“The old man [Wilbur Mercer] said, ‘You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so.’” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In recent years, I have come to firmly believe that Philip K. Dick — allegedly a ‘science-fiction’ writer — was the greatest literary writer of the second half of the 20th century — no qualifications, no hedging. Compared to Dick’s shattering intuitions, other post-war greats pale in comparison: Paul Bowles’s angst about colonisation, Richard Yates’s plunge into mental illness, Vladimir Nabokov’s odes to tastelessness, Charles Johnson’s glut of racial violence, and John Updike’s meticulous bourgeois sadness, all seem to ultimately hold back from the most unforgiving truths. Dick’s fiction contains all of these dimensions, anyway, plus something else that none of the others have.

In novels like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Dick proved himself to be our greatest modern writer of death. I do not know of anyone else who can provoke the reader to the same emotional depths with his anger about death. And Dick dealt with the two most important issues of the postmodern era — the nature of reality and the question of identity — more deeply than any of his peers. His period of peak productivity, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, resembles the astonishing outbursts of Shakespeare or Mozart in their comparable periods.

The timeless works of Philip K. Dick evoke a sense of pure wonder about what it might mean to be human

If we think of the important films of the last 35 years — beginning with Blade Runner (1982), an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and on to Total Recall, The Truman Show, The Matrix Trilogy, Minority Report, and many others that define how we perceive the future (meaning, really, the present), it is clear that we live in the Dick era; he grabs our imagination in a way that no realist writer can.

The Truman Show (1998) was based on the first novel where Dick came into his own, abandoning his early realist novels for the sci-fi apparatus, with its characteristic themes, that he claimed for himself; that novel, published in 1959, was Time Out of Joint, and I could make a case for it being even more essential than George Orwell’s 1984 as the defining novel of the 20th century. I know of no other book where our profound uncertainty about who we are or what we are doing in our present social structure is as hauntingly presented. Time Out of Joint seems to me the original fable of our time, addressing our sense of paranoia or persecution, akin to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau elaborated in his Confessions at the onset of the Age of Enlightenment, but updated for the new age of television, computers, mechanistaion, and jet and space travel.

If I had to pick the best written Dick novel, it would have to be The Man in the High Castle (currently adapted for an Amazon television series), in which Dick posits an alternate history where Japan and Germany win WWII, and end up splitting the continental US between themselves. The unique narrative innovations in this novel must be the subject of a separate essay, but the key interest of the novel is the alteration of not just an individual’s character but entire nations thinking and behaving in unfamiliar ways. For example, the colonised West Coast Americans adopt the distinctly ‘Japanese’ (or stereotypical Japanese) traits of mellowness, obedience to authority, self-doubt, and a tendency towards melancholy — not at all what one thinks of as the conventional American character.

For Dick, the science-fiction veneer was only a sheltering device from which to embark on his philosophical plots. Space travel and colonisation (often of Mars or the moon) was a given, as were certain technological advancements such as genetic enhancement, robotics and artificial intelligence. In Dick’s world, “vidphones” (today’s Skype or FaceTime) are ubiquitous, as are personal aircraft that fly vertically and horizontally. His novels often take place in ecologically devastated worlds, where memories of the pre-war era are scarce or false. Often individuals have psychic powers (the “precogs”, familiar from Minority Report), and often they inhabit each other’s minds (this started in an early novel called Eye in the Sky, where eight individuals caught between life and death inhabit each other’s realities in turn). Evoking New Age spirituality, there is often some deity with the power to fuse with individual consciousness. Within these basic parameters Dick is free to come up with huge variation, so that each novel is set in a distinct world with its own sensibility — which we can quickly figure out, however, because we know his usual foundations.

In Dick’s world of the future (though there may be memorable forays into the past, as in Ubik), we typically encounter an individual, or a set of individuals, uncertain of their identity. They may be dead or alive, but not know which is which, as in Ubik (1969). Their new identities may deviate from their past identities, as in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Or they may be androids or humans, and not know which is which, as in Do Androids Dream? (1968).

