When I was a teenager, and despite the fact that money was short, I splashed out on the collected short fiction of Philip K Dick – four hefty paperback volumes, which I still have, and still read. This collection includes some of the greatest science fiction stories ever written, but it was a blurb on the back that really caught my eye and captured my imagination. It was a quotation from the Independent: “Dick was a great philosophical writer who found science fiction the ideal form for the expression of his ideas.”
Maybe that makes him sound a little intellectually forbidding. Nothing could be further from the truth: Phil Dick turned pulp into art, and couldn’t write un-entertainingly if he tried. But the blurb captures something essential about his greatness: his extraordinary ability to interrogate the nature of reality, to make you doubt all the things you had previously taken for granted.
He was an autodidact in philosophical matters, and sometimes was clumsy, or oddball, in the arguments he developed. At the end of his life he had what he considered a religious vision and devoted years and thousands of pages of frantic writing to try to make sense of it. Selections of this home-brew theology have been published under the title The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, and they make for wild reading, equal measures bonkers and astonishing.
But at his best Dick was a focused and penetrating metaphysician. His classic mid-1960s novels manage both to be fast-paced and thrilling SF adventure and – lord, I hope I don’t sound pretentious when I say this (but it’s true!) – genuinely profound interventions into the philosophy of being, what the professionals call “ontology”. And for my money Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is the best of all of them.
The great French thinker René Descartes, trying to pin down the one thing that he could absolutely and certainly call his own, lighted upon his famous cornerstone proposition: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. It was something he felt he could be absolutely certain about, a foundation on which he built his entire edifice of thought. Philip K Dick, though, is the anti-Descartes. He meets “I think therefore I am” with the brilliant, destabilising, counter-proposition: “Why do you assume that the thoughts in your head are yours?” In the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (1966) people buy fake memories of exotic holidays or exciting adventures that are indistinguishable from their real memories (this story has been made into two movies, both called Total Recall). In Dick’s science fiction, sensations, memories and even thoughts can be faked; characters who genuinely believe they are people discover that they are only robots programmed to believe they are people. But if I think no longer guarantees I am, then how can we be sure anything at all is real?
Dick says: we can’t. It’s a brilliant and unsettling vision.
Do androids dream .....appeared almost exactly midway through Dick’s career as a novelist: 14 years after his first published novel, Solar Lottery, was written and 14 years before his premature death in 1982. His personal life was in turmoil, he was constantly short of money, often anxious or full-on paranoid, but this novel is him at the height of his powers.
It is set in a future San Francisco. Much of the population has died in a nuclear war, and many of the survivors have left Earth for the Offworld colonies. With natural wildlife devastated, people instead own android pets and animals. The protagonist, Rick Deckard, keeps a robot sheep on the roof of his apartment, and works as an “android hunter”, tracking down and terminating rogue humanoid androids.
The whole novel is a brilliant exploration of the inauthenticity of existence. Deckard’s sheep is fake; his job is hunting down fake people; his wife’s emotions are decanted into her from a machine (one of my favourite moments in the novel is at the beginning when Deckard and his wife, Iran, have an argument, which ends when Iran dials “594” on her console: “pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”. Dick was often a superbly dry comedian in his writing). Even Deckard’s religion is bogus. He belongs to a faith called Mercerism, which uses “empathy boxes” that connect worshippers to a virtual reality in which their messiah, Wilbur Mercer, eternally climbs a hill while being hit with sharp stones. But, the novel reveals, Mercer is just an elderly actor, desperate for work; the religion is a confidence trick.
Ridley Scott’s celebrated movie adaptation of this novel, Blade Runner(1982), omits the Mercerism, and opts for a very different vibe. Dick’s characters rattle around the echoing, enormous, empty spaces of a mostly abandoned Earth; Scott’s movie plays up the novel’s existential claustrophobia via a brilliantly cluttered cyberpunk noir, all choking streets, crowds at night-time, dark spaces and neon lights. But one way in which the movie stays true to the book is the unsettling precision with which it captures an eerie sense of the pervasiveness of artificiality. There are no open green spaces in Blade Runner: nothing natural or organic. The fake environments and fake “replicants” Deckard hunts (by 1982 “androids” was deemed too old-fashioned, and the new term was invented) are sophisticated and compelling, but fake for all that.
Later this year the greatly anticipated sequel to this movie will be released: Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. I look forward to this with an excitement mixed with equal amounts of trepidation – because one of the things that makes the original movie so compelling is the unanswered question at its heart: whether Deckard himself is a fake, an android programmed to believe himself a human. It would be a shame if the new movie is too explicit when it comes to answering that question. The ambiguity is what makes it so potent.
Dick’s novel is equally open-ended: Deckard himself comes to suspect that even his own consciousness, his thinking-therefore-he-is, might be as much a fake as everything else. But he finds a sort of consolation even there. At the end of the book he discovers what he believes to be a real toad – potentially very valuable – and brings it home. His wife discovers the toad is electric, but he is not downhearted. “Electric things have their lives, too,” he tells her, “paltry as those lives are,” and dials up 670 on his own Mood Organ: “long deserved peace”. Maybe “I only think paltry and artificial thoughts” can still precede a “therefore I am”. Dick, the anti-Descartes, at least suggests it might be so.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/27/philip-k-dick-best-novels-blade-runner-minority-report
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