This advertisement appeared in The New York Times some time in early to mid-1946. As described at Wikipedia, “The Ford car was thoroughly updated in 1941, in preparation for a time of unpredictability surrounding World War II. The 1941 design would continue in an aborted 1942 model year and would be restarted in 1946 and produced until 1948 when the more modern 1949 Fords were ready. During the initial year of this car, it evolved considerably.”
As befitting the year, the ad is direct, simple, and above all, optimistic.
It was found, at random, while reviewing the Times – “to see what I could see” – for news articles pertaining to the Second World War. Of which, inevitably, there were many.
Announcing the NEW 1946 FORD
*Smartest Ford ever built *More new developments than most pre-war yearly models *Greater economy *Longer life *New, finer performance – 100 h.p. V-8 engine 90 h.p. 6 cyl. engine *Extra-big hydraulic brakes for quick, quiet stops *New, full-cushioned ride
There’s a in your future!
It’s not only the smartest Ford ever built, but in every way the finest. Advancements everywhere you look. Rich and roomy two-tone interiors… Horsepower stepped up from 90 to 100 – plus still more over-all economy… New performance and ease of handling…: New springing for a full-cushioned, level ride. Brakes are newly-designed, self-centering hydraulics, extra large for quick, smooth, quiet stops… Around the block or across the country, here’s a car you’ll drive with pride – and constant pleasure. FORD MOTOR COMPANY.
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
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But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
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What’s on a book is interesting (hey, that’s why this blog’s here!) but it’s what’s inside that really counts. Some novels; some stories are so compelling that the message they present – whether explicitly or implicitly – demands acknowledgement; demands recognition; demands contemplation. This is so regardless of a tale’s format, physical quality, or (sometimes being generous!) literary venue. In some pulp fiction, there has been profundity. In a few cheap paperbacks, there has been prescience. And even in some works of mainstream fiction, there can be (on infrequent occasion!) meaning. Such as, in the four examples below: Two pulps; a mainstream novel; a cheap paperback. While they certainly merit notice of their cover art, it’s the commonality – expressed in different degrees of sophistication and style – of their understanding of the intersection between human nature, technology, and civilization, and the endurance of civilization, for which they should be recognized.
So, each post features images of the book or pulp’s cover art, followed by a whole, long, big bunch of excerpts.
… some worthy quotes from That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s final novel, follow below.
But first…!
here’s George Orwell’s review of the novel from the Manchester Evening News of August 16, 1945, published one day after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast concerning the termination of WW II. A strange and subtle synchronicity, eh? Orwell’s opinion of Lewis’ novel is generally positive, but his criticisms of the magical and supernatural elements in the story are, I think, unwarranted and strangely naive, especially coming from a man of such shining literary skill and moral sensitivity. (I recently finished The Road to Wigan Pier, and, Homage to Catalonia, both of which clearly reveal Orwell’s intellectual honesty, compassion, and political wisdom.) After all, it was Lewis’ specific and deliberate intention – having successively “segued” from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – to combine elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural as a warning about the dangers of deification of the human intellect, the seductiveness of power – and especially the desire to feel that one is among a society’s elect, and, an entirely mechanistic view of reality.
Here’s the review…
The Scientist Takes Over
(Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251)
On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.
Mr. C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.
In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.
His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.
There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.
It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.
One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.
They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.
Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.
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This post concludes with a bunch of references to commentary about and discussion of the novel, the most recent of which are N.S. Lyons’ profound “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” – also available in podcast form via Audyo – and Rusty Reno’s “That Haunting Nihilism“. (Admittedly, the very title of Lyons’ post inspired the leading word in this post’s title: Technonihilism. One must give credit where credit’s due!)
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But First, Some Thing to Watch
So, to (try!) to begin on a note of levity, what better way than to poke fun at sciencescientism than by Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” (Official Video – HD Remaster – April 15, 2009), at Thomas Dolby Official?
After all, humor may be the refuge of the powerless, but it is a refuge nonetheless.
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And so, some quotes:
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The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would house this remarkable organisation. The N.I.C.E. was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. (23)
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Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. (28)
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“And what do you think about it, Studdock?” said Feverstone.
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.” (38)
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“But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.” (40-41)
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“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”
“The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting – especially on the winning side.”
“And what is the first practical step?”
“Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on the side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.”
“Go on. This interests me very much.”
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as you can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
“What sort of things have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”
“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”
“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.” (42)
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“Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Miss Ironwood.
“You mean it will go away?”
“I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.”
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face. “Then – can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams – horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.”
“I can quite understand that.”
“Is it something that can’t be cured?”
“The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.” (64)
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“But what is this all about?” said Jane “I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”
“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.” (66)
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“I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living at not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” (71)
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They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (87)
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“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.” (99-100)
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Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton — the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgment he smiled a sickly — smile and said “Hullo!” (109)
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The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then — perhaps once in the whole evening — something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles — shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world — to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant. (128)
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience — but certainly not obedience to Mark — came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, and ambiguous…
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage… ?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends — comrades — do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience — humility — is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.” (147-148)
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”
“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”
“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”
“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”
“Go on,” said Winter.
“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”
“That’s true.”
“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”
“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”
“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.
“My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away. Bah! I know that is not what you think. But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid, are they not? You see? Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. You would understand if you were peasants. Who would try to work with stallions and bulls? No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.” (172-173)
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“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” (174) Filostrato
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Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.
“For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here. This Institute — Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (177)
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Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
“You are frightened?” said Filostrato. “You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ahi — if you were outside, if you were mere canaglia you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power. He lives forever. The giant time is conquered. And the giant space — he was already conquered too. One of our company has already travelled in space. True; he was betrayed and murdered and his manuscripts are imperfect: we have not yet been able to reconstruct his space ship. But that will come.”
“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”
“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.”
“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”
“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature — Man in the abstract — is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”
“A king cometh,” said Straik, “who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Mark.
“But it is very easy,” said Filostrato. “We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever; he gets wiser. Later, we make them live better — for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present.”
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.” (178-179)
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One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee (who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils) was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that — if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent. In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth. Doubtless, the great beings who now so often came to him had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England and England from the face of the globe; perhaps, to blot the globe itself out of existence. But no power of that kind would be used. Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men. It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side, that they had discovered the state of Merlin: not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood, but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place where those things remain that are taken off thine’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.
It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow, in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him. There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin: and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners — what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stilling of all deepset repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
“It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same – until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices.”
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“His faith was the faith of a Torquemada backed by science.”
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The imagination of the future comes in many guises.
Among the most compelling are five twentieth-century novels that, despite the marked differences in their literary styles, plot, and characters, are stunning examples of world-building. All are chillingly crisp depictions of totalitarianism built upon a foundation of technology and bureaucracy, and ultimately, sociological persuasion, manipulation, and control.
1984, by George Orwell Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Fahrenheit 451 (based on The Fireman) by Ray Bradbury We, by Evgeniy Zamyatin Utopia 14 (alternate title Player Piano), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
There are innumerable other works in this vein, particularly in the realm of science-fiction, which have received (or merited?!) far less attention, but which are still compelling in their own right. One of these is Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 Year of Consent which, despite not being of the same literary standard as the above-mentioned works, has proven to be eerily relevant to the United States, and perhaps “the world”, of 2021. A Dell paperback, you can read David Foster’s insightful 2021 review – I recommend it highly! – at ChicagoBoyz, and three brief comments (with middling ratings; oh, well!) at GoodReads.
To quote David Foster’s post:
The story is set in the then-future year of 1990. The United States is still nominally a democracy, but the real power lies with the social engineers…sophisticated advertising & PR men…who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want. (Prefiguring “nudging”) The social engineers are aided in their tasks by a giant computer called Sociac (500,000 vacuum tubes! 860,000 relays!) and colloquially known as ‘Herbie.’ The political system now in place is called Democratic Rule by Consent. While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States….who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers. The social engineers work in a department called ‘Communications’, which most people believe is limited to such benign tasks as keeping the telephones and the television stations in operation. Actually, its main function is the carrying out of influence operations.