The plot of Do Androids Dream? is the most linear of Dick’s major novels, whereas the plotting is mind-bogglingly complex and ultimately indecipherable (particularly because of his favourite twists at the end, which subvert everything that has gone on before), in novels like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Flow My Tears, or Ubik. But in Do Androids Dream? the plot is relatively straightforward and remains so until the end, lacking the characteristic final twist.

In a ruined San Francisco of 2021, after a calamitous war that has caused radioactive fallout, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter working for the San Francisco Police Department. His job is to hunt down escaped “andys” (androids), specifically the advanced Nexus-6 brand created by the Rosen Association in Seattle, a breed so sophisticated that it is difficult to tell them apart — except with acute tests of involuntary physical reflexes, such as the Voigt-Kampff test measuring the subject’s empathy, especially with regard to animals. Animals have pretty much died out, so those with means, such as Deckard, keep artificial animals which, like the androids, are difficult to tell apart from the real thing. The elite survivors on earth tune into the empathetic religion of “Mercerism” by holding on to an empathy box, which generates feelings of oneness with the transcendent/sacrificial/misunderstood soul of Wilbur Mercer, while “specials” or “chickenheads,” those who have suffered mental damage from radiation, are consigned to devastated, mostly uninhabited suburbs.

The story unfolds over a 24-hour period as Deckard is assigned the task of retiring the remaining six escaped Nexus-6 androids, and he motivates himself by dreaming of — and buying — live animals, such as an owl or a goat, the most precious of all commodities. Along the way he develops romantic feelings for Rachael Rosen of the Rosen Association, an android employed by the company. As Deckard fights and retires androids, it becomes difficult to know what is human and what is not. Deckard wonders if he is an android himself and doesn’t know it; but upon taking the test he turns out to be human, one of the few instances in Dick’s novels where he is not ambiguous about such a central question of identity. (The movie was more ambivalent, however; the director’s cut hinted strongly that Deckard may be an android.)

Dick is able to leap right into the deepest metaphysical questions because he doesn’t have to waste time in each novel setting the boundaries; with a few brushstrokes he starts telling his fast-paced stories, which in this case is a binary one: the hunter with the task of killing a specific number of androids for bounty, while administering tests to distinguish androids from humans. In other Dick novels no such qualifying examination exists but, in the end, Dick is just playing his old game: the impossibility of knowing what is real by putting these tests to shame, as advanced as they may be.

When Deckard administers the empathy test, often checking for mercy to animals, the measurements involve optical or spinal reflexes, which lag just a fraction behind humans; so we’re on pretty thin ground indeed if this is the only distinction between a human and an android.

More to the point, since we seem nowhere close to producing androids today, is the issue of how we can judge humanity, since in the novel there are many ambiguous cases: Deckard starts feeling empathy for androids, especially after taking a liking to Rachael, which should disqualify him from retiring androids (because he’s not human enough to do it?); a fellow bounty hunter, Phil Desch, who suspects he may be an android implanted with false memories, passes the human test despite showing all the signs that he lacks the empathy to be human; Rachael is a complicated case, as is one of the last remaining “andys”, Irmgard Baty, who seems to be as empathetic as any human in the novel, including having sympathy for the “chickenhead,” J.R. Isidore, the novel’s Christ-like innocent, who gives shelter to the last three androids, even at the risk of personal harm.

Consider how close Dick’s dystopia is to the social condition in the US today: we physically enfold, or hold with both hands, little empathy boxes (iPhones or iPads) that instantly summon up waves of “Mercerism” — ie, unwarranted sympathy for causes we may not have personal stakes in; animals have become the most precious of all things in the West, the singular commodity that determines our humanness, the surest litmus test of how we rank in empathy; and biology and genetics determine the degree to which each of us will be assimilated or segregated, the age of meritocracy having come to a merciless close.

