country between 1933 and
1945. Gravity can thus be read as a giant analepsis which ends in the final
scene,19 when the CONELRAD signal is heard on the radio, and missiles fall
on Los Angeles (and the cinema where the fictional film Gravity’s Rainbow,
the “content” of the novel, has been shown); in a bewildering narrative short-
 3. Obscure Admixtures 93

circuit the missile aimed at the movie theatre is the same 00000 missile fired
by Captain Blicero in the penultimate scene of the novel, so that it is clear
that the inhuman and murderous technology devised by Nazi scientists and
technicians (among which Wernher von Braun, the father of the A-4, aka V-
2, and the Saturn missile which brought Americans on the Moon) could
destroy the USA and the rest of the world if World War III actually broke
loose.
On the other hand Dick, who was not a historical novelist like Pyn-
chon,20 tackled the relationship between the fearful present of Cold War and
the dreadful past of World War II in a sfnal fashion by imagining a different
outcome for that war and an alternative present whose origins in the war were
as evident as possible; the original sin of nuclear warfare technologies is made
evident by the fact that both missiles and the Bomb are developed by Nazi
Germany, governed by the same criminal leaders which ruled it during the
war. It is in fact curious that, when Tagomi and other Japanese officials in
California meet at the embassy to be informed about the power struggle in
Germany after the death of Chancellor Bormann, they listen to a series of
profiles of the notables (93–6) which only presents the readers with those
Nazi hierarchs (Göring, Heydrich, Goebbels, von Schirach, etc.) which were
already in power before May 1945; no new figure is introduced. Continuity
between pre-war and post-war leadership is thus highlighted.
Yet the alternative present dominated by the Nazis seems to lead to the
same dead end which faces Dick’s own world of 1961. Nuclear war looms large
on the reality of 1962, in the real world where both USA and USSR are well
equipped with H bombs, and in the two alternate realities of The Man in the
High Castle and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, where only one of the two com-
peting superpowers is endowed with nuclear armament. All its ontological
uncertainty notwithstanding, all the three textual levels of the novel seem to
be doomed to the same global catastrophe of mass holocaust. The destructive
madness of Nazism could easily destroy the “mad” alternate reality conjured
up by Dick, but also the “real” world where he and his readers lived in 1962.
Though Nazism has been defeated, its cosmic death drive is still active, still
threatening to wipe out humankind. Thus the Game of the Rat here seems
aimed at telling us that behind all beguiling appearances, behind all masks
and intrigues, there is something hard and solid and heavy, “like cement,”
thinks Tagomi: “There is evil!” (97).
We might end this discussion of The Man in the High Castle by pointing
out that this novel is a sort of postmodernist theodicy. If theodicy is that part
of theology and philosophy which strives to reconcile belief in God with the
perceived existence of evil, then Dick’s novel tries to reconcile the solid pres-
ence of evil, which is experienced by all the main characters (Tagomi, but
94 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

also Juliana, who finds out who Cinnadella really is, and Frink, who is impris-
oned and faces deportation to a concentration camp), with something that
may counter evil and justify hope. No wonder then that there are so many
meditations about the philosophical and psychological nature of Nazism,
which is the fictional embodiment of evil in the novel; no wonder if one of
the parallel plots ends with Wegener/Baynes’ musing which is on the impos-
sibility to have “clear good and evil alternatives” (236), particularly meaningful
in a novel where alternative realities determine the overall architecture of the
text, and the necessity to face “obscure admixtures, ... blends, with no proper
tool by which to untangle the components” (236)— this being a form of ethical
uncertainty, after all.
Reading Castle as a sort of theodicy is also authorized by the meaningful
quotation of Nathanael West’s novelette Mrs. Lonelyhearts (1933),21 read by
Paul Kasoura, who asks Childan help to understand its Christian symbolism.
In West’s novel, a young writer wastes his life working for a New York news-
paper, answering the letters sent by desperate readers to the advice column
entitled “Miss Lonelyhearts,” which is also the nickname his feature editor
has assigned him. The protagonist of the novel is exposed to the suffering and
despair of humankind (the novel was written and published during the Great
Depression), and feels terribly burdened by the letters he receives; he falls
into a cycle of depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional
barfights. Miss Lonelyhearts develops an identification with Christ, and this
is the aspect of the novel which baffles Kasoura; Childan, who has not even
heard of the novel, is totally unable to explain it. It is quite clear, on the other
hand, that Dick used this small episode to suggest his readers how they should
read his novel: if Miss Lonelyhearts is exposed, through the letters of his read-
ers (which West deliberately inserted in his novel, with all their ramshackle
English), to the concrete suffering of humankind that no pietist rhetoric can
assuage, the characters of Castle must discover evil by direct contact, realizing
that they live in a hellish world where madmen are in power. A world beset
with horrors that resemble those of the zero text: Cold War, the nuclear threat,
the extermination of African peoples, racism, witch-hunting.
West’s theodicy is such only in a metaphoric sense; unlike Leibniz’s,
which optimistically posited our world as the best of all possible worlds, Miss
Lonelyhearts ends with a scene where the protagonist might be accidentally
killed by one of his readers (West wrote the scene in such a way that readers
cannot be sure of the outcome of the tussle). Dick is not as pessimistic as his
predecessor: Tagomi manages to stop the Nazi commando and has Frank
Frink released, Juliana thwarts the Nazi plot to eliminate Abendsen. Evil can-
not be defeated once and for all, but it can be kept at bay, at least temporarily.
The ending, with the revelation of the defeat of Germany and Japan, may
 3. Obscure Admixtures 95

also be part of this postmodernist theodicy: it hints at St. Augustine’s idea of

evil as privatio boni, or absence of good, which proposes evil as something
insubstantial. In Dick’s own version, evil is something fake; something which
is not endowed with inner truth. In the very last pages of the novel, evil is
implicitly defeated.
Dick thought the ending was not open; in his opinion, as we have seen,
it was simply not very good. If evil (the world threatened by nuclear death
and plagued by violence and oppression) is insubstantial, or bogus, why do
we live in this only apparently real nightmare (an idea which ultimately derives
from the second chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus says that
history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake — and we know Joyce
was one of Dick’s favorite authors)? If Germany and Japan lost World War
II, why do the characters of the novel live in a world dominated by those
powers? Dick was not satisfied because he did not have a solution to this apo-
ria. No wonder then that it will come back in the rest of Dick’s oeuvre, always
coupled with ontological uncertainty. Which is at the same time a game Dick
loved to play, but also a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.
 Chapter 4

A Maze of Lives:
Martian Time-Slip,
Dr. Bloodmoney, and
Clans of the Alphane Moon

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”
John Donne

In his groundbreaking essay on Dick’s oeuvre, Darko Suvin divided his

fiction up to 1974 in three phases, one of apprenticeship, then another which
he called “a high plateau” (Suvin 1975, 2), which included Dick’s masterpieces
and a third phase of decadence.1 Suvin’s periodization was updated in another
article, published in 2002, where he also covered the works Dick wrote and
published after 1974, positing a second plateau which included the VALIS
Trilogy and A Scanner Darkly. His first article is however relevant to our dis-
cussion inasmuch as he pointed out Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney
as Dick’s masterpieces, preceded by The Man in the High Castle as Dick’s “cre-
ative breakthrough” (Suvin 1975, 2), which could be considered as the cul-
mination of his apprenticeship or the beginning of that climactic phase which
culminates in the two masterpieces. What characterized these three novels is
Dick’s polyphony, that is, the fact that his third-person narrative does not
feature “the old-fashioned, all knowing, neutral and superior narrator” (Suvin
1975, 3).
Multiple internal focalization was not invented by Dick; there are several
examples already in the second half of the 19th century. Nor were multiple
plots, which Dick used in their purest version in Castle, invented by him;
such a technique may already be found in one of John Dos Passos’ earliest
novels, Three Soldiers (1921), and is typically associated to his USA Trilogy

96
 4. A Maze of Lives 97

(1930–36). In his February 10, 1958 letter to sf writer James Blish, Dick stated
that he was interested in Joyce’s “technique of starting with more than one
thread and drawing these threads together at some nexus later in the book”
(SL1 40); he is evidently referring to Ulysses, where the shorter plot focused
on Stephen Dedalus and the longer one whose focus is Leopold Bloom ulti-
mately converge in the third and last part of the novel. In the same letter
Dick also mentions Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, where “there are a multitude of
threads, finally drawn together” (SL1 40). Then he says that the same feature
may be found in modern Japanese novel, which are “of course, based on
French novels.”
Dick discussed again the issue of multiple plots and narrative foci in The
Man in the High Castle and other novels of the 1960s, but he dropped Joyce
and Dos Passos as models; in his April 29, 1969 letter he says he was inspired
by “the novels of the students of Tokyo University, who were themselves in
the French Department, and hence influenced by the French” (SL1, 246). In
two letters written in 19782 Dick talks again about these novels, and in one
of them he adds that their authors were active after the Second World War;
moreover, following Japanese models is what could be expected of Abendsen,
as he wrote his The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in a world where the Japanese had
won and their culture was dominant (SL5 8). He repeated this claim in Gregg
Rickman’s interview (Rickman 1988, 140), which was carried out in late 1981
and early 1982, just before Dick’s death (Rickman 1988, xvii–xviii).3
Though Dick insisted on his having drawn inspiration from Japanese
novelists, he never specified who those novelists were. There are indeed impor-
tant Japanese writers who earned a degree in French literature at the University
of Tokyo (Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Hideo Kobayashi), while others
studied French literature at the University of Kyoto (Hiroshi Noma and Shohei
Ooka), but the works of these authors which were available in English trans-
lations before the publication of The Man in the High Castle do not have a
multiple plot structure, though one of them, Hiroshi Noma’s war novel Zone
of Emptiness (1952, translated into English in 1956) does have multiple points
of view. It is however difficult to see it as a narrative model to Dick’s 1962
novel because there is only one plot, pivoted on the tragic story of a Japanese
soldier who is imprisoned for two years in a military penitentiary for a crime
he has not committed and then sent to fight (and probably die) in a faraway
Pacific island; and this novel has only two narrative foci, unlike Castle. More-
over, while Dick’s novel presents the reader with a rather positive image of
the Japanese domination in California, which is depicted as stern but sub-
stantially fair, Noma’s novel denounces the corruption of the Imperial Japanese
Army and the hypocrite and narrow-minded militarism which dominated the
country in World War II years. It is in any case true that private Soda’s desperate
98 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

efforts to save the doomed protagonist, Kitani, from the deadly bureaucratic
machine of the army may bear resemblance to the rebellion of the little man
Nobosuke Tagomi, which instead manages to save Frank Frink from the deadly
machine of Nazi racial warfare. But this is not enough to prove that Dick had
read Zone of Emptiness, as the overall architecture of the two novels is too dif-
ferent.4
If we want to point out more credible candidates as models for Dick’s
multi-plot and -foci narratives we should perhaps get back to his 1958 letter,
and look at the tenth chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, the so-called “Wandering
Rocks,” where the cavalcade of the Lord Lieutenant through the streets of
Dublin is witnessed by 19 different characters, whose wanderings are told in
nineteen short vignettes from each characters’ point of view. It is then inter-
esting that Dick did not only mention Dos Passos’ celebrated trilogy; in a
1960 letter he cites another work by Dos Passos, The Prospect Before Us (1950),
surely not one of his most famous achievements, which might indicate a sus-
tained interest in the oeuvre of the American novelist (SL1 56). However,
Dick does not mention Dos Passos in the letters written after 1971, and one
must notice that the full-blown multi-plot technique was not used after that
year (we only have a simplified version of it in The Divine Invasion).
Regardless of what sources of inspiration Dick tapped, one thing is sure:
the multiple plot/point of view narrative technique dominates his fiction in
the early 1960s. It is the approach he adopted in the most important novels
published in this decade, maybe also for the simple reason that it was func-
tional to Dick’s strategy of ontological uncertainty. Having multiple points
of view on multiple plotlines fictionally embodies the dichotomy of koinos
kosmos vs. idios kosmos Dick had derived from the existentialist psychoan-
alysts. Seeing events unfold through the eyes of different characters allows the
reader to perceive how different individual takes on reality may be, how con-
ditioned by highly subjective drives, fears, expectations, obsessions, etc. Above
all it generates a condition of general uncertainty, because what readers are
shown might not be a reliable representation of a fictional koinos kosmos, but
a very deformed perception of that common world, as seen from a very odd
and twisted private world. According to Dick, “any given person ... cannot
tell what part of that which he experiences is the idios kosmos and which the
koinos” (Gillespie 32). Besides, we should not forget that the dichotomy of
koinos vs. idios kosmos is a simplification of what Dick found in existentialist
psychoanalysis, where idios kosmos (Eigenwelt, or private world) is opposed
to koinos kosmos (Mitwelt, or shared world), but both are the human coun-
terpart of the Umwelt or environment, the natural world: the world as it is.
This explains something that Dick wrote in the same 8 June 1969 letter we
have already quoted: “In all my books ... the protagonist is suffering from a
 4. A Maze of Lives 99

breakdown of his idios kosmos— at least we hope that’s what’s breaking down,
not the koinos kosmos” (Gillespie 32). Dick’s remark is more than a shaft of
wit; it is true that the subjective point of view of single characters may be
unreliable (and this is something novelists already knew well before Dick, at
least since Conrad and Henry James), but the shared world is just another
human construction, a cultural artifact, one might say, the product of the
interaction of individuals, and also the shared world or koinos kosmos could
break down, in Dick’s terms, revealing an Umwelt or natural world that we
are not equipped to directly cope with. This might explain why Dick, in the
same letter, felt he had to quote “Kant’s concept of the Dinge-an-sich [sic]”:
he could misspell the German phase (should be Ding-an-sich, “thing-in-
itself ”), but he was aware that the non-human Umwelt is something difficult
or almost impossible to experience directly, something which is always medi-
ated by human and cultural categories or conditions of possibility, in Kantian
terms (such as causality or necessity). If both the idios kosmos and the koinos
kosmos break down, we are left with the Umwelt, but this might be a deadly
experience, if we may call it thus.
Dick depicted such a double collapse in one of his most philosophical short
stories, “The Electric Ant” (1969), where the protagonist discovers that he is not
a man but an “electric ant” or organic robot, and then tinkers with its sensory
apparatus, with the tape from which “all sense stimuli received from [its] central
neurological system emanate” (CS5 295). Garson Poole, the electric ant, ulti-
mately cuts the tape, because it thinks that this is the only way to know his per-
sonal secretary “completely”; to know if she really exists or if she is just “a stimulus
factor on [its] reality tape” (CS5 305). In other terms, Poole wants to know
where his private world (the illusory sensory stimuli recorded on the tape) ends
and what is really there, beyond the tape. When the tape ends and the photo-
electric beam directly hits the scanner, a sort of psychedelic experience takes
place, described in an impressive paragraph (CS5 307) where Dick manages to
convey a surreal compresence of everything with everything else. But this ultimate
experience of the unknowable and unexperienceable thing-in-itself brings Poole
to death, or better, to burning its brain circuits. Dick commented: “Again the
theme: How much of what we call ‘reality’ is actually out there or rather within
our own head?” (CS5 489); the borderline between the private world, the shared
world, and the natural world or environment (the Umwelt) is quite difficult
to pinpoint. This difficulty leads to ontological uncertainty; no wonder then
that, at the end of “The Electric Ant” Sarah Benton, Poole’s secretary discovers
that she and the world surrounding her are part of the artificial reality emanated
from Poole’s “reality tape,” which is quickly fading away. This is one of Dick’s
typical bewildering endings which is not only aimed at surprising readers
with final fireworks, but at reminding us that nothing can be taken for granted.
100 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Private worlds, shared world and environment all play an important role
in a novel that Dick wrote just after The Man in the High Castle, that is, Mar-
tian Time-Slip (1964).5 Dick told Gregg Rickman that the latter was an
attempt “to escalate from Man in the High Castle to the next level of quality,
complexity, and value” (Rickman 1988, 146). He felt confident as he thought
he had found his own structure (the “multi-foci structure”); moreover, he had
won the Hugo Award for High Castle, and he had sold his two previous novels
to hardcover publishers. Dick felt he was headed to success or at least
respectability, and he could finally forsake the pulp paperback market. No
wonder then that he used again the multi-plot, multi-foci architecture in this
novel, and tried to reach new depths. The multi-foci structure of the novel
allows Dick to show us several private worlds, those of the eight characters
endowed with a narrative focus,6 thus retaining and deepening “the MHC
narrative polyphony” (Suvin 1975, 5); the web of human relations — be they
personal, economical, familial, political — ties the characters in a “maledictory
web,” to put it in Brian Aldiss’ terms (Aldiss 37), which is of course the shared
world7; and the environment — threatening, hostile, bleak, alien — is planet
Mars, where the novel takes place in its entirety.8
Ontological uncertainty is thus not based on the competition of alter-
native histories or parallel universes; it is rather based on the narrative
polyphony which allows readers to enter the idioi kosmoi of the characters,
that are quite different from each other. Suffice it to say that one of the nar-
rative foci is Jack Bohlen, who suffers from schizophrenia, while another,
Manfred Steiner, is an autistic boy. This offers Dick the opportunity to conjure
up highly different private worlds — a deliberate move, explained in an inter-
view with Paul Williams (Rickman 1989, 206–7), where he says that “it is
more striking ... if I use a more exaggerated discrepancy between people’s
viewpoints, like in Martian Time Slip” (207).
The discrepancy is temporal: the title is quite clear about this. Whether
it was devised by Dick or chosen by the publisher, it is rather felicitous, as it
hints at the non-linear plot of the novel, where prolexes abound, especially in
the long sequence of Jack Bohlen’s bout of schizophrenia (chapters 10 to 12,
according to Warrick “the most bizarre and dramatically original section of
the novel” [73] and I tend to agree), but also at the core of Manfred’s autism.
This mental condition is explained by Dr. Glaub as “a derangement in the
interior time-sense” (92), an acceleration of the inner sense of time which
forces Manfred’s mind to be out of tune with the shared world; his private
world is tuned to a moment in a more or less remote future, which grants the
boy the power of precognition. But the time-slip that allows Manfred to see
what will happen also prevents him from communicating with others in the
present; moreover, the future he can see is one of alienation, imprisonment
 4. A Maze of Lives 101

in a mental institution, a nightmarish vision of an exceedingly long life (124–

5) which is actually an overlong agony — a death-in-life. Hence the plot of
the novel where the ruthless labor union leader Arnie Kott asks Jack Bohlen
to design a device that may allow him to communicate with Manfred. Arnie’s
involvement with the autistic boy is definitely not altruistic; the chief of the
Water Workers Union wants to use Manfred’s precognitive ability to ward off
any threat to his power over the Martian colony.
Manfred’s schizophrenic time-slip allows Dick to show Mars and the
events taking place there from a very different perspective from what we are
accustomed to, forcing us to adopt the point of view of what we usually con-
sider as a defective mind. This creates a condition of ontological uncertainty,
because since the boy’s mind is out of phase with the koinos kosmos of other
characters we may have serious difficulties to understand what belongs to the
present of the novel and what lies in the future. It is something definitely
more sophisticated than what can be found in a later novel, Counter-Clock
World (1967), where the so-called Hobart Phase has inverted the time flux,
and people get younger day by day, while the dead resurrect9: the linearity of
the inversion in Counter-Clock does not create a real condition of ontological
uncertainty.
Manfred’s perception of people is also strongly deformed by his schizoid
condition. Here is how he sees Arnie Kott: “Inside Mr. Kott’s skin were dead
bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny-wet.
His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens
became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead” (126). This
description returns twice (133, 141), because it is part of a prolexis caused by
Manfred’s precognitive powers: the scene of the meeting between Arnie and
Jack Bohlen in chapters 10 and 11 is shown in three prolexes and then it is
nonchalantly bypassed by the main narrative line (168), with another crucial
time-slip; no wonder that Kim Stanley Robinson considers these chapters as
central, since they manage to capture also readers in this nightmarish time-
slip (Robinson 57).10
But it is not Manfred’s point of view alone that causes the ontological
uncertainty dominating the novel; though it is the most interesting focus,
endowed with a somewhat emblematic role in the character system (something
which has been acknowledged by most commentators, from Suvin to Warrick,
from Pagetti11 to Vallorani,12 not to mention Brian Aldiss), also Jack Bohlen’s
point of view questions the distinction between objective and subjective real-
ities, as we can see in this passage where we are shown Dr. Glaub as seen by Jack,
“a thing composed of cold wires and switches, not a human at all, not made
of flesh. The fleshy trappings melted and became transparent and Jack Bohlen
saw the mechanical device beyond” (94). Is this just the effect of madness,
102 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

hence a purely subjective vision which blurs objective, shared reality? Warrick
calls it an “intuitive vision” (72), because it unveils a hideous aspect of the
psychiatrist’s personality (whose manipulative and sordid character is subse-
quently shown during his confrontation with Anne Esterhazy [148–51]). Jack,
who suffers from schizophrenia (and is thus both closer to Manfred and at
risk of being absorbed by his autism, as Glaub correctly diagnoses [156]) may
be imprisoned in his own idios kosmos, but he (like Manfred) may see some-
thing other characters are blind to; in this case, something even Dr. Glaub
does not seem to be wholly aware of. We might quote a famous proverb by
William Blake, which also applies to Manfred: “If the fool would persist in
his folly he would become wise.”
This does not mean that what Jack sees or hears should be always taken
at its face value. When he hears all the teaching androids13 at Camp Ben-
Gurion (the school for autistic children in the Israeli settlement) utter unin-
telligible words, rendered as “Gubble gubble” (153–4), he concludes that “his
own psyche ... had not misinformed him: it was happening, what he heard
and saw” (154); but we soon discover (and the narrative shifts to Dr. Glaub’s
point of view to make this clear) that Jack is “in a state of catatonic stupor”
(155), and that, as Jack realizes when he recovers, the “gubble” were Manfred’s
words apparently coming from the android teachers (156). A mental short cir-
cuit caused Jack’s private world to be invaded by Manfred’s, something which
had already happened in a previous episode (143), though then Jack had man-
aged to realize that “[h]e had imbibed ... of Manfred’s world-view.”
This invasion leads readers to see Manfred as a threatening, possibly
destructive presence; but this happens because in these last chapters we mostly
see the autistic boy’s private world through Jack’s idios kosmos, suffused with
fear and anguish. When we “directly” access Manfred’s private world (e.g.,
in a short sequence in chapter 12 [165–7]) we see that the boy is not threat-
ening, but threatened by the looming future of solitude, deprivation and
decay in the bleak AM-WEB building (167). Thus he is quite different from
another figure of psi-empowered child, Jory in Ubik, who can and does impose
his world-view on others (Ch. 7).
The early commentators of the novel underscored its negative depiction
of the Martian society; Suvin posits the dismal AM-WEB building as its symbol,
and then interprets the acronym as the “American Web of big business, corrupt
labor aristocracy and big state” (Suvin 1975, 8), drawing from Brian Aldiss’
idea of a maledictory web which imprisons the Terran settlements on Mars,
though in Aldiss’ essay the negative web is not a sociopolitical system but the
entrapment of psychosis (Aldiss 40), represented by Manfred’s autism (which
in Aldiss’ opinion is the epitome of the uneasy mental condition of all the
characters, a stasis which “means death, spiritual if not actual” [40]). Also
 4. A Maze of Lives 103

Carlo Pagetti sees Mars as a place torn by “the ruthless struggle for power”
(Pagetti 1975, 21), reading it as “another of the many images of the Waste
Land that 20th-century culture proposes us with obsessive repetitiousness.”14
Both Pagetti and Suvin interpret Mars as an anamorphic image of the United
States,15 an image that is at the same time defamiliarized and insightful, a
group portrait of very real characters (Butler 2007, 61) on a science-fictional
background. Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that Dick’s Mars is “an American
suburb of 1963 simplified in order to make certain processes in it clearer”
(Robinson 55). Another critic, Fredric Jameson, quoted a line by Marianne
Moore to summarize the results of his interpretive method applied to this and
other Dickian novels of the sixties: “real toads in imaginary gardens” ( Jameson
2005, 379); this line also applies to the uncanny effect of Dick’s peculiar
approach to fiction in this novel.
The real toads are not only the characters of Time-Slip,16 a fully persuad-
ing group of Americans displaced on the Red Planet. One should also mention
another achievement, that is the depiction of California seen through a sci-
ence-fictional mirror, darkly. Mars is California, in a way that only Dick’s
fiction allows. The barren Martian landscape is quite similar to that of the
state where Dick lived for most of his life, as depicted in the first chapter of
his realistic novel Puttering About in a Small Land:
The hills ... were so bleak, so lacking in life.... The hills in the East;
before the present generation other people had lived there, and before them
others. It was clear that someone had always lived there. Before the English
the Indians. Before the Indians — nobody knew, but certainly some race,
some form of life, intelligent, responsible.... Here, the hills were like refuse
heaps, without color; the ground was only dirt, the plants were patches of
weeds separated from one another, holding beer cans and paper that had
blown down the canyons. This was a canyon ... not a cleft. And the wind
roared... [7].

Like California, Mars is a dry, desolate land, kept alive by complex and
precarious water works, anamorphic images of the complex system of aque-
ducts supervised by William Mulholland which allowed the fast growth of
Los Angeles at the beginning of the Twentieth century; the real estate spec-
ulation organized by Jack Bohlen’s father Leo (which will lead to the building
of the dreadful AM-WEB building) resembles the speculations described in
Dick’s non-sf novels, such as The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike or
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, set in California, where real estate development
has always played an important role; and the Bleekmen are evidently the Mar-
tian equivalents of the Native Americans or Mexicans which lived on the west
coast before it was colonized by European Americans. All in all, the whole
novel puts the readers in a situation of ontological uncertainty: is the alien
104 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

world really alien, or does it look suspiciously like California? We might say
that here we have the reverse of what Dick did in Time Out of Joint: there an
apparently familiar world turned out to be completely alien, while here the
Red Planet is bewilderingly similar to the West Coast. 17 This might add
another meaning to the “terrible sincerity” that Patricia Warrick finds in this
novel (Warrick 78).
If Mars is a bleak place, dominated by “violence, deceit, and, finally, the
spiritual aridity of man” (Pagetti, 1975, 21), California, this synecdoche of
the United States, fares no better. Yet we cannot say that this is a dystopian
novel like A Scanner Darkly or Radio Free Albemuth. Fredric Jameson has
located a strong utopian element in Martian Time-Slip, and that is undoubt-
edly the final apparition of Manfred (218–9), getting back from a far future
and turned into a cyborg, which presents us with
the collective, the primitive communism of the aboriginals, who have
also become the helpers and the rescuers of the schizophrenic Manfred,
himself now a new kind of prosthetic being who has emerged from out of
the future of his own past, immobilized in gubbish, and about to escape,
with his friends around him bearing him away, all tubes and hoses trailing
behind, into the alternate dreamtime of another History and another pres-
ent [Jameson 2005, 383].
Though the apparition of Manfred scares both his mother and Jack’s
wife Silvia, it is undoubtedly an apotheosis (which according to Jameson
unites the four main semic clusters which structure the textual space in this
and the other novels Dick published in the 1960s); it is also the climactic
moment when Manfred may communicate with another human being. Man-
fred came back from the future not just “to say goodbye to [his] mother”
(219), but to thank Jack Bohlen: “You tried to communicate with me, many
years ago. I appreciate that.”
We are also told that Manfred managed to escape am-web, which may
be read, in this final scene, as both the dismal building and the socioeconomic
wasteland which built (and also, thanks to the time-slip, will build) it. “I am
with my friends,” says Manfred, and they are the Bleekmen. Salvation can be
reached if one can escape the American Web and get in touch with the
defeated, the marginalized people, or, as another postmodernist writer called
them in his Gravity’s Rainbow, the Preterite. If madmen were in power in The
Man in the High Castle, and were busy bringing the world(s) to nuclear holo-
caust, here madmen are the only hope left: madmen who can forsake the dis-
mal logic of exploitation and deception and drop out of the American Web.
Christopher Palmer defined this novel as “anti-psichiatric” (Palmer 146), and
connected it to the theories of Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing; it should also
be connected to its countercultural context, as represented e.g., in Ken Kesey’s
 4. A Maze of Lives 105

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (a connection also made by Link [27–8]).
While in Dick the autistic boy Manfred manages to escape the American
Web,18 in Kesey’s novel only “Chief ” Bromden, a half-Indian, ultimately man-
ages to escape the totalitarian mental hospital dominated by Nurse Ratched
(another anamorphic image of the United States) and find shelter in his tribe’s
lands. If in Dick’s novel we are ultimately uncertain about who is really insane
and who is not (as the purported sanity of characters like Arnie Kott and
Otto Zitte brings to exploitation and murder), the title of the 1963 novella
“All We Marsmen”— that Dick expanded into the novel — might also suggest
that it is a story about “All We Madmen (and Women)”; and the protagonists
of Kesey’s novel are mostly madmen, oppressed by sane people who (like the
domineering and sadistic nurse) are probably not so sane as they think or say
they are.19
Having been completed just four months after Time-Slip, Dr. Blood-
money, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, though published in 1965, is
strictly connected to the previous novel. Suvin noticed that there were struc-
tural similarities, such as the multiple plots and the presence of several nar-
rative foci,20 and consequently included it in the so-called Plateau Period. It
did not take Dick a long time to complete the novel because he usually wrote
them in a very short time (he repeatedly explained in his letters and interviews
that he thought about the plots of novels for a long time, sometimes writing
notes and outlines of plots, but it generally took him less than a month to
type the first draft of his novels), but also because he had already written a
story “about Hoppy Harrington on his cart ... a novelette version of Dr. Blood-
money” (Rickman 1988, 71); Dick had been invited to submit a story for an
ambitious anthology of experimental sf which was cancelled for lack of suitable
materials (something which, according to Dick, could have anticipated Harlan
Ellison’s Dangerous Visions). Moreover, according to Patricia Warrick, Dick
drew on the manuscript of the then unpublished realistic novel Voices from
the Street, especially for the initial chapters (Warrick 80).21
Though Dick’s expectations about Martian Time-Slip were great, as we
have seen, the novel had not been sold yet when he started working on Blood-
money, and he knew all too well that if he was not paid much for his novels
he had to compensate with a huge output. In 1963 and 1964 he wrote or com-
pleted eleven novels plus several stories, in what was the most productive time
of his life. Hyper-production was also an answer to the disappointments that
he had to face in those months. In January 1963 his literary agent sent back
all his non-sf manuscripts, having been unable to sell them to any publisher.22
After this failure, Dick felt “completely deflated” (Rickman 1988, 146) when
his most ambitious novel so far, Martian Time-Slip, could find no hard cover
publisher, and had to be ultimately sold to Ballantine for a meager $2,000,
106 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

to be published as a cheap sf paperback; moreover, the novel did not sell well
at all. “It went unnoticed, it went unreviewed, unnoticed by the critics, by
the publishers, and by the readers” (Rickman 1988, 146): maybe it was not as
great a disaster for U.S. and world literature as the commercial failure of Her-
man Melville’s Moby-Dick, but it was surely a terrible blow for the 35-years-
old writer who had thought to be on the verge of fame and success.23
No wonder then that Dick went back to science-fiction for good, first
with Dr. Bloodmoney, then with the following ten novels he completed in
1963–64. It was a compromise solution: “it was not exactly what I wanted to
write, and it was marketable, and it had enough of what I wanted to do in it
to make it worth my interest” (Rickman 1988, 147). Dr. Bloodmoney was in
fact first published as an Ace paperback.
However, it is quite clear that the new novel could not be that different
from Time-Slip. The narrative architecture with multiple plots and narrative
foci is similar; we also have a group of well-differentiated characters, among
which there are two individuals characterized by mental derangement, Bruno
Bluthgeld and Hoppy Harrington (though the mental problems of the latter
are less evident and somewhat lighter than those of Bluthgeld and the two
schizophrenics — Jack and Manfred — in the previous novel). Hoppy is
endowed with psi powers like Manfred, and he is also physically different
from other characters, being a phocomelus; but he is as greedy and violent as
Arnie Kott, maybe even more.
However, if a web of human relations tied all the characters of Time-
Slip, the same may be said of those in Dr. Bloodmoney. The novel is set in a
small community of survivors in Marin County, and it tells their daily life,
remarkably quiet and bucolic, after the disaster of World War III which wiped
away the United States and most national governments. The web in this novel
is purely local, though there is another thin, precarious web connecting the
small community with the others scattered on the rest of the world: the orbital
DJ Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut who should have reached Mars with his
wife, but remained in orbit due to the war and then used the powerful radio
transmitter of the space capsule to contact the survivors and keep them in
touch with each other. The small bucolic society, daily listening to Dan-
gerfield’s wise and ironic pacifist comments, has definitely countercultural and
utopian undertones; after all, Dick had lived for years in the bohemian, anti-
establishment community of Berkeley, and the novel was written less than
two years before the beginning of the Free Speech Movement.24 Maybe the war
is no more than a device allowing Dick to depict a utopian community; besides,
he overtly said that he thought it was an excellent book above all because the
society he portrayed was “not what you’d expect to find after a Holocaust”
(Rickman 1988, 155): it was a fusion of the rural Point Reyes Station community
 4. A Maze of Lives 107

with the urban Berkeley milieu, confirmed by Anne Dick (Warrick 83–4).
The result of such a fusion is, and Jameson’s analysis convincingly proves this,
“a genuinely Jeffersonian commonwealth beyond the bomb” ( Jameson 1975,
362), a reestablished utopian collectivity.
Yet it is difficult to read the nuclear war in Bloodmoney as nothing more
than a narrative device. Fredric Jameson noticed that nuclear war can be found
in most of the short stories and several novels Dick had written before Dr.
Bloodmoney, but that it is not usually shown; it is mentioned by the characters
or the 3rd-person narrator as something lying in the past, which should explain
the difference between the science-fictional world Dick has conjured up and
the world of his readers ( Jameson 2005, 349). In these earlier works World
War III is indeed a fictional device “in which [his near-futures] find their his-
torical sustenance” (349). There are exceptions that Jameson does not men-
tions, such as The Man in the High Castle, where nuclear war looms large on
the three alternate worlds intersecting in the novel, or Time Out of Joint,
where a “serialized” nuclear war is going on; but Jameson is right in under-
scoring the fact that the moment when the bombs actually detonate is only
shown in Bloodmoney. Here the nuclear holocaust manifests itself; it is not
just an antecedent, or a possibility. Though enclosed in an analepsis in chapters
5 and 6, it is staged in a giant 38-page flashback introduced by Bonny Keller’s
musings at the end of chapter 4, when she comes to think, by association, of
“the day, seven years ago, when the bombs began to fall on things” (57). 25
According to Jameson, the two chapters showing the war posit “artistic
problems unlike any other” ( Jameson 1975, 350); the critic notices, as we
have already seen in the Introduction, that the power of Dick’s fiction lies in
his ability to keep together and somewhat integrate (though it is a rather trou-
blesome integration) “subjective and objective explanation systems” (350);
what I have called ontological uncertainty. But can Dick’s own literary solution
accommodate such a cumbersome object as nuclear war? In Jameson’s words:
“Dick’s narrative ambiguity can accommodate individual experience, but runs
greater risks in evoking the materials of world history, the flat yes and no of
the mushroom cloud” (351). And this contradiction, or tension, or fault is
well present in Bloodmoney, not just because the author felt somewhat com-
pelled to show something that had been just implied in former novels and
short stories, but because readers “are less and less able to distinguish between
... ‘real’ explosions and those that take place within the psyche” (350). This
remark is preceded by a hint at the fact that one of the characters, nuclear
physicist Bruno Bluthgeld, “takes [the nuclear war] to be a projection of his
own psychic powers” (350), something which Jameson does not see as a major
interpretive problem, however not as great as the second; the two remarks
point to two very important episodes which should be discussed at length,
108 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

because here our interpretive hypothesis of ontological uncertainty may

unearth something that Jameson has briefly hinted at but other interpreters
seem to have overlooked.
Actually Patricia Warrick paid attention to the character of Bluthgeld
(whose surname may sound German, like that of other nuclear scientists such
as Oppenheimer or Fuchs, but was actually invented by Dick by putting
together the German words Blut, “blood” and Geld, “money,” hence the title
of the novel)26: she suggests that Bluthgeld is “a thinly disguised” (Warrick,
81) Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist who had migrated to the USA in
the 1930s, worked under Enrico Fermi, and subsequently became the father
of the hydrogen bomb. Like most Americans in the postwar years Dick was
quite well informed about Cold War and the threat of a Third World War;
in addition to all his short stories and novels set in a post–World War III
world, we should mention the Minimax, repeatedly mentioned in Solar Lottery,
one of the games studied by Hungarian-born mathematician John von Neu-
mann, a friend of Teller and another key figure of Project Manhattan and
subsequently U.S. defense strategy (Poundstone 52–5); several details of
Bluthgeld’s life are taken from the real life of Teller, such as the fact that he
worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (54), or the fact he
was born in Budapest (7), though 34 years after the real scientist.
When the nuclear bombs fall, Bluthgeld’s reaction seems to be simply
dictated by his mental disease: a little before the war breaks out, Dick has
the scientist visited by a psychoanalyst, Dr. Stockstill (another narrative focus
in the novel), to make it clear that he suffers from a paranoid syndrome (4–
10); the psychoanalyst also remembers Richard Nixon’s27 distrust of Bluthgeld
(8), due to the latter’s growing mental problems. No wonder then if Bluthgeld
believes he made the nuclear war happen: in a powerful sequence of Chapter
6 (80–7), Dick shows us the catastrophic aftermath of the nuclear attack on
the San Francisco Bay Area through the paranoid delirium of this deranged
character (whose madness is now fully manifest), who first gloats over the
devastating effects of “the almost limitless potency of [his] reactive psychic
energy” (80–1), then moves his hands to heal the damage done in a demented
act of forgiveness (83–4). Bluthgeld has moved from taking responsibility for
a failed nuclear experiment in 1972 which caused malformations in many
children (5, 14) to taking liability for something he cannot have caused, and
the mental stress caused by the 1972 disaster may well explain his psychotic
reaction to the nuclear war.
This first episode is not a major problem because everything we read
before the episode in chapter 6 authorizes readers to see Bluthgeld as a mad-
man entrapped by his paranoia: he only believes that he is the cause of World
War III. But a major problem rises when, in chapter 12, Bluthgeld, now living
 4. A Maze of Lives 109

in West Marin some years after the war, under the false identity of Jack Tree,
meets Stuart McConchie, the same man he had met before being visited by
Dr. Stockstill, and immediately thinks that the war will start again (208). He
is scared by this at first, but then he decides to unleash nuclear destruction
again as a punishment to the small community (213), which has gathered in
the Foresters’ Hall to listen to Dangerfield’s radio broadcast. Megalomaniac
delirium again, we might say, but something happens which calls everything
in doubt, because after Bluthgeld has decided to eliminate Dangerfield, whose
radio-broadcast voice annoys him, with high-altitude hydrogen blasts (215–
6), the voice of the orbital DJ ceases (216). Bluthgeld is then so excited that
he stands up and addresses the community, announcing that “[t]he demolition
of existence has begun. Everyone present will be spared by special consider-
ation long enough to confess sins and repent if it is sincere” (218), in a mix
of megalomania and religious mania, then revealing his true identity.
This could obviously be no more than a coincidence; we also know that
Dangerfield is the victim of his difficult condition (living alone in a small
space for years), the grief for the death of his wife (who committed suicide
[111]), and the psi powers of Hoppy Harrington. When Dangerfield’s voice is
heard again (218–9), the people in the hall and the readers may well be reas-
sured that Bluthgeld is mad, not endowed with supernatural powers. But
another fact is much more difficult to explain, and that is the explosions in
the sky which take place soon after the scene in the Foresters’ Hall (212–9):
they are seen by Bonny Keller and Mr. Barnes (231), but also by many other
members of the West Marin community (239).
The night explosions, two over West Marin, another over San Francisco,
are not explained in the novel. Since they resemble the enigmatic scene in the
park in Time Out of Joint we have discussed in chapter 2, we could ascribe
them to Dick’s poor control of his texts, also because we know that this novel
was definitely not written as carefully (and/or properly edited) as The Man
in the High Castle or Martian Time-Slip, and ignore them.
There is however at least a critic, Patricia Warrick, who takes them at
their face value, and believes that Bluthgeld is endowed with “mental powers”
allowing him to “begin another atomic war” (Warrick 87). If this is true, he
might also have caused the first nuclear war.28 Such a reading might justify
Jameson’s discomfort: ascribing the nuclear holocaust to the evil powers of a
single deranged individual may be something childish, something “uncon-
vincing and ineffectual” ( Jameson 1975, 351), because America and its insti-
tutions (including that fearful American creation, the nuclear Bomb, Dick’s
equivalent or complement of Thomas Pynchon’s threatening Rocket, and the
vast apparatus managing it during and after the Cold War) are too massive
and unchangeable for Dick’s typical approach to fiction: “to prevent the
110 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

reestablishment of the reality principle and the reconstitution of experience

into the twin airtight domains of the objective and the subjective” ( Jameson
1975, 351)— in other words, one of the forms of ontological uncertainty.
It is indeed a matter of being objective or subjective; if the power to
trigger the nuclear holocaust is merely subjective, then Bluthgeld is just a
pathetic case of madness. But those explosions seem to be something objective,
belonging to the koinos kosmos of the characters, not just to Bluthgeld’s
deformed idios kosmos. Bonny Keller thinks that we are well in the domain
of the objective, as she says: “It’s an evil god ... who gave him that power,
whatever it is. I know it’s him .... We’ve seen a lot of strange things over the
years, so why not this? The ability to recreate the war, to bring it back, like
he said last night. Maybe he’s got us snared in time” (231).29
Actually the explosions might be also explained in another way. Since
Hoppy Harrington is going to kill Bluthgeld in order to become the hero of
the community (thus reinforcing the unity of the society with the old trick
of sacrificing a scapegoat), and Hoppy does have psi powers (including telekine-
sis and precognition), plus amazing technical skills to repair and build electric
and electronic devices, the explosions might well be something conjured up
by him by supernatural or technological means in order to persuade the mem-
bers of the West Marin community that Bluthgeld is not somebody to be
pitied (and possibly cured), but a real threat.
Dick does not tell us this overtly, but it is a possibility which is left open.
Besides, it is not the only issue left open in the novel. Dick does not explain
what are the causes of the nuclear catastrophe which wipes out the United
States as we know them: was it a Soviet attack, or an accident? Dr. Stockstill
thinks that “something had gone wrong with the automatic defense system
out in space” so that “it was Washington that was dropping bombs on them,
not the Chinese or the Russian” (66). He ends this overexcited meditation by
concluding that “The impersonal ... has attacked us” (67). This may mean,
as the doctor himself does, that the war has caused the break-up of society;
but it also means that ascertaining individual responsibilities after such a
catastrophe is practically impossible and possibly pointless. The multiple nar-
rative foci are there because they make us understand that such an enormous
event is beyond the human faculty to perceive, and maybe even mentally pic-
ture it; such a difficulty of telling, representing or picturing has been repeatedly
discussed in connection with the experience of modern warfare,30 so that it
is not surprising that we only have fragmented views of the nuclear attack, as
Warrick has noticed (Warrick 84–5).
Ontological uncertainty is thus at work also in this novel, maybe in a
less pyrotechnic and blatant way than in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
and the other novels discussed in chapter 7, but it is there, not just in the
 4. A Maze of Lives 111

greater issue of the nuclear war (the big one of 1981 and the much smaller one
of 1988), but also in other episodes of the novel. We have the many lies and
falsifications of Hoppy Harrington (whose fake id is just the first of a long
series, possibly including the explosions in the sky), up to the imitation and
replacement of Walt Dangerfield (266) facilitated by the invisibility of the
orbital DJ; we have Billy Keller’s uncanny imitations of dead people’s voices
which terrify Hoppy and bring him to his eventual defeat (271–5); the musing
of Andrew Gill about Stuart’s authenticity as a salesman, and then the dis-
cussion about real coffee and the substitute that Andrew must offer Stuart
(193–4, 197); Hoppy’s vision of the afterlife in chapter 3 which is only revealed
as a fraud when Stuart realizes that what Hoppy was really seeing was the
wrecked world after the nuclear catastrophe (81). Ontological uncertainty is
generated because the story is told through a web of points of view, each one
with a very different conception of what is subjective and what is objective
in the shared world — a shared world that Dick’s narrative technique in this
novel shows us as something remarkably shifting and undetermined.
Any discussion of Dick’s novels where the collective dimension is para-
mount must necessarily include another text, completed in January 1964 and
published in the same year: Clans of the Alphane Moon. Neither Jameson nor
Warrick have connected this novel to Dr. Bloodmoney: conversely, they see
The Simulacra as its “less successful companion piece” ( Jameson 1975, 349)
or “twin” (Warrick 88), based on its having been completed only six months
later. Surely there are reasons for grouping these novels together, as it is not
difficult to find similarities between works written by the same author in a
relatively short period; but in my opinion the elements with tie Simulacra
with Now Wait for Last Year (the third novel completed in 1963) are much
stronger than those that connect it to Dr. Bloodmoney, as we shall see in Chap-
ter 5.
On the other hand, Clans is a close relative of Time-Slip and Bloodmoney
for more than one reason. Warrick noticed that two themes, “mental illness
and domestic disharmony” (Warrick 65), are pivotal both in Time-Slip and
Clans; these issues are also present also in Bloodmoney, and they do not play
a secondary role.31 Multi-plot and multi-focal architecture are a common fea-
ture of these three novels; they are used to provide ontological uncertainty,
as we shall see; they are meant to analyze the workings of a community, con-
sidered as a complex web of interacting private worlds. Moreover, madness
plays a vital role, though this time it is not just a pair of characters who suffer
from mental disease (be they positive, as Jack Bohlen and Manfred Steiner in
Time-Slip, or negative, as Hoppy Harrington and Bruno Bluthgeld in Blood-
money): in Clans all the inhabitants of the Alpha Centauri moon Alpha III
M2, where a large part of the action takes place, are insane.
112 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

But insanity here is not at all something dangerous, as it is in Bloodmoney,

or a social stigma. The inhabitants of the Alphane moon are the former inmates
of the Harry Stack Sullivan32 Neuropsychiatric Hospital (95), which was cut
off from Earth during the war between humans and the Alphanes; once set
free, the madmen (and women) organized themselves in a clan system accord-
ing to their mental disorder, which I have tried to describe in the following
table (based on Mary Rittersdorf ’s analysis in chapter 7 [77–9]):

Table 4.1
Clan Mental disorder Town Vocation Character
Pares Paranoia Adolfville Leaders, Gabriel Baines
statesmen
Mans Manic-depressive Da Vinci Heights Warriors Howard Straw
Polys Polymorphic Hamlet Hamlet Creative Annette Golding
schizophrenia individuals,
producers of
new ideas
Heebs Hebephrenia Gandhitown Untouchables, Sarah Apostles,
saints, ascetics Ignatz Ledebur,
Jacob Simion
Ob-Coms Obsessive- - Clerks, office Miss Hibbler
compulsive holders
neuroses
Deps Depression Cotton Mather - Dino Walters
Estates
Skitzes Schizophrenia - Poets, religious Omar Diamond
visionaries,
dogmatists

The table is incomplete because Dick did not bother to describe every-
thing in detail. In fact we should not forget that only a half of the novel is
devoted to the Alphane moon with its clans, a utopian or quasi-utopian soci-
ety; another half is set on Earth, and is pivoted upon the troublesome marriage
of Chuck and Mary Rittersdorf, and the mission they have been assigned by
the CIA — to persuade the members of the clans to undergo a psychiatric
therapy “to put them actually in the position which, by accident, they now
improperly hold” (81). A rather paradoxical mission, because the autonomous
community which lives on the Alphane moon should renounce its independ-
ence in order to enter a program which will allow them to “govern themselves.
As legitimate settlers on [that] moon, eventually” (81); the program is actually
utter nonsense, as it is no more than a cover for the machination of the Terran
 4. A Maze of Lives 113

authorities who only want to subjugate the lost colony. A complex web of
intrigue surrounds Alpha III M2, but it is much less serious than what we
have found in The Man in the High Castle; the simple fact that in the far
future of interstellar travel and interplanetary wars the CIA still exists and is
still plotting to overthrow foreign governments tells us that Dick was poking
fun at the USA and its imperialistic policies.
What is really important if we want to fully understand Wait is that this
novel is based on the opposition of two worlds: Earth and the Alphane moon.
The former is the world as it was in 1964 and still is, dominated by compe-
tition, intrigue, power struggle, conspiracies: it is a world where everybody
spies on everybody else; even the benevolent Lord Running Clam, one of
Dick’s most sympathetic aliens, regularly reads Chuck’s thoughts (51–2).
Everybody on Earth is busy scheming against somebody else: no wonder that
several characters in this part of the novel are or are suspected to be spies,
secret agents, or double-crossers. The symbol of this world of mistrust, resent-
ment and unease is the teetering marriage of Chuck and Mary, whose recip-
rocal hostility brings the former to devise an elaborate plan to eliminate his
wife, reminiscent of the plot in Solar Lottery, where another murder by android
is described. All in all, the Terran part of the novel has all the elements of a
noir, inasmuch as readers already know who wants to kill the potential victim
and only have to wait and see if the plot will be successful, or will be hindered
by the freaks who know about it (Lord Running Clam, Joan Trieste, RBX303);
we even have a dark lady, that is, Mary Rittersdorf, scheming against her hus-
band with a bunch of hoodlums.
If this is the “real” world, the Alphane moon is evidently the place of an
alternative society where cooperation, not destructive competition, is the rule.
The opposition between the two worlds has already been analyzed by Christo-
pher Palmer, who sees Clans as “a satiric novel contrasting the sanity of the
‘mad’ and the insanity of the ‘sane’” (Palmer 150), though Dick’s animosity
towards Mary Rittersdorf unbalances the novel, as the writer “does not main-
tain the necessary detachment.” Here Palmer is evidently influenced by Dick’s
life as it has been reconstructed by Lawrence Sutin, who describes in detail
the crisis of Dick’s marriage with Anne Rubinstein, which reached its climax
at the end of summer 1963 and ended with their separation in March 1964;
since the novel was written in that stormy period, Palmer reads it as mirroring
Dick’s real life feelings and worries. Mary Rittersdorf is then a fictional portrait
of Anne, and this reading seems to be strengthened by the fact that on the
Alphane moon Mary is first believed to be a manic (197), but then, after being
accurately tested, is diagnosed as a Dep (198–9), that is, suffering from depres-
sion. This bears a strong connection with an unpleasant episode of Dick’s
own marital crisis, when a psychiatrist diagnosed Anne as manic-depressive
114 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

(Sutin 123) and then filed involuntary commitment papers which led to Anne’s
internment at Ross Psychiatric Hospital for seventy-two hours and then at
Langley-Porter Clinic for two weeks of further evaluation. Anne was eventually
released, but the psychiatrist (whose name Sutin tactfully omitted) insisted
on his diagnosis and prescribed the use of Stelazine, a powerful tranquilizer
which turned Anne “into a zombie” (Sutin 124) for three months.
Dick was certainly not proud of the at least acquiescent role he had
played in this episode, and “never alluded publicly to the commitment” (Sutin
124), even though, as the biographer duly observes, it is mirrored by the fate
of Mary Rittersdorf in Clans and Kathy Sweetscent in Now Wait for Last Year.
This may explain Palmer’s remarks about Clans being a “deranged novel,” “a
return of Philip K. Dick’s repressed” (Palmer 150); evidently the critic is
annoyed by Dick’s treatment of female characters, in connection to the injus-
tice suffered by Anne Dick (whose responsibility, however, mainly falls upon
the anonymous Marin County psychiatrist), which explains this remark: “the
brew thickens, and also goes sour, in the opinion of many, if we add to it
Dick’s feelings about women” (Palmer 154).
Such generalizations may be dangerous, and a bit too much black-and-
white, especially if one realizes that female commentators of Dick’s fiction are
not so annoyed by his portrayals of women (I might quote Warrick33 and Val-
lorani, but there are others, such as Dillon and N. Katherine Hayles). But let
us accept a biographical reading like the one underpinning Palmer’s interpre-
tation of Clans (though I cannot honestly say that all his interpretation can
be reduced to this, as his analysis of Lord Running Clam is insightful and
adds much to our understanding of the novel): if Mary is Anne sub specie sci-
ence-fiction, we will have to admit that Chuck — unlike the historical Philip
K. Dick — does not eventually divorce her, but gets back to her after having
discarded two possible substitutes ( Joan Trieste and Annette Golding [Palmer
151]). Moreover, Palmer maintains that sterility is one of the main themes in
the novel (154), the embodiment of the entropy which threatens the human
society on Earth; “women ought to offer nurture, kindliness, fertility” but
“they have turned aside from this potential in them” (Palmer 154). I suspect
that the Australian critic is reading female characters’ failure to counter socioe-
conomic sterility as ultimately related to the abortion Anne Dick had in 1960
(Sutin 108–9), one of the indirect reasons of Dick’s real-life marital crisis. But
this is Dick’s own biography, which is not so faithfully mirrored in the novel.
In fact once Chuck and Mary are reconciled, she suggests that “maybe we’ll
have more children ... like the slime moulds ... we arrived and we’ll increase in
numbers until we become legion” (204). The reference to slime moulds, the
alien race that Lord Running Clam belongs to, is quite clear if one keeps in
mind Palmer’s argument that if women have forsaken their capacity to generate
 4. A Maze of Lives 115

and nurture, “males have to assume the role: Chuck as midwife-gardener,

assisted by Annette, and Lord Running Clam reproduces himself ” (153). But
the novel ends when Mary proposes to have more children, who will grow up
on the Alphane moon, and Chuck sees this offer as “a good omen, one that
could not be overlooked” (204).
The point that Palmer seems to have missed is that biographic readings
are a risky business because they can and will never explain how readers can
enjoy the reading of literary texts even if they do not know anything about
the life of their authors (be they long time dead like Homer or living like
Thomas Pynchon). But this objection is not as important as his having appar-
ently overlooked the fact that sterility (and social entropy) dominates one of
the two worlds depicted in the novel, that is, Earth. Until Chuck and Mary
are on planet Earth their marriage, “perverted into ruthless competition”
(Palmer 149), is reduced to a sterile, maddened struggle which may predictably
end in merciless exploitation or murder. But once the couple moves to the
Alphane moon, a sort of harmony is regained, and fertility counters sterility.
Mary is indeed diagnosed as depressive, but this does not mean that she
is humbled and punished (150). In fact we should not forget that she is a psy-
chologist specialized in “marriage counseling” (18), who is sent to the Alphane
moon to negotiate with the clans; this negotiation, masterminded by Earth
authorities (including the CIA), is not political but medical, hence not based
on parity. The Alphane clans are not recognized as peers when Mary tells
them “You are, individually and collectively, mentally ill” (134)— which, from
the point of view of Terran authorities, justifies the landing on the moon
without any attempt at securing permission (135), a point which the Clans
delegation immediately raises.
In other words, Mary is not just Chuck’s wife. She is a psychologist who
“used to think that [she] was ... completely different from [her] patients”
(202–3). This radical difference between sane and insane individuals has
heavy political consequences: the allegedly (or self-proclaimed) sane world
considers itself to be entitled to the tutelage of the insane world of Alpha III
M2. A radical inequality between the two planets is suggested, which is parallel
to the inequality between therapist and patient (e.g., between Anne Dick and
the anonymous psychiatrist who had her committed); this inequality is used
by Earth to legitimate its claims on the Alphane moon and its inhabitants —
who can be elegantly ignored as political subjects. Thus Palmer’s idea that
“the come-uppance Mary Rittersdorf receives is a matter between Philip K.
Dick and his feelings about women” (Palmer 158) is totally untenable.
The diagnosis of Mary’s psychosis (performed by members of the clans
[198]) is not a punishment, but a political act; its purpose is to show that
those who claim to be sane may well be as insane as the madmen and -women
116 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

of the Alphane moon. It is a denunciation of Earth’s attempt to subjugate the

Alphane moon, which represents too different a model of society from the
one existing on Earth. It should then be clear that Robinson’s interpretation
that the Alphane moon is a sort of mirror image of Earth, “a satiric microcosm
of the world at large” (Robinson 73) fails to grasp the opposition between the
two worlds, one where purportedly sane people struggle for power (even in
the marital context), the other where the alleged madmen are able to coop-
erate.
Once Mary is diagnosed as depressive, she is not humiliated and dis-
criminated (as she would surely be on Earth), but becomes part of one of the
clans, that of the Deps. Even Chuck, who is diagnosed normal, admits that
“suicidal impulses had motivated him, and after that hostile, murderous
impulses towards [Mary]” (203). Being normal is not a matter of “complete
difference,” one that may justify inequality, discrimination, dispossession or
exploitation (like the seizing of Alpha III M2, somewhat legitimized by a psy-
chologist); it is, in Chuck’s words, just a matter of degree, and “[w]hat a slight
degree it was” (203). No wonder then if Chuck, having to settle on the
Alphane moon, plans to found a new clan once he is diagnosed as normal,
that of the Norms, which will live in a new settlement called Thomas Jeffer-
sonburg (199).
The name of the Norm settlement to be is revealing, from a political
point of view, and reminds us that a biographical reading of the novel may
hinder our understanding of the political apologue it contains (including,
among other things, memorable scenes of marital disharmony).

To summarize these three novels we should focus on mental disorders

again. If the multiple point of view technique allows for a fragmented image
of the koinos kosmos, which in itself fosters ontological uncertainty, as we
have seen, it is evident that the insertion of mentally deranged characters
among the narrative foci allows Dick to conjure up highly twisted worlds,
such as Manfred’s one, invaded by gubbish, or the apocalyptic world halluci-
nated by Bruno Bluthgeld, or the strange perspectives that the members of
the Alphane moon clans (lunatics, after all, because Luna is indisputably a
moon) project. Seeing the world from the point of view of madmen and -
women, however, may be a way to understand that we all are madmen and
-women, at least to a certain degree; that the borderline between sanity and
insanity is rather thin and difficult to locate, notwithstanding the pronounce-
ments of psychiatric (or political) authorities.
Dick was well aware of this. One day, while driving with his daughters
to visit Anne, who was residing in the locked ward of Langley-Porter Clinic
at Berkeley, he said he was going to talk with the doctors, and added “I’m
 4. A Maze of Lives 117

sure they’re going to tell me that I’m the one who should be in there, not your
mother” (Sutin 124). If we want to read Clans on the basis of biography, we
should keep also this in mind.
Surely the issue of mental disease is one that ties all these novels together.
Dick somewhat minimized it as a transitory interest while talking about Clans
in 1981, when he said that “the world of the psychotic is no longer of any
interest to me” (Rickman 1988, 152); yet this is a powerful intertextual bridge
among Clans, Martian Time-Slip and Bloodmoney. But there is another com-
mon theme, suggested by Dick himself when he says that Clans is “[t]he story
of the survival value of various forms of psychosis” and then asks “[d]id they
have any utilitarian utility?” (Rickman 1988, 153). According to Dick they
did, and the proof that psychoses may be useful is the fact that, at least “in
other cultures” (including those Dick conjured up), psychotics may work
together — and, to quote Gabriel Baines, one of the members of the clans del-
egation, “if we can work together we are not sick” (134). Working or living
together is the other important issue of these three novels: not just because
the multi-foci technique allows Dick to render the complexities of a maze of
individual lives seen as a web of human relations, but because salvation and
community go hand in hand in these novels. Manfred may escape the dire
Am-Web building which looms large on his future by joining the Bleekmen,
who are presented as his friends in his final apparition; Walt Dangerfield is
saved by establishing a two-way relation (a human bondage, we might say,
using the title of the Somerset Maugham novel he reads to his listeners) with
Dr. Stockstill, thus rejoining the human community; Chuck and Mary can
save their marriage moving to Alpha III M2 and joining the local clans
(Chuck, as we have seen, goes one step beyond and founds a new clan).
Besides, all this may have its roots in Dick’s own life. At the end of
Bloodmoney, Bonny Keller, Andrew Gill and Stuart McConchie leave the iso-
lated West Marin community and get back to San Francisco, which is
definitely not as bad as the survivors in the countryside thought: “We heard
the awful stories,— muses Bonny — that it was only ruins, with predators
creeping about, derelicts and opportunists and nappers, the dregs of what it
had once been ... and we had fled from that too, before the war. We had
already become too afraid to live here” (288). Is this the ending of a post-
nuclear holocaust sf novel, or a meditation on what pushed millions of Amer-
icans to abandon the residential areas in city centers and move to the suburbs?
The opposition of alienated individuals vs. cooperative community may then
have also a socioeconomic and historical dimension, which is undoubtedly
developed in different fashions in the three novels that we have discussed.
 Chapter 5

Time Travels and Historical

Manipulation: The Simulacra,
Now Wait for Last Year and
The Penultimate Truth

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
T.S. Eliot

This chapter deals with three novels written in 1963–64 which have gen-
erally been considered as minor works, compared to those we have discussed
in the previous chapter or will discuss in the next two. Dick himself plus
some commentators might disagree, yet it is true that these three works have
received scant critical attention so far, compared to those of the first Plateau
period and the final trilogy (with the exception of The Divine Invasion).
Besides, Butler considers The Simulacra a book which lacks coherence (Butler
2007, 66), while Palmer objects to how Dick challenges “the reader’s capacity
for belief ” in that novel, in a game where the author is “embroiled, risking
disorientation, if not humiliation” (Palmer 234). As for Now Wait for Last
Year and The Penultimate Truth, these novels rank higher in Butler’s appre-
ciation, but other interpreters mention them occasionally and never deemed
them worth a sustained and detailed critical examination: Warrick just men-
tions Penultimate and Wait, while she deems Simulacra worth discussing as a
sort of prequel to Bloodmoney (Warrick 88–93). Palmer finds “the manufacture
of the news” in Simulacra worth discussing (Palmer 20–1), but only hints at
the Wait in a few pages. The only critic who has covered all the three novels
so far is Robinson, who considers Wait underrated (Robinson 80), Penultimate
flawed in the second part (Robinson 73) and Simulacra “one of Dick’s best

118
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 119

books ... but ... seriously flawed” because of “extravagant inclusion”: there is
just too much in it (Robinson 72).
Even Dick thought that Simulacra was somewhat overloaded, as its dif-
ferent plots of do not hang together: he told Rickman he had tried to draw
a chart of the plotlines “to see if by any chance it all cohered,” but had to
admit that some characters “just don’t have any relation with some of the
other people in that group” (Rickman 1988, 152). Yet he thought that this
was not necessarily a fault, because heterogeneity and multiplicity were to
him a form of richness: “[m]y idea is to put as much into the book as I can
put in. In other words I want to give the reader as much as I can give him”
(Rickman, 1988, 152). Suvin and Robinson might undoubtedly object that
sometimes what Dick can put in a novel is simply too much, but I wonder
whether measuring Dick’s novels based on some criterion or rule of classical
elegance and simplicity is an acceptable critical move. I cannot see why the
proliferating imagination of a novelist like Thomas Pynchon is praised by
interpreters as an impressive example of postmodernist complexity, while it
should be a fault in Dick’s novels.
Besides, there may be a less evident form of coherence in Simulacra: in
my first critical attempt I tried to apply to this novel the same fourfold scheme
of fictional levels that I have used in the previous discussion of The Cosmic
Puppets, Time Out of Joint and The Man in the High Castle (Rossi “Fourfold
Symmetry”); the scheme worked quite well when applied to The Penultimate
Truth, as we shall see, but was not satisfactory when I used it to analyze Sim-
ulacra. It is difficult to say that there are two or more alternate worlds in that
novel, so I had to shift to a diachronic opposition, different from the syn-
chronic alternance I had found in Puppets and High Castle. The two poles of
that antithesis should have been on the one hand the scientifically and tech-
nologically managed political system we are presented based on at the begin-
ning of the novel, based on the dual Ge/Be communication system (with a
future society divided into two castes, those who know certain political
secrets — the Ge, the ruling elite — and those who do not — the Be, the ruled
masses), plus the TV charisma of Nicole Thibodeaux which supports the
power system (that also includes an android president); on the other hand,
the destruction of social structures (and oppositions) which takes place at the
end of the novel, when we have discovered that all the political leaders (android
and human) were simulacra, and the USEA are ravaged by civil war (Rossi
“Fourfold Symmetry,” 409–11). My hypothesis was that the whole novel is
articulated along a diachronic opposition: the series of events which leads
from the initial state of relative order and functionality to the final state of
mayhem and destructuration is an entropic process leading from the primary
to the secondary text, and it coincides with the very plot of the novel.
120 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

I have also attempted a more detailed discussion of The Simulacra as a

peculiar sort of disaster novel, not a natural disaster like many other famous
science-fiction texts (especially in the British tradition, from Wyndham’s The
Day of the Triffids, to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass up to Ballard’s
catastrophic tetralogy of the 1960s), but a political disaster, which brings the
future USA (or better USEA) depicted in the novel to civil war and nuclear
destruction (Rossi, “The Great National Disaster”).
The novel could then be read as another chapter of the American jeremiad.
All in all, Dick’s vision of the future United States of Europe and America
(West Germany has been admitted to the Union), ruled by an android president
whose forever young and attractive dark-haired wife is the real charismatic
figure, while Washington cabals ruthlessly struggle for real power, was a way
to poke fun at the Kennedy administration and its myth of a new Frontier.
This novel — published in 1964 but written in the summer of 1963, well before
the Dallas assassination — is indeed deeply rooted in the historical moment
Dick found himself in. Once civil war breaks loose one of the characters
muses on the rampaging destruction: “The destruction, the great national
disaster, was still there. That was the terrible thing about civil war; no matter
how it came out it was still bad. Still a catastrophe. And for everyone” (216).
The reference to the historical civil war should not surprise us, because Dick
wrote this novel during the Civil War centenary (1961–1965); unmistakable
traces of that event can also be found in We Can Build You (Ch. 6).
Besides, reference to the hottest political issues in the early 1960s abound
in this novel. Dick’s anamorphic rendering of the Civil War (triggered by an
attempt to change history by means of a time machine, helping Nazi Germany
to win the war in exchange for the life of the Jews in concentration camps)
creates a short circuit between racism and Nazism, between the limits of
American democracy and the manipulation of mass unconscious, between
Goebbels’ scientifically managed propaganda and PR in the age of TV politics;
and, last but not least, it connects the past of the United States with its immi-
nent future. The Simulacra was published in 1964; can one pretend not to
foresee the Watts race riot that would blow up just a year later? The racist
bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, had occurred in September 1963; Vietnam
was raging, year after year, sending more and more images of destruction to
the screens of American TV sets; those were, to quote Todd Gitlin’s history
of the sixties, years of discord. Before the ghettos of major U.S. metropolises
blew up, before Vietnam became a national emergency, before political figures
such as Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy were slaughtered,
before Chicago and four dead students in Ohio, before the conspiracies and
counter-conspiracies of the Nixon era, Dick perceived the oncoming destruc-
tion, the great national disaster ahead.
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 121

The political aspect is also quite important in The Penultimate Truth,

completed in March 1964: Andrew Butler summarized this novel as “Cold
War paranoia at its height” (Butler 2007, 78) and it is a felicitous description.
Though we tend to associate Cold War to the 1950s, we should not forget
that the confrontation between the two superpowers who had won World
War II lasted till 1989; besides, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building of
the Berlin Wall were recent events. The future world depicted in Penultimate
is divided in two different realities by the ground line which separates the
world of the tankers from that of the Yance-men: the former are the vast major-
ity of U.S. citizens who live underground because they believe that an apoc-
alyptic nuclear/biological warfare is raging on the uninhabitable surface; the
latter is the elite of PR professionals which live in vast luxurious country
demesnes, because the war actually ended years before and the surface has
been reclaimed by the military-political ruling class. The dividing line struc-
tures all the text with a binary opposition which gives it a rather symmetrical
structure (Rossi “Fourfold Symmetry”)1:

Table 5.1
Fictional levels “Real” (historical) levels
PRIMARY TEXT: ZERO TEXT (1) “Accepted” levels
underground history is a faithful and
(morlocks)* verifiable narrative of reality in
Yancy, the charismatic its objective progress
President, and the war are Cold War is an objective,
real; Americans are undisputable menace
dispossessed due to the war
SECONDARY TEXT: ZERO TEXT (2) Alternative levels
surface history is a technically
(ehloi) reproducible product, a
Yancy is a simulacrum; the regulative device of textual
war is a mass media practises, the instrument of
simulation. Americans are governments and cliques
exploited by the Yance-men, Cold War is a power system
who are ultimately in which legitimates business,
cahoots with the Eastern Bloc control, repression, etc.
*Here it is necessary to indicate the textual references to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine which
are quite important in shaping the narrative fictional levels and the topography of The Penul-
timate Truth; Dick inverted Wells’ opposition between the morlocks — the subhuman and
predatory descendants of the working class — living and proliferating underground, and the
ehloi — the effete offspring of the upper and middle classes — who graze on the garden-like
surface, waiting to be hunted by the morlocks. The inversion turns the lower classes in their
underground shelters into powerless subjects, exploited and cheated by the greedy and cynical
inhabitants of the georgic surface.
122 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