…and…
Year of Consent can’t be called great literature, on a par with 1984 or Brave New World, but it projects a future which is perhaps closer to the immediate threats facing American liberty in 2020 than do either of those two other novels.
Aside from Crossen’s prescience, in purely artistic terms, Dell’s paperback is an unusual example of the art of illustrator Richard Powers. Unlike as in the overwhelming majority of his compositions, Powers created a painting that is both symbolic and realistic. In the background, kind of Matrix-like, a citizen is embedded in and connected to electronic circuits, her hands and feet fused into or hidden by a tapestry of wire junctions, even as her head and torso are surrounded by a translucent container.
However… Protagonist Gerald Leeds an his girlfriend Nancy are neither stylized nor abstract nor – as in so many of Powers’ 1950s paintings – diminutively symbolic: They’re depicted in complete and dramatic realism as they flee from “Herbie”.
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She and her smartphone are one!
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As far as the appearance of Gerald Leeds, could he have been modeled after Powers himself, as in this self-portrait from Bill & Sue-On Hillman’s ERBZine? (Just a thought.)
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SECURITY A.D. 1990
It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same – until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices.
They are victims of a gigantic con game. Free will, the right of dissent have been washed away in a sea of slogans coined by the public-relations manipulators who have taken over the government. The rare ones who momentarily forget they are no longer individuals have their symptoms recorded by an enormous mechanical brain in Washington. The real dissenters, the incorrigible rebels, have their “sickness” cured by a simple surgical operation…
This is the year of consent. And this is the story of a man who fought back.
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Some quotes from the novel.
Or, are they aspects of our reality?
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Never has there been more freedom anywhere than in America today.
We’ve done away with police and even prisons.
Crime has been almost wiped out since we recognized it as a social disease.
We’ve done away with poverty.
There are fewer restrictions on people than ever before in the history of mankind.
For the first time they’re really free.
Gerald reflects:
Even if it hadn’t been dangerous, I wouldn’t have argued with him.
He believed what he was saying.
His faith was the faith of a Torquemada backed by science.
There was no way to make him see
that the social engineers had taken away only one freedom,
but that it was the ultimate freedom –
the right to choose.
Everything…was decided for them and then they were conditioned to want it.
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“Why even the great Lenin said,
“It is true that liberty is precious – so precious that it must be rationed.”
“Yeah,” I said dryly. “Hobbyhorses.”
“What?”
“Hobbyhorses,” I repeated.
“Did you know that it is now almost two generations
since hobbyhorses have been sold in toy stores in either Russia or the United States?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said doubtfully.
“I’m not sure why hobbyhorses withered away in the Soviet,” I said,
“but the ban was started here by the playschool consultants,
who were influenced by the social engineers
long before the latter came into power.
They put the finger on hobbyhorses
on the grounds that they did not develop the group spirit.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Of course.
But you realize that it meant different things in the two countries.
Here the group spirit was used to build fascism
while in Russia and the Soviet Countries it was used to build a people’s world.
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This is a fight to the finish between mass man and individual man.
It was a pretty even match until the advent of controlled mass communications.
Then the giant electronic brains completely tipped the scales…
there is no difference between our social engineers and those in Russia.
Both are out to turn the world into one of mass men –
everyone conforming in every single way.
And they’ve damn near succeeded.
“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!”
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The Road Back is a book I’ve read a b o u t, but not yet actually read, having learned about it at ChicagoBoyz. There, the book is discussed in the context of literature of First World War in general, and, the war’s impact and legacy, in intellectual and cultural terms, in particular, on the generation of soldiers who fought in it. Much more importantly – with relevance for the world of 2022; our world – is the way in which the war altered ways of understanding, living in, and acting upon (and catastrophically against?) the world, for veterans of the conflict and especially those who came after.
Akin to Remarque’s to Arch of Triumph, The Road Back was transformed to film in 1937. The full movie, at Sir Jänskä’s YouTube channel, can be viewed here…
The Old Man decides to humor us at all costs. We are too many, and Willy stands there too formidably trumpeting before him. And who can say what these undisciplined fellows may not be doing next; they may even produce bombs from their pockets. He beats the air with his arms as an archangel his wings. But no on listens to him.
Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. There is silence. “Mr. Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice, “you have seen the war after your fashion – with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with it – we went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing, and about which there can be no speeches.”
Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. He passes his hand over his forehead and continues. “We have not come to ask a reckoning – that would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming. – But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the “Fatherland” on our lips – and we have returned in silence, but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. And now we ask you to be silent too. Have done with fine phrases. They are not fitting. Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. We saw them die. And the memory of it is still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are talking. They died for more than that.”
Now everywhere it is quiet. The Principal has his hands clasped together. “But, Breyer,” he says gently, “I – I did not mean to – “
Ludwig has done.
After a while the Principal continues. “But tell me then, what is it that you do want?”
We look at one another. What do we want? Yes, if it were so easy a thing to say in a sentence. A vague, urgent sense of it we have – but for words? We have no words for it, yet. But perhaps later we shall have. (97-98)
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At last came my turn. The man who had been before me stumbled out and I stepped into the room. It was low and dark, and reeked so of carbolic acid and sweat that I thought it strange to see the branches of a lime tree just outside the window, and the sun and wind playing in the fresh, green leaves – so withered and used up did everything in the room appear. There was a dish with pink water on a chair and in the corner a sort of camp-bed on which was spread a torn sheet. The woman was fat and had on a short, transparent chemise. She did not look at me at all, but straightway lay down. Only when I still did not come, did she look up impatiently; then a flicker of comprehension showed in her spongy face. She perceived that I was still quite young.
I simply could not; horror seized me and a chocking nausea. The woman made a few gestures to rouse me, gross, repulsive gestures; she tried to pull me to her and even smiled as she did so, sweetly and coyly, that I should have compassion on her – what was she, after all, but a poor, army mattress, that must bed twenty and more fellows every day? – but I laid down only the money beside her and went out hastily and down the stairs.
Jupp gave me a wink. “Well, how was it?”
“So, so”, I answered like an old hand, and we turned to go. But no, we must go first to the A.M.C corporal again and make water under his eyes. Then we received a further injection of protargol.
“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!” I rolled up my great-coat and packed my ground-sheet, I received my ammunition and we marched out. I was silent and sorrowful, and I thought upon it: how now nothing was left me of those high-flying dreams of life and of love, but a rifle, a fat whore and the dull rumble out there on the sky-line whither we were now slowly marching. Then came darkness, and the trenches and death. – Franz Wagner fell that night, and we lost besides twenty-three men. (157-158)
For Further Thought
World War One, and the Transformation of Civilization, With Relevance for Our Times, atChicago Boyz…
Like the covers of other 1950s-era Mentor books, that of New American Library’s 1957 edition of Albert Schweitzer’s Out Of My Life and Thought was designed by Robert Jonas. However, perhaps by virtue of Schweitzer then being still very-much-alive (!), Jonas’ cover is a simple and direct representation of its subject, set against an equally literal background. This is quite unlike Jonas’ typical use of either a limited number of bold, primary colors, or, softly varying hues of the same color, with subjects geometrically arranged and visually simplified within his compositions.
The back cover is devoid of explanatory text – presenting only an endorsement by John H. Holmes of the New York Herald Tribune – instead displaying Erica Anderson’s photograph of Schweitzer…
… Albert Schweitzer Papers (Syracuse University Libraries – Special Collections Research Center)
… Vimeo (“1957 documentary produced and directed by Jerome Hill. Cinematography by Erica Anderson. Music by Alec Wilder. Narrated by Burgess Meredith and Fredric March.”)
“And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots – roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep – his home.”
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Some works of fiction are didactic: An author will compose a short story; a novelette; a novel, to impart a lesson or present a viewpoint about the nature of contemporary society through the vantage of a “world”, whether that world be past, present, or future; whether that world be real or purely imaginary.