I have wondered why Dick was so obsessed with the nature of identity and of reality at the inception of the postmodern age, when in Eisenhower’s — and, later, Kennedy’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s — America, technology did not yet have the powers of surveillance and intrusion it would later develop in the age of personal computers, which only began in the 1980s. But it is ever the case that the writer who defines the problems of an era in its formative stage captures it most acutely (Plato and Aristotle for the dawn of philosophy, Cervantes and Shakespeare for the emergence of humanism, Defoe and Swift for the rise of capitalist liberalism), which also means that such writers — like Dick for the post-capitalist age — are visionaries who help realise, and even shape, the actual contours of the future.

We are all Dickians today whether we know it or not, just as it was true for Shakespeare or Dickens in earlier times. The visual landscape Blade Runner chose is not how I imagined Dick’s future world, but for better or worse the Hollywood version of the future, through countless movies inspired by Dick, determines our interpretation of globalisation or technology or terrorism, and even shapes our responses, such as forms of surveillance or counter-surveillance.

I do think that popular culture is untrue to Dick’s humanistic vision. No matter how bleak and desperate things get in Dick’s novels, the essential optimism of California in its golden age always comes through. The violence, even when it occurs, is not of the unforgiving kind that we know from Hollywood, and there is an abiding gentleness, true to California, that Dick experienced, and that I too shared in later decades when that spirit still reigned in the exact spots in southern and northern California where Dick spent his life.

I come back to the question of why the nature of reality is so indecipherable today, as Dick foresaw in Time Out of Joint and made his lifelong project to explicate in various plots. Why can’t we tell who we really are; why do we often suspect that all around us is a scrim of unreality; why do we have the uncanny sense that we function as automatons, inhabiting only the surface, unable to penetrate to the truth? Being positioned in the post-capitalist economy as abstract commodities ourselves is part of the answer, but the deeper truth may simply be the weight of history: as everything becomes known and repeated, we do not feel newness about anything. This is less true in “developing” societies (developing toward what? unreality?), but the phenomenon is rapidly becoming inescapable everywhere. What this means — not to avoid the point — is that we have ceased being human, since we have ceased being historical subjects. Hence all the doubt.

Technology, in the novels of Dick, ironically appears as the primary means to return our historicity to ourselves. Conditions such as persisting in some sentient form after death, the distinction between humans and humanoid robots disappearing, artificial intelligence taking over beyond the intentions of humans, or boundaries between separate minds eroding through drugs or other stimulation, are all intended to shake us from our reverie, to make us think of rising again to face our desperate aloneness in the universe.

Every Dick novel articulates this desperation, peculiar in the shape it takes in post-capitalist societies, to a higher pitch than any other writer of his era managed. It is because he refused to accept any ‘reality’ (which is just a particular imposition of a particular stage of technology on our place in history) as given that he was therefore free, in that bygone optimistic Californian way, to reimagine all of reality.

I feel the same joy reading Dick’s novels today as I did when I first started reading novels like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels at an incomprehensibly early age: I feel the same sense of pure wonder about what it might mean to be human, crisscrossing multiple dimensions that remain hidden in our customary sleepwalking. And while those early novels addressed quandaries to identity posed by emerging capitalist individualism (the same arc where developing countries found themselves during the post-war years), Dick’s novels ask parallel questions for the post-modern, post-capitalist, post-ideological era. The pleasure for me is indescribable (even if the books are sad), the immersion is total, as my doubts about reality are confirmed, so that I may be left with nothing, to discover myself anew.

Reading Dick is for me a profoundly personal experience. I have travelled the same journey with him, in many ways and in many places, in different times and milieus, and have come to know that his way of suspending reality is the only way out — or in. His plots are not that complex after all, and, besides, there is really only the one plot he knows, which is true of all great writers.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 21st, 2016