The issue of history-manufacturing, embodied in the activity of Gottlieb

Fischer and the Yance-men (whose scientifically organized and “authorized”
forging of historical evidences clearly derives from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four) is coupled in this novel with the issue of one-way communication, of
the modality of the circulation of historical discourses and consciousness in
the U.S. mass-media civilization of the sixties, as already discussed in
Boorstin’s 1962 essay The Image, especially with reference to the 1960 presi-
dential elections (51–3).2 Here Dick issues (not in an overt way, but without
the ambiguities of The Man in the High Castle) a remarkably negative judgment
on America: his deconstruction of the mass-media circulation of discourse
ends up with the bitter awareness that all the government tells people is just
a lie, or better, an irredeemably penultimate truth. The U.S. political system
is called in doubt well before the Watergate scandal: Cold War is an useful
threat which may scare Americans and force them to accept whatever is con-
venient to the industrial-military complex.
Also the third novel of the trio, Now Wait for Last Year, has a strong
political content, though it does not seem to be directly related to the current
U.S. affairs of 1963, the year it was written; it was completed by the beginning
of December, not many days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but
no elements of the story seem to refer to the Dallas event. Yet Robinson pro-
posed a historical reading of the novel by putting it in connection with the
Vietnam war (Robinson 78–9); it is true that Wait depicts “the grim world
of war economy in service of conquest” (Robinson 79), but the historical-
political subtext is not contemporary, as the critic suggests. It actually refers
to a then recent past, as Dick himself explained to Rickman:
In some ways I was quite an admirer of Mussolini. He’s the basis for
Gino Molinari in Now Wait for Last Year .... I think Mussolini was a very,
very great man. But the tragedy for Mussolini was he fell under Hitler’s
spell. But then so did many others. In a way you can’t blame Mussolini for
that ... [Rickman 1988, 142].
The plot of the novel — albeit set in 2055 — parallels the history of Italy
and Germany during World War II, moving it to a sfnal future with aliens
and space travel. In the novel Gino Molinari, aka The Mole, is the leader of
Earth, unified by the UNO; the Mole is a charismatic (and rather authori-
tarian) ruler who allies himself with the first alien visitors, the Lilistarians,
who are at war with another race, the insect-like Reegs. Molinari’s choice,
biased by the similarity between humans and the people from Lilistar
(explained with Earth being an ancient colony of Lilistar which lost contact
with the mother planet and then memory of its real origins), turns out to be
a terrible mistake: the Lilistarians are cold and cruel imperialists, and the
Reegs just want to defend themselves; moreover, notwithstanding what war
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 123

propaganda tells people on Earth and Lilistar, the Reegs are winning the war.
Molinari desperately tries to stave off Lilistar’s increasing demands, and to
negotiate a separate peace with the Reegs: a very dangerous situation, as the
Lilistarians could easily liquidate Molinari, occupy Earth and then use humans
as forced labor in their industries.
Though there is a striking similarity with the plight of Italy in the Second
World War, Dick’s reference to Mussolini is actually mixed up. It is true that
the Duce made a fatal mistake when he decided to declare war on France and
the British Empire in June 1940, having allied himself with Nazi Germany in
May 1939; Mussolini mistakenly thought that after the defeat of France, the
victory of Germany was a matter of days or weeks, and that Italy could reap
much with little effort. The cynical comment of the Duce about his decision
was: “I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference
as a man who has fought” (Badoglio 37, translation mine). When it was clear
that the war would not be short and painless (especially after 1942, when
things got remarkably worse for the Axis powers), Mussolini did not change
his mind, and remained faithful to Nazi Germany and his disciple Adolph
Hitler till his death in April 1945; the alliance with Germany only ended
when the King, Victor Emanuel III, seeing that the war was lost, decided to
switch sides in summer 1943; Mussolini was dismissed as prime minister (his
formal role in the Italian state), and immediately arrested, while the King
negotiated an armistice with the Allies, who had already landed in Sicily. The
fact that Mussolini subsequently accepted to become the head of a Quisling
government in Northern Italy (the Repubblica Sociale di Salò) proves that he
never changed his mind about the alliance with the Nazi regime.3
However, the history of Italy in World War II offered Dick a complex
and tragic historical background that allowed him to write a story of intrigue
and tragedy, which also included a religious subtext where Molinari is a Christ-
like figure ready to sacrifice his own life to save humankind (quite different
from the historical Benito Mussolini). The novel however does not only deal
with political issues, but with a troubled marriage, that of the protagonist,
Eric Sweetscent, and his estranged wife Kathy (something which is quite com-
mon in Dick’s oeuvre but is remarkably absent in the other two novels); with
a deadly synthetic drug, JJ-180, which causes addiction and moves people
back and forward in time; with nostalgia, as Kathy’s job is to reproduce Wash-
ington as it was in 1935 for Eric’s employer, Virgil Ackerman (who, like Leo
Bulero in Stigmata, also produces JJ-180).4
One might criticize Dick’s idea of a good ruler, either by showing how
his perception of Mussolini was blurred (and not very detailed), or by pointing
out that all the characters who belong to that category (Molinari in Now Wait
for Last Year, Leo Bulero in Stigmata, Glen Runciter in Ubik, etc.) ultimately
124 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

derive from Dick’s substitute paternal figure, Herb Hollis (Sutin, 50–5), the
owner and manager of the record and radio shop where the writer worked in
the late 1940s. One thing is portraying the decent and humane employer that
treated adolescent Phil like a son (something he badly needed in that phase
of his life), another thing is believing that the owner of a multinational cor-
poration or the autocratic ruler of a whole planet may behave as a father;
paternalism is a dangerous option in politics. Darko Suvin criticized this when
he wrote that this is “Dick’s permanent ideological type that I would call ‘the
good ruler,’ or finding the good in the bad ruler” and complained that this
attitude is “illusory and misleading” (Suvin 2002, 377; cf. also 393). One
cannot escape the feeling that this problem is connected with another issue
Suvin raised in the same article, that is, Dick’s “taboo on large industry, indus-
trial workers, and the workings of high finance” (Suvin 2002, 392), because
Dick lacked the experience of working in a big industry or corporation; he
derived his depiction of leadership from his personal experience in a shop and
a repair laboratory.
Yet what Dick lacked in direct experience of the powerful and their envi-
ronment, he could compensate by reading history books; and we know that
historia may be, as Cicero said, magistra vitae, but in postmodernist fiction it
may be magistra artium as well. Much of the description of power struggle in
Simulacra comes from the history books Dick had read while researching The
Man in the High Castle. The history of Hitler’s rise to power was surely in his
mind when he conjured up the character of Bertold Goltz in Simulacra, a
demagogue who apparently opposes the USEA government with his paramil-
itary organization The Sons of Job (clearly inspired by Fascist Blackshirts, or
MVSN, and Nazi SA, or Brownshirts), but actually is part of a secret council
that controls the First Lady, Nicole Thibodeaux (actually a young actress cho-
sen because she resembles the long-dead First Lady).
However, the common element of these three novels which is really rel-
evant to our discussion is not the issue of political power in general. What
will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter is another key element that
plays such an important role in the three novels that we are allowed to read
them as variations on a theme, that of time travel; a narrative device which
is another important application of the principle of ontological uncertainty,
with conspicuous and so far uncharted political underpinnings. Creating hal-
lucinations through drugs or virtual realities or mass-media simulation may
alter the present; but Dick envisioned a future in which it is the past that may
be changed.
Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” were written
in early 1940, when the German philosopher and critic was in Vichy France,
and could be handed over to the Gestapo because he was a German political
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 125

refugee, a Marxist, and a Jew. When he wrote in his Theses that “[o]nly that
historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is
firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he
wins” (Benjamin 257), he was not just presenting his readers (of whose exis-
tence Benjamin was not sure, as the text was only published well after his
death) with a striking hyperbole to make his abstract theoretical point; he
was talking about his threatened life, which ended abruptly only a few months
later. Benjamin was well aware that if there is a spark of hope in the past, the
expectation of a Messianic regeneration to end the evils of history (Benjamin
256), that spark must be totally extinguished by those who aim at totalitarian
power. Totalitarianism is not just a form of total control on the present; as
another leftist writer knew, totalitarian power means also the ability to rewrite
the past, because “who controls the past controls the future, who controls the
present controls the past” (Orwell 197).
In these three novels the control of the past is not something that is
achieved, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, by retroactively altering the traces of the
past, be they letters or newspapers, documents or records, as Winston Smith
does in the Minitrue; Dick ups the ante by showing how the traditional sci-
ence-fictional device of the time machine may be applied to a radical remaking
of the past, so that neither the living nor the dead will be safe. This is what
happens in the first novel of the trio in chronological order of completion,
The Simulacra.
One of the narrative threads of this multiple-plot and -foci narrative is
pivoted upon a daring hi-tech military project to be carried out by means of
the von Lessinger time machine, which should enable the Ge élite to correct
such historical mistakes as the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany, a
stain on the otherwise spotless façade of the USEA. “Days of Barbarism − that
was the sweet-talk for the Nazi period of the middle part of the previous cen-
tury, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled” (27);
once Germany has been phagocyted by the U.S., the ruling élite feels that
those (not presentable) days must be erased by changing the course of
history, as we can infer from Nicole’s conversation with the Prime Minister
of Israel (44–50). The time machine brings Hermann Goering back from the
past, so that the Ges may put a proposition to him (45): the USEA will
exchange the military technology of 2050 which will allow the Nazi armies
to defeat the Allies for the life of all the Jews imprisoned in the extermination
camps (48). If the operation will succeed, the Ge will add a total control on
the past to the total control on reality assured by the mass media technology
(including the management of such simulacra as der Alte or Nicole).
The operation is opposed by Bertold Goltz, who is a Jew, because he
thinks that the Nazis will exterminate the Jews anyway. One cannot negotiate
126 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the life of the Jews with the creators of Auschwitz, because “...the objective
in the war for the Nazis was the extermination of World Jewry; it was not
merely a by-product” (124). I have already argued that the Ge oligarchy in
the novel cannot understand that the irrational element in Nazism is not a
secondary aspect, but is deeply ingrained in Hitler’s Reich, because the ruling
class of the USEA has been infected from the start by inequalitarianism,
authoritarianism, and an intellectual arrogance preventing it from perceiving
the deep nature of Nazism, something Dick had already grasped in The Man
in the High Castle. Bringing back Goering from the past will unleash a con-
tagious form of insanity which will in turn unleash the final slaughter; this
is Dick’s own way to tell us (as he had already done in High Castle) that the
winners of World War II have come to resemble the losers. Something quite
similar to the “Nazi thuggery” Dick had described in Castle will wipe out the
ruling élite of the USEA, so that the Nazi regime can be said to play the role
of a distorted mirror image of the rulers of the futuristic America: both are
enthralled by a morbid fascination with violence, murder, and death.
The Ges had been forewarned, though, by the inventor of the time
machine: “Von Lessinger was right in his final summation: no one should go
near the Third Reich. When you deal with psychotics you’re drawn in; you
become mentally ill yourself ” (46). This warning might be read as something
more than the recommendation to avoid a quarantined area of the past,
infected by madness, violence and irrational destructive drives; it may be read
as a warning about the incontrollable ontological uncertainty that may be
unleashed once the past may be changed, thus altering the chains of causes
and effects which tie it to the present — and the future. What is metaphorical
in Orwell becomes literal here, as it often happens in science-fiction. When
Wilder Pembroke, one of the commanders of the National Police suggests to
bring an Einsatzgruppe (one of the Nazi commando) to the present, so that
they can dispose of the management of a German corporation which is oppos-
ing the government (88), Dick seems to be suggesting us (even if Pembroke’s
plan will not be carried out) that the consequences of time (and history)
manipulation may easily get out of control; destruction from a barbaric past
may infect the purportedly civilized present. Nicole objects that “we’re too
modern, too civilized for massacres now” (88), but her words assume a bitterly
ironic flavor when we think that a massacre ends the novel, and that the mod-
ern and civilized Americans of the USEA will use nuclear weapons against
their fellow countrymen (209), in a final large-scale outburst of “Nazi thug-
gery.”
Time travel and its paradoxes had been explored and exploited by other
science-fiction writers before Dick; one might mention one of the most vir-
tuosic examples of this sub-genre, Fritz Leiber’s novelette The Big Time (1958)
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 127

and other short stories included in the cycle of the Change Wars, where a
temporal conflict rages between two factions, the Snakes and the Spiders; each
faction strives to change the outcome of certain key historical events according
to a plan which is so vast and complex that the soldiers never know what the
ultimate purpose of their actions will be. In one of the stories in the cycle,
“No Great Magic” (1963), a group of actors belonging to the Snakes is sent
to Elizabethan England to perform Macbeth for Queen Elizabeth I, apparently
to persuade her not to have Mary Stuart executed; but Elizabeth is then
revealed to be a substitute of the real queen, who has been replaced several
times by look-alikes sent by the Snakes or the Spiders. Such was the instability
that the idea of time-travel used as a weapon could bring to, that Leiber felt
he had to somewhat curb this principle of ontological uncertainty, by intro-
ducing the Law of the Conservation of Reality in The Big Time, which is so
enunciated by one of the characters at the beginning of the novelette: “when
the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust, barely enough
to admit the new data” (Leiber 23).5
Unsurprisingly, Dick’s first novel to extensively deal with time travel and
the manipulation of history (meaning res gestae, not historia rerum gestarum)
was written in 1959 and published in 19606; it is Dr. Futurity, a hastily written
expansion of a 1954 novelette, “Time Pawn.” The expansion was radical,
because Dick told his literary agent in a letter that he had “put in ideas not
already there” (SL1 51), and he may have been influenced by Leiber’s novelette.
The complicated plot is pivoted upon a 22nd-century physician who is kid-
napped via time travel and brought to the 25th century, where his medical
competence and tools (lost in the intervening centuries) may save a dying
woman. Summarizing the rest of the plot would take too much time; suffice
it to say that in the 25th-century society non-white people hold the power,
and a political leader of Native American descent, Corith, wants to prevent
the genocide of American Indians by getting back to the 16th century and
killing Francis Drake during his expedition to Nova Albion in 1579.7 This
should discourage England from colonizing North America; but Corith is
killed before he can hit Drake, and this is the effect of a counter-plot organized
by another leader of 25th-century America, Stenog, who reached the place
of Drake’s landing before Corith thanks to the time-travel device. We might
add that Drake himself might be Stenog or have been replaced by Stenog just
to convey how baroque is the plot of this “neat but dull time paradox history”
(Butler 2007, 47).
However, the idea of a direct manipulation of history resurfaced just
four years later in The Simulacra, as we have seen, in the subplot to save the
Jews by negotiating with the Nazi regime, though the plan fails in the end,
and Goering must be executed (190). But something else ties Simulacra to
128 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Futurity; like Corith and Stenog, Bertold Goltz uses time travel to play his
game of political intrigue (156–9). He appears wherever and whenever he
wants thanks to the Von Lessinger principle, achieving a sort of ubiquity.
We ought to get back, Nicole thought, to Goltz’s babyhood and destroy
him. But Goltz had anticipated them. He was long since back there, at the
time of his birth and onward into childhood. Guarding himself, training
himself, crooning over his child-self; through the von Lessinger principle
Bertold Goltz had become, in effect, his own parent. He was his own con-
stant companion, his own Aristotle, for the initial fifteen years of his life,
and for that reason the younger Goltz could not be surprised [158].
Actually Goltz is killed by Wilder Pembroke (198–9), who will in turn
be killed by psi-empowered pianist Kongrosian in the final massacre, so what
Goltz told Nicole in an earlier episode, “you have nothing under control”
(157), applies to him too. Direct manipulation of past events via time travel
is a metaphor of absolute, unrestrained power, also symbolized by the image
of a man who is “his own parent”; such an absolute power should ensure total
control (and an absolute patriarchal domination, one should add),8 but the
dream of total control (which is the aim of the USEA as the hyper-techno-
logical state) fails due to the irrational element of destruction (which is often
self-destruction, as in Kongrosian’s case) that cannot be eliminated or con-
trolled. Goltz, the man who could not be surprised, the master game-player,
is surprised in the end, and this is not just a cheap trick to entertain readers9;
it is Dick’s own way to suggest that no dream of total control can be successful.
Thuggery leads to more thuggery, manipulation leads to more manipulation,
and there is no law of the Conservation of Reality to protect Dickian characters
from the consequences of their plots and conspiracies tampering with the
past. Where ontological uncertainty reigns, the conservation of reality is only
wishful thinking.
On the other hand, since it is unattractive power-hungry characters that
dream of total control on space and time, the failure of their plans is good
news to the little men who do not aim at absolute power, but at staying alive
in the chaos unleashed by great power struggles. This happens in a counter-
historical context in The Man in the High Castle, with Juliana, Frank, and
Baynes/Wegener surviving the two conspiracies to kill general Tedeki and to
liquidate Hawthorne Abendsen; it happens again in a science-fictional futur-
istic context with the group of little men and women watching the civil war
raging on TV screens in the last pages of Simulacra (218–20). Maybe
humankind will be ultimately wiped out and the Chuppers — the Nean-
derthalians who reappeared in Northern California possibly due to nuclear
fallout — have good reasons to rejoice in the last pages of the novel; they are
forefathers, but if Homo sapiens manages to commit a collective suicide, they
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 129

may as well be our progeny, as Nat Flieger suggests (220). However, this is
only a possibility, because “time will tell us which it is” (220): the little men
could survive the massacre of their leaders and build a different society on
the ruins of the USEA. The ending of The Simulacra is cautiously open.
Time manipulation returns in Now Wait For Last Year, surely not one of
Dick’s most linear novels. Completed four months after The Simulacra, it
could have been written immediately before or after The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch,10 another novel where time-slips turn the plot into a diegetic
maze, with a complex interplay of prolepses and analepses which are fictionally
materialized by the sfnal device of the hallucinogenic drug Chew-Z, which
also allows a ghostly form of time-travel (Ch. 7). The title itself of Wait tells
us that the ordinary chronological succession has been radically subverted in
this narrative.
Here we have a sfnal drug, JJ-180, which is first introduced in the third
chapter by Christian Plout, a taxi driver (and drug dealer) in Tijuana. JJ-180
is a new, unknown drug, and the nonchalant attitude of Plout and his cus-
tomers (including Kathy Sweetscent) to it reminds us of the reckless and
enthusiastic experimentation with mind-altering drugs which was taking place
in the early 1960s (one might mention Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s
Harvard Psilocybin Project, which started in 1960). The drug in the novel is
described as “tempogogic,” inasmuch as “it alters your perception of time in
particular” (33).
The experiences caused by JJ-180 could be travels to a more or less far
future, or hallucinatory FSRs: I have in any case mapped them in the following
table.

Table 5.2
JJ-180 experience Character involved Pages Chapter(s)
Kathy disappears, but her Kathy Sweetscent, 41–2 4
experience with the drug is Chris Plout, Bruce Himmel,
not described Marm Hastings
Kathy goes back to the Kathy Sweetscent 95–103 7–8
United States in 1935
Eric goes to 2065, ten years Eric Sweetscent 131–5 10
in the future, and is almost
cheated by Don Festenburg
Eric travels to a future time, Eric Sweetscent 146–170 11–1
but then he discovers that it
is an alternate future, the
future of a different present
where Molinari did not enter (cont. next page)
130 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Table 5.2 (continued)

into an alliance with the
Lilistar Empire; he has
troubles in getting back to
his year (2055)2
Eric goes to 2065 to check Eric Sweetscent 195–203 14
that his wife cannot recover
from the brain-damaging
effects of JJ-180

Much of the complication of the novel lies in the fact that readers are
first told that JJ-180 causes hallucinations (which explains why Chris Plout
cannot see the other people in the apartment after he has taken the drug,
while the others can see him [41]), as the alteration of Kant’s “categories of
perception” (33) mentioned by one of the characters does not necessarily entail
a modification of objective reality. But things change when we are shown
what Kathy Sweetscent sees in her trip to the past in chapters 7 and 8, during
her second experience with JJ-180, and a regressive movement back to the
past starts (95–9) until the radio of the flying cab she is traveling on receives
an old soap opera, The Story of Mary Marlin (99), broadcast from 1935 to
1952, and she understands that the drug actually brought her to the 1930s,
so that it is not just a tempogogic drug, but a substance which allows time
travel.
Having seen what Dick’s treatment of time travel and the manipulation
of history had been in The Simulacra, it is not surprising that Kathy imme-
diately sees her trip to the past as an opportunity to manipulate history. She
considers setting up a savings account with a small sum which would become
huge by 2055; to call President Roosevelt and warn him about Pearl Harbor;
to talk him out of building the atom bomb (100). Then she realizes that he
her future boss, Virgil Ackerman, the owner of the corporation she and Eric
work for, is just a small boy in 1935, and this “gives [her] enormous power
over him” (100). She considers sending information about the future that may
make him richer and more powerful than he already is; she settles on sending
Virgil a transistor taken from the cab via mail, enclosing this message in the
envelope: “This is a radio part from the future, Virgil Ackerman. Show it to
no one but save it until the early 1940s. Then take it to Westinghouse Corp.
or to General Electric or any electronics (radio) firm. It will make you rich.
I am Katherine Sweetscent. Remember me for this, later on” (102). Kathy
thinks that this move will insure (or determine) Virgil’s “economic future and
therefore her own” (102); it is a crude attempt to alter the past to control the
future and achieve economic power (because Virgil should reward Kathy for
revealing the secret of a future technology ahead of its time).
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 131

It is not important that her attempt ultimately fails because when the
effect of the drug is over everything which was brought from the future gets
back there, so that Virgil received only an empty envelope in 1935. It is the
impulse to manipulate the past in order to control the future that connects
this sequence of the novel to The Simulacra.
The same should be said about Eric’s trips to the future, also caused by
JJ-180; but in his first, involuntary time-slip (he has been given the drug
behind his back by his wife, who wishes to addict him too; the two are the
typical Dickian couple torn by marital struggle) Eric does not try to manip-
ulate the future. On the contrary, Dan Festenburg, one of the Mole’s con-
sultants, tries to manipulate him, by offering him an antidote to JJ-180 (the
drug immediately addicts its users and has huge damaging effects on the brain)
in exchange for something which remains unspecified because Eric rejects the
deal (132). Festenburg tries to make Eric believe that now he is the UN Sec-
retary by showing him a copy of The Times (133) and wearing a uniform sim-
ilar to the one usually donned by Molinari; it is interesting that he tries to
cheat Eric by using a fake copy of the same newspaper which was altered by
Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Though we are not told what Festenburg wants from Eric, it is quite
simple to understand that — since Eric comes from what Festenburg thinks
the past — the ruthless and power-hungry consultant wants to manipulate that
past through Eric, who is the surgeon assisting the Mole in his periodic health
crises. Eric could easily kill Molinari, thus paving the way for Festenburg’s
rise to power.11 Once again, by manipulating the past (even by proxy) one can
control the present — and the future.
But in his third and longest JJ-180-induced travel, Eric discovers that
the future that he has visited is not his future; in fact, it does not really stem
from the events taking place in the 2055 that is his present. A history lesson
delivered by an employee of Hazeltine Corporation (the firm, owned by Virgil
Ackerman, which produces JJ-180) in the “future” (150) makes it clear that
the past of the world Eric is visiting is not the one he has lived: The Mole
signed “the Era of Common Understanding Protocols with the reegs” (150)
and then Earth and the reegs defeated the Lilistar empire. Molinari was sub-
sequently killed by a racist fanatic, because he let the reegs immigrate and
settle on Terra (151).12
This explains one of the mysteries of the novel, the corpses that Molinari
keeps in refrigerated caskets under the White House, which look exactly like
the UN secretary (106): they are not robants, that is, android simulacra of the
politician, but alter-egos of the Mole coming from parallel universes (152)
that he reached thanks to JJ-180, as Willy K., an alien from Betelgeuse, tells
Eric (154).13 In Eric’s final meeting with Molinari (183–6), the world leader
132 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

explains that he is the third Mole, because the original Gino was killed and
replaced by another, coming from a different alternate world; the second Mole
dies at the end of chapter 12 due to a heart attack, and is replaced by the
younger and healthier Molinari that Eric meets at the end of the novel. The
Mole takes advantage of the fact that JJ-180 does not really transfer its users
to their past or future, but to parallel universes with alternate histories; this
enables the Mole to recruit his less successful alter-egos, the Molinaris who
did not manage to become UN secretary or were ousted. Since the parallel
universes are not synchronous, Molinari can always find some unsuccessful
and younger version of himself that can replace him and resist the crushing
psychophysical pressure put on him by the unfortunate alliance with Lilistar;
moreover, by recruiting his failed alter-egos, the Mole does not risk altering
the course of history in other universes.
Two remarks should be made now. First, the revelation that JJ-180 does
not allow “vertical” time travel, but “horizontal” trips to alternate histories,
eliminates the risk of those paradoxes that may easily be generated by visiting
the future or the past (those paradoxes curbed by Leiber’s Law of the Con-
servation of Reality); but this “stabilizing” effect is countered, in the archi-
tecture of the novel, by its strengthening characters’ and readers’ uncertainty
about what is really going on — once again, we have ontological uncertainty,
or the Game of the Rat. There are many coups de théâtre in this novel, which
was aimed at the sf paperback market, after all; we should mention one con-
nected with the dynamics of the apparent time-slips generated by the drug,
that is, the moment when, in the middle of his second experience with JJ-
180, Eric thinks to be back to his own year, 2055 (157), only to discover that
he “failed to make it to his own time” (158); he is in 2056, after Gino Molinari
has broken off his alliance with Lilistar. This twist in the tale reminds us of
the difficulty to get back to one’s own world in Eye in the Sky (Ch. 2), or the
deceptive returns to normality experienced by Leo Bulero while under Chew-
Z in Stigmata (Ch. 7); it is indeed part of Dick’s game of the Rat. Uncertainty
is then heightened by the discovery that the 2056 where Eric is stranded is
not the future of his present.14
Second, if JJ-180 takes its users to alternate histories, not to their “real”
future or past, Molinari, who has been using it for a long time, has thus
acquired an extensive knowledge of a series of “what-ifs”; he can see— not just
conjecture — what the consequences might be of certain choices he or others
made or will make, as if he was shown the materialization of those thought
experiments so often practiced by historians. Visiting the alternate histories
of universes where his alter-ego failed, for example, warned him about the
negative consequences of his decisions. Molinari cannot change the past or
foretell his future, but he may figure what the right course of action should
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 133

be based on the alternate histories he visits. Though he is no time-traveling

superman like Bertolt Goltz in Simulacra, his abnormally wide knowledge of
historical possibilities allows him a certain power of “indirect foreknowledge,”
so that he may tell Eric “I had it all worked out. Nothing by accident” (183).
The Mole’s ability to access other worlds differentiates him from Goltz
and makes him similar to Palmer Eldritch; his ability to predict future events
and prepare plans in advance can also be found both in Goltz and in Eldritch,
but while Goltz and Eldritch fail to prevent their assassination, Molinari man-
ages to stave off crises and to thwart Lilistar’s attempts to totally subjugate
Earth. It is not simply a matter of sloppy writing (how could Goltz miss Pem-
broke’s raid if he had already dodged countless attempt to liquidate him?) or
fatalism (Eldritch seems to have resigned to his death in his last conversation
with Barney): the destiny of those two characters is determined by a moral
judgment. Eldritch and Goltz ultimately fail because Dick sees them as vil-
lains, while Molinari, with all his faults, is a positive character. Suvin’s mistrust
of Dick’s “good rulers” is understandable, but such figures exist in this and
other novels that we are going to read (Ubik, Sigmata, but also Flow My Tears,
The Policeman Said) and must be interpreted as such.
Dick actually saw Molinari as a mythical figure; when he compares his
troubles to Eric’s, he uses a meaningful image: “One of us ... suffering unbear-
ably on the private level, hidden from the public, small and unimportant.
The other suffering in the grand Roman public manner, like a speared and
dying god.... The microcosm and the macro” (51). The “small and unimpor-
tant individual” is Eric with his marital agony — the typical Dickian little
man; while the other is Molinari, ruler of Earth, suffering from a heart con-
dition (which may seem bogus but ultimately kills him in chapter 12). The
hint at a speared and dying god is explained later in the novel, when Eric
meets himself in his second JJ-180 experience (actually his alter-ego in an
alternate universe), and his 2056 counterpart says “Molinari is Arthur with
the spear wound in his side” (168), thus equating the Mole with the archetypal
good king of the Arthurian legends.
This is not enough to say that Wait is a rewriting of the Parsifal/Perceval
legend, though some elements could be read as hinting at that legend: Eric
is a sort of not-very-competent Parsifal (he is a doctor, hence a healer, and
Parsifal’s aim is to heal the dying king) looking for the grail that may cure he
and his wife (the antidote) and the truth that may explain the mystery of the
corpses in cryogenic suspension under the White House; Freneksy could be
an avatar of Klingsor, the evil enemy of Amfortas (the equivalent of Arthur
in Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera that Dick was surely familiar with); Molinari’s
replacement by his younger selves after his death(s) may be a science-fictional
anamorphic image of the symbolism of death and regeneration which under-
134 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

pins the Arthurian legend, especially in the part about Parsifal/Perceval and
the quest for the grail, according to the anthropological interpretation made
famous by Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Though The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch will be analyzed in Chap-
ter 7, a comparison between a scene in Wait and another in Stigmata may help
us to understand a fundamental difference between the Mole and Palmer
Eldritch. The similarities between these two scenes seem to have escaped com-
mentators so far, but they are blatant. In Chapter 4 of Wait (46–51) Eric is
forced to live again an unpleasant scene of his marriage with Kathy; it is a
sort of mental time-slip which brings him back to the moment when his wife
deliberately erased one of the tapes in his collection to set up a particularly
nasty form of emotional blackmail. Unlike the other time-slips we have found
in this novel, this one is not produced by JJ-180, neither it is caused by some
psi-power that the Mole may be endowed with (Dick takes care to rule out
this explanation [46]); it seems to be simply triggered by Molinari’s sheer
will-power, and his deep understanding of Eric’s personality.
This scene, focused on marital struggle, is quite similar to what happens
to Barney Mayerson, one of the main characters in Stigmata, once he takes
Chew-Z in chapter 10 (150–7): the drug brings him back to two episodes of
his past, a quarrel with his wife Emily (which Barney has divorced, though
he regrets this decision) and a meeting with Emily and her new husband
Richard Hnatt. That the latter episode is placed in the past is evident inasmuch
as Barney wakes up in Roni Fugate’s apartment (153), the same scene described
at the beginning of the novel (7); Dick even repeated Roni’s description almost
verbatim (“He saw an unfamiliar girl who slept on, breathing lightly through
her mouth, her hair a tumble of cottonlike white, shoulders bare and smooth”
[153]).
In both novels the protagonist is brought back to his past. But the atti-
tude of the two characters who supervise this time-slip (or materialized analep-
sis) in each novel are quite different. The Mole wants to know the reason why
Eric almost committed suicide in a critical moment of his life, the quarrel
which is then lived again under Molinari’s control (45–6). He does not want
to change Eric’s past, nor wants Eric to change his own past. He is much like
a self-taught psychoanalyst: while Eric relives his painful confrontation with
his wife, Molinari comments on it, sympathizing with Eric in a crucial
moment (49). He subsequently analyses Eric’s and Kathy’s behavior, and then
suggests a possible therapy: a new job. “How would you like to be attached
to my staff? ... You wouldn’t be running into her all the time. This might be
a beginning. A start toward prying the two of you apart” (51).
On the other hand, when Palmer Eldritch intervenes in Barney Mayer-
son’s disheartening repetition of past experiences, his attitude is quite different.
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 135

When Barney fails to interact with his wife and expresses once again his dis-
content with her and her job (vase-making), Eldritch chides him: “Mayerson,
you’re using your time badly. You’re doing nothing but repeating the past.
What’s the use of my selling you Chew-Z? ... I’ll give you ten more minutes ...
So you better figure out very damn fast what you want and if you understand
anything finally” (152).
In the second part of Barney’s experience with Chew-Z he goes to Emily
and Richard Hnatt’s apartment, and pointlessly tries to persuade her to divorce
Richard and remarry him. When this attempt fails, Eldritch reappears, super-
imposing his features on Richard’s face (and hand), and he coaxes Barney into
trying again, though he cannot persuade Emily to get back to her former hus-
band. What Eldritch says at the end of the experience, when the effects of
Chew-Z are almost over, is revealing: “Don’t give up ... Remember: this is
only the initial time you’ve made use of Chew-Z; you’ll have other times later.
You can keep chipping away until eventually you get it” (157).
Eldritch — unlike Molinari — wants Barney to believe that the past can
be changed. Molinari’s approach to the matter is quite different, and it is
expressed in a straightforward fashion in his last meeting with Eric: “Has
using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don’t know you’ve got
only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you
waiting for last year to come by again or something?” (186). The importance
of these words is underscored by the fact that they provide the title to the
novel (one which does not seem to have had a working title, so that Now Wait
for Last Year should be Dick’s own choice); and its main argument is that the
dreams of omnipotence fostered by Golden Age science-fiction, including the
idea of changing the past to improve the present, are sterile forms of wish-
fulfillment, which somewhat betray science-fiction’s mission to envision a
possible, viable, sustainable future.
Molinari tries to persuade Eric to live his own life by looking at the future
(not regretting his childhood, like Virgil Ackerman, whose yearning for the
past is embodied in Wash-35, the maniacally painstaking reproduction of Wash-
ington as it was in 1935 [27–9]), and this is more or less confirmed by the final
opinion of the cab whose advice has been asked by Eric; after describing his
plight, the possibility to remain with Kathy even if there is no hope of recovery
for her, or to leave her because staying “would mean no other life for [him]
beyond caring for her” (205), the cab answers that it would stay with her.
“To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such. I have to have
uniquely special easier conditions” (205). The final message of the novel is
that one has to face the difficulties of life, whatever they are, not to escape
them, possibly helped by drugs or dreams of a different past leading to a dif-
ferent and more pleasant present, one under “uniquely special easier conditions.”
136 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Behind this scene we may see Dick’s marital crisis with Anne, his third
wife. That he could not follow the advice of the cab and eventually divorced
Anne in 1966 is only one of the many contradictions of a most contradictory
man and artist. What is important for us readers and commentators is the
fact that the dream of changing the past is always fostered by negative char-
acters, such as Palmer Eldritch; hence, time travel and the direct manipulation
of the past to gain something or to strengthen one’s power is a typical activity
of Dick’s villains, from Goltz to the USEA government, to David Lantano.
We cannot say that Lantano is one of the main characters in The Penul-
timate Truth. In this novel the multi-foci and multi-plot narrative approach
is streamlined, so that there are only two main points of view, each belonging
to one of the two coexisting worlds: Nicholas St James is the one of the tankers
who live underground, while Joseph Adams belongs to the yance-men who
have sequestered the surface. We never see through Lantano’s eyes, and we
never partake his inner monologue; yet he is a more important character than
previous interpreters (including myself ) have realized so far.
Even a very perceptive reader like Robinson does not see Lantano as a
key character, but as an interpretive nuisance, betraying a structural fault of
the novel:
The interesting setting that I have described as a political metaphor
made literal [i.e., the two worlds of the underground and the surface],
becomes in the second half of the novel nothing more than the background
for an adventure concerning the character of David Lantano, a Cherokee
Indian chief who (like Goerring [sic!] in The Simulacra) has been scooped
out of the past by a time machine [Robinson 72–3].
Suvin, quoted by Robinson, backs up this judgment as he sees the plot
in the second half of the novel, pivoted upon Lantano and his intrigue, as a
Van Vogtian residual which mars “one of Dick’s potentially most interesting
books” (Suvin 1975, 17).
The first part of the novel is the one that depicts the system of mass
media simulation allowing the ruling elites to control the majority of the pop-
ulation, forced to live underground and build combat robots (the “leadies”)
that are actually used as servants by the upper classes living in their vast surface
demesnes. It is a rather transparent anamorphic image of a system of social
classes: the exploited lower classes under the exploiting upper classes is the
materialization of a traditional metaphor born in sociological analyses. Accord-
ing to Suvin and Robinson, Dick had set up a promising background for his
novel, but when he focused on Lantano and his machinations we have no
more than an adventure story — possibly something whose only purpose is to
entertain readers with the usual fireworks of turn-ups for the book.
But Lantano becomes a much more interesting figure if we connect him
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 137

with the direct manipulation of past events, one of Dick’s strategies to foster
ontological uncertainty, which goes beyond Orwell — who contented himself
with the manipulation of the records and traces of past events carried out in
the Ministry of Truth. That kind of manipulation is introduced in the first
half of The Penultimate Truth, when Stanton Brose, the Minister of the Inte-
rior,15 hatches a plot to incriminate a wealthy and powerful builder, Louis
Runcible, suspected of tipping the people in the underground shelters off
about the end of the war on the surface (43–50). Runcible does not do this
for humanitarian reasons; he simply wants to have more people escaping from
the ant-tanks so that the demand for housing keeps increasing. On the other
hand, Stanton Brose and the ruling class want to keep as many tankers under-
ground as possible, so that they can preserve their privileges, including their
vast rural demesnes. If, as Robinson seems to suggest, this novel is an example
of the triumph of capitalism (this being the title of the chapter of his mono-
graph which also deals with The Penultimate Truth), the political competition
between different sectors of a capitalistic economy is not such an indefensible
concept.
Brose’s strategy to have Runcible indicted and then convicted includes
the manipulation of the past by means of a time machine. There is a Precious
Relics Ordinance (48) which compels the owners of the demesnes or any other
portion of the Earth’s surface to hand in any major archaeological find to the
government; those who do not comply may be arrested and their possessions
requisitioned. So Brose plans to send some forged skulls and weapons, some
of them Terran, some of them non–Terran (92–3), six hundred years back to
the past; these would be evidence that aliens landed on Earth centuries before
Europeans settled in North America, fought against the natives and were
forced to leave the planet. The artifacts include skulls that should belong to
more evolved humanoids than Homo sapiens (93) and technologically
advanced weapons. Having been sent to the past, the artifacts would not just
look six hundred years old; they would “be six hundred years old” (95) when
Runcible will find them in the land he has purchased to build new residential
units, and would easily pass the carbon-14 test.
This plot has been overlooked by Robinson and Suvin, yet I think here
Dick goes well beyond what we may find in Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four
shows the scientifically managed production of fake evidence of historical
events, the manipulation of traces. The equivalent of this process in Dick’s
novel are the two fake documentaries shot by Gottlieb Fischer (Chapter 10),
the forerunner of the Yance-men: they deal with World War II, and present
two reconstructions of how things really went during that war that support
the propaganda of the Wes-Dem (USA and its Western Allies) and Pac-Peop
(USSR and the Warsaw Pact). The two versions of the documentary are called
138 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

A and B respectively; the former rehabilitates Hitler (72) and “proves” that
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was “a Communist agent. Under Party discipline”
(75); the latter “proves” that “the Allies [held] back the Normandy landings
for at least a year so that Germany [could] use all her armies on the Eastern
Front to defeat Russia” (78). Both versions are aimed at discrediting the enemy
of each bloc, and both are as bogus as the issues of The Times that Winston
Smith rewrites in Orwell’s novel.
But the time scoop in The Penultimate Truth does not produce fake evi-
dence; it produces authenticity— something that seems to have escaped the
attention of postmodern-oriented critics (e.g., many of those who contributed
to the second special issue of Science-Fiction Studies on Dick in 1988).16 It
allows the direct manipulation of the past, which is the ultimate form of power
and control. Joseph Adams immediately understands this, once Brose has
explained his plan.
We could shoot back scientific data, constructs of unfathomable value, to
civilizations in the past — formulae for medicines ... we could be of infinite
aid to former societies and peoples; just a few reference books translated
into Latin and Greek or Old English ... we could head off wars, we could
provide remedies that might halt the great plagues of the Middle Ages. We
could communicate with Oppenheimer and Teller, persuade them not to
develop the A-bomb and the H-bomb — a few film sequences of the war
that we just lived through would do that. But no. It’s to be for this, to con-
coct a fraud, one implement in a series of implements by which Stanton
Brose gains more personal power [96].

Adams imagines a good use of the time scoop as opposed to Brose’s eth-
ically questionable machination, yet one might ask what the “humanitarian”
manipulation of the past might bring to. Adam’s dream of benevolent omnipo-
tence may be as short-sighted as Brose’s small-scale plot to frame Runcible;
in any case, it resembles the apparently well-meaning tampering with the past
of the USEA government in The Simulacra, or Palmer Eldritch’s dubious
encouraging Barney Mayerson to relive and possibly correct his own past.
Unlike Molinari, who looks for a sustainable future among several more or
less dangerous alternatives, here we have the dream to delete an unpleasant
past and replace it with something more palatable to our sensibility — a power
dream nonetheless.
And, in the oldest tradition of science-fiction, a well-meaning scientific
discovery generates a monster: David Lantano. He is introduced in Chapter 7,
after about 1⁄4 of the story has been told. He is one of the Yance-men, like Joseph
Adams, a PR professional in charge of writing the speeches of the android pres-
ident, Talbot Yancy, which are broadcast via coaxial cable to the underground
shelters, being the main propaganda tool of the invisible ruling elite.
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 139

Since his first apparition, Lantano is a puzzling character. He is described

as a young man of Mexican descent (56), and this should explain his dark
skin; but after a few pages Lantano’s dark complexion is partly explained as
a radiation burn (59), the effect of reclaiming land for his demesne which is
still polluted by nuclear fallout. Also his age is uncertain: at times he may
seem young, or young and sick, but he may also look definitely old: “Time
curled and poked at him, tinkered insidiously at the metabolism of his body.
But — never totally overtook him. Never really won” (148). Lantano is a con-
tradictory being; old and young, but also sick and healthy: “It was as if he
oscillated; he swung into degeneration, into submission to the radioactivity
with which he had, twelve hours a day, to live ... and then, as it ate him, he
pulled himself back from the edge; he was recharged” (148). There is an enigma
about Lantano (150), greater than the enigma about Goltz, possibly as big as
the enigma about Palmer Eldritch.
Lantano’s strangeness has something to do with time. Joseph Adams
muses: “Time .... It’s as if a force that grips us all in a one-way path of power,
a total power on its part, none on ours, had for him divided: he is moved by it
and yet simultaneously, or perhaps alternately, he seizes it and grips it and then
he moves on to suit his own needs” (150). Lantano is actually a “collateral victim”
of the time scoop: a 15th-century Cherokee chief accidentally kidnapped from
his time by Brose’s scoop, and brought forward to 2025. There is no doubt
that Dick was recycling his old idea of the time-traveling Native American
chief Corith we found in Dr. Futurity, but here Lantano is not just a would-
be (and failed) avenger of the oppressed, he is also an ambiguous manipulative
figure like Goltz in The Simulacra. Lantano is revealed to have taken part in
Gottlieb Fischer’s making of the two fake documentaries on World War II:
he played the part of general Dwight D. Eisenhower (175), and was then the
model on which the face of Talbot Yancy, the artificial president, was molded.
The connection between Eisenhower and Yancy is not surprising inasmuch
as The Penultimate Truth is a remarkably composite novel, drawing from three
different short stories, one of which, “The Mold of Yancy” (1955) proposed
the idea of a bogus president and poked fun at the then current U.S. president
whose election owed much to the efforts of advertising agencies, with the then
innovative use of television ads (also used by his contender Adlai Stevenson);
Dick himself acknowledged that Yancy was based on president Eisenhower
(CS4 376).
The resemblance between Lantano and Yancy allows Dick to put another
twist in his tale, because the time-traveling Cherokee plans to replace the
android president, and start “visiting representative ant tanks” (182), like Win-
ston Churchill did in World War II. The fake president would then be replaced
by a real fake president, an actor replacing a machine. This is not a problem
140 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

for Lantano, as he has already declared that “[a]s a component in his makeup
... every world leader has had some fictional aspect. Especially during the last
century” (161–2). Thanks to the direct manipulation of history by means of
time travel, the USA of 2025 will be ruled by a Dwight D. Eisenhower looka-
like, who is also a Native American chief— a most paradoxical situation, and
a splendid example of Dick’s corrosive deadpan humor.
However, Lantano is not just the most striking figure of Dick’s satirical
portrait of his own country. The novel may well be, as Butler said, “Cold War
paranoia at its height,” hence connected to Dick’s production of the 1950s,
but Lantano’s time-traveling ability ties this novel to the most psychedelic
works of the 1960s, such as Stigmata; Lantano is a toned down version of
Palmer Eldritch, another ubiquitous and scheming arch-villain whose plot
stretches across different times — and ages (the characters in the novel unsur-
prisingly keep asking themselves and Lantano who or what he is, just like
Barney Mayerson and others do in Stigmata). But the time scoop allows Dick
to play those games with narrative time that we have already found in other
major novels, such as Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait for Last Year, or Ubik. In
this novel Lantano may utter this odd sentence: “You know who I am, Foote.
Or rather, who I have been in the past, in 1982. And who I will be” (175).
The present, the past and the future are all encompassed by Lantano’s ubiq-
uitous I, and this foreshadows the famous sentence we find in Ubik: “I am
Ubik. Before the universe was, I am ... I am. I shall always be” (190).
Lantano as a semi-divine being, then, like other Dickian characters —
be they evil like Palmer Eldritch, or good like Molinari? Lantano as another
demiurge, a manipulative second-rate god like the ones we shall meet in Chap-
ter 7? Or Lantano as one of the many embodiments we find in Dick’s fiction
of the ruthless, almost animal survival instinct or will to survive, which is
easily readable as a derivative of the Nietzschean will to power? I do not think
any of these interpretive lines can be discarded, but what I find more interesting
is reading Lantano as a character which produces the sort of ontological uncer-
tainty about what has been, not just about what is, which we have already
found in the two other novels we have analyzed in this chapter. The narrative
consequences of this condition make for the twisted, multi-layered, multi-
dimensional structure of the plot of these and other novels by Dick, and may
well explain much of their literary value. The radicalization of traditional nar-
rative devices of science-fiction allowed Dick to build destructured narratives
not so far from the not-wholly-consistent stories of postmodernist fiction
writers, from Vonnegut to Pynchon.
But there is another political aspect that we should consider, one that
Robinson does not seem to have taken into account when he distinguished
(33) between inessential time travel accomplished by means of machines (in
 5. Time Travels and Historical Manipulation 141

Penultimate and Simulacra), and artistically productive “private cosmos” time

travel (as in Wait)— misunderstanding what are the real effects of JJ-180.
Regardless of its being machine- or drug-produced, time travel may be a way
to achieve a sort of immortality, and this is what the will to survive demands;
and longevity may be a form of class struggle, as Fredric Jameson suggested
in his essay on immortality in George Bernard Shaw and Robert A. Heinlein
( Jameson 1996). It is in the latter, a writer towards whom Dick had ambivalent
feelings, that we find the apotheosis of an immortal and time-traveling hero,
Lazarus Long, who is only immortal in Methuselah’s Children (1941), but then
also travels backwards in time at the end of Time Enough for Love (1973),
where Lazarus has sexual intercourse with his mother, so that he is — like
Goltz in Simulacra— his own parent; he subsequently reappears in The Number
of the Beast (1980), The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), and To Sail
Beyond the Sunset (1987). According to Jameson, Lazarus assumes a paternal
function ( Jameson 1996, 337); but, as an alter-ego and ideological mouthpiece
of the author, he is also a patriarchal figure. Lazarus Long’s omnipresence and
invulnerability is a form of omnipotence, and it undoubtedly stems from the
dream of transcendence rooted in Golden Age science-fiction. It is just one
of the paradoxes or time-slips of this not-always-linear genre that Dick’s cor-
rosive criticism of time-travel as an instrument of manipulation and total
control — as represented by the three novels we have read — came well before
Heinlein added the ability of time-travel to Lazarus Long’s immortality.
However Dick’s final achievement along this line of development is not
to be found in one of his novels, but in one of his best short stories. Most of
Dick’s short fiction, as we know, was hastily produced in the 1950s, and it
includes scores of stories whose literary value is rather small; Dick himself was
well aware of this. But when his output decreased, in the 1960s and 1970s, it
is difficult to deny that quality replaced quantity. Among the eleven stories
Dick wrote and published after 1970 we have one of the bleakest yet most
fascinating time paradoxes ever written, “A Little Something for Us Tempu-
nauts” (1974) where Addison Doug, the commander of the first U.S. crew of
time-traveling explorers, deliberately causes a fatal accident on re-entry, thus
locking “an absolutely unyielding loop” (350), a closed train of events which
will endlessly and circularly repeat itself for ever and ever (the loop includes
the participation of the three tempunauts in their own solemn funeral [341–
2]). This nightmarish destiny, which resembles the dire real situation of the
group of characters in A Maze of Death (Ch. 7), is actually sought for by Addi-
son as a form of immortality; not individual, but collective.
He saw, in his head, himself in other parades too, and in the deaths of
many. But really it was one death and one parade. Slow cars moving along
the street in Dallas and with Dr. King as well ... He saw himself return
142 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

again and again, in his closed cycle of life, to the national mourning that he
could not and they could not forget. He would be there; they would always
be there; it would always be, and every one of them would return together
again and again forever. To the place, the moment, they wanted to be. The
event which meant the most to all of them.
This was his gift to them, the people, his country. He had bestowed
upon the world a wonderful burden. The dreadful and weary miracle of
eternal life [351–2].
If we do not forget that there is a dream of eternity in every empire (let
us not forget that Dick was familiar with Hitler’s idea of a Thousand Year
Reich), this is one of the most provocative images of the American Empire —
not the actual reality of the USA in any given time, but the myth of the
nation. An imperial myth of power and eternity, materialized thanks to an
original use of the old device of time travel whose political implications Dick
had already explored in his novels of the 1960s.
Yet the dismal miracle of eternal life does not completely hide the par-
ticular times that this story powerfully evokes: the funerals of John F. Kennedy
on November 25, 1963, and Martin Luther King on April 7, 1968 (to those
we could add Robert Kennedy’s funeral on June 8 of the same year). After the
death of president Kennedy, the assassinations and funerals of the other two
American leaders must have triggered a sense of déjà vu in Dick, which he
rendered perfectly in his short story. It is then a final paradox that these works
which depict the manipulation of the past through time travel, materializing
Benjamin’s fears “that even the dead will not be safe,” are deeply rooted in
the historical moment in which they were conceived, written, and published.
 Chapter 6

The Android Cogito: We Can

Build You and Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Golem stories are all hard telling”

Gustáv Meyrink

In his synoptic analysis of Dick’s major novels of the 1960s, Fredric Jame-
son underscored the importance of Descartes’ ontological investigation for a
better understanding of a key area in Dick’s fictional world, that of individual
consciousness, which in his opinion includes such major Dickian motifs as
androids and simulacra, empathy vs. the lack thereof, technology, enemies,
and the future ( Jameson 2005, 379). Jameson argues that the problem of
individual consciousness cannot be reduced to pop psychology: it must be
dealt with on a philosophical level. Dick’s doubts about identity (some of
which have been presented in Chapter 2, while others will be discussed here
and in the following chapters) are not far from the Cartesian doubt, which
posited a malin genie (“evil dæmon or genie”) which may cheat the inquiring
mind of the philosopher by presenting its senses with a complete illusion of
an external world — including other people — and an illusion of his own body.
It is a rather Dickian situation of ontological uncertainty, even if it appeared
in print in 1641 as Meditations in First Philosophy. Descartes solved the problem
by positing the human mind as something which doubts, that is, thinks: a
“thinking thing,” or res cogitans (Descartes wrote his philosophical essays in
Latin). You can doubt an external reality with all the people in it, you can
even doubt your own body; but how can you doubt, while doubting, that
there is something that is doubting, that is, thinking? That became the basis
of Cartesian ontology.
Dick, according to Jameson, went one step beyond. He did that by
putting artificial intelligence into the picture: once mental processes can be

143
144 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

technologically reproduced, or simulated, “what emerges at length is what I

will call the ‘android cogito’: I think, therefore I am an android” ( Jameson
2005, 374). Jameson then focuses on the scenes in Blade Runner (Ricley Scott’s
celebrated 1982 film based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?) in which people are tested to check whether they are androids,1 and
suggests that “the external issue of testing” is reversed “into a permanent rift
within self-consciousness itself ” ( Jameson 2005, 374): it is thus not coinci-
dental if the discussions about Blade Runner moved from the tested people or
replicants to the tester him- or itself, to understand “whether Rick Deckard ...
might not be an android himself ” ( Jameson 2005, 374).
Jameson’s argument is quite cogent inasmuch as Dick sees solipsism as
a suspicious condition, bordering on insanity. Descartes’ foundation of the
knowing (and doubting) subject on itself would not be satisfactory for the
author of “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (1980), a short story based on what
we might call a recreational use of virtual reality. The protagonist of the story,
Victor Kemmings, unexpectedly regains consciousness during a ten-year-long
interstellar journey. He should have traveled in cryosleep, as there is no space
(nor other vital resources) on board the ship; since the ship’s artificial intel-
ligence cannot repair the malfunction, Kemmings is doomed to remain con-
scious but paralyzed. To protect his sanity, the AI replays Kemmings’ memories
to him, but they are not at all pleasant, and he finds himself in the same sit-
uation of Barney Mayerson under Chew-Z in Stigmata (Ch. 7), re-living a
lifetime of failures and mistakes. The ship AI then asks Kemmings what he
wants most, and since his greatest wish is that the trip is over and he may
reach his destination, the AI constructs such a scenario for Kemmings and
repeatedly plays it to him for the next ten years. When the ship finally arrives
at its destination, Kemming cannot tell reality from virtual reality, and thinks
that his arrival is no more than another simulation: he is clinically insane.
Whenever characters are isolated in a solipsistic situation where the world
around them is no more than a backcloth, possibly something they themselves
have created, the result is terror and ultimately madness — not the “creative”
madness that we find in Clans, but reaching that dreadful condition in which
“nothing ever happens” (Time-Slip 143) to the psychotic again: the Tomb
World which so scared Manfred and Jack Bohlen (which reappears in the
eighteenth chapter of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, when John R.
Isidore plunges into it due to the shock at the androids’ cruel behavior).
Thinking alone makes me a thinking machine; an android, not a human
being.
The “android cogito” is part of the ontological uncertainty which dom-
inates Dick’s fiction. The characters of his novels and short stories may think
that someone is a real human being while s/he actually is an android (this
 6. The Android Cogito 145

already happens in Dick’s first published novel, Solar Lottery, where a remotely
controlled android pretending to be a human being, Keith Pellig, is built to
escape the bodyguards of the Quizmaster); but — which is a more genuinely
Dickian situation — they may discover that they are androids, robots, repli-
cants, electric ants, like Olham in “Imposter,” or Garson Poole in “The Electric
Ant.”2 This particular form of ontological uncertainty will guide us in a read-
ing of two novels, one of which is among the most famous Dick ever wrote,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as it was turned into the film which
made the writer really famous outside the sf ghetto, Blade Runner 3; the other
is not as famous, though I believe that it should be ranked among Dick’s best
literary achievements, We Can Build You.
We will start from the less famous work, because it should be read as an
important moment in the definition of the issue of the android cogito (no
wonder it was discussed by Jameson, who also connected it to Androids),
which will find its full development in the celebrated story of replicant-hunt-
ing cum philosophical inquiry. To do this we have to invert the chronological
order of publication. While Androids was completed in 1966 and published
in 1968, Build was sent to Dick’s agent in October 1962 and was probably
written immediately after The Man in the High Castle, though it only found
a publisher as a magazine novelette in 1969–70 (on Amazing, as “A. Lincoln,
Simulacrum”) and as a paperback novel in 1972. This ten-year delay tells us
that Build had a troubled story, and was not easily accepted by publishers.
Dick himself explains why:
[We Can Build You] essentially was not designed by me as science fiction.
That was one of my hybrid books.... That was a book that would bridge
science fiction and mainstream. And that was supposed to be one of them.
Where there’d be science fiction elements but there’d also be elements of a
mainstream novel.
And that was the main one. It would be a continuum from The World
Jones Made to We Can Build You to Confessions of a Crap Artist, would form
a[n] ... unbroken continuum, where there’s no sharp delineation between
the three. And so I was trying to make a continuum out of my two parallel
streams of writing, my science fiction and my mainstream [Rickman 1988,
175].

One might wonder why Dick saw such a heterogeneous trio of novels
as a continuum, yet if we read his comments on Jones it will be easier to make
sense of what he told Rickman. “[In Jones] I tried to transfer some elements
from my quality or literary novels ... when you read it over you find a little
more character development, it’s a little more sophisticated in terms of char-
acter development” (Rickman 1988, 114). Besides, in the last months of 1954,
when Dick wrote Jones, aimed at the science-fiction market, he was devoting
146 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

most of his energy to the composition of those realistic novels that should
have allowed him to become a professional writer for respectable and better-
paying publishers; as far as we know, he was working on Mary and the Giant
when he completed Jones. Dick’s idea that Jones— albeit far from satisfactory
in terms of overall quality — may have more technical sophistication than
Solar Lottery (Rickman 1988, 114) is not so outlandish, and may well explain
why Dick linked it to a definitely ambitious novel like Build and to the only
unambiguously realistic novel that he managed to publish in his lifetime, that
is, Confessions (whose history is just as troubled, having been published 16
years after its completion).
If, as Dick told Rickman, the two parallel streams of his writing (the
two genres he practiced) were science-fiction and mainstream (i.e., realism),
We Can Build You is sandwiched between two pure specimens of the two gen-
res: The World Jones Made has space travel, psi-powers, aliens, colonization
of another planet, genetic engineering, a world government; Confessions of a
Crap Artist is an ordinary story of ordinary people in Northern California in
the late 1950s, told by a rather odd narrator, Jack Isidore, whose utter naivety
(possibly explained by his being mentally retarded) allows Dick to give a par-
ticular (and remarkably effective) twist to his narrative. If a continuum unites
the three texts, it is evident that We Can Build You must be a hybrid, a text
which mixes some sfnal elements with the characterization, the more careful
plotting and the stylistic quality of the realistic works; its hybrid nature could
then explain the problems it encountered in finding a publisher.
According to Robinson, such a duality or heterogeneity can also be found
in the plot itself of the novel: the first half is pivoted upon “the abilities of
the simulacra,” that is the two androids reproducing Edwin M. Stanton and
Abraham Lincoln respectively, climaxing in the “illuminating argument
between Lincoln and the big businessman [i.e., Sam K. Barrows] concerning
the differences between man and an intelligent machine” (Robinson 105). But
this plot is abandoned, the narrative “jumps tracks” and tells the story of
Louis Rosen’s self-destructive pursuit of Pris Frauenzimmer (aka Pristine
Womankind) which ultimately brings him to madness and internment in an
asylum. Robinson regrets that “[w]e never return to the story of the simulacra
and the business battle over them” (Robinson 106); this judgment follows
Suvin’s reading of the novel as split in two parts, the Dickian beginning with
androids and the Jungian ending with Pris (Suvin 1975, 14).
Robinson sees the shifting of the narrative as a sign that the novel is
“broken-backed” (Robinson 105), like other minor (and failed) novels Dick
published in the late sixties (it is compared to The Crack in Space and The
Unteleported Man). The critic implicitly suggests that Dick moved from one
plot to another because he was unable to fully develop the initial plot (Robin-
 6. The Android Cogito 147

son 84–7), so that these works bespeak Dick’s creative crisis in those years.
Robinson then attempts a half-hearted defense of the novel saying that “the
division into two parts [could be] a deliberate formal device that reinforces
the preemptive strength of the second story-line,” because “[m]adness pre-
empts any other business at hand, no matter how interesting” (Robinson 106).
But philology contradicts this interpretation. Already Warrick noticed
that, though published at the very end of the 1960s, Build had been written
well before, “during the same year as Martian-Time Slip” (Warrick 65), and
was concerned with schizophrenia, like its more prestigious and accomplished
companion. It is then impossible to assess its value on the basis of its belonging
to a period of creative sterility. Warrick also deems Build to be a minor work,
but for a different reason: it is weak because it is a mainstream work, while
Dick was a powerful science-fiction writer: “in [Build] the characters talk and
talk, driven to make certain they have told all about schizophrenia” (Warrick
66).
While Warrick’s placement of Build in the first plateau period of the
early 1960s is undisputable, her reading of the novel as mainstream is highly
questionable; in it we have androids, space travel (Sam K. Barrows, the reckless
interplanetary realtor, plans to use the androids as artificial neighbors for fam-
ilies who settle on other planets [114–6], so that the settlers do not feel lonely),
electronic Penfield organs that may control the moods and emotions of their
users, and a futuristic USA where citizens may be sent to Federal asylums by
the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Mental Health — which seems to have
replaced the good old FBI (172)— if they fail to pass psychiatric tests; the
workings of this repressive apparatus are described in several pages of the
novel, especially when Louis fails his tests and is sent to the Kasanin Clinic
in Chapters 17 and 18. The science-fictional component is so strong that we
cannot talk about bestseller realism here, and the difficulties to sell the novel
to non-sf publishers prove this beyond any doubt; though Dick saw it as a
hybrid (which is the best way to describe the text), it was ultimately published
on a science-fiction magazine and then as a science-fiction paperback.
However Warrick does have a point when she highlights the connection
between this novel and Martian Time-Slip. An intertextual reading may tell
us much about Build, and it should not surprise us that Fredric Jameson dealt
with it in his synoptic reading of a group of novels which also included major
works like Stigmata, Androids, Bloodmoney, Ubik, and High Castle. Actually
the issue of schizophrenia is not something that Dick conjures up when the
plot about the simulacra and the struggle of the little men Louis and Maury
Rock against the big businessman Barrows “fizzles out”— to put it in Suvin’s
terms — but an issue which is already introduced in the third chapter of the
novel, when Louis meets Pris, who has been recently been dismissed from the
148 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Kasanin Clinic in Kansas City, where she was interned because of “dynamism
of difficulty” (26), a legal euphemism for her schizophrenic condition.
Besides, the issue of mental health is suggested in an indirect fashion
earlier in the novel. Previous commentators of Build seem to have not won-
dered why the first simulacrum built by the MASA Associates, before the one
reproducing Lincoln, is the Stanton. Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869) is surely
not as famous a historical character as the U.S. President who won the War
Between the States, abolished slavery and was assassinated while still in office;
but there is a feature of Stanton’s personality, suggested by any synopsis of
his life, that might have appealed to Dick’s sensibility: it was characterized
by a striking paranoid streak. In at least two key moments of Stanton’s political
career (his activity as Secretary of War under Lincoln and the investigations
after Lincoln’s assassination) he was bent on the persecution of people who
conspired against the Union or the President: army officers suspected of having
traitorous sympathies for the South or suspected accomplices of John Wilkes
Booth — this fear of conspiracies was so strong that it led Stanton to hand-
pick the members of martial courts and suborn witnesses.
Be it paranoia or schizophrenia, insanity is strictly connected to what is
arguably the main issue of the novel, the attempt to define — at least in a ten-
tative fashion — what is human; an attempt which was troubled at least,
because Dick has also applied his strategy of ontological uncertainty to Build.
Surely the strategy is more manifest in Androids, where one of the main issues
is ascertaining who is human and who is not (so that the psychiatric tests
used in Build to detect psychos are applied to the hunting of runaway androids
in Androids); but in the earlier novel (in terms of composition) there is uncer-
tainty as to who qualifies as a human being regardless of its/his having been
built/born. The title of the magazine version of the novel was “A. Lincoln,
Simulacrum,” an oxymoron that couples a historical character whose reality
is not to be doubted and an artificial entity (androids are called simulacra in
the novel) which is no more than someone’s representation; it suggests an
ambiguity, putting together somebody who is authentically human (albeit long
time dead) and something which is not.
The title of the paperback edition sounds much less ambiguous, as it is
something humans might tell simulacra: “we can build you, hence you are
not authentic: you are artifacts, manufactured devices, products.” Ontogeny,
however, does not guarantee that all those born of man and woman are
human(e), neither it ensures that the simulacra in the novel are no more than
machines. There is a political side to the novel which Suvin only began to
detect when he noticed that “the conjuring up of the past probity from the
heroic age of the U.S. bourgeoisie against its present corruption cries out for
more detailed treatment” (Suvin 1975, 14); but the purpose of resurrecting
 6. The Android Cogito 149

Stanton and Lincoln is not just a way to insert a sort of moral touchstone in
the novel, though surely the comparison between Lincoln and such a shallow
and mean character like Barrows may also suggest thoughts similar to those
of the critic. In fact we should not forget that the main issue of the War
Between the States was slavery — its diffusion and then its abolition — and
slavery is based on a distinction between those who are fully entitled to human
rights — and a human identity — and those who, being not entitled to civil
rights, are second-rate citizens, less-than-human individuals. Being completed
in October 1962, the novel was written (like The Simulacra, which should be
considered as another companion piece, as we shall see) during the 100th
anniversary of the Civil War, which is also mentioned in the novel — set in
1982 — as “a flop” where “[a] few souls got out and refought a few battles”
(15). While Simulacra ironically pays homage to the American Civil War by
depicting a futuristic civil war (cf. Ch. 5), Build represents in a science-
fictional context the basic question of that war, “the only and first national
epic in which we Americans participated” (14), that is, “who (or what) is
human?”— which is also known as the question of racism.
Racial discrimination, which was the core issue of the Civil War and was
still a hot issue in the early 1960s (1961 was the year of the Freedom Rides),
is an undertext which surfaces in many episodes. Both the protagonist/narrator
of this 1st-person narrative, Louis Rosen, and his business partner Maury
Rock are of Jewish descent; Louis’ father Jerome still uses Yiddish words and
phrases, Louis seems to be familiar with German; Maury changed his real
“original old-country” (9) surname, Frauenzimmer, into Rock, possibly
because he felt ashamed of his Jewish origins. Putting two Jewish families in
the foreground necessarily hints at the issue of race and racism which was also
central in the Civil War.
The Jewish roots of the narrator may also be connected with the legends
about the Golem, an animated clay man purportedly created by Judah Loew
ben Bezalel, aka the Maharal of Prague in the 16th century, and made famous
by Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 fantasy novel The Golem. The artificial man was
created, according to the legend, to protect the Jewish community of Prague
from threats of pogrom or expulsion by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph
II; Jameson, on the other hand, sees the two simulacra as “adjuvants” or
“helpers” after Propp’s narratological theory ( Jameson 2005, 376). But the
Lincoln, and then the Stanton, help MASA Associates to defend itself from
the machinations of Sam Barrows (cf. in particular the eleventh chapter), so
that the two helpers are also protectors, just like the Golem.
The racial issue is however more insistently hinted at than the Golem
legends. It is central, for example, in the argument between Lincoln and Bar-
rows about the differences between man and an intelligent machine, which
150 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

takes place more or less at the middle of the novel (Chapter 9, 111–3) and is
pointed out by Robinson as the climactic moment of Build. Actually the argu-
ment begins when the Lincoln objects to Barrows’ intention to purchase him
and the Stanton (108); the simulacrum asks the businessman “how [he] could
acquire [him] or anyone else, when Miss Frauenzimmer tells [him] that there
is a stronger impartiality between the races now than ever before” (111). The
Lincoln thus equates the purchase of simulacra to the purchase of human
beings, that is, slave trade.
Barrows’ answer is that the concept of human “doesn’t include mechanical
men” (111), that is the traditional justification of racial discrimination (and slav-
ery): some humans can be treated in a different way (possibly be sold and bought)
because they do not qualify as fully human, be they Africans or Jews. The
Lincoln then counters Barrows’ argument by asking the businessman to tell
him what is a man (111). Barrows quotes Shakespeare’s line where Falstaff calls
man “a forked radish” (in King Henry IV, Part II), and then proposes a mock
definition of man as “an animal that carries a pocket handkerchief ” (112). The
Lincoln then asks Barrows to define an animal, since he understands that the
possession of a soul, the traditional distinction between man and animals, is
meaningless to Barrows (he will later say that “[t]here is no soul [...]. That’s
pap” [113]), and the definition of the animal should apply to humans too, as
opposed to simulacra. Barrows maintains that an animal “has a biological
heritage and makeup which [simulacra] lack” (112), because simulacra are
machines, like spinning jennies or steam engines. Asked to define a machine,
Barrows tells the Lincoln that he is one of them, something that has been
made by someone and belongs to him or them. It is a matter of being pro-
duced, then; but the Lincoln objects that also Barrows is a machine, for he
has a Creator, God, like the people who have built it. In other words, if
humans can tell simulacra “we can build you,” the simulacra may object that
“somebody built you too”— God, for those of religious persuasion, or natural
evolution, for those who trust Darwin. If a man is nothing else than a more
sophisticated animal, and animals, according to Spinoza (quoted by the Lin-
coln) are no more than “clever machines” (113), then, since Barrows thinks
that there is no soul, “a machine is the same as an animal.... And an animal is
the same as a man” (113), which means the distinction between humans and
simulacra is at least problematic, and not as clear-cut as Barrows likes to think.
Barrows’ reaction is quite annoyed, and bespeaks the inability to properly
counter the thrust of the Lincoln; he only repeats the former argument that
“an animal is made out of flesh and blood, and a machine is made out of
wiring and tubes” (113), a terribly weak idea in Dick’s world where artiforgs
(artificial organs) abound and cyborgs are quite common. Stanton Brose in
Simulacra and Palmer Eldritch in Stigmata are both also made “of wiring and
 6. The Android Cogito 151

tubes,” and this is not enough to make them totally non-human (besides, this
applies today to many people in our koinos kosmos of 2010). Barrows’ final
argument is “I know you’re a machine; I don’t care” (113), and it expresses the
typical arrogance and shallowness of those who think they are always right
just because they are rich and powerful.
But Barrows’ annoyance, which is quite clearly expressed by his words,
proves that the Lincoln is able to discuss a complex issue with him, thus
giving the lie to Barrows’ claim that what the simulacra say has just been
recorded on a tape, and that they are just “the familiar mechanical man gim-
mick” (111). Barrows has scathingly compared the simulacra built by MASA
to “Pedro the Vodor,” one of the technological mirabilia on display at the
1939 San Francisco World Fair, which was no more than “a keyboard-operated
talking machine invented by the Bell Telephone Laboratories” (Domzalski
114). All this shifts the argument between the Lincoln and Barrows from the
realm of noble (or questionable) philosophical and political principles to the
prosaic world of business transactions. Barrows’ underestimation of the tech-
nological innovation achieved by MASA is a tactic aimed at lowering the price
the businessman could eventually have to pay for the simulacra and their proj-
ects. Dick was well aware of such tactics, because he carefully depicts a business
negotiation where they are used in his non-sf novel Puttering About in a Small
Land (Ch. 8), where Roger Lindahl’s business proposal is first unenthusias-
tically received and then nonchalantly stolen by a store owner. If this is what
Barrows is really driving at, his move is thwarted by the simulacrum, who
proves it is much more than a “Pedro the Vodor” device, even though Barrows
does not want to admit it.
The argument also suggests that things are not as simple as they may
seem. The borderline between human and artificial, between wo/men and
machines is not so easy to trace. The simulacra may have a switch that allows
humans to turn them on or off like a vacuum cleaner or a TV set, but shutting
the Lincoln off is something that Maury hates to do, and Pris finds dreadful
(125)— almost like killing a real human being. On the other hand, Louis’
brother Chester is a “radiation-mutant” (19) whose face is upside down; he
belongs to the group of those tactfully called “[s]pecial birth persons,” and
one wonders whether they are (considered) completely human if “there is so
much discrimination and prejudice in so many fields that most professions of
high status are closed to them” (19). We should then not forget that there was
a time and a place (Nazi Germany, 1933–45) in which people like Chester
and Jews were not considered persons, and this was surely something the
author of The Man in the High Castle was well aware of. But the greatest prob-
lem can be said to be represented by the two newborn creatures, the Stanton
and the Lincoln, and their creator, Pris Frauenzimmer.
152 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