Other works of fiction can be emotionally cathartic: They create moods of anticipation, dread, and fear; they manufacture a sense of unreality – a perhaps Lovecraftian unreality, one permeated by an inexpressible sense of wrongness: “That which should not be, but is!” The goal? To cause aN intensity of feeling through identification with a character‘s (or, characters’) predicament, and then the resolution of that predicament: hopefully for the good. And if not for the good, at least – if there’s any compensation to be had – with stoicism and bravery.
And, then, some works of fiction can be prophetic. Whether written a thousand, a hundred, or ten years “prior”; whether through chance; whether by calculatedly analyzing economic, ideological, sociological, and technological trends; whether by intuition born of a sixth sense, or, intuition born from the ability to view the “world” from a vantage point detached from popular culture and the mood of an age; whether ultimately by grasping (to adapt the idiom of Charles Péguy) the “mystique” of an age, some works of fiction can be – and are – windows upon the future.
The prediction doesn’t have to be accurate – how could it be? – close enough will duly suffice.
Case in point, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1952 novel (his first novel, at that) Player Piano, excerpts from which follow, quoted from Dell’s 1980 edition.
Not as well known as his subsequent works, such as The Sirens of Titan or Slaughterhouse-Five (the latter having been adapted for film), the novel – especially in the year 2021 – merits consideration for Vonnegut’s degree of foresight, if not prescience, via his extrapolation of academic, sociological, and technological trends then prevalent in post WW-II America.
And today, irrevocably prevailing?
While an in-depth description of Player Piano is beyond the immediate scope of this post (such insight is readily available at Wikipedia and GoodReads), and it has been a “few” (!) decades since I’ve read the novel), here’s a mini(mini), highly simplified summary of the work: Vonnegut posits a scenario where in the United States, through a combination of advances in electronic technology, and, the development of a permanent academic, corporate, and government meritocracy, society has arrived at a great stagnation: A small minority (a very small minority) of corporate bureaucrats and electronic engineers has become responsible for the operation and maintenance of the technology that, in effect and reality, runs not just the United States, but the modern world.
On a technical note, the word “tapes” appears in the text when Vonnegut alludes to the technology and algorithms that run society, probably reflective of the use of magnetic tape as a medium for data storage in the 1950s. (Well, this was before the advent of the transistor, let alone integrated circuits.)
As touched upon at several points in the novel, the only real activity for many citizens has become “employment” with the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps – the “Reeks and Wrecks” – or enrollment in the Army, the latter having no battles to fight. However, rather than the violence, rebellion, or “underground” one might expect to arise in such a situation, the mood and actions of the citizenry are instead characterized by the opposite: Except for the ruling elite, society is permeated by pervasive lethargy born of resignation: a spiritual, psychological, and intellectual malaise which has vague undertones (no overtones!) of a crudely Huxleyan – not Orwellian – world (by no means a Brave world, either). The material and physical needs of most of citizens are provided for on a nominal level, but humanity has become permanently “stuck”.
Enter Doctor Paul Proteus. (Great choice of character name by Vonnegut!) One of the “engineers”, the 35-year-old Dr. Proteus becomes disillusioned with and alienated from his place and role in society, and becomes involved in an attempt to … well … change things. Drastically. Permanently. For the better. However (spoiler alert!), despite his best efforts and the mood of optimism and hope that pervades the novel’s latter pages (you really, really think that success will ensue), Player Piano ends upon a solidly, matter-of-factly, pessimistic note: The organization of society, the pervasiveness and power of electronic technology, the reluctant or willing (and sometimes both) co-option of the intellectual elite by government and corporate (especially corporate) bureaucracy, and the habituation of the population to a gray nature, all combine to generate a civilizational momentum that has irrevocably solidified the structure of society.
Change, if any, will only come in a way yet unknown.
One recompense, though a recompense in a sense purely literary, is Player Piano’s very quality as literature. It’s well written. Very well written, at a level that renders its dystopian ending, well … uh … tolerable. In any event, not only is there no easy way out, there seems to be no way “out”, at all. And in that sense, another recompense, albeit of a symbolic nature, is that the novel’s ending is realistic and refreshingly non-Spielbergian, characterized by neither an avoidance of reality nor a romanticized view of human nature.
Examples of cover art for three editions of the book follow below, with quotes interspersed between.
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Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”
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(Here’s the cover of the novel’s first (1952) printing; artist unknown. Note that the cover shows symbols of science and technology: An oscilloscope, a diagram of a circuit, and a “man”. Notably, the man – whether Scribner’s design staff intended so is unknown! – is dwarfed by technology.)
Paul nodded his thanks. His skin began to itch, as though he had suddenly become unclean. These were members of the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, in their own estimate the “Reeks and Wrecks”. Those who couldn’t compete economically with machines had their choice, if they had no source of income, of the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps. The soldiers, with their hollowness hidden beneath twinkling buttons and buckles, crisp serge, and glossy leather, didn’t depress Paul nearly as much as the Reeks and Wrecks did. (21-22)
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At one point, Kroner raised his big hand and asked if he might make a comment. “Just to sort of underline what you’re saying, Paul, I’d like to point out something I thought was rather interesting. One horsepower equals about twenty-two manpower – big manpower. If you convert the horsepower of one of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower, you’ll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do – and do it twenty-four hours a day.” He smiled beatifically. Kroner was the rock, the fountainhead of faith and pride for all in the Eastern Division. (45)
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Kroner smiled, “As you say, like rabbits. Incidentally, Paul, another interesting sidelight your father probably told you about is how people didn’t pay much attention to this, as you call it, Second Industrial Revolution for quite some time. Atomic energy was hogging the headlines, and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world. The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.” (46-47)
(…and, rear cover.)
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“Uh-huh,” said Paul, looking at the familiar graph with distaste. It was a so-called Achievement and Aptitude Profile, and every college graduate got one along with his sheepskin. And the sheepskin was nothing, and the graph was everything. When time for graduation came, a machine took a student’s grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph – the profile. Here Bud’s graph was high for theory, there low for administration, here low for creativity, and so on, up and down across the page to the last quality – personality. In mysterious, unnamed units of measure, each graduate was credited with having a high, medium, or low personality. Bud, Paul saw, was a strong medium, as the expression went, personality-wise. When the graduate was taken into the economy, all his peaks and valleys were translated into perforations on his personal card. (65)
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“That’s pretty strong. I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out – most of them – that what’s left is just another zero. A good bit of enough, anyway.
My glass is empty.”
Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men – and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s had been shot to hell.
My glass is empty.”
“I just had it filled again,” said Finnerty. “Oh, so you did.” Lasher sipped thoughtfully.
“These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them – or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suppose they’re right.”
“If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?” said Paul.
“Oh, this business we’ve got now – it’s been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime, and take a look at the magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production – know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. Even then, half the people or more didn’t understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego. And then there was all this let’s-not-shoot-Father Christmas advertising.”
“How that?” said Paul.
“You know – those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil – the works.”
“Strange business,” said Lasher. “This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy way: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job business becomes today’s sermon.” (78-79)
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And the personnel machines saw to it that all governmental jobs of any consequence were filled by top-notch civil servants. The more Halyard thought about Lynn’s fat pay check, the madder he got, because all the gorgeous dummy had to do was read whatever was handed to him on state occasions: to be suitable awed and reverent, as he said, for all the ordinary, stupid people who’d elected him to office, to run wisdom from somewhere else through that resonant voicebox and between those even, pearl choppers. (104)
(The novel’s first paperback edition (November, 1954) published by Bantam Books under the titleUtopia 14, with cover art by Charles Binger. The cover scene is so general as to be unrelated to any specific event in the novel. On one side and receding into the distance, an ambiguous mass of struggling humanity, with no individual distinct from another. On the other, a man stares forward contemplatively; indifferently. The backdrop? Towers, buildings, platforms, and perhaps a factory: A vague metropolis against a sunset.)
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“Um,” said Mr. Haycox apathetically. “What [sic] do you keep working so smoothly?” Doctor Paul smiled modestly. “I spent seven years in the Cornell Graduate School of Realty to qualify for a Doctor of Realty degree and get this job.” “Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?” said Mr. Haycox. “I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree,” said Doctor Paul coolly. “My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year – eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins.” “Real-estate salesman,” said Mr. Haycox. He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. “I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me in the barn shoveling my thesis.” (133-134)
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He tried again: “In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them – the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.” (151)
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“That’s just it: things haven’t always been that way. It’s new, and it’s people like us who’ve brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.” (159)
(And, the rather simple rear cover.)
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“But he was great, and nobody’d argue about that, but do you think he could have been great today, in this modern day and age? Wheeler? Elm Wheeler? You know what he would be today? A Reek and a Wreck, that’s all. The war made him, and this life would of killed him.”
“Used to be there was a lot of damn fool things a dumb bastard could do to be great, but the machines fixed that. You know, used to be you could go to sea or a big clipper ship or a fishing ship and be a big hero in a storm. Or maybe you could be a pioneer and go out west and lead the people and make trails and chase away Indians and all that. Or you could be a cowboy, or all kinds of dangerous things, and still, be a dumb bastard.
“Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs, and the dumb bastards get tucked away in big bunches of prefabs that look like the end of a game of Monopoly, or in barracks, and there’s nothing for them to do but set there and kind of hope for a big fire where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody and run out with a baby in their hands. Or maybe hope – though they don’t say so out loud because the last one was so terrible – for another war. Course, there isn’t going to be another one.
“And, oh, I guess machines have made things a lot better. I’d be a fool to say they haven’t, though there’s been plenty who say they haven’t, and I can see what they mean, all right. It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to himself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones. And I guess I’m just about the end of a race, standing here on my own two feet.” (178-179)
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“Paul, your father tells me you’re real smart.” Paul had nodded uncomfortably. “That’s good, Paul, but that’s not enough.”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t be bluffed.”
“No, sir, I won’t.”
“Everybody’s shaking in their boots, so don’t be bluffed.”
“No, sir.”
“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per-cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me a specialist, and I’ll show you a man who’s so scared he’s dug a hole for himself to hide in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how had most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Want to be rich, Paul?”
“Yes, sir – I guess so. Yes, sir.”
“All right. I got rich, and I told you ninety per cent of what I know about it. The rest is decoration. All right?” (198)
(One of the several paperback editions published by Dell, this copy is a 1980 imprint. Hard to tell if the cover design is a painting, or, a sculpture or casting; I think the latter. Faces – similar faces – embedded in clear acrylic or glass. Looks like a human pinball machine, where the pinballs are frozen in space.)
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And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots – roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep – his home. A lump grew in his throat, and he couldn’t do anything about it. Doctor Paul Proteus was saying goodbye forever. (205)
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“Public relations,” said Halyard. “Please, what are public relations?” said Khashdrahr. “That profession,” said Halyard, quoting by memory from the Manual, “that profession specializing in the cultivation, by applied psychology in mass communication media, of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions, without being offensive to anyone of importance, and with the continued stability of the economy and society its primary goal.” (209)
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“… He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it.” “I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy?” “Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and, was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.” (212)
(And, rear cover.)
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Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves, or wards of the machines.” (251)
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves, even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit, and there’s a woman. The woman is wearing a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms, a curve of her creamy chest; she’s contemplating a cigarette in her right hand thinking that her companion has finally left his wife but can she trust him? Her heavy-lidded eyes, pouty lipsticked mouth, she has the redhead’s true pallor like skim milk, damned good-looking and she guesses she knows it but what exactly has it gotten her so far, and where? – he’ll start to feel guilty in a few days, she knows the signs, and actual smell, sweaty, rancid, like dirty socks; he’ll slip away to make telephone calls and she swears she isn’t going to go through that again, isn’t going to break down crying or begging nor is she going to scream at him, she’s finished with all that. And he’s silent beside her, not the kind to talk much but he’s thinking thank God he made the right move at last, he’s a little dazed like a man in a dream – is this a dream?—so much that’s wide, still, mute, horizontal, and the counterman in white, stooped as he is and unmoving, and the man on the other stool unmoving except to sip his coffee; but he’s feeling pretty good, it’s primarily relief, this time he’s sure as hell going to make it work, he owes it to her and to himself, Christ’s sake. And she’s thinking the light in this place is too bright, probably not very flattering, she hates it when her lipstick wears off and her makeup gets caked, she’d like to use a ladies’ room but there isn’t one here and Jesus how long before a gas station opens? – it’s the middle of the night and she has a feeling time is never going to budge. This time though she isn’t going to demean herself – he starts in about his wife, his kids, how he let them down, they trusted him and he let them down, she’ll slam out of the goddamned room and if he calls her SUGAR or BABY in that voice, running his hands over her like he has the right, she’ll slap his face hard, YOU KNOW I HATE THAT: STOP. And he’ll stop. He’d better. The angrier she gets the stiller she is, hasn’t said a word for the past ten minutes, not a strand of her hair stirs, and it smells a little like ashes or like the henna she uses to brighten it, but the smell is faint or anyway, crazy for her like he is, he doesn’t notice, or mind – burying his hot face in her neck, between her cool breasts, or her legs – wherever she’ll have him, and whenever. She’s still contemplating the cigarette burning in her hand, the counterman is still stooped gaping at her, and he doesn’t mind that, why not, as long as she doesn’t look back, in fact he’s thinking he’s the luckiest man in the world so why isn’t he happier? (Yale Review, Volume 78, Number 1, 1989)
[Update – December 26, 2020: My search for additional sightings of Frank the Robot has been successful. I’m happy to report that he’s been captured on video on many occasions, and entirely un-UFO-like, his identity has been definitively verified by amateur and professional observers from locales the world over. It turns out that he’s not at all reticent about public appearances, seeming to quietly revel in and appreciate public recognition. True, he doesn’t say much. (Actually, he doesn’t say anything at all.) After all, if you’re a metallic man several stories tall, your presence alone speaks for itself.
I’ve also included numerous links about Frank’s creator, Frank Kelly Freas. Oh, yes… Note Frank’s resemblance to the robot in Freas’ black & white illustration for Tom Godwin’s story “The Gulf Between”. A distant relative?
So, to view a better Frank sighting, scroll down a little – just below Stewie Griffin – and enjoy.]
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“What the hell is that, a killer robot monster?!”
Frank Kelly Freas’ art gets around, in ways quite unexpected:
I recently discovered that the plaintive, puppy-dog-eyed, giant robot featured on the cover of the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction – the inspiration for the cover art of Queen’s 1997 album “News of the World” – was encountered in the latter form by none other than Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, in the series’ 2012 episode “Killer Queen”. As you can see in the clip below (original here), Stewie’s introduction to the un-named metal monstrosity – courtesy of Brian Griffin – is a meeting quite memorable.
“You wanted obedience Cullin – now you have it. You climbed a long way up by forcing human beings to behave like machines. But you were wrong in one respect; no human can ever be forced to behave exactly like a machine, and no machine can ever be constructed that will behave exactly like a human. Machines are the servants of humans, not their equals. There will always be a gulf between Flesh and Steel. Read those five words on the panel before you and you will understand.
It was a good ship, built to travel almost forever, and it hurled itself on through the galaxy at full acceleration; on and on until the galaxy was a great pinwheel of white fire behind it and there was nothing before it.
On and on, faster and faster, into the black void of Nothing; without reason or purpose while a dark-eyed robot stared at a skeleton that was grinning mirthlessly at a five-word sentence:
A MACHINE DOES NOT CARE (Tom Godwin, “The Gulf Between”, p. 56) ________________________________________
“God, why does he look sad?! He’s already destroyed mankind; what else could he want?!”