The two simulacra may be endowed with on/off switches, but do not
behave like machines at all. They are also endowed with free will, as Louis
tells Barrows (111); the Stanton’s decision to leave Boise and go to Seattle and
remain there, without informing his creators (94–5) is proof of this. There
is a moment that the Stanton seems to be ready to work for Barrows; only a
shrewd move by the Lincoln (offering the other simulacrum the position of
“Chairman of [the] Board of Directors” [141]) persuades him to remain with
Louis and Maury. The two simulacra are able to make decisions and take the
initiative, just like humans. This description of the Stanton talking to Louis’
father, taken from the second chapters, tells us that the simulacra are also
endowed with charisma: “... it was impressive, the two old gentlemen standing
there facing each other, the Stanton with its split white beard, its old-style
garments, my father looking not much newer. The meeting of patriarchs, I
thought, like in the synagogue” (21).
The Lincoln is even more charismatic. When Louis first talks to it, he
faints (83); just before that, he cannot help calling the simulacrum “Mr. Pres-
ident.” Louis’ reaction to this is worth quoting: “My going up to it and speak-
ing to it this way put me into the fiction, the drama, as an actor like the
machine itself; nobody had fed me an instruction tape — they didn’t have to.
I was acting out my part of the foolishness voluntarily. And yet I couldn’t
help myself ” (83). Being part of the fiction means being artificial, playing a
part; but Louis has to deal with the Lincoln as if it were another human being
(the only one who stubbornly strives not to treat the Lincoln as a person is
Barrows, who “did not offer to shake hands with it, nor did he say goodbye
to it” [120], though he discussed with it and found it a tough opponent).
Moreover, when Louis’ own schizophrenia starts surfacing, it is the Lincoln
that he empathizes with: “Lincoln was exactly like me. He might have been
remote, but he was not dead emotionally: quite the contrary. So he was the
opposite of Pris, of the cold schizoid type. Grief, emotional empathy, were
written on his face” (188). The Lincoln itself (or should we say himself?)
acknowledges this bond when he says that Louis and it (him?) have much in
common (193).
Moreover, even though the narrator does not seem to be aware of this
(but Louis is not, as we shall see, totally reliable), the Lincoln appears as the
mastermind of the plot. Robinson thinks that the first plot, the struggle
between Barrows and the MASA Associates about the use of the androids, is
abandoned when Louis’ unfortunate quest for Pris comes to the fore; yet a
careful reading of the second part of the novel (which follows the climactic
argument between the Lincoln and Barrows) might show that, though the
narrator is distracted by his obsession with Pris, he nonetheless provides readers
with information about the destiny of MASA. Once the firm is managed by
 6. The Android Cogito 153

the Stanton and the Lincoln, Barrows’ plan is thwarted, and the moves the
Lincoln suggests to Louis are effective — even when he apparently misdirects
Louis, telling him that Pris might be at Colleen Nild’s apartment (211); in fact
Louis will find his father there, but this will allow his relatives to rescue him
when his schizoid hallucination fully erupts (215–9). If the Lincoln’s purpose
was to stop Barrows’ takeover, he manages to do that when Pris “kills” the
Booth simulacrum and breaks with Barrows in the other climactic sequence
of the novel, Chapter 16 (without Pris’ talent, any simulacra Barrows could
build would be as shallow and unimpressive as the Booth).
It might then be argued that the Lincoln and Barrows are the two com-
peting masterminds of the plot, and that — as it happens in so many novels,
e.g., in The Great Gatsby— the 1st-person narrator is a secondary character
who does not know everything about what is really going on (Dick was knowl-
edgeable about Fitzgerald’s novel, even if he considered it a failure because
“it fell completely apart in the ending” [SL1 56], as he wrote in a letter written
in 1960). Besides, what is Barrows’ move to ultimately defeat his would-be
competitors? After having secured the two creators of the simulacra, Pris
Frauenzimmer and Bob Bundy, he has a Booth simulacrum built (202); its
purpose is to eliminate (or scare) the Lincoln, not Maury or Louis. This move
tells us that, notwithstanding his scathing attitude towards the artificial men,
Barrows is well aware that his most dangerous enemy is the Lincoln, not the
humans who built it — directly or indirectly.
On the other hand, the material creators of the two simulacra, though
legally human, have both mental problems; Pris is schizophrenic, while Bob
is hebephrenic (and this is the reason why he was fired by the Federal Space
Agency [11]). Bundy never appears in the story; people talk about him, but
he never takes part in any scene. We have to rely on Louis’ description to
somewhat picture him: “His clothes are dirty, his hair uncombed, his chin
unshaved, and he won’t look you in the eyes. He grins inanely.... If someone
asks him a question he can’t figure out how to answer it; he has speech block-
age” (11). Bundy’s speech impediment should be compared to the brisk but
effective use of language by the Stanton or the Lincoln’s articulate eloquence.
Barrows insists that the simulacra are not human, and nothing new, because
they are no more than mindless “talking machines” (like Pedro the Vodor);
but it is the legally human Bundy who is unable to speak properly, though
he is “damn fine” (11) with his hands. Being mentally and linguistically
impaired, Bundy can be said to belong to the group of less-than-human char-
acters, like Louis’ brother Chester.
What is more impressive, however, is how Louis sees the woman he cat-
astrophically falls in love with. It is not just that Pris is or has been insane;
it is that “[b]eside her the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness”
154 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

(33). Though Louis is in love with Pris, he is well aware of her pathological
coldness; she clearly tells Louis that he is in love with her because she is abnor-
mally unemotional: “I’m sexually desirable when I’m cruel and schizoid, but
if I become MAUDLIN, THEN I’m not even that” (127). When Pris defects
from MASA to join Barrows, Louis is depressed (and this will trigger his
insane trip to Seattle), but he muses: “What a woman, what a thing to fall in
love with” (155). The thingness or inhumanity of Pris is repeatedly stated:
Louis complains that he “was doomed to loving something beyond life itself,
a cruel, cold and sterile thingthing — Pris Frauenzimmer” (184). Pris’ coldness
is such that she is “two times thing.”
We might obviously doubt Louis’ reliability when it comes to describing
the woman, or better the entity, he loves. To him Pris is not a real woman;
she is a deity, the Mediterranean Magna Mater, as explained by doctor Nisea:
Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, “Athene” (or better Athena), more a goddess than a
human being (227). Pris, as seen by Louis, is cosmic, so that he may tell Bar-
rows that “[y]ou’ve lost Pris .... That’s everything” (207). Louis is eventually
diagnosed as a psychopath, suffering from “the dynamism of difficulty which
we call the Magna Mater type of schizophrenia” (227)4; and Nisea explains
that what Louis is loving, or better worshipping, is a projection of the part
of himself (the anima posited by Jung) “onto the cosmos” (227). Nisea’s psy-
choanalytical diagnosis should warn us readers that we are not presented with
Pris as she “really” is, but as an increasingly deranged mind perceives her.
There is however a sort of double bind at work here. On the one hand,
we may disbelieve what Louis tells us because he is insane; on the other hand
his insanity is sanctioned by the same psychiatric apparatus, the FBMH, which
diagnosed Pris as insane when she was a teenager, and interned her in the
same mental hospital where Louis chooses to go. The FBMH tells us that
Louis is not a reliable narrator, so that we could call in doubt his description
of Pris as an emotionless “thingthing”; but then the same organization twice
diagnoses Pris as a schizophrenic, because Louis meets Pris again in the
Kasanin Clinic (244), and when he last meets her she reveals that she is much
too sick to be released, so that she might remain in the clinic for a long time,
possibly forever (252).
Louis is then a partly-reliable, partly-unreliable narrator: such a condi-
tion amounts to a form of ontological uncertainty that we already know. Our
reading of Martian Time-Slip (Build’s companion piece, it should be under-
scored) showed how madness may foster ontological uncertainty; when the
narrative focus is put on a mentally diseased character (be it Manfred, Jack
Bohlen or Louis Rosen), we are not sure that what we are told corresponds
to some hypothetical objective reality or at least to the fictional koinos kosmos
we should be presented with. Here the narrator himself is not reliable, and
 6. The Android Cogito 155

all we know about the fictional world of the novel must be filtered by his
instable mind. But ontological uncertainty in this novel is not only caused
by the unsettling comparison of simulacra’s behavior with that of “humans,”5
or Louis’ schizophrenia. At the Kasanin Clinic Louis undergoes a form of
psychiatric therapy, the controlled fugue (237), which consists in drug-pro-
duced hallucinations, that is, the creation of a series of Finite Subjective Real-
ities where he can live a happy life with Pris, as we can see in the table below:

Table 6.1
Louis’ Controlled Fugues
I 238–9 Louis and Pris are in Jack London Square in Oakland feeding
pigeons; he asks her if she loves him, and she answers she
does not.*
II 240–1 Louis and Pris are travelling by car; she once more refuses him.
III 241–2 Pris and Louis are walking in the train station of Cheyenne,
Wyoming; they are married; Pris considers committing
suicide.
IV 242–3 Pris and Louis are in the Jack London Park in Oakland; she says
she feels “dead and empty,” but then announces she is
pregnant.
V 243–4 Pris and Louis are married and have a son, called Charles.
VI 245–6 Pris is older; they have been married for years; they are doing
the washing-up and Louis tells his wife he has met her in the
Kasanin Clinic.
VII 249–50 Louis is in a supermarket with Pris and their son. Louis wonders
whether what they are experiencing is real; Pris tells him she
cannot stand his “eternal philosophizing” (250). Louis tells
her he will not accept other “derogatory opinions” and then
slaps her.
*This scene is similar to the ending of another novel by Dick, Mary and the Giant. The char-
acter of Mary Rittersdorf belongs to the type of dark-haired girls which also includes Pris
Frauenzimmer, and, as we shall see, two androids in the other novel we will discuss in this
chapter, Androids: Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen.

These seven controlled fugues, which can be seen as drug-induced FSRs

similar to those conjured up by Chew-Z in Stigmata (Ch. 7), show us moments
of an alternate life where Louis manages to marry Pris and live with her for
years. It might be seen as a form of wish-fulfillment, if we were not presented
with the unpleasant aspects of their ménage in all these FSRs; Pris may have
married Louis and borne him a son, but her intractable character does not
seem to have changed very much. These are, however, the experiences that
Dick shows us; Louis is told by doctor Shedd that he underwent many other
controlled fugues (up to 220 are counted [247]). Louis has forgotten many
of them, and realizes he has lost track of the days he has spent in the clinic;
156 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

it is a dismal awareness of an entropic time-slip, a loss of memory which

signals a loss of time and a sort of narrative black hole, because we skip days
and then weeks and months of Louis’ stay at the Kasanin, summarized by this
piece of inner monologue: “How much time had passed? How many times
had we been together, now? A dozen? A hundred? I couldn’t tell; time was
gone for me, a thing that did not flow but moved in fitful jolts and starts,
bogging down completely and then hesitantly resuming” (243).
The impression readers get is that the therapy is not working, and that
Louis is coming dreadfully near to the “stopping of time” that Jack Bohlen
(another schizophrenic) sees as the essence of psychosis in Martian Time-Slip:
“once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again”
(143). It is then interesting to see that if time-slips are part of the content of
Time-Slip, but also one of its main structural features, they may also be found
in the final chapter of Build, which, being set in an asylum which is also a
sort of prison, a closed space of potentially endless repetition, embodies what
Jack Bohlen called “[t]he end of experience, of anything new” (143).
However, it is in the place of madness and perverse time-slip, a place
where Louis lives an illusory virtual life and loses the time of his real life, that
an odd kind of salvation takes place. And here we have another paradox: if
Louis could find empathy and humanity in the Lincoln, a simulacrum, he
may find the way to escape the clinic and its dismal therapy thanks to Pris,
a diagnosed and interned schizophrenic. Pris tells Louis what to do to stop
the relentless sequence of controlled fugues: “Tell [Shedd] you’re not sure
you’re getting anything out of it anymore. And then when you’re in it, tell
your fantasy sex-partner there, the Pris Frauenzimmer you’ve cooked up in
that warped, hot little brain of yours, that you don’t find her convincing any
more” (248–9).
It is interesting that the key to escape the drug-induced FSRs is to express
doubts as to their reality. Louis’ problem was that he could no more tell hal-
lucination from real life; if he starts doubting the reality of the controlled
fugues, he might qualify as sane again. In other words, it is not certainty that
may help you to escape madness, but uncertainty: asking yourself if an evil
dæmon is not cheating you. This is a rather original version of Descartes’
thought experiment.
Uncertainty however rules in the ending of Build. During the sixth con-
trolled fugue Louis tells Pris that he saw her the day before in the hall of the
Kasanin Clinic (246). Does not this amount to suspecting their ménage is
not real? And it happens before Pris (in the Clinic) suggests him to tell Pris
(during the controlled fugue) he does not find her convincing any more. One
cannot help wondering whether Louis really met Pris in the clinic. Doctor
Shedd says he cannot have met her, because he checked the records and did
 6. The Android Cogito 157

not find her name; to him their meeting is just “an involuntary lapse into
psychosis” (246). Louis then finds out that Pris is at the Kasanin Clinic under
her father’s assumed name, Rock (247), but this is what is told us by a diag-
nosed psychotic who has already suffered from hallucination concerning Pris
(the scene where Louis hallucinates sexual intercourse with Pris at the end of
Chapter 16),6 and has been undergoing a treatment with hallucinogenic drugs.
Can we trust such an untrustworthy narrator?
Telling fictional reality from fictional hallucination, be it drug- or schiz-
ophrenia-induced, is not easy. If the two simulacra are declaredly “fiction,”
because they are the artificial reproduction of long-dead historical characters,
then Louis (and the other characters) are “put into the fiction,” because they
eventually interact with the Stanton and the Lincoln as if they were real people;
and we have seen that the Lincoln has enough intellect, volition and agency
to be a match for a shrewd human like Barrows. Yet also Barrows’ humanity
appears dubious to Louis, well before his schizophrenic outbreak: the busi-
nessman seems to be controlled by “some servo-system or some feedback cir-
cuit of selenoids and relays, all of which was operated from a distance off ”
(34). This is actually a description of a character in the first novel Dick pub-
lished, Solar Lottery, where the villain tries to liquidate the new Quizmaster
using an android, Keith Pellig, which is remotely controlled by a pool of oper-
ators, so as to escape the surveillance of the telepaths which should protect
the Quizmaster.
Besides, Barrows’ inhumanity is also stressed by his being definitely on
the side of deliberate and carefully planned simulation, aimed at cynically
swindling others. He dismisses Maury’s naïve idea of using the simulacra to
re-enact the battles of the American Civil War (a grandiose theatrical display
where spectators would in any case know that the soldiers fighting and dying
before them are not human beings [24]); he proposes instead to “use a number
of them designed to look exactly like the family next door. A friendly, helpful
family that would make a good neighbour” (114). This should persuade Terrans
to emigrate to the colonies on other planets, because they would not feel
lonely and miserable in those “empty, barren wastes” (115). Barrows says that
the actual settlers would know that their neighbors are simulacra, but Maury
and Louis suspect that the businessman has other plans. Louis even suggests
that the simulacra might be quietly pulled back out “as more and more people
got hooked” (115), and Barrows concludes “I think it would work.” This is,
in Louis words, “[a]ppearance built up over the fake” (117)— something
definitely unacceptable in Dick’s fictional world. Barrows belongs to the series
of Dick’s evil entrepreneurs, like Palmer Eldritch or the Karps in The Simu-
lacra.
Here we may find a full development of Barrows’ idea of artificial neigh-
158 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

bors. They are the famnexdos, clearly derived from what is only imagined in
Build. Also in Simulacra those who emigrate to Mars feel terribly lonely; but
they may buy a group of simulacra reproducing a typical American family, and
that is the meaning of the term famnexdo: family next-door (the same words
used by Barrows in Build).
Four simulacra seated in silence, a group: one in adult male form, its
female mate and two children. This was a major item of the firm’s cata-
logue; this was a famnexdo....
A man, when he emigrated, could buy neighbours, buy the simulated
presence of life, the sound and motion of human activity − or at least its
mechanical near-substitute − to bolster his morale in the new environment
of unfamiliar stimuli and perhaps, god forbid, no stimuli at all [58–9].
Baudrillard’s comment on this scene also applies to Build: “Models no
longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real, and thus
leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism” (Baudrillard 310). The travel
to Mars does not carry settlers Elsewhere, perhaps to meet some unthinkable
Other; it takes them to a hyperreal neighborhood where their neighbors have
surely been given “the colors of the real, the banal, the lived.” They go to
another planet just to get exactly what they had at home, nuisances included
(58). Baudrillard again: “SF of this sort is no longer an elsewhere, it is an
everywhere : in the circulation of the models here and now, in the very
axiomatic nature of our simulated environment” (Baudrillard, 312). Dick’s
comment on the famnexdos chimes in with the analysis of the French soci-
ologist: “Communication with them [i.e., the simulacra of the famnexdo]
was in essence a circular dialogue with oneself; the famnexdo ... picked up
the covert hopes and dreams of the settler and detailed them back in an artic-
ulated fashion” (59). What does such an artificial environment reproduce, or
re-circulate? Probably California.
Barrows’ real estate speculations on other planets are no more than the
anamorphic replica of models derived from the urban history of California,
where such speculations had started even before Dick moved there with his
family. He depicted such ambiguous economic transactions in The Man Whose
Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (where the realtor Leo Runcible is ready to do
anything to protect the value of his investments), and in Humpty Dumpty in
Oakland, where Harmon suggests Jim Fergesson to invest his money in a
garage in a brand new suburb. Dick had a first-hand knowledge of California’s
suburbanization, and he simply projected it on other worlds; and Barrows,
like many characters involved in such speculations, is a greedy and ruthless
individual, surely not an example of humanity and empathy. Suffice it to say
that, after having presented his plan to induce people to settle in the neigh-
borhoods he is building on other worlds, he clearly tells Maury and Louis:
 6. The Android Cogito 159

“It’s an environment up there that once you’ve seen it ... well, let’s put it this
way. About ten minutes is enough for most people. I’ve been there. I’m not
going again” (116). Barrows is then less a human being than a cold-blooded
and unsympathetic predator.
Who are the humans in this novel, then? Chester is a freak; Louis is
mentally impaired, and his love for Pris is more an inhuman obsession with
an artificial, overpowering image than a human passion; Colleen Nild and
Mr. Blunk, Barrows’ assistants, are two life-size puppets; as for Pris, she is
characterized by a sort of mechanical coldness, but maybe her real problem
is that she is not living her own life, but a fiction of herself, having read Her-
man Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar (1955), which tells the story of a
Jewish girl who replaces her real name Morgenstern with a more Anglo-Saxon
surname in order to facilitate her career as an actress. This is somewhat similar
to what Maury has done when he changed his surname from Frauenzimmer
to Rock. Pris went several steps further, adopting an artificial identity as Pris-
tine Womankind, and starting a career as a local celebrity thanks to Barrows’
money and connections (156–62).
Quoting Ezra Pound I might say that there is no clear demarcation
between human and artificial. Being made of flesh and blood or wiring and
tubes is ultimately unimportant; it is what characters do, strive to do, or do
not do which is really relevant. Dick expressed such a view much later in his
life, in his 1976 essay “Man, Android, and Machine”: “As one of us acts godlike
(gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its
programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision” (212). The issue of
the novel is then who is acting human and who is not, and this is something
that cannot be decided once and for all, so that we are asked to judge scene
by scene, act by act.
However, the borderline dividing the two simulacra (and those that will
be built) from the biologically human individuals is ultimately not as impor-
tant as the one which divides 75 percent of the U.S. population, made up by
fully human — i.e., mentally sane — Americans, from the 25 percent of those
that have been diagnosed insane based on the Benjamin Proverb Test and the
Vigotsky-Luria Block Test (37), the same tests which certify the sanity of our
unreliable narrator at the end of the novel (251). While the two simulacra act
in a passably sane and humane way, one American out of four has been or is
interned in a mental hospital, and Louis recalls a long list of people he knows
that have been victims of certified madness (37–8), so long that one may sus-
pect that just anybody could be declared mentally insane and interned in the
near future devised by Dick. Are those who do not pass the mandatory tests
fully human? If they are, why are they forced to go to a clinic (which disqui-
etingly resembles a prison) and undergo dismal therapies like the controlled
160 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

fugue applied to Louis? However, the insane 25 percent of the population

does not enjoy full civil rights — just like the Afro-Americans in antebellum
USA, or the segregated racial minority in Southern states before 1955, or the
Jews under the Nazi and Fascist regimes of the 1930s. Or the two simulacra,
if Sam K. Barrows self-serving distinctions were turned into laws.
The Lincoln and the Stanton are there to embody the main argument
of the novel, which is the difficulty (or, for pessimist interpreters, the impos-
sibility) to have a clear demarcation that may separate what is human from
what is not. The ontological uncertainty which reigns in the novel, heightened
in the final chapter by the controlled fugues, should induce readers to question
their standard definitions of authentically human and inhuman, when even
Abraham Lincoln, an illustrious representative of the category of the Great
Man, can be a simulacrum, and be occasionally switched off. On the other
hand, the authentic human who tells us the story, Louis Rosen, the character
we should know and understand better, is eventually revealed as a madman
ready to go to Seattle with a .38 pistol, who sees himself as “the stranger in
town, armed, and with a mission” (166), a mission which might just be a
killing spree. Here Louis reminds us of the fictional Travis Bickle, the pro-
tagonist of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver; or the historical Mark
David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon7; and this could be an excellent
variation on Jameson’s android cogito, where the certainty of the “I think” is
promptly neutered by the conclusion that “therefore I am an android”; in a
metaphoric rewording, Louis’ motto might be “I tell, therefore I am a mad-
man.”
Dick could not publish Build for eight years, so it should not surprise
us that he started recycling ideas and characters taken from it in other works.
We have already noticed that the famnexdos in The Simulacra were at least
imagined (by Barrows and Louis) in Build; Simulacra was completed less than
a year after We Can Build You, and unsurprisingly features such an old acquain-
tance as Maury Frauenzimmer — back to his original German surname — as
the manager of the Frauenzimmer Associates, which builds the famnexdos
and is then awarded a contract to build the android president of the USEA,
der Alte. In this novel the Man in the White House is not as charismatic as
the Lincoln in Build, but it is even more artificial; being not endowed with
an autonomous mind, he can only utter the speeches prepared by the White
House staff, like Yancy in The Penultimate Truth (Ch. 5).
But other elements reappear in Simulacra: unlike Pris, who is seen by
Louis as an overpowering Magna Mater, but appears skeptical about the Pris
Frauenzimmer he has cooked up in his “warped, hot little brain,” the First
Lady Nicole Thibodeaux deliberately plays the part of the archetypal Great
Mother: the young woman embodies an archetypal figure, “the image ... of
 6. The Android Cogito 161

the Bad Mother. Overpowering and cosmic” (98). Psychoanalysis is not as impor-
tant here as it was in Build, but there is a narrative thread about a psychother-
apist, Dr. Egon Superb (another of Dick’s onomastic puns), and Dick hints at
a psychoanalytical interpretation of the “national neurosis” (98), the psycho-
logical weakness felt by males in the novel in relation to Nicole: “I’m terrified
of her and that’s why I’m scared of Julie, I guess in fact of all women ... It’s
because of weak-fibred men like me that Nicole can rule ... I’m the reason
why we’ve got matriarchal society” (98), confesses one of Dr. Superb’s patients.
“Bad Mother” is here an equivalent of the Magna Mater, as we can see
when another character explains his feelings towards Nicole. “She’s a Magna
Mater figure to him. As she is to all of us.... The great primordial mother”
(184). She is a dreadful figure, even though all male characters seem to be fas-
cinated by her beauty: when Ian Duncan meets Nicole in the White House
he is evidently starstruck, but also scared by the First Lady, whose semi-divine
status is revealed by an involuntary pun by Ian, who after hearing Al Miller
say “We ate, Mrs. Thibodeaux” thinks “We ate Mrs. Thibodeaux,” thus hinting
at Christian Eucharist, where believers eat god; but then he adds “Doesn’t
she, sitting here in her blue-cotton pants and shirt, doesn’t she devour us?
Strange thought...” (162). Not so strange if we think that there were human
sacrifices to pagan gods, so that those deities might as well be seen as devouring
gods. Nicole, as an embodiment of the Magna Mater, is a voracious, canni-
balistic figure. Nicole’s archetypal role explains her place in the power structure
of the USEA and her ascendancy as depicted in the novel: something imported
from Nazi Germany, where the dominating figure was the Führer — undoubt-
edly a patriarchal authority figure — while in the USEA there is a totalitarian
matriarchy which requires “spiritual-moral emasculation ... a present day pre-
requisite for participation in the Ge class, in the ruling circles” (36).
But then Nicole is unmasked as a young actress who has replaced the
original First Lady, who died many years before, so that she is just one of the
many simulacra in this overcrowded novel; she may not be built, but her
agency is severely diminished by fact that she receives orders from a secret
Council ultimately masterminded by Goltz (cf. Ch. 4). In this bitter satirical
novel simulacra pass for humans and humans are actually puppets, and such
an idea is a development of the world of sane simulacra and insane humans
depicted in Build.
But there is another novel which is strongly connected to the one we
have analyzed in the first half of this chapter, one which Warrick saw as a
powerful reworking of the then still unpublished manuscript (Warrick 66):
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? When Dick was interviewed by Rickman
he did not talk about the connection between Build and Androids, but it is
quite evident that he considered it one of his best novels, written in a moment
162 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

of economic and emotional stability (Rickman 1988, 171). His comment high-
lights the psychological metaphor underlying the text:
... I was contrasting Nancy’s warmth with the coldness of the people I’d
known before. I was beginning to develop the idea of the human versus the
android, the bipedal humanoid that is not essentially human. She had
shown me for the first time what a real human being could be like, tender
and loving and vulnerable. And I was beginning to contrast that to what I
had been brought up with [Rickman 1988, 171].
Another version of this comment is found in one of his last letters (dated
July 1, 1981), where Dick overtly connects Build to Androids, and he does it
in such a way that we are authorized to apply what we have found in the
former to the latter:
I guess the essence of my artistic vision is to try to formulate what con-
stitutes the authentic human being, as contrasted to what I call the
“android” (a metaphor) or reflex machine; that is, the creature which
resembled a human, is human biologically yet lacks, really, a soul. This is a
preoccupation with me that first finds expression in my early novel WE CAN
BUILD YOU (written in the early sixties) and attains a sort of peak in DO
ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? which is the novel BLADE RUNNER is
based on [SL6 178].
Many interpretations of this novel have been written, and the temptation
to read it in a biographical key is understandable: Dick felt he had to contrast
Nancy (the authentic human being) with people like his parents, his distant
father and his cold mother (metaphorically androids, or reflex machines). This
obviously leads to those analyses which, like Robinson’s short but effective
discussion, show that in Do Androids Dream of Electric Dreams? beside the
Humane Humans (such as John R. Isidore) there are the Cruel Androids (Roy
Baty, his wife Irmgard, Pris Stratton), but also Cruel Humans, such as bounty-
hunter Phil Resch (Robinson 92). It is something we have also found in Build.
Humans in Androids are not necessarily cruel, but they are surely lacking in
emotions, which should be among the main features of the real human being.
In fact Rispoli noticed that “humans in the world of the novel are so unable
to experience any kind of emotional response that they have to use the mood
organ even to get negative moods” (Rispoli 100, translation mine), like Iran —
the wife of the protagonist — uses to do.
What I find questionable, however, is Robinson’s idea that there are
Humane Androids, with Luba Luft, the opera singer, as the representative of
this group. Dick’s opinion is overtly expressed in a letter to his literary agent
where he says that Rick’s view has won out: “the androids are vicious machines
which must be destroyed” (SL1 230)— without exception. Rick Deckard may
find Luba humane and warm, but she is ultimately as cunning and potentially
 6. The Android Cogito 163

lethal as the other, more aggressive androids, Polokov and Baty; she does not
hesitate to have Rick arrested by the police officer from the fake Hall of Justice
on Mission Street (Ch. 9), even if that means his death (Rick is only acciden-
tally rescued by Phil Resch, who apparently behaves like an android but is
human); then, when Phil and Rick get back to the Opera House to retire her
in Chapter 12, she tries to set Rick against Phil by declaring that the latter is
an android (102). Rick’s reaction to Luba’s words once more confirms what is
more or less overtly suggested by the novel: he is not the best bounty hunter
in the Los Angeles area, being the substitute of Holden, the top bounty hunter
in town (25), wounded by Polokov while he was testing it.
What is clear, if one reads this novel in connection to Build, is that the
two narrative foci of Androids are not much more reliable than Louis was in
the former novel. John Isidore is a chickenhead or special, that is, an individual
who has been mentally impaired by radiations; he may be a warm person
from the emotional point of view, and there is no doubt that he is one of the
most humane characters in Dick’s gallery, but has troubles when it comes to
analyzing others’ behavior with some detachment. On the other hand, Rick
is not a very competent bounty hunter at the beginning of Androids; he is
almost cheated (and killed) by Polokov, is shrewdly manipulated by Rachael
Rosen (as we shall see), and at least confused by Luba’s allegation that his col-
league is an android — even though she had already accused him to be one
just a few hours before (79).
Believing what Luba tells him during their second meeting (even if he
should be well aware that the android singer is able to lie easily and effectively)
Rick almost fights with Phil, and this might offer Luba the opportunity to
escape, or to shoot both bounty-hunters (we have already seen in her first
meeting with Rick that she is armed). Moreover, since Rick believes her when
she accuses Resch of being an android (he will only test him, and discover to
his dismay that the cruel bounty-hunter is indeed human, only after Luba
has been retired [108]), he might kill him straightaway if he were as trigger-
happy as Phil Resch — hence the android’s lie might lead to the killing of a
human being. Rick may not be a complete fool, yet he is a typical represen-
tative of those Dickian Little Men who are not impeccable professionals, but
only passable workmen. Rick manages to retire all the Nexus-6 androids in
24 hours in the end, but he needs help to do that: Phil’s help during the
retirement of Luba, and Mercer’s help when he attacks the last three remaining
androids in Isidore’s apartment. He may make serious mistakes, and he almost
makes one in Luba’s case; then he makes another when dealing with Rachael,
as we shall see.
Though Luba’s attempt to imitate the human (103) may allow her to be
an artist (she does sing Mozart’s The Magic Flute wonderfully [76–7]), it does
164 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

not mean that she has also developed the empathic faculties that would turn
her into a Humane Human in Robinson’s scheme. While simulacra are better
than humans in Build— with the possible exception of the disquieting Booth
— androids are all worse than humans in Androids, even if they may have a
fascinating artistic talent like Luba’s, or be sexually attractive like Rachael
Rosen.8 And that is exactly Rick’s problem, which is not accidentally explained
by Resch, a more competent and expert bounty-hunter: Rick had problems
with Luba “[b]ecause she — it — was physically attractive.... We were taught
that it constitutes a prime problem in bounty hunting. Don’t you know ...
that in the colonies they have android mistresses?” (110). Deckard does not
know (though he is aware of the attraction female androids may exert [75]),
hence his problem with Luba, and the greater problem with Rachael.
Robinson’s superficial interpretation of Luba’s behavior might be
explained with a confusion which takes sometimes place between Androids
and its famous cinematic version, Blade Runner. While androids are selfish
and merciless creatures in Dick’s novel, some of them are endowed with a
remarkable dignity in the film, where Roy Batty proves to be a humane
android when he spares the life of a human bounty hunter (in the original
version of the film, where Deckard is a man) or proves to be capable of sol-
idarity (in the Director’s Cut, where both he and Deckard are Nexus-6
androids, but the latter does not know yet). While Ridley Scott’s ultimate
version of the film shows that androids may be better than humans (with the
possible exception of Gaff ), something which pushes Deckard to revolt, Dick
uses androids, cold and emotionless beings whose only purpose is selfish self-
preservation at the expense of others, to present us with anamorphic images
of those human beings who are as cold, selfish and cruel as them — the epitome
of the Cruel Human being Phil Resch, whose cynical (and morbid) approach
to a female android is “[g]et to bed with her first ... and then kill her” (111),
which sounds like a line recited by one of the streetwise, cynical characters
of noir movies.
Yet the comparison between the novel and the movie is not necessarily
misleading, provided we pay attention to all the shifts that take place between
Dick’s text and the movie as it was re-released in 1992 (the Director’s Cut).
We should also remember that there is something that the two works have in
common, their radical differences notwithstanding. That Blade Runner mixes
a science fiction background with elements drawn from film noir is something
which was almost immediately noticed and discussed by critics (cf. Doll &
Faller, but also the essays collected in Judith B. Kernan’s Retrofitting Blade
Runner); yet the presence of crime fiction elements in Androids is not some-
thing which has often been discussed, even though Stanislaw Lem spotted
this aspect in one of the first academic essays on Dick’s science fiction, when
 6. The Android Cogito 165

he said that this novel “we see the sad picture of an author who squanders his
talent by using brilliant ideas to keep up a game of cops and robbers” (Lem
1972, 89). Lem, who was all too eager to make a distinction between the “des-
perate case” (sf as pure entertainment product, belonging to the despicable
“Lower Realm” [Lem 1972, 47]) and the exceptions (sf as respectable literature
belonging to the “Upper Realm” or “Olympus” [Lem 1972, 48]), could evi-
dently not accept the crime component in Dick’s novel since it belonged to
the Lower Realm.
Today we do not see the picture of Dick mixing androids and a police
investigation as such a disreputable one, because we know that — notwith-
standing the fact that a great part of crime fiction belongs to the lower realm —
several crime fiction authors (among which two who were also based in
California, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) are now considered
part of the upper realm; we also know that the iron curtain dividing the two
realms (Lem 1972, 49) was more a rhetorical device than a historical reality.
What is more interesting is that the crime element is probably what Dick added
to turn the materials he had already elaborated9 in We Can Build You— still an
unpublished text and a failure in 1966 — into a novel that might be more palat-
able to sf publishers and readers. Besides, we shall see in the next chapter that
he could take a narrative model from crime fiction in a moment of creative
dearth and build a passable science-fiction novel on it, A Maze of Death.
The importance of noir themes, imagery and aesthetics in Androids has
not been discussed, probably because Dick’s essays, fiction and letters do not
mention of Chandler, Hammett, or any other writer involved with noir film
or hard-boiled fiction (he only mentions Mickey Spillane in a letter he wrote
less than a month before his death [SL6 313–4]). I am not suggesting that
Dick deliberately attempted to hybridize his sf with noir movies or hard-
boiled fiction in particular: it is however undeniable that the relevant difference
between Build and Androids, since the central issue of human vs. android
(with all the metaphoric implications we have found in the former text) is
the present in both novels, is the insertion of plot devices typical of crime
fiction in Androids, such as the investigation, the hunt for criminals (here
runaway androids), the interrogations (here turned into the Voigt-Kampff
tests), so that an analysis of these elements is unavoidable.10 One might for
example consider how Dick took a rather secondary character in Build, the
Booth simulacrum, which is by definition a murderer, and turned it into the
threatening and cold Nexus-6 androids in Androids; he gave the androids all
the features of the schizophrenic mind as depicted in the earlier novel, but
above all turned them into criminals — like the historical John Wilkes Booth.
If we follow the names and surnames of characters, it is easy to see that
Eldon Rosen, the powerful owner and chief of the Rosen Association, may
166 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

well be a descendant of Louis Rosen in Build ( Jameson 2005, 375), which is

an ironic reversal, inasmuch as the small firm of losers turned into a powerful
and successful corporation.11 So it is not a surprise that one of the androids is
called Pris, even if the surname is not Frauenzimmer: Pris Stratton physically
resembles her schizophrenic namesake in Build, and her android nature leads
her to be as abusive to John R. Isidore as the first Pris was to Louis Rosen.
But the character that most closely resembles Pris Frauenzimmer is
Rachael Rosen, who appears in one of the most remarkable episodes of onto-
logical uncertainty (which Ridley Scott and/or his screenwriters could not
omit), when Rick Deckard is summoned to the premises of Rosen Association,
shown their collection of precious animals and invited to submit Rachael to
the Voigt-Kampff test (Chapter 5). Here we have uncertainty about her nature
(is she human or an android?), which is obviously one of the main issues of
this novel, an uncertainty which Dick dramatized by turning the artificial
characters (who helped the protagonist/narrator in Build) into dangerous and
hunted outlaws (who mostly attempt to kill one of the human protagonists,
and almost enslave the other), and having one of the two narrative foci on a
bounty hunter. And, though there is always deception at work in this novel
whenever the androids appear (e.g., Luba desperately trying to imitate
humans — which is also a mimetic ruse that should prevent her identification
as an android —,12 Polokov pretending to be a visiting Soviet policeman, Roy
and Irmgard Baty hiding in a desolate suburb where only specials live, prob-
ably hoping to pass as radiation mutants), the most impressive episodes of
ontological uncertainty are tied to Rachael (with the remarkable exception of
the fake Hall of Justice, which is visited after Rick’s failed attempt to retire
Luba and masterminded by Garland, the bogus police officer, who is actually
an android).
Rick initially identifies her as an android, but is immediately told by
Eldon Rosen that Rachael is human, albeit emotionally defective because born
and raised on board a space ship, in a sealed and artificial environment (43–
4). This scene has heavy implications: if the Voigt-Kampff test can fail to
identify as human someone suffering from mental disorder, it is unreliable,
and this could discredit the activity of bounty-hunters. This revelation, the
typical Dickian abrupt reversal, is followed by an attempt to blackmail and
corrupt Rick, so that he certifies that Nexus-6 androids can be detected by
the test, so that the Rosen corporation may continue their production and
sale (47)— it is a matter of money (recalling the shady dealings which abound
in hard-boiled fiction, especially in such novels as Hammett’s The Glass Key
and Red Harvest, where corruption is a main issue).
In a further reversal Rick manages to correctly identify Rachael as an
android, and ward off Eldon’s deception, by asking her one more question
 6. The Android Cogito 167

from the test and measuring her reaction time; what arouses his suspicion is
a little verbal detail, the fact that Rachael keeps calling the precious specimen
of owl owned by the corporation “it” (48), showing no affection to it. Rachael
is actually too sincere; the owl is another fraud, an artificial animal like Rick’s
electric sheep and the toad he will find almost at the end of the novel (180).
The presence of android animals adds another form of ontological uncertainty
to the novel, which in the episode of Rachael’s test further complicates the
main human vs. android opposition.13
But the revelation that Rachael is an android, even if she is not aware of
it (49), does not lead to her retirement (or liquidation); since she belongs to
the Rosen corporation (which designs, tests and builds androids), her presence
on Earth is not illegal. This paves the way for another important episode in
the novel, that is, Rick and Rachael’s night at the motel, when they have sex.
Their second meeting is prepared by a video call from the android girl, who
offers Rick to take part in the hunting of the remaining Nexus 6 androids.
This amazes the bounty hunter, who wonders: “[w]hat kind of world is it ...
when an android phones up a bounty hunter and offers him assistance?” (71).
He takes this as an example of something humans give for granted, that
androids cannot properly cooperate because they lack empathy. Rick believes
in this, when he tells Garland that “You ... don’t exactly cover for each other
in times of stress,” and it agrees because “it would seem we lack a specific
talent you humans possess ... called empathy” (95).
Rachael’s good will seems confirmed when she proposes a strange deal:
“[g]o to bed with me and I’ll retire Stratton” (147). This seems to be precious
help, because Rick has just realized that Rachael and Pris do not just belong
to the same Nexus 6 model, but also to the same batch of female androids
with the same body and face. This had been already suggested by Pris, when
she told John Isidore that her name was Rachael Rosen (55); it was arguably
a mistake, and Pris immediately realizes this when John connects her to the
powerful corporation: she immediately tells him that her name is Pris Stratton
(which might well be made-up). When Rick realizes that Pris is a look-alike
of Rachael he understands that if he goes to bed with the latter he will not
be able to retire the former, because a powerful empathic (or sentimental)
relation will be established. Hence Pris’ apparently helpful offer to kill Pris.
I say “apparently” because Rachael belongs to a type of character whose
ability to cheat is remarkable; we might say that their main role in the sort
of narratives where they appear is to cheat or betray the male protagonist. I
am obviously talking of the so-called dark ladies so often found both in noir
movies and in hard-boiled fiction. I might add that one of the classical theorists
of noir cinema, Damien Hirsch, defined these complex figures as “amoral
destroyers of male strength” (Hirsch 20–1), and though subsequent critics of
168 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the genre have expressed different opinions on female characters in noir movies
(cf. Cowie), that definition fits Rachael perfectly.14 In fact, after their sexual
intercourse, she tells Rick that “[y]ou’re not going to be able to hunt androids
any longer .... No bounty hunter has ever gone on ... [a]fter being with me”
(149)— the only exception being Phil Resch, described as cynical and nutty
(his lack of empathy being a possible symptom of borderline schizophrenia
or some other light mental disorder). So Rachael is exploiting Rick’s (and
other bounty hunters’) empathy to destroy their psychological strength, the
ability to keep hunting and eliminating runaway androids. That she does this
by exploiting her sexual appeal should not surprise noir connoisseurs: it is the
typical situation of the male protagonist in those films, because Pris is, like
other dark ladies, a “not innocent woman ... to whom [the protagonist] is sex-
ually and fatally attracted” (Damico 54).
The attraction is fatal inasmuch as empathic (sentimental and/or erotic)
involvement with a female simulacra may disable any bounty hunter save the
psychopathic ones like Resch — who might be dangerously eager to kill the
suspect, even if they are not sure he or she is an android (something that out-
rages Rick during the retirement of Luba Luft [103]). But this is just a part
of Rachael’s plot15: the fact that she and Pris are two specimens of the same
android model will be also exploited by Pris when she will go towards Rick
on the stairs of Isidore’s conapt building (166), hiding a laser tube (167), and
telling him “[for] what we’ve meant to each other” (166)— something which
would be nonsensical, since Pris has never met Rick before, if we did not take
into account the fact that Rick almost mistakes Pris for Rachael (this mistake
is also caused by his belief that Rachael will reach him to keep her promise
to retire Pris). Pris knows that Rachael exists and that they are almost undis-
tinguishable; but she cannot know that Rick has gone to bed with Rachael
and believes she will reach him to help him —unless Rachael has told her. It is
one of those tricks that one can expect from the canonical dark ladies of noir
movies, and it tells us how devious Rachael really is; no wonder that she is
the only android to escape the 24-hour slaughter unscathed.16
Rick is only saved by the direct intervention of Mercer, the odd godhead
of the religion practiced by most humans in the novel. This is a science-fiction
novel, after all, and a Dickian novel, so technological mirabilia (like the
androids, the artificial animals, space travel and laser tubes, flying cars and
the empathy box) live together with supernatural events, like Mercer’s appari-
tion in Chapter 19, just before the final shootout (which resembles the appari-
tion of the Intercessor in A Maze of Death that will be discussed in the next
chapter). Mercer not only saves Rick’s life, thus averting the machinations of
the dark lady, but he also solves the moral quandary of the novel, even if the
solution is terribly bitter.
 6. The Android Cogito 169

Other interpreters have noticed Rick’s moral dilemma (Fitting 1987, 135;
Robinson 91; Warrick 127–8), which is formulated well before his night with
Rachael at the hotel: if androids must be hunted when they reach Earth,
because they have killed their owners to escape the colonies on other planets
(29), and because, lacking empathy, each one of them is a dangerous “solitary
predator” (28), the hunter — which must be human — will only be able to
retire them if he has no empathic bond with them. A biological parallelism
is suggested: the androids are like predators, which must not be endowed
with empathy to survive (28), while men are “like herbivores” endowed with
a “group instinct,” being “omnivores who could depart form a meat diet”
(28). This implies that all the humans in the novel are vegetarians, since eating
meat would contradict the generalized veneration of animals required by Mer-
cerism. Yet some men, the bounty hunters, must retire androids, that is, kill
them; and while the simulacra in Build were electronic devices, the androids
in this novel are the product of genetic engineering, even though Dick did
not use this phrase. They look like humans, hence the necessity of the tests
to identify them, and here rises a contradiction: how can a man go on killing
androids once he establishes an empathic bond with some or all of them, due
to their human (and sometimes attractive) appearance, and cannot simply see
them (like Rick does at the beginning of the novel) as “the Killers” (28–9)
and obey Mercer’s commandment that “You shall kill only the killers” (28)?
The basic idea in the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner is there to solve this
problem: Rick is a replicant, expediently used by the police (and possibly
controlled by Gaff ) to retire runaway replicants. But this is not the case in
the novel. Rationality will not solve this dilemma, also because the fact that
androids are purely rational prevents them from understanding Mercerism
and empathy: unrestrained rationality is on the side of inhumanity. If this is
a mystery, in the religious meaning of the term (especially used by Eastern
Christianity and Roman Catholics), here is how Mercer enunciates it: “You
will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition
of life, to be required to violate your own identity.... It is the ultimate shadow,
the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.
Everywhere in the universe” (135). Jameson described this as a “Bhagavadgita
moral” ( Jameson 2005, 366), because also the sacred Hindu Bhagavad Gita
contains a contradiction between the principle of ahimsa (avoidance of vio-
lence) and just war (one which is not tainted by selfish concerns). So Rick
may have an empathic bond with his prospective victims and kill them all
the same; he can paradoxically kill more efficiently because he may empathize
with them and see the world from their point of view (whenever he fails to
do this, as with Rachel or Luba, he is cheated). He is not cynical, like Resch
(or the real protagonist of a classical noir), so he will suffer for what he must
170 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

do — hence the deep emotional exhaustion which besets him after he has
retired Pris, Roy and Irmgard Baty, in chapters 20 and 21 (also caused by the
killing of the goat [170]). Rick cannot hide what he is doing behind an euphe-
mism; he is well aware that he is not just “retiring” androids but slaughtering
them, and the scene of the final killings (166–9) has a dry brutality of an
intensity that one rarely finds in Dick, a man who intensely disliked physical
violence and never indulged in graphic descriptions of carnage in his fiction.
All in all, this novel is also a theodicy, that is, a meditation on the presence
of evil in the world, hence similar to High Castle (Ch. 3), and Stigmata, as
we shall see in the next chapter; the philosophical implications of the existence
of evil were evidently a long-term concern for Dick, also noticed by Link,
who chose to devote a section of his overview of Dick’s themes to the “Theod-
icy Problem” (Link 73–9). Androids is a science-fictional theodicy which —
we cannot say whether accidentally or intentionally — has many elements in
common with noir movies and hard-boiled fiction: the dark lady, as we have
seen; the convoluted plot with a series of coups de théâtre (as it is usual in
Dick but also in Hammett’s novels, be they Red Harvest or The Dain Curse);
but above all the character of Rick Deckard, which Jameson correctly describes
as a “middle-class bounty hunter” ( Jameson 2005, 367). This may have been
inspired by Marc Vernet’s contention that the hero of noir cinema, the private
detective, “is a petty-bourgeois jealous of his independence, convinced of his
moral worth and concerned with protecting what is, in his eyes, the exemplary
value of American democracy” (Vernet 18).17 There is little doubt that Rick
(as depicted in the novel, with his wife, his electric sheep, his wish to buy a
real animal frustrated by his scant salary, and his independent position as a
bounty hunter) is a typical Dickian Little Man, closer to Vernet’s petty-bour-
geois class than to a really proletarian character like John R. Isidore (I tend
to see the androids as a group outside the class system, similar to Marx’s
Lumpenproletariat; it is too difficult to see them as a “wronged lower class” as
suggested by Suvin [14]). If Dick’s Rick Dekard, as distinguished from Ridley
Scott’s character, has some traits in common with the heroes of noir movies
(though lacking their street wisdom, vitriolic sense of humor, and baroque
verbal skills),18 it should be then added that the roots of his contradictory
moral are not necessarily as exotic as Jameson suspects (though one should
always take into account Dick’s familiarity with Oriental philosophies and
religions).
On the one hand the contradiction of the predator (Rick) endowed with
empathy can be solved from an ethological point of view. Not all predators
are lonely killers; lions and wolves (two animals that Dick did not mention
in this animal-crowded novel) hunt in well-organized teams, and they have
both social instincts and killing skills. On the other hand, Rick’s plight —
 6. The Android Cogito 171

that is, to empathize with his victims, kill them and suffer — may bear some
relation with D.H. Lawrence’s definition of the essential American soul, that
he posited as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” (Lawrence 68). Maybe Rick
is not as hard as Phil Resch, and he is luckily not isolate (though he isolates
himself in chapter 21, after the final slaughter), but there is no doubt that he
kills most of the six androids and that the experience allowed by the empathy
box, the fundamental ritual of Mercerism, has a remarkably stoic quality:
climbing a desolate slope hit by stones thrown by invisible tormenters asks
for those virtues of self-control and fortitude that stoics considered para-
mount.19
Is Rick Deckard a representative American, after all? It is not something
that may be ruled out, given Dick’s powerful democratic (and sometimes pop-
ulist) frame of mind. It should be said, however, that he is the only professional
killer in Dick’s gallery of characters — if we exclude the sometimes psychotic
and almost always android-like thugs, such as the Nazi commandos which
try to eliminate general Tedeki, mister Tagomi and herr Wegener in The Man
in the High Castle.
We should conclude our discussion of these two novels by pointing out
that these are — as usual — multi-layered texts where ontological uncertainty
asks readers to reconsider their notions of human, machine, and android. But
other received notions are at stake in these texts. It is in fact interesting that
Peter Fitting asks a very simple question, when he notices that “there are few
reasons given why anyone would want to go to the expense and trouble of
developing a robot which could pass for a human being — especially since this
resemblance is the source of considerable anxieties” (Fitting 1987, 133). It is
a sensible questions if one considers Androids (and Blade Runner), though one
may wonder whether Rachael’s sexual intercourse with Rick (and Rachel’s
love story with the replicant hunter in the movie) are not enough to explain
what can be done with these beings which almost perfectly imitate humans
though they are not legally recognized as humans.
All in all, however, Fitting’s question finds an answer in Build, and one
which reconnects the two novels that the tradition of science-fiction: there
Pris perceives the quasi-religious aspects of building the Stanton and the Lin-
coln, first by connecting them to resurrection (69), then to the sacrament of
the Eucharist (69), though not without doubts; but a clearer statement of the
religious implication in what she and the MASA Associates are really doing
is expressed later in the novel, when she tells Louis: “We’re like gods ... in
what we’ve done, this task of ours, this great labor. Stanton and Lincoln, the
new race...” (91). By creating life, man becomes god; but this was already
clear to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley when she chose to use these three lines
from Milton’s Paradise Lost as the epigraph of Frankenstein; or, the Modern
172 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Prometheus: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man?

Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?”
This religious aspect of the human-android relation is present in Build,
but it is even blatant in Blade Runner (where the killing of Tyrrell by Roy may
amount to a Luciferian rebellion or a resurrection of the monster’s conflictual
attitude towards his creator, Victor Frankenstein, cf. Desser). On the other
hand, it does not seem to be active in Androids, where the issue of religion is
represented by Mercerism and its stoic morality; yet it might be argued that
if Build describes the past of Androids, and Eldon Rosen is a descendant of
Louis Rosen in the earlier text, then the consequence of Pris’ act of hubris —
creating a new race and turning into gods — is the gloomy and decadent world
of Androids. Here it is not clear anymore who is human and who is not: just
anybody could be a runaway Frankenstein’s monster without revealing elec-
trodes and scars, ready to laser us to death, and decent men like Rick must
turn into stoic killers to survive. Ontological uncertainty cuts both ways: it
may create such a situation where the injustices of racism are denounced and
a more equalitarian society may be glimpsed — one where the Lincoln could
be an excellent president of a posthuman USA — but also lead us to a paranoid
world of mistrust and suffering, where the Dickian little man feels he has
became “a scourge, like famine or plague” (169). Once again Dick is ques-
tioning the ideology of transcendence through technology which underpins
the narratives of Golden Age science-fiction. It is not then strange that, after
stating the godlike status she has achieved, Pris Fraunezimmer adds “and yet
by giving them life we empty ourselves. Don’t you feel hollow, now?” (91).
I do not know whether there is an echo of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men in
these words; however it is plain to see that the religious undertones of Androids
may tell us so much about it. So much may stem from the two different sit-
uations of ontological uncertainty at work in the two novels, which are both
however pivoted upon the basic opposition of authentic vs. fake, or human
vs. android. The absence of a clear demarcation in these narratives may lead
to such a condition that “no man can find site for his dwelling,” to quote
Pound once again (is not that a condition of radical uncertainty?), but it surely
allows for rich and hopefully fecund interpretive work. Dick believed he had
exhausted the issue of androids vs. humans, as this “is his last significant
extended statement in fiction on the android” (Barlow 1991, 77); given the
complexity of Androids, he had good reasons to think so.
Last but not least, the bleaker tone in the second novel in order of com-
pletion, that is, Androids, prepares us for the reading of the darkest novels
Dick wrote, which will be discussed in the next chapter; it also introduces
the issue of Dick’s creative crisis in the late sixties and early seventies, which
will be dealt with there.
 Chapter 7

Psychedelic Demiurges:
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
Ubik, A Maze of Death and
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

“I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself

a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.”
William Shakespeare

The three novels in the fourth chapter are united by the themes of mad-
ness and community, and seem to express a moderately optimistic stance (with
at least a utopian possibility glimpsed at the end of Time-Slip, and utopian
undertones in Bloodmoney and Clans— surely stronger in the latter than the
former); the four novels I will discuss in this chapter —The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (1964), Ubik (1969), and A Maze of Death (1970), and Flow
My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)— present us with four different variations
on the theme of finite subjective realities, and it is a remarkably bleaker quartet
than the previous trio (with the partial exception of Tears).
I will not use the terms utopia and dystopia to differentiate these two
groups of novels because there is no fully developed utopian component in
Martian Time-Slip; even Fredric Jameson reads the ending of that novel, with
Manfred’s final visitation (discussed in chapter 4), admitting that it is a single
episode “in the most depressing of all his novelistic ‘realities,’ the settlements
on Mars of Martian Time-Slip” ( Jameson 2005, 383). On the other hand,
three of the four novels we are going to discuss do not qualify as dystopias,
a term which can only be used for Flow My Tears (plus the two subsequent
works, A Scanner Darkly [1977] and Radio Free Albemuth [posthumously pub-
lished in 1985 but actually completed in 1976]); hence I disagree with Darko

173
174 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Suvin’s contention that “[u]p to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch the
novels by Dick that are not primarily dystopian ... are better forgotten” (Suvin,
1975, 7). The problem with such a formulation is not that it dismisses a novel
which should not be forgotten at all (The Cosmic Puppets), but that it is difficult
to qualify the major works before Stigmata (published in 1964) and some of
the following as primarily dystopian.
In his essay on science-fiction, utopia and dystopia, Tom Moylan defines
the third genre, drawing from such previous theorists as Sargent and Suvin
(Moylan 155), as a narrative text that offers a detailed description of a non-
existent society which is worse or significantly less perfect than the society in
which the contemporary readers lives; but this society must be presented
and/or judged as such from the point of view of a representative of a discon-
tented group or class. The lack of a detailed description in Dick’s novels of
the 1960s tells us they do not really qualify — with the possible exception of
The Man in the High Castle. In all the other novels (with two remarkable
exceptions), even if the world described is bleak, oppressive, even totalitarian
(like the One Happy World in Time Out of Joint), the stress is more on indi-
vidual adventures and misadventures than on the collective level. In Dick’s
novels we never find something like the essay-within-the-novel The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein that Orwell
grafted on his Nineteen Eighty-Four to describe in detail the workings of the
totalitarian regimes in Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. There is a text-within-
the-text in High Castle, Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy: it is however
an alternate history novel, which does not analyze or explain the world Mr.
Tagomi and the other characters live in, but conjures up another world alto-
gether; it complicates the plot, as we have seen, rather than clarify it, as Gold-
stein’s hyperfictional essay does in Orwell’s novel.1
The future societies devised by Dick are mostly backgrounds, seen from
the perspective of the ordinary people who live in those societies; a perspective
which usually allows only sketchy descriptions of how those societies work.
Moreover, the future societies in Dick’s science-fiction are often anamorphic
images of the United States as seen by Dick (this is true for the Martian set-
tlements in Time-Slip, but also for the USEA in The Simulacra, cf. Chapter
6), or they may be derivative of stock despotic governments easily found in
commercial science-fiction (which Dick knew quite well and also produced).
Christopher Palmer is in fact right when he observes that “popular fiction ...
commonly implies that the ruling structures of society are inadequate or cor-
rupt and that average people are helpless or incriminated, so that a superhero
or — what is much the same thing — a private investigator must come to the
rescue” (Palmer 161).
I might object at Palmer’s a bit too nonchalant superimposition of pulp
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 175

science-fiction (whose pulpiest representatives are surely superhero comics)2

and hard-boiled detective stories, but his remarks are quite fitting: unjust or
oppressive governments are a staple in cheap science-fiction, and they are
unfailingly found in those novels Dick wrote as apprentice works or to make
ends meet: Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, Vulcan’s Hammer, Our Friends
from Frolix 8, etc. In these works the overthrow of dystopian governments is
correctly diagnosed by Robinson as “wish-fulfillment” (27). There is a certain
difference between Dick’s dismal worlds, which are often nightmarish (even
in their “pulpier” versions, such as The Game-Players of Titan, which Kim
Stanley Robinson finds disturbing even if he considers it a failure [Robinson
53]), and the programmatically evil world depicted by Orwell, Zamjatin,
Huxley, Atwood. Characters in real dystopias are mere probes which allow
writers to show their readers the awful workings of those hellish societies;
they may also be ethical/political touchstones, as Moylan theorized following
Suvin, as they embody the discontented group or class which rejects that soci-
ety.3 But in Dick’s fiction characters are central, even if they are destructured,
fragmented, split, mad, neurotic, amnesiac, or any combinations of these,
because Dick is above all a pure-bred novelist. Tears might almost qualify as
a dystopia if only the representatives of the discontented/repressed class in it
presented that world or expressed an articulate judgment; their (often
unhappy) feelings and experiences of love are however more important. Even
in Dick’s only full-fledged dystopias, Scanner and Albemuth,4 characters and
their lives are more important than the sfnal societies they live in.
However, though one has to reject Suvin’s stress on the dystopian dimen-
sion, in the same essay there is an interesting remark which may tell us some-
thing about The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and the three other novels
we are going to read in this chapter. The Croatian critic was evidently annoyed
by Stigmata: in the first page of his essay he says it is “a flawed but powerful
near-masterpiece” (Suvin 1975, 2). Then he explains that “the political theme
and horizon begin here to give way to the ontological” (9); the problem is
Palmer Eldritch, of course, the interplanetary entrepreneur and drug-dealer
whose drug Chew-Z not only allows its consumers to live in imaginary worlds
where their wishes may allegedly come true, but allows him to control those
virtual worlds or FSRs to such an extent that Chew-Z users do not know
whether they are in the real world or in one that only looks real, but is actually
another FSR conjured up by Eldritch. The classical “what is real?” question,
that some interpreters see as Dick’s main obsession, is here more ostensibly
central than in High Castle (though we should now see that Dick has simply
heightened the ontological uncertainty which characterized The Cosmic Pup-
pets, Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint). Suvin understands that “the onto-
logical dilemmas have a clear genesis in the political ones” (9), but shifting
176 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the issue of power from human institutions to mysterious entities is something

that a Marxist — albeit unorthodox — intellectual like him cannot accept.
Suvin probably sensed something that underlies the whole novel, writ-
ten — as Dick told Rickman —“in connection with [his] becoming an adult
convert to the Episcopal Church” (Rickman 1988, 149): in that church, the
United States province of the Anglican Communion, there is the sacrament of
the Eucharist, which is considered by some Anglo-Catholic Anglicans as
a transubstantiation, a change of bread and wine into the body and blood
of Christ. This mystical transformation evidently fascinated Dick, which
devised “a diabolical Eucharist” (Rickman 1988, 149), having elaborated “a
fairly profound idea” of the sacrament. The mysterious entities — Eldritch and
the Chew-Z he markets — were unpalatable to Suvin because he realized that
those entities were above all religious, or derived from theological concepts.5
Stigmata was completed in March 1964, developing an idea that Dick
had already presented in his 1963 short story “The Days of Perky Pat.” The
months in which he wrote the novel are a time of marital crisis, but also a
moment of psychological malaise. Sutin tells us that Dick saw a face in the
sky in the second half of 1963, a metal face with “empty slots for eyes” (Sutin
127); it was cruel, and it was God. Dick said that he “didn’t really see it, but
the face was there” (127); Sutin suggests that Dick’s abuse of amphetamines,
that he took to sustain his hectic writing habits (Dick himself says he saw the
ominous face when he was going to the shack where he wrote eight hours a
day and more), may have caused the hallucination.
Dick’s involvement in the Episcopal Church was an attempt to find spir-
itual comfort vis-à-vis that terrifying vision, which was explained by a priest
at Dick’s church as an apparition of Satan (that’s in any case what the writer
wrote in a text which might not be very reliable, an unpublished headnote for
a story collection [Sutin 326]); but that vision had a strong resemblance to the
sight of Dick’s father Edgar wearing his Great War gasmask when he told little
Phil about his horrifying combat experiences on the Western Front (Sutin 127).
Dick himself acknowledged that the face in the sky was that “metal, blind,
inhuman visage ... now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil” (Sutin 127).
Moreover, Dick wrote in an unpublished headnote to “The Days of Perky
Pat,” the short story he expanded to write Eldritch, that “my father appears as
both Palmer Eldritch (the evil father, the diabolic mask-father) and as Leo
Bulero, the tender, gruff, warm, human, loving man” (Sutin 132).
Sutin rightly warns that no single event can explain the creation of a lit-
erary text like Stigmata; the face in the sky may have pushed Dick towards
the Episcopalian church, with its sacrament of the Eucharist; the Eucharist,
which should offer salvation through ingestion, might seem somewhat similar
to the relief from tiredness that amphetamines offered; the ominous face in
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 177

the sky reminding Dick of his father6 may well have been turned into the
ghastly face of Palmer Eldrich, with artificial Luxvid eyes and steel teeth
(implanted due to an accident)7; but there are other elements to be taken into
account. According to Sutin, Dick was fascinated by the symbology of the
Eucharist, which led him to read Carl Gustav Jung’s 1941 essay on “Transfor-
mation Symbolism in the Mass,” and that essay hinted at the Gnostic roots
of the sacrament (Sutin 128). In Jung’s opinion, Christ dies because he has
created a flawed world: “the auctor rerum [world creator] was a lower archon
who falsely imagined that he had created a perfect world, whereas in fact it
was woefully imperfect” ( Jung 1941, 334).
Here we may see how Dick’s synthetic imagination worked (being not
different, be it clear, from that of most writers): in fact archons were servants
of the demiurge in Gnostic doctrines. The demiurge is the lord of the imper-
fect world we live in, who pretends to be the real God — who is hidden, and
can only be reached through gnosis, or spiritual knowledge.8 It is easy to see
that Palmer Eldritch is an archon of sorts, inasmuch as he thinks (or says) he
creates perfect worlds of wish-fulfillment, who are actually imperfect; the
worlds or Finite Subjective Realities can be accessed by taking Chew-Z pills,
in a blaspheme parody of the Eucharist; those FSRs may seem real, like the
imperfect world created by the demiurge, but they are not; and though the
worlds conjured up by Chew-Z seem to offer an opportunity to recover what
one has lost (Barney could get back to the happy days of his marriage to
Emily, before their divorce [Ch. 5]), thus having a positive value, they are
actually “like being in hell,” a hell that is “recurrent and unyielding” (158).
The worlds created by Eldritch’s drug carry his stigmata, “the evil, negative
trinity of alienation, blurred reality and despair” (203). This is what lies under
or behind Eldritch’s prosthetic organs, that are clearly recognized by a Martian
telepathic jackal, a creature living in the wilderness which seems to have a
more direct perception of the nature of things; Barney, having used the Chew-
Z, assumes now and then the aspect of Eldritch, sporting metallic eyes, teeth
and arm; he is thus declared “Unclean”— hence uneatable — by the hungry
jackal, as “there’s something intolerably wrong” (197) with him.
Are we then allowed to read this novel as an allegoric narrative whose
two main characters, Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson, try to fight a sort of
cosmic villain, Palmer Eldritch, who embodies in a science-fictional setting
Evil itself? Is this novel a translation into science-fictional language of the
ancient Gnostic theology? Before a general interpretation is attempted, we
should pay attention to the architecture of the novel, especially to the parts
of it which are set in drug-produced finite subjective realities, or virtual real-
ities.
178 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Table 7.1
Virtual Realities in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Kind of
virtual reality Agent Pages Content
Shared artificial Can-D 42–7 The colonists in the Chicken Pox
world Prospects translate into Perky Pat and
Walt in California (as it was before the
global heating)
Finite Subjective Chew-Z 69–99 Leo Bulero is trapped in several delu-
sional worlds controlled by Palmer
Reality Eldritch, including one which seems so
real that Leo is beguiled; it includes a
contact with the men of the future with
the visionof the monument to Leo Bulero
(92–8); it is interrupted by a short
sequence with Barney Mayerson (narra
tive focus)and Felix Blau (76–9)
Finite Subjective Chew-Z 150–157 Barney gets back to his life with Emily;
Reality then to the morning after his night with
Roni Fugate; Eldritch intervenes by
superimposing himself on Hnatt
Finite Subjective Chew-Z 168–85 Barney meets Leo in the future as a
Reality phantasm, then talks to his future self,
and replaces Palmer Eldritch in his final
trip from Venus, to be killed by Leo in
Eldritch’s place

All in all, slightly more than one fourth of the whole novel (59 pages
out of 209) describe what happens to Bulero or Mayerson in the virtual real-
ities produced by drugs. Most of the artificial worlds are produced by Eldritch’s
drug Chew-Z, and a single episode shows what is experienced by users of
Can-D, the drug manufactured and sold by Bulero. It is quite clear that there
is a fundamental difference between the two substances: Can-D allows its
users to share a pleasant reality of Earth as it was before global heating forced
people to emigrate to Mars; Chew-Z sends those who use it to different sub-
jective worlds, as Leo understands while he is imprisoned in one of them (85).
Of course, one might object that the happy-go-lucky virtual California, where
Perky Pat and Walt Essex do not have to care about the impending environ-
mental disaster, seems to be more an opiate for the masses than a real com-
munitarian experience — but, compared to the nightmarish microworlds of
solipsistic isolation conjured up by Chew-Z, the artificial koinos kosmos of
Can-D appears rather harmless.
Moreover, the FSRs created by Chew-Z are controlled by Eldritch, who
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 179

uses them as means to an end. If we consider the three larger sequences of

virtual, drug-induced reality in the novel, we easily see that the first, which
involves Leo Bulero, is aimed at forcing the businessman to accept Eldritch’s
conditions, and the terms of his capitulation are clearly stated by Eldritch
(90) while Leo is still imprisoned in the FSR; the other two sequences, involv-
ing Barney Mayerson, can be said to be part of Eldritch’s B plan. Once the
cyborg entrepreneur understands that Bulero will never accept his commercial
proposition, and this means that Bulero will eventually kill Eldritch (some-
thing that the latter knows thanks to the ghostly time-traveling capacity pro-
vided by Chew-Z), he tries to persuade Barney to replace him on board the
doomed starship that will be destroyed by Bulero.
Once again a twisted theological subtext can be easily detected: Eldritch
is an anti–Christ (Warrick 110–1), one who is not ready to die for humankind’s
sin, but asks a man to die in his stead. And, at the end of the eleventh chapter,
Eldritch’s B plan seems to succeed, when the “great translation” is accom-
plished, and Barney discovers that “[i]t will be [him] ... that Leo Bulero will
kill. [Him] the monument will present a narration of ” (179), because now he
is Palmer Eldritch.
Here the term translation9 hints at transformation (it refers to the very
specific transformation taking place when people use Can-D and are embodied
in the two characters/dolls in the layouts, Perky Pat and Walt), but the key
concept — or metaphor — in this novel is rather a religious one, transubstan-
tiation. It is the Roman Catholic and Anglican/Episcopalian belief that bread
and wine change into the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, an onto-
logical translation similar to those which take place in the novel. Thanks to
Can-D (something which is ingested, like the Host), a layout with dolls is
transmogrified into a temporarily inhabitable world (Perky Pat and Walt’s
sunny and carefree pre-disaster California); the comparison between this
(pharmaceutical) experience and the Holy Communion is suggested by Anne
Hawthorne, who is a believer and belongs to a relatively traditionalist church
(114–6). But once Chew-Z enters the scene, transubstantiation is more fre-
quent; smaller and greater transformations take place both in and outside the
FSRs controlled by Eldritch. When Barney becomes Eldritch, Eldritch turns
into Barney (183), so that we have a double transubstantiation. The use of
the theological term is appropriate because, though the host and the wine
retain their appearance, believers know that they are actually changed into
Christ’s flesh and blood; in Stigmata Barney finds himself in Eldritch’s body
on board a doomed starship, while the entrepreneur is safely hidden in Barney’s
body. In Aristotelian terms, the appearance of the two characters is a mere
accident, while what counts is the substance within — their soul, to use an
old-fashioned name.
180 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

But there is another transubstantiation which repeatedly occurs in the

novel, and that is when someone (not just Barney, who has been in such close
contact with Eldritch that “neither of [them] can ever become completely
separated again” [187]) suddenly assumes Eldritch’s appearance, showing
Luxvid eyes, steel teeth and a prosthetic arm; this happens more than ten
times in the novel,10 and involves all the main characters, Leo Bulero, Barney
Mayerson, and Anne Hawthorne. The phenomenon initially occurs in the
FSRs created by Chew-Z, so that it may seem no more than a hallucination
caused by the drug, but then it takes place even after characters have gone
out of the virtual realities and are again in the koinos kosmos. This happens
for example in chapter 11, when Barney sees Anne Hawthorne with Eldritch’s
stigmata, while she tries to prevent him from using Chew-Z again when it is
too soon (168); we subsequently learn that also Barney appeared to Anne sub
specie Palmer Eldritch (194) in that crucial moment. These apparitions could
be explained as after-effects of the drug, but in the final pages they also extend
to characters like Felix Blau, who have not used Chew-Z (201), so that they
undoubtedly contribute to the condition of generalized ontological uncertainty
that dominates in the novel.
Ontological uncertainty is generated in the drug-induced idioi kosmoi,
when the characters are not sure if they are still the artificial world or have
managed to get out of it (this repeatedly happens to Leo in his Chew-Z expe-
rience), and anybody (or anything) can turn into Palmer Eldritch. But it also
impacts on them when they are out of the FSRs produced by the drug, and
there is no certainty that they are really out of them, as Eldritch keeps appear-
ing in the koinos kosmos (one of these apparitions, when Eldritch is super-
imposed to Leo’s secretary [167] has been noticed by Jameson); in Leo’s words
“once you get into one of [the virtual realities] you can’t quite scramble back
out” (165). This might admittedly render my previous scheme pointless,
though I believe that mapping Dick’s novels can always help us grasp his tex-
tual strategies: the simple fact that most of the psychedelic fireworks triggered
by Chew-Z arrive when 1/3 of the novel has elapsed tell us that the crescendo
architecture we found in such a minor work as The Game-Players of Titan
(Ch. 1) still applies to this major work.
Talking about ontological uncertainty in Stigmata is particularly appro-
priate, as ontology is overtly mentioned in the text; in fact Anne Hawthorne
admonishes Barney not to “talk ontology,” reminding him that if “the map is
not the territory, the pot is not the potter” (193), even emphasizing it, so that
he should not “say is”; but Eucharist is a fundamentally ontological sacrament,
where bread is flesh and wine is blood (their appearances notwithstanding,
but this is once again a matter of accident and substance). As we have seen,
in this novel everybody can be Palmer Eldritch, and a suitcase can be a
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 181

psychiatrist (7) called Dr. Smile. Displacements of identities and objects

abound; uncertainty undermines any conclusion Barney and other characters
may think they have reached (or wish they have) also because it cuts both
ways. Chew-Z is a de-realizing, hallucinogenic drug, hence what you see
while under its effects should be false, bogus, artificial; yet Leo, during his
Chew-Z trip, reaches a moment in the future — well after Eldritch has been
defeated and killed by him — thanks to the “time-overtones” of the drug (97),
and contemplates a monument celebrating his victory over his rival.11 Chew-
Z is Eldritch’s instrument, but it may offer a vision of a world where Eldritch
has been defeated; it is hallucinogenic, but it may offer a revelation.
Besides Eldritch himself is a most ambiguous figure. He might be the
embodiment of absolute evil, a ruthless alien invader who entered the body
of the businessman while he was traveling from Proxima Centauri to Earth,
and uses his product to dominate humankind (92, 164, 188–9). Yet he (or it)
is also a superior form of life, with a “vast, reliable wisdom” (188) that helps
Barney to make a fundamental choice about his own future. Barney had for-
merly described him as “an evil visitor oozing over us from the Prox system”
(136), imagining him (or it) as the pulpish alien menace from outer space;
but then Eldritch is much more than that, as Barney suspects that when people
turn into Palmer Eldritch what is taking place is not just a superimposition,
but a revelation of “absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance”
(194). Though Anne rejects Barney’s suggestion that Eldritch is God, because
“it’s a creature fashioned by something higher than itself ” (192), Barney main-
tains that if Eldritch manifests himself even to those who have not used Chew-
Z, it may mean that he is more than he seems to be; he somewhat underlies
the surface of reality. Barney insists on the stigmata (the artificial eyes, the
steel teeth, the prosthetic arm) as “symbols of ... inhabitation” (194), and then
goes on to describe the helplessness of humankind vis-à-vis this disquieting
presence, as “we have no sacraments through which to protect ourselves; we
can’t compel it, by our careful, time-honored, clever, painstaking rituals, to
confine itself to specific elements such as bread and water or bread and wine”
(195). This takes us to the Eucharist again, where we have what the theologians
have called the “real presence” of Christ. Eldritch is both alien invader out of
pulp sf and a divine entity; but if he is God, he is neither a kind, loving, and
caring heavenly father, nor a self-sacrificing redeemer.
Eldritch’s genesis connects him to Dick’s real father Edgar; Eldritch is a
patriarchal god, because he, unlike Christ, is not a Son ready to die for his
Father (and us), but “the superior power asking us to perish for it” (195). Such
an inversion of the core of Christian theology smells of sulphur. Dick himself
told Rickman that this “is essentially a diabolical novel,” and that he accepted
its definition as a “Satanic bible,” with a “diabolical Eucharist” (Rickman
182 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

1988, 149). Do we have Palmer Eldritch as the Devil, then? In Rickman’s

interview Dick says that he aimed at “explaining just what [he] felt was the
absolute evil in the world” (Rickman 1988, 149), something he had tried to
grasp in The Man in the High Castle.
If we are satisfied with the idea that this is another science-fictional
theodicy, another exploration of the problem of evil, then it is Barney who
eventually offers an explanation, because if Eldritch is the embodiment of
absolute evil, his fundamental drive seems to be “nothing more or less than
the desire of ... an out-of-dust created organism to perpetuate itself ” (195).
It is the instinct of self-preservation that pushes Eldritch to ask Barney to
perish for him, as he eventually admits when he says that his ultimate aim
was to “perpetuate [him]self ” (198). This idea returns in other important
works by Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ch. 6), but was
already present in one of his earliest short stories, “The Preserving Machine”
(1953), where a stereotyped sfnal inventor builds a device that may turn the
great masterpieces of music (by Schubert or Wagner) into animals, so that
they may survive the passing of time and “the reshuffling of societies” (CS1
149). But once the machine translates the music animals back into musical
scores, the wonderful harmonies and melodies of great composers are turned
into something “distorted, diabolical, without sense or meaning” (CS1 155),
because the struggle for survival, the self-preserving instinct has corrupted
them. In this early story we already have transubstantiation, the transformation
of something into something else that should somewhat remain what it orig-
inally was under a different appearance; and the overpowering force of the
principle of self-preservation.
We should not forget that Dick has also smuggled the Gnostic idea of
the Demiurge in his novel, and Eldritch, being a semi-divine creator of false
realities can be seen as a sfnal Demiurge. If we take the Gnostic subtext into
account, we have to add another layer to our interpretation of Stigmata as a
quite unconventional theodicy: evil is a de-realizing principle, just like Ahri-
man in The Cosmic Puppets, and there is no doubt that Eldritch is a master
illusionist, “a damned magician” (100) in Leo Bulero’s own words.
All this might well induce us to get to a little lower layer of meaning, to
paraphrase Melville’s Ahab, and ask ourselves whether Eldritch is not a sort
of anamorphic self-portrait of the author as a novelistic demiurge. It is the
conception of the author-as-god which Carravetta proposes as the represen-
tative figure of an important current in postmodernist fiction (Carravetta 505–
8). Dick, the ultimate creator of the worlds in Stigmata, operates and intervenes
through an archon who is no more than a servant of the real demiurge, namely
the novelist. We should not forget that, unlike Castle and Time-Slip, Stigmata
was written for the pulp paperback market; it was completed after the “pub-
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 183

lishing disaster” of 1963 that we have already discussed in the previous chap-
ters, and its prose and structure bespeaks a much hastier writing process. This
is not said in order to underestimate this novel, but to explain its rollercoaster,
hectic rhythm, and the evident fact that Dick unashamedly plays the Game
of the Rat once again, the same game he had played in his The Game-Players
of Titan (completed nine months before Stigmata). While the Rat is invisible
in the earlier novel and just occasionally hinted at (Ch. 1), here the game-
player appears with his scary face and prosthetic arm: he is the arch-conjuror
Palmer Eldritch, who can manipulate the fabric itself of reality, who creates
a condition of radical ontological uncertainty — just like the hack sf writer
Philip K. Dick, always ready to pull whatever sort of science-fictional rabbit
out of his apparently inexhaustible hat.
Dick’s identification with Eldritch may not be something that was clear
to Dick himself, though the connection of Eldritch’s face with his father’s
may well hint at that. Identification with one’s father is always a viable psy-
chological option, even for those who have a troubled relation with their male
parent, like Dick did. The relation between Dick and Eldritch may also entail
a generous dose of ambiguity (like everything else connected to Eldritch); the
cosmic drug dealer may stand for a negative version of creativity, one that
cheats humans (and readers), to be opposed by the real creative force belonging
to artists (here represented by Emily Hnatt, the potter). But if Eldritch is a
flawed artist, only able to concoct unsatisfactory worlds (universes falling
apart, to paraphrase the title of one of Dick’s most celebrated essays) which
ultimately inexorably turn into recurrent and unyielding hells, he might be
dangerously close to Dick, creator of unsatisfactory novels rejected by
respectable publishing houses and sentenced to the repetitive toil of the hack
writer.
Eldritch fails in the end, defeated by the little men Barney and Leo; we
cannot obviously deny that Dick always sympathized for the little man who
bravely struggle against absolute evil, like Mr. Tagomi, or Joe Chip in Ubik,
but here the canny creator of FSRs is Eldritch, a failed conjuror of idioi kosmoi
like Dick himself. This may allow us to reinterpret Barney’s final remarks,
when he wonders whether some responsibility for Eldritch’s misdeeds does
not lie on God after all —if Eldritch cannot be identified with God — because
“it was a portion of God’s Creation” (200). Eldritch is in fact a character in
a novel created by Dick; if he is not Dick, because we cannot talk ontology,
he is a portion of Dick’s creation, so part of the responsibility lies in any case
on the author of Stigmata. Then one of Dick’s most famous sayings, which
ends the plot pivoted upon Barney Mayerson, “there was such a thing as sal-
vation. But — Not for everyone” (200), may be a bitter remark on Dick’s fate
as both writer and man.
184 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

That Eldritch is directly (as Dick’s fictional alter-ego, because they are
both demiurges) or indirectly (as the archon of Dick, the demiurge of the
bogus world depicted in Stigmata) should then not surprise us, because the
ending scene of the novel, with Leo Bulero turning into Eldritch to such an
extent that he even forgets who he is, and asks Felix Blau “‘Leo’? How come
you keep calling me ‘Leo’?” (204), is not just a way to provide a sardonic
punch-line to the novel, but aims at reminding us that if Eldritch is evil,
there is Eldritch in all of us, even in the man who will slain the arch-villain
in fair combat (97).12 Hence there had to be some Eldritch also in Philip Kin-
dred Dick.
This metafictional interpretation does not exclude other approaches. I
have for example proposed a reading of Palmer Eldritch as the embodiment
of technology in all its manipulative capabilities (Rossi 1994), in a paper which
drew strongly from Heidegger’s meditation on Technik. To counter a certain
interpretation of Dick as a herald of the postmodern condition — a condition
where the uncertainty about reality is heightened by the mass media apparatus
made up by several technologies — which was burgeoning in the 1980s and
which was flattening the complexities of Dick’s oeuvre, I identified Eldritch
with mass media technologies and the FSRs they produced, and showed Dick’s
negative presentation of those artificial worlds. Such a reading is not incom-
patible with the analysis that I have proposed in this chapter, inasmuch as
cheap pulp paperbacks aimed at a mass market were definitely not outside
the mass media apparatus of the 1960s (nor they are today). Dick managed
(once more) to use the tools of conventional science-fiction (Mars, space travel,
alien invasion, psi-powers) and deconstruct them; he remained in the ghetto
of a then still discredited popular genre, but managed to dismantle its mech-
anisms: the whole story of the colonization of Mars is a demolition of the
expansionist myth underlying most of the Golden Age sf. While apparently
catering to the unsophisticated appetites of purportedly lowbrow sf fans, Dick
presents his readers with a display of alienation (the colonists in their hovels),
blurred reality (the dominating ontological uncertainty, which cannot be sim-
ply read as a fake reality, but as something indistinct, hence beguiling, like
Eldritch’s virtual realities) and despair (Barney’s final situation, when he is
purposelessly stranded in the middle of the wasteland called Mars). This is,
after all, an attack to a central principle of Golden Age sf, the programmatic
optimism about the wonders that science and technology will offer us. Sf his-
torians tell us that the 1950s, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
started to depict scientific progress as a mixed blessing, and Dick is among
those representatives of sociological sf which replaced the gung-ho attitude
of Campbell and his disciples with a more cautious exploration of the futures
that might stem from nuclear weapons, the mass media, computers, space
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 185

travel. But in Stigmata the dreams of omnipotence and transcendence-

through-science of Golden Age sf are somewhat recapitulated in Eldritch’s
offer of eternal life as an easily-available commodity; and immortality is one
of the myths of scientific transcendence repeatedly proposed by Robert A.
Heinlein in his Lazarus Long stories and novels, from Methuselah’s Children
(1941) to To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) (Ch. 5).
Like Golden Age sf, Eldritch says he can deliver eternal life, which means
transcending the mortality of man through science and technology; but
immortality in Stigmata is only achieved in Chew-Z-produced Finite Sub-
jective Realities, that is in a virtual, imaginary condition. Death is actually
not overcome, because it is already inscribed in the plot of the novel: Eldritch’s
death has already taken place when we arrive to the ending, i.e., to Barney’s
last conversation with the drug dealer and entrepreneur, which takes place in
linear time before Leo Bulero destroys Eldritch’s space ship (here the opposition
between fabula and sujet posited by Russian Formalists and structuralism finds
a most original application); Eldritch is well aware that he cannot escape death
(199). Hence I cannot agree with Robinson when he maintains that “the novel
ends before the deed is actually accomplished” (62), where the “deed” is
Eldritch’s defeat, because the scene immediately preceding Eldritch’s death is
shown in Chapter 12 (183–5); the deed is thus accomplished in a prolepsis,
which should not surprise us in a novel which begins with another, less evident
prolepsis, Bulero’s “interoffice audio-memo” (5) which, according to Dick,
was “the real ending of the novel” as it “indicates that Leo has been successful
in freeing his mind from delusion, that he has indeed remembered who and
what he is” (SL5 135). This is no mean time-slip: the memo appearing as an
epigraph at the beginning of the novel was “dictated by Leo Bulero immedi-
ately on his return from Mars” (5), which is told in Chapter 12. Besides, we
know of Eldritch’s final defeat thanks to the story the guards tell Bulero and
the monument he sees during his Chew-Z experience in Chapter 6. The novel
may end (if the ending is chapter 13) before the deed is actually accomplished,
but what comes after the ending has been already told, pace Robinson, in a
totally non-linear fashion — maybe less blatant than the labyrinthine temporal
displacements in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, but almost as effective.
However, even in the Chew-Z-generated FSRs, neither Leo nor Barney
achieve eternal life. Leo is described as a phantasm (95) by one of the guards
watching the future monument; Barney is told by a future Leo he is a phantasm
too (170). A phantasm may be an illusion, but it is also a ghost, a disembodied
soul, what is left of a dead person; hence Chew-Z, by turning its users into
phantasms, ultimately brings them to a sort of displaced death. It is not much
better than the deadly Substance D in A Scanner Darkly.
There is a strong connection between Stigmata and the three other novels
186 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

I am going to discuss in this chapter, and it becomes evident if we compare

them to the three novels we have analyzed in Chapter 4: while Bloodmoney,
Time-Slip and Clans are multi-plot and multi-foci novels (the first two being
the best specimens of this technique with The Man in the High Castle), Stig-
mata, Ubik, Maze, and Tears, though presenting their readers with a group
of characters, do not offer a full-blown multi-foci narrative, but either a
“stripped down” (Robinson, 93) version of it, where the points of view of one
or two characters prevail (Leo and Barney in Stigmata; Joe Chip in Ubik; Tav-
erner and Buckman in Tears), or a meager multiplicity of points of view, as
in Maze (with a prevalent focus on Seth Morley). Besides, compared to the
gallery of well-distinct personalities that we meet in Castle, Time-Slip or Blood-
money, the group of colonists on Delmak-O in Maze is only weakly differen-
tiated; the same may be said for the inertials around Joe Chip in Ubik. In
Stigmata, the clash among the three main characters (Leo, Barney and Palmer
Eldritch) does not offer others many opportunities to shine (with the possible
exception of Anne Hawthorne, who plays a more important role in the plot
than has been acknowledged by critics so far). Compared to these novels Tears
could seem out of place, as the characters met by Taverner in the novel are
strongly characterized, and some of them (Kathy Nelson, Ruth Rae, Mary
Ann Dominic, Alys Buckman) are definitely remarkable, some of them fore-
shadowing the powerful portraits of drug-addicts and dropouts in A Scanner
Darkly.
Besides, Dick himself saw a connection among the novels discussed in
this chapter. In a fragment of the Exegesis he wrote: “JOINT, EYE, STIGMATA,
UBIK, MAZE & TEARS are progressive parts of one unfolding true narrative”
depicting “the spurious world for what it is” (Pursuit 165). This statement,
written in 1977, is connected to Dick’s frantic attempts to explain his 2-3-74
experiences: he saw those novels — all connected by the issue of bogus worlds,
or FSRs — as hinting at the religious revelation that he was striving to grasp,
according to which the writer was only apparently living in California in the
1970s, while he was actually one of the first Christians in A.D. 70. You may
believe his theories about the 1974 experiences or not (but if you do do you
will have to choose which one you should believe, because Dick spun so many
of them — sometimes in his essays, more often in his letters — not always con-
sistent with each other), but I find this statement more interesting from the
point of view of literary criticism.
Dick then added a list of titles, each with a brief description of the pre-
cious information it conveys. Here is what he thought about the four novels
discussed in this chapter: “3) STIGMATA plural hallucinated worlds concocted
by an evil magician-like deity 4) UBIK messages of assistance penetrating the
simulated world(s) ‘from the other side’ by/from a salvific true deity 5) MAZE
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 187

simulated world fabricated by us, to escape an intolerable actuality 6) TEARS

the nature specifically of that actuality (an intolerable one — the BIP Acts)”13
(Pursuit 166). The idea of a bogus world hiding a reality that may be intol-
erable, but which is quite different from the one we know, is then present in
all these novels.
Another fragment (written in 1978) reworks this idea thus: “EYE , JOINT,
3 STIGMATA , UBIK & MAZE are the same novel written over and over again.
The characters are all out cold & lying around together on the floor, mass
hallucinating a world” (Pursuit 177). The situation described by Dick is what
we have found in Eye in the Sky, with the seven victims of the Bevatron accident
unconscious and visiting a series of FSRs; yet it is clear that there is indeed
a common element in these novels, namely the FSRs. Created by an imaginary
physical phenomenon, as in Eye; by the combination of a vast conspiracy and
a retreat syndrome, as in Time Out of Joint; by hallucinogenic or reality-alter-
ing drugs, as in Stigmata and Tears; or by two different sorts of Virtual Reality,
as in Ubik and A Maze of Death, it does not really matter. What is at stake is
the reality or unreality of a world, be it finite or infinite. Here ontological
uncertainty does not just involve, as in Dick’s android/simulacra stories, single
individuals, who might or might not be human; here worlds may be faked.
In all these novels we have characters or groups of characters trapped in FSRs
they did not choose to live in (with the possible exception of Maze, but also
the deliberately selected artificial shared world of Delmak-O may be seen as
a prison, and it is ultimately threatening and dismal, as we shall see); moreover,
in all these novels the FSRs have been created by someone or something whose
intentions are questionable or absolutely bad.
The FSRs we are mapping in this chapter could be easily considered as
private or partially shared hells. These realities are not subjective because they
are pure idioi kosmoi, solipsistic microworlds with a population of one; these
are rather ontologically uncertain infernos devised by a single, possibly
deranged mind, but inhabited by a small bunch of damned souls (or, in Tears,
a single damned who is aware that the world around him has changed, plus
all the others who are unaware). It is the destiny of those souls which compels
us to differentiate between the first two novels in the first list and the remaining
four. While in Eye and Time an escape is not impossible,14 in the four novels
written in the 1960s escape is impossible or (as in Tears) quite difficult.15
Let us then read Ubik, considered by most critics as one of Dick’s master-
pieces, on a par with Castle and Time-Slip. We should start by saying that when
Dick linked this novel to Eye in the Sky and A Maze of Death he was quite
accurate, as in these three works you do have a group of characters “all out
cold & lying around together on the floor, mass hallucinating a world”; on
the other hand the characters of Time Out of Joint may be mass-hallucinating
188 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

a world but are not unconscious; in Stigmata, as we have seen, there is group-
hallucination when Can-D is used, but Leo’s and Barney’s FSRs are definitely
individual and solipsistic; in Tears there is a peculiar sort of FSR, whose only
difference from the koinos kosmos is the non-existence of a single man — the
only individual who is aware of this. This should remind us that Dick’s own
comments on his works should always be read cum grano salis, allowing for
the slips of a rather disordered memory (let us not forget that the Rickman
interviews took place in the early 1980s, more than ten years after Dick had
written Ubik, more than twenty years after the publication of Time Out of
Joint).
Dick did not consider Ubik one of his best works: he told Rickman that
it was “a rather desperate effort to infuse something original” into a conven-
tional plot; moreover, he thought that in this novel readers could perceive
“the beginning of an ossification in my writing where I am beginning to repeat
myself ” (Rickman 1988, 172). This novel that was wholeheartedly praised by
Stanislaw Lem, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Fitting and others, including
Suvin, who saw the second half of the 1960s as a downbeat period in Dick’s
oeuvre, but considered this “richest and most provocative novel” as an excep-
tion [Suvin 1975, 2]; its narrative architecture may seem simpler than the
polyphony we find in Castle or Time-Slip, though interpreters like Robinson
have shown that its stripped-down structure has its bewildering complexities.
Yet Ubik bore — in the opinion of its author — the marks of ossification, decay,
maybe even death.
Surely the time when the novel was written was not one of the worst in
Dick’s life: in 1966 his marriage with his fourth wife, Nancy Hackett, was
quite serene. But there is a dark and haunting atmosphere in Ubik, which is
above all a novel about death: what else could be said about the story of a
group of characters who gradually discover that they are dead, and that what
they are experiencing is not life but half-life, a form of virtual reality conjured
up by residual electric activity in the brains of corpses preserved in cryogenic
suspension? There is a double reversal, in this plot, which is ultimately rather
depressing; while in the first half of the novel Joe Chip and the other survivors
of the explosion on the Moon think their employer Glen Runciter was the
only victim of the bombing, a series of strange events can only be rationally
explained by Runciter’s jeering message “LEAN OVER THE BOWL AND THEN
TAKE A DIVE. ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD. I AM ALIVE” (111); here is what Dick meant
by “messages of assistance” (Pursuit 166). In the last seven chapters of the
book (10–16) we discover that only Runciter survived the attack, while Joe
and the other members of the team died and were put in cryogenic suspension,
with their boss trying to keep in touch with and help them. But then there
is a reversal of the reversal when, in the brief last chapter, Runciter notices
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 189

that on the fifty-cent pieces he is giving his secretary there is the profile of
Joe Chip; since the appearance in the virtual reality of coins with Glen
Runciter’s profile was one of the signs that there was something wrong in Joe’s
world,16 readers may well conclude that also Runciter died in the bombing
and that he is in half-life too. Quoting Orwell, the characters of Ubik could
declare “we are the dead,” and such a bleak situation may well justify Dick’s
uneasiness with this novel.17 If we don’t forget that the bleakest period of Dick’s
life started in 1969, the year Ubik was published, we are authorized to read it
also as a harbinger of a major psychological crisis in the life of its author.18
Not all the commentators consider the situation at the end of Ubik hope-
less. Proietti suggests a political reading of the novel, where the final apparition
of the 50 cents coins with Joe Chip, by revealing that all the characters are
“on the same ontological plan” (Proietti 2006, 215), leads to a rejection of the
previously suggested hierarchical relation, which saw Runciter as privileged
because alive; Proietti then reads Ella Runciter’s statement that “[t]his battle
goes on wherever you have half-lifers” (183) as hinting to a stubborn opposition
to an evil trinity of “evil, the capital, and entropy” (Proietti 2006, 215). Also
for Kim Stanley Robinson the ending is not necessarily pessimistic, but must
be read as a sort of sabotage of certain traditional narrative devices of sf. The
ending heavily impinges on the interpretation of the novel, inasmuch as it
creates a major logical inconsistency: in fact, if all the characters had died in
the attack, “there would have been no one to get them to the Moratorium”
(Robinson 94), that is, the place where dead people are kept in cryogenic sus-
pension and can communicate with their relatives and friends. This leads
Robinson to interpret the inconsistency as the result of a deliberate narrative
strategy by Dick, as he “made certain that no explanation will cover all of the
facts” (Robinson 95): it is not a matter of sloppy writing, but a move to pur-
posefully thwart any rational explanation of the events told.19 When Robinson
wrote his monograph he could not quote another piece of evidence which
demonstrated that the logical inconsistencies of this novel could not be
explained away with hasty or careless writing: his PhD dissertation was pub-
lished in 1984, while the text of the screenplay based on Ubik (written by
Dick in 1974 for French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, whose project to film
the novel failed for lack of funding) was only published in 1985 (as Ubik: The
Screenplay). So Dick had an opportunity to change the plotline as much as
he wished eight years after its original composition; if he chose not to change
those crucial elements (the Runciter and Chip coins), it should mean that
whatever inconsistencies are in the text are deliberate, not accidental.
In his monograph Robinson follows Stanislaw Lem’s suggestion that
inconsistency in literature is not always the result of incompetence, but may
indicate the repudiation of certain values (such as logical consistency) for the
190 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

sake of others (Lem 1972, 60–1); in other words, the oddities of, say, Surrealist
art are not the result of Salvador Dali’s or René Magritte’s poor craftsmanship.
But what are the “other values”? Robinson does not clearly tell us, though his
quoting Fitting at the end of his essay may well mean that he accepts the basic
thesis of Fitting’s “Ubik and the Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF”: Dick aims
at the denunciation of “the anthropomorphic presuppositions of science and
of SF” (Fitting 1975, 45). Fitting’s essay is a typical representative of the
earliest season of Dick scholarship, where the Marxist approach was para-
mount, and Dick’s fiction was read as a form of socio-political criticism;
though not all the conclusions drawn by those readings are fully persuasive
today, the idea that Ubik is an attack to certain presuppositions of science-
fiction is still worth considering.
Half-life, with the ontological uncertainty it generates, can well be a way
to short-circuit and somewhat sabotage the idea of objectivity and rationality
which Golden Age Sf propounded. But there is more to it than that: we have
seen that Palmer Eldritch — who can mass-produce and deliver eternal life —
is an embodiment of the dream of transcendence-through-science20 which
was typical of Golden Age Sf. He boasts that Chew-Z enables men and women
to live whatever life they like, to attain immortality, even to change what is
by definition unchangeable, that is, the past; it is then a way to achieve a sort
of omnipotence, or total control. Half-life is not so different, inasmuch as it
should deliver a sort of eternal life, or at least a prolongation of life beyond
death — it also enables the living (like Runciter) to exploit the dead, to use
them as consultants (this is what the entrepreneur does with his wife Ella
right from the start), and this is what Proietti seems to suggest in his essay.
But Jory’s domination on the half-lifers gives the lie to the hopes for a
prolonged life, and unmasks the artificial afterlife as a nightmarish hell. More-
over, the final discovery disrupts any dream of rational control. Until we
believe that only Runciter is dead and the others are alive, or Joe Chip and
the inertials are dead and only Runciter is alive, we think we have at least one
narrative focus outside the virtual reality of half-life, which should provide
us with a grasp on the much needed objectivity of koinos kosmos. But the
last chapter tells us that there is no external and reliable point of view. This
does not really mean, pace Robinson, that there is no consistent explanation:
one might imagine that after the bombing police forces intervened and put
all the victims in a Moratorium; Jory’s malignant intervention may then
explain the separation of Runciter and his employees which leads he and them
to believe they have survived the explosion. The final coup de théâtre, abol-
ishing any external point of view at the end of the novel, determines the lack
of a certain logically consistent explanation — we are well into ontological
uncertainty once more, admittedly in a more radical fashion than in Stigmata.
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 191

Yet something important ties the two novels: in both Stigmata and Ubik
it is the villain who maintains and controls the virtual reality. Jory clearly says
that every fixture in the pseudo-world where most of the novel takes place “is
a product of [his] mind” (174). Jory explains that the energy he absorbs from
the brains of people in cryogenic suspension is used to maintain a small world
(175), just enough virtual space to host the minds of those he is deluding.
This is rather strange, and the strangeness of this behavior also strikes Joe
Chip, who asks “What’s the point of keeping this hotel and the street outside
going for me now? ... Now that I know [that it is all bogus]?” (175). Jory’s
answer is scoffing: “But I always do it this way”; it does not really explain,
and this may be part of the strategy of sabotaging any rational explanation
that we have already discussed. But it might also be explained in a different
way, if we connect this to something Ella Runciter tells Joe in a subsequent
episode, that is, that “there are Jorys in every moratorium” (183).
Ella, being part of the virtual reality, might be untrustworthy, but her
role in the plot is antithetical to Jory’s. While the cruel and voracious boy
embodies the destructive principle, propelled by sheer and avid self-preser-
vation (174), and only interested in “eating” other minds to survive (just like
Palmer Eldritch, though in a coarser fashion), Ella helps Joe survive by means
of the reviving Ubik spray can. We have bitheism again, a dualistic world
view where a principle of death and decay (originally represented by Ahriman
in Puppets) is countered by a principle of life and growth (Ormazd and Armaiti
in the same novel); no wonder then that Ella is represented as a young and
beautiful woman. This resurfacing of an old symbolic opposition in Dick’s
fictional world should not however put us off the fact that wherever there is
a moratorium — i.e., a space of virtual reality, however short-lived and flick-
ering it may be — there is a Jory, that is, someone or something who maintains
and manages the virtual reality, to a certain extent (the fact that Joe can protect
himself from decay and death with the Ubik spray means that Jory’s control
of the artificial reality is not as total as he would like).
Who controls the virtual reality, then? In other words, who controls the
fiction? The metafictional answer is that Dick himself, the game-player, the
Rat, controls the game. And there is no doubt that also Ubik is another Game
of the Rat, where readers’ and characters’ expectations and hypotheses are
perversely belied by the repeated twists in the tale. Like Palmer Eldritch before
him, Jory may be another anamorphic portrait of the author as a mischievous
and twisted boy. This should not surprise us, because the childlike or ado-
lescent character of SF (as it was, or as it was perceived from outside the
ghetto) was already an issue Dick had explored in Time Out of Joint and then
in his short story “Small Town” (see Ch. 1 and 2).21 The fact that the author
could portray himself as such a ghastly and despicable character as Jory chimes
192 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

in with his not wholly positive opinion on the novel, and the gloomy atmos-
phere haunting it (though countered in several episodes by Dick’s indestruc-
tible deadpan humor). A writer who had failed to escape the Sf ghetto (like
one of his former colleagues, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who was moving to recog-
nition outside the genre in the very years Dick was stuck in the cheap paper-
back market), whose most ambitious works had been rejected by serious
publishers, whose private life seemed to repeat a pattern of marital failure
(which consisted in the inability to assume an adult role as a husband and a
father) could well paint his self-portrait as a cruel boy who can only manipulate
those who are trapped in his virtual reality — that is, a writer who picks on
his characters.
The presence of the positive, protective figure of Ella Runciter is then
another sign of a duality in Philip K. Dick’s mind. I will not go so far as to
talk about split or multiple personality, but the importance of Dick’s dead
twin Jane as a symbolic figure is something that scholars cannot ignore today.
If half-life is an anamorphic image of Dick’s science fiction, including his
interest in time and its derangement (hence the strange regressive force at
work in the novel, a time-slip in its own right, which transforms modern air-
planes into old biplanes, television sets into thermoionic tube radios, etc.), it
is to be expected that Ubik is the place of a “battle [which] goes on whenever
you have half-lifers” (183), the battle between the two drives which struggled
in Philip K. Dick’s mind as depicted in his fiction (and possibly in his real
emotional life). Of course those two drives are here represented by Jory and
Ella Runciter.
Dick’s feeling of ossification, his perception of a waning of his creative
powers as a writer, is then depicted in the novel as the typical “universe falling
apart”; the virtual reality that Jory maintains is precarious, decaying, and
there are several moments (like the harrowing scene in the hotel in Chapter
15 or the gloomy episode in the drugstore in chapter 16) in which the lights
are almost off and the annihilation of Joe’s consciousness is almost accom-
plished. The virtual reality in Ubik is not as solid and resistant as the alternate
universe in Castle; it is always on the verge of ultimate dissolution. If Jory is
a demiurge to the half-life, his powers are remarkably weaker than those of
Palmer Eldritch; he can be exhausted by sustained efforts of world-projection
(175), as during Joe’s flight from New York to Des Moines at the beginning
of Chapter 11 (though we are only told this in Chapter 15). Joe’s experience
in the virtual world conjured up by Jory is often one of utter tiredness and
sickness. In fact Dick told Rickman that the composition of Ubik had been
quite an effort; an almost failed novel, saved in extremis, that the author “had
to pull ... out of the fire,” so that “there is an element of desperation that
began to show up in the writing” (Rickman 1988, 172).
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 193

The third novel in this group, A Maze of Death, was described by Dick
as “a desperate attempt to come up with something new,” a failed attempt
because “in no way it is new. It repeats familiar things with a multi-foci basis
and the epistemological theme, the reality versus irreality. That’s the last gasp
of those things that had become my stock in trade” (Rickman 1988, 172). The
novel was probably written in autumn 1968, and this was surely a much less
peaceful time in Dick’s life; his literary mentor and friend Anthony Boucher
had died in April; Dick and his family had moved to a new and larger house
in Santa Venetia the year before, a decision that put some financial strain on
his budget (the house had to be registered in the name of his mother and her
new husband due to Dick’s poor credit rating [Sutin 158]); Dick had problems
with the IRS from 1967 to 1969; to all this we should add his increasing addic-
tion to amphetamines, which he took in increasingly larger doses. Writer’s
block, in such a precarious financial situation, could mean disaster.
No wonder, then, that Dick recycled older materials to write Maze. Much
older, as the basic device of the novel dates back to 1939: in fact, the idea of
fourteen people stranded on a faraway planet called Delmak-O, and killed
one by one by an unknown murderer — possibly one of them — is too similar
to the story of ten people lured to Soldier Island, on the coast of Dorset, and
then inexorably killed by someone who might be part of the group, to consider
it a mere coincidence; but this is the plot of Agatha Christie’s And Then There
Were None, aka Ten Little Niggers.22 There is no direct evidence that Dick had
read the novel, but in a dialogue two characters who meditate on their dire
situation seems to suggest how Dick would rework the plot of Christie’s novel:
‘It’s like some awful dream. I keep feeling that things like this can’t hap-
pen.’ ...
‘I know. Presently a tap will come on the door, and early morning tea
will be brought in.’ ...
‘Oh, how I wish that could happen!’ ...
‘Yes, but it won’t! We’re all in the dream! ...’ [Christie, 180].
The series of murders in And Then There Were None is not a dream, and
all the events are logically and exhaustively explained in the final statement
written by Justice Wargrave, who is the murderer and mastermind of the plot.
But Dick literalized the metaphoric sentence “We’re all in the dream,” because
this is what we discover in the fifteenth and penultimate chapter of A Maze
of Death: the characters only dreamt their frightening experiences on Del-
mak-O. The fourteen colonists are actually the crew of a spaceship, the Persus
9, forever orbiting a dead star due to an accident that also killed its captain
and irreparably damaged its transmitter. The crewmembers know all too well
that they will never be able to repair the ship or the transmitter, so that they
are forever imprisoned in their orbital jailhouse; the only way to stave off
194 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

creeping psychosis, generated by seclusion in such a small space, is “the poly-

encephalic mind.... Originally an escape toy to amuse us during our twenty-
year voyage” (183). The device is connected to the ship’s computer, TENCH
889B, and its working anticipates the cyberspace that would be introduced
more than ten years later by another science-fiction author, William Gibson,
in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome.” The main difference is that Gib-
son’s cyberspace is a virtual reality which is patently artificial, “an abstract
representation of the relationships between data systems ... the consensus-
hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchanging of massive quantities
of data” (Gibson 196–7), so that the console cowboys in “Burning Chrome”
and Neuromancer are well aware that they are operating in a virtual space. On
the other hand, the virtual reality created by the polyencephalic mind is real-
istic enough to cheat the minds of those who are connected to it; besides,
their memories of life on board the Persus 9 have been replaced by “manufac-
tured recall datum,” fake memories “implanted in [their] mind during the
fusion, to add the semblance of authenticity in the polyencephalic venture”
(182). This is why Dick saw the gist of the novel as the depiction of a “sim-
ulated world fabricated by us, to escape an intolerable actuality” (Pursuit
166).
Here Dick is recycling one of his classical devices, the amnesiac character,
that he had already used in Time Out of Joint and in the short story “We Can
Remember It For You Wholesale” published two years before the completion
of Maze; it should be added that the amnesiac hero was something Dick had
developed from A.E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, one of the classics of
the Golden Age of Science-Fiction. But other elements of the plot derive from
Dick’s earlier works. Before the final denouement, there is a false revelation
in Chapter 14, when — after discovering that they are on Earth, not on Del-
mak-O (156–8)— the survivors assume that they are former inmates of a giant
asylum, the Aviary, where all the humans who could not stand the trauma of
interstellar travel have been committed; the fourteen characters could have
managed to escape, or have been set free in an experiment that should test
their ability to resume a normal life. If this were true, they would be a small
replica of the community of madmen and -women in Clans of the Alphane
Moon, and this hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that some of them have
mental problems or deviant behaviors: Tony Dunkelwelt has mystical hallu-
cinations, Ben Tallchef is an alcoholic, Ned Russell is obsessed by cleanliness,
Betty Jo Berm is addicted to psychotropic drugs, Maggie Walsh has a mild
religious mania, Mary Morley is a control freak with a remarkable aggressive
component, Milton Bubble is hypochondriac, Ignatz Thugg is a zoophile and
has a strong homicidal drive (nomen, omen). But, unlike the clans of the
Alphane moon, the small community of deranged individuals on Delmak-O
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 195

is completely dysfunctional, because we eventually discover that the characters

have killed each other (167–9).
Even when the events told in chapters 1–14 are revealed to be a synthetic
experience generated by the polyencephalic mind, madness is still present;
the violence in the virtual reality of Delmak-O bespeaks the derangement
seeping into the minds of the crew members. “How long, really, can we keep
on?” muses Seth Morley, brooding over the dismal virtual experience. “Not
much longer. Thugg’s wits are scrambled; so are Frazer’s and Babble’s. And
me, too.... Maybe I’m gradually breaking down, too. Wade Frazer is right;
the murders on Delmak-O show how much derangement and hostility exists
in all of us” (187). Seth’s disconsolate conclusion is that each artificial world
produced by the polyencephalic mind “will be more feral.” This view of mad-
ness is in marked contrast to the optimistic approach in Clans of the Alphane
Moon.
We should also notice that Maze returns — or strives to return — to Dick’s
narrative strategy of the early 1960s, the multi-foci and multi-plot diegetic
structure. But it is a half-hearted effort. If we check who are the narrative
foci of the novel in each chapter, we find out that Dick did not achieve a full-
fledged polyphony, as in Bloodmoney or Time-Slip.

Table 7.2
Narrative Narrative
Chapter focus/foci Pages Chapter focus/foci Pages
1 Ben Tallchef 9–15 Betty Jo Berm 115–6
2 Seth Morley 15–27 Maggie Walsh 117–20
3 Ben Tallchef 27–36 Tony Dunkelwelt 120–4
4 Seth Morley 36–44 10 Seth Morley 124–31
Milton Babble 44–51 Glen Belsnor 131–6
5 Seth Morley 51–6 Roberta Rockingham 136–8
Ben Tallchef 56–60 11 Glen Belsnor 138–41
Seth Morley 60–1 Maggie Walsh 141–4
6 Seth Morley 61–73 Seth Morley 144–5
Susie Smart 73–7 12 Seth Morley 145–51
7 Seth Morley 78–91 13 Seth Morley 151–62
Susie Smart 91–6 14 Seth Morley 163–78
8 Glen Belsnor 96–105 15 Glen Belsnor 178–81
Seth Morley 105–9 Seth Morley 181–6
9 Seth Morley 109–10 16 Seth Morley 186–9
Maggie Walsh 110–1 Mary Morley 189–91
Wade Frazer 111–2
Mary Morley 112–3
Ignatz Thugg 113–4
Ned Russell 114–5
196 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

As we can see the pages of the novel are not equally distributed among
the characters. Seth Morley acts as a narrative focus in about 90 pages, more
than half of the novel. The rest must be divided among some of the others,
among which Glen Belsnor, Ben Tallchef, Maggie Walsh and Susie Smart
have larger shares. All in all, the narrative focus and protagonist of the novel
is Seth Morley, and the events are occasionally told from the point of view of
other characters, without a wholehearted effort to achieve a complete narrative
polyphony (something Dick himself admitted in the Author’s Foreword [5]).
Only in Chapter 9 we have a frantic change of point of view, which strongly
contributes to the effectiveness of this part of the novel, where each character
sees what he or she wishes to see in a mysterious building discovered on the
barren surface of Delmak-O (so that Ignatz Thugg sees it as a HIPPERY HOP-
PERY, that is a place where you can have sex with animals [113], while Seth
Morley, who loves good wines and cheeses, visualizes it as a WINERY [110], and
so on). The shifting of narrative foci continues at a lower speed in the two
following chapters, then Dick relies on Seth’s point of view for three chapters
in a row.
Also the characters in the plot are more sketched than carved or etched.
Usually Dick strives to portray at least a few rounded characters, and his
impressive achievements in terms of characterization have been acknowledged
by several critics, among which Ursula K. Le Guin with her essay “The Modest
One” (Le Guin 1979); but here only Seth Morley can be said to have been
painted in detail, and he is the umpteenth Little Man à la Frank Frink, Joe
Chip, or Barney Mayerson, only remarkable because he is not a repairman or
a professional, but the cook of the Persus 9.
There is no doubt that Dick built this novel with wreckage of his previous
works, even though he managed to build a compact, suspenseful work which is
excellent entertainment, and is endowed with an atmosphere of doom and men-
ace with a remarkable impact. Maze is in any case an important document for
Dick scholars, bearing witness to Dick’s creative exhaustion. For example, there
is a remarkable difference between Maze and the two other novels that we
have already read in this chapter: in Stigmata and Ubik the idioi kosmoi (in
the former), or fake koinos kosmos (in the latter) are conjured up by human
figures, by individuals which — identified as Gnostic demiurges or archons —
can well be interpreted as avatars of the author; but here there is no central
manipulative game-player, no Rat directing the play behind the scenes. The
artificial koinos kosmos of Delmak-O is the consensual product of several
minds coordinated by a machine, TENCH 889B, a computer. On the one
hand we might read this a sign of Dick’s tiredness with the Game of the Rat:
he felt that, as a hack writer producing pulp fiction, he was no more an artist,
not even a respectable artisan, but a machine which kept churning out book
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 197

after book monotonously repeating itself. A machine which cannot sustain

the koinos kosmos it has projected on the characters’ (and readers’) minds for
long, however; when asked “WHAT IS PERSUS 9?” (173) by the surviving
colonists, the tench, the avatar of the ship’s computer in the virtual reality
(disguised as a mysterious alien creature, a “cube of gelatinous mass” [125]
that is able to answer to written questions with enigmatic, sibylline answers
[126–9]), explodes in a cataclysmic paroxysm (174–8) and the characters are
abruptly ejected from the virtual reality and wake up on board the doomed
starship. Another universe falling apart, like the FSRs of Stigmata and the
half-life in Ubik. But this may be a universe that Dick himself is tearing apart,
as Robinson suggested that “[j]ust as in the Christie’s novel, Dick kills off the
characters one by one. A Maze of Death is a rampage by Dick through his
character system, a desperate attempt to kill off a cast that has obsessed him
for over twenty years, in over twenty books” (Robinson 104). The systematic
slaughter already took place in Ubik, but there Joe Chip could resist thanks
to Ella Runciter’s heaven-sent spray can; here no one gets out alive.
On the other hand the novel turns out to be even bleaker once we realize
that behind this disintegrating reality we do not have, this time, an evil mind
that masterminds the misadventures of the characters; the destructive drives
that turn Delmak-O into a nightmare are already in the minds of the dreamers,
and this bespeaks a much more pessimistic stance of the author/demiurge.
Besides, the koinos kosmos that the characters get back to at the end of the
novel is not less desperate and asphyxiating than Delmak-O; if we read it as
an anamorphic image of our world, where we orbit a dying star on a planet
which technology and globalized economy have made smaller and smaller,
while virtual realities projected by the mass media distract us from the
inescapable end of our life, i.e., death, it is a terribly bleak image, maybe the
bleakest Dick ever presented his readers with (Warrick 150). Maze suggests
an abysmal pointlessness of life, the world and also history; space travel, which
was a glorious adventure towards an amazing future history in Heinlein and
other Golden Age authors, only leads to a dreadful dead end in this novel —
it is once again the frightening mental place imagined by Jack Bohlen in Mar-
tian Time-Slip, where nothing ever happens anymore.
Yet someone manages to escape the event horizon of this novel (the Persus
9 orbits a dead star, not a black hole, but the situation is remarkably similar
as there is no escape in both cases). When Seth Morley is ready to open the
vents of the space ship, so that the atmosphere may get out and the crew can
reach its “only comfort,” death (188), someone appears to stop him. This
apparition marks an ontological twist in the tale resembling the apparition
of the Joe Chip coins in the last chapter of Ubik, because Seth is approached
by a bearded young man, “with flowing, pale robes, ... erect, with a pure,
198 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

shining face” (188); not a member of the crew, hence somebody who should
not be there. He is the Intercessor, one of the divine entities of the fictional
religion which was part of the virtual reality created by the polyencephalic
mind, a syncretic mix of “all the data they had in their possession concerning
advanced religions ... Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrian-
ism, Tibetan Buddhism” (182–3).
The Intercessor should belong to the virtual reality of the polyencephalic
fusion; yet he invades the “real” universe of the doomed starship. If we applied
the same reading strategy we have used with Ubik, this should mean that
either Dick is once again playing the Game of the Rat, preventing us from
rationally interpreting this novel, and plunging also the clarifying ending into
ontological uncertainty again; or he is telling his readers that the “real” reality
depicted in the last two chapters of Maze is in any case science-fiction — pos-
sibly cheap science fiction!— an imaginary universe conjured up by a writer
who also is beginning to show serious signs of overwork. One should however
be careful not to explain away this episode as a further sign of Dick’s creative
exhaustion or impending writer’s block: this scene is after all a replica of the
apparition of Mercer in Androids (Ch. 6), when the sfnal messiah, just declared
a fraud by Buster Friendly (something Mercer himself does not deny), appears
in the “real” world to offer Isidore and Deckard comfort and advice; and
Androids was not written in a moment of creative dearth.
The apparition of the Intercessor offers Seth a possibility to escape the
space ship, so that he does not try to kill himself and the others, by fulfilling
Seth’s wish to become “a desert plant ... that would see the sun all day” (188).
This is read by Robinson as a sign that “at this ultimately low point in Dick’s
work, a miracle is the only hope. If a miracle cannot be summoned up, the
alternative is endless horror” (Robinson 105). Becoming a cactus is a quite
weird form of salvation, but then much in Dick’s novels is weird; one may
then wonder whether Seth’s wish should not be taken ironically, as an elab-
orate, maybe pataphysical joke.23 Yet we cannot downplay a simple fact that
Robinson does not mention: while in Stigmata the religious subtext was tied
to Palmer Eldritch, so that the figure with religious connotations is an evil
god or an imposter (demiurge or archon), here the bogus religion concocted
by the polyencephalic mind manages to somewhat save the protagonist,
because Seth does leave the Persus 9 (Dick takes care to shift the point of view
on his wife who looks for him in vain, so that we cannot think that the
meeting with the Intercessor was a hallucination or a dream), and his com-
panions get back to another polyencephalic fusion, on Delmak-O again (a
repetition which strengthens the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel, like
the dreadfully repetitive circular orbit of the Persus 9).
Unless we accept Mackey’s straight interpretation of the scene as a real
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 199

miracle (Mackey 101), and read Maze as a religious novel in its own right —
something that is not critically untenable per se — the apparition of the Inter-
cessor should be read as suggesting that there is a further ontological level.
Delmak-O is a virtual reality; Persus 9 seems to be the real koinos kosmos,
but the intervention of the Intercessor means that it is no more than another
FSR, a bogus world that can be accessed from an unimaginable Outside —
by God (if one prefers Mackey’s reading) or the author (metafictional reading)
who, pace Robinson, may be tired of exterminating his characters and possibly
melts with pity. His saving Seth, the most humane character in the novel,
and letting him get out of the doomed ship is then an act of metafictional
mercy.
However, such a reading does not contradict the ontological uncertainty
which dominates this text. Several (though not numberless) alternative,
conflicting explanations are possible; all of them, however, will have to take
into account the interplay among the three alternate realities (or textual levels)
in the novel.
Alternate realities are also the key element of a novel that could seem to
belong to another phase of Dick’s literary activity, Flow My Tears, The Police-
man Said. Published in 1974, it might seem nearer such works as A Scanner
Darkly (1977) and Radio Free Albemuth (completed in 1976 and posthumously
published); but documental evidence tells us that the novel was actually writ-
ten in 1970. It was published only four years later because Dick’s private life
in 1971 and 1972 was in such a turmoil that he could not work on it; suffice
it to say that the manuscript of the first draft of Tears was finished in the
bleakest moment of Dick’s life, when his fourth wife Nancy had left him with
his second daughter Isa, amphetamine addiction had reached a dangerous cli-
max (he didn’t take pills, but handfuls of pills [Sutin 169]), and his house was
a meeting-place of drug addicts, dropouts and other weirdoes; it had been
practically turned into a sort of commune (Sutin 177).24 If we add his increas-
ing problems with the IRS, it is easy to understand Dick’s psychological insta-
bility in 1971, which prevented him even to work on an almost completed
manuscript like that of Tears. It was real writer’s block at last, which made
his financial problems devastating.
The psychological impact was overwhelming: in August 1971 Dick asked
to be hospitalized in Marin General Psychiatric Hospital and Ross Psychiatric
Clinic, due to bouts of depression. He was visited by his attorney William
Wolfson in Ross, and gave him the manuscript of Tears for safekeeping. This
was a wise decision indeed, because on November 17, 1971 Dick’s house in
Santa Venetia was burglarized and his fireproof file cabinet forced open with
explosives (Sutin 181–3). If the manuscript had been there, it could have been
destroyed or stolen like other documents that were in the cabinet.
200 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

The 1971 break-in is a definitely Dickian event, marked by a deep uncer-

tainty: Sutin lists eight possible explanations of the burglary, whose culprits
have never been identified (one of the hypotheses being that Dick simulated
it), but what is relevant to us is the fact that the manuscript of Tears remained
in Wolfson’s custody until late 1972, when Dick’s situation had greatly
improved and he had moved to Southern California. When he resumed the
composition of Tears he worked especially on the ending scene, which he
claimed to have rewritten ten times (SL2 139). The long pause in the writing
of this novel and the repeated rewriting of at least a part of it25 allowed Dick
to have more control on the text, and it shows: Tears is more carefully built
and woven than the novels of the late 1960s which immediately precede it,
such as Maze or Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970); its prose is even more accu-
rately crafted than what we find in such major works as Stigmata or Ubik.
Tears is undoubtedly the link between two phases of Dick’s life and lit-
erary production; it has much in common with his novels of the 1960s (Robin-
son 106), but it also foreshadows Dick’s concerns in the 1970s and early 1980s.
One of the key elements of the novel, for example, is a sfnal drug called KR-
3, used by one of the main characters, Alys Buckman; it is a deadly substance,
which enables its user to manipulate the ontological frame of reality, and to
access alternate worlds. It then resembles JJ-180 in Wait; but its world-creating
power also bears relation with Chew-Z in Stigmata. However, in the uncannily
realistic setting of Flow, whose futuristic elements are fewer than those one
could find in the two earlier novels, KR-3 is less a sfnal device than something
threateningly similar to amphetamines or heroin, paving the way for the dev-
astating Substance D in A Scanner Darkly, an illicit drug whose direct effects
are never described by Dick, so that it may be seen as a sort of archetypal ur-
drug representing all the illicit substances used by whatever drug-addict one
may imagine. In Scanner the drug does not directly produce ontological uncer-
tainty, but its effects on its users are so unsettling that they live in an onto-
logically uncertain world: the main character, S.A. Fred, an undercover nark,
is led to believe that Bob Arctor, his fake identity on the drug scene, is actually
another person. KR-3 in Tears is more straightforward: it does change reality,
it does bring the characters in the novel from one world to another and then
to a third one; but its deadly effects are not just told, they are shown in the
ghastly scene in Chapter 21, when Jason Taverner finds what is left of Alys,
reduced to a skeleton (148).
Commentators have pointed out the strong autobiographical elements
in Tears (Robinson 107): Dick’s troubles with amphetamines, plus his stay in
a Canadian rehabilitation centre, X-Kalay, have also been connected to Alys
Buckman and her addiction to KR-3, though they have generally been tied
to Scanner. Love and bereavement, the main argument of the novel according
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 201

to Warrick (Warrick 158–9) and Dick himself (Rickman 1988, 177–8), are
connected with an event in the writer’s life, the painful break-up with his
fourth wife Nancy. On the other hand the strong dystopian frame of the novel
bears relation with Dick’s growing anxieties about his being targeted by the
police, the FBI or some other repressive apparatus, as a political dissident,
due to his signing a petition against the Vietnam War in February 1968 (Sutin
160)— but also, and this is a more Dickian sort of fear, that he had “somehow,
by accident, ... depicted a classified secret in his SF” (Sutin 161), in other
words that he actually was like Ragle Gumm, not in a merely metaphorical
sense. The 1971 break-in reinforced Dick’s fears, and the revelations about
COINTELPRO and the Watergate scandal (which started with another, more
famous burglary) led him to believe, as he wrote in a 1974 letter to Richard
M. Nixon, that he was “one of those whom [Nixon’s] Administration sought
to destroy” (SL3 64). Besides, Dick had already written in a previous letter
that “the fascists almost took over, almost seized absolute power in the U.S.,
in a vast secret coup” (SL2 237). The world police state depicted in Tears,
ruled by police marshals, with concentration camps and hi-tech surveillance
devices (like those planted on Jason and neutralized by Alys [128–30]), stems
from Dick’s protracted fears which eventually brought him to write, from
1973 to 1975, the notorious letters to the FBI (cf. Philmus) where he strives
to prove he is a law-abiding citizen eager to inform the authorities about a
Communist conspiracy targeting him. A whole book could (and probably
should) be written about these episodes in Dick’s life, also because they may
shed light on the split personality of Fred/Bob in Scanner, a character who is
at the same time part of the repressive apparatus and one of its victims; suffice
it to say that those letters show that Dick’s fears about conspiracies and under-
cover surveillance were definitely not a pose.
However, Tears is a novel we must discuss because it features one more sit-
uation of ontological uncertainty which bears relation to the three earlier works
we have already analyzed. We have already mentioned the reality-altering drug
KR-3, whose effects are only explained in Chapter 27; the explanation is delayed
because Dick wanted to exploit the suspense generated by the effects of the drug,
which creates an absurd and disorienting situation of uncertainty. In the first
chapter we are presented with the main character, Jason Taverner, a popular TV
emcee and singer, whose Jason Taverner Show is watched by thirty million peo-
ple (11); but after Jason is attacked by Marilyn Mason — a wannabe singer who
had an affair with the TV celebrity to be subsequently dumped by him — and
hospitalized, he wakes up in a “cheap wino hotel” (22) in Watts and finds out
that nobody knows him anymore. The TV star is and has always been a nonen-
tity; no one even remembers Jason was famous and successful, neither his
agent Al Bliss, nor his attorney Bill Wolfer, nor his lover Heather Hart.
202 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

The situation is similar to what we have found in The Cosmic Puppets:

there Ted Barton finds himself in a town where he does not exist, because he
died when he was nine. But Jason’s plight is even stranger: in the world where
the novel is set after the first chapter he was never born — just like George
Bailey in Pottersville (Ch. 1). It is also interesting that Taverner owes much
of his success to the fact that he is a six, a genetically-engineered superman
(117–9), so that here we have a mutant with enhanced intellectual powers like
those in Van Vogt’s novels, only he is not amnesiac at all: he remembers all
too well who he is (or was), it is the world around him that apparently suffers
from amnesia. Jason then becomes the victim of the repressive apparatus
because he is the descendant of those Variable Men found in Dick’s sociological
sf of the 1950s (Ch. 2): the only man without proper IDs and records in a
world where everybody is under surveillance.
Actually Taverner “passed over to a universe in which he didn’t exist”
(186), a parallel universe without a Jason Taverner; his passage, or translation,
was brought about by Alys Buckman under KR-3,26 but “when the drug wore
off he passed back again” (186). We would then have a threefold scheme like
this:

Table 7.3
Primary text Secondary text Primary text
Chapter 1 Chapter 2–21 Chapter 22-Epilog
Jason exists and is famous Jason does not exist Jason exists and is famous

This threefold structure resembles the one we had in Puppets, with the
final restoration of the same reality which was challenged by the secondary
text. We could then read the secondary text where Jason does not exist as an
evil unreal world of occlusion, being the product of a KR3-addicted demiurge
like Alys — who also uses other drugs, like the mescaline she gives Jason (134)
or the “hexophenophrine hydrosuphate” she is on when we first meet her (80),
and practices forms of sexual perversion by means of neurosurgery, which
impact on her lucidity (82). If the secondary text is the product of such an
unstable and obfuscated mind, where uncertainty reigns (as “she doesn’t play
by the rules” [95]), it must be an “occlusion, hiding the real world,” as Zina
Pallas will explain Emmanuel in The Divine Invasion (Ch. 9). This chapter
focuses on novels featuring FSRs created by evil demiurges or archons, and
we may see that Dick carries the idea to extremes in Tears: unlike the pocket
universes in Stigmata or Ubik, or the deserted virtual planet Delmak-O in
Maze, the alternate universe to whom Jason is dragged by Alys is populated
by billions of individuals who ignore him; it may be a subjective reality, as it
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 203

is somewhat masterminded by Alys, but it is not finite. Moreover, here the

archon or demiurge is somewhat debased if compared to Eldritch, Jory or the
polyencephalic fusion in Maze: the world Jason is trapped in has been conjured
up by a decadent, perverted, mischievous, dying junkie.
It may be easily argued that this is another, even more pessimistic,
anamorphic self-portrait of Dick: let us not forget that Alys is the twin brother
of Felix Buckman, so that she may be another sfnal avatar of Dick’s twin sister
Jane, who was at the same time the author’s missing half and the person he
often identified with. Surely Alys is a world-creator like Dick; in Chapter 19
we are told that she is — like her brother — a collector of stamps (one of Dick’s
hobbies), antique snuff boxes (Dick loved snuff ) and music records (another
of Dick’s passions)27; moreover she is a drug-addict like Dick was when he
wrote the first draft of the novel.
But the relationship between textual levels and alternate realities is actu-
ally more complex than the one I have suggested. There are textual inconsis-
tencies that call in doubt the identification of the reality accessed by Jason
and the other characters in chapter 22 with the one depicted in Chapter 1;
such inconsistencies were noticed by Robinson, who maintained that Tears
“is another of the novel in which inconsistency is part of the structural fabric,
only in this case it is unclear what purpose the inconsistency has, if any”
(Robinson 107).28 Once again, the pioneers of Dick scholarship were penalized
by the limited availability of important documental sources, such as the
writer’s speeches.29 It is there that an important inconsistency is explained as
a deliberate textual move; in fact at least a commentator has noticed that
while in Chapter 3 the hotel clerk mentions the law that forbids Afro-Amer-
ican couples to have more than one child (29), evidently devised to perform
a “soft” genocide (in fact Blacks are few in the novel, and Watts is a depop-
ulated neighborhood), the black man met by Felix in the final scene of the
novel tells him that he has three children (197), and Rispoli interprets this as
proof that Buckman spends some time (like Mr. Tagomi in High Castle) in
our world (Rispoli 2006, 224).
If Robinson had been able to read (like Rispoli probably did) the text of
“If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (the speech
Dick delivered in Metz, France in 1977) he would have understood that in
Dick’s interpretation of his own novel, the inconsistent detail was aimed at
telling readers that “[s]omehow, just as Mr. Togomi (sic!) slipped over briefly
into our alternate present, General Buckman in Flow My Tears did the same
thing” (Shifting Realities 247). Hence the scheme should be changed thus:
204 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Table 7.4
Primary text Secondary text Primary text Zero Text
Chapter 1 Chapter 2–21 Chapter 22–27 Ending of
(until page 194) Chapter 27
Jason exists and Jason does not exist Jason exists and Felix visits our
is famous is famous world and meets
Montgomery L.
Hopkins

For the sake of clarity I did not add a fifth column to this table, which
should contain the Epilogue, as it is certainly not set in our world but in the
one depicted by the primary text. However, the brief episode purportedly set
in our world should be read — according to Dick — as having an important
psychological (and ethical) meaning. It is preceded by a dream (194) where a
procession of medieval knights led by an old, white-haired king, reaches a
house where Jason Taverner has sealed himself up; the posse enters the win-
dowless house and kills Taverner, something which strikes Felix with “absolute
and utter desolate grief.” Due to the dream, Felix does not just feel devastat-
ingly sorry for his sister Alys, but also for Taverner, the man he has just ordered
to be arrested and arraigned for Alys’ death (which Felix considers a murder).
Dick maintained that this dream “was a graphic depiction in General
Buckman’s mind of the transformation taking place objectively; it was a kind
of inner analog to what was happening outside him to his entire world” (Shift-
ing Realities 248) because Felix “underwent an inner change appropriate to
the qualities of the better world, the more just, the warmer world in which
the tyranny of the police apparatus was already beginning to fade away as
would a dream upon the awakening of the dreamer” (Shifting Realities 249).
Dick then adds that also this scene (and the dream) has an autobiographical
meaning:
In March 1974, when I regained my buried memories (a process called in
Greek anamnesis, which literally means remembering)— upon those memo-
ries reentering consciousness I, like General Buckman, underwent a person-
ality change. Like his, it was fundamental but at the same time subtle. It
was me but yet it was not me [Shifting Realities 249].
The “buried” memories are those of Dick’s alleged alternative life as an
ancient Christian in A.D. 70 which will be discussed in more detail in the next
Chapter. However, there are inconsistencies also in Dick’s explanation of the
inconsistency in Tears, and they are quite subtle. The writer tells us that the
world where Felix meets Montgomery is the Zero Text, our world. Why do
both Felix and Montgomery reach the gas station on quibbles (195), then? If
Montgomery were a black man from our reality, free to have more than one
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 205

child, he should travel on a car, not a quibble. Dick does not bother to describe
quibbles in detail, though it is clear that they are definitely not our cars: they
can fly, like the vehicles in Blade Runner. Montgomery should drive a Ford
or a Chevrolet (or, like Dick for a short time in the 1970s, a FIAT); and the
landing of Felix’s quibble should amaze him.
But there is another inconsistency, and this is an internal one: first Dick
tells us that Felix “slipped into our alternate present” (Shifting Realities 247),
then he states that it is a “better world,” one “in which the tyranny of the
police apparatus was already beginning to fade away” (Shifting Realities 249);
but we did not have the tyranny of the police apparatus in our world, at least
not the variety depicted in the novel. Someone might complain that the 2001
USA PATRIOT Act is equivalent to such a tyranny, but the ubiquitous police
force imagined by Dick, which in the novel has replaced all the local police
authorities of the USA (and extends also to other countries, being “planetwide”
[203]) is something that not even president G.W. Bush ever proposed. The
gradual dismantling of the police apparatus, “too cumbersome to threaten
anyone” is accomplished in 2136, when “the rank of police marshal was aban-
doned” (203), and this means that it is not something that may happen in
“our alternate present.” If Montgomery’s three children mean that the world
where Felix meets him is a better alternate reality than the one he comes from,
the dismantling of the world police may belong to that world, but the presence
of quibbles means it is not the world in which you are reading this monograph
on Dick. Though a quibble is an evasion of the point of an argument by
raising irrelevant distinctions or objections, the presence of quibbles as vehicles
in the scene raises a relevant objection to Dick’s own interpretation, and asks
for a different scheme of how textual levels are structured in Tears:

Table 7.5
Primary text Secondary text Tertiary text
Chapter 1 Chapter 2–21 Chapter 22-Epilog
Jason exists and is famous; Jason does not exist; Jason exists and is
Afro-Americans are Afro-American are famous; Afro-Americans
threatened by genocide due threatened by genocide are not threatened by
to the one-children law due to the one-children genocide; the planetwide
law police will be dismantled

The passage from the first to the second world, and then to the third,
makes for the atmosphere of ontological uncertainty, which is heightened and
highlighted by the moral uncertainty of a dystopian world where anyone can
be an informer of the police, ready to betray anyone else to reap real or imag-
inary benefits (imaginary like those expected by Kathy Nelson, who became
206 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

an informer to save her husband Jack’s life, unaware that he had actually been
dead for a long time): here too things — and people — are seldom what they
seem. Police general Buckman, one of the heads of the repressive apparatus,
is actually a humane individual who shut down several concentration camps
thanks to a legal catch (139) and prevented the final shootout between the
police and students barricaded in the besieged university campuses or “kib-
butzim” (140); he even “saw to it ... that in the kibbutzim the students were
bathed, fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided” (140). But the
“good cop” is also the man who decides that Jason Taverner must be arrested
for the murder of his sister, claims he wants to kill the TV celebrity (188–9)
and then cynically justifies the unmotivated prosecution of Taverner because
“[t]he real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public fol-
lowing you are expendable.... And I am not” (192). Besides, Felix Buckman
is quite good at cheating, as when he first meets Taverner and tells him that
he is not impressed by his being a six, because the general is a seven (117); it
is a lie, because sevens do not exist, but it helps Buckman to deal with the
genetically-engineered supermen and -women. Once again, skim milk mas-
querades as cream.
On the other hand, it is the deranged, perverted, and wanton Alys Buck-
man who offers Buckman an opportunity to escape the nightmare world of
non-existence: she is the first and only person in the secondary text who
remembers Jason, his songs, and his TV show (132); she is then the equivalent
of Will Christopher in Puppets (Ch. 1). But one might suspect that she does
much more than confirm Jason’s memories: since Taverner reaches a world
where he is again famous only after having met Alys, his liberation must be
tied to the woman; it is explained with Alys’ death, because the death of the
drug-addict demiurge must wipe away the false world (186) and let Tav-
erner — and others, like Felix, officer McNulty, the policeman who investigates
on Jason, and Phil Westerburg,30 the chief coroner — return to the real world.
But if the world at the end of the text (Tertiary Text) is neither the same we
were presented with in Chapter 1 (Primary Text) nor the one where Jason is
a nobody and where most of the novel takes place (Secondary Text), Alys’
death is not sufficient to explain everything. If the death of the demiurge
should terminate the effects of KR-3, Jason and the other character should
return to a world where (a) Taverner is famous and (b) Afro-Americans are
only allowed to have one child. Someone might object that the one-child
genocidal law only exists in the Secondary Text, but this is not the case; when
the hotel clerk mentions the law (29), Jason is not surprised by it, and shows
he knows the workings of the law (such as the “birth coupon” that Afro-
American women have to surrender when their first and only child is born);
this means that the law also exists in the Primary Text. Hence the world where
 7. Psychedelic Demiurges 207

the novel ends is not the one where it started from; and how could Jason, and
the other characters — including above all Felix, who will meet Montgomery —
reach another alternate reality?
Maybe this is another of those inconsistencies noticed by Robinson; but
we have already seen that one of them was actually something Dick had delib-
erately planted in his text. Could not this be another? If Jason ends up in an
alternate world which may be acceptable to him, because he is a celebrity
again, but is not the one he started from, his situation is quite similar to that
of Hamilton at the end of Eye in the Sky (Ch. 2). We have an open ending,
also because we cannot help asking what has really happened in Chapter 21;
if Alys’ death alone was enough to bring everybody back to the Primary text,
it was not sufficient to take them to a third alternate reality, so what did move
everybody to that world? There are two possibilities: either Alys is not dead,
but is still alive, and is keeping Jason, her brother and the others in the third,
better world by means of KR-3; or somebody else has taken KR-3, and that
could be Jason, who has been given a pill by Alys (134) which might not be
mescaline, after all, but KR-3 — this would be consistent with the fact that
Jason desperately wishes to get back to his old life of fame and privilege.
There is another unclear element, though, because Jason “conjectures
that his whole career as a TV star had been a drug-induced hallucination”
(Mackey 104), and this conjecture, though discarded in the ending of the
novel, indirectly casts light on a detail of the beginning: when Chapter 1 ends,
Jason has been struck by the deadly Callisto cuddle sponge (20), an alien par-
asite which may enter a human body by means of its feeding tubes; Jason
manages to kill the sponge, but the feeding tubes have penetrated in his chest
(21), and it is not sure that the surgeons may do something to save his life.
This episode is not mentioned any more in the novel: when Jason wakes
up in the dingy hotel at the beginning of Chapter 2 he is healed and shows
no trace of a surgical intervention (22). How was he saved by the effects of
the attack? We are not told. One explanation might be that Jason could not
be operated and died, killed by the feeding tubes; and that the world he wakes
up in is his afterlife (of half-life), where his status as a nobody is a sort of
retaliation for his arrogance and insensibility. Hence this novel could be much
closer to Ubik than previous interpreters have surmised, and it might be set
in a highly allegorical FSR where a soul (Taverner’s) may reach a better realm
(the Tertiary Text) after having expiated his sins of pride and lack of empathy
in a dismal world of dystopian oppression and obscurity.
Once again, ontological uncertainty makes for several effects of signifi-
cation. It also allows us to interpret this novel as an anamorphic image of
Dick’s own situation in 1972–3, when he completed it; Warrick and Robinson
already pointed out how sentimental bereavement was explored in Tears, due
208 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

to the failure of Dick’s fourth marriage; but this novel also unfolds the author’s
fear and uncertainty vis-à-vis the break-in and its meaning, and his paranoid
anxiety for the situation of the country he was living in, the paranoid scare
that the Nixon administration and the conservative backlash which had
brought it to the White House could usher in a totalitarian regime — among
whose victims there might have been Dick himself. He depicted such a sce-
nario in Radio Free Albemuth, where a fictional Phil Dick ends up in a con-
centration camp for political prisoners. Albemuth must have been written
between February 1973 and August 1976, and shares some elements with Tears;
the dystopian setting is rather similar, though it is less sfnal (something which
is to be expected in a story set in the contemporary USA, while Tears takes place
in the then near future of 1988); the autobiographical component is even
stronger, because it features Dick among his characters (anticipating what the
writer will do in VALIS, cf. Ch. 8), and the co-protagonist Nick Brady has a
lot in common with the author (he could be considered as an alternative Philip
Dick who did not become a pro writer but found a job in the music industry).
Tears does not only stage Dick’s fears and sorrows. It also offers some
displaced self-portraits. Alys Buckman can be read as an anamorphic image
of Dick; the applies to her twin brother, if the Jane-Phil/Alys-Felix analogy
is tenable, as both twins are Dick’s portrait of the artist as a split subject
(something we also have in Albemuth, VALIS [Ch. 8], and The Divine Invasion
[Ch. 9]). But another character stands for the author: Mary Anne Dominic,
the potter, whose surname is nothing more than “Dick” with a few additional
phonemes. Once again the creative artist is a woman, like Pris Frauenzimmer
in Build (Ch. 6), Emily Hnatt in Stigmata, Sadassa Silvia, the folksinger in
Albemuth, or Linda Fox, the singer in The Divine Invasion (Ch. 9). It is Mary
Anne’s blue vase which survives all the characters of Tears (204), and her work
deserves to be mentioned at the end of this long chapter on fictional demiurges:
to all the dismal universes falling apart conjured up by evil or insane archons,
we may oppose this small and beautiful (and fragile) creation, which nonethe-
less abides and is “openly and genuinely cherished.” It should obviously
remind us of another precious artifact, Frank Frink’s pin, the piece of jewelry
which somewhat allows Tagomi to visit the Zero Text in The Man in the High
Castle. In that novel, after refusing Paul Kasoura’s offensive proposal to market
the jewel as a cheap good-luck charm in Third World countries, Robert
Childan muses: “Life is short.... Art, or something not life, is long, stretching
out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over
or across it” (179). Like Frink’s pin, Mary Anne Dominic’s blue vase is
unsmoothed by any passage over or across other worlds — and it may well be
an anamorphic image of those other works of art which could open those
labyrinthine passages: Dick’s own novels, of course.
 Chapter 8

Amateur Questers: VALIS and

Its Quandaries

“O you Doppelgänger! you pale comrade!