“I’ll tell you what the news of the world is, we’re in a lot of #@%$*! trouble!”
A very colorful cover by Robert Jonas, for a very serious work…
“…experimental science is one of the most unlikely products of history. Seers, priests, warriors and shepherds have abounded in all times and places. But this fauna of experimental man apparently requires for its production a combination of circumstances more exceptional than those that engender the unicorn.”
“The civilisation of the XIXth Century is, then, of such a character that it allows the average man to take his place in a world of superabundance, of which he perceives only the lavishness of the means at his disposal, nothing of the pains involved. He finds himself surrounded by marvelous instruments, healing medicines, watchful governments, comfortable privileges. On the other hand, he is ignorant how difficult it is to invent those medicines and those instruments
and to assure their production in the future;
he does not realise how unstable is the organisation of the State
and is scarcely conscious to himself of any obligations. This lack of balance falsifies his nature, vitiates it in its very roots, causing him to lose contact with the very substance of life, which is made up of absolute danger, is radically problematic.”
Being that I’m currently binge-watching Amazon Prime’s The Man In The High Castle (on Season Three just now) while holding off on season four of The Expanse ’til I’m done (aaaargh! – how much longer can I wait?!), I though it apropos to present Alexander Star’s perceptive and pithy essay about Philip K. Dick’s life and literary oeuvre, which was published in The New Republic in 1993.
Alexander Star’s essay includes a portrait of PKD by former punk rock band manager (for the Germs) and actor & writer (for The Pee-Wee Herman Show) / script editor / author / essayist / photographer / jeweler (and more) Nicole Panter. (See photo below.)
Nicole Panter’s Flickr photostream also includes a superb 1978 color image (posted in 2008) of PKD, Nicole herself, K.W. Jeter and Gary Panter. Being that I’ve no idea whether the image is copyrighted or not, I’m not actually presenting it “here”, in this post. Rather, you can view it at Ms. Panter’s Photostream, here.
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The God in the Trash
The fantastic life and oracular work of Philip K. Dick
BY ALEXANDER STAR
The New Republic December 6, 1993
(Photograph of Philip K. Dick by Nicole Panter)
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Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick (Collier, 243 pp., $9 paper) Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick (Carroll & Graf, 263 pp., $3.95 paper) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (Vintage, 259 pp., $10 paper) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (Vintage, 230 pp., $10 paper) Ubik by Philip K. Dick (Vintage, 216 pp., $10 paper) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (Ballantine, 216 pp., $4.95 paper) A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick (Vintage, 278 pp., $10 paper) Valis by Philip K. Dick (Vintage, 256 pp., $10 paper) The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Citadel Press, 5 volumes, $12.95 each) In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis edited by Lawrence Sutin (Underwood-Miller, 278 pp., $14.95 paper) Divine Invasions: The Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin (Citadel Press, 352 pp., $12.95 paper) On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from ‘Science-Fiction Studies’ edited by R.D. Mullen et al. (SF-TH Inc., 290 pp., $24.95, $14.95 paper)
I.
Eleven years after his removal to a Colorado graveyard, Philip K. Dick is among the busiest of American writers. New novels arrive regularly from the tomb; box office smashes (Total Recall) and Hollywood classics (Blade Runner) are spliced from his work; young writers of diverse persuasions sit raptly at his icy feet. A science fiction journeyman, ardent bohemian and restless observer of suburban life, Dick never discovered a place for himself while he lived. He was dismissed as a crackpot and hailed as a “visionary among charlatans”; and like most visionaries, he had a hard time finding a publisher. Today his published work could fill a small bookstore.
To enter a novel by Philip K. Dick is to enter a zone of disappearing worlds, nested hallucinations and impossible time-loops. This domain is inhabited by lonely repairmen, egotistical entrepreneurs and hapless housewives, and strewn with slant humor and menacing paradox. Although the books vary, their inspiration is always the same: they are governed by a passionate apprehension of appearances. Few writers have ever been so distrustful of the phenomenal world. Dick’s characters are driven to doubt their environment, and their environment is driven with an equal and opposite force to doubt them. There is always some primal error in Dick’s fictions, something “out of joint,” and the location of that error – inside the individual or outside the individual – can never be decided upon. Dick systematically blurs the boundaries between mind and matter, between storms in the psyche and crises of the atmosphere. The coiling search to set things right is doubled and redoubled and doubled again. Dick never met a story that ended or a regression that was finite.
Although he is still pigeonholed as a writer of science fiction, Dick had little respect for the prestige of science, and even less for the dignity of fiction, to which it must be said he contributed very little. His interest in hard and applied science was minimal, extending not far beyond a persistent (and unhappy) acquaintance with the details of automobile repair. His maddeningly profuse plots make a mockery of the notion that the novel can be a stable and self-sustaining work of art. And yet, all this notwithstanding, Dick’s novels demand attention. They intrude extreme experiences into everyday scenarios with compassion, humor and poise. He is both lucid and strange, practical and paranoid. (“By their fruits ye shall know them, and their fruits are that they communicate by radio.”) There is nothing merely willful or notional in the bizarre aspects of Dick’s work.
As an experimental writer of the 1950s and ‘60s, Dick belongs in the company of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. His novels recall Burroughs’s pitiless cycles of addiction and schizophrenia and Ballard’s eroticized landscapes of celebrity and death. What he lacks of Ballard’s unnerving coolness and Burroughs’s deadpan swagger, he makes up for with a compassion that is quite alien to them. His most esoteric dismantlings of reality still insist on the need for human empathy; and they do so with an alertness to the serious obstacles that empathy must sometimes encounter. Like Burroughs, his clipped prose wittily recycles the cliches of advertising lingo (“Emigrate or Degenerate: The Choice is Yours”) and pulp writing (“You’re a successful man, Mr. Poole. But, Mr. Poole, you’re not a man. You’re an electric ant”). Sometimes it reaches a higher level of eloquence. In his later years, as he came to believe that the revelations of a medieval rabbi were reaching him through occult channels, Dick’s sanity was open to question. But throughout his career he wrote with qualities that are rare in a science fiction writer, or in any writer at all. These included a sure feel for the detritus and debris, the obsolescent object-world, of postwar suburbia; a sharp historical wit; and a searching moral subtlety and concern.
II.
A heavy man with an absent smile and an intent gaze, Philip Dick typed 120 words a minute even when he wasn’t on speed, drank prodigious quantities of scotch and completed five marriages and over fifty novels before the pills and the liquor conspired to kill him at 54. His busy life has been ably narrated by Lawrence Sutin in his biography, Divine Invasions, which appeared a few years ago. Born in 1928, Dick witnessed the Depression from inside a broken home. His father, an employee of the Department of Agriculture, left the family in 1931 and went on to host a radio show in Los Angeles called “This is Your Government.” Dick grew up with his mother on the fringes of Berkeley’s fledgling bohemia. A troubled student, he was often “hypochondriacal about his mental condition,” as one of his wives later put it. And like many troubled boys of the time, he became a voracious reader of the science fiction pulp magazines that were then at their peak. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, a novel written in 1959, he wryly portrayed himself as an awkward kid spouting oddball ideas from Popular Mechanics and adventure stores: “Even to look at me you’d recognize that my main energies are in the mind.”
Dick evidently had few friends until he went to work at a record store in Berkeley, where he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music and the friendship of customers and colleagues. “Art Music” was also a site of romance. The employees, university dropouts with time to spare, courted their customers with cunning; after impressing one frequent browser with his musical expertise, Dick married her. Not long after the wedding they quarreled, and the bride’s brother threatened to smash his precious record collection. A divorce followed; of his five marriages, it was the shortest.