Why do you ape the pain of my love
Which tormented me upon this spot
So many a night, so long ago?”
Heinrich Heine

The last three chapters of this monograph are not incidentally devoted
to the three parts of the VALIS Trilogy, which is Dick’s final literary achieve-
ment. Obviously one has to be aware that only the “brute fact” of Dick’s
death granted these novels (i.e., VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Trans-
migration of Timothy Archer) such a conclusive value. The biographer tells us
that Dick wanted to write another novel right after Archer, whose title should
have been The Owl in Daylight (Sutin 281): the fact that Dick was planning
another novel should warn us that reading the VALIS Trilogy as a sort of lit-
erary testament containing Dick’s own final “message” is a rather risky critical
move (cf. Fitting’s doubts about those interpreters who look for “something
akin to religious truth” in Dick’s writings [Fitting 1989, 243]).
However, there are reasons which lead us to consider the trilogy as
another climax of Dick’s literary career, though this opinion is not shared by
all critics. In fact the strong presence of religious symbols, motifs and subtexts
has been a problem for several commentators: Fredric Jameson chose to steer
his analysis away from Dick’s religious thematics ( Jameson 2005, 363) thus
avoiding his last novels; Carl Freedman was more drastic, as he liquidated
VALIS and The Divine Invasion as “pretentiously tedious” (Freedman 2000,
165)1; Rabkin went so far as to declare the whole trilogy the product of an
insane mind (Rabkin 186). A more positive appreciation can be found in
Christopher Palmer’s monograph on Dick (Palmer, 221–37), while other critics
deem these novels to be among Dick’s most important literary achievements,

209
210 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

one of them being Darko Suvin. He considers these three novels (plus the
posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth, which was anyway written
before VALIS) as parts of a second artistic plateau (Suvin 2002), rivaling that
of the “canonic” novels of the 1960s — usually considered Dick’s best achieve-
ments (from High Castle to Ubik). Highly positive appreciations were also
expressed by Gabriele Frasca and Kim Stanley Robinson (Frasca 2006; Robin-
son 111–27); a balanced and open-minded judgment on the religious themes
in Dick has been formulated by Antonio Caronia, who reads it as an attempt
to somewhat tackle ethical (and ultimately political) quandaries (Caronia &
Gallo, 211–6). Here I can only say that the three parts of the VALIS trilogy
are excellent examples of that principle of ontological uncertainty which is so
important in Dick’s oeuvre, and that they are among the most intriguing to
a critic among those the Californian writer ever wrote. But if a defense of
these works is needed, it will carried out in the analyses of the single novels,
in this chapter and in those which follow it.
What should be briefly discussed here, before starting a detailed reading
of VALIS, is why Dick’s last three novels are to be considered a trilogy,
notwithstanding the indisputable fact that the characters of the three works
are not the same and the settings are different, as VALIS takes place in Southern
California, The Divine Invasion on the extrasolar planet CY30-CY30B and
then on the East Coast (only the ending is set in California), while the scene
of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the San Francisco Bay area (with
a single episode set in Santa Barbara). As for plot continuity, there is a link
between VALIS and Invasion, because in the latter two characters — Elias/Elijah
and Emmanuel — talk in Chapter 6 about “a very old movie” whose title is
Valis, “made by a rock singer in the latter part of the twentieth century” (69):
the title and description of the film clearly say that it is the same movie which
gives VALIS its title, and is described in detail in Chapter 9 of that novel,
when the protagonists watch and then discuss it; such an overt reference to
the first part of the trilogy tells us that VALIS is set in the past of Invasion.2
But there is no connection like this between any of these two novels and the
third part of the trilogy, Archer. Moreover, the three parts belong to quite dif-
ferent genres; but it is exactly this difference which may help us understand
what sort of unity can be hidden behind such a heterogeneous trio of narra-
tives.
Invasion is undoubtedly a sf novel, we might also say an exasperated sf
novel: extrasolar planets with aliens, space travel, a totalitarian world govern-
ment, cryogenic suspension, flying cars — Dick put almost all the traditional
ingredients of pulp sf in this book, thus leading Kim Stanley Robinson to
suggest that Invasion could have been written by Horselover Fat, the deranged
and visionary half of Dick’s fictional self-portrait in VALIS (Robinson 112).
 8. Amateur Questers 211

The overt presence of God in this novel is also sfnal, as he (if such a sexist
pronoun is allowed) is a character that we can meet in several classics of sf,
from C.S. Lewis’ quite orthodox Space Trilogy (1938–46)— quoted in VALIS
as Lewis is David’s favorite writer — to Michael Moorcock’s provocative novel
Behold the Man (1969).3 But Dick’s most original move is to stage an invasion
of Earth, this most sfnal event (since H.G. Wells’ original War of the Worlds),
where Earth is invaded not by the usual Martians (or other bug-eyed-mon-
sters), but by the Old Testament God (embodied in a little child), supported
by a Holy Family of sorts (the literary avatars of Joseph and Mary being not
even married) plus prophet Elijah.
On the other hand The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is fundamentally
a realistic novel (and as such it was sold to Simon and Schuster [Sutin 278])
where there is no more than the ghost of a fantastic element,4 that is, the
imaginary ancient sect of the Zadokites who might have used a hallucinogen
substance called anokhi, thus creating the basic ideas of Christianity two hun-
dred years before Christ. This is just a provocative hypothesis whose truth-
fulness is uncertain, held by bishop Timothy Archer — and it is ultimately
less important than the sometimes merciless cross-section of the countercul-
tural generation that Dick presents us with. Through a brilliant use of the
technique of flashback Dick shows us what happened to the dreams and the
delusions of a quite representative bunch of Californian protagonists of the
“years of discord,” and he does this starting from the fateful year 1980, when
John Lennon was killed and Ronald Reagan elected. The novel is thus tightly
pegged to the historical reality of the 1960s and 1970s in the USA.
VALIS is possibly more complex than the two following parts of the tril-
ogy, as we will see in the detailed analysis that will be carried out in the rest
of this chapter. Suffice it to say that the novel oscillates between religious sf
and realism, and that such oscillation is not resolved, not even in the ending:
it so exemplifies the principle of ontological uncertainty that has guided us
in our survey of Dick’s fiction like no other text we have read so far.
Hence what we have is a sf novel, a realistic novel, and a novel which is
neither sfnal nor realistic, or both sfnal and realistic, or something that lives
in a weird middle space between the two genres5— a situation that reminds
us of a novelette by another American writer, Henry James’ The Turn of the
Screw. In other words, in this final trilogy we have the two literary genres
which Dick practiced in his life: sf, which gave him an undeniable popularity
in the sf ghetto and a cult writer status outside it; and realism, which is the
genre of all the posthumously published novels (with the single exception of
Albemuth) plus two novels Dick managed to publish in his lifetime, Confessions
of a Crap Artist and Archer (remarkably, the preternatural elements present in
this last novel belong to the fantasy genre he started from [Ch. 1]). Hence the
212 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Trilogy is a representative sample of what Dick could do as a writer, and it

is a trilogy also because it presents the whole gamut of narrative strategies
that Dick mastered. It explores the possible games (of the Rat, of course) that
a novelist can play when hybridizing two only apparently incompatible genres;
it may have been Dick’s own way to show the world (respectable publishers
included, those who had so often — albeit not always — snubbed him) what
he could do.
However, one should take into account what Dick himself said about
the trilogy, because he suggested that there is a unifying element for these
three novels. In fact, a June 1981 interview — possibly his last — the writer
said:
I would call VALIS a picaresque novel, experimental science fiction. The
Divine Invasion has a very conventional structure for science fiction, almost
science fantasy; no experimental devices of any kind. Timothy Archer is in
no way science fiction; it starts out the day John Lennon is shot and then
goes into flashbacks. And yet the three do form a trilogy constellating
around a basic theme [Boonstra 1982].
Dick however does not say that the “basic theme” is. We have a clearer
suggestion in the published selection of the Exegesis, where Dick says that the
trilogy is about his mystical experiences called 2-3-74 (meaning February-
March 1974, the period when he purportedly had visions and received enig-
matic messages quite similar to those received by Horselover Fat in VALIS),
and his contact with “not Elijah; the spirit of Elijah” (Pursuit, 239).6 Usually
such statements have been politely ignored by critics or taken as proof that
Dick was insane when he wrote his final works. Since I am not a psychiatrist
and believe in a critic’s duty not to sweep under the carpet what does not fit
an interpretation, I think it is from here that we should start.
In his July 9, 1981 letter to his daughter Laura and her husband Joe,
Dick wrote:
The topic of the trilogy is Christ; it is a study of the essence of Christ,
what the term means, and how Christ is encountered and — in a certain
real sense — brought into being.... In looking over the three novels of the
trilogy I can see how Christ becomes progressively more and more real, but
only is truly there in the third and final novel. And even in that novel
Christ only ‘occurs’ at the end [SL6 178–9].
We should not underestimate the fact that the protagonist of the third
part of the Trilogy is called Angel, inasmuch as that name derives from the
Greek word ¥ggeloj (angelos) which originally meant “messenger.” A mes-
senger announces something; a messenger can also reveal something previously
unknown. In fact these three novels are about revelation. It does not really
matter whether Dick’s mystical experiences were real or not, that is, if he
 8. Amateur Questers 213

really was contacted by God. I dare say this is a matter of religious beliefs
which each reader should sort out by him or herself.7 What is important for
literary critics is what is in the novels and what Dick did with that, and the
concept of revelation is surely the theme that the writer has developed through
sophisticated variations in the three movements of his fictional concerto. The
fact that in 1981 Dick thought that the two parts of the trilogy he had already
written (in this fragment he does not mention Archer) had as their “final ulti-
mate purpose ... to predict ... the imminent coming — i.e., return — of the
Savior” (Pursuit, 238) should not lead us to hasty judgments based on our
religious beliefs, whatever they may be, or lack thereof, but to question what
the coming of the Savior may mean from a literary point of view and what is
its meaning in these three novels.8 It is interesting to notice, by the way, that
Dick’s statements about his mystical experiences are rather contradictory, as
in the same collection of excerpts from the Exegesis we have a self-examination
(written in 1979, when the writer had already completed VALIS) where the
author himself explains his visions of February-March 1974 as psychosis (Pur-
suit 241–6).
Revelation has then to be taken here as a literary theme or motif. The
three novels are pivoted on revelations of some sorts, and characters’ reactions
to those revelations are different in the three parts of the Trilogy: in VALIS
Fat’s experience, the revelation of a God that communicates via pink beams
carrying impressive amounts of information (God as a broadband data down-
load, we might say today), is met by his friends (and himself ) with an alter-
nation of belief and skepticism; in The Divine Invasion there is no doubt
about the presence of God, which is revealed through indisputable facts (and
an authoritative messenger, prophet Elijah), though there is a series of further
revelations after the initial manifestation of Yah (concerning the character of
Zina, as we shall see); in Archer there is a bewildering revelation about the
origins of Christianity, and then the announcement of bishop Tim Archer’s
reincarnation, which are met by the 1st-person narrator, Angel Archer, with
incredulity and a much stronger — and effective — skepticism than that dis-
played by Phil and Kevin in VALIS (there is another, much more effective
revelation when Angel meets Edgar Barefoot [Ch. 10]).
Surely revelation is a category which originates in religion, and the three
novels are unsurprisingly crowded with religious terms, symbols, narratives:
at least one of them, Invasion, is a religious sf novel, though one should wonder
why the novel which stages the manifestation of God in the most straight-
forward and indubitable manner is the only “pure” science-fiction novel of
the trio (science-fiction being, as we all should know, a non-realistic genre).
However, the strong and overt religious subtexts are a unifying element of all
the trilogy, and this may even suggest an underlying symbolism. Since Chris-
214 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

tian symbols and concepts are paramount here (especially those from the
Protestant traditions, as Dick considered himself an Episcopalian), the Holy
Trinity may be a very important key to understand this trio of literary texts.
Since the Trinity is composed of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, it is difficult
not to see that the quest for God is the main theme in the first novel, and
that an incarnation (the embodiment of God in the Son) is only attempted
there through the birth of Sophia, but fails. On the other hand the incarnation
is successful in the second part of the Trilogy, whose protagonist is Emmanuel,
a strange boy which is also God Incarnate, a new Christ who should not
repeat the mistakes of the first. As for the third part, the presence of the Holy
Ghost may have something to do with the ghost of Timothy Archer, which
manifests itself in the last chapters of the novel; with the spiritualist teachings
of one of the main characters, New Age guru Edgar Barefoot; and with the
fact that the novel is powerfully influenced by Paul’s epistles and the Acts of
the Apostles, which were written (and take place) after the Ascension of Jesus,
when the apostles are left with the Holy Ghost in their effort to covert the
heathens.9
These and other religious elements will be discussed when each of the
three parts of the trilogy will be analyzed. But before our reading of VALIS
may begin, a last unifying structure of this weird triptych should be high-
lighted, as it is strongly connected to the leading issue of ontological uncer-
tainty. The three movements of the trilogy can be said to be related to the
present, the future and the past. It is the everyday present of late 1970s-early
1980s that Dick depicts in VALIS, and the two alternative readings of Fat’s
experience (divine revelation, or epiphany, vs. psychotic delusion) stand for
two different visions of that present, two alternative or laminated present
moments (“laminated” being, as we shall see in the rest of this chapter, a key
Dickian word first used in VALIS): one of messianic hope and the other of
despair and dissolution. The opposition of a living vs. dying present is quite
important if we want to fully understand this novel.
It is quite obvious that the future is the favorite (albeit not the only)
time of science-fiction, and that is the genre that The Divine Invasion undoubt-
edly belongs to. Here we are presented with two alternative futures, one of
dystopian oppression and despair (a future Earth dominated by a two-
headed world dictatorship), the other a more sustainable time where oppres-
sion can at least be fought. The two futures are embodied — in sfnal
fashion — in two parallel universes, which the novel explores in turn: both
however should be read as alternative futures stemming from Dick’s present
in 1981.
As for the last part of the triptych, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer,
it is not just the massive presence of analepses that tells us this novel is dominated
 8. Amateur Questers 215

by a very peculiar sense of the past: Archer, as we have already said and will
see in more detail in the last chapter of this essay, is fundamentally a reckoning
of Dick’s past life, told against the background of the rising and ebbing coun-
tercultural tide. No wonder then that the only undisputed fantastic element
in this realistic novel (haunted, as many American realistic novels, by allegor-
ical echoes and hints) is the past — or better ancient — story of the Zadokite
sect and its scrolls. What is at stake in the novel is definitely not an alternative
present or future, but an alternative, counterfactual past.
We can then end this preliminary discussion by saying that the unity of
the VALIS trilogy should be understood as the way in which Dick applied
his strategy of ontological uncertainty to the present, the future, and the past,
indissolubly linking these three novels not by means of narrative continuity
or recurring characters, but through a series of variations of his favorite theme.
This should not surprise us, since we are dealing with a writer who was deeply
in love with music (and Invasion can also be read as a celebration of the
redemptive power of that art).

Once again, our reading of VALIS will be based on the detection of genre
shunts, a technique already applied to The Game-Players of Titan (Ch. 2).
This narrative starts like a realistic novel describing the nervous breakdown
of a middle aged man, Horselover Fat: the setting is California in the 1970s,
the years of the ebbing of the countercultural tide of the 1960s, and the story
begins with the suicide of Fat’s friend Gloria, which triggers his breakdown.
There is nothing supernatural or science-fictional in Chapter 1, and the book
adopts a rather traditional realistic narrative mode, only complicated by fast-
forward narrative leaps which quickly move the story from a year to another:
“This was 1971. In 1972 he would be up north.... In 1976 ... Horselover Fat
would slit his wrist...” (10). The realistic atmosphere is strengthened by the
fact that Fat is no more than an alter-ego of the author, who tells us “I am
Horselover Fat” (11), and justifies this disguise as a narrative device which,
through the distancing third-person narration, should help him “to gain
much-needed objectivity.” Is there anything more realistic than an autobio-
graphical narrative in the first person?10
This narrative move is however ambiguous, because it could either be
read as a deliberate literary creation (which was also carried out with the help
of Dick’s agent, Russell Galen [Rickman 1988, 196–7]) or a psychotic pro-
jection, as Dick explained in his July 12, 1980 letter to Galen: “[i]t is not the
case that Fat is psychotic; Fat is the narrator’s psychosis, objectively given”
(SL6 18). But — be it artistic creation or psychotic delusion — the split is what
generates the narrative itself. Which is a remarkably ambiguous narrative, as
the rest of this chapter should prove.
216 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

In fact we move from autobiographic fiction to something quite different

with the first genre shunt, placed at the beginning of Chapter 2, when Phil
(the narrating I, who should coincide with the author) tells us how Fat man-
aged to overcome his suicidal impulses: “The first thing that came along to
save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old highschool girl ... and the
second was God” (18). This cryptic hint might make us think that Fat simply
(and realistically) found consolation in religion (plus womanly beauty). But
what befalls him two pages later is absolutely not a conventional moment of
religious inspiration:
God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his
head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached
for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it’s exactly
what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in
your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed
up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color [20].
Fat’s experience or vision is not directly shown to us as readers: we (and
Fat’s friends) are told about an experience which occurred in an undefined
moment in the recent past. One should compare this passage with one of the
letters where Dick described his 2-3-74 experiences, like the one he wrote on
June 28, 1974 to Peter Fitting (the earliest one about his experiences that I
have managed to find), where he describes “colored graphics which resembled
the non-objective paintings of Kandisky and Klee, thousands of them one
after the other, so fast as to resemble ‘flash cut’ use [sic!] in movie work” (SL3
142–3). This is followed by more detailed descriptions, which are however
not explained as a religious experience, but as a bewildering phenomenon
maybe triggered by an overdose of vitamins (SL3 141), where information
from the future was transferred by means of tachyons. Unlike Fat, Dick tried
to explain his experiences with scientific theories11 in this letter, and maintained
that “[w]ithout the tachyon theory I would lack any kind of scientific foun-
dation and would have to declare that ‘God has shown me the sacred tablets
in which the future is written’ and so forth, as did our forefathers” (SL3 143).
What Dick’s personal experience — as depicted in the initial letter — and
Fat’s vision have in common is their sfnal character. In fact, God does not
communicate in the traditional ways, by means of a miracle, an acousmatic
voice, or an inner feeling or illumination; he hits Fat with a beam of pink
light, resembling the laser weapons of cheap science-fiction, acting like a mys-
terious alien entity. Thence the reader is presented with two alternatives: (a)
Fat is the victim of a hallucination (which is not surprising given his difficult
psychological situation)12 and VALIS is a realistic novel telling the story of a
madman (with a hefty dose of irony and black humor), or (b) Fat has really
been contacted by some alien entity by means of a technology so advanced
 8. Amateur Questers 217

that it seems miraculous (or science-fictional) to us, and VALIS is a sf novel

about contacts with aliens (or God).
Phil, the sensible narrator of Fat’s antics (or the sane part in a split mind
whose deranged half is Fat), does not subscribe to his friend’s (or alternate
personality’s) mystical point of view, but chronicles his subsequent search for
God: in fact Fat embarks on a frantic quest for the ultimate truth behind his
vision, whatever it, he, or she may be. He starts writing a journal (called Trac-
tates: Cryptica Scriptura) which should keep track of his meditations and dis-
coveries, which are frequently quoted in the novel (starting from p. 23); this
text really exists outside VALIS the novel, as the quotations come from Dick’s
own Exegesis. But the attitude of Phil the character in the novel is not very
respectful: he calls Fat’s (and P.K. Dick’s) journal “the furtive act of a deranged
person” (22).
Besides, Fat’s quest is a rather wild enterprise: not the scholarly research
of a trained scholar, but the rambling pursuit of a self-taught thinker. Christo-
pher Palmer has objected to these frantic quotations from the most different
sources, from Plato to the Tibetan Book of the Dead:
Each of these colorfully different texts, torn out of historical context,
bathed in the warm solvents of esotericism, says the same thing, although,
admittedly, what that same thing is changes from speculation to specula-
tion. And this blurring of differentiation should be connected to an under-
lying literalism of interpretation... [Palmer 232].
There is a name for this “adventurous syncretism” (Palmer 232), non-
chalantly mixing so many sources from Plato to the Rusicrucians: textuality.
Textuality is a condition where “text speaks to text” (Palmer 230–1), where
quotation answers quotation and a new, esoteric name replaces the previous
name (which stands for a previous interpretation/explanation of the phenom-
ena); textuality is also a condition, typical of postmodernist literature (Palmer
describes the atmosphere in the novel as “rhapsodic postmodernist restlessness”
[Palmer 232]), where characters (and their adventures) are a textual artifact
only, a self-referential construct. Hence, according to the Australian critic,
“Dick’s attempts to restore ‘thingness,’ phenomenological substance, to hum-
ble objects, are not successful here as they were in earlier novels” (Palmer
232); he quotes as an example an episode in the twelfth chapter of VALIS,
where the narrator secretly baptizes his son using hot chocolate and a hotdog
bun (207–9), which the Australian critic finds unconvincing (Palmer 233).
Palmer does not seem to have noticed that this scene can also be found
in the eighteenth chapter of Radio Free Albemuth (169), and that — according
to Sutin — it mirrors instructions Dick received by means of the information-
rich pink beam which hit the writer during his 2-3-74 experiences (Sutin
218).13 Yet this is one of the many elements in the text which could bolster
218 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Palmer’s thesis that VALIS suggests — even to those who do not know that
many episodes of the novel “are recounted and analyzed as events in Dick’s
life, in his Exegesis and in interviews” (Palmer 235)— that the author believed
in VALIS. But this “literary effect ... denies textuality” (Palmer 235): this may
look like a postmodernist novel which playfully quotes a heterogeneous con-
stellation of texts and does not pretend to have substantiality; it may resemble
the quotationist works of Borges, Barth, or Pynchon — but it is actually a text
which, by staging the author’s belief in what has been revealed in his Febru-
ary-March 1974 experiences (the author is then unsurprisingly present in the
novel as the narrating I “Phil Dick”), is reduced “to a screen through which
we look at Dick’s belief in the existence of VALIS” (Palmer 235).
Though Palmer’s discussion of VALIS might in some points read like a
denunciation of Dick as a charlatan,14 what the Australian critic really aims
at is rejecting Scott Durham’s postmodern reading of the novel as a text where
the author as a subject is abolished (Palmer 234), something which is declared
in the title itself of Durham’s article, quoting Roland Barthes’ “death of the
subject” (Durham 188–9). How can the subject be abolished, or die, seems
to be Palmer’s objection, if it is somewhat reasserted, if “the novel defeats our
attempt to defend ourselves by saying that it is only a novel,” as it “denies its
fictionality” (Palmer 236)? What Palmer finds in VALIS is a “collision between
ethical seriousness and a postmodern sense of the textuality of meaning”
(Palmer 237): on the one hand we have the actual suffering of characters
(committing suicide, suffering from cancer or depression) and Dick’s direct
implication in the novel as a believer in the reality of VALIS; on the other
hand the quotationist extravaganza which seems to annihilate the substantiality
of meaning in a “threat to differentiation” (Palmer 237) where all texts mean
the same thing. This collision brings to a “painful blockage” (Palmer 237),
not a dissolution of the subject in textuality.
Actually Durham’s article seems to have been presented in an oversim-
plified fashion by Palmer, inasmuch as its complete title is “From the Death
of the Subject to a Theology of Late Capitalism”: Durham quotes, as an exam-
ple of the death — or better disassembling — of the subject, a scene in the
fourteenth chapter of The Simulacra (a novel published and written well before
VALIS) where telekinetic (and schizophrenic) pianist Richard Kongrosian lit-
erally turns himself inside out (Durham 189), a moment when the sfnal device
of telekinesis turns the metaphor of madness as “delirious dissolution of sub-
jectivity” (Durham 189) into a literal dismemberment. On the other hand,
Dick’s last novels hint at a possible resurrection of the subject, no more indi-
vidual but collective, as the critic sees the theological component in VALIS as
helping to conceive “a collective subject capable of grasping such contradictions,”
i.e., the contradiction between “the subject of countercultural experience and
 8. Amateur Questers 219

the subject of hegemonic social memory” (Durham 197), respectively embod-

ied in the two halves of Scanner’s split protagonist, Bob Arctor the junkie and
Special Agent Fred the undercover nark. According to Durham, in VALIS
there is a momentary reunion of “the subject of memory to the delirious
subject of experience” (Durham 197), and this may have a political meaning
because the “theological madness ... proves to be the method by which a
counter-culture attempts to think a counter-memory” (Durham 198).
Palmer’s and Durham’s analyses of VALIS, both stemming from the post-
modern season of Dick scholarship (well represented by the 1988 special issue
of Science-Fiction Studies, which included Durham’s article), are interesting
because — their divergence of views notwithstanding — they are both pivoted
on a contradiction which is undeniably present in the novel, and this chimes
in with my reading. There is a split, a chasm, a conflict in VALIS. No wonder
that the protagonist/narrator is split, then; no wonder that the text mixes
scores of erudite quotations and episodes from Dick’s own life; no wonder
that it is difficult to trace the borderline between fiction and autobiography;
no wonder, eventually, that there are two different works of art in a single
book, struggling against each other, belonging to two different literary genres:
autobiographical novel and religious science-fiction. The split, the chasm,
the conflict is evidently the constitutive element of VALIS, and this means
that any discussion of the novel which aims at finding a unified interpretation,
a monological reading, will always fall short of the fascinating duplicity of
this book. Palmer’s collision is there, and it is that collision which gives VALIS
most of whatever literary value it may have.
What we are going to do in the remainder of this chapter is to map the
collision, by showing where and when the contradiction between the two lit-
erary genres that VALIS might belong to are textually embodied; the shunts
(Ch. 1) which shift the plot from realistic quasi-autobiography to religious sf
and back. There is an oscillation between these two genres, so that Palmer’s
collision is actually a constellation of small collisions, which fosters a condition
of ontological uncertainty.
It is in fact quite interesting that Fat, after his pink beam experience,
does not achieve certainty. He does not have a truth to preach to the heathens;
he is no Christ, no rabbi15 teaching his apostles a transcendental verity. Fat —
unlike real prophets and messengers of any God worth considering —16does
not come equipped with the Way, the Truth and the Life. Above all Fat does
not have positive knowledge: the pink beam experience is mostly an enigma
to him. Let us read an important passage of the novel where Phil describes
what happens when Fat’s mystical experience is discussed:
David continually quoted C.S. Lewis; Kevin contradicted himself logi-
cally in his zeal to defame God; Fat made obscure references to information
220 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

fired into his head by a beam of pink light; Sherri, who had suffered dread-
fully, wheezed out pious mummeries; I switched my position according to
who I was talking to at the time [29].
If, according to Palmer, this novel wants to make us believe in Fat’s (and
Dick’s) 2-3-74 experience, such scenes are far from effective: here the expe-
rience is presented as the manifestation of something unclear, obscure, enig-
matic. Palmer rightly suggests that “[t]he possibility that is allowed to grow,
to vary and to permute ... is best defined ... as the possibility that Philip K.
Dick believes in VALIS” (Palmer 235–6); but believing that something hap-
pened to Fat (and his author Philip K. Dick) is one thing, saying what it is
or was that is something completely different. VALIS is the name of an enigma,
not a revealed truth. In fact, most of what happens in the 23 pages between
the first mention of the pink beam and the second twist in the plot is not the
announcement of some revelation, but the unquiet questioning of a puzzling
event — or its exegesis17; hence the series of hypotheses, or speculations, that
explain the event in different fashions. The quotation of Heraclitus in Chapter
3, “The nature of things is in the habit of concealing themselves” (39) is prob-
ably less tied to ontology than to hermeneutics: concealed truths, the “latent
structure,” must be laboriously deciphered, and may well remain hidden. The
pink beam actually opens a quest, a search for meaning and truth.
However, Fat’s religious but cryptic experience has not really saved him
from his psychical turmoil, as he attempts to commit a spectacular (and redun-
dant) suicide “with the pills, the razor sharp blade and the car engine” (43).
If the so far undetermined message delivered through the pink beam should
save him from his initial nervous breakdown, we have to admit that what was
told him was disappointingly ineffective. “Encountering the living God had
not helped to equip him for the tasks of ordinary endurance, which ordinary
men, not so favored, handle” (46): Phil’s comment indirectly tells us that Fat’s
experience was not illumination but madness, that “his brains are fried” (47).
The supernatural element is discredited, and here we have a shunt which takes
the narrative back to realistic fiction.
This return to realism leads to one of the worst moments in Fat’s life,
when he is detained at the Orange County mental hospital (43),18 which is
practically a prison. Should we then be surprised by the curious political-his-
torical bent Fat’s visions assume in this part of the novel, when he starts to
see the California of 1974 mysteriously superimposed to the Imperial Rome
of A.D. 70? If the mental hospital is a prison, where Fat can be kept for an
indefinite time (50), it is not that strange that Fat “discerned within the super-
imposition [of contemporary California and ancient Rome] a Gestalt shared
by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison”
(48). The reference to Gestalt psychology should make us aware that the Black
 8. Amateur Questers 221

Iron Prison is a form which may organize and define the single parts of which
it is composed; a form that may holistically define the political situation of
Imperial Rome, or modern California,19 or the very personal predicament of
Horselover Fat, a wrecked individual prisoner of a mental hospital — and
madness. The religious and esoteric symbols can be thus read as referring to
a very concrete and mundane reality of suffering and despair (acknowledged
by Palmer [233]); an individual reality, one should add. Let us not forget that
the novel begins with Fat’s nervous breakdown, not with the pink beam.
We should also notice that this ghostly apparition of another time and
place, superimposed to late 20th-century California, reminds us of the ghost-
like apparitions of Ubik (in its several embodiments) in the homonymous
novel, and is another manifestation of ontological uncertainty. The never
ending Imperial Rome is in fact also a parallel universe, an alternative history
or layer of reality which might be hidden by our only apparently real koinos
kosmos of A.D. 1974. Once again, the fictional reality conjured up by the Game-
Player and so far accepted by readers thanks to the usual willing suspension
of disbelief (helped by the realistic Californian setting) might in any moment
dissolve to reveal a far weirder and unfamiliar world.
However, the novel moves — after the suicide attempt and Fat’s hospi-
talization — towards a new shunt, that is, the intervention of doctor Stone.
This unorthodox therapist cures Fat by means of a language that he may
understand and accept, that of his religious obsession (in what Stilling defines
a “metapsychanalitical” sequence [96]). He first solves a contradiction between
the two superimposed moments (the 1970s and A.D. 70) in Fat’s vision, by
pointing out that — according to Fat himself— time ceased in A.D. 70: actually
they are still in Roman times. Modern day California is no more than a dream:
humankind is still under the domination of Rome, as a symbol of absolute
political power.20 From Phil’s point of view, Stone’s intervention is in any case
worse than the illness it should cure: “Now Fat would never depart from faith
in his encounter with God. Dr. Stone had nailed it down” (63). Stone’s sub-
sequent therapeutic move is even more successful, though it once again ratifies
his patient’s faith in the supernatural character of his experience: when asked
an opinion on the Nag Hammadi manuscripts,21 one of the fundamental ele-
ments in Fat’s (and Dick’s) home-made theological system, Dr. Stone replies:
“You would know.... You’re the authority” (65). With this reinstatement of
Fat’s faith in himself, the psychological collapse triggered by the departure of
his wife and, before that, Fat’s failure to save Gloria’s life, seems healed. The
quester may not know who or what exactly fired the beam at him, but he
knows that there is an explanation which transcends ordinary reality — so the
novel is once again a search for something preternatural, or better — since we
are in a science-fictional atmosphere — for something alien.
222 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

It is not a harmless quest, though: Fat, once discharged from the asylum,
goes to live with Sherri Solveig, his friend who suffers from cancer, animated
by a morbid self-destructive drive, as she “did not merely plan to get sick
again; she like Gloria planned to take as many people with her as possible”
(73). It is quite clear now that behind the first and most evident oppositions
which structure the plot of the novel — Realism vs. Science-fiction, Sanity vs.
Madness, Ordinary reality vs. Supernatural entities — there is also an arguably
more fundamental semic opposition: Freud’s classical dichotomy of Eros vs.
Thanatos (Stilling 94). Fat is basically threatened by death, embodied in the
suicidal impulse which gets hold of him after Gloria’s suicide: the self-destruc-
tive drive is like a contagious disease which may easily spread to individuals
with no or not enough spiritual antibodies — people weakened by physical
suffering like Sherri, or by a crazy mixed-up life, like Fat. While the novel
oscillates between realism and fantasy/science-fiction, Fat more or less suc-
cessfully strives to keep far from death and reach life. It is through therapy22
that Dr. Stone has helped Fat to stave off death and grasp life again — and
that is Eros; while Sherri involves him in her own destruction, and that is
surely Thanatos. One might even say that Fat’s predicament is like Joe Chip’s
in Ubik, with the divine spraycan replaced by VALIS/Zebra.
However, Fat’s decision to live with Sherri marks another genre shunt,
because the question arises about how a man who has been enlightened by
God (via pink beam) can make such a blatant mistake as “to bind himself to
the Antichrist” (74), i.e., to Sherri, who “planned to take as many people
with her as possible” (73). Phil’s understated question is: if God is on the side
of life and healing (Eros), how can one who has really been touched by God
deliberately chose Thanatos?23
Yet the critical, ironic distance between Phil and Fat seems to decrease
after the beginning of chapter 7. Palmer noticed this loss of distance: “Philip
begins to participate in the obsessions and textual riffs that the split seemed
to have assigned to Fat rather than to the often impressively wise and blunt
Philip” (Palmer 235). Suvin, following Palmer, sees Phil as a device aimed at
persuading readers, a “disbelieving patsy” whose incredulity was “set up so
that [it] can be confounded, wiping out the reader’s disbelief too” (Suvin
2002, 383). But we should remember once again what the sensible Phil tells
us almost at the beginning of the novel: “I am Horselover Fat and I am writing
this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity” (11). The apparent
distance between Phil the sceptic and Fat the visionary is exactly that: appar-
ent. It is a fictional device which is craftily exploited by Dick to curb Fat’s
interpretive obsession, but his interest in esoteric literature and ancient reli-
gious texts cannot be completely neutered because Fat and Phil are the same
man, after all — or maybe two conflicting drives in the same mind.
 8. Amateur Questers 223

However, even if Phil is confounded, and this means that Fat is right
(an oversimplified interpretation, as we shall see), once again Fat does not
have a truth to teach; he has several conflicting hypotheses about truth, like
Dick, and the many interpretations he suggested in scores of letters in Volumes
3–6 of the Selected Letters prove this. On April 6, 1977 he sent a letter to his
literary agent where he declared that he believed that the Zebra Principle, the
entity behind his 1974 mystical experiences, was “not just a fictional device
for the purpose of novel writing” (SL5 67), but something he really believed
in (SL5 68), though it is explained in a quasi-materialistic fashion by an essay
written by psychologist Julian Jaynes that Dick had just read.24 But in two
letters written four months later the writer explains his experiences with the
intervention of the Holy Ghost, with no mention of Jaynes’ theories (SL5
90–3). Other theories are formulated in the scores of letters to Claudia Bush
and Patricia Warrick. Dick even hypothesized that the “Biblical apocalyptic
terms” (SL6 51) he was using in the early eighties to explain his mystical expe-
riences had been suggested by the macro-brain (another embodiment of the
mysterious intelligence Dick used to call VALIS) to camouflage itself: by using
those terms Dick discredited himself, so nobody would believe his description
of the enigmatic entity.25 All in all, even when Fat and Phil (and their friends
Kevin and David) agree, they do not agree on some ultimate truth; they agree
on carrying on a quest for truth, and Suvin seems to have missed this, as well
as the many tell-tale references to Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail scattered
throughout the novel, which may induce us to read VALIS as Dick’s own,
very personal version of The Waste Land.
Doubts lurk everywhere: not many pages after Phil begins to discuss the
same esoteric texts that Fat loves so much (as the hymn by Ikhnaton quoted
at the beginning of ch. 7 [101–2]), there is a moment of radical uncertainty:
it is Phil who, “without getting Fat’s permission” (117), quotes Heraclitus and
then one of his interpreters, Edward Hussey: “the infinitely old divinity is a
child playing a board game as he moves the cosmic pieces in combat according
to rule” (117). The image of a god who treats humans like “pieces on a board”
(118) must have chimed in with Dick’s paranoid streak: but the idea of char-
acters like pawns manipulated by a superhuman game-player hints at The
Game-Players of Titan (Ch. 1), and Dick’s own Game of the Rat, where the
manipulation of genre conventions (and readers’ expectations) plays a funda-
mental role. One might then suspect that Dick is playing with us once again.
In fact the pink beam broadcast something, but that message, however
important, is not easy to decode: hence the moves of the child god may be
totally obscure to his pawns. Also because God may be very different from
mortal creatures, as different as some alien form of life from another planet:
what we call God may not be what we have always meant by that term (118).
224 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Both Fat and Phil are prey to a radical and unstoppable form of doubt, more
puzzling than Descartes’ ontological doubt.
It may even be, as Phil suspects, that the being which fired the pink
beam at Fat is not God, but Fat himself, or better Fat as he will be in a future
moment. The identity of Zebra (the code name that Fat has assigned to the
entity that has contacted him [102]) could thus be something that is not tran-
scendental at all: “Zebra is all the selves along the linear time-axis, laminated
into one super–or trans-temporal self which cannot die, and which has come
to save Fat” (132). This hypothesis creates another textual shunt, because if
we take this laminated self as someone or something that can retroactively act
on his old self by moving backwards in the time flux, we have to accept the
idea of time-travel, albeit limited to information: this is a typical science-
fictional idea based on the tachyon theory quoted in the letter to Fitting (SL3
141–8) we have already quoted (a theory featured e.g., in Gregory Benford’s
1980 solid sf novel Timescape), so VALIS moves from theological science-
fiction to hard science-fiction.
But Zebra, considered as the sum of all the selves along the time-axis
laminated into one trans-temporal self might simply be Philip Kindred Dick
writing his own story in 1978, staging his own 2-3-74 experience with con-
siderable hindsight (in any moment our self is made up of all our past selves),
and communicating with his own fictional alter-ego Horselover Fat (the idea
that the laminated self cannot die may also be read as a new version of the
old topos of the immortality of literature and its authors). Here we have post-
modernist metafiction, not religious preaching, as the image of the child play-
ing a board game already suggested; then also VALIS could be part of the
Game of the Rat. VALIS might simply be the author himself.
In any case, the novel does not end here, and the oscillation takes us
back again to theology and supernatural entities when Kevin, Phil’s and Fat’s
ultra-skeptic friend (a purported portrait of Dick’s real friend K.W. Jeter,
another science-fiction writer),26 invites them and David to see “a science-
fiction film” (138), Valis, whose screenplay has been written by Eric Lampton,
the leader of rock group Mother Goose. The film is described in detail by
Dick (139–44); suffice it to say that much of its plot is a rehashing of the sto-
ryline of Radio Free Albemuth (which has been considered an earlier version
of VALIS, though the differences between the two novels are so extensive that
they can be read as independent works). What is important, however, is that
the film contains a welter of allusions to what Fat has seen in his mystical
visions: pink light beams, three-eyed aliens, the meaningful little clay pot,
the Christian fish sign. Some of these images are in the background, so that
only the initiates may recognize them; some are explained in an unexpected
way, such as the source of the information-rich beam, which is fired by an
 8. Amateur Questers 225

alien satellite called VALIS, i.e., Vast Active Living Intelligence System; or
the fish sign, identified with Crick and Watson’s double helix model of DNA
(146). The vision of the film radically changes Fat’s friends’ attitude to his
“lurid schizophrenic episode”: “Kevin had gone to the movie and now he was
not so sure; the Mother Goose flick had shaken him up” (153).
The film persuades Fat & C., now dubbed “Rhipidon Society” (a name
that Dick derives from the early Christian Ichthys or fish symbol, as rhipidon
means “fin” in Greek [171]), after more wild hypotheses and interpretations
of Valis, to contact Eric Lampton and his wife Linda, plus their friend Brent
Mini,27 an experimental musician who composed the soundtrack of the movie.
Already the phone call before the actual meeting marks an important change
in the novel: when Phil says that it was not he who was “told things” (168),
that is, received information from VALIS, because “[t]he information was
fired at my friend Horselover Fat,” Lampton immediately deconstructs his
fictional alter-ego: “But that’s you. ‘Philip’ means ‘Horselover’ in Greek ...
‘Fat’ is the German translation of ‘Dick.’ So you’ve translated your name.”
One might object that dick is the German translation of “fat,” but Lampton
has in any case decoded Dick’s interlinguistic pun, and reminded us, after
more than 150 pages, that Dick and Fat are one. This might mean that Lamp-
ton, who is not cheated by Dick’s fictional device, is endowed with the truth,
or, gnostically speaking, with Sophia, the divine wisdom.
In fact when Rhipidon Society meet the Lamptons in Sonoma they dis-
cover that their guests are indeed endowed with Sophia, because that is the
name of their 2-year-old daughter (189), who is introduced by Eric Lampton
as the reincarnation of the Messiah (which is Christ but also Buddha [169]):
“This time ... for the first time, the Savior takes female form” (189). But before
this revelation another shunt operates in Chapter 11: after talking with the
Lamptons, Phil tells David that “they’re crazy” (181), because what they have
said may also chime in with the findings of Fat’s esoteric research, but when
they claim to belong to Ikhnaton’s race, three-eyed aliens with claw-like hands
(175–6), they push their act too far, mixing the story of pharaoh Akhenaten,
or Ikhnaton — who strove to push Egypt towards monotheism — with aliens
out of conspiracy theories on Area 51.
Fat’s quest for truth may seem as crazy as other (more or less symbolic)
pursuits of ultimate truths, be they Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail or Ahab’s
hunt for Moby-Dick, but here the questers will not settle for some second-
hand nonsense. And when they finally meet Sophia (190), in the climactic
twelfth chapter of the novel, they discover that the little girl who should be
the embodiment divine wisdom has a remarkably no-nonsense approach to
life: “Your suicide attempt was a violent cruelty against yourself,” she tells
Phil, and when he tries to parry by saying “It was Horselover Fat,” she replies
226 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

“Phil, Kevin and David. Three of you. There are no more.” Horselover Fat
is exposed as a projection of Phil’s sick mind, at the same time a product of
his madness and the representation of that madness. Sophia can heal the split
personalities, and make Phil whole again; if this, as we have seen, is the sign
of her belonging to the side of Eros, not Thanatos (while the Lamptons, as
we shall see, will ultimately ally themselves to the forces of destruction), we
should also understand that her message is not at all deranged or nonsensi-
cal.
Another critic acknowledged this, namely Kim Stanley Robinson, who
suggests that what Sophia says “is very simple, very humanistic” (Robinson
116–7), and quotes two highly relevant passages of the novel (198, 213) which
express an idea of God as something which is inside man, as a salvific force
in the human mind. “[H]uman beings should now give up the worship of all
deities except mankind itself ” (213): here is a summation of Sophia’s message
to Phil and his friends, something that strikes me as surprisingly closer to the
ideas of such a canonized poet as William Blake than to the ravings of a mad-
man. We should also add that here (190) the genre shunt turns the theological
science-fiction novel to a straight religious novel, because readers might now
easily take Sophia as a metaphorical or symbolic figure of a wisdom (this is
the meaning of her name in Greek) which may be directly and preternaturally
inspired by God, but also reached thanks to a process of inner growth.
However, since Dick was definitely not a preacher, but remained a nov-
elist till the end, this truth does not come as something ultimate and incon-
trovertible. The novel enters the territory of theological science-fiction once
again when Phil is struck by a pink beam which also causes a time slip (204);
this mysterious episode helps him to escape the deranged Lamptons, so that
the Rhipidon Society will not be involved in Sophia’s accidental death. That
tragic event evidently marks another shunt in the novel, as it compels readers
to doubt the divine nature of the little girl. There are already doubts about
Sophia when the Rhipidon Society is in the Lamptons’ house in Sonoma
(195–6), but Kevin, the stubborn skeptic, says that one thing is sure: Sophia
healed Phil: “[y]ou stopped believing you were two people. You stopped
believing in Horselover Fat as a separate person” (196–7).28
However, a much stronger threat to the persuasion that Sophia is the
Savior comes when — after the return home of Phil, Kevin and David — Linda
Lampton phones the writer and announces that Sophia died in a failed exper-
iment in which Brent Mini tried to gather information from the child through
laser beams (215). “[I]f Sophia was the Savior, how could she die?” asks Linda,
expressing the radical doubt that also the other characters (and we readers)
must share: how could the thanatoid forces of psychopathy (Mini’s crackpot
experiment) prevail if Sophia was the embodiment of Eros/God? Doubt strikes
 8. Amateur Questers 227

back, and this obliges me to disagree with Suvin’s reading of the novel as
divided into two parts, one of skeptical and frantic search before the viewing
of the film, the other of wholehearted belief after the viewing of Valis and the
meeting with Sophia (Suvin, 383).
We might instead quite easily read the novel as a realistic narrative depict-
ing a sometimes comic case of madness (the split between Phil and Horselover
Fat) plus the tragedy of a small sect of self-deluded individuals (the Lamptons
and Brent Mini). Dick was well aware of the dangers of fanatical religious
faith: its effects are represented by the tragedy of the Lamptons, and they are
also evoked by the brief hint at the 1978 mass-suicide in Jonestown (220),
organized by religious leader Jim Jones. Is this the ultimate meaning of the
novel? Or does the comeback of Horselover Fat (216), at the beginning of the
fourteenth and last chapter, ultimately shunt it towards the area of theological
science-fiction, since Fat starts spinning his theories again and manifests his
intention to continue his quest (217)? Phil tells him to go away (220), and
this might amount to a refusal to continue the quest, foreshadowing Angel’s
rejection of the quest in Archer (Ch. 10), but this time Fat does not disappear:
he becomes a wanderer who looks for an explanation of his experience in the
farthest corners of Earth, and gets now and then in touch with Phil (usually
via mailgrams [221] or phone calls [227]).
Does one of the two possible interpretations ultimately prevail? I think
that we may try to answer this question only if we carefully read the ending
paragraph of the novel. We are told that Fat has left, and is searching for
truth all around the world, but Phil has not followed him: he has stayed at
home, and this choice seems to be quite important, if the novel ends by restat-
ing it: “My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living
room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told,
originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission” (228). This ending para-
graph is a modern-day rewriting of a key passage in another text which Dick
knew quite well, the Gospel of Mark; when Phil says “I waited; I watched,”
he clearly refers to the ending of the “Little Apocalypse” (Mark 13:35–7),
where Christ exhorts to watch “for ye know not when the master of the house
cometh”— this is probably what “we had been told, originally, long ago.”
The Little Apocalypse is a very important part of the gospel, and there
is a Biblical scholar, Etienne Trocmé, who hypothesized that Mark (which,
according to the majority of New Testament scholars, was the source or one
of the sources of both Matthew and Luke) originally ended here, when Christ
says “And what I say unto you I say unto all, watch” (Kermode 71–2), and
what follows Mark 13 is an appendix subsequently added by an anonymous
editor. This is not the right place for an exegetical discussion, but we should
not overlook the fact that at the end of his novel Dick chooses to quote a part
228 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

of Mark’s Gospel which might or might not be the real ending29; because the
ending of the fourteenth chapter of VALIS might not be the real ending of
the novel.
In fact the paragraph I have quoted is followed by an Appendix which
collects all the excerpts of Fat’s (and Dick’s) Exegesis scattered in the novel,
something which might seem gratuitous, or worse, might be read as upholding
Fat’s crackpot esoteric revelations (being placed at the end of VALIS, these
fragments might amount to the moral of the story)— were it not that the final
fragment says: “From Ikhnaton this knowledge passed to Moses, and from
Moses to Elijah, the Immortal Man, who became Christ. But underneath all
the names there is only one Immortal man; and we are that man” (241).
Palmer contends that “[e]ach of these colorfully different texts, torn out
of historical context, ... says the same thing” (Palmer 232); Dick was well
aware of this, if he ends up the book VALIS with the revelation that we (he,
his characters, his readers, everybody) is Christ, that is the Messiah, the Savior,
the principle of Eros and healing, the divine wisdom, or Sophia. It takes some
wisdom to understand this truth; to understand that Ikhnaton the monotheist
pharaoh, Moses and Elijah the prophets, Christ the Messiah and all the other
figures from esoteric and religious texts which have been mentioned, quoted
and discussed in VALIS, once inside the space of fiction, all become fiction,30
all become characters in a complicated story which maybe is not so complicate
because after all we are talking about a man and his mortal terrors, his hopes,
his feelings: and we are that man. Once again, as Horace already knew, mutato
nomine de te fabula narratur.
The ending excerpts from the Exegesis might persuade readers to accept
Palmer’s basic idea that VALIS denies its fictionality (Palmer 236), not because
it is autobiographic, but because it is a disguised religious pamphlet: the
Appendix may read dangerously like a final revelation (with or without capital
R). Yet, by placing at the end of the Appendix (which follows Dick’s own
Little Apocalypse, the ending of Chapter 14) a fragment which identifies
prophets and messiahs with us readers, Dick ultimately brings everything to
the only place where we all meet, believers and unbelievers, visionaries and
skeptics: real life, our shared reality with all its laminations, the koinos kosmos
where all the private worlds intersect in the most complicated ways.
Dick leaves to the readers the freedom to decide if we should bring Ikhna-
ton and those other characters down to our mundane level, or spiritually rise
to the transcendental heights of religious truth. Both a materialist and a spir-
itualist reading are possible: the oscillation is not closed, not even in the
second ending. And this ultimate form of tolerance and open-mindedness
might well be another of the strong points of this most complex novel — pos-
sibly its strongest point.
 8. Amateur Questers 229

It is Dick himself to explain this in one of his last letters, one he sent to
his agent Russell Galen, on November 12, 1981. He starts by pointing out that
the inner contradiction of the novel is a new version of Epimenides’ paradox,
that is, the Cretan who declares that all Cretans are liars (SL6 286): Horselover
Fat says he saw Christ (aka VALIS), but he is a madman, hence not reliable;
but the author of the book is Fat, writing in the third person about himself,
and readers should wonder whether a narrative by a madman can be reliable.
A blow-by-blow analysis of the consequence of this original logical paradox
brings to this conclusion:
What, then, if anything is asserted? It is impossible to tell. VALIS is a
novel/VALIS is not a novel. I am Horselover Fat/I am not Horselover Fat.
Horselover Fat is insane/Horselover Fat is not insane. I saw Christ/I did
not see Christ. I assert I saw Christ but I am insane/I assert I saw Christ
but I am not insane. I assert I saw Christ/I do not assert I saw Christ [SL6
287].
This barrage of alternatives somewhat mirrors the following scheme,
summarizing the shunts in VALIS, which should help us understand that this
novel does not lack of focus, as Suvin maintains (Suvin 2002, 383), but simply
has two alternative foci — something Dick was well aware of.

Table 8.1
Page # Description From To
20 Fat is struck by the pink beam Realistic fiction Theological
science-fiction
43 Attempted suicide: Fat’s despera- Theological Realistic fiction
tion denies divine intervention science-fiction (a case of
madness)
63 Dr. Stone confirms Fat’s faith in Realistic fiction Theological
himself (“you’re the authority”) science-fiction
73 Fat goes to live with Sherri: if God Theological Realistic fiction
is in contact with him, why didn’t science-fiction
he warn Fat?
101 Phil begins to participate in Fat’s Realistic fiction Theological
obsessions science-fiction
132 Phil suspects that Zebra is Fat’s Theological Science-fiction
supra- or trans-temporal self science-fiction (time-travel) or
postmodernist
metafiction
138 Fat and friends watch the movie Science-fiction Theological
Valis which confirms Fat’s visions (time-travel) or science-fiction
postmodernist
metafiction (cont. next page)
230 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Table 8.1 (continued)

181 Fat thinks that the Lamptons Thological Realistic fiction
are insane science-fiction
190 When Phil and friends meet Realistic fiction Religious novel
Sophia, Fat disappears
204 Phil is struck by the pink beam, Religious novel Theological
and manages to escape the science-fiction
deranged Lamptons and Mini
215 Sophia dies in Brent Mini’s Theological Realistic fiction
experiment science-fiction
216 Fat reappears, but Phil sends him Realistic fiction Open ending
away (220)

Dick’s final conclusion, as expressed in the letter to Galen, is that

However, something is asserted. Assertions are made. The astute reader,
then recognizes that assertions are made ... and then contradicted.... Drop-
ping formal logic for a moment, it occurs to the readers that probably—
only probably —some— but only some — of the assertions in VALIS are true.
Parts— but only parts — of VALIS are true. VALIS, then, is a new kind of
thing never seen before; it is neither novel nor autobiography, neither true
nor false [SL6 287].

Dick is right when he says that his novel is neither a “pure” novel (pro-
vided novels were ever pure: the earliest specimens of the genre were Daniel
Defoe’s fake autobiographies) nor an autobiography, but is wrong when he
says that VALIS was a new kind of thing. There was an illustrious predecessor,
published in 1969 and written by another sf writer who had managed to escape
the ghetto and become an acclaimed writer, one of those quoted in the chapter
of the prestigious Columbia History of the American Novel 31 devoted to Post-
modern Fiction (Hite 699): Kurt Vonnegut, whose Slaughterhouse-Five also
unashamedly mixes autobiography and science fiction. Like Dick, Vonnegut
appears in his de-structured novel as a character (a secondary one, unlike Phil
Dick in VALIS, but in his capacity as writer,32 like Phil Dick in VALIS), and
describes his horrifying wartime experiences in Dresden by conjuring up a
fictional alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, who finds himself in the 1945 Dresden bomb-
ing and fire storm like the real Vonnegut.
Dick’s VALIS is well inside one of the currents of postmodernist fiction,
that of autofiction, covering “autobiographical fiction, or fictional narrative
in the first-person mode” (Smith and Watson 186). Such texts are astraddle
the borderline between autobiography and fiction, and use “textual markers
that signal a deliberate, often ironic, interplay between the two modes” (Smith
and Watson 186)— and I cannot imagine a more blatant marker than having
 8. Amateur Questers 231

two protagonists, one of which (the narrating I) is the author himself. There
are other examples of this hybrid form; Smith and Watson mention Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), but there is another interesting specimen
(also written by a former sf author), J.G. Ballard’s The Kindness of Women
(1991), which — like VALIS— has been read as part of a “life trilogy” also
including the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) and the
compact autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), whose three parts have dif-
ferent takes on the narrative materials of Ballard’s own life (Rossi 2008).
Palmer may be right when he suggests that VALIS is a screen through
which we look at Dick’s belief in the existence of VALIS; but the character
of Horselover Fat may be another screen through which Dick himself looked
at his own belief in VALIS. Fictions like VALIS do work like screens, screening
embarrassing and problematic memories to protect the mind of the writer,
but at the same time screening those very experiences which cause embarrass-
ment and disorientation; they resemble Freud’s screen memories about child-
hood which retain insignificant facts, but are associated with important facts
that have been suppressed because they are unacceptable to the ego. Mixing
memories and fiction may be a way to tackle unsettling or painful experiences:
let us not forget that the novel begins with one of these painful events, the
suicide of Fat’s friend Gloria Knudson, and an even more painful event which
is only briefly mentioned, the fact that “Fat had lost his wife, the year before,
to mental illness” (11).
Thus Dick was definitely not off the mark when he claimed that VALIS
was “experimental science fiction” (Boonstra 1982), as it closely resembles
other postmodernist authors’ experiments in genre hybridization which short-
circuit “reliable” autobiographic writing and fictional invention. Such expe-
riences are conterminous with other experiments in hybridization, like
Norman Mailer’s New Journalism (as represented by The Armies of the Night
[1968] and Of a Fire on the Moon [1971]), or Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo
journalism (Hell’s Angels [1966] and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1972]),
possibly even Tom Wolfe’s “nonfiction novel” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(1968). Dick often mentioned Vonnegut in his letters (though not very respect-
fully), and he said that VALIS contained “certain modern elements associated
with Hunter S. Thompson” (SL6 127).
It is also interesting that these texts all deal with events which have
strongly characterized the 1960s and their countercultural wave, from the
Apollo missions to the use of illicit drugs, from the October 1967 march on
the Pentagon to the lysergic odyssey of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters across
America. It is not difficult to understand that Fat’s and Phil’s quest for VALIS
belongs to those years, even if it was published in 1981, when the Reaganite
backlash was already wiping the countercultural wave away. Phil clearly says:
232 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

“This time in America —1960 to 1970— and this place, the Bay Area of North-
ern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the
truth” (11); and as an example of this totally fucked time, he quotes one of
the climactic events of those years, but not one related with LSD, mysticism,
or some form of more or less deranged creativity: “The day they moved Angela
Davis, the Black Marxist, out of the Marin County jail, the authorities dis-
mantled the whole civic center. This was to baffle radicals who might intend
trouble” (12). This refers to Angela Davis’ trial, held in 1972 for the August
7, 1970, shootout at the Marin County courthouse. Interestingly the events
as witnessed by Fat are strange, almost sfnal:
The elevators got unwired; doors got relabeled with spurious informa-
tion; the district attorney hid. Fat saw all this. He had gone to the civic
center that day to return a library book. At the electronic hoop at the civic
center entrance, two cops had ripped open the book and papers that Fat
carried. He was perplexed. The whole day perplexed him. In the cafeteria,
an armed cop watched everyone eat. Fat returned home by cab, afraid of
his own car and wondering if he was nuts. He was, but so was everyone else
[12].

Strange days ask for strange chronicles and stranger chroniclers. Durham
may then have got a point, and not a secondary one, when he claims that
VALIS — considered as a postmodernist autofiction — may be the textual form
“by which a counter-culture attempts to think a counter-memory” (Durham
198). Freedman persuasively argued that Dick is “a writer of the 1960s” (Freed-
man 1988, 147–51), not so much because he wrote his best works in that
decade (Freedman’s assessment of Dick’s oeuvre is oversimplified [147]), but
because Dick is perfectly attuned to the intellectual climate of those years,
and can be considered one of their greatest singers.
Many of the historical events of the 1960s and early 1970s defy traditional
concepts of reasonableness and verisimilitude; then the quandaries of the late-
modern or postmodern histories must necessarily be explored by means of
such partly-reliable, partly-unreliable narratives, that are at the same time
both autobiography and science-fiction, both a skeptical debunking of religion
and quests for a mutant form of religiosity — and, last but not least both com-
edy and tragedy.33 Such texts tell us that ontological uncertainty, far from
being a mere device to keep readers interested, may be the only viable method
to map an ontologically uncertain age like ours.
All in all, Phil, Kevin, and David’s quest is an open-ended one; it is
quite different from the modernist version of the medieval chivalric quest as
depicted in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the Chapel perilous is reached,
but found empty (“There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home”), mean-
ing that in the modern age there is no salvific Grail, no ultimate truth that
 8. Amateur Questers 233

can redeem our fallen world. In fact one could believe that Fat’s departure
towards faraway lands and Phil’s resigned wait in front of a TV set at the end
of the novel mean that the quest is endless, and that such and endlessness
implies its pointlessness, as there is no salvation, no redemption, no hope;
this also means no healing, as the novel, in Dick’s opinion, could also be read
as “the narrator’s odyssey to exorcise his psychotic self,” where Fat’s return is
triggered when Sophia’s death “revives in him the original trauma” and “the
narrator is again split into two people” (SL6 18). But we should never forget
that VALIS is only the first part of a trilogy, and the quest actually continues
in its second and above all its third part — because it is in Archer that an
answer will be found to the quandaries VALIS leaves open.34
 Chapter 9

The God from Outer Space:

Reconsidering The Divine Invasion

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
W.B. Yeats

The second part of the trilogy is apparently less ambiguous and prob-
lematic than VALIS; no wonder that Dick himself said that it “has a very con-
ventional structure for science fiction, almost science fantasy; no experimental
devices of any kind” (Boonstra 1982). Here God — called Yah — undoubtedly
exists, intervenes, operates, and is one of the characters of the story. We are
even presented with his thoughts in several moments of the complicated plot.
As we have already said, this is a science-fiction novel and the reader may
expect weird events in it, even God’s carefully planned invasion of planet
Earth to defeat his Adversary, Belial, the personification of Evil. This might
seem to wipe out any form of ontological uncertainty and its intriguing textual
consequences, but a careful reading of the novel1 may reveal us complexities
which have been already perceived by another critic, Darko Suvin:
This second novel in the trilogy ... is ideationally and narratively more
coherent, though the following account streamlines Dick’s gradual revela-
tions but also his sometimes competing explanations, confusingly over-
loaded details and layers, and simple inconsistencies [Suvin 386].
There are indeed competing realities in this novel; two alternative worlds
whose existence may justify and clarify the “competing explanations” and
“simple inconsistencies” Suvin talks about. This is an important source of
ontological uncertainty, but there are others. Contrary to what Christian the-
ology has always taught us, i.e., that Christ’s incarnation saved humankind —
notwithstanding the evident fact that this is definitely not the best possible
world (Palmer 39)— this novel tells us that the official (we might even say

234
 9. The God from Outer Space 235

Authorized) version of the first Coming is not true: things went wrong in A.D.
33 (and after). Hence we have a hidden truth behind the “official” history (or
story) told by the four Gospels.
Moreover, in this novel we have once again the typical Dickian character
whose memory is not totally reliable, and that is God himself, who suffers
from amnesia due to a primary trauma. Since God must recover his lost mem-
ories, we also have a quest here, and the quest necessarily entails interrogations,
inquiries, doubts, revelations which may seem ultimate but are sometimes
given the lie by subsequent discoveries; all in all, that atmosphere of uncer-
tainty which should be familiar to Dick’s readers. Another game of the Rat.

However, any reading of The Divine Invasion must start from its Entste-
hungsgeschichte, that is, the history of how this novel was written, which begins
with a short story published in 1980, “Chains of Air, Web of Aether.” Its plot
is set on the same star system CY30-CY30B where the novel begins; its pro-
tagonists, Leo McVane and Rybus Rommey — two of the Earth colonists living
a boring and almost purposeless life under the airtight domes on the alien
planet — are quite similar to Herb Asher and Rybys Rommey, two of the main
characters of the novel (the name of the woman is almost the same); in both
story and novel Leo/Herbert is a fan of interstellar pop star Linda Fox, who
sings electronic arrangements of John Dowland’s 16th-century lute songs;
Rybus/Rybys is sick with multiple sclerosis in both texts, and undergoes a
devastating chemotherapy; both Leo and Herbert grudgingly look after their
ill neighbor, though they dislike her; both Rybus and Rybys detest Fox’s
music, and vocally express their negative opinion without considering
Leo/Herb’s feelings.
Dick recycled his short story to write the first five chapters of his novel,
something that was not unusual for him, as we have already seen when we
discussed, e.g., The Penultimate Truth (Ch. 5) and The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (Ch. 7). The differences between the story and the novel may
tell us something about The Divine Invasion and its overall architecture. While
in the novel Rybys, Herb and Emmanuel form a Holy Family of sorts,2 in the
short story there is no hint at the Christian image of the Holy Family; there
is not even an affair between the two protagonists. Rybus is not pregnant and
she does not return to Earth with Leo. The short story is focused on the
destructive drives in Rybus, described as a dying person who wants to take
somebody with her (431).3 Notwithstanding his intense dislike of Rybus’
destructive personality, Leo feels ethically compelled to assist her, but this
entails paying a high price, because Rybus’ jeering criticism of Linda Fox and
her music spoils forever the pleasure he draws from her songs. What happens
is synthesized in this sentence: “a human life won and a synthetic media image
236 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

wrecked” (441). It is not a totally positive ending, as Leo is well aware that
he “got [Rybus] through her ordeal and she paid [him] back by deriding into
rubbish that which [he] cherished the most” (441). Moreover, Rybus’ physical
survival is somewhat neutralized by her psychological degradation: when Leo
visits her dome after her multiple sclerosis has been healed, he finds her com-
pulsively watching TV soaps (and it is quite clear that if Fox is just pop trash
those TV programs are not much better) and almost unable to interact with
another human being. “She’s completely crazy. She is dead. Her body has
been healed, but it killed her mind” (443) is Leo’s almost final comment.
I say that this comment is almost final because it is followed by a moment
of recollection, when Leo, watching Rybus who still wears her black glasses,
thinks of a John Dowland song that the Fox uses to sing “on Christmas Day,
for all the planets” (444). This might mean that Leo’s love for Fox’s versions
of Dowland has not been completely destroyed by Rybus’ insensitive derision.
But we should be careful about the meaning of the lines quoted by Dick:
When the poor cripple by the pool did lie
Full many years in misery and pain,
No sooner he on Christ had set his eye,
But he was well, and comfort came again.