In 1947, Dick moved into a Berkeley rooming house, living for a short time with the poet Robert Duncan. After one unhappy term at Berkeley in 1949, he married again and settled down to a writing career, publishing his first science fiction stories in 1952. Dick entered the market at a time when the genre was in flux. Like the big bands, the great pulp magazines of the ‘30s declined after the war. They were replaced by a flood of cheap paperbacks, and the leading format for science fiction became the “double paperback” published by Ace Books, two novels together in one binding with a different lurid cover illustration on each side. Throughout the ‘50s Dick worked closely with Ace’s top editor, Don Wollheim. Typing from morning to night, he cranked out large quantities of prose, and turned himself into a typically prolific and typically uneven writer of the genre.
Dick was not unsuccessful at this: his novel Solar Lottery, published in 1955, sold 300,000 copies, and he became one of the first clients of the powerful agent Scott Meredith. Still, it was not a writer’s life; royalties were meager and manuscripts were altered at will to ensure the proper amount of extraterrestrial warfare and gee-whiz gadgetry. (The Zap Gun was written because Wollheim insisted on publishing a book with that title.) As he read widely Dick’s frustrations with science fiction grew, and his discontent became apparent.
Throughout his career Dick longed for a wider audience, and sought to escape the science fiction ghetto. He envied writers such as Ursula Le Guin, who acquired a serious reputation and was even published in The New Yorker. His readers, he complained, were “trolls and wackos.” In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, he wrote a series of non-science fiction novels, all of which were rejected by publishers at the time. These books were mainly somber tales of thwarted love in northern California, peopled with cranky record salesmen and bitter couples and narrated in a glumly painstaking fashion. On the whole, their vision of domestic life is an unhappy one. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, an accumulation of errant jealousies and petty insults leads to illness and insanity. The novel ridicules the newly formed UFO cults of Marin County, though years later Dick reflected that the cults “didn’t seem as crazy to me now …”
Rebuffed by “mainstream” publishers, Dick abandoned his realist writings in 1963. By then he had discovered a different way out of the Ace formula: he would transform the genre of science fiction from within. Concerned with psychic dislocation, and its moral and philosophical consequences, he began to ignore the expectations of his editors. In particular, he disregarded the most honored conventions of “hard S.F.,” that science fiction should be rigorously “extrapolative” of hard science, and that it should be “prophetic” of plausible futures.
By the late ‘50s, these conventions had a long and venerable history. When Hugo Gernsback started his magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, initiating modern science fiction, he hired Thomas Edison’s son-in-law as a fact checker. In its heyday, John W. Campbell Jr.’s Astounding Stories [sic] insisted that writers postulate one outlandish circumstance – the “what if?” clause – and rigorously follow the laws of science from there. After World War II these conventions loosened, as the optimistic narrative of invention and discovery was tempered by dystopian broodings and doubts about the authority and integrity of science. But the most important figures, Asimov, Heinlen, Bradbury, remained faithful to the Campbellian requirements of scientific accuracy and plausible prophecy. As Asimov put it, “In my stories I always suppose a sane world.”
Philip Dick’s fictional worlds have a great many attributes, but sanity is not among them. Campbell, the monarch of postwar science fiction, refused to publish his stories because they were “too neurotic.” In his preoccupation with abnormal psychology, collective delusions and implanted memories, Dick in part followed the path of irregular science fiction writers of the ‘50s such as A.E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon. Yet he ranged further in his subversions. Dick continued to rely on the ready-made materials of science fiction, the pulp prose, the planetary conflicts, the “psionic” powers of “precogs” (who read the future) and “telepaths” (who read minds); but he employed these materials to his own extravagant ends.
Dick’s novels of the late ‘50s were littered with intellectual debris of the period: the existential psychoanalysis of Ludwig Binswanger, popularized in America by Rollo May; the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner [sic] and the game theory of John von Neumann; gestalt psychology and Carl Jung; Tibetan Buddhism and the I Ching. Eye in the Sky (1957) amusingly presents a nation given over to ostentatious piety and soulless technocracy. Its engineers stabilize “reservoirs of grace” while “consulting semanticians” secure communication lines with God and IBM computers tabulate credits toward salvation. (The satire of religious fundamentalism worried Dick’s editors at Ace, who changed a central character into a Muslim to avoid offending readers.)
Time Out of Joint, which appeared in 1959, departed even further from the norms of science fiction. Its first hundred pages unfold a slow-paced story set in a small west coast town. Evidence that something is “out of joint” gradually amasses, until the startling scene when a soft-drink stand vanishes into a strip of paper labeled “SOFT-DRINK STAND” and the entire community is revealed to be a Potemkin village; it is, in fact, an artificial replica of the ‘50s constructed in 1994 to salve the nerves of the protagonist, whose sanity is essential to national security. In 1959 Dick was already proposing that the ‘50s themselves were a kind of pacifying fantasy available for the nostalgia of future generations. Where traditional science fiction stirred anxieties about the future, Dick deftly introduced his uncertainties into the present and recent past. Despite the concluding narrative fireworks, Ace refused to publish Time Out of Joint, and Doubleday brought it out instead as a “novel of menace.”
Dick’s biggest literary advance came in 1962, when he published The Man in the High Castle. This study of an alternate universe in which the Axis won the Second World War was entirely devoid of the usual sci-fi devices. (“No science in it,” a character observes. “Nor set in future.”) Mr. Tagomi, a Japanese bureaucrat and connoisseur of American antiques, is one of Dick’s most sympathetic characters. Repelled by international intrigue and devoted to the occult beauty of old bottle caps and cheap jewelry, he resists Nazi brutality with a fragile but steady will. Alter Bormann dies, a power struggle breaks out among the remaining Nazi leaders (Hitler has long since entered a sanitarium) and Tagomi unhappily plays one faction off against another, aware that they are all unspeakably evil. Ingeniously, the book contains its own counterfiction: in this America divided into German and Japanese zones, rumors spread of an incendiary novel speculating that the allies actually won the war. The narrative adroitly maneuvers back and forth between these two competing accounts of what is real. The Man in the High Castle was Dick’s most assured and subtle work, and he hoped it would win him a wider audience. He was chagrined when reviewers treated it as just another thriller. Ironically, it was the science fiction community that celebrated the book, bestowing the Hugo Award on it in 1963.
Fueled by marital troubles, esoteric visions and an epic diet of speed and scotch, Dick composed eleven novels in a hectic two-year period. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Ubik, written in 1966, are his ‘60s classics, his wildest experiments in the manufacture and management of chaos. These are not Dick’s most accessible or likeable books, but they are his tours de force. (Both are among the dozen titles by Dick that Vintage Books has happily reissued over the past three years.) The time-loops and the Conspiracies, the conflicts between frail human subjects and large unsettling forces, the disorientations of perspective: all of these deuces are brought to new levels of complexity and compression.
In 1963, Philip Dick experienced the first of a number of “visions” that were to augment and to anguish his life. Depressed by a failing marriage and troubled by memories of his lather’s wartime gas mask, Dick reported that he saw “a vast visage of evil” in the sky. It had “empty slots for eyes, metal and cruel, and worst of all, it was god.” Out of this emerged the demiurgic figure of Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, an interstellar drug lord luring his customers and competitors into a “negative trinity” of “alienation, binned reality and despair.” Eldrilch’s powers are not absolute, but they are sufficient to rob other characters of confidence in their reality and in themselves. “We see into his eyes,” they fret, and we see out of his eyes.” In a typical conundrum, the protagonist, Leo Bulero, finds himself stranded in a blurred landscape, a “plain of dead things,” unable to know whether he is still in the grip of one of Eldritch’s hallucinations or whether he has returned to his original “reality.” He meets two men, shakes their hands and watches his lingers slip through theirs. He would assume that they are phantasms but they assume, just as reasonably, that he is a phantasm; and he concedes that they might be right. In the realm of the “irreal,” as Dick called it, to doubt the solidity of one’s surroundings is to doubt the solidity of oneself.