Is the “poor cripple” Rybus, who has not been healed by Christ’s appari-
tion but chemotherapy? Or is it Leo, turned into a spiritual cripple by the
contact with Rybus’ “thanatous” personality (according to the AI system con-
sulted by Leo, which recommends “total avoidance on [his] part” [435])? And
is the final “comfort” an effect of art’s power to heal psychological wounds,
or is it just an ironic thrust? The ending is rather ambiguous.
The story is however focused on the relationship between Leo and Rybus,
and its main argument seems to be the value of art and beauty in an age when
works of art (here music) are industrially produced like any other commodity.
It is not just a matter of technological reproducibility or mechanical repro-
duction, as in Walter Benjamin’s famous (and rather optimistic) 1935 essay;
we are talking of a “synthetic media image” (441), something which is radically
false, mass-produced trash animated, in Rybus’ words, by “recycled sentimen-
tality, which is the worst kind of sentimentality” (429). The story is pivoted
on the clash between Rybus matter-of-fact mentality, focused on survival,
indifferent to feelings and beauty, and Leo’s sentimental approach to life,
whose artistic sensibility is marred by amateurism (his attitude to the Fox is
undeniably fannish [431]). It is not a resolved contrast, as we may disapprove
of Leo’s teenagerish selfishness, which brings him to refuse contact with
another human being to cultivate his platonic love for a virtual woman, but
it is difficult to subscribe to Rybus monomaniac harshness. Though she man-
 9. The God from Outer Space 237

ages to defeat her illness, she turns into a sort of soulless robot, having sac-
rificed all those emotions that give life much of its meaning.

When Dick turned “Chains of Air...” into the first part of Invasion, he
also turned the two conflicting characters of Leo and Rybus into a couple of
sfnal Joseph and Mary, and added a child, Emmanuel, so that the Holy Family
is complete — though Emmanuel is not Herb’s son, as we shall see (but that
is also true for Joseph and Jesus in the Gospels). The image of the Holy Family,
be it overt or covert, virtual or actual, was present in Dick’s fiction well before
he started writing Invasion in 1980. Earlier embodiments of this image can
be found in Time Out of Joint and above all in The World Jones Made (well
before its evocation in VALIS), and it is this neglected novel that may shed
light on the role the Holy Family will play in the second part of the VALIS
Trilogy.
The World Jones Made (1956) is pivoted on the political takeover of Floyd
Jones, a psi-empowered religious leader who succeeds in establishing a world
dictatorship based on intolerance, and grandiose plans of space colonization
by exploiting the xenophobic fears spreading all over the world because of the
arrival of enigmatic alien creatures called “drifters.” Jones’ theocracy replaces
the former tolerant, enlightened, and peaceful Fedgov administration, whose
values are upheld by the protagonist of the novel, Cussick, a Fedgov service-
man; at the end of the story his family must flee Earth and settle on Venus
in order to escape the revenge of Jones’ followers (Cussick has accidentally
killed Jones, thus turning him into a martyr).
In the last pages of the novel the protagonist, his partner Nina, and their
son Jacky are shown as the only depositors of the old values of open-mind-
edness and tolerance, and have to insulate themselves —first by leaving Earth,
then by sealing themselves into an airtight transparent bubble protecting them
from Venus’s atmosphere (like the domes on CY30-CY30B). Religious symbols
abound in the novel: Jones is a Jesus-like figure (notice the similarity of their
names) who manages to prevail thanks to his death (foretold by his precog-
nitive faculty and possibly premeditated by the religious leader). In this context
it is quite easy to see Cussick’s triadic family under its bubble on an alien
planet as Dick’s sfnal version of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The fact
that the sfnal flight to Egypt occurs after Jones’ death is not inconsistent with
the reverend’s purported messianic features: it is quite clear, at the end of the
novel, that Jones is a false messiah, actually an Antichrist of sorts, and that
his followers are even worse than him.
Cussick, Nina and Jacky preserve the ethical and political values of tol-
erance, a political issue that ties the novel to the historical context of the
1950s. Jones’ intolerance may well relate to the activities of Joseph McCarthy’s
238 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Subcommittee on Investigations, the House Committee on Un-American

Activities (one of its members being Dick’s political nemesis, Richard Nixon),4
or the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, plus the beginning of the strug-
gle for the civil rights. However, if Cussick’s triadic family is the embodiment
of a repressed political truth, it is also a symbol coming from the Christian
tradition. The religious subtext is quite evident in The World Jones Made,
thanks to the presence of the negative messiah Jones.5 However, these religious
materials are endowed with a strong political charge, which fuels a radical
and ironic criticism of Eisenhower’s America Felix. Religious subtexts are not
here part of some escapist fantasy, but provide a symbolic frame which orients
the overall ethical meaning of the novel.
When the ethically charged family in The World Jones Made must leave
Earth because it is under the domination of and evil authoritarian regimes
(re-enacting the Flight to Egypt, but with the ancient North-African country
replaced by Venus), its flight sanctions at the same time its “subversive” value,
and the domination of Earth by the powers of evil. On the other hand, it is
quite clear that the return of the Holy Family might amount to a challenge
to the authoritarian domination that has enslaved Earth. It is a quite simple
political symbolism, once we understand how Dick superimposed religious
symbols to sfnal topoi. This will turn the rather static plot of “Chains of
Air...,” which is confined to the claustrophobic domes of the two colonists
on CY30-CY30B, into an eventful novel with a hectic rhythm,6 where the
return of the Holy Family to Earth is staged.
Much of the complexity of the plot derives from its non-linear architec-
ture, shaped by a massive use of analepses. The story begins in medias res,
when a lot has already happened, both in the near and far past, and all these
previous events are told or shown through flashbacks. For example we are
told that it all started with Yahweh’s retreat from Earth, with a revelation
which is both political and theological: God was exiled, leaving our planet to
the Adversary (Belial),7 in a definite moment in time and space, A.D. 73 (or
C.E., as Rybys says), when the Roman Tenth Legion “Fretensis” crushed the
last remnants of the Jewish rebellion at Masada. It is then that the Incarnation
failed.
This historical event, overtly mentioned in the novel (54–5), is evidently
an episode of imperialist/colonialist repression of the freedom and independ-
ence (mostly political, but also religious) of a small people. We know that
Dick repeatedly used the idea of the Empire as a visionary symbol of (a)
oppressive power in general, (b) the United States of America as a hegemonic
superpower,8 and/or (c) evil itself. In Dick’s own home-made variety of Gno-
sis — as it is expounded e.g., in VALIS 9— the fact that we live in a bogus world,
the Black Iron Prison, concocted by a bogus god (the Demiurge), is also con-
 9. The God from Outer Space 239

nected to the idea that the Empire never ended, that we are still living in the
age of the Roman empire (VALIS, 48–63).10
Crackpot historiography? Delusional mysticism? If we read Dick’s fiction
as a history book such accusations might stick, but this is fiction and it should
be read as such11: from a symbolic point of view the superimposition of Impe-
rial Rome and the imperialist USA is a legitimate move, which appears even
clearer today after Negri and Hardt’s Empire.12 However, the synchronic super-
imposition of different moments in time is an important feature of VALIS,
but not of The Divine Invasion: the departure of God from Earth after the
fall of Masada is placed in a far past and it remains an antecedent, though it
has consequences on the present depicted in the novel (actually a sfnal future).
After God’s defeat there have been different forms of oppression on the Earth,
all of them related to Belial: different empires have ruled according to the
principle of technological and political power, the last of which may look
odd in 2009, but was definitely not in 1981.
Earth is dominated by two competing institutions which actually buttress
each other (in a way that foreshadows the construct called Empire by Negri
and Hardt, created by the interplay of different global entities): the twin insti-
tutions are the Christian-Islamic Church, whose supreme leader is the Chief
Prelate, Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms, and the Scientific Legate, headed by
the Procurator Maximus, Nicholas Bulkowsky (the two characters and their
plots are first introduced in Chapter 7). Suvin reads them as Church and
Party, and interprets their “behind-the-scenes struggle” as modeled on the
“medieval Papacy vs. Empire” (Suvin 386); Butler says that this “sub-plot
about the leaders of the Communist/Catholic Alliance ... never quite fits in”
(Butler 110–1). Schmid sees it as an “amusing invention” (Schmid 3), then
seems to get lost in the complex architecture of this novel when he says that
“[t]he pseudo-reality as represented by Cardinal Harms and Procurator
Bulkowsky is as far as it is concerned nothing but a hologram” (Schmid 3)
and supports this interpretation quoting a conversation between Elias and
Emmanuel where the former says “[a]n artificial satellite that projects a holo-
gram that they take to be reality,” to whom Emmanuel replies “[t]hen it’s a
reality generator” (69)— actually the two characters are talking, as we shall
see, of an old film called Valis.
Actually the sub-plot with the machinations of Cardinal Harms and
Procurator Bulkowsky, occupying a small part of the novel, is fundamentally
an exasperation of what Dick knew all too well as a U.S. citizen in the late
1970s-early 1980s: the global competition between the two superpowers, USA
and USSR, the former trusting in God (and supporting the Muslim
Mujahideens in Afghanistan),13 the latter purportedly believing in Marxist
scientific thought and technocratic materialism. The Christian-Islamic Church
240 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

and the Scientific Legate are two sfnal inventions which remind us of H.G.
Wells’ Morlocks and Elois: while the two humanoid species in The Time
Machine are the result of Darwinian evolution applied to the British working
class and bourgeoisie respectively, the two competing institutions which rule
Earth in The Divine Invasion are the result of an imaginary historical evolution,
which turned two competing super-nations into a double-headed totalitarian
global government. Both leaders are instrumental in Belial’s domination of
the world; both are the result of a typical sfnal projection of present realities
on a reasonably far future.
Dick took pains to make it clear that the world in Invasion is our future;
he did that by having Elijah and Emmanuel talk about “a very old movie”
(69) whose title is Valis, “made by a rock singer in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century” (69): this is an overt reference to the first part of the trilogy,
where rock star Eric Lampton directs Valis the movie (Ch. 8), and clearly tells
that VALIS is the past of DI. This is also a way to connect the two novels,
and stress the continuity between Dick’s present (California in the 1970s) and
the dystopian future (surely not near, judging by its technological advance-
ment) depicted in Invasion. But there is more than this in the conversation
on the film Valis, as we shall see.
However, God’s defeat can be reversed, as “God can be defeated, but
only temporarily” (56): the Holy Family must get back to Earth, in a well-
organized raid that may place the Messiah well inside “the zone of Belial”
(96). The mastermind of the operation is Elias (who is actually the prophet
Elijah), who explains that Rybys is not just sick with multiple sclerosis but
also three months pregnant thanks to Yah’s intervention (55); the disease is
no more than a trick to get Rybys (and the Messiah, her son) past Earth’s
Immigration, and Herb is part of the ploy, as he will play the role of the
father. So Rybys’ pregnancy, which is in itself a supernatural event (a woman
conceiving without sexual intercourse), we might even say a sfnal event, con-
tributes to the composition of the image of the Holy Family, but it is also a
propulsive element of the plot, as Rybys’ womb will be the vehicle of the
divine invasion: her son Emmanuel will be the new Messiah.
Between Masada and the raid of the Holy Family from outer space Elijah
kept the resistance against Belial active. He proudly lists a series of historical
moments when he intervened, times of important political upheavals: “I was
with Graf Egmont in the Dutch wars of independence, the Thirty Years War;
I was present the day he was executed. I knew Beethoven.... We engineered
the American Revolution.... We were the Friends of God at one time and the
Brothers of the Rosy Cross in 1615... I was Jakob Boehme” (97). Some refer-
ences in this list might be obscure and must be explained: Lamoral, Count
of Egmont is a Dutch aristocrat and commander who protested against the
 9. The God from Outer Space 241

harsh Spanish rule in the Netherlands and was executed in 1568 (Dick surely
knew the Dutch statesman through Beethoven’s 1810 overture and music com-
posed for Goethe’s 1788 play Egmont); his death triggered the rebellion of the
Dutch against the Spanish domination, but this was called the Eighty Years
War (1568–1648), though the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was connected
to it (suffice it to say that the Dutch funded all the countries which fought
against the Catholic Habsburg empires in the Thirty Years War). Beethoven
is mentioned due to his connection to Egmont via Goethe’s play, but also for
his attachment to the egalitarian and libertarian ideals of Enlightenment. The
German mystical group of the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde) was founded
in the 14th century in Switzerland, and spread to cities which are now part
of Germany and France; Dick may have it mentioned by Elijah because the
name of the sect was taken by John 15:15, a passage of the Gospel with a
potentially egalitarian and democratic meaning: “No longer do I call you ser-
vants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have
called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known
to you.” The symbol of the Rosy Cross has been used in several contexts, but
the date mentioned by Elijah probably refers to the publication of the two
anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos, which occurred in Germany around 1615:
the two texts declared the existence of a secret confraternity of alchemists and
sages ready to revolutionize European arts, sciences, religion, and political
and intellectual landscape. As for Jakob Boehme, or Böhme (1575–1624), a
German mystic and theologian, he does not seem to have a particular political
relevance, though his idea that the Fall is a necessary phase in the evolution
of the universe may have a strong relation to the overall frame of reference of
The Divine Invasion.
In fact we should not forget that this novel had as its working title Valis
Regained (Sutin, 261) as a pun on Milton’s Paradise Regained where the Fall
was also seen as a necessary precondition of redemption — it is St. Augustine’s
theological concept of felix culpa, mentioned by Rybis in the novel (56). Yet
Dick knew the Bible too well to ignore that that title was ultimately mislead-
ing, as VALIS is the name he came to assign not to Eden but to God (as in
VALIS) or something that resembles God or connects man to God (as in Radio
Free Albemuth, where VALIS is an alien communication satellite), so he
switched to The Divine Invasion, but both titles are important to fully grasp
what Dick was aiming at. On the one hand, this novel should tell us the story
of how the disaster of the Fall was really remedied, since what Milton thought
was the remedy (Christ’s coming, or, in Elijah’s terms, “mission”) actually was
an aborted attempt (56); the lost Paradise will be really regained only by
means of God second incarnation through Rybys. On the other hand, the
scriptural frame of reference is inextricably interwoven with materials and
242 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

topoi from the sf tradition, and that is underscored by the ultimate title of
the novel: God, in order to defeat Belial, must invade Earth, and this inva-
sion is seen by the Earthmen — whose mind is benumbed by evil — as a threat-
ening alien attack, something out of Wells’ War of the Worlds or the
unconscious fears behind it and most pulp sf. So Rybys’ son Emmanuel is a
new version of “the monster from outer space” (65), as she realizes in a most
dramatic scene (63–6) when she accepts her dire destiny.14 In fact Elijah’s
(and Yah’s) invasion plan is not completely successful. After the Holy Family
has reached Earth an air accident (arranged by Belial) occurs, where Rybys
dies, though she manages to give birth to Emmanuel, who is immediately
tutored by Elijah, also because Herb suffers severe brain damage in the accident
and has to be put in cryonic suspension. These events too are told through a
series of analepses (and re-lived by Herb while he is in cryonic suspension
[9–10]).
Most of The Divine Invasion is actually a sort of chess game between
Emmanuel and Zina, a girl that the child messiah meets on his first school
day, at the beginning of the novel (9). Zina cannot be just an ordinary little
girl: like Emmanuel, she talks and behaves like an adult, and is abnormally
knowledgeable about religious texts from different traditions. We (like Herb
and Elijah/Elias) know that Emmanuel is Yah(weh) in disguise, who managed
to infiltrate Belial’s fortress: but we are not told who Zina actually is, and
some of her words may also lead readers to believe that she is not friendly
(Elias mistrusts her and suspects that she may be Belial or one of his agents).
The turning point in the relation between the two enfants prodiges is
when the girl dares Emmanuel to visit her realm (141). This comes just after
the moment when the boy has clearly said that there will be war between him
and Belial and it will be nothing less than Armageddon (140). Hence Zina’s
invitation to visit “the Secret Commonwealth” (142), a place whose name is
enough to scare Elijah (surely not a faint-hearted man); readers are induced
to suspect that something in that place may endanger Emmanuel or hinder
his plans. The trip to the Secret Commonwealth might also be, however,
something that Emmanuel himself has planned: though he is God, and is
obviously omniscient, he suffered a “brain damage” (143) that made him forget
something — actually there was a split which “caused part of the Godhead to
fall” so that it “lost touch with a part of itself ” (145). Obviously an omniscient
God would be the end of any narrative; the amnesiac God allows Dick to
have the Christian godhead in the picture and save the suspense of a plot
whose developments are unknown to both readers and characters. This highly
unorthodox idea of a schizophrenic God, suffering from a cosmic trauma
which caused amnesia (Warrick 191–2), and struggling to recover some of his
memories (that he might also have deliberately hidden to foster his own plans)
 9. The God from Outer Space 243

is one of Dick’s typical moves to generate ontological uncertainty, but it has

a theological basis being an adaptation of Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic theory of
tzimtzum, the contraction or constriction of God to leave space to his creation,
and that of the “Breaking of the Vessels” (which was made famous in literary
studies by Harold Bloom’s 1982 essay), according to which sparks of God
(nitzotzot) were disseminated in all worldly matter (the part of the Godhead
that fell, according to Emmauel). Once again these religious concepts, this
time taken from the Jewish Kabbalah, are superimposed to sfnal topoi: we
know how often Dick has already used amnesia and anamnesis as narrative
devices, from Joint (Ch. 2) to Game-Players (Ch. 1) and beyond.
The Secret Commonwealth is not a very remarkable place at first, as
Emmanuel discovers when he enters it through the disappointingly ordinary
door of a savings and loan building (which is anyway shaped as a Golden
Rectangle, like the doorway Emmanuel has already seen in his self-induced
experience of accelerated time [59–63])15: is not very different from the world
Emmanuel and Zina have just left, but the differences are important: in fact
the little girl turns into a young woman, Miss Zina Pallas. The relation
between them is now such that Zina can lecture Emmanuel about all the
things he does not know: for example, she tells him that his world lacks beauty
and fertility. “You were always partial to arid land.... You have gone from the
wastelands to a frozen landscape — methane crystals, with little domes here
and there, and stupid natives.... You skulk in the badlands and promise your
people a refuge they never found” (150). Zina’s world is a place of spring,
unlike the Sinai and other Middle Eastern deserts where God usually appears
in the Bible, and the desolate planet CY30-CY30B where Yah took refuge
after his defeat. Zina’s declared aim (152) is to show Emmanuel/Yah the beauty
of her world, and to persuade him not to destroy it: to “postpone [his] great
and terrible day,” because she says that “[t]he power of Belial is mere occlusion,
hiding the real world, and if you attack the real world, as you have come to
Earth to do, then you will destroy beauty and kindness and charm” (152–3).
Then the question obviously arises if the world we have been shown so
far is the real world. Surely for us readers it is not the real world of 2011, nor
it was the real world of 1981 when the novel was first published. One should
however wonder whether the Earth dominated by the two-headed authori-
tarian regime of the Christian-Islamic Church and the Scientific Legate (and
secretly ruled by Belial) is the real world in the novel, the world we readers
should recognize as real thanks to the customary willing suspension of disbelief
that fiction in general — and science-fiction in particular — ask for. The
answer, as we understand once we venture into Zina’s Secret Commonwealth,
is that it may seem real, but it might be “mere occlusion,” a dismal appearance
hiding a better reality, hence similar to Ahriman’s decaying Millgate in Puppets
244 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

(Ch. 1) or the Black Iron Prison world with the repressive police state in Tears
(Ch. 7). However, there is no doubt that the world where we and Emmanuel
are taken in chapters 12–20 is not the same where the first 11 chapters are set,
something Dick overtly acknowledged (Rickman 1988, 189). The Secret Com-
monwealth is a place where Zina is a young woman, as we have already said;
Rybys is still alive and married to Herb, though their marriage is evidently
unsuccessful; they have never been to CY30-CY30B and have no children;
when they meet Zina and Emmanuel (who are now brother and sister) they
do not recognize the boy; Elias is a colleague of Herb, who works in the
latter’s small hi-fi business. But the differences are greater than these. In fact
Zina tells Emmanuel:
The Communist Party has not the world power that you are accustomed
to. The term “scientific legate” is not known. Nor is Fulton Statler Harms
the chief prelate of the C.I.C. inasmuch as no Christian-Islamic Church
exists. He is a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church; he does not control
the lives of millions [164].
So the two autocrats who ruled Earth in the first part of the novel are
here demoted to cadres of organizations that do not have (yet?) the pervasive
power they wielded before Chapter 12 (195–8). This also suggests us that
Zina’s world is somewhat better, less bleak and oppressive than the world
where the story started. Emmanuel is not eager to accept this idea: he protests
that Zina’s world is just an illusion. But Zina’s answer refuses to accept the
idea of a simple dualistic real vs. fake dichotomy: “The world you see here,
my world, is an alternative world to your own, and equally real” (164).
Zina’s world is an alternate reality which does not coincide with the sfnal
world where the first part of the novel takes place. We have — once again —
a Primary and Secondary text in Dick’s novel, projecting two different onto-
logical levels; Zina and Emmanuel are well aware of this. But the novel hints
at a third alternate reality, or better an alternate past. In fact when Elijah and
Emmanuel discuss Valis the movie the prophet describes it as set in “an alter-
native U.S.A. where a man named Ferris F. Fremount is president,” featuring
Valis, “[a]n artificial satellite that project a hologram that they take to be real-
ity” (69). In fact this very short descriptions fits the movie Fat, Phil, and
David watch in the ninth chapter of VALIS, at the prompting of Kevin (VALIS
139–44)— and that film is a sort of surrealistic hallucination of the plot of
another novel by Dick, the posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth
(1985), actually written by Dick before VALIS and Invasion.
The plot of Valis the movie in VALIS the novel is a disjointed, dream-
like tale, actually aimed at transferring subliminal messages (VALIS 144);
besides, it is directed by an amateur, rock star Eric Lampton, a character
whose sanity is dubious at best (Ch. 8). Yet it evokes the dystopian history —
 9. The God from Outer Space 245

sfnal, but not at all oneiric — of the totalitarian USA ruled by evil president
Ferris F. Fremont (whose initials may be numerically read as 666, hence hint-
ing at his connection with the Lord of Flies, aka Belial) in whose fictional
reality Valis is a satellite, not a movie. Hence the movie deals with an alternate
reality, by showing in speculum, per aenigmata, the dystopian near future
depicted in Albemuth. In 1980, when Dick was working on Invasion, that
novel was no more than a forsaken manuscript, a discarded earlier version of
VALIS: it amounted to a lost memory of a dismal alternate reality. By recalling
it in DI, Dick seems to be telling us that there may be more than two realities
in the fictional world conjured up by Invasion— with different degrees of real-
ity.
This is what Zina and Emmanuel discuss when they evaluate the pros
and cons of the real world vis-à-vis Zina’s Secret Commonwealth (163–6), a
discussion that brings Emmanuel to acknowledge that Zina’s Earth is not so
bad, and it “should not be scourged by fire” (166). During the discussion
Emmanuel objects to Zina’s alternate world being an illusion (166); there are
many worlds, protests Zina, but Emmanuel/Yah explains that they are “poten-
tialities that do not become actualized” (165)— this may also hint at the sus-
pended status of Albemuth, then a manuscript which had not turned yet into
a published novel. Emmanuel eventually decides that he will make Linda Fox
real, because, being God, conferring being is his job; and this leads to a bet
between Emmanuel and Zina, where what is at stake is the relation of Herb
Asher with his idol Linda (who, in the world of the two-headed dictatorship,
does not really exist, but is just a media-created image meant to soothe the
oppressed — in other words, an opiate of the people). Emmanuel thinks that
Zina’s dreams of happiness are nothing, that “the quality of realness is more
important than any other quality” (163), so he will make Linda Fox real to
make it up to Herb; Zina, on the other hand, thinks that Linda Fox is worth-
less both as a media myth and as a real woman, so that Emmanuel will not
achieve anything by making her real.
This bet might remind us of the Book of Job in the Bible, where it is
God and Satan who bet; but, as we discover in Chapter 16, Zina is not the
Adversary, nor an agent of his, but the lost part of God, which is called
Malkuth in the novel, after the name of the tenth sefiroth, or emanation of
God, in the Jewish Kabbala. By discovering the real identity of the girl he
met at the beginning of the novel, Emmanuel completes the process of anam-
nesis and the split between him and his lost part is healed. This symbolic
reunion of the male and female part of God might be read as a happy ending,
which mirrors the successful meeting of Herb and Linda, which will soon
turn into love.
The ending of the novel is a complex, multilayered allegory, which
246 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Robinson seems to have only partially understood; he maintains that “the

mock reality ... at the end of the book ... corresponds very closely to a fantasy
that Herb entertained about Linda Fox, long before he began his adventures
on CY30-CY30B” (Robinson 120). If this were true, we would have no more
than a happy ending whose substance is mere wish-fulfillment. The ending
is more than that, but it is also a display of those coups de théâtre that Dick
could pull out of his hat with the consummate craftsmanship of the pulp
writer he also was, and it takes more than one reading to fully understand it.
One should however not forget that Emmanuel’s decision to make Zina’s
world real means that Herb will be able to meet Linda Fox, but Linda will
be a real woman with her period who may occasionally burp (189)— otherwise
she would be a “nonentity” (185), as Zina says. Dick took pains to make clear
that Linda as she is presented her in the final chapters is not a fantasy (part
of Zina’s realm) but has been “imparted substance” (185), entering Emmanuel/
Yah’s realm.
The ending is more complicated than Robinson’s “illusory world” (120),
because just after the anamnesis, and Emmanuel/Yah’s reconciliation with
Zina/Malkuth, there is in fact another, unexpected fall: Zina unwittingly sets
free an apparently harmless goat which is actually Belial himself (207). Dick
is aware that no tale only made of words can remedy the ills and evils of the
world by itself. The reunion of the two parts of God could admittedly please
him (being also an anamorphic image of the reconciliation of two sides of his
mind, or a symbolic resurrection of his dead twin sister Jane, the archetype
of all the dark-haired girls in his fiction) and satisfy his reader’s love of sym-
metry; the final solving marriage (the final union or macrocosmic syzygy [239]
should mean that this is Dick’s own Divina commedia, as classical comedies
must end with a marriage) could be an original happy ending; but Dick knew
that the symbolic apotheosis he stages in his novel cannot really redeem the
world around him. Dick wrote Invasion in May-June 1980; too soon for the
Republican National Convention, held in July, but not too soon for the news
that George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s remaining opponent in the quest for the
Republican nomination conceded defeat (May 26). Reagan’s victory only took
place in the October elections, but Dick surely disliked the Republican can-
didate, the man who had ordered the National Guard to occupy Berkeley in
May 1969. Reagan was not the U.S. President yet when Dick was writing
Invasion, but the possibility of his victory loomed large, and it was not some-
thing welcome for Dick.
No wonder then that Belial strikes back in the ending; he does that by
having Herb Asher arrested by a policeman while flying to California and
Linda Fox; what is even worse, Herb hears again the all-string version of South
Pacific (210)— the same sort of mawkish muzak he had to listen to while in
 9. The God from Outer Space 247

cryogenic suspension (10–5). He then suspects — in a classical Dickian fash-

ion — that he is still in cryonic suspension (210–1), and that all the events fol-
lowing his release are no more than one of those delusions experienced when
“he was in that part of his cycle when he was under the impression that he
was still alive” (9). The final chapters suggest that if Zina is on the side of
creative imagination, and Emmanuel/Yah’s business is solid being, Belial is
the master of de-realization and fakery — of such a ghastly delusional condition
as the half-life in Ubik, more or less the same condition Herb was in at the
beginning of the novel.
Herb in any case manages to escape the policeman who has arrested him,
in one of Dick’s funniest scenes, with a display of musical expertise (including
listing all the instrumentation that Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony is scored
for, which is a form of Sophia in its own right; besides, Mahler’s symphony
is also called “Resurrection”— an escape from half-life, no doubt). Herb is set
free also because the policeman is — unlike his boss — a decent person, in
which Herb sees “some response ... some amount of human warmth” (22).
Persuading the policeman to release him is a small, almost irrelevant victory,
in Yah and Belial’s cosmic battle — but it is a victory against Belial nonethe-
less.
Herb subsequently tells Elijah abut the soupy string music he is hearing,
and the prophet/repairman suggests him to “patch into that FM station whose
sound [he] hears” (222), to turn it into an instrument of enlightenment and
liberation. Elijah thinks the radio station should only broadcast his fiery
speeches, but Herb suggests also playing “something interesting, something
that stimulates the mind” (224)— also Linda Fox’s music. What Herb and
Elijah have in mind is a free radio, much like Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth in
his then unpublished novel. And radio is usually the liberating medium in
Dick’s fiction (Rossi 2010).
Good music may counter Belial’s threat; human relations (call them
empathy, call them solidarity, love, agape) may stave off his evil lack of reality
and his dismal simulations. Elijah’s words may unmask his lies. But — and
this should teach something to those commentators who, like Robinson,16
have complained about Dick’s purported inability to create positive female
characters or his conservative stance vis-à-vis the issue of abortion17— it takes
a woman to defeat Belial when he takes control of Herb’s body, appearing as
an only apparently harmless little kid18 (227–34). In fact it is Linda Fox who
immediately recognizes the Adversary, cheats him and then singlehandedly
slays him (234).
Linda’s toughness behind her appearance as an ordinary girl who looks
“a little like a pizza waitress” (187) can only surprise those who are not familiar
with the rest of Dick’s oeuvre. In Dick’s fiction there are destructive female
248 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

characters, but there are also warrior women, usually dark-haired girls like
Zina; Juliana Frink in High Castle (Ch. 3), a martial arts instructress who
kills the Nazi hatchet man Joe Cinnadella; Pris Frauenzimmer in Build (Ch.
6), who disables the John Wilkes Booth simulacrum built to liquidate the
Lincoln; Donna, the undercover agent in A Scanner Darkly. Zina belongs to
this typology of characters, as her surname is Pallas, an attribute of Pallas
Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, but armed with the typical weapons
of the Greek hoplites (armored infantry) because she also was the goddess of
rationally planner warfare, superseding the old, primitive male god Ares. Zina
may say “I am not Pallas Athena” (154), meaning that she is not just that, but
Yah correctly identifies her as Malkuth, and her identity also includes — in
Dick’s syncretistic mythology — her being “Pallas Athena, the spirit of right-
eous war” (195).
It is Linda, not Zina, who defeats Belial, but Linda is — behind her harm-
less and ordinary appearance — another tough woman; we might say that she
is more than a human being, as she is Herb’s yetzer ha-tov, his Advocate, a
sort of spiritual protector (once again Dick is stealing ideas and words from
the Jewish tradition, where the yetzer ha-tov is actually man’s tendency to do
good, as opposed to yetzer ha-ra, his inclination to do evil), sent by God to
defend those who are accused by Belial (235). Linda Fox is revealed at the
beginning of Chapter 20 as the ultimate embodiment of the type of the tough,
streetwise, determined, dark-haired girl who often manages to do what Dick’s
little men cannot. If Linda is Herb’s Advocate, it means she is his lawyer —
surely a job for tough people. She paves the way for Dick’s most impressive
female character, Angel Archer in his last novel (Ch. 10), the ultimate embod-
iment of these strong, no-nonsense figures who play important roles in some
of Dick’s most celebrated novels.
The complexity of the final scenes is heightened by the fact that Linda
is a singer, that is, an artist, and her relation to Herb is also aesthetic: Dick
is also suggesting that there is a redemptive power in music, and this may
explain the otherwise incongruous fact that Linda and Emmanuel/Yah (240)
speak — of all languages — German when they meet after the defeat of Belial.
One might expect Hebrew (because of the Torah) or Greek (the Gospels), but
German is the language of music for Dick, used by some of his favorite com-
posers of vocal music, such as Wagner, Schubert, Beethoven, and Bach. It is
then in German that Emmanuel/Yah tells Linda to sing forever for all people,
throughout eternity (240); to sing her Zauberton (a compound word which
should mean “magic note or sound”), her Musik. There is such a redemptive
power also in the other arts, of course including that branch of literature
called science-fiction, and this is tied to the fact that Emmanuel and Zina —
or Yah and Malkuth — can be also interpreted as two aspects of the writer’s
 9. The God from Outer Space 249

mind, and that their relationship may be a complex and original allegory of
literary creation.19
Compared to the bleak ending of Radio Free Albemuth and A Scanner
Darkly, this novel seems to offer quite a different perspective on the political
situation of the USA in the last years of Dick’s life. The writer seems to be
suggesting that the reality of any given historical moment is something com-
plex, a laminated world where the potential horrors of a crushing totalitarian
regime are superimposed on interstices of quasi-utopian opportunities. The
readers’ world, in other words, is one where Belial rules, through repressive
surveillance apparatuses like those depicted in A Scanner Darkly; yet it is also
one where a little man like Herb Asher can survive Belial’s aggression, possibly
helped by a spiritual Advocate. The redemptive power of art (Fox’s music)
can help the victim of brutalization to heal. Surely the defeat of Belial is a
small, temporary event, not the ultimate triumph that Yah/Emmanuel aims
at; however it is real, inasmuch as it takes place in the world that Yah has
made real.
What we have at the end is not the passage from a dismal dystopian
world to an utopian reality, but the passage from a dystopian reality (another
embodiment of Dick’s Black Iron Prison, like the police state in Tears) to a
sustainable reality (Zina’s world), which is however threatened by Belial, who
stands for evil (in a metaphysical, even religious sense) but also repression (in
a quite concrete political sense). In the last chapters we actually have an oscil-
lation between the sustainable world where Herb may have a truly satisfactory
life with Linda (neither imprisoned in the prison domes of CY30-CY30B,
nor damned in the cold hell of cryogenic suspension), and Belial’s dystopian
world, which can always get back (its return immediately triggering Herb’s
solipsistic paranoia of being in cryogenic suspension). Yah’s Armageddon has
been postponed sine die; yet this does not bring to an unconditional surrender
to the forces of evil. We have rather guerrilla warfare, with small victories
achieved by little men like Herb, with the precious help of tough women who
know how to deal with the Prince of Darkness.
The oscillation between the two alternate realities can be read in many
ways — just like the interplay between alternate histories in The Man in the
High Castle (cf. Chapter 3)— but it is difficult to deny that the ontological
uncertainty inherent in this laminated reality is another of Dick’s variations
on his favorite theme. However we should ask ourselves if what is at stake
here is just the passage from a bleak future to one which looks much less bleak
(though Herb is stopped and almost arrested by the Police there), or the oscil-
lation between those two worlds; we should also ask us if the alternative real-
ities here are just two or more, because we also have the heavenly Palm Garden,
repeatedly mentioned in the novel (and briefly glimpsed at p. 147). Could
250 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

this be read as a psychologization of our cognitive relationship to the world,

so that the kosmos we live in is ultimately determined by our state of mind?
Such an interpretation obviously puts The Divine Invasion in the context of
Dick’s life: we might associate the oppressive world under the two-headed
world regime in the first part of the novel with Dick’s bleakest years (late six-
ties-early seventies), and the very dark mood which pervades Flow My Tears
and A Scanner Darkly (both dystopian drugs novels); getting out of that world
and entering the Secret Commonwealth might be psychologically equivalent
to Dick entering the relatively more serene last years of his life.
Is it just a private matter? Since the years 1968–1974 are possibly Dick’s
most troubled time, but also the years of a strong conservative backlash and
the presidency of Dick’s political bugbear, Richard Nixon, also a historicist
reading is possible. The Secret Commonwealth is not a perfect world (it is
still threatened by Belial, after all), but it is decidedly more inhabitable than
the stifling dystopia where the first part of the novel takes place. We should
not forget that the domes on CY30-CY30B are prisons, after all, that the very
travel to Earth is an act of rebellion (promptly repressed by the political
authorities), while Herb and the other characters enjoy a greater freedom of
movement in the second part (Herb and Rybys in the Secret Commonwealth
have never been secluded on the dismal planet where the story begins). Prob-
ably Dick — personal problems apart — saw the late seventies of President
Carter as a relatively more tolerable world than the U.S. under Nixon. As for
Belial striking back, it might hint at Reagan, as we have already said, and it
is then interesting to quote one of Dick’s letters, written in February 1981,
after Reagan’s victory, commenting on his administration:
The President we have now is worse than any we have had before. He is
worse than Nixon. The plans of the new regime are worse than the plans
Nixon had. The FIA (Freedom of Information Act) is to be cancelled
(really). It will soon be legal for an FBI undercover operative to commit
murder in order to maintain his cover (really). Two billion dollars will
immediately go into a nerve-gas program. The MX missile will be
approved. Likewise the neutron bomb. Likewise the B-One bomber. Like-
wise a central data bank to gather information on domestic sedition, or sus-
pected sedition, which includes “terrorism,” probably defined as any group
of two or more blacks with a .22 pistol and a couple of lids of grass. The
Director of the CIA now holds cabinet rank for the first time. Fanatical
madmen are at the helm and the suppose themselves to be in possession of
a mandate [SL6 123].
One may subscribe to Dick’s outline of Reagan’s politics or not, but this
letter proves that, though he was writing about angels and demons, godheads
and archons, he did not forget what was happening in the koinos kosmos of
the early 1980s surrounding him. Surely here we have a tangle of individual
 9. The God from Outer Space 251

and collective history, a node where Dick’s idios kosmos is tuned to the koinos
kosmos of those years. We cannot help feeling that the cripple in John Dow-
land’s song, quoted once again in the last page of The Divine Invasion (243),
the wretch who “after many years in misery and pain” is finally well and
receives comfort, may well be Philip K. Dick himself. Like VALIS before it,
and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer after it, this novel may also be,
among other things, a very original exercise in anamorphic autobiography.
 Chapter 10

A Counterfactual Counterculture:
The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh”

Ecclesiastes

Before we start discussing Archer we should deal with Warrick’s con-

tention that it does not really belong to the VALIS Trilogy. This should be
done because Patricia Warrick is an authoritative interpreter inasmuch as she
is one of the few scholars who was in contact with Dick for quite a long time,
with a regular exchange of letters beginning in November 1979. According to
her,

The Owl in Daylight, the novel in progress when he died, was to be the
final work in the trilogy. The writing of Timothy Archer gave him a chance
to catch his intellectual breath, to retrace his creative leap in moving from
the depression of Valis to the transcendence of The Divine Invasion. We
recall that he saw those novels as analogous to Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained [Warrick 185].

Warrick’s monograph was published in 1987, so she had to base her recon-
struction of Dick’s plans only on the long letters he had sent to her before his
death (mostly contained in the sixth volume of the Selected Letters). But she
could not access the letters Dick had sent others; the publication of Dick’s
letters only began in 1991, and the sixth volume with the letters that are
relevant to an understanding of the Entstehungsgeschichte of Archer, covering
the period 1980–1982, was only published in 2010.1 Warrick could not then
read all those letters written by Dick to different addressees where he maintains
that Archer is the third part of the Trilogy.2

252
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 253

The fact that he indicates Archer as the third part of the Trilogy in letters
to different people is quite important, inasmuch as even a cursory reading of
Dick’s letters shows that he always tried to please the person he was writing
to, and this occasionally brought him to write different and contradictory
things in letters sent to different addressees; a good example of this is the
letter he sent to Ursula K. Le Guin on May 13, 1981, on the very day he sent
the manuscript of Archer to his agent, where he tells the sf writer and critic —
who had criticized Dick’s female characters in VALIS3 and did not approve
of Dick’s theological concerns in his last novels (cf. SL6 137)— that the most
important element of the new novel was Angel Archer, a woman who is “quite
anti–Christian and very against the sort of mushy mysticism that I’ve involved
myself in” (SL6 151); one might then read this as Dick’s rejection of the reli-
gious concerns which had animated his fiction after 1974 (though, as we have
seen, they were already present in earlier novels). But less than two months
later, in a letter to Laura and Joe Coelho, Dick states that Christ “becomes
progressively more and more real” in the three novels, “but only is truly there
in the third and final novel” (SL6 179), that is, The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer.4
As a general rule I have not trusted what Dick wrote in a single letter to
a single person, but only what he repeatedly said to different people — with
some unavoidable exceptions, like the so far unidentified and unconfirmed
Japanese novels which he repeatedly pointed out as the models of the multi-
foci and multi-plot architecture used in Castle, Time-Slip and Bloodmoney
(Ch. 4). I have accepted what Dick said in a single letter if it was not con-
tradicted in other letters and was consistent with what we find in his fiction
or can be found in other sources. Hence the five letters that include Archer
in the Trilogy seem to me enough to call in doubt Warrick’s contention that
Owl should have been its third part.
Besides, The Owl in Daylight does not really exist; saying that it would
have fit the first two novels in the Trilogy better than Archer may be a rather
risky interpretive move. Though Dick wrote letters with outlines of the plot,
such as the one he sent to David Hartwell5 on July 14, 1981 (SL6 180–1), Butler
lists other sources of information about the content of the projected novel,
and notices that Dick’s descriptions are not consistent, as he probably kept
changing his mind about the plot and the ideas to be expressed in Owl, sensibly
concluding that “[g]iven the way Valisystem A [i.e., VALIS’ working title]
shifted between first draft and VALIS, [Owl] could have borne no resemblance
to any of the notes” (Butler 2007, 114). All we can say is that theology would
have been once again an important component of the novel; that Dante’s
Divine Comedy would have been a major inspiration (after having also played
an important role, as we shall see, in Archer); that Dick wanted to reconcile
254 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

the three concepts of Umwelt, Mitwelt and Eigenwelt derived from existential
psychoanalysis (Ch. 2) with the three realms visited by Dante in his other-
worldly voyage (SL6 156, 174); and that he wanted to use again the Buddhist
concept of bodhisattva (SL6 156) that plays a crucial role, as we shall see, in
the ending of Archer. Something Dick wrote in a letter, that Archer was “the
third and presumably final novel of the VALIS trilogy” (SL6 178, italics mine),
might on the other hand induce to suspect that the Trilogy could have become
a tetralogy if and when Owl had been completed.6
Warrick’s contention may be easily explained if we take into account
what she wrote about Build (Ch. 6): she considers that novel proof of Dick’s
“weaknesses as a mainstream writer” (Warrick 66). This judgment arguably
stems from Warrick’s interest in “Dick’s technique to make the metaphorical
literal” (Warrick 29), which she saw well represented in one of Dick’s earliest
short story, “The Eyes Have It” (1953), where a naïve or deranged reader inter-
prets literally all the metaphors (some of them actually idiomatic expressions
like “his eyes slowly roved about the room” or “he took her arm”) and mis-
construes a piece of mainstream fiction as the description of an alien invasion
of Earth. If Dick’s literary value lies mainly in his extraordinary ability to
materialize metaphors (a good specimen might be The Penultimate Truth,
where the tankers in their underground shelters believing that World War III
is ravaging the surface of Earth is a materialization of Plato’s Metaphor of the
Cave), it is his science-fiction that is worth discussing: in fact Warrick declares
that in his sf Dick “paints metaphors that show the reader his meaning” while
in Build (and in his realistic novels) “characters talk and talk, driven to make
certain they have told all about schizophrenia” (Warrick 66).7
Warrick’s misjudgment may be excused with the undisputable fact that
most of Dick’s non-sf novels were unpublished or out of print when she wrote
her monograph. However, if she deemed Dick’s realistic fiction inferior to his
sf, it is to be suspected that she would not see Archer as part of the trilogy
because it, unlike VALIS and Invasion, is basically a realistic novel — something
Warrick does not clearly say in her reading of Dick’s last work, but may be
the basis of her hypothesis about the composition of the Trilogy. However,
Warrick devoted some pages of her monograph to Dick’s last novel, pointing
out that the structure of the novel “echoes that of Valis,” though “in Valis,
the character of Phil Dick is much less hostile to Horselover Fat and his mania
than is Angel Archer to Tim Archer and the Dyonisian madness that drives
him to his death” (Warrick 188–9).
Also Robinson connected Archer to VALIS, identifying bishop Tim
Archer as “the visionary [which] fills the same role in the narrative that
Horselover Fat does in VALIS” (Robinson 120), though he considers it as the
novel that Phil Dick, the lucid and skeptical narrating I in VALIS, could have
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 255

written (as opposed to Invasion, which might have been written by Horselover
Fat). If this parallelism works, and I think it does to a certain extent, Angel
Archer offers Dick a distancing screen that may help him to objectivise Tim
Archer’s frantic and impulsive religious quests, be they aimed at interpreting
the Zadokite scrolls (transparently inspired by the Qumran and Nag Hammadi
findings), at discovering the mysterious and miraculous anokhi mentioned in
those ancient documents, at contacting his dead son Jefferson through medi-
ums, at finding the anokhi, once it has been identified as a hallucinogenic
mushroom, in the Dead Sea Desert — a final quest which will bring Tim to
his death.
Though Tim is a fictional portrait of one of Dick’s best friends, bishop
James Pike, who actually died in the Israeli desert in September 1969, he does
have much in common with Horselover Fat, who in turn is, as we have seen,
a fictional depiction of Dick himself, or at least of what he felt was a part of
himself. The remarkable difference between VALIS and Archer is that in the
former novel the distancing screen is Phil Dick, a literary avatar of the author
himself, which unavoidably leads to an interpretation of the novel in terms
of split personality or a fractured subject; while in the latter text Dick uses
as a screen a character that is as different from him as possible: a woman,
younger than Dick, more educated, skeptical, pragmatic, an atheist, an avid
reader (not a writer), who works for a law office and then a record shop. Yet
Angel and her creator have something important in common: love of music
and Berkeley (where Angel still lives at the beginning of the novel on December
8, 1980, when a giant analepsis summons up all the events pertaining to the
death of her husband Jeff, her father-in-law Tim and her friend Kirsten Lund-
borg).8 These are not lesser elements: Berkeley becomes the symbol of a certain
lifestyle in the novel, and stands for a place where Angel lives and her psy-
chological condition; music is — as we have seen in our reading of Invasion—
not just Dick’s hobby, but a powerful force in his fictional world.
Two more characters are important in the novel. The first is the son of
Tim Archer, Jefferson, Angel’s husband, who kills himself in Chapter 5 —
though, given the rather loose and spoken modality of telling used by Dick,
the event is mentioned before that chapter because after all we are “listening”
to Archer, who is not always recollecting events from her past in an orderly
fashion. Tim is indeed one of the protagonists, but in absentia: he is already
dead in chapter 1 (before the analepsis begins), and the events recollected after
Chapter 5 (9 chapters out of 16) all take place after his death. Notwithstanding
this, his suicide is tied to all the main events in the novel: Jeff ’s self-destructive
act is caused by the love affair between his father and Kirsten Lundborg, one
of Angel’s friends, which triggers Jeff ’s “emotional involvement” with Kirsten
and morbid jealousy for his father (43, 56–7, 60–1); and it is quite evident
256 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

that the train of events recollected in the 12-chapter analepsis starts with the
meal that the four characters have at the Bad Luck Restaurant (a glaring case
of nomen, omen), when Tim first meets Kirsten (20). Thus Jeff appears in the
novel mostly like a ghost9; literally for Tim and Kirsten, in the period when
they believe in messages from the afterlife (delivered via mediums like Dr.
Garrett in Chapters 9 and 10); metaphorically for Angel, who does not believe
in the supernatural events that Tim and Kirsten have experienced (the content
of Tim’s book-in-the-book Here, Tyrant Death).
The “quartet” of main characters in the novel is completed by Kirsten,
who will commit suicide when she will be told she has an incurable lung
cancer (171). While Jeff ’s personality is not very well outlined, which is not
surprising for someone whose apparitions are prevalently spectral, Kirsten
clearly stems from the lineage of Dick’s negative female characters, the cas-
trating bitches, though her personality is much more complex than the stereo-
typed domineering wives like Kathy Sweetscent in Wait or Mary Rittersdorf
in Clans. Though often cynical and power-hungry, Kirsten is endowed with
a corrosive sense of humor and has a deep relation with Tim; Angel appreciates
her qualities, though well aware of her sometimes intractable character.
To these four main characters we should add Bill Lundborg, Kirsten’s
son, who suffers from schizophrenia and is not a constant presence in the
novel, being often interned. Nonetheless, he plays an important role inasmuch
as he counters Tim’s intellectual and abstract turn of mind with his matter-
of-fact, practical approach to life: he is not educated, but, being a mechanic,
his link to the material world is stronger and steadier. In a memorable scene
of the novel in Chapter 8, Bill is the only one who dares challenge Tim’s belief
in supernatural events and messages from the hereafter, and he does this by
debunking the bishop’s faulty inductive reasoning with his practical knowledge
of cars and their working. Bill becomes more important in the ending chapters
(Ch. 14–16) when he reappears at Edgar Barefoot’s seminar and is “adopted”
by Angel at Barefoot’s suggestion, and subsequently claims to be the reincar-
nation of Timothy Archer — whose mind has supernaturally transmigrated
into his brain, though it has not completely replaced Bill’s one (Chapter 15),
hence the title of the novel.
The presence of such a set of round characters with strong and in some
case well-detailed personalities (especially Tim and Archer) is to be expected
in a novel which was conceived as a “quality” narrative, as a literary book, as
Dick repeatedly says in several letters included in SL6, especially the one to
Rickman in which he complains that he could have written a cheap novel-
ization of Blade Runner for $400,000 and chose instead to write a “quality”
novel for $7,500 (SL6 167–70). Dick was disappointed by his agent’s reaction
(he “couldn’t read” it [SL6 167]) and afraid that the publishing house might
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 257

not like it (SL6 169), since his previous attempts at writing a mainstream
novel (that is, a non-sf book) had not been successful, as we know, and he
feared another failure. “Quality” meant, for Dick, stronger characterization;
whatever we may think of the role played by flat characters in many post–
World War II American novels considered masterpieces of postmodernist
fiction (one might think of Heller’s Catch-22, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,
or Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five), Dick evidently associated flat characters
with cheap sf, the very genre he wanted to escape (though he often wrote in
his letters that he was at heart a sf writer and should stick to that). Moreover,
some of the characters in this novel are based on real people, bishop James
Pike and his lover Maren Bergrud (whose stepdaughter Nancy Hackett was
Dick’s fourth wife); we do not need to get into a detailed description of what
is fact and what fiction in Archer, because Dick did it in a clear and detailed
letter (SL6 224–5) to show that there was no risk of a libel action from the
living relatives of Pike or Bergrud.
But if characters and their complex relations are paramount in this novel,
one may be tempted to read Archer in a quite traditional fashion, as if it were
a 19th-century realistic narrative; or, stressing the connection with VALIS,
concentrate on the autobiographical component and analyze it as an autofic-
tion (Smith & Watson 186), that is, one of those 1st-person narratives which
conflate real and fictional elements (among whose most interesting specimens
there is a novel like The Kindness of Woman, written by another sf author
often compared to Dick, J.G. Ballard), and are often found in the territories
of postmodernist fiction.10 Though undoubtedly interesting, such a reading
would remain outside of the issue of ontological uncertainty; and it is that
line of inquiry that we must follow. In fact ontological uncertainty lurks in
the pages of Archer, though it is much less exhibited than it is in VALIS, and
of a different kind than the one at work in Invasion.
Robinson noticed that Archer only features a “single break away from
strict realism” (Robinson 122), and this happens when Bill tells Angel “I am
Tim Archer ... I have come back from the other side. To those I love” (226).
This simple message hides a reference to the title of James Pike’s essay The
Other Side (1968), whose fictional avatar is Tim Archer’s Here, Tyrant Death;
in the real essay, Pike described the paranormal phenomena he had allegedly
experienced after his son Jim’s death by drug overdose in 1966. Jim’s (and
Bill’s) “other side” is then afterlife; from our point of view, the “other side”
is the genre of fantasy which would include Archer if we accepted what Angel
Archer refuses to accept, that is, Tim’s return from the hereafter and the com-
munication of living people with the dead.
Since the narrating voice of the novel rejects Bill’s revelation readers may
be encouraged to take it as a symptom of mental disorder, and read Archer as
258 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

a novel realistically depicting several forms of madness: Jeff ’s suicidal drive,

strengthened by depression, a difficult relation to his father and (possibly)
drug abuse (68); Kirsten’s pathologic jealousy (166), and her deep rooted sense
of guilt for Jeff ’s death, which brings her to an irrational faith in the para-
normal; Tim’s obsession with the paranormal first (though it is rejected after
Kirsten’s suicide [180–3]), and then with the anokhi, the mysterious entity or
substance mentioned in the Zadokite scrolls; and, of course, Bill’s madness
that has been certified well before his final revelation. We might also include
Angel among the mentally impaired people, due to her inability to leave
Berkeley even when Tim implores her to go with him to Israel in the thirteenth
chapter; Angel’s exasperate attachment to the Berkeley area (and community)
reminds us of Dick’s agoraphobia, which often struck him, and made him
difficult, though not impossible, to undertake long travels (and also shorter
ones).
But how does Angel justify her disbelief? Here is what she tells us readers:
“That the bishop had returned from the next world and now inhabited Bill
Lundborg’s mind or brain — that couldn’t be, for obvious reasons. One knows
this instinctively; one does not debate this; one perceives this as absolute fact:
it cannot happen” (234). While Bill disputes the bishop’s faith in the para-
normal with a rational argument, calling in doubt the causal connection
between the strange phenomena the bishop has experienced and his dead son
(126–8),11 Angel makes her rejection something instinctive — a matter of faith,
though a faith that is opposite to the bishop’s or, in this case, Bill’s.
This bears relation to what Dick wrote about the difference between sf
and fantasy (Ch. 1), when he said that it is “in essence a judgment-call, since
what is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is,
rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and the reader” (SL6 153).
This also applies to the borderline between realism and fantasy. A reader may
not believe in reincarnation outside the fictional world conjured up by Dick,
but he could believe that it takes place in the novel, regardless of what Angel’s
opinion may be, even if she warns readers that “I could quiz Bill forever,
trying to establish the presence in him of facts known only to me and to Tim,
but this would lead nowhere ... all data become suspect because there are mul-
tiple ways that data can arise within the human mind” (234).
Angel’s mention of facts known only to her and Tim anticipates a crucial
scene which takes place ten pages later, when Bill quotes the Gospels showing
Angel a mushroom he has picked up, and declares “This is my body ... and
this is my blood” (245). This is a famous passage that can be found, with
slight differences, in Mark (14.22, 24), Matthew (26.26–7) and Luke (22.19–
20); but the less famous passage he subsequently quotes “I am the true vine,
and my father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 259

cuts away, and every —“ is only found in John (15.1–2)— and in a previous
chapter of the novel.
In fact Tim quotes this passage from John’s Gospel while discussing the
then still mysterious anokhi with Angel: “I am the true vine, and my father
is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts away, and
every branch that does bear fruit he prunes to make it bear even more” (82).
When Tim quotes this passage, to explain that the Holy Writ cannot be read
literally but must be interpreted symbolically, he and Angel are alone, in front
of a small grocery store in San Francisco. It is a remarkable coincidence that
Bill quotes precisely that (not very famous) passage of the Gospel in his con-
versation with Angel —if this is a coincidence. If it is, we are reading a realistic
novel; if it is not, it is proof that Tim really transmigrated, and that he is
speaking through Bill.
But this is not the only fact that could support a reading of Archer as a
novel of the preternatural — a fantasy novel, then, belonging to the very genre
Dick had practiced before moving to sf for commercial reasons (Ch. 1). When
Tim and Kirsten consult Dr. Garrett, a medium living in Southern California
(the only moment described in the novel that Angel leaves Berkeley), she tells
them that Jeff said “The man at the restaurant was a Soviet ... police agent”
(151). The man at the restaurant is actually Fred Hill, the owner of the Bad
Luck restaurant, and many in Berkeley (including Archer and Jeff ) do believe
that he is a KGB agent (20–1). This is what Angel calls “a creepy residuum”
that she cannot explain: “How could Dr. Garrett know about the Bad Luck
Restaurant? And even if she knew that Kirsten and Tim had met originally
at that place, how could she have known about Fred Hill or what we supposed
was the case with Fred Hill?” (154). In fact neither Jeff nor Angel talk about
the urban legend concerning Fred Hill when Tim and Kirsten are present, so
Dr. Garrett could not have been told this by them or Mason, the medium
they have consulted in England (106). Does this mean that the medium really
contacted Jefferson Archer? Another judgment-call, of course.
Another element taken from fantasy fiction is fate: this is a novel where
predictions are effective — no wonder then that bishop Archer discusses the
ancient Greek term for fate, ananke (75). On the day of her first meeting with
Tim Archer, Kirsten jokingly says that her body “is trying to die” (27); this
is undoubtedly explained with the symptoms of an undiagnosed peritonitis
which does not allow her to eat, but Kirsten’s body is really trying to die
because of a lung cancer which will only be discovered in Chapter 10. Her
offhand remark sounds like a premonition, but there is not only that: a full-
fledged prophecy is uttered by Dr. Garrett, the medium in Santa Barbara,
who unambiguously tells Kirsten “You are going to die very soon” and then
adds “His father will die soon after Kirsten” (156–7). Tim’s reaction after
260 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Kirsten’s death is one of disbelief, and he solemnly states “Kirsten is dead ...
because we believed in nonsense. Both of us.... Garrett and Mason could see
that Kirsten was sick. They took advantage of a sick, disturbed woman and
now she’s dead” (180–1). With these words he is repudiating his previous faith
in the preternatural, yet he will soon die in Israel and Dr. Garrett’s prophecy
will thus come true. It may be a scam, like Angel always thought and Tim
comes to think only after the first half of the prophecy has been fulfilled; one
might even think that Tim fulfils the prophecy by trying to resist, because he
will travel to the place of his accidental death in order to find the anokhi
(204–5) which could possibly save him from the tyranny of fate (and death).
And this resembles a very old story told by Sophocles in his most famous
tragedy, Oedipus the King, who fulfils a prophecy by trying to avert it — one
of those ancient Greek tragedies which Dick knew and liked (Aeschylus’
Agamemnon is quoted in the Bibliography of Archer [251]), though he does
not explicitly mention Sophocles’ masterpiece in this novel; one of those
stories which confirm the overwhelming power of fate by showing humans’
helpless attempts to escape its tyranny. Once again, if fate and prophecies
really work, this is a fantasy novel (with remarkable gothic undertones); if
fate and soothsayers are nothing more than a hoax, and those who believe
them are fools, then this is a realistic novel.
Ontological uncertainty, as we can see, is also present in this third part
of the trilogy. It depends on what readers believe — or what their willing sus-
pension of disbelief allows them to believe while reading the novel. Besides,
there is another matter of ontological uncertainty which looms large over
Archer, but it is of such nature that it does not necessarily have the same
impact and force for all readers: the Zadokite scrolls.
These have been based on the findings in Qumran, where a collection
of Essene scrolls was found between 1946 and the mid–1960s, and those in
Nag Hammadi, where an important set of Gnostic texts was found in 1946.
What Dick drew from the real story of these portentous archaeological findings
has been discussed in detail by Gabriele Frasca (in the last chapter of his
monograph L’oscuro scrutare di Philip K. Dick, “Restare nel buio”); suffice it
to say that the fictional Zadokite scrolls are nothing less than Q, or “Q source,”
or “Q document,” the source of the three synoptic Gospels (60), a text whose
existence has been only hypothesized by Biblical scholarship since the 19th
century but which Dick conjures up in his novel. He was not faithful to schol-
arly hypotheses on Q, because these only posit it as a source for Matthew and
Luke, on a par with Mark (this is called the Two-Source Hypothesis, according
to which those parts of the two later gospels which are not in Mark derive
from a lost written Q source); but Angel is fiction, after all, or better a complex
mix of facts and fiction, where some facts may also be slightly twisted. How-
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 261

ever, the problem with the Zadokite scrolls is that if they are the Q document,
since they “date from two hundred years before Christ” (60), they call in
doubt all traditional beliefs about Jesus and his historical reality.
Either Christ was not the original source of those teachings and revela-
tions that are found in the Gospels, but he simply reported much older reli-
gious truths stemming from forgotten sects; or he never existed, and those
words which have been attributed to him come from others, possibly some
anonymous master whose identity might remain forever unknown. This is
not a very important issue for an atheist like Angel, but it is a devastating
discovery for bishop Timothy Archer. Once again, it is a matter of belief or
disbelief; but the consequences for an important member of the Episcopalian
clergy like Tim are overwhelming. He feels he is morally obliged to “step
down as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California” (136)— a particularly
outrageous act, because Tim Archer (like his historical counterpart James
Pike) is a celebrity, who marched with Martin Luther King at Selma and was
a friend of President Kennedy. But Tim’s integrity compels him to resign,
because, as he tells Kirsten and Angel, “I have no faith in the reality of
Christ.... None whatsoever. I cannot in good conscience go on preaching the
kerygma of the New Testament. Every time I get up in front of my congre-
gation, I feel that I am deceiving them” (136).
As we can see, the matter of belief plays a fundamental role in this novel.
For those who believe in reincarnation, this may be a realistic novel. For
Angel, the transmigration of Timothy Archer did not take place, and there
may be other explanations for the “creepy residua.” For an atheist like Angel,
or a Muslim, or a practicing Jew, the discovery of the Zadokite scrolls is not
an epoch-making event as it is for bishop Archer (and his congregation,
including an unorthodox Christian like Philip K. Dick). However, the dis-
covery that Christ was no more than a disciple of a nameless and faceless
“Zadokite Expositor” (78) is more than a matter of ontological uncertainty
(we are not sure any more of what the past really was, of what res gestae may
lie behind an untrustworthy historia rerum gestarum): it is a matter of radical
metaphysical uncertainty for practicing Christians (like Tim, and also Philip
K. Dick).
But the final discovery of Tim’s quest (and the fact that he is another
tireless quester once again ties this novel to VALIS), the ultimate — or better
penultimate, as we shall see — truth, is another destabilizing move by Dick.
The mysterious anokhi which gave the Zadokite sect eternal life is actually is
a hallucinogenic mushroom (88); the Zadokites “were simply getting off on
a psychedelic trip, like the kids in the Haight-Ashbury ... The Twelve, the
disciples, were ... smuggling the anokhi into Jerusalem and they got caught”
(88–9).
262 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

A first comment might be that, whatever Dick said in many of his letters,
his deadpan humor never abandoned him; the idea that the Apostles were a
bunch of stoned freaks pushing illegal drugs in Jerusalem is one of his funniest
jokes. On the other hand, we have a further moment of ontological uncer-
tainty, both for believers and agnostics: practicing Christians would be obvi-
ously shocked to discover that the revelations of the Gospels ultimately derive
from the hallucinations of a small sect of drug-addicts; while atheists might
be surprised by discovering that the idea of religion as the opiate of the masses
could not be just a metaphor, after all, and that something (chemically) real
lies behind the Holy Writ. This reconnects to with Jameson’s argument about
Dick’s favorite forms of hallucination (cf. Introduction), those — such as drug-
induced altered states — that generate ontological uncertainty.
But there is more to be said about the discovery of the real nature of the
anokhi. This disconcerting revelation resembles the scene in Do Androids of
Electric Sheep? when Buster Friendly discloses on TV that “Mercerism is a
swindle” (158): his was a ham actor and an alcoholic, the scene of Mercer’s
agony on the stony slope was shot in a studio, the religion practiced by all
humans in the novel (Ch. 6) is a gigantic media hoax. Yet Mercer appears to
Rick Deckard and helps him to overcome the three remaining androids, even
Pris Stratton, the one which appeared impossible to the not-very-competent
bounty hunter. This revelation has a devastating effect on John R. Isidore,
who goes into hysterics, starts breaking everything (160) and then retreats in
a dismal hallucination, falling in the tomb world. Yet Mercer appears and
saves him from his psychotic retreat, though the old man admits: “I am a
fraud” (162). It is a paradoxical statement, and the fact that the self-proclaimed
fraud manages to heal John and his spider, to somewhat comfort Rick (para-
doxically again, because when they first meet Mercer tells him that “There is
no salvation” [135], surely not a comforting truth) and then to save him from
Rachael’s and Pris’ trap adds to the paradoxicalness of the situation.
The paradox remains such in Androids, though something Mercer tells
John hints at an explanation. After having admitted that what Buster Friendly
and his pals (actually a group of androids that have managed to escape the
surveillance of the police and the bounty hunters) have announced is true, he
adds that “[t]hey will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed.
Because you’re still here and I’m still here” (162). Buster friendly has revealed
that Mercer was actually a bit player called Al Jarry; yet the fraud is there to
save John, the spider, and Rick Deckard. Though the religious figure — half
prophet, half persecuted messiah — that represents the main virtue of Mer-
cerism is bogus, empathy still works. And it may save people, at least from a
psychological point of view.
Maybe the point is symbolism itself. Something that symbolizes some-
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 263

thing else is not the symbolized entity — it is just a sign, an indicator. What
is signified, what is indicated is important. Even if symbols are cheap, even
if the moon in the background is painted and the rocks thrown at Mercer are
made of soft plastic (156), and Mercer himself is a bit player (157). We could
also say: even if the novel telling us the story of Mercer, Rick Deckard, John
R. Isidore and the other characters in Androids is cheap pulp sf, it may hint
at something serious, it may have something important to tell its readers.
In Archer the issue of a bogus religion (something started well before
Christ by a group of drug-addicts eating hallucinogenic mushrooms) returns,
and Dick seems to be better able to articulate what was only an enigmatic
paradox in Androids. He does this by putting in the foreground Tim, who
may be said to play the same role of Buster Friendly in Androids: like the
android TV celebrity aimed at debunking Mercerism in the earlier novel,
Tim wants to debunk Christianity in Dick’s last novel. Not a mean feat; in
fact the issue of discovering what lies behind the traditional truths of Chris-
tianity (we might also say “that which general opinion regards as true”) is a
much more important thread than Buster Friendly’s disclosure was in Androids.
Yet Dick did not think that Tim’s disclosure could annihilate the “good news”
of the Gospels.12 Here is what he wrote in a letter sent to his daughter Laura
a few weeks after completing Archer:
In looking over the three novels of the trilogy I can see how Christ
becomes progressively more and more real, but only is truly there in the
third and final novel, and even in that novel Christ only ‘occurs’ at the end.
It is as if the disparate pieces that make Him up come together: a part of
Angel, a part of Tim Archer, a part of the boy Bill Lundborg, a part taken
from the Sufi teacher, Edgar Barefoot; no single alone is Christ but when
they join together they do form Christ, as if by an alchemical miracle [SL6
179].

This explanation may sound like one of the mysteries of Christianity,

truths that we cannot really understand: a matter of faith, not reason. Yet,
having been uttered by a writer who is trying to explain his last work to some-
one he loved, it should be taken seriously and understood in its literary impli-
cations. We may do it if we take into account the disclosure which takes place
in Androids but does not change anything; because Mercer is there to help.
Edgar Barefoot is the character who may explain what is left once “that
which general opinion regards as true” has been revealed as a fraud, once we
know that the truth behind the truth, the ultimate truth Tim Archer strives
to find, revelation after revelation, the ultimate experience that the anokhi
should bestow upon him, is an undignified death in the Dead Sea desert. The
story begins when Angel goes to one of his seminars, and ironically says that
“it costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get
264 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day” (7). Frasca noticed that this sentence
is one of Dick’s frequent “hidden prolepses” (Frasca 209), because Barefoot’s
lecture is not as important as the sandwich he offers his audience, and this is
something we will only be told at the end of the giant analepsis which retrieves
the sad story of bishop Archer, Kirsten, Jeff, and Angel, that is, at the end of
the novel. It is then that Barefoot tells Angel that she is sleeping (in fact she
has not really listened to his lecture, but recalled her sad story); then he tells
her something even more important, which Dick felt had to be italicized:
“you are starved” (215).
Barefoot explains this with clear words: “Spiritual things will not help.
You don’t need them. There are too many spiritual things in the world, far
too many” (215). And the sandwich that Archer sarcastically mentioned in
the very first page of the novel comes back with a vengeance: “When people
come here to listen to me speak, I offer them a sandwich. The foolish ones
listen to my words; the wise ones eat the sandwich” (216). This baffling rev-
elation is much less cryptic if we take into account that feeding someone is a
way to take care of him/her. It is then clear that the world of words, where
revelation follows revelation, the world where Tim Archer lived, is an unin-
habitable place if the sandwich is not eaten, if people starve there, feeding
themselves only with words, and possibly tranquilizers, like Kirsten (128),
LSD, like Jeff, or amphetamines, like Tim (52, 198) (cf, Frasca 213).
If the bread of the sandwich has a positive value, and symbolizes the
ability to be anchored in the real world, keeping in touch with others, actions
like eating or feeding are semantically charged in the novel, and it is no coin-
cidence if during Angel’s first meeting with Bill Lundborg the boy manages
to feed Angel’s cat, Magnificat, and she notices “[t]he care he took in spooning
out the food... systematically, his attention deeply fixed, as if it were very
important, what he had become involved in” (91). No wonder then that Mag-
nificat, “a rough-and-tumble old tomcat who normally did not allow strangers
to get near him” (90) lets Bill, the nourisher, pet him.
On the other hand, though Archer often meets her word-obsessed friends
( Jeff and above all Tim) for lunch or dinner, something is always missing
from their meals. When the four friends meet at the Bad Luck Restaurant,
Dick (rather unusually) makes them tell us what they are going to have: mine-
strone, sweetbreads, veal Oscar (22); when Kirsten arrives, Jeff suggests her
to order “toast and a soft-boiled egg” (27), but she refuses, saying that her
body is “trying to die,” and contents herself with white wine and cigarettes
(26). In a novel where prophecies are a main theme (Kirsten’s and Tim’s
untimely deaths are predicted by Dr. Garrett in Chapter 10) it is not a coin-
cidence if a lung cancer kills Kirsten, given what she says in this scene. But
the refusal of the toast is also meaningful as a toast is made with bread, and
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 265

this is the food that the four guests will not have. One should also notice that
Tim forgets to pay the check (27), thus bespeaking his lack of interest in
nourishment and bodily life.
Another meal is hastily organized after Jeff ’s funeral: Kirsten proposes
to have a takeaway dinner with pizza (73), but then changes her mind because
“[t]here is no way [she is] going to be able to keep down pizza” (75), and asks
Angel to buy boned chicken, rice or noodles, ginger ale and the unavoidable
cigarettes (76). If we do not forget that pizza is basically a flat disc-shaped
kind of bread, topped with a variety of food, we can see that also in this
dinner bread is missing, or better refused. What is also remarkable is that
Tim and Archer stop outside the grocery store (81–3) talking about Tim’s
religious quest, that is, forgetting nourishment to exchange words. They enter
the shop at the end of chapter 5, but we are not shown the three eating.
There is a third meal, which unsurprisingly takes place after Kirsten’s
suicide (carried out by ingesting barbiturates): this time Tim and Angel meet
in a Chinese restaurant: “This was Mandarin-style Chinese food, not Can-
tonese; it would be spiced and hot, not sweet, with lots of nuts. Ginger root...”
(200-1). Once again, no bread. And Tim does not seem to be aware of what
he is eating, because when Angel tells him it has been a wonderful dinner, he
replies “Was it? I didn’t notice” (208). His trip to Israel is much more impor-
tant of what he is doing; Tim always lives in an immaterial future, not in the
material present.
The series of scenes where food plays a role also include indirect refer-
ences. When Angel suggests a literal interpretation of the passage in John’s
Gospel where Christ says he is a vine, (“Well, it’s a vine, then [...] look for a
vine” [82]), Tim rejects this suggestion as it is “absurd and carnal”— and
carnal may mean something related to flesh. Some time later, Kirsten must
be hospitalized for a peritonitis, which explains her lack of appetite (85), and
this is a disease of the digestive apparatus. When they first meet, Bill tells
Angel about his experiences in the asylum, where also drug-addicts were
interned (consumers of drugs like Tim and Kirsten),13 and says that being
messed up from drugs “is due to malnutrition; people on drugs forget to eat
and, when they do eat, they eat junk food;” and those addicted to ampheta-
mines (like Tim and Dick before 1971) “don’t eat at all” (98). When Kirsten
gets back from England, she looks younger; she asks Angel if she thinks she
lost weight (105), and one may wonder how a loss of weight agrees with
Kirsten’s claim that she quit smoking — however, one loses weight by eating
less or not eating, so that once again lack of nourishment seems to characterize
the three main characters. Actually Tim and Kirsten are not eating the right
food, but thriving on words (Tim’s, but also those of the mediums they are
consulting).
266 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Bishop Archer talks about food when he wants to show Bill that there
is another world, on the other side of death, and starts by asking the boy “Do
you create your own food? Do you out of yourself, out of your own body,
generate the food that you need in order to live?” (125). But talking about
food is not eating, and this is something Barefoot teaches Angel: “When your
dog or cat is hungry, do you talk to him? No; you give him food” (216). Tim’s
(and Angel’s) problem is that when they should have eaten the sandwich, to
put it in Barefoot’s terms (and this is what never happens in all the meals
described in the novel, as bread is always absent), they have talked — or eaten
something else, not even noticing what they were eating.
The crucial moment of Angel’s life, the moment which defines her life,
“the time of her birth into the real world” (146) is the sleepless night when
she suffers from an abscessed tooth (145), and spends the whole night drinking
cheap bourbon and reading Dante’s Divina commedia. If the real world is that
of books and words, there is really nothing to object; yet this is a night when
toothache prevents Angel from eating (she obviously goes to the dentist “with
no breakfast, not even coffee” [145], and coffee is all she has — with the
inevitable pill — once she gets back home from the dentist [146]). No wonder
that Angel is enthralled by Dante’s supreme vision of the universe made up
by scattered pages which are bound by divine love in a cosmic book — being
a book-addict she reads it quite literally, not heading Dante’s warning that
“Quanto è corto il dire e come fioco/al mio concetto!” (Dante, Paradiso,
XXXIII, ll. 121–2), which, roughly translated, means that the words he is using
(il dire) fall short (corto) of the infinite entity (God) he is trying to describe,
and that those words are too feeble (fioco) to render his concept (concetto) of
what he has seen, a mental image which is in turn only a pale shadow of God
himself (cf. also ll. 133–41). Dante was well aware of the limits of the language
he could use like nobody else; while Angel, a professional student — but nei-
ther a professional scholar nor a professional writer — seems to be too confident
of the power of words (and literature) left alone.
At the end of the novel Angel does not take the sandwich, and even a
patient teacher (and therapist) like Barefoot seems to think hers is a desperate
case: “Someday perhaps you’ll come for the sandwich. But I doubt that. I
think you will always need the pretext of words” (249). Angel does not answer,
though she thinks “Don’t be that pessimistic ... I must surprise you.” This
adds a further uncertainty which remains such: one wonders whether Angel
will be able to escape her mental prison of words and no nourishment, her
condition of professional student, too much in love with words to be able to
live a full life, her psychological jailhouse called Berkeley, more a state of mind
than a physical place.
The issue of not being able to leave Berkeley is particularly important
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 267

inasmuch as Angel thinks of herself as the traitor of her friends (including

her husband Jeff ). “Traitor” is the secret name she confesses to have when
asked by Barefoot (214), and there are at least three betrayals that beset her
recollection of the past: having neglected the estrangement from her husband
Jeff (61, 67), having seconded Tim’s and Kirsten’s madness about the preter-
natural for fear of losing them (112–3), and — last but not least — having
rejected Tim’s proposal to become her secretary (which she misinterprets as
an advance Tim is making to her [201]) for his trip to Israel. Not eating the
sandwich Barefoot has offered her should mean Angel has not completed yet
the process that should heal her; she has acknowledged the grief for her friends’
deaths and her responsibility for what has happened, she has started to abreact,
but she has not gone all the way to a full recovery from her machine-like con-
dition of spiritual death (210).
Yet there is hope: she has accepted to take care of Bill Lundborg, some-
thing Barefoot warmly encourages her to do (247). She does this because he
is the only survivor of her lost affective world, being Kirsten’s son and having
once been Jeff ’s friend; it may be a form of nostalgia, but taking care of Bill
is a lot better than living alone or wasting time with such unsatisfactory and
nonsensical affairs like the one with Hampton (196), who behaves like a child,
insensitively pokes fun at people who committed suicide (196–7), and even-
tually show “traces — rather more than traces — of paranoia and hypomania”
(236). By taking care of Bill Angel may take care of herself— or better, Bill
may take care of her, because dealing with people is something that may turn
words into actions, possibly into acts of love. This may also involve preparing
sandwiches and — who knows?— eating them.
If the issue of nourishment is a metaphor for human relations (we would
better call them “humane relations,” given the importance Dick assigns to
caring, nurturing, sheltering, feeding, sharing food, etc. in the novel), it is
opposed to Tim Archer’s frantic quest, and these two opposite attitudes both
relate to ontological uncertainty: Tim wants to solve all the mysteries, to
debunk or sort out the episodes of ontological uncertainty that play a pivotal
role in the novel (communication with the hereafter vs. delusion, prophecy
vs. hoax, fate vs. accident, and ultimately fantasy vs. realism); Barefoot seems
to be suspicious of such searches for an ultimate truth. When Angel tells him
he is “another fisherman” (213), a spiritual man like Tim (of course the
metaphor of the fisherman refers to Christ, as Dick was well aware of the
Christian symbolism of the fish, already explored in VALIS), Barefoot answers
“I fish for fish. Not for souls. I do not know of ‘soul’; I only know of fish”
(213). Another biographic element, because Dick is actually quoting his son
Christopher who, at four, while the writer and his wife Tessa were talking
about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, declared “I am a fisherman. I fish for
268 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

fish” (Shifting Realities 279). In Dick’s 1978 essay which includes this anecdote
(“How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”) Christo-
pher’s words hint at a hidden, mystical reality; but in the novel they pave the
way for Barefoot’s concrete offer of the sandwich. Fish is food, after all, and
refusing a metaphorical or symbolic interpretation of fish aims at stressing the
importance of material life, of living beings — be they fish, or people. Striving
to understand once and for all whether Bill is Tim Archer reincarnate, to
grasp the ultimate truth behind the anokhi (or thanks to it), to fully under-
stand what the impact of the Thirty Years War was on our koinos kosmos
( Jeff ’s final obsessive self-imposed task, another endless quest), is fishing for
souls — but that is not as important as fishing for fish, that is, deciding how
to deal with the one who is still alive, Bill, how to practically help him, how
to take care of him.14 One thing is to discourse on the etymology of the word
“love,” as Tim does in his confrontation with Archer in chapter 4, and say
that it is equivalent of the Latin word caritas, from which the word “caring”
comes from; another thing is actually caring for or loving someone. In other
words: you have to live in a condition of ontological uncertainty; you cannot
sort out the riddles of shifting realities first, and then bother to live.
All this mirrored Dick’s state of mind in the second half of 1981. In his
September 5, 1981, letter to Le Guin, he writes : “I know that I do not know”
and adds “I am beginning to lose vitality in this effort” (SL6 242); “effort”
obviously refers to the relentless, home-made research and theory production
that left us the ponderous Exegesis. In his last interview with Rickman, Dick
declared, talking about his main obsession, the 2–3-74 experiences: “I saw
something, and I can remember it very well, but I don’t know what it was,
what it signified.... I’ll never know what it was” (Rickman 1985, 51). I do not
believe that the truth (or truths) of a literary work are completely revealed by
taking this or that event or statement in the author’s life and positing it as
the ultimate meaning of that work; but I think that a critic is authorized to
read literary text intertextually, placing them in a network of texts, and Dick’s
huge production of letters, some of which not deprived of literary values,
some rich in a twisted, proletarian, vernacular beauty and pathos, offers us
other texts that we can connect to Dick’s novels and short stories and essays.
What these letters tell us is that six months before his death Dick was sick
and tired of his endless exegesis, of his interpretive effort to understand the
ultimate meaning of his weird personal experience. If Bishop Archer embodies
his questing drive, Angel is the fictional embodiment of a state of mind that
Dick recorded in his September 11, 1981 (talk about coincidences!) letter to
Russell Galen:
I have wound down my exegesis, at last, realizing that in seven and a half
years that I have worked on it I have learned relatively little; ... My study of
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 269

Plato, Pythagoras and Philo (among others indicated that what I saw in
March 1974 that I call VALIS is real, but what it is I simply do not know,
nor do I expect ever to know [SL6 250].
That just three days later Dick was enthusiastically reading an essay by
the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, whose interpretation of Luther’s idea
of an omnipresence of Christ’s body seemed to chime in with his 2–3-74
experiences, tells us that the oscillation between the obsessive quest and the
pragmatic awareness that life had to be lived in the here-and-now was not
resolved once and for all. Ontological uncertainty was not just a narrative
strategy; it was Philip K. Dick’s lifestyle.
The psychological dimension of the novel — Archer’s sense of guilt, her
and her friends’ “madness,” Barefoot’s warning that words alone cannot save
anybody — should not however hide another important aspect of Archer, that
is, its being a tapestry of the life and times of the countercultural generation.
In fact the counterculture of the 1960s is well represented by Angel Archer,
the professional student of Berkeley, but also by her feminist friend Kirsten,
her Berkeleyite husband Jeff and above all her father-in-law Tim, who quotes
Romans 7.6, “But now we are rid of the law ... free to serve in the new spiritual
way and not in the old way of a written law” (47), to show Angel that her
fears about his affair with Kirsten are misplaced. Freedom was what the coun-
terculture of the 1960s aimed at, and freedom from old rules and sometimes
old written laws was part of the program, as well as the intellectual freedom
to question all the old dogmas, everything that was held true because general
opinion regarded it as true, or right, or licit. Surely the counterculture is more
famous for his approach to the civil rights, free speech, the Vietnam War,
women’s liberation, environmentalism, lifestyle (including sexual liberation,
use of drugs, alternative models of family), art (especially music and cinema);
yet it cannot be denied that the countercultural period was one of widespread
interest in the preternatural, per se or as something connected with the enlarge-
ment of consciousness to be hopefully achieved by means of psychedelic drugs.
If science mistrusted paranormal phenomena, many people who adopted a
countercultural stance mistrusted science, and experimented ESP and other
forms of the preternatural — including séances with or without mediums. The
historical James Pike did that, and published the results of his dealings with
the hereafter under the title The Other Side.
Most of those countercultural issues I have listed above are present in
the novel (especially sexual liberation, use of drugs and the civil rights move-
ment, the latter being repeatedly stressed by Dick)15; the countercultural atti-
tude was to be on the other side of whatever established truth was held true
simply because the mainstream mechanically accepted it — and I am well
aware that this sentence mixes keywords in Dick’s vocabulary, but this should
270 THE TWISTED WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

not surprise us, because, though older than most baby boomers (that is, the
generation usually associated with counterculture), he partook in that cultural
emotion (Frasca 217) since the beginnings of his career, when he lived in
Berkeley (possibly the cradle of the countercultural movement) and already
expressed his unorthodox opinions in his earliest short stories.
Angel Archer may have a skeptical approach to the preternatural, yet she
is a typical representative of the countercultural mentality, for her use or abuse
of marijuana (a bit too nonchalant when she shares a joint with Bill [237–
40]), her political opinions, even her love of music, which ultimately brings
her to work in a record shop. But also the historical thread of the novel has
a strong countercultural undertone. Surely Dick inserted the reference to Wal-
lenstein and the Thirty Year War to substantiate Jeff ’s scholarly turn of
mind — even if he is just another professional student, not a real scholar —
and mirror Tim’s superstition, so that when he says that “What Schiller saw
in Wallenstein was a man who colluded with fate to being on his own demise”
(75) he is actually — a good example of tragic irony — talking about himself.
But Jeff ’s search for the historical truth behind World War Two and Nazism,
which brings him back to Wallenstein and the Thirty Years War, is not so
different from Tim’s attempt to find out what is the historical truth behind
Christ, and then behind the Zadokites, and behind the anokhi— a counter-
cultural effort to discover an alternative truth (which is also an alternate his-
tory — and reality). These quests resemble another counter-historical project,
stemming from the cultural emotion16 of the 1960s, and produces one of the
masterpieces of postmodernist fiction, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
One of Dick’s readers once asked him if he had read anything by Pyn-
chon. He answered: “I have read no Pynchon — paranoia makes me dreadfully
suspicious; viz: I suspect paranoia, which is a paranoid reaction!— but I under-
stand he is very good” (SL6 147). Was this just his usual way to please those
he was writing to? As far as I know, Dick only mentions Pynchon in another
letter, written on January 6, 1973, to recommend the manuscript of a then
unpublished novel, Dr. Adder, written by his friend K.W. Jeter: “It’s somewhat
like Thomas Pynchon’s stuff ” (SL2 128). He may not have read Pynchon, but
he knew what Pynchon was writing, as he knew that Pynchon was a paranoid
writer like him. Moreover, if Dick was aware of Thomas Pynchon in early
1973, before the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow (which only reached book-
shops on February 23), and the controversy about the 1974 Pulitzer Prize
(which was not awarded to Gravity though the Pulitzer jury on fiction unan-
imously supported it — probably because it was too countercultural), he was
presumably not informed about Pynchon’s innovative fiction by newspapers
or magazines, but by some of his acquaintances who had read either V. or The
Crying of Lot 49. But, leaving aside the issue of a direct or indirect influence,
 10. A Counterfactual Counterculture 271

it is remarkable how close Archer and Gravity are, notwithstanding the massive
stylistic and structural differences: both aim at rewriting history, Pynchon
with the partly factual, partly counterfactual conspiracy pivoted upon the
Rocket and Dominus Blicero, Dick with the Zadokite scrolls. Both craftily
mix fact and fiction: behind the Rocket there is the historical German V-2/A-
4 ballistic missile; behind Blicero there is Wernher Von Braun, a former Waf-
fen-SS officer, the father of the Nazi hi-tech weapons and the Apollo project;
while behind the Zadokite scrolls there is the history of John Allegro’s chal-
lenge to the orthodox history of Christianity. Both draw from personal expe-
riences of their authors: Pynchon worked for Boeing in Seattle and took part
in the BOMARC project, regarding an advanced anti-aircraft nuclear missile,
in the early 1960s; Dick was a friend of James Pike and Maren Bergrud, and
an avid reader of the Gospels and Paul’s letters (whose influence on Archer
has been thoroughly discussed by Frasca). Both deal with the countercultural
wave of the 1960s: Pynchon in an indirect fashion, by putting characters which
uncannily resemble the Californian hippies in war-torn post–1945 Germany;
Dick in a metonymic fashion, by focusing on a small group of characters
which well represent that decade and its aftermath.
All in all, these two novels stem from the countercultural wave, and
would be unthinkable without the counterculture of the 1960s. And both
writers are engaged in a highly countercultural and characteristically irreverent
act: Pynchon populates the shattered cities of post–World War II Germany
with stoned freaks or marijuana pushers like Bummer Säure; Dick imagines
the real founders of Christianity as a bunch of hippies high on magic mush-
rooms. Both gestures are born from the same cultural emotion, the same
refusal to accept that which general opinion regards as true.
But here is a remarkable difference between Gravity and Archer, one that
may tell us something important about both novels: while the former, pub-
lished in the early 1970s but written during the 1960s anamorphically mirrors
the decade in which the counterculture blossomed and ripened, and still suggests
that there is hope, because Pynchon counters the conspiracy around the Rocket
with the Counterforce (appearing in the fourth part of his counter-historical
novel), Archer witnesses the dissolution of the counterculture, symbolized by
the murder of John Lennon,17 which only leaves behind traumatized survivors
like Angel, veterans of a lost war waged by a generation who wanted to give
up war and dehumanization. Dick’s final novel is then closer — and could be
an inspiration — to Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, focused on a group of
survivors of the Summer of Love in the reactionary winter of Reaganite Amer-
ica. That Pynchon went out of his 14-year narrative silence after he had had
time to ponder Dick’s literary testament may be no more than a coincidence,
as it may not — as far as we know today, it is a judgment-call.
This page intentionally left blank
 Notes

Introduction
1. The history of Dick scholarship was quite short in the Appendix to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The
Novels of Philip K. Dick (Robinson 131–3), but it would not be so compact today. I have tried to take
into account all the book-length contributions (be they monographs or collections of essays) that are
available, with the exception of Samuel J. Umland’s Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations
(1995), which today is a collector’s item (unfortunately not available in Italian libraries); and to select
those articles published on academic journals which might best help me in my exploration of onto-
logical uncertainty in Dick’s fiction. Dick scholarship was a pioneer settlement when Robinson first
attempted to map it — much like Dick’s depiction of Mars in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—
but it is a populated mid-size city today, rapidly growing to become a metropolis.
2. To these names we shall perhaps have to add that of Laurence A. Rickels, whose ponderous mono-
graph on Dick, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010) reached me too late to be used and discussed as it
could have deserved —its density and unorthodox approach to psychoanalysis and German culture in
Dick’s oeuvre made it impossible to include it in my discussion in a systematic and exhaustive fashion.
3. Here I refer to Avantpop as theorized and illustrated by Larry McCaffery in After Yesterday’s
Crash: The Avant-Pop Antholog y.
4. A more balanced position is expressed by Christopher Palmer, who maintains that these novels
“have not received much discussion, and it is not hard to see why” (Palmer 67), yet devotes a chapter
of his essay (the fourth, “Mired in the Sex War”) to two of them, Confessions of a Crap Artist and The
Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, with a reading focused on gender issues.
5. The main problem is Dick’s style, though Gopnik acknowledges the raw power of Dick’s fiction
(and has partially grasped the main critical question in VALIS): “The trouble is that, much as one
would like to place Dick above or alongside Pynchon and Vonnegut — or, for that matter, Chesterton
or Tolkien — as a poet of the fantastic parable he was a pretty bad writer” (Gopnik).
6. Dick enjoyed a moderate prosperity only in the last years of his life, also due to the filming
rights of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as Blade Runner (1982).
7. Here Jameson is reintroducing a fundamental dichotomy which was already expressed by György
Lukács in his fundamental 1920 essay Theory of the Novel, where the original equilibrium and harmony
of subjective and objective in the classical Greek culture was split by Christianity, thus originating
(among other philosophical consequences) the two different approaches to narration, centered on the
self or the objective reality.
8. Jameson’s model is more persuasive than Stanislaw Lem’s reading of Dick’s fiction in his 1972
essay “Science-Fiction: A Hopeless Case — With Exceptions,” where the peculiarity of Dick’s fiction
is explained thus: “[h]e is accustomed to let action issue from a clearly and precisely built situation,
and only later in the course of a novel does decay, perplexing the reader, begin to undermine initial
order so that the end of the novel becomes a single knot of fantasies. Dreaming and waking are mixed,
reality becomes undistinguishable from hallucination, and the intangible center of Dick’s fiction dis-
solves into a series of quivering, mocking monstrosities” (Lem 1972, 73–4). What is actually proposed

273
274 NOTES — CHAPTER 1

here is a model of Dick’s fiction as literary entropy, where chaos gradually replaces order, but this is
a rather simplified description of what really happens in those novels. Besides, Lem admits it is based
on the reading of only seven novels (which do not include, say, Time Out of Joint, Eye in the Sky, Dr.
Bloodmoney) and a few short stories (Lem 1972, 81). Moreover, Lem underestimates the importance
of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ch. 6), so that his appreciation of Dick seems to be mostly
based on Ubik (the only novel he quotes repeatedly) and — to a lesser extent —Stigmata. Often en-
thusiastically quoted in the 1970s, when the secondary bibliography on Dick was discouragingly thin,
Lem’s essay is definitely outdated today.
9. Jameson reads the characters of the novel as suggesting a provisional, unstable solution to ma-
terial problems, that is, the shift from “the older … world of empirical activity, capitalist everyday
work and scientific knowledge” to “that newer one of communication and of messages of all kinds
which we are only too familiar in this consumer and service era” ( Jameson 1975, 360); in other words,
the passage from a modern to a late-modern or postmodern condition. On the other hand Dick is in-
terested in the “actual energy elements” in signals and messages (SL4 130), because he was desperately
trying to understand his February-March 1974 experience: the transmission of high energy signals
that he received as psychedelic visions presented itself as a viable explanation of those phenomena, at
least in that moment.
10. Ontological uncertainty in Dick may bear relation to R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960),
where the British psychiatrist contrasted the experience of the “ontologically secure” person with that
of an individual who “cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others
for granted” and consequently strives to avoid “losing his self ” (Laing 41–3). Laing explains how we
all exist in the world as beings, defined how others see us and how we see them; then our feelings and
motivations derive from this condition of “being in the world” in the sense of existing for others, who
exist for us. Without this we suffer “ontological insecurity,” a condition often expressed in terms of
“being dead” by people who are clearly still physically alive. Dick was an avid reader of psychiatric
and psychoanalytic literature, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period in which Laing
became famous; it is not impossible that he was influenced by The Divided Self, and its idea of onto-
logical insecurity.
11. Though philosophers may be interested in narratives, cf. Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative.
12. A particularly virulent critique was written by Stanislaw Lem (Lem 1974).
13. Dick discusses these two complementary concepts in his 1965 essay “Schizophrenia & The
Book of Change” (175); they are derived from Heraclitus’ fragment B89.
14. The relevance of Descartes to any reading of paranoia in Dick has been suggested by Jameson
with his idea of an “android cogito” ( Jameson 373–4): a foundation of ontological certainty on the
self-evidence of the doubting mind (synthesized in the famous motto “I think, therefore I am”) is
questioned by Dick because the then purely sfnal device of AI technology enables a technical repro-
duction of the thinking (and doubting) mind. Jameson therefore ironically rephrases Descartes motto
as “I think, therefore I am an android,” thus highlighting the threat of de-humanization lurking in
the solipsistic foundation of a transcendental (and ontologically certain) subject.
15. Whose implications have been thoroughly discussed in Pagetti’s Introduction to the Italian edition,
“Un sinantropo di nome Bill Smith” (Pagetti 2002) and my Afterword to the novel (Rossi Postfazione).
16. But there are other aspects of this complex, and unfortunately neglected novel, which Butler’s
brilliant article “LSD, Lying Ink and Lies, Inc.” has only begun to fathom (Butler 2005).
17. The most exhaustive discussion of Scanner is undoubtedly the third chapter of Frasca’s L’oscuro
scrutare di Philip K. Dick (Frasca 147–98), whose depth owes much to the fact that Frasca wrote an
excellent translation of the novel into Italian in 1993.
18. One of the greatest practitioners of the sequential art, Art Spiegelman, was one of Dick’s
friends before his graphic novel Maus made him famous. Dick liked Spiegelman’s comics, and he even
wrote a short story in 1975, “The Eye of the Sybil,” which Spiegelman should have illustrated “in a
vivid and compelling way” (SL4 144), but did not.

Chapter 1
1. Suvin does not consider Puppets worth discussing, and he sentences it (and the next novel we
will deal with) to a sort of damnatio memoriae (Suvin 1975, 7).
2. Moreover Warrick overtly declared that her “choice is to devote [her] attention to the great
 Notes — Chapter 1 275

novels and to ignore the others” (xiv), so that we may understand that in her opinion Puppets does
not belong to the group of the major works.
3. But the novel could have been completed even before that date; in a letter written on September
16, 1954, Dick complains that there is a “fantasy novel” written two years before that his agent “won’t
handle … because there’s no market” (SL3 33). This could well be the manuscript of Puppets: its de-
scription as a story “whose beginning is natural, factual, normal” which then “progresses into greater
and deeper levels of fantasy” does fit the plot of Puppets. This should mean that the novel had been
written in 1952, at the beginning of Dick’s career as a professional writer.
4. The letter was published in 1981 on a sf magazine, Just: SF, under the title “My Definition of
Science Fiction,” and then reprinted in the volume of collected essays (Shifting Realities, 99–100).
Being something written for publication, its purpose should not be to gratify the addressee — like
other statements found in single letters.
5. The same might be said of a later work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which would
still be sf even if the protagonist were an android — like the Rick Deckard of Blade Runner: The Di-
rector’s Cut (Ch. 6).
6. Here Dick is writing thirty years after the original publication of Hubbard’s quasi-noir tale,
and this confirms that it had left a lasting impression on his mind.
7. Maybe it is not just a coincidence if one of the secondary characters of Time Out of Joint is
called Mr. Lowery.
8. I must simplify Hubbard’s novelette here for the sake of clarity, because its ending, where the
last words (“Who ever heard of demons, my sister?” “No one at all, my brother” [Hubbard 190]) are
perhaps said by the demons (who speak in italics throughout the text). In fact Fear does lend itself to
a double interpretation, which might superimpose a supernatural layer to its basic crime plot; though
those final words may also be read as a monitory ending which warns readers about the demons which
live in the minds of people even if they do not believe in a supernatural reality anymore, demons
which are nonetheless strong enough to do mischief. No wonder that Dick was fascinated by such an
ambiguous narrative.
9. The fact that Capra’s movie is not mentioned in the first volume of the Selected Letters, which
covers the years from 1938 to 1971 does not necessarily mean that Dick did not know It’s A Wonderful
Life; due to the 1971 break-in, many of the documents Dick kept in his archive were destroyed, in-
cluding the carbon copies of the letters he wrote before 1971. Just a few of them have been retrieved
by the editors of the Selected Letters, compared to the abundance in the following five volumes.
10. There is obviously a strong political subtext in the opposition Bedford Falls vs. Pottersville
which has been noticed by Frasca (cf. Ch. 2 “La notte delle superfici”); suffice it to say that Bedford
Falls embodies the ideals of Roosevelt’s Keynesian economy, while Pottersville materializes the negative
consequences of laissez-faire capitalism (what is today known as Neoliberalism).
11. Lorenzo DiTommaso has highlighted the syncretistic nature of the religious subtext in Puppets,
showing that it also draws from Christian, Platonic, and Gnostic traditions (DiTommaso 2001, 53–
5). Besides, the original title of the novel —A Glass of Darkness— is an unmistakable quotation of
Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13:12 (DiTommaso 2001, 53).
12. Also Will Christopher is cured, because in the last chapter he is no more a bum but a successful,
enterprising TV technician, owner of “the most attractive shop along Central Street” (140).
13. Dick’s use of concepts coming from existentialist psychoanalysis was first discussed by Tony
Wolk in his 1995 essay “The Swiss Connection.”
14. In the essay “The World of a Compulsive” by V.E. von Gebsattel (May, 170–90), which quotes
Heraclitus’ Fragment B89 thus: “When men dream, each has his own world (idios kosmos), when
they are awake, they have a common world (koinos kosmos)” (May, 182).
15. Also the grave-world or tomb-world concept can be found in one of the most important essays
in Existence, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought” by Ludwig Binswanger (May, 191–213),
possibly the most important representative of existential psychoanalysis.
16. In 1967 Dick suggested Roger Zelazny to write a novel based on a board game where characters
should move on the board, or better inside it, because each square is an alternate world; the game was
to be controlled by “Cosmic Game-Players”; he quoted his “ACE book” Puppets as the model (SL1
226).
17. We might mention such short stories like “The Leech,” “The Mountain Without a Name,”
and the highly representative “The Academy,” plus his 1960 novel The Status Civilization which may
be considered as a summa of his “sociological” period. Sociological sf also includes a good part of the
276 NOTES — CHAPTER 2

sf short fiction written by Richard Matheson in the 1950s, and some works by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit
451 first and foremost.
18. One might then wonder whether purportedly “Dickian” films such as Andy and Larry Wa-
chowski’s The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003) actually
are more VanVogtian than Dickian.
19. There could be some relation between Dick’s shunts and what van Vogt might have told him
at the sf Worldcon in 1954. The modal verb is necessary since we do not have sources that tell us what
van Vogt actually told Dick; we just know what the fictional character of van Vogt tells the fan (who
might be a fictional avatar of Philip K. Dick) in Dick’s short story “Waterspider”: “I start out with a
plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot to finish the rest of the
story” (CS4 224). So we have van Vogt’s method in Dick’s own words; however, what is interesting
is the idea of a discontinuity, of an interrupted plot that must be superseded by another in order to
complete a story. Unfortunately we have no external evidence telling us whether Dick faithfully —
albeit not literally — reported van Vogt’s words, or put in the character’s mouth a statement that
reflected his own modus operandi.
20. Especially in its Avant-Pop variety, well represented in the nineties by such novels as Patricia
Anthony’s Happy Policeman (1994), Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape (1998), Steve Erickson’s Arc
d’X (1993) and Lewis Shiner’s Glimpses (1993); cf. Rossi “From Daick to Lethem.”
21. Besides, the name of the protagonist (Peter Garden) resembles the name of a property on the
Monopoly Board, i.e. Marvin Gardens (Sutin 301).
22. There are at least three other novels where Dick traveled in a Sfnal territory which bordered
on crime fiction: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), A Maze of Death (1970), and Flow My
Tears, The Policeman Said (1974). But some critics (Italian sf novelist and expert Valerio Evangelisti
among them) noticed that also Ubik is indebted to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (cf.
Ch. 6 and 7).
23. This name/surname seems to be one of Dick’s favorites, since we also have Anne Hawthorne
in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Ch. 7), and Hawthorne Abendsen, the writer in The Man
in the High Castle (Ch 3). Valerio Massimo De Angelis argued that Abendsen’s character might hint
at Nathaniel Hawthorne (De Angelis 2006).
24. He completed Stigmata less than a year later; Game-Players was received by Dick’s agent on 4
June 1963, Stigmata on 18 March 1964.
25. A good example of time travel outside sf is Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “Rip Van
Winkle.”
26. Dick does not say in his June 3, 1957, letter to Anthony Boucher what were the other novels
he had to drastically shorten (as for The Man Who Japed he says that 75 typescript pages were edited
out): yet, given the date of the letter, they should be The World Jones Made and Solar Lottery. Eye in the
Sky also underwent major changes, but those will be discussed in Chapter 2. However, Don Wollheim,
the publisher, said that he never changed the plots of those Dick’s novels he published (Sutin 90).

Chapter 2
1. Kim Stanley Robinson says that “the action of these narratives is in every case the successful
toppling of the dystopian state” and concludes that “all of these novels are wish fulfillments” (Robinson
14); this is obviously not incompatible with their status of hastily written sf novels, whose primary
aim is entertaining readers.
2. Dick’s appreciation of the little man may have populist aspects, which will be discussed in the
reading of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ch. 6). It is however interesting that Fallada’s ab-
solutely realistic depiction of a little man, an ordinary German young man struggling to maintain his
little family, could be transmogrified into the Dickian Little Men struggling against futuristic world
dictatorships and alien threats. It is one of Dick’s many “deliberate anachronisms,” his appropriation
of characters, ideas, stories from other times (some of them definitely remote) to be “brutally” inserted
in his futuristic or contemporary settings — we might mention his thefts from Gnostic theology, Ger-
man romanticism, 17th-century poetry. A whole book might be written on this, and it would not be
a work of pedantic erudition.
3. What Dick was not allowed to do in the 1950s he managed to do in the early 1980s, when he wrote
a novel, The Divine Invasion, where one of the protagonists is Yah, the God of the Bible, cf. Chapter 10.
 Notes — Chapter 3 277

4. Also Robinson analysed this novel on the basis of Heraclitus’ dichotomy (Robinson 15–7); but
I prefer to introduce the concept of Finite Subjective Reality because in Lethem the private world is
one that other people may access (albeit involuntarily), which is the same situation we have in Eye and
in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Obviously a private world that may be somewhat accessed
and shared turns into a small koinos kosmos or common world, but one where individuals are subjected
to the will of the creator or dreamer of the FSR; this microworld is evidently a metaphor of literature
(and other arts which may create a sustained virtual reality, such as cinema, theatre, etc.).
5. This choice is also motivated by the criticism of the not-well-meditated use of the koinos/idios
kosmos concepts that has been expressed by Lorenzo DiTommaso (DiTommaso 2001, 57). We should
in fact not forget that Dick’s pocket universes or FSRs are quite different from what idios kosmos originally
was in Heraclitus and its translation in psychoanalytical terms operated by existential psychiatrists.
6. According to Robinson this is Dick’s way to suggest his readers to drop out of society, rejecting
the American Fifities’ koinos kosmos of conformism, intolerance and militarism (Robinson 16–7).
One might object that starting a business is a rather weak way to drop out, but we should not un-
derestimate the difference between a firm working on missile technologies and one producing harmless
hi-fi equipment: the former serving the machinery of Cold War, the latter at the service of music,
that is, one of Dick’s favourite forms of artistic creativity.
7. Yet Dick thought that the ending, where Hamilton enters into a partnership with Laws, was
“very daring and progressive” for 1956, the year when he wrote the novel (Rickman 1988, 125), when
segregation was still mandated by Jim Crow laws in several states.
8. Moreover, there is at least a commentator which proposed a religious subtext for this novel,
because Hamilton can be said to have had an experience of “awakening conscience” which allows him
to fully understand the immorality of the bigoted political intolerance which has targeted his wife;
this awakening is associated with a renewed “faith in oneself ” (DiTommaso 2001, 60).
9. Hofstadter does not however apply his category of “paranoid style” to contemporary American
politics, but also to earlier phases of US history; he traces the sources of political paranoia back to the
spreading of Illuminist ideas in late-18th-century America.
10. An idea which would be later recycled by an older and more successful sf writer, Robert A.
Heinlein, in his 1964 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In Heinlein’s the opposition between the
Lunar rebels and the Earth is seen as a science-fictional re-telling of the American Revolution, some-
thing which is not as evident in Dick’s novel.
11. According to Sutin, Confessions was written in 1959 though it was published in 1975 (Sutin 298).
12. I have taken this phrase from Umberto Eco’s discussion of Greimas’ semantics (Eco 1979, 94);
there effect de sense is something that is created by much smaller texts than a novel, but it may be said
that a particular reading of a text much longer than a lexeme like the one analysed by Eco may also
produce an effect of signification, and that several effects of signification may be produced by a single
literary text.
13. It could be also argued that the character leaves the Peyton Place-like world of mainstream lit-
erature (but we would better use the term “best-seller realism” here) and is free to reach the world of
science-fiction travelling on the archetypal icon of SF according to Thomas M. Disch: the starship.
14. In my 1996 article “Just a Bunch of Words” I suggested that Dick was aware that behind the
Greek word logos used by St. John at the beginning of his Gospel, there was the Jewish term dabar,
meaning both “thing” and “word.” This hypothesis was subsequently contested by Lorenzo DiTommaso
in his 1998 article “A logos or Two Concerning the logoz of Umberto Rossi and Philip K. Dick’s Time
Out of Joint,” though one of the fragments of the Exegesis that have been published mentions the
Jewish term (spelled as dabhar) (Pursuit 126) in connection with Philo of Alexandria’s theory of Logos.
Anyhow, the fragment was written in 1981, so it does not prove that Dick already knew about dabar
and its peculiar double meaning when he wrote the park scene in Time.
15. Something similar can be found in the Introduction Dick wrote to his short story collection
The Golden Man (Shifting Realities 93).

Chapter 3
1. Though the atrocities shown by newsreels left deep marks on Dick’s mind (Platt 153–4).
2. The Fifth Marine Regiment was involved in heavy fighting in summer 1918, especially in the
fierce battle of Belleau Wood (1–26 June); some episodes of those clashes were soon part of the Marines
278 NOTES — CHAPTER 3

mythology. The Fifth also played an important role during the final Allied offensive of Autumn 1918
which brought W.W.I to an end, fighting in the battles of Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne Of-
fensive (which is not casually mentioned in High Castle [66]). The Fifth was a prestigious unit which
distinguished itself; no wonder then that Edgar Dick described himself as “a corporal like Napoleon
and Hitler” (Sutin 14).
3. This story will be subsequently used as the plot frame of The Penultimate Truth (Ch. 6).
4. Here we follow Peter Jones’ distinction of combat novel vs. war novel; the former focusing on
the experience of soldiers (a good example could be The Short-Timers, written by one of Dick’s ac-
quaintances, Gustav Hasford, a Vietnam veteran), the latter also dealing with the civilian world, and
showing the consequences of war, or contrasting the plight of combatants with that of civilians, etc.
(two examples being Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow). Jones introduced the
distinction in his 1976 monograph War and the Novelist, focusing on US war narratives; I extended it
to other literatures in my essay Il secolo di fuoco, which also discusses High Castle.
5. Working with a respectable publishing house did not only mean more prestige for the author,
but also an opportunity to work with a competent editor, like Peter Israel, who worked with Dick on
High Castle: Israel’s contribution was wholeheartedly acknowledged by Dick (Rickman 1988, 139–
40).
6. Dick could have read the novel, as he had been deeply struck by Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922),
where he “found [his] character” (Rickman 1989, 211).
7. Already published as a standalone article on Extrapolation in 1991.
8. This is particularly evident in the treatment of Byron, who turns into “an uncompromising
conservative” (Hawthorne 290) in the House of the Lords in his old age, or Bonaparte, who has been
moved “from St. Helena to England” (Hawthorne 294). Though most of the story is about literature,
it also possesses an important historical-political aspect.
9. It is quite clear that the knowledge of history may vary, and that we may imagine a reader so
ignorant about 20th-century history that s/he might totally miss the point of the novel; but even if
this hypothetical reader did not know anything of W.W.II and its outcome, he would be faced with
two different versions of history in the novel, which would obviously lead him/her to wonder what
really happened in 1939–45. We might say that The Man in the High Castle intrinsically forces the
reader to question his/her referential code, even if he lacks information about the Second World War.
10. This should also bring to a revision of Barthes’ idea of a Referential Code, which I have at-
tempted in my doctoral thesis, La prova del fuoco.
11. It also accounts for an important episode of the novel, Mr. Tagomi’s visit (in Chapter 14) to
an alternate San Francisco where the Japanese are not respected and feared, but treated with racist
contempt — another level of reality which should correspond to our one. Hence the novel also displays
the Zero Text, and this is something Dick overtly said in one of his speeches (Shifting Realities 247).
12. I have collected all the I Ching hexagrams mentioned in the text in this table which might be
useful for future interpreters:
Table 3.2 Note
Character who
Number obtains the
and name Description hexagram Page
15, Ch’ien Modesty FRANK FRINK 18
44, Kou Coming To Meet F. FRINK 20
20, Ta Kuo The Preponderance of the Great TAGOMI 23
46, Sheng Ascending TAGOMI 25
11, T’ai Peace F. FRINK 53
26, Dà Chù The Taming Power of the Great F. FRINK 56
47, K’un Oppression (Exhaustion) F. FRINK 102
51, Ch’en God Appears in the Sign of Arousing TAGOMI 161
42, Yi Increase JULIANA FRINK 209
43, Kuai Break-through (Resoluteness) J. FRINK 209
61, Chung Fu Inner Truth TAGOMI 231
Idem Idem J. FRINK 267
Tagomi actually obtains Hexagram 61 at p. 194, so that it comes before 42 and 43, but Dick does not
tell us in that page what hexagram is the result of Tagomi’s query.
13. Even his family name is bogus: “Cinnadella” may sound Italian, but it is not a real, documented
Italian surname.
 Notes — Chapter 4 279

14. I have discussed the character system in High Castle from a racial/ethnic point of view in my
2000 article “All Around the High Castle: Narrative Voices and Fictional Visions in Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle,” where I show how ethnic identity affects each character’s point of
view, and how the I Ching can be considered as a quasi-character.
15. According to Palmer the devices Dick used to do this are “fantasy, … a textualist dissolution
of the objective ‘real,’ … a non-linear conception of temporality, and … a theologizing of history”
(Palmer 131); these are indeed components which play a role in the novel, and Palmer managed to
outline their respective roles. One should add that these components fit Palmer’s conception of post-
modernism as an ideology of gnoseologic nihilism, and that is the reason why he chose to focus on
them, overlooking the issue of paranoia.
16. In the former we have Leon Cartwright’s elaborate plot to overthrow the despotic rule of Quiz-
master Reese Verrick, and Verrick’s less hidden counterplot to defend his own power; in the latter, a
world dominated by computers endowed with artificial intelligence is torn by the struggle between
two AIs, Vulcan 3 and Vulcan 2, based on deception and the manipulation of informa-
tion.
17. Palmer is sceptical about DiTommaso’s description of Juliana’s “adventure” as a path to re-
demption, and says “it is hard to see why Dick has Abendsen praise her as something magical, a
‘chthonic spirit’” (Palmer 129). Actually Abendsen’s words do not sound like praise at all, as Juliana
is also called a daemon; Caroline, Abendsen’s wife says she is “terribly, terribly disruptive” (248); and
a chthonic spirit belongs to the underworld (in ancient Greek religion), to the world of the dead. In
Dick’s oeuvre Juliana is another embodiment of that formidable female figure which is also described
as Magna Mater, whose avatars are other dark-haired, streetwise, cold-blooded women, like Pris
Frauenzimmer in We Can Build You or Donna in A Scanner Darkly; these dark-haired girls are often
warlike and ready to fight ( Juliana is a martial arts instructress), and they may also relate to a peculiar
Olympian (not Chthonian) goddess, Pallas Athena, who was the Greek goddess of war and wisdom
(one of the identities of another dark-haired girl, Zina Pallas in The Divine Invasion, cf. Ch. 9).
Palmer may find her figure puzzling, but her meaning is not so difficult to interpret once she is read
against the background of Dick’s oeuvre, where characters are often recurring; in that intertextual
system, it is the dark-haired, tough, warlike girl who must eliminate the Nazi thug.
18. A remarkable case of historical uncertainty, because more than forty years after they execution
there is not absolute certainty yet about their being innocents unjustly killed or real Soviet spies; con-
tradictory revelations about the couple were published as late as 2008.
19. While the numberless hints at the reality of the 1950s and 1960s scattered throughout the
novel could be read as a series of more or less hidden prolepses.
20. Though he had to research his novel and study the details of W.W.II, something that has
already been noticed by Palmer (Palmer 119). Dick was quite proud of his research work, cf. the
Acknowledgements page (8). Suffice it to say that even major Ricardo Pardi, the commander of Joe
Cinnadella’s “crack artillery battery” (82) during the war in North-Africa, mentioned only twice
in just one scene of the novel, really existed. In fact the commander of the first group of the Italian
2° Reggimento d’Artiglieria Celere in January 1942 (which was part of the Marcks group of the
German Afrikakorps) was a major Pardi (whose Christian name was actually spelt Riccardo); he played
an important role in the battle at Halfaya Pass, near Sallum, in June 1941 (mentioned in Paul Carell’s
The Foxes of the Desert, one of the historical essays Dick listed in the Acknowledgements [Carell 37–
8]).
21. West was acknowledged by Dick as an influence on his Confessions of a Crap Artist (Rickman
1988, 133); though the writer added that “there’s no evidence of a Nathaniel [sic!] West influence on
the book when you read it,” Confessions does read as a journey in the ordinary madness of ordinary
people in California, just like West’s The Day of the Locust: Jack Isidore may be just an updated (and
less threatening) version of the fool in West’s novel, Homer Simpson.

Chapter 4
1. Suvin ends his article wondering whether Dick will continue writing science-fiction, as the
science-fictional elements of his most recent novel at that time, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said,
are “perfunctory” (Suvin 1975, 14).
2. On January 18 and July 31 respectively: the latter is quoted by Sutin in Divine Invasions (114).
280 NOTES — CHAPTER 4

3. Dick reiterated his claim also in one of the last letters he wrote, that of August 10, 1981 (SL6
206–7).
4. While writing High Castle Dick used the Antholog y of Japanese Literature (1955) edited by
Donald Keene, one of the major Japanologists in the United States (who suggested me to read Noma’s
Zone of Emptiness). That anthology, mentioned in the Acknowledgements of Dick’s novel (7), does
not cover the 20th century, though it mentions two other works by Keene, his 1956 anthology Modern
Japanese Literature and his 1953 compact history Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western
Readers, none of which mentions the students of French literature at Tokyo University that Dick al-
legedly imitated.
5. High Castle was completed by November 29, 1961; Dick completed Time-Slip less than a year
later, in October 1962.
6. They are Arnie Kott, Jack Bohlen and his wife Silvia, Leo Bohlen, Norbert Steiner and his
son Manfred, Otto Zitte, Dr. Glaub. Suvin did not insert the psychiatrist in his scheme (Suvin 1975,
5) but David Bohlen, Jack and Silvia’s son, though he cannot be said to have a point of view of his
own.
7. Warrick posits four different networks or webs which connect the four settings of the novel
(Warrick 68) and the episodes of the plot (Warrick 68–9); one of them is “the invisible network of
human relationships” (Warrick 68).
8. We know Dick had the concepts of existentialist psychoanalysis in mind while he was writing
Time-Slip, as he recommends Rollo May’s collection of essays to Tony Boucher in his April 25, 1962
letter (written just six months before the completion of the novel), where he also mentions the Umwelt
(misspelt as “Unwelt,” SL1 65).
9. Counter-Clock was completed in late 1965, so it comes after the group of novels where Dick
creates ontological uncertainty by means of time travel (Ch. 5) and Stigmata, where the hallucinogenic
drug Chew-Z also allows a ghostly form of time travel; we might then say that the first half of the
1960s is a time in which time is a central concern for Dick, who experiments with both Erzahlzeit
(the time of narrating) and erzahlte Zeit (the narrated time) as distinguished by Gunter Muller (Muller
1968).
10. Also Warrick noticed this passage, highlighting the blackout of consciousness that strikes Jack
when the confrontation with Arnie occurs (Warrick 74); actually Dick does not really need to describe
what happens once again, as readers already know it thanks to the repeated prolepses. This is not very
different from what we will find in Stigmata, where the moment of Eldritch’s death is not told because
it has been already shown through Barney (Ch. 7).
11. Pagetti reads Manfred’s gubble (which is Dick’s rendering of both his destructured utterances
and the way he perceives what other characters tell him) as “the annihilation of any verbal communi-
cation” (Pagetti 2002, 14), a sort of degree zero of language (and writing), but sees also Manfred as a
sort of arch-Dickian character, whose deviant mind turns the private drama of alienation into a public
issue — we might say that Manfred’s private world powerfully impacts on the shared world (Pagetti
2002, 14–5).
12. Vallorani’s 2006 essay “Con gli occhi di un bambino” reads Manfred’s condition based on
Bruno Bettelheim’s essay on autism, but unfortunately ignores the existentialist psychoanalysis which
inspired Dick’s novel; however, Vallorani’s reading effectively focuses on the paradoxical role of con-
nector played by the autistic boy in the climactic scene on Dirty Knobby (chapters 15 and 16).
13. Interestingly one of the androids, which have been built to resemble historical characters, is a
replica of Immanuel Kant (152); a possible hint at the Ding-an-sich issue, the radical split between an
unknowable objective reality and the human mind which strives to grasp and order it through its cat-
egories.
14. This reading and other precious insights on this novel can also be found in Pagetti’s 2002 In-
troduction to the Italian translation (written by Pagetti himself ), “I procioni di Marte.”
15. This seems to be the assumption that underlies Lejla Kucukalic’s reading of Martian Time-Slip
in the third chapter of her Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age, but the lack of a solid
reconstruction of the historical background of the novel (something that earliest critics could afford
to omit, given the small historical distance from the year of publication of the novel) renders her
reading too unfocused and abstract. Kucukalic quotes Foucault as an example of the “corresponding
intellectual climate” (62–6), where “contemporary” would have been a more fitting adjective than
“corresponding,” but does not mention Anti-psychiatry or its most important representatives, such as
R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz or Franco Basaglia; nor she connects the novel to other countercultural
 Notes — Chapter 4 281

texts or works of art which tried to promote a different image of and approach to mental disease in
the 1960s.
16. And their plight, as Warrick points out that “[t]he Martian world may be imaginary, but Jack’s
struggle to escape the Tomb World is real” (Warrick 78).
17. If Mars is California, a synecdoche of the United States, could not Arnie Kott, the corrupt,
power-hungry yet charismatic trade union leader, be an anamorphic image of Jimmy Hoffa, the Team-
sters leader who had been pursued by Robert F. Kennedy since 1957? A whole book could be written
only to pinpoint all the reference to US current affairs scattered in Dick’s novels.
18. And, as Palmer suggests, Jack manages to escape both Arnie and Manfred (Palmer 147), because
the boy is dangerous to him: “Manfred … can infect others with his vision of reality” (Palmer 158).
It is a vision invaded by the entropic gubbish, an inner wasteland of ruins and decay mirroring the
desolation of the Martian landscape. Maybe a better description of the interaction between Jack and
Manfred is that the former must escape the dismal tomb world in which the latter is trapped; the
time-slip is somewhat contagious (in fact also Arnie is sucked down by it in chapter 15 and 16).
19. We do not know if Dick had read Kesey’s novel; the name of the author of One Flew Over…
is mentioned only once in Dick’s letters (SL4 10), but in the January 10, 1975 letter it is misspelt as
“Keasy,” and there is no mention of his novel (in that letter Dick complained that he was unable to
provide the publisher of A Scanner Darkly with a list of prestigious writers which could read and pos-
sibly endorse his new novel).
20. They are Bruno Bluthgeld, Hoppy Harrington, Stuart McConchie, Bonny Keller and her chil-
dren Edie and Billy, Dr. Stockstill, Walt Dangerfield, Andrew Gill; to these we should add other
minor characters, such as Eldon Blaine (175–9), who may occasionally act as narrative foci.
21. Actually the two novels are quite different, though it is true that the initial scene of Voices has
striking similarities with the first pages of Bloodmoney; in the earlier novel there is a Modern TV Sales
and Service shop, owned by Jim Fergessen (Hoppy’s and Stuart’s employer in Bloodmoney); there is
an Afro-American sweeping the pavement, though he does not work in the TV shop; the name of the
protagonist is Stuart Hadley (though he is white).
22. The details of the failure can be found in Rickman 1989 (304). Suffice it to say that, for
example, Mary and the Giant was rejected by 25 publishers. Commentators have suggested reasons
why the important New York publishers did not buy Dick’s novels: according to Butler, it is a matter
of the scandalous issues (incest, interracial couples, marital problems, etc.) Dick often dealt with
(Butler 2007, 36, 40, 42, 45–6, 49, 52); Rickman believes mainstream publishers found the hidden
message in Dick’s novels unpalatable, as it revealed “that so many Americans were lying to themselves,
about their jobs, about their lives” (Rickman 1989, 314).
23. Lawrence Sutin rejects Dick’s narrative of the Time-Slip disaster, as he maintains that the novel
which was submitted to several mainstream publishers was We Can Build You, completed in October
1962 but published only ten years later (Sutin 118). Here I suspect Sutin is missing the point; Dick
was not deflated by the fact that Time-Slip did not find a publisher, because it did, in 1964, well
before Build; he was depressed because after two novels published as hardcovers, he “was back selling
to the goddamn paperbacks again, selling to Ace again” (Rickman 1988, 147). To this humiliation,
we should add that Time-Slip was turned down even by Wollheim at Ace.
24. I have discussed the figure of Walt Dangerfield by putting it in the wider context of the media
in Dick’s oeuvre in my article “Radio PKD” and in the even wider context of US radio vis-à-vis
Sixties counterculture in “Acousmatic Presences” (Rossi 2009, 88–9).
25. The graphic description of war and other forms of mass violence was not, however, Dick’s
forte. The two chapters which display the day the bombs fell are characterized by a distinctly oneiric
atmosphere, though it might be argued that such a feeling is stronger or weaker according to the point
of view adopted. If this is a choral novel, also the depiction of the catastrophe is choral, and differ-
entiated. Compare, for example, the nightmarish, vaguely surrealistic paragraph where we see the nu-
clear holocaust as perceived by Bruno Bluthgeld (58–61) with Stuart McConchie’s more concrete and
frantic experience (61–3).
26. The title of the novel as it is now was concocted by the publisher (those proposed by Dick
were In Earth’s Diurnal Course and A Terran Odyssey), possibly to take advantage of the popularity of
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb, also dealing with the nuclear holocaust.
27. In this novel Nixon is the Director of the FBI, but this is not a clue to the falseness of the
world Dick presents us with; it is part of the construction of a near-future world, as we are told right
282 NOTES — CHAPTER 5

from the start that the year is 1981 (2). Nixon, who had just been defeated in the 1962 California gu-
bernatorial election when Dick was working on the novel, seemed at that time to have no political
future, hence his recycling in the intelligence field.
28. So Warrick disagrees with Jameson; interestingly she also disagrees with the widespread belief
that Dr. Bloodmoney is a utopian novel (Warrick 88).
29. Also Edie Keller believes in Bluthgeld’s powers (236), but she is a little girl after all.
30. In my essay Il secolo di fuoco I discuss the issue of the radical difficulty of narrating and expe-
riencing war as one of the key theoretical issues in the field of war literature criticism (Rossi 2008,
45–62); it is difficult to deny that Dr. Bloodmoney belongs to that very peculiar area of war literature
which deals with World War III, a war which never took place but looms large on the mindscape of
the late 20th century.
31. Here domestic disharmony is present in the crumbling marriage of Bonny Keller; and it is in-
teresting to see how Dick could touch the theme of marital strife from the point of view of a woman,
regardless of critical commonplaces. For a more detailed treatment of marriage in Dick’s oeuvre (es-
pecially in the realistic novels), see the fourth chapter of Palmer’s monograph, “Mired in the Sex War”
(Palmer 67–84).
32. Interestingly, in a novel based on interpersonal relations, the asylum takes its name from an
American psychiatrist whose research on interpersonal relationships led to the foundation of inter-
personal psychoanalysis. Dick had read Sullivan’s 1956 essay, Clinical Studies in Psychiatry, which he
recommended to Tony Boucher in a letter written in 1962 (SL1 64).
33. Warrick only passingly mentions Clans, but files no complaint about its alleged sexism.

Chapter 5
1. Maybe some critics consider Penultimate a somewhat minor literary achievement by Philip
Dick because its binary structure is less complex, intriguing and ambiguous than the mazes we find
in the major works of the 1960s, such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip,
or Dr. Bloodmoney. Moreover, Penultimate seems closer to the concerns of Dick’s fiction of the 1950s
(the nuclear threat, Cold War propaganda, social status, the Grey Flannel Suit nightmare etc.), thus
it may have been read as a step back.
2. A model that has been subsequently imitated in many other countries, including Italy; no
wonder then that it took Europe about twenty years to articulate a discussion of mass-media politics,
which finds its most radical expression in Jean Baudrillard’s works of the 1980s.
3. It should then be noted that the relation between Mussolini and Hitler was more complex than
the former falling under the spell of the latter; Hitler only managed to become Germany’s prime min-
ister in 1933, when Mussolini’s Fascist regime had been in power for eleven years. Historians generally
say that it was Hitler who fell under Mussolini’s spell, and imitated the older dictator (the Duce was
born in 1883, six years before the Fuhrer).
4. The issue of nostalgia and nostalgic objects in Dick has been thoroughly discussed by Jameson,
which subsumes Wash-35 and other artefacts which reproduce lieux de memoire under the category
of the layout (a term Dick used in Stigmata, cf. Ch. 7) in his “History and Salvation in Philip K.
Dick.”
5. The effects of the law had already been shown in his 1958 short story with the eloquent title
“Try and Change the Past,” which also belongs to the Change War cycle.
6. Dick was surely aware of Leiber’s treatment of time travel when he wrote Penultimate because
on the December 1963 issue of Galaxy where “No Great Magic” was published there was also Dick’s
short story “If There Were No Benny Cemoli”; but Leiber’s Change War cycle was so famous in the
sf community (The Big Time won the Hugo Award in 1958) it is highly unlikely that Dick totally ig-
nored it before that date.
7. Though there is no agreement on where exactly Drake landed, one of the prevalent hypotheses
identifies Nova Albion with Drakes Bay, situated on the coast of Marin County, California, not far
from Point Reyes, where Dick lived with his third wife Anne; hence Dick’s interest in the Drake ex-
pedition.
8. The idea of a man who is “his own parent” obviously bypasses any female figure representing
motherhood, thus achieving a disquieting absolute fatherhood (cf. Jameson’s discussion of Heinlein’s
Lazarus Long novels quoted at the end of this chapter).
 Notes — Chapter 6 283

9. This is the position of Kim Stanley Robinson, who criticizes Dick for having put too many
twists in the plot so that it “just doesn’t work” (Robinson 72). Surely if we analyze the plot looking
for the “rational explanation” Robinson demands we will find holes and even pratfalls, but one cannot
help wondering what is the consistency of berating Dick for the lack of a tightly woven rational plot
in Simulacra and then praising Dick’s decision to make certain that “no explanation will cover all of
the facts” (Robinson 95) in Ubik. The Simulacra is structured along an entropic process: order is grad-
ually replaced by chaos, then mayhem — this structure works because it is charged with a political
meaning, and can be even said to be prophetic, if one thinks of what happened in the USA from 1960
to the moment that Nixon had to resign, including the assassination of a President and a possible can-
didate to presidency, plus two prestigious Black leaders, urban riots, etc. Warrick’s assessment of the
novel as pessimistic political satire is more perceptive (Warrick 89–93).
10. We know that Wait was completed on December 4, 1963. Less than a month later Dick sent
another manuscript to his literary agent, Clans of the Alphane Moon: though we know that Dick wrote
fast, it is difficult to believe that he was not already working on Clans when he was still completing
Wait. Stigmata was completed by March 17, 1964; the day before he had sent another manuscript, The
Crack in Space, and this should mean he worked on both novels in winter 1963–64. Dick repeatedly
said that it took him a short time to write a novel, but that he kept meditating on its plot and scenes
for a long time before he started typing the first draft, only jotting down short notes now and then
(Rickman 1988, 55). The strong connections between Wait and Stigmata may then be explained by
the simple fact that while materially working on the former Dick was already composing the latter in
his head.
11. This echoes another historical event, the so-called Doctors’ Plot, an anti–Semitic campaign
hatched by Stalin in the last months of his life (1952–53); Stalin thought that Jewish doctors had
caused the death of several Soviet leaders, and that they might try to assassinate him too.
12. There is an evident political subtext in this novel that deals with racism, an issue that was par-
ticularly hot in 1963, when Dick wrote Wait. Anthropocentrism leads Molinari to ally himself with
the Lilistarians, thus making a fatal mistake; a racist group kills Molinari for his tolerance to aliens.
Racial issues were also present in Dr. Futurity, and they play a very important role in The Crack in
Space, a novel Dick completed only three months after Wait: it tells the story of the first Afro-American
president of the United States, Jim Briskin, who has to solve the problem of all the unemployed
citizens (the so-called sleepers, most of whom are Black) who are kept in cryogenic suspension. I have
already discussed this issue in the Afterword to the Italian translation of Crack (Rossi Postfazione).
13. This marginal figure is a perfect example of helper, a role often played by alien creatures which
are mostly benevolent in Dick’s fiction, whose function is what Jameson has defined “counsel” ( Jameson
2005, 376–7, 379); his name then is reminiscent of Kafka’s characters (another writer often mentioned
in relation to Dick, and one whose name Dick himself sometimes dropped in his interviews).
14. A revelation which is anticipated by Bert Hazeltine, the manager of the firm which manufactures
the drug, who suspects that “the time period entered by the subject under its influence is phony”
(140).
15. It is interesting that Dick does not use the usual US political terminology to define the offices
of the future government: Stanton Brose is not a Secretary, but a Minister; Dick is using a term which
is not usual in Anglo-Saxon political systems, but is typical of Continental European governments.
Germany has Ministers, and the term was also used in the Third Reich. Dick may have derived the
term from his research on Nazi Germany, and used it to suggest the totalitarian character of the world
government depicted in the novel.
16. On the other hand, it is something that Dick still remembered almost twenty years later, when
Rickman asked him to comment on this novel (Rickman 1988, 154); Rickman told Dick that “[a]ny
other novelist would have built a whole novel around that idea, and you just toss it off as a plot
device,” without realizing that often Dick’s “small” plot devices, taken together, create the bewildering
and overpowering effect of radical uncertainty which characterizes his fiction.

Chapter 6
1. The objection that Blade Runner is not a novel by Dick but a film based on Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? is not relevant, inasmuch as the idea that Rick Deckard might be an android is also
suggested in the novel, as we shall see, even if it turns out to be false.
284 NOTES — CHAPTER 6

2. For a survey of Dick’s sf about androids, robots, and simulacra, cf. Barlow’s “Philip K. Dick’s
Androids.”
3. It also started the current PKD craze in Hollywood, with several films based on Dick’s novels
or stories and more films being made. I am not interested in the movie versions of Dick’s fictions (be
they adaptations that strive to be faithful to the text, like Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly or action movies
where the name of Dick is just a pretext, like Tamahori’s Next), but this is an aspect of his impact on
our culture that has been repeatedly discussed, cf. Fitting 2006, La Polla 2006, Kerman 1991.
4. Dick must have taken the figure of the Magna Mater from Jung, who considers it one of the
archetypes (cf. Jung’s essay “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore”). The so-called Magna Mater
schizophrenia is thus a fictional mental disease assembled by Dick himself (and possibly rooted in his
difficult relation to his own mother).
5. I wish to repeat it to make it as clear as possible: when simulacra/androids/replicants are clearly
recognized as such they are not the direct cause of ontological uncertainty. Things are different when
it is not clear whether one or more characters (including the protagonist) are or are not artificial —
like in “Imposter” or, on a vaster scale, in Androids.
6. In a novel fraught with ambiguity and ontologically uncertain situations, especially in the last
three chapters, something said by Barrows may well call in doubt our understanding of that scene:
the businessman remarks “That girl in there is underdeveloped. Everything slides back out. What’s
she doing there in the bedroom anyhow? Has she got that skinny body–” (219). Does Barrows really
say this, or is Louis also hallucinating these comments? And if Barrows really says this, does this mean
that Pris is in the room, notwithstanding what we have been told a few pages before (214), that Louis
found his cigar-smoking father in the bedroom? Many pitfalls are scattered in this most beguiling
novel.
7. Another event that struck Dick, since he decided to open his last novel, The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer, on the day that Lennon was shot (Ch. 10).
8. Once again a comparison with Build is enlightening: in that novel Pris may be artistically
gifted, and there is no doubt that she is (cf. Dillon 53–5), but she is undoubtedly not-wholly-human
in her relations with Louis and others.
9. Dick admitted that Androids was written by cannibalizing previous works, and mentions Con-
fessions of a Crap Artist, at that time another unpublished text he did not expect to see ever published
(Rickman 1988, 133).
10. Another feature which may derive from crime fiction is the absence of the time-slips that char-
acterize other works by Dick and that we have repeatedly mapped in this book: notwithstanding the
abundance of coups de théâtre, the plot is extremely linear and compact, as all the events are told in
chronological succession and take place in 24 hours.
11. There might be another interpretation of the name of the corporation, because it is based in
Seattle, which was the city where Barrows lived in Build, not Louis. We might then imagine that Bar-
rows eventually managed to take Louis and Maury’s firm over — Eldon’s devious manners (49) are
more similar to Barrows’ ways than Louis.’
12. Luba also tries to cheat Rick by explaining her systematic misunderstanding of the proverbs in
the test with the fact that she is German, and takes literally what only a native speaker of English can
perceive as metaphorical statements (80); it is another version of Polokov’s ruse to pose as a stranger.
13. There is also the subplot about Buster Friendly, the TV emcee who exposes Mercerism as a
hoax, which will be discussed in Chapter 10.
14. Peter Fitting is right when he says that Rachel is no more than “a grateful and subservient —
and ageless!— sex doll” (Fitting 1987, 140) in the questionable ending of the first version (I am not
sure this description fits her character in the rest of the movie); however, in the Director’s Cut she is
Deckard’s peer (both are runaway replicants in the end) and her partner (thus mirroring or reintro-
ducing the Roy-Pris couple), yet she is not amoral nor a destroyer of male strength. We might say
that Blade Runner (both versions) is an anomalous noir because it lacks a veritable dark lady. Fitting
already noticed the strong difference between Rachael and Rachel (Fitting 1987, 134).
15. Already noticed by Warrick (128).
16. That of undistinguishable androids looking all the same is an idea Dick had already exploited
in one of his best short stories, “Second Variety” (1953).
17. I suspect Jameson may have had Vernet in mind when he characterized Deckard as a middle-
class hero because the essay of the French critic was published in the same collection of essays, Shades
of Noir (1993), where Jameson published his “Synoptic Chandler.” Jameson explained in his essay on
 Notes — Chapter 7 285

“History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick” that he applied the same “synoptic” method he had used
to explore Chandler’s novels to Dick’s fiction ( Jameson 2005, 363–4).
18. The noir elements in the novel are also hidden by the simple fact that Rick, though endowed with
one of the narrative foci, is not the narrating I of the novel. Both hard-boiled fiction and noir movies are
strongly characterized by the voice of the protagonist/narrator which retrospectively comments on the
events in the story with its unmistakable style unsurprisingly inserted in the final versio of Blade Runner.
19. One might wonder whether the idea to stage Luba Luft’s “retirement” at an exhibition of
paintings by Edvard Munch, including his celebrated The Scream (1893), does not hint at the plight
of bounty hunters, as the description of the painting ends with “[t]he creature stood on a bridge and
no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation” (100); if bounty hunters must be isolate,
and suffer for what they are required to do, Munch’s scene of alienation is a perfect depiction of their
distressing psychological condition.

Chapter 7
1. Interestingly Moylan analyzes one of Dick’s short stories, the impressive “Faith of Our Fathers”
(1967), and he reads it as a “supremely anti-utopian” narrative (Moylan 177), but one with a “closed
mythic quality” which explains its lack of opposition, of a way out or forward of a utopian horizon
(Moylan 177). Unfortunately the author of Scraps of the Untainted Sky did not tackle Dick’s most clas-
sical dystopia, Radio Free Albemuth.
2. Of course I am well aware that condescension should be avoided even when talking about su-
perheroes, be they Marvel or DC Comics or whatever, inasmuch as even in this genre there have been
examples of artistic sophistication and excellence, such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen,
or Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese stories.
3. Though it should be said that Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, has a
greater complexity than the characters of other “classical” dystopias.
4. In Scanner the repressive anti-drug apparatus is evidently a totalitarian system, inasmuch as
the complex surveillance apparatus seem to have made the concept of privacy totally devoid of meaning;
S.A. Fred, the undercover nark, spies on his fellow drug-addicts but also on himself as Bob Arctor,
small-time pusher and junkie. In Albemuth the story is told by two ordinary men, Nicholas Brady
and Phil Dick, who belong to the part of the nation which is oppressed by the police state set up by
president Fremont; they try to resist the repressive political system depicted in the novel, but are
crushed by it (Phil ends up in a concentration camp, Nicholas is executed).
5. Though Suvin changed his mind about the works of the 1970s, he did not revise his assessment
of Stigmata in his 2002 article “Goodbye and Hello.” In fact he chooses to “leave unresolved the stature”
of Stigmata, but lets readers understand that it does not qualify as a member of Dick’s creative plateau
of the early 1960s, which should then only include Castle, Bloodmoney and Time-Slip (Suvin 2002, 373).
6. Carlo Pagetti read Stigmata as a sort of oedipal story where Barney has to deal with two equally
overwhelming paternal figures, Eldritch and Bulero; Eldritch, “the father of the father” (Pagetti 1984,
204, translation mine) is then the ultimate patriarchal authority figure, resembling Saturn, the Greek
god who ate his children.
7. We know that Dick used to recycle images he liked: in fact there is a minor character in an
earlier novel, The Simulacra, who sports “stainless steel teeth” (83), Janet Raimer, the talent scout
who works for the First Lady.
8. Once again readers should be warned that gnosis is not an organized Church whose articles of
faith or dogmas are well defined and fixed (as it is in Roman Catholicism). Gnosis is a constellation
of religious sects which thrived in the early Christian era, whose theological ideas we know only
through fragmentary and incomplete sources.
9. The noun “translation” is however endowed with theological significations in some traditions;
in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for example, or in other branches of Mormonism,
it indicates being physically changed by God from a mortal human being to an immortal human
being — another transformation, and one which bears relation to the novel, as Eldritch boasts that
“God … promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it” (80).
10. The superimposition of Eldritch’s face, especially his eyes and teeth, and his artificial arm on
other characters takes place at pages 83–4, 98, 156, 158–9, 167, 170–1, 177, 200–1, and 204. It is not
always a matter of accident superimposed on substance: in the final occurrence of this phenomenon,
286 NOTES — CHAPTER 7

Bulero asks Felix Blau “‘Leo?’ How come you keep calling me ‘Leo’?” (204). Forgetting who you are
may lead you to believe you are somebody else, possibly Eldritch himself.
11. Though Dick does not miss the opportunity to poke fun at Leo’s triumph by means of Eldritch’s
apparition as a desecrating/defecating dog (97–8).
12. Another layer of meaning is the one that identifies the three stigmata with the original sin, or
“original curse of God” (194). Religious references abound throughout the novel: among the books
Barney takes to Mars there is Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi (127), whose title hints at
Palmer’s being a grim parody of Jesus Christ; on the other hand, Anne Hawthorne is reading an essay
on Mars during her trip to the red planet, whose title, Pilgrim Without Progress (117) is both a pun on
John Bunyan’s famous Christian allegory and another hint at Palmer Eldritch, whose first name in-
dicates a Medieval pilgrim who had visited the Holy Land.
13. BIP is the Black Iron Prison, a recurring phrase in Dick’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s, in-
dicating the dystopian alternate world where the Roman Empire still exists; it is a place where early
Christians, among which Dick’s alter ego, are jailed; but it is also an atemporal symbol of oppression
and despair. Hence Dick’s note means that Tears shows what is the actual world we all live in (the
dystopian police state depicted in the novel is a sort of planetwide jailhouse), so that it is to the BIP
what the Acts of the Apostles were to the Apostolic Age (from c. A.D. 26–36 to A.D. 100), the early
“heroic” age of Christianity.
14. In the latter it only involves Ragle Gumm, but we may well surmise that after Ragle has left
Earth the war will unavoidably end and the fake 1958 town will be dismantled, so that all its “prisoners”
will be set free.
15. Though published in 1974, Tears was written in 1970, and is thematically close to such works
written in the late 1960s as Our Friends From Frolix 8 (which also features a totalitarian society) and
Maze (featuring alternate worlds); I consider it part of a phase of Dick’s literary activity beginning
with Eye and ending with Tears itself.
16. Dick was not however totally wrong when he linked Ubik to Eye and Joint; also in this novel
in an apparently normal — albeit futuristic — world a gradually unfolding chain of strange events (the
regression of vehicles and appliances, mysterious messages appearing in the least likely places, the ap-
parition of Runciter coins) makes the characters (and the readers) suspect that there must be something
wrong. Nothing like that is found in Stigmata, where characters are abruptly thrown in a dismal, sur-
realistic wonderland.
17. Dick’s doubts about the books written after 1964 is not just a matter of hindsight: he already
declared his unhappiness about them in a May 1969 letter (Sutin 163). He was surprised by the critical
interest about Ubik, for example, and in 1975 he could not understand yet why “Marxist critics”
(under this definition he included Stanislaw Lem, unspecified French critics and those — like Suvin,
Fitting and Jameson — who wrote on Science-Fiction Studies) “were so impressed” by this novel (SL4
25); he subsequently told a British critic that he “wrote the book and forgot how [he] came to write
it” (SL4 41). His amazement at the critical enthusiasm about a novel he had probably written just to
pay the bills led Dick to take literally Lem’s thought experiment at the end of his essay “A Hopeless
Case,” the Appendix called “Ubik as Science Fiction” (Lem 1973, 96–104). While Lem wanted to
prove that Dick’s novel was sf, not fantasy — hence his examination of the “scientifically sensible no-
tions” (Lem 1973, 97) the novel was arguably based on — Dick (possibly misled by the explanations
of Lem’s article provided by Claudia Bush, an Idaho State University student who was writing her
MA thesis on Dick’s fiction [SL4 41] and did not seem to be knowledgeable about genre theory) un-
derstood that Ubik was “a paradigm which applies to our own world” (SL4 42), that is a sf novel
which accidentally explained what lies behind the apparent reality of our koinos kosmos. One more
episode of Dick’s uneasy and troublesome relation with the academia.
18. In a letter written well after the composition of the novel, Dick said: “I have a year of amnesia
around the years 1968/70, which is about the time I wrote UBIK, MAZE OF DEATH and OUR FRIENDS
FROM FROLIX EIGHT” (SL5 156). He may be exaggerating here, and his purportedly lost year may
remind us of too many amnesiac characters in his novels, but this should be read as his quasi-fictional
his way to express how difficult that period was.
19. These repeated reversals are instead read by Gallo in an epistemological perspective, suggesting
that each new “discovery” compels characters to change their gnoseological paradigms, in a process
of progressive disenchantment which resembles that of hard sciences (as outlined by Karl Popper);
when Runciter finds the Chip coins, it means that “even the days of the new theory of reality are lim-
ited” (Gallo 1989, 78), translation mine.
 Notes — Chapter 8 287

20. As depicted, not without a certain amount of naivety, by Alexei and Cory Panshin in their his-
tory of Golden Age SF, The World Beyond the Hill (1989).
21. For a more detailed interpretation cf. Rossi 1996 and 2004.
22. The resemblance between the two novels did not escape a British critic like Andrew M. Butler
(Butler 2007, 92). On the other hand, Christie’s influence on Dick was suggested to me by Italian sf
writer and expert Valerio Evangelisti in a personal e-mail, but he underscored the structural similarities
between Ten Little Niggers and Ubik.
23. The influence of Alfred Jarry, the French proto-surrealist writer and inventor of pataphysics,
the absurdist “the science of imaginary solutions,” on Dick is attested by a 1978 letter where he admits
he discovered Jarry through his former wife Nancy Hackett, who had studied at the Sorbonne for a
year and belonged to a circle of pataphysicians (SL5 159–60); all this explains why the name of the
ham actor who plays the part of Mercer in Androids is Al Jarry (Androids 157).
24. That milieu was optimistically depicted by Dick in his speech “The Android and the Human,”
delivered at the University of British Columbia in February 1972; there he proposed those streetwise
kids as the real opponents of the “creatures who have … become instruments, means, rather than
ends” (Shifting Realities 187), that is, the alienated middle-class Americans of Nixon’s years.
25. Dick claimed in another letter that he had completely rewritten the novel “adding all sorts of
new touches” (SL2 151); he then declares “I had done 9 revisions and thought it to be perfect,” and
this might mean that the heavy revising of the manuscript had taken place in 1970, so that only the
tenth and final revision was carried out in 1972. However, Dick’s versions of the story in different
letter are — as it often happens — not wholly consistent. I should add that while he was working on
Tears he also wrote one of his most impressive short stories, “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts”
(Ch. 5), which also shows better craftsmanship than his previous short fiction.
26. Tears may have also been influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin most Dickian novel, The Lathe of
Heaven (Watson 66); though Dick had almost completed the novel in 1970, he rewrote part of it after
the publication of Lathe in 1971. Le Guin’s character of George Orr, a man who can change reality
through his dreams, is an analogous of Dick’s demiurges, though he is less threatening than Palmer
Eldritch and Jory, and less devious than Alys Buckman.
27. The powerful musical subtext of this novel would deserve a detailed analysis. Suffice it to say
that music does not only provide Tears’s title, part of which comes from a song by John Dowland
published in 1600, whose lines Dick also used as epigraphs for the four parts of the novel; it is also a
key element in the scene in chapter 18, when Jason meets Alys, and discovers that she is the only
person who remembers him, and has two of his albums in her quibble; and in the climactic scene in
Chapter 22, set in a coffee shop where the jukebox features Jason’s songs, which are then played by
Mary Ann Dominic and lead to Taverner’s being recognized by the customers (158–9). Music then
sanctions the return of Jason to his reality, to the primary text — or better, as we shall see, to what
looks like the primary text.
28. Suvin seems to subscribe to this idea, but this brings him to brand Tears as a “broken-backed
narrative” (Suvin 2002, 374). Besides, Suvin sees Tears as exemplifying one of Dick’s sins of “political
illiteracy,” the fixation on the “Good Magnate or Ruler” (Suvin 2002, 393).
29. Or Dick’s letters, whose reading might have prevented Robinson from writing that Tears has
“a little protagonist, a TV star who one day wakes up in a world where no one has heard of him” (106).
It is difficult to believe that Jason Taverner, rich, beautiful, famous, a celebrity whose show is followed
by thirty million spectators, is a “little protagonist” at the beginning of the novel; he is then turned
into a nobody who is however not an ordinary man like Dick’s typical characters. Robinson may have
been deceived by something said by Alys Buckman in chapter 18, “How now, little man?” (127), a
rather ironical line, as Alys knows that Jason was a celebrity in the world he comes from. If Robinson
had had access to the first volume of the Selected Letters, he could have discovered that Alys is actually
quoting (or misquoting) one of Dick’s favorite novels, Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? (SL1 64).
30. One more hint at the Zero Text: the character who manages to unravel Taverner’s mystery in
Chapter 27 is called Phil, like the author of the novel.

Chapter 8
1. Curiously he does not mention The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and one might wonder
whether this is due to the fact that it is not a sf novel.
288 NOTES — CHAPTER 8

2. Such an indirectly suggested continuity may be said to exist — albeit in an even less overt
form — also for We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ch. 6).
3. Hence I find it at least surprising that Dick’s VALIS Trilogy is absent from the chapter of the
authoritative Cambridge Companion to Science-Fiction devoted to “Religion and science-fiction,” writ-
ten by Farah Mendlesohn.
4. There are also preternatural events which might induce to read Archer as a fantasy novel, but
they are somewhat neutered in the text (Ch. 10).
5. This is also a possible reading of Time Out of Joint (Ch. 2).
6. Who is not incidentally one of the characters of the second novel in the Trilogy, The Divine
Invasion (Ch. 10).
7. An example of a honest, albeit fragmentary attempt to read Dick in a religious, not literary,
perspective being McKee’s Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter; a more organic effort could
surely yield interesting results.
8. We should also take into account the fact that the novel Dick does not mention in that excerpt
of the Exegesis, namely Archer, is the most skeptical part of the trilogy (Ch. 10).
9. Being based on Dick’s own comments on the Trilogy, this interpretation could be undermined
by other comments to be found in another letter, which Dick wrote to Ursula K. Le Guin on March
6, 1981, where he claims that Invasion, then just published, was part (and conclusion) of a “meta-
novel” which also included Flow, Scanner and VALIS (SL6 137). One should however be suspicious
of this claim, as it is meant to soothe Le Guin’s “distress concerning the female characters” (SL6 137),
by showing that Invasion should heal the wound of “the primordial death of the woman,” i.e. Alys
Buckman in Flow (Ch. 7). After this letter the purported fourfold “meta-novel” is never mentioned
again, and there are several letters that describe the VALIS Trilogy as we know it today (Ch. 9).
10. First-person narrative was not the usual technique Dick resorted to, but he had already used
a narrating-I in Build, Confessions of a Crap Artist and Albemuth (where the two protagonists, Nicholas
Brady and Phil Dick, closely resemble those of VALIS).
11. Which are still undemonstrated hypotheses — like the one presented by Arthur Koestler in an
article published on the July 1974 issue of Harper’s Magazine, quoted by Dick in his letter (SL3 141).
No experimental evidence for the existence of tachyon particles — which should travel faster than
light — has been found yet.
12. Plus other problems about which Dick himself ironized, as when he wrote in a 1980 letter
(hence written well after the 2–3-74 experiences) that people could easily think he “[t]ook drugs. Saw
God. BFD” (SL6 27) i.e., drug abuse had permanently impaired his mental faculties.
13. It remains to understand whether Dick meant the scene to be convincing — or, if we take into
account Frye’s fallacy of premature teleology (Frye 17)— whether its position in the text, the role it
plays in its architecture, aims at convincing readers of something specific: in Albemuth the scene is
dramatic, because Nicholas lives in a totalitarian society where being aware of VALIS and its subversive
messages is extremely dangerous; here it is the clandestine character of the act that is underscored. In
VALIS this scene takes place after Phil has been healed by Sophia, when he is aware again that he and
Fat are the same person, and it may well mark a recovery of his own past, as it refers to something
happened at the time of the earliest pink beam phenomena — it is in fact part of an analepsis — and
is not just related to the anamnesis of the Lord’s Supper (209)— Dick’s theological comments notwith-
standing — but to a recovery of Phil’s own memories. Like many other episodes of the novel, its tone
oscillates between comedy and serious revelation.
14. This is what a superficial reader might understand when Palmer talks about “the blurring be-
tween fictional and historical” taking place in “low” postmodernism (Palmer 235n), and mentions as
examples a few authors of fake memoirs/autobiographies, such as the male white Australian writer
Leon Carmen who published a novel, My Own Sweet Time (1994), pretending to be an aboriginal
woman, Wanda Koolmatrie; or the Swiss musician Bruno Dössekker who published a bogus Holocaust
survivor memoir, Fragments, under the pen name of Binjamin Wilkomirski.
15. A rabbi being more a religious teacher than a priest.
16. One should compare Fat’s predicament to that of Nicholas Brady in Albemuth, who is sure that
VALIS (an alien communication satellite broadcasting precious subversive information) exists. Fat’s
situation is relatively closer to that of Herb Asher in Invasion (Ch. 9) who doubts about the reality of
the world he is living in and suspects he is still in half-life; but in Invasion the multiple plot technique
shows that God exists and is fighting on Herb’s side, and readers are shown what is really going on
when they read the parts about Emmanuel and Zina.
 Notes — Chapter 8 289

17. The Greek word this term derives from originally meant “to lead out”; exegesis being an in-
terpretation or explanation of a text (usually a religious one) which should lead us out of the difficulties
we may encounter while reading it.
18. Another autobiographical reference, as Dick attended group therapy sessions in that hospital
in 1977 (Sutin 253).
19. Completed in 1978, four years after Nixon’s resignation, most of the novel covers the period
1971–77, a time of conservative backlash, given Reagan’s election as Governor of California in 1967
(an office he kept until 1975) and Nixon’s election the following year.
20. This might seem off beat in the early Eighties, but it does not sound insane in A.D. 2010 , after
Negri and Hardt’s Empire and all the talk about an American empire which preceded and followed
9–11.
21. It would be more correct to talk of a Nag Hammadi library: it is made up by thirteen leather-
bound papyrus codices, together with pages torn from another book, which were found near the Nag
Hammadi village in December 1945. The codices contained Coptic translations of 52 mostly Gnostic
tractates dating back to the 2nd century A.D., including the famous Gospel of Thomas.
22. Therapy is, as we have already seen, one of the four corners of the semiotic square that Jameson
has used to persuasively identify the fundamental semantic coordinates of Dick’s works of the 1960s
( Jameson 376, 382)— coordinates which are however still valid for Dick’s later output.
23. This could be interpreted as another form of the paradox that we have met in Androids (Ch.
6): there we had a human being endowed with empathy (Rick Deckard) who is led by his own empathy
to spare a creature (Rachael) who is totally deprived of that ability to understand and enter into an-
other’s feelings; here we have a man (Fat) who feels pity for another (Sherri) who has been rendered
merciless by her terminal illness.
24. Jaynes’ 1976 essay, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, is still
controversial and contested by several psychiatrists; its theory of hallucinations being generated by the
right hemisphere of the brain is however quite important for another novel written by Dick, Scanner.
25. Once again the sf imagination shapes Dick’s meditations on his mystical visions: this situation
is similar to what we have in several sf novels and movies (such as Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie The In-
vasion of the Body-Snatchers), where those who have discovered a covert alien invasion are considered
mad by other people, so that the invasion may continue undisturbed.
26. Kevin and David have been generally interpreted as portraits of Kevin Wayne Jeter and Tim
Powers respectively, two of Dick’s closest friends (both professional sf writers, by the way); but this
identification should be taken cum grano salis. Robert Galbreath has suggested that Phil, Kevin, and
David, whose initials spell PKD, might all actually be aspects of Dick’s own (split?) personality (Gal-
breath 119). Besides, K.W. Jeter himself has said that he “wasn’t a complete church-burning skeptic,
… Phil wasn’t this completely befuddled person,” and Powers was not “a complete religious no-doubt
fundamentalist” (Sutin 258); once again, reading VALIS as a barely disguised autobiography can be
misleading. It is a fictionalized biography, similar to Carrère’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which
should not be read and used as a factual narration of Dick’s life.
27. The autobiographical subtext is also important here: Mini’s surname is the same of the man
Kleo Apostolides married after divorcing Dick. Moreover, Mini is a sfnal portrait of the British mu-
sician Brian Eno, whose 1975 album Discreet Music Dick loved (Sutin 252). On the other hand, Eric
Lampton is an avatar of David Bowie, whose acting in Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 movie The Man Who
Fell to Earth had greatly impressed Dick (Sutin 258).
28. Here Kevin interestingly suggests something quite different from Phil’s first explanation of the
“creation” of Horselover Fat: if Phil “believed” in Fat as a “separate person,” that was not a deliberate
narrative move, but a psychotic split caused by Phil’s derangement. This reading is bolstered by a
letter to Russell Galen where Dick defines Fat as the “psychotic self of the ‘I’ narrator” (SL6 18).
29. Kermode describes at length the scholarly dispute about where Mark’s Gospel really ends; the
usually questioned part, which many exegetes suspect of being a later addition, is Mark 16:9–20 (Ker-
mode 65–73).
30. This idea is already present in Pierre Klossowski’s labyrinthine novel-essay La vocation suspendue,
which explores the complexities and contradictions of any novel which presents itself as a religious
text.
31. Which unsurprisingly does not mention Dick, having been published in 1991, when Dick’s
canonization had just started.
32. Vonnegut describes the genesis of his “Dresden book” in the 1st-person Chapter One of the
290 NOTES — CHAPTER 9

novel, thus appearing as the author, and then as one of the many American soldiers in Europe in
Chapter Five (Vonnegut 86).
33. If by these two terms we mean tales with a happy or sad ending, we have to admit that VALIS
contains both: the comedy of Phil’s healing, but also the tragedy of the Lampton family, which is a
very dark variation on the theme of the Holy Family.
34. There may be an osmosis between modernism and postmodernism, especially in a writer like
Dick who was under the influence of the high modernist classics (Kafka, Joyce, etc.) in his college
years, when he befriended Robert Duncan (Sutin 56–7). But the osmosis between these two apparently
conflicting seasons of Western literature may be something not at all incidental (Carravetta 482–3).

Chapter 9
1. Which will develop an embryonic idea I have found in Christopher Palmer’s monograph
(Palmer 38–9).
2. The image of the Holy Family is also present, in a more cryptic form, in Time Out of Joint
(Rossi 1996). I have discussed its symbolic and political implications in more detail in a forthcoming
article, “The Holy Family From Outer Space,” to be published on Extrapolation.
3. Her figure is thus quite similar to Sherri, the dying and destructive friend of Horselover Fat
in VALIS (Ch. 8).
4. Cf. the fictional portrait of Nixon as the evil president Ferris F. Fremont in Radio Free Albemuth.
Dick’s feelings about Nixon are briefly but effectively expressed in the May 2, 1974 letter he sent to
the then President of the USA, which ends with this question: “If you feel such contempt for us, how
can we feel anything good back for you?” (SL3 78). This letter is even more remarkable because if
follows the April 20, 1974 letter where Dick sympathized with Nixon for the ordeal the President was
going through due to the Watergate scandal (SL3 64–5).
5. Lorenzo DiTommaso also dealt with the religious subtext in The World Jones Made (DiTommaso
2001, 55–8).
6. Surely the plot is so complex and strewn with twists that also Suvin lost his bearings when he
said that most of the first eight chapters are set on CY30-CY30B when actually only parts of chapters
1–5 take place there (Suvin 386).
7. Once again Dick is remarkably close to C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet (1938), where Earth
is also isolated from the rest of the universe and under the domination of an evil spirit (or oyarsa),
Thulcandra, who is actually Satan. Lewis is briefly mentioned in VALIS (Ch. 8) and this might be
Dick’s way to acknowledge his literary precursor, though the quotation is rather ironic.
8. The unsuccessful resistance of the Jews against the Roman Empire might well be a hint at the
successful resistance of the Vietnamese against the American Empire; Dick wrote it in 1980, just five
years after the Fall of Saigon.
9. Or in an essay like “Cosmology and Cosmogony” (1978), where the Demiurge becomes “an
artifact, a computerlike teaching machine” (281) called Zebra (cf. Chapter VIII).
10. The Gnostic idea of our physical world as a Black Iron Prison is also present in The Divine In-
vasion, because Emmanuel realizes that “This is a prison, and few men have guessed” (123). In the
same page Emmanuel opposes the world dominated by Belial (the B.I.P.) to the Palm Garden, which
is the lost paradise where men originally dwelt.
11. Regardless of what Dick wrote in his letters and in the pages of the Exegesis that have been
published so far. It is interesting to notice that most of what Dick wrote before February-March 1974
was reinterpreted by the writer in the late 1970s as containing a series of messages pertaining the real
meaning of Dick’s mystical experiences in early 1974. He wrote in the Exegesis that “[t]he vast overtheme
could be extracted from the novels & stories” (Pursuit 167), but this extraction entails an interpretive
work which can also be done in other ways, to extract other “over-themes” or local messages. Besides,
Dick adds that the mystical truths to be extracted by his previous fiction (when he was not aware of
it, of course) alone “would not prove it to be true” (Pursuit 167)— according to the writer, it was his
2–3-74 experiences proved it to be true. Hence our different experiences that compel us to extract
other messages.
12. Surely in the essay — written by the two Marxist philosophers before 9–11 but often quoted by
the media after the fall of the Twin Towers — the idea of Empire is not only tied to the domination
of the USA after the dissolution of the USSR: their idea of Empire is more a postmodern network of
 Notes — Chapter 10 291

global organizations and institutions than a monolithic pyramid of power. Yet the USA are one of
those insititutions; and we shall see that Dick’s idea of Empire in The Divine Invasion is also more
global than simply national.
13. USSR involvement in Afghanistan started on December 27, 1979 and the USA announced on
March 21, 1980 that they would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics to protest against the invasion;
when Dick wrote the novel in May-June 1980, the issue of Afghanistan was undoubtedly hot on the
media.
14. If the story of Emmanuel is a sfnal rewriting of the Gospel, we should realize that Dick changed
the plotline in a highly meaningful way. Since Emmanuel should succeed where Christ failed, he will
not die. Yet somebody else has to die, and that is Rybys, so that the moment in the Olive Garden
where Christ accepts his destiny is present in Dick’s novel, but with a woman, the new Mary, as the
protagonist (63–6). This is not the only moment in which women play a key role in this sfnal story
of the Second Coming, as we shall see.
15. That is a rectangle whose sides respect the Golden Ratio, mentioned in Chapter 11 as a feature
of the doorways to Zina’s Secret Commonwealth (144). The ratio itself, also known as Fibonacci Con-
stant, is quoted in the novel, and it is interesting to notice that this proportion (lately made famous
by Dan Brown’s bestseller) had above all artistic applications, as it was used — among others — by Le
Corbusier, Piet Mondrian and Salvador Dali. Hence the Secret Commonwealth is characterized by
(artistic) beauty right from the start, from its very door.
16. His contention that “in VALIS and The Divine Invasion, the women characters are almost uni-
formly destructive personalities” (Robinson 123) is well-grounded as regards the former novel, but is
completely off the mark in regard to Invasion. Neither Zina nor Linda can be labeled as “destructive”;
as for Rybys, she may resemble the Dickian bitch wives in her second embodiment (in Zina’s world),
but her figure in the first part of the novel has a sort of tragic greatness, and the role she plays is ab-
solutely not destructive, being the mother of the second Messiah.
17. Expressed in the notorious 1974 short story “The Pre–Persons,” depicting a dystopian future
society where abortion is legal well after the birth.
18. Interestingly, evil is here embodied in a domesticated animal, a kid, which resembles Rick
Deckard unlucky sheep in Androids. The kid is killed on the roof of Linda’s house, where Herb has
landed with his flying car. The scene has striking similarities with the killing of the sheep (reported,
not shown) in the twentieth chapter of Androids (Ch. 6). There is a symbolic inversion at work here,
which has turned the innocent victim into the Prince of This World; such an inversion might be ex-
plained with Dick’s comments about the “metal face” of the devil in “Man, Android, and Machine”
(Shifting Realities 213), which seem to depict a generalized inversion in the meaning of certain symbols
and images the writer had used in his works written before the 2–3-74 experiences (such as Palmer
Eldritch’s metallic features, or the evil metal face in the sky which purportedly inspired Dick to create
Eldritch [Ch. 7]).
19. To follow this interpretive trail we should also take into account Dick’s own life, and the com-
plex relation to his twin sister Jane, who died less than a month after their birth, and remains an om-
nipresent shadow in his life and fictional world(s) (Sutin 17–9).

Chapter 10
1. For the dates of publication of the other five volumes, cf. the Bibliography. There is a remarkable
asymmetry in the collection of letters, because 33 years of Dick’s life are covered by a single volume,
while the other parts of the collection cover periods of 2–3 years each (with the third volume only
covering 1974, considered by the editors a particularly relevant moment because of the February-
March experience). Since the texts of the letters in Volumes 2–6 have been prevalently taken from the
carbon copies found in Dick’s apartment after his death, and those that were typed before 1971 were
presumably lost in the notorious November 17, 1971 burglary in Dick’s house on Hacienda Way
(Williams 1986, 26–46), the first volume was made only of those letters that the editors managed to
retrieve from the addressees; hence the paradox that we are left with very few letters covering the most
productive time in Dick’s life (1952–1971). Since Dick often expressed different and contradictory
opinions on the same issue in different letters, what we can or cannot find in Volume 1 of the Selected
Letters should be taken with proper prudence (cf. also Butler 2007, 133–4).
2. I have found at least 5 letters where Dick says this: July 9, 1981 to Laura and Joe Coelho (SL6
292 NOTES — CHAPTER 10

178–9); July 25, 1981 to Glenn Ole Hellekjaer (SL6 195); July 28, 1981 to Ralph Vicinanza (SL6 196);
August 30, 1981 to Cathy Workman (SL6 231); December 31, 1981 to Len Bales (SL6 300–1). To these
we might add the June 7, 1981 letter to Lou and Cynthia Goldstone where Dick connects Archer with
at least The Divine Invasion (SL6 163) because of the theme of Judaism.
3. Le Guin criticized Dick’s portrayals of female characters in a famous letter sent to Science
Fiction Review on February 26, 1981. It is a brief letter, which aimed at clarifying possible misunder-
standings about the opinions she had previously expressed about Dick and his most recent production;
Le Guin wrote that “it seems like you hate women now, and the part of you that is woman is denied
and despised” and concludes “I can no longer follow your art, which has been such a joy & solace to
me”— though she then adds “But I keep trying!” (Le Guin 1981). Robinson used this letter — which
is definitely not as authoritative as a scholarly essay — to bolster his contention that “in VALIS and
The Divine Invasion the women characters are almost uniformly destructive personalities, and in the
rest of his work the balance is not much better” (Robinson 123). Robinson thus questionably extended
Le Guin’s comments on VALIS (which were in any case not a meditated critical assessment) to the rest
of Dick’s oeuvre; this precipitous and superficial critical judgement was then — unfortunately — oc-
casionally quoted by other commentators.
4. One might compare this letter to the one Dick sent Patricia Warrick on February 12, 1981,
where he suggests a political interpretation of VALIS. Of course the writer was not unaware of his
contradictions: in fact he tells Warrick “Once again my right hand did not know what my left hand
was doing. I thought I was writing a theological, philosophical novel; but … VALIS can be interpreted
as a call for political action against [the regime that has just now come to power here in the U.S.]”
(SL6 103). Dick — who often re-read his novels in the last years of his life — was only dimly aware of
the fact that a novel can tell more than one story at the same time — a truth critics should be well
aware of.
5. An important sf editor and publisher who worked for the Timescape imprint of Simon and
Schuster which had already published Invasion and Archer.
6. Judging from what Dick tells Russell Galen and others in the letters he wrote in the Autumn
of 1981, he was prevented from starting Owl by a state of deep physical and psychological exhaustion
which induced him to postpone the heavy work of writing a new novel (SL6 237–9, 243), even though
he had been taking notes for some time. One might wonder whether Dick’s dejection was a harbinger
of the fatal heart attack which would kill him in March 1982; in any case he kept rather busy, projecting
a trip to Metz, France which should also have brought him to New York and Germany in mid–1982;
he also looked forward to the premiere of Blade Runner, also scheduled for that period (Sutin 286–
9).
7. Warrick went so far as to propose the scheme of a “dynamic four-chambered metaphor” (War-
rick 30) as a model to fully understand Dick’s metaphorical method. Curiously Warrick does not
seem to be aware that the literalization or materialization of tropes had already been proposed as one
of the fundamental elements of fantastic literature by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970: “The supernatural
often appears because we take a figurative sense literally” (Todorov 76–7). This idea is extensively de-
veloped (and applied) in the fifth chapter of Todorov’s essay, “Discourse of the Fantastic.”
8. Among the many literary quotations in this novel based on the recollection of things past,
there is — unsurprisingly — Marcel Proust’s masterpiece. Angel ironically complains: “I read The Re-
membrance of Things Past and I remember nothing” (9).
9. This is a remarkable inversion of what happens in Shakespeare’s Hamlet— un-incidentally
mentioned by Angel and Kirsten (161)— where it is Hamlet’s father who only appears as a ghost. The
Shakespearean subtext hints at the fact that this novel is pivoted upon the father-son relation; it also
hints at the issue of revenge, because Hamlet must avenge his father, while Tim tries to avenge his
son: he does not fight against a material usurper, but against tyrannous death (and fate, as we shall see).
10. Archer could also be read as a vindication of the historical character of Jim Pike, as Dick had
been annoyed by Joan Didion’s scathing portrait of the former bishop in her 1976 essay “James Pike,
American” (later included in The White Album). Dick sent her a letter on February 13, 1981 (SL6 107–
9), where he calmly describes Pike’s personality (also quoting some episodes which are also present in
the novel), implicitly rejecting Didion’s depiction and her contention that Pike “shed women when
they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious” (Didion 57); Dick replied that his
friend “was totally loyal to his friends. Those he never forgot” (SL6 109). The letter was then inserted
in the second chapter of the novel, with Didion’s name changed into “Jane Marion” (16–9), a choice
that underscores its strong connection with the author’s life.
 Notes — Chapter 10 293

11. Also Angel questions the cause-effect connection imprudently established by the Bishop between
Jeff and the phenomena (described by Kirsten [106–7] but not directly witnessed by Angel), and it is
interesting to see that while she needs the Indian philosophical concept of inference or anumãna (107–
9), which is not exactly something familiar to Western readers, Bill manages to debunk the Bishop’s
inference by explaining that a pool of water under a parked car does not necessarily indicate that there
is a leak in the radiator of that car. Dick here opposes Angel’s scholarly, erudite and bookish frame of
mind to Bill’s eminently practical mentality.
12. The original Greek term euangelion means “good news,” and the same may be said for the Old
English phrase gÉd spell which became “gospel” in Modern English — this is not something that could
escape a writer like Dick, whose oeuvre is characterised, according to Suvin, by “messengers: from Ju-
liana in Man in the High Castle and Walt in Dr. Bloodmoney, the theme grows omnipresent and mys-
terious in Ubik. In A Scanner, messages inside Arctor’s brain get so confused that they break down.
By the VALIS Cycle, almost everybody is a messenger and everything is a message” (Suvin 2002,
395). The message is more important, however, than the messenger; Mercer may be a fraud, the mes-
sage of Mercerism is not.
13. Also a Berkeleyite like Angel uses illegal drugs, though she mostly smokes marijuana and only
occasionally takes pills. However, she is starving, like her friends Tim and Kirsten, and like them is
not shown eating bread or similar food.
14. Not an easy task, as Angel discovers when she is told by Dr. Greeby that she is a harmful in-
fluence on Bill (241–3). Greeby, Bill’s psychiatrist, does not like Angel as a representative of the
“Berkeley community” (242), yet he says something that may easily be overlooked when one reads
their conversation: “We learn by erring” (241). This goes in the direction of that gradual — albeit
painful and troubled — improvement which seems to be the message — or one of the many messages —
of this novel. An improvement that Angel sets as her aim, countering the static, mechanical repetition
which characterised her life before she met Barefoot (210–1).
15. For example in Angel’s invective against Tim’s involvement in the preternatural: “For this, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr, died. For this you marched at Selma …” (111).
16. I take this concept from Frasca’s discussion of Dick’s fiction; he took it in turn from Yuri Lot-
man.
17. Dick had good reasons to choose Lennon in particular as an icon of the 1960s; it was from
Lennon’s suite that Timothy Leary phoned him in 1969 to announce that the British rock star had
been fascinated by Stigmata and wanted to make a film out of it — another of those never materialised
projects that are too often found in Dick’s life (Sutin 129, 158).
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 Bibliography

Primary Literature
Novels
Clans of the Alphane Moon, 1964. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Confessions of a Crap Artist, 1975. Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1991.
The Cosmic Puppets, 1957. Rpt. London: Granada, 1985.
Counter-Clock World. 1967. New York: Berkeley.
The Crack in Space. 1966. New York: ACE Books.
The Divine Invasion, 1981. Rpt. London: Corgi, 1982.
Deus Irae, 1976. With Roger Zelazny. Rpt. London: Sphere Books, 1982
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Dr. Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the Bomb, 1965. Rpt. London: Arrow, 1987.
Dr. Futurity, 1960. Rpt. New York: ACE Books, 1972.
Eye in the Sky, 1957. Rpt. London: Arrow, 1987.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 1974. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Galactic Pot-Healer, 1969. Rpt. London: Grafton, 1987.
The Game-Players of Titan, 1963. Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, 1986. Rpt. London: Paladin, 1988
In Minton Lunky Territory, 1985. Rpt. London: Paladin, 1987.
Lies, Inc., 1964. Rpt. London: Panther Books, 1985.
The Man in the High Castle, 1962. Rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, 1984. Rpt. London: Paladin, 1986.
Martian Time-Slip, 1964. Rpt. Ballantine: New York, 1981.
Mary and the Giant, 1987. Rpt. London: Paladin, 1989.
A Maze of Death, 1970. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Now Wait for Last Year, 1966. Rpt. New York: DAW, 1981.
Our Friends from Frolix 8, 1970. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
The Penultimate Truth, 1964. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Puttering About in a Small Land, 1985. Rpt. London: Paladin, 1987.
Radio Free Albemuth, 1985. Rpt. London: Grafton, 1987.
A Scanner Darkly, 1977. Rpt. London: Granada, 1985.
The Simulacra, 1964. Rpt. London: Methuen, 1983.
Solar Lottery, 1955. Rpt. London; Arrow, 1982.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1964. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Time Out of Joint, 1959. Rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 1982. Rpt. London: Granada, 1983.
Ubik, 1969. Rpt. London: Granada, 1984.
Ubik: The Screenplay, 1985. Rpt. Burton: Subterranean Press, 2008.
VALIS, 1980. Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1991.
The Variable Man, 1953. Rpt. New York: Ace Books, 1957.

295
296 BIBLIOGRAPHY

We Can Build You, 1972. Rpt. London: Grafton, 1986.

The World Jones Made, 1956. Rpt. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Short Stories
Beyond Lies the Wub: Volume One of the Collected Stories, 1987. Rpt. London: Gollancz, 1999.
The Father Thing: The Collected Stories Volume 3, 1987. Rpt. London: HarperCollins, 1998.
The Minority Report: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 4, 1987. Rpt. New York: Citadel, 1991.
Second Variety: Volume 2 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 1987. Rpt. London: HarperCollins,
1994.
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale: Volume 5 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 1987. Rpt.
London: HarperCollins, 1994.

Essays
The Dark Haired Girl. 1988. Willimantic: Mark V. Ziesing.
In Pursuit of VALIS: Selection from the Exegesis. 1991. Novato and Lancaster: Underwood-Miller.
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. 1995. Sutin,
Lawrence, ed. New York: Vintage.

Letters
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 1: 1938 –1971. Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1996.
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 2: 1972 –1973 Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1993.
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 3: 1974 Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1991.
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 4: 1975 –1976 Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1992
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 5: 1977–1979 Novato: Underwood-Miller, 1992.
The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick — Volume 6: 1980 –1981. Ed. Heron, Don. Novato: Underwood-
Miller, 2010.

Secondary Literature
Interviews
Boonstra, John. “Philip K. Dick’s Final Interview, June 1982.” Philip K. Dick: The Official Site. Online
resource. <http://www.philipkdick.com/media_twilightzone.html> Retrieved on October 16, 2010.
Platt, Charles. 1980. “Philip K. Dick.” Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science
Fiction. New York: Berkeley.
Rickman, Gregg. 1988. Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words. Long Beach: Fragments West/The Valentine
Press.
_____. 1985. Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament. Long Beach: Fragments West.
Williams, Paul. 1986. Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick. Encinitas: Entwhistle Books,

Monographs
Barlow, Aaron. 2005. How Much Does Chaos Scare You? Politics, Religion and Philosophy in the Fiction
of Philip K. Dick. Brooklyn: Lulu.com.
Butler, Andrew M. 2000. The Pocket Essential: Philip K. Dick. Rpt. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2007.
Caronia, Antonio, and Domenico Gallo. 2006. La macchina della paranoia: Enciclopedia Dickiana.
Milano: X Book.
Frasca, Gabriele. 2007. L’oscuro scrutare di Philip K. Dick. Roma: Meltemi.
Gillespie, Bruce (ed.). 1975. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. Carlton, Victoria and Melbourne:
Norstrilia.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
London: Verso.
Kucukalic, Lejla. 2008. Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age. London: Routledge.
Link, Eric Carl. 2010. Understanding Philip K. Dick. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press.
Mackey, Douglas A. 1988. Philip K. Dick, Boston: Twayne.
 Bibliography 297

McKee, Gabriel. 2004. Pink Beams from the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip
K. Dick. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Palmer, Christopher. 2003. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: Liv-
erpool University Press.
Rickman, Gregg. 1989. To the High Castle — Philip K. Dick: A life 1928 –1962. Long Beach: Fragments
West/The Valentine Press.
Rispoli, Francesca. 2001. Universi che cadono a pezzi: La fantascienza di Philip K. Dick. Milano: Bruno
Mondadori.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 1981. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
Sutin, Lawrence. 1989. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony Books.
Vest, Jason P. 2009. The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.
Warrick, Patricia S. 1987. Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press.

Essay Collections
De Angelis, Valerio Massimo and Umberto Rossi (eds.). 2006. Trasmigrazioni: I mondi di Philip K.
Dick, Firenze: Le Monnier.
Kerman, Judith B. (ed.). 1991. Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Rpt. Madison: The University of Wis-
consin Press, 1995.
Mullen, R.D., Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger (eds.). 1992. On
Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF-TH Inc.
Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg (eds.). 1983. Philip K. Dick. New York: Taplinger.
Umland, Samuel J. (ed.). 1995. Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Westport, Ct.
and London: Greenwood.
Viviani, Gianfranco, and Carlo Pagetti (eds.). 1989 Philip K. Dick: Il sogno dei simulacri, Milan:
Editrice Nord.

Essays Published on Collections, Conference Proceedings,

or Academic Journals
Aldiss, Brian. 1975. “Dick’s Maledictory Web: About and Around Martian Time-Slip.” Rpt. Mullen
et al., 1992, 37–41.
Barlow, Aaron. 1991. “Philip K. Dick’s Androids: Victimized Victimizers.” Kerman: 76–89.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1980. “Simulacra and Science-Fiction.” Tr. Arthur B. Evans, Science-Fiction Studies,
#55, 18:3, November 1991: 309–13.
Butler, Andrew M. July 2005. “LSD, Lying Ink and Lies, Inc.” Science-Fiction Studies, #96 32:2: pp.
265–80.
Campbell, Laura E. 1992. “Dickian Time in The Man in the High Castle.” Extrapolation, 33:3: 190–201.
Carratello, Mattia. 2006. “Piccole città, piccoli uomini e un futuro possibile: i romanzi mainstream
di Philip K. Dick.” De Angelis and Rossi: 178–187.
Carter, Cassie. 1995. “The Metacolonization of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: Mimicry, Parasitism
and Americanism in the PSA.” Science-Fiction Studies #67, 22:3: 333–342.
De Angelis, Valerio Massimo. 2006. “Storiografie multiple in L’uomo nell’alto castello.” De Angelis
and Rossi: 168–77.
Desser, David. 1991. “The New Eve: The Influence of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein on Blade Runner.”
Kerman: 53–65.
Dillon, Grace L. 2006. “L’impulso divinatorio di Philip K. Dick: il ragno e l’ape.” De Angelis and
Rossi: 52–60.
Disch, Thomas M. 1982. “Toward the Transcendence: An Introduction to Solar Lottery and Other
Works.” Olander & Greenberg: 13–25.
DiTommaso, Lorenzo. March 2001. “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick.”
Science-Fiction Studies # 83, 28:1: 49–65.
_____. 1998. “A logos or Two Concerning the logoz of Umberto Rossi and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out
of Joint.” Extrapolation. 39:4: 285–98.
_____. March 1999. “Redemption in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” Science-Fiction
Studies # 77, 26:1: 91–119.
298 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Doll, Susan, and Greg Faller. 1986. “Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction.” Lit-
erature/Film Quarterly, 14: 89–100.
Dossena, Giampaolo. 2000. “Postfazione.” Philip K. Dick, I giocatori di Titano. Roma: Fanucci:
265-9.
Durham, Scott. 1988. “P. K. Dick: From the Death of the Subject to a Theology of Late Capitalism.”
Rpt. Mullen et al. 1992: 188–99.
Fitting, Peter. 2006. “Il mondo che sta dietro tutto questo: l’eredità di Philip K. Dick al cinema.” De
Angelis and Rossi: 263–74.
_____. “1989. Philip K. Dick Is Dead.” Rpt. Mullen et al., 1992: 243–5.
_____. 1983. “Reality as Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels by Philip K. Dick.” Rpt.
Mullen et al. 1992: 92–110.
Freedman, Carl. 1988. “Editorial Introduction: Philip K. Dick and Criticism,” Rpt. Mullen et al.
1992: 145–53.
Galen, Russell. September 6, 2010. Email to the author.
Gallo, Domenico. 1989. “Il sogno di Galileo e l’incubo di Philip K. Dick.” Viviani and Pagetti: 73–9.
Gopnik, Adam. August 20, 2007. “Blows Against the Empire: The Return of Philip K. Dick.” The
New Yorker: 79–83.
Hayles, N.B. 1982. “Metaphysics and Metafiction in The Man in the High Castle.” Olander & Green-
berg: 53–71.
Huntington, John. 1988. “Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity.” Rpt. Mullen et al. 1992:
170–7.
Jameson, Fredric. 1975. “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney.” Rpt. Archaeologies
of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005: 349–
62.
_____. 2005. “History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick.” Archaeologies of the Future. cit. 363–84.
_____. 1989. “Nostalgia for the Present.” Rpt. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham, Duke University Press, 1991: 279–96.
La Polla, Franco. 2006. “Dick a Hollywood: ovvero, la quadratura del cerchio.” De Angelis and Rossi:
275–81.
Le Guin, Ursula. Summer 1981. “Letter. February 26, 1981” Science Fiction Review. No. 39, 32.
_____. 1975. “The Modest One.” Rpt. The Language of the Night. Ed. Susan Wood. New York:
Berkley, 1982: 165–68.
Lem, Stanislaw. 1975. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” Tr. Abernathy, Robert.
Microworlds. London: Mandarin, 1991: 106–35.
_____. 1972. “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — With Exceptions.” Tr. Koopmann, Werner.
Microworlds. London: Mandarin, 1991: 45–105.
Lethem, Jonathan. 2002. “You Don’t Know Dick.” Rpt. The Disappointment Artist, New York: Dou-
bleday, 2005: 77–83.
Pagetti, Carlo. 1977. “Introduzione a La svastica sul sole.” Rpt. Viviani and Pagetti 1989: 132–49.
_____. 1984. “Introduzione a Le tre stimmate di Palmer Eldritch.” Rpt. Viviani and Pagetti 1989: 199–
205.
_____. 2002. “I procioni di Marte.” Philip K. Dick. Noi Marziani. Roma: Fanucci: 7–21.
_____. 2002. “Un sinantropo di nome Bill Smith.” Dick, Philip K. Svegliatevi, dormienti. Roma:
Fanucci: 7–18.
_____. 2003. “Il tempo ritrovato di un piccolo Amleto americano.” Philip K. Dick, Tempo fuor di
sesto, Roma: Fanucci: 5–21.
_____. 2000. “Travestimenti da alieno.” Dick, Philip K. I giocatori di Titano. Roma: Fanucci: 7–14.
Philmus, Robert M. 1991. “The Two Faces of Philip K. Dick.” Rpt. Mullen et al, 1992: 246–56.
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Proietti, Salvatore. 2006. “Vuoti di potere e resistenza umana: Dick, Ubik e l’epica americana.” De
Angelis and Rossi: 204–15.
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 Index

“A. Lincoln, Simulacrum” see We Can Build Bloom, Harold 243

You Böhme, Jakob 240–1
Aeschylus 260 Bonaparte, Napoleon 83, 278
Akhenaten 225 Boonstra, John 212, 231, 234
Aldiss, Brian 100–2 Boorstin, David J. 122
Alighieri, Dante 246, 253–4, 266 Booth, John Wilkes 148, 165
“All We Marsmen” 105 Borges, Jorge Luis 1, 218
Allegro, John 271 Bormann, Martin 89, 93
Alpert, Richard 129 Boucher, Anthony 26, 37, 40, 193, 276, 280,
“The Android and the Human” 287 282
Anthony, Patricia 276 Bowie, David 289
Aristotle 128 Bradbury, Ray 276
Atwood, Margaret 175 The Broken Bubble 42
Augustine of Hippo 95, 241 Brown, Dan 291
“Autofac” 80 Bukatman, Scott 9
Bunyan, John 286
Bach, Johann Sebastian 248 Burdick, Eugene 80
Badoglio, Pietro 123 Bush, Claudia 7, 223, 286
Bales, Len 292 Bush, George H.W. 246
Ballard, J.G. ( James Graham) 24, 79, 120, Bush, George W. 205
231, 257 Butler, Andrew M. 25–6, 40, 42, 59–60, 65–
Barlow, Aaron 24, 40, 172, 284 6, 103, 118, 127, 140, 239, 253, 274, 281,
Barth, John 218 287, 291
Barthes, Roland 69, 84, 218, 231, 278 Byron, George Gordon 83, 278
Basaglia, Franco 280
Baudrillard, Jean 2, 8–9, 26, 158, 282 Campbell, John W. 27, 185
Beckett, Samuel 24 Campbell, Laura 82
Beethoven, Ludwig van 240–1, 248 Capra, Frank 31–3, 35, 275
Benford, Gregory 224 Carell, Paul 279
Benjamin, Walter 124–5, 236 Carmen, Leon 288
Bergrud, Maren 257, 271 Caronia, Antonio 9, 210
Bettelheim, Bruno 280 Carratello, Mattia 20
“Beyond Lies the Wub” 40 Carravetta, Peter 182, 290
“Beyond the Door” 27 Carrère, Emanuel 289
Binswanger, Ludwig 275 Carter, Cassie 82
Blade Runner 144–5, 162, 164, 169, 171, 205, Carter, Jimmy 250
256, 273, 275, 283, 284, 292 Cartmill, Cleve 27
Blake, William 102, 226 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 85
Blish, James 59, 97 Ceserani, Remo 51

303
304 INDEX

“Chains of Air, Web of Aether” 235–8 161–72, 182, 198, 262–3, 273–6, 283–4,
Chandler, Raymond 165, 284–5 287–8, 291
Chapman, Mark David 160 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 273 Bomb 7–8, 20–1, 42, 45, 79, 80, 96, 105–12,
Christie, Agatha 193, 197, 276 117, 147, 173, 186, 195, 253, 274, 281–2, 285
Christopher, John 120 Dr. Futurity 18, 22, 40, 52, 58, 60, 127–8,
Churchill, Winston 139 139, 175, 283
Cicero 124 Doll, Susan 164
Clans of the Alphane Moon 17, 21, 96, 111–7, Domzalski, Shawn Michael 151
144, 173, 186, 194, 195, 256, 282, 283 Donne, John 5
Clift, Montgomery 75 Dos Passos, John 96–8
Confessions of a Crap Artist 18, 20, 42, 69, 78, Dössekker, Bruno 288
145, 146, 211, 273, 288 Dossena, Giampaolo 45
Conrad, Joseph 99 Dowland, John 235–6, 251, 287
“The Cookie Lady” 27 Drake, Sir Francis 127, 282
The Cosmic Puppets 1–7, 21, 25–41, 44, 50, 53, Duncan, Robert 290
57–61, 67, 70, 86–8, 119, 174, 175, 182, 191, Durham, Scott 218–9, 232
202, 206, 243, 274, 275 Eco, Umberto 277
“Cosmology and Cosmogony” 280
Counter-Clock World 22, 101, 280 Egmont, Lamoral, Count of 240
Cowie, Elizabeth 168 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 42, 70, 74, 76, 86,
The Crack in Space 12, 22, 146, 283 139–40, 238
Crick, Francis 225 “The Electric Ant” 99, 145
Elijah 211–2, 228, 240
Dalí, Salvador 190, 291 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 172, 223, 232
Damico, James 168 Elizabeth I 127
Darwin, Charles 150 Ellison, Harlan 105
Da Vinci, Leonardo see Leonardo da Vinci Eno, Brian 289
Davis, Angela 232 Epimenides 229
“The Days of Perky Pat” 176 Erikson, Steve 276
Dazai, Osamu 97 Evangelisti, Valerio 276, 287
Dean, James 75 Exegesis see In Pursuit of VALIS
De Angelis, Valerio Massimo 85, 276 “Exhibit Piece” 9
“The Defenders” 80 “Expendable” 27
Defoe, Daniel 230 Eye in the Sky 12, 17, 21, 29, 56, 57, 59, 60–7,
DeLillo, Don 6 175, 186–7, 207, 274, 276–7, 286
Descartes, René 19, 143, 156, 274 “The Eye of the Sybil” 274
Desser, David 172 “The Eyes Have It” 254
Deus Irae 37
Dick, Anne 107, 113–6 “Faith of Our Fathers” 285
Dick, Christopher 267 Fallada, Hans 59, 276, 287
Dick, Edgar 6, 79, 176, 181, 183, 277 Faller, Greg 164
Dick, Isa 199 Fermi, Enrico 108
Dick, Jane 192, 203, 246, 291 Fitting, Peter 23, 59, 64–6, 69, 71, 169, 171,
Dick, Laura 212, 253, 263, 291 188, 190, 209, 216, 284, 286
Dick, Tessa 267 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott 153
Dickens, Charles 33 Flaubert, Gustave 56
Didion, Joan 292 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said 7, 17–9, 20,
Dillon, Grace 114, 284 22, 133, 173, 175, 186–8, 199–208, 244,
Disch, Thomas M. 15–6, 28, 44, 277 249–50, 276, 279, 286–8
DiTommaso, Lorenzo 81–2, 275, 277, Frasca, Gabriele 2, 31–2, 82, 210, 260, 264,
290 271, 274–5, 293
The Divine Invasion 17, 19, 22, 38, 52, 98, Frazer, James 134
202, 209–15, 234–52, 254–5, 257, 276, Freedman, Carl 24, 82, 209, 232
279, 288, 290–2 Freud, Sigmund 17, 35, 63, 222, 231
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 4–5, 14, “Frozen Journey” see “I Hope I Shall Arrive
18–9, 21–2, 26, 29, 37, 143–4, 147, 155, Soon”
 Index 305

Frye, Northrop 56, 86, 288 I Ching 85–7, 92, 278–9

Fuchs, Klaus 108 “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” 17, 144
“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” 9
Galactic Pot-Healer 22 “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See
Galen, Russell 215, 229, 230, 268, 289, 292 Some of the Others” 76, 203–4
Gallo, Domenico 9, 286 Ikhnaton see Akhenaten
The Game-Players of Titan 19, 21, 40–9, 52, “Imposter” 15, 29, 145, 284
54, 58, 67, 175, 180, 183, 215, 223, 243, In Milton Lumky Territory 18, 42
276 In Pursuit of Valis 4, 186–8, 194, 212–3, 217,
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 112 268, 277, 288, 290
Gather Yourselves Together 26, 42, 50–1 “Introduction to The Golden Man” 92
George, Peter 80 Irving, Washington 276
Gibson, William 194 Israel, Peter 278
Gilbert and Sullivan 89
Gillespie, Bruce 98 James, Henry 13, 211
Gitlin, Todd 120 Jameson, Fredric 2–3, 6–9, 26, 46, 70–1, 75,
“A Glass of Darkness” see The Cosmic Puppets 79, 103, 107, 109–11, 140, 143–4, 147, 160,
Goebbels, Joseph 89, 93 166, 168, 170, 173, 180, 209, 261, 273–4,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 72–3 283–6, 289
Goldstone, Cynthia 292 Jarry, Alfred 187
Goldstone, Lou 292 Jaynes, Julian 223, 289
Gopnik, Adam 4, 273 Jefferson, Thomas 116
Gorin, Jean-Pierre 189 Jesus Christ 212–3, 219, 228, 236–7, 261
Göring, Hermann 93, 125, 127, 136 John the Evangelist 75, 241, 289, 265
“The Great C” 27 Jones, Jim 227
Greimas, Algirdas Julien 277 Jones, Peter 278
Joyce, James 5, 95, 97–8, 290
Haas, Mr. 27 Jung, Carl Gustav 17, 154, 177, 284
Hackett, Nancy 188, 199, 201, 257, 287
Hammett, Dashiell 164, 166, 170 Kafka, Franz 27, 52, 55, 283, 290
Hartwell, David 253 Kandinsky, Wassily 216
Hasford, Gustav 278 Kant, Immanuel 130, 280
Hawkes, John 6 Keats, John 83
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 83, 87, 278 Keene, Donald 280
Hayles, N. Katherine 114 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 120, 122, 142, 261, 281
Heidegger, Martin 78 Kennedy, Robert 120, 142
Heinlein, Robert A. 27, 141, 185, 197, 277, 282 Kermode, Frank 227, 289
Hellekjaer, Glenn Ole 292 Kernan, Judith B. 164
Heller, Joseph 79–80, 185, 257 Kesey, Ken 104–5, 231, 281
Hemingway, Ernest 5 King, Martin Luther 120, 141–2, 261, 293
Heraclitus 31, 67, 74, 220, 275, 277 “The King of the Elves” 27
Heydrich, Reinhard 84 Klee, Paul 216
Hirsch, Damien 167 Klossowski, Pierre 289
Hite, Molly 230 Kobayashi, Hideo 97
Hitler, Adolf 81, 86–7, 112, 122, 124, 138, 142 Koestler, Arthur 288
Hoffa, Jimmy 281 Kornbluth, Cyril M. 41, 57
Hofstadter, Richard J. 67, 92, 277 Kubrick, Stanley 281
Hollis, Herbert 124 Kucukalic, Lejla 23, 280
Homer 115 Kuttner, Henry 27; see Padgett, Lewis
Horace 228
“How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Laing, Ronald 17, 104, 274, 280
Apart Two Days Later” 11, 268 La Polla, Franco 284
Hubbard, Ron L. 24, 30–1, 39, 40, 275 Lawrence, David Herbert 171
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland 42, 103, 158 Leary, Timothy 129, 293
Huntington, John 15, 54, 55 Le Corbusier 191
Hussey, Edward 223 Le Guin, Ursula K. 196, 253, 268, 287–8, 292
Huxley, Aldous 175 Leiber, Fritz 126–7, 132, 282
306 INDEX

Leibniz, Gottfried 94 Meyrink, Gustav 149

Lem, Stanislaw 164, 188–9, 273–4, 286 Milicia, Joseph 86–8
Lennon, John 160, 211, 271, 284, 293 Milton, John 171, 241
Leonardo da Vinci 112 Mini, Kleo 92, 289
Lethem, Jonathan 2, 17, 62, 276 Mondrian, Piet 291
Lewis, C.S. 211, 219, 290 Monroe, Marilyn 68, 75
Lewis, Sinclair 81, 278 Moorcock, Michael 211
Lies, Inc. 22, 274 Moore, Alan 285
Lincoln, Abraham 9, 146, 148–50, 160 Moore, C.L. (Catherine Lucille) 27; see also
Link, Eric Carl 105, 170 Padgett, Lewis
Linklater, Richard 284 Moore, Ward 83–4, 86
“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” 52, Moses 228
287 Moylan, Tom 174, 285
Loew ben Bezalel, Judah 149 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 163
Lotman, Yuri 293 Mulholland, William 103
Luckhurst, Roger 41, 57–8 Muller, Gunter 280
Lukács, György 273 Munch, Edvard 5, 285
Luke the Evangelist 227, 258, 260 Mussolini, Benito 9, 81, 122–3, 282
Luria, Alexander Romanovich 17 “My Definition of Science Fiction” 275
Luria, Isaac 243
Nati, Maurizio 66–7
Mackey, Douglas A. 2, 23, 25–26, 50, 198–9, Negri, Antonio e Michael Hardt 239, 289
207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 140
Magritte, René 190 Nixon, Richard 65, 108, 201, 208, 238, 250,
Mahler, Gustav 247 281, 287, 289–90
Mailer, Norman 79–80, 231 Noma, Hiroshi 97
Malcom X 120 Now Wait for Last Year 9, 18–9, 21, 52, 111,
“Man, Android and Machine” 7, 159, 291 118, 122, 129–36, 140, 200, 256, 283
The Man in the High Castle 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17–
8, 20–1, 57, 60, 66, 78–94, 97, 107, 109, Oe, Kenzaburo 97
113, 119, 124, 128, 145, 147, 158, 170–1, 174– “Of Withered Apples” 27
5, 182, 186–7, 192, 203, 208, 210, 248–9, Ooka, Shohei 97
253, 276–80, 285 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 108
The Man Who Japed 42, 52, 58–9, 276 Orwell, George 58, 122, 125–6, 131, 137–8,
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike 174–5, 189, 285
14, 18, 20, 42, 79, 103, 273 Our Friends from Frolix 8 175, 200, 286
Marcuse, Herbert 64 “Out in the Garden” 27
Mark the Evangelist 227–8, 289 The Owl in Daylight 209, 252–4
Martian Time-Slip 6, 9, 20–2, 26, 46, 50, 96,
100–6, 109, 111, 117, 140, 144, 147, 154, 156, Padgett, Lewis 27; see also Kuttner, Henry;
173–4, 182, 186–7, 195, 153, 280–2, 285 Moore, C.L.
Mary and the Giant 20, 42, 146, 281 Pagetti, Carlo 43, 55, 60, 72, 81, 84, 101,
Mather, Cotton 112 103–4, 274, 280, 285
Matheson, Richard 276 Palmer, Christopher 3, 45, 82, 89–90, 113–5,
Matthew the Evangelist 227, 258, 260 118, 174, 209, 217–22, 228, 234, 279, 281–
Maugham, Somerset 117 2, 288, 290
Maupassant, Guy de 13 Panshin, Alexei 287
May, Rollo 37, 67, 280 Panshin, Cory 287
A Maze of Death 14, 22, 29, 52, 141, 165, 168, Pardi, Riccardo 279
173, 186–7, 193–200, 202, 276, 286 Paul the Apostle 87, 271, 275
McCaffery, Larry 273 The Penultimate Truth 12, 14, 18–21, 29, 121–
McCarthy, Joseph 58, 65, 92, 237 2, 136–41, 160, 235, 259, 277–8, 282
McComas, Francis 84 Pepys, Samuel 5
McHale, Brian 8 Philmus, Robert M. 201
McKee, Gabriel 288 Philo of Alexandria 269, 277
Melville, Herman 106, 182 Pierce, Hazel 43
Mendlesohn, Farah 288 Pike, James 255, 257, 261, 269, 271, 292
 Index 307

Plato 217, 254, 269 Schubert, Franz 182, 248

Platt, Charles 74, 277 Scorsese, Martin 160
Pohl, Frederick 41, 57 Scott, Ridley 144, 164
Pope, Alexander 6 “Second Variety” 284
Popper, Karl 286 Selkirk, Alexander 75
Pound, Ezra 159, 172 Shakespeare, William 5, 72, 150, 292
Poundstone, William 108 Shaw, George Bernard 141
Powers, Richard 51 Sheckley, Robert 1, 41, 57, 275
Powers, Tim 286 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 83
Pratt, Hugo 285 Shiner, Lewis 276
“The Pre-Persons” 291 Shklovsky, Viktor 54
“The Preserving Machine” 27, 182 “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford”
Proietti, Salvatore 85, 189–90 27
Proust, Marcel 53, 292 Siegel, Don 289
Puttering About in a Small Land 20, 42, 79, 103 The Simulacra 8–9, 11, 14, 18–21, 52, 111, 118–
Pynchon, Thomas 8, 51, 77, 90–3, 104, 109, 20, 124, 125–31, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140,
115, 119, 140, 218, 257, 270–1, 273, 277 149–50, 157–8, 160, 174, 218, 283, 285
Pythagoras of Samos 269 “Small Town” 27, 49–52, 191
Smith, Sidonie 230, 257
Rabkin, Eric 23, 58, 209 Solar Lottery 22, 26, 28, 41–2, 58–9, 90, 108,
Radio Free Albemuth 104, 173, 175, 199, 208, 113, 145, 157, 175, 276, 279
211, 217, 224, 241, 244–5, 247, 249, 284–5, Sophocles 260
288, 290 Spiegelman, Art 274
Read, Herbert 5 Spillane, Mickey 165
Reagan, Ronald 211, 231, 246, 250, 289 Spinoza, Baruch 150
Rickels, Laurence A. 273 Stableford, Brian 33
Rickman, Gregg 5–6, 27, 40, 97, 100, 105–6, Stalin, Joseph 283
117, 119, 122, 145, 161–2, 176, 181–2, 188, Stanton, Edwin M. 146, 148–9
192–3, 201, 244, 256, 268, 277–9, 281, Stendhal 80
283–4 Stevenson, Adlai 134
Ricoeur, Paul 274 Stilling, Roger J. 221–2
Rieder, John 82 Stuart, Mary 127
Riesman, David 59 Sturgeon, Theodore 28
Rispoli, Francesca 74, 85, 87, 162, 203 Sullivan, Harry Stack 112, 282
Robinson, Kim Stanley 2, 9, 20, 25, 40, 76, Sutin, Lawrence 3, 25, 40, 62, 79, 81, 92,
81, 86, 101, 103, 116, 118–9, 136–7, 140, 146– 113–4, 117, 176–7, 199, 200, 201, 209–11,
7, 150, 152, 162, 164, 169, 175, 185–6, 189, 217, 234, 277–9, 281, 286, 289–93
190, 197–200, 203, 207, 210, 226, 246–7, Suvin, Darko 2, 15, 20, 28, 40, 46, 81, 96,
254, 257, 273, 276–7, 287, 291–2 100–3, 105, 119, 124, 133, 136–7, 146, 148,
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 17, 34, 88, 130, 170, 173–6, 188, 222, 227, 229, 239, 274,
138, 275 280, 285–7, 289–90, 293
Rosenberg, Ethel 92 Swift, Jonathan 5–6
Rosenberg, Julius 92 Szasz, Thomas 104, 280
Rossi, Umberto 17, 41, 55, 60, 70, 71, 76, 82,
85, 119, 184, 231, 247, 277, 281–2, 287, 290 Tamahori, Lee 284
Rubinstein, Anne see Dick, Anne Teller, Edward 108
Rudolph II 149 Thackeray, William Makepeace 6
Ryman, Geoff 51 Thomas à Kempis 286
Thompson, Hunter S. 231
Sargent, Lyman Tower 174 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch 14, 17–
A Scanner Darkly 8, 18–9, 22, 29, 36, 173, 20, 22, 29, 45–6, 52, 63, 110, 123, 129,
175, 185–6, 199–201, 219, 248–50, 279, 132–4, 140, 144, 147, 150, 170, 173–88, 190–
281, 285, 288–9 1, 196–7, 200, 202, 208, 235, 273–4, 276–
Schiller, Friedrich 270 7, 280, 282–3, 285–6, 291
“Schizophrenia and The Book of Change” 274 Tillich, Paul 269
Schmid, Georg 239 Time Out of Joint 6, 9, 12, 19–21, 29, 33, 56,
Scholes, Robert 58 57–60, 67–78, 81, 84, 90, 92, 104, 107, 109,
308 INDEX

119, 174–5, 186–8, 191, 194, 237, 243, 273, von Schirach, Baldur 93
275, 277, 286, 288 Vulcan’s Hammer 42, 58–9, 60, 90, 175
“Time Pawn” 127
Todorov, Tzvetan 13–4, 53, 292 Wachowski, Andy 276
Tolkien, J.R.R. 273 Wachowski, Larry 276
Tolstoy, Lev 278 Wagner, Richard 133, 182, 248
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer 9, 11–2, Wallenstein, Albrecht 270
14, 17, 20, 22, 209–15, 227, 248, 251–71 Warrick, Patricia 3, 23, 25, 40, 81, 100–1,
Trevelyan, George Macaulay 33, 82–4 104–5, 108–11, 114, 118, 147, 169, 197,
Trocmé, Etienne 227 201, 207, 223, 242, 252–4, 274, 280–4,
292
Ubik 8, 12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 46, 52, 63, 66, 102, “Waterspider” 16, 276
133, 140, 147, 173, 186–92, 196–8, 200, 202, Watson, James D. 225
207, 210, 221–2, 274, 276, 283, 286 Watson, Julia 230, 257
Ubik: The Screenplay 189 We Can Build You 3, 8–9, 18, 20–1, 120, 143,
Umland, Samuel J. 273 145–66, 169, 171–2, 208, 248, 254, 279,
281, 284, 288
VALIS 3, 12, 14, 16, 20, 22, 26, 33, 52, 209– “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” 19,
34, 238–40, 244–5, 252–5, 257, 261, 267, 29, 194
288, 290, 292 Welles, Orson 31
VALIS Trilogy 22–3, 36, 209–15, 237, 252– Wells, Herbert George 121, 211, 240, 242
4, 288, 293; see also The Divine Invasion; West, Nathanael 94, 279
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer Whitman, Walt 2
Vallorani, Nicoletta 101, 114, 280 “Who Is an Sf Writer” 3
Van Doren Stern, Philip 33 Williams, Paul 100, 291
Van Vogt, A.E. (Alfred Elton) 15–6, 24, 43, Wolfe, Gary K. 23
45–6, 48–9, 54, 90, 136, 194, 202, 276 Wolfe, Tom 231
“The Variable Man” 59 Wolfson, William 199–200
Vaughan, Henry 24 Wolk, Tony 275
Verne, Jules 51 Wollestonecraft Shelley, Mary 171
Vernet, Marc 170, 284 Wollheim, Don 276, 281
Vest, Jason P. 23, 73 Workman, Cathy 292
Vicinanza, Ralph 292 The World Jones Made 22, 42, 58–9, 145–6,
Victor Emmanuel, III 123 175, 237–8, 276, 290
Voices from the Street 26, 42 Wouk, Herman 159
von Braun, Wernher 93 Wyn, A.A. (Aaron Weinstein) 62
von Gebsattel, Victor-Emil 275 Wyndham, John 120
von Hofmannsthal, Hugo 24
Vonnegut, Kurt 79, 140, 192, 230, 257, 273, Zamjatin, Yevgeny 175
289–90 Zangara, Giuseppe 17
von Neumann, John 108 Zelazny, Roger 37, 275