In Palmer Eldritch Dick perfected one of his “irreal” themes, the nested hallucination. In Ubik he perfected another, the experience of entropy, the onset of “decay, deterioration and destruction.” Imprisoned in a purgatorial “half-life,” the paralyzed characters of Ubik witness the spread of a cataclysmic force, a mass “reversion of matter” that causes objects lo revert to prior forms of themselves: televisions become radios, spray cans turn into jars of ointment. They struggle with their “obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk” and “worn-out tape recorders,” that “all the cigarettes in the world are stale.” Stranded in his apartment, the central character resignedly watches his sleek, modern elevator become a creaky and dangerous relic. Ubik is a comedy of enforced obsolescence; the most familiar things acquire an unruly resonance as they confront their own historicity.
These two novels established Dick’s reputation as a master of experimental science fiction. Ubik inspired his election in Europe to the College du Pataphysique, a kind of Academie Francaise for Dadaists, and John Lennon expressed an interest in producing a film of Palmer Eldritch. “New wave” science fiction writers of the late ‘60s, led by Harlan Ellison, regarded him as a godfather. But Dick, as usual, received few financial rewards. The middle-aged pataphysician found himself living on welfare in a “run down, rubble-filled” house in Santa Venetia, a notorious crash-pad for dealers and runaways.
Squabbling with girlfriends, fearing the FBI and the IRS, Dick succumbed to serious bouts of paranoia and unease. (His paranoia was not entirely without foundation: in 1957 the CIA had in fact intercepted a letter that he had sent to a Soviet physicist. Fortunately he never knew of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s intention to compile a bibliography of drug-related science fiction.) In 1971 Dick’s stability declined further when someone broke into his home and looted his papers. He devoted countless hours of speculation to the identity of the burglars. It was his own private Watergate. At various times he suspected the FBI, the Black Panthers, a gang of local drug dealers, right-wing militiamen and himself. He retrieved one tentative lesson from the debacle: “At least I’m not paranoid.”
Dick’s writing of this period trembles with fear of a totalitarian “betrayal state” of advanced surveillance and narcotic intrigue. His novels envisage a burned-out post-’60s nation headed into a dark age of police repression and entertainment-enforced normality. In Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), the authorities deploy an arsenal of bugs, sensors, minicams and tattoos to solve the mystery of a man who thinks that he is a television talk show host even though no one has heard of him. A Scanner Darkly (1977) sympathetically observes the unraveling of Bob Arctor, an undercover cop in a Los Angeles police state where “straights” and addicts inhabit segregated areas and where access to shopping malls is restricted to those with the correct credit cards. Arctor slowly becomes unhinged as he is forced to narc on himself. Witnessing his friends’ fuzzy chatter (“Bob, you know something … I used to be the same age as everyone else”) and acute distress, he worries that “the same murk covers me.” Eventually it does; his brain splits into two distinct identities, his thinking comes to a halt and he becomes dead to the world: “His circuits welded shut.” With its well-scored drug talk and its terrible portrait of a mind becoming opaque to itself, A Scanner Darkly is Dick’s funniest novel, and his most affecting.
In 1972, striving to escape the druggy clutter, the spreading “murk,” of his life, Dick traveled to Vancouver, where he gave a speech to an annual convention of science fiction writers. In his lecture, “The Android and the Human,” Dick fashioned a kind of homespun anarchism, honoring young people of the ‘60s for their “sheer perverse malice,” their willingness to defy power, to “build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.” Eschewing the dogmas of the New Left, he warned that all systems of explanation tend toward overdetermination, toward paranoia. Paranoia, for Dick, was a temptation and a trap. He feared conspiracies, and he feared the debilitating consequences of his fears. And so, he advised, one “should be content” with the fleeting and the marginal, the “mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile and, most of all, the unexplainably warm and giving.” This sudden, self-justifying affection, which Dick also referred to as “caritas” and as “empathy,” was the only guarantee of the “human.”
Having diagnosed the breakdown of society in his speech, Dick suffered a breakdown of his own and checked into a Vancouver clinic run on brutal Synanon-style principles of rehabilitation. He was appalled by the clinic’s ruthless assault on its patients and their personalities, but his worst pill-popping days were through. Lured by a college professor who admired his work, he returned to California and moved into a “jail-like, full-security” apartment complex in Orange County. He married again and began to clean up his life, even writing to President Nixon and offering his assistance in the war against drugs.
But a complacent Orange County serenity was not at hand. In March 1974 Dick underwent a series of visions that astonished and thrilled and hounded him for the rest of his life. An onslaught of otherworldly insight and illumination seemed to press down on him for weeks. (“Once God started talking … he never seemed to stop. I don’t think they report that in the Bible.”) The elements of this experience, which he returned to obsessively in his writing, were many: flickering sequences of abstract color, three-eyed “invaders,” Latin and Russian texts, visions of a “Black Iron Prison,” messages that the Roman Empire never died, “hideous words” spoken out of an unplugged radio, a beam of pink light conveying knowledge.
When it was over, he believed that he had received confirmation that the universe was indeed the “cardboard fake” that he had long portrayed it to be. As in gnostic myth, the world of appearances was an “iron prison” under the sway of a defective deity; illumination was available only from outside the prison, from a pure source of knowledge that Dick referred to as a ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System” (VALIS). For the remaining eight years of his life he filled notebook after notebook with an “Exegesis” of these peculiar days, constructing a gnostic cosmology involving “a double exposure of two realities superimposed.” But Dick was never satisfied with his speculations. In the Exegesis and in his novel Valis (1981), he wrestled with himself, asking over and over whether his revelations were real, and if they were not, what had triggered them. (Radio signals from the future? Water-soluble vitamins? A stroke?)
Dick observed in 1978 that “my life … is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories.” After systematically dislocating the reality-principles of his readers, he came to find his own relation to reality increasingly unsure. He combed T.V. ads and record albums for signs of VALIS, the hidden god. Dick left his last wife in 1976 and moved back north to Sonoma, where he cruised the local asylum for dates and wrote The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), a troubled memorial to his friend James Pike. (Pike, the former Episcopalian bishop of California, had vanished in the Jordanian desert looking for Jesus, leaving behind two bottles of warm Coke and a road map.) Meanwhile the Exegesis became a sprawling spiritual diary, by turns ordinary and extraordinary, filled with philosophical disputation, personal reminiscence and analysis of his previous work.
In the early ‘80s Dick’s hopes for renown revived, as younger writers arrived at his doorstep, royalties increased and German, French and Japanese editions of his work proliferated. Back in the early ‘70s he had optioned his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Hollywood; by 1980 the producers of the film promised that it would be the next Star Wars. (Dick hoped that Victoria Principal would have a starring role.) In fact, Blade Runner was a commercial disappointment in its initial release. But Dick never knew of its early unsuccess. In March 1982, he died of a stroke after proudly attending an advance screening of the movie.
Despite the greater comfort and recognition in his last years, Dick maintained his restless work on the Exegesis, ever lamenting the failure of his visions to repeat themselves, their maddening resistance to explanation. Later passages of the Exegesis express his mingled resignation, devotion and ingenuity: “My attempt to know (VALIS) is a failure qua explanation … Emotionally, this is useless. But epistemologically it is priceless. I am a unique pioneer … who is hopelessly lost. & the fact that no one yet can help me is of extraordinary significance!” Like one of his own perplexed characters, strung out between parallel worlds, Dick never solved the puzzles that rattled him. “They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him,” he wrote sadly in Valis. “… Finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers. Who deals God?”
III.
In the years since his death, Philip Dick has attracted a small army of interpreters. He has been seen as a prophet of “hyperreality”; as a beleaguered and heroic humanist, championing “moral sanity” as his mind suffered; and as a gnostic visionary of the suburbs. Marxist critics and theorists of postmodernism have busily sifted through his work, investigating its debased commodities and corporate conspiracies, its cold war fears and its elevation of paranoia into principle. Dick’s fiction, in the view of the critic Scott Durham, is nothing less than a full-blown “theology of late capitalism” that “reflects on the psychic strains of the transition to postindustrial capitalism.” According to Jean Baudrillard, one of Dick’s many French fans, it is “a total simulation without origin, past or future.”
Dick himself, interestingly enough, was alternately gratified, amused and alarmed by the attention that modish critics gave to his work. When a delegation of French authorities visited him in Orange County to discuss his notions of “irrealism,” he offered them an exposition of his views, but as soon as they left he telephoned the FBI and warned that there was a gang of subversives in the neighborhood. (Dick’s politics were never especially coherent; he nearly dedicated A Scanner Darkly to Nixon’s Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, but in the Exegesis he treats Nixon’s resignation as a providential event in sacred history.) The Marxist and postmodern readings of Dick’s work are often informative; his novels do have more than their share of simulacra and spectacles, fractured identities and postindustrial proletariats. But these readings do not do justice either to his insistence on compassion as a stabilizing force or to his earnest search for an “absolute reality.” Their anatomy of “irrealism” is incomplete.
What, then, does this “irrealism” consist of? In the Exegesis, Dick confided that his writing had a single overriding theme: it indicted “the universe as a forgery (& our memories also).” In book after book, Dick portrayed the onset of doubt, of an elemental estrangement from reality. The perceived defect in the substance of the world is traced back to a variety of sources – atomic catastrophes and potent drugs, dangerous gods and political conspiracies, schizophrenic derangement and paranoid insecurity. But the origin doesn’t really matter; it is the experience of “irreality” that interested him most. As his characters confront exasperating hallucinations and intersecting time-sequences, they respond with a typical blend of desperate speculation, cautious empathy and brittle humor. (“God is responsible for everything, but it’s hard to get him to admit it.”)
The most recurrent anxiety in Dick’s fiction is that beneath the surface of appearances there is nothing except crude building materials: struts, wire, floor joists, rotten boards. This anxiety was suited to its times. The postwar heyday of science fiction coincided with a nationwide accumulation of raw materials; the United States became a Popular Mechanics Utopia. There was plenty of tin and wire and aluminum to go around, and there were plenty of young inventors prepared to devise ingenious contraptions in their garages. More than any other science fiction writer, Dick turned these innocuous materials into the stuff of nightmare. What if the paste and wire and tinfoil substratum of the built environment was also the substratum of our own bodies and minds? Such a possibility arises in one Dick novel after another: that the world is made of “wires and staves and foam-rubber padding,” that a man is a “skeleton wired together … with bones connected with copper wire … artificial organs of plastic and stainless steel … the voice taped.”
Indeed, you never know when one of Dick’s full-bodied characters might become a creaky automaton, no longer capable of empathy, love or spontaneity. Sometimes the transposition is metaphorical: “Her heart … was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.” Often it is deadly literal. In a harrowing passage of A Scanner Darkly, Dick compares an addict to a machine, programmed to find the next score. A junkie is a “closed loop of tape” with a “brain of twisted wire”; his voice is “the music you hear on a clock-radio … it is only there to make you do something … He, a machine, will turn you into his machine.”
In many of Dick’s early novels, these distortions of perspective are attributed to paranoia. His characters fear conspiracies and plots, preordained worlds where “there are no genuine strangers.” They also fear ordinary appliances and fixtures, dreading that “everything has a life of its own, vicious and hateful.” Things, appliances, entire houses suddenly come alive, bristling with menace. In later novels, the focus shifts to schizophrenia. Dick’s interest in abnormal psychology led him to the work of
Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychoanalyst who believed that schizophrenia involved a disturbance in the patient’s orientation toward time. In his famous paper, “The Case of Ellen West,” Binswanger described the “tomb world” that his subject seemed to inhabit, a realm of “moldering and withering” in which time no longer moved forward and West felt like “a nothing, a timid earthworm smitten by the curse surrounded by black night.”
For Dick, the tomb world connoted a kind of interior entropy, a sentiment that the world and oneself are inexorably “moving toward the ash heap.” The process of decline is all-embracing: people, places, things, time and space themselves all seem caught in a great storm of regression. Terrifying visions of the tomb world recur throughout Dick’s novels of the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Tagomi, the sympathetic aesthete-bureaucrat of The Man in the High Castle, recoils from the presence of evil and likens human beings to “blind moles, creeping through the soil, feeling with our snouts. We know nothing.” In Martian Time-Slip (1964), the autistic child Manfred intuits a grotesque future of ashen limbs and dust-covered rubble. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a radiation-damaged truck driver lives amidst global scarcity and barren silence. Ubik is his greatest distillation of the theme; in a film scenario for the novel, Dick brilliantly proposed to embed this decay in the movie itself, using older film stocks and directing techniques as the story progressed.
Dick’s alterations of ordinary reality, his tomb worlds and time-loops, never seem like conjuring tricks because he is able to establish the tangibility and the immediacy of the worlds that he disrupts. In Time Out of Joint, the bitter couple-swapping and boredom of ‘50s suburbia are nimbly detailed. Every potato peel and pinup photo is fully observed before the arrival of “leaks in our reality.” As the town begins to flicker in and out of view, Dick hauntingly presents the edges of his pseudo-environment: Main Street trailing off into a half-glow of empty shopping strips and gas stations, the bus station queues that don’t move, the strange airplanes that signal overhead.
Setting the immediate and the “irreal” into a precarious balance, Dick presented litanies of destruction, detailed inventories of objects that are named only as they vanish. In Time Out of Joint, we see “the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for Coke and root beer, the ice-chests of bottles, the hot dog boiler, the jars of mustard, the shelves of cones, the row of heavy round metal lids under which were the different ice creams.” In Eye in the Sky, the survivors of a nuclear accident find themselves trapped in each others’ hallucinations. One member of the group is a fastidious Victorian moralist whose mind is a sexless place of soap factories and shrubbery. (For her, Freud believed in a basic urge to create cultural masterpieces, and worried that this impulse might be sublimated into sexual desire.) As she recoils from the polluted objects of the world, she wills their destruction. “Cheese, doorknobs, toothbrushes,” she calls out, and they all vanish. Her dismal roll call continues, and the entire planet begins to disappear.
Dick’s narrative method, here and elsewhere, is to furnish the world as he dismantles it. On a political level, this operation encapsulates the nuclear anxieties of the ‘50s. The artifacts of everyday life take on an extra poignancy, and a heightened presence, under the conditions of their own possible destruction. Indeed, only the specter of total incineration can make the sprawling banality of the California suburbs into something precious. But these vanishing things are also vulnerable to other, less apocalyptic dangers. In the degraded landscape of postwar consumerism, commodities are obsolescent and bear the seeds of their own demise. Dick sifts through the trash, the old magazines and the soiled wrappers; it is only a matter of time, he suggests, before the suburbs are swallowed by their own landfills. On an occult level, Dick’s negations suggest something very different. Just as the mind can make the world, he implies, so it can unmake it. In a reversal of Adam’s naming of the animals, the bestowal of names robs things of their materiality, it causes them to vanish. The danger, of course, is that you might not be the one with the power to name names. You might be on the list.
Dick’s fallen worlds are not, to put it mildly, happy places. And yet they are at least partially redeemed by fleeting glimpses of a hidden god. ‘Trash” and divinity, Dick believed, were intimately linked. In an Exegesis entry, he wrote: “Premise: things are inside out … Therefore the right place to look for the almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley.” A “concealed god,” he added in Valis, takes on “the likeness of sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters”; he “presumes to be … debris no longer noticed” so that he can “literally ambush reality, and us as well.” Dick did not regard the artifacts of industrial civilization as indices of man’s alienation from the divine. God’s disavowal of the world was both older and deeper. Carrying on a distinctly American visionary tradition, Dick proposed that God preferred industrial waste to holy sanctuaries. In its spiritualization of the coarse and the vulgar, Dick’s demotic gnosticism unexpectedly echoes Emerson, or Whitman, or even Melville. He sought a kind of urban sublime, looking for shards of divinity in piles of junk.
Dick’s spiritual beliefs were highly variable, but his ethical code was not. What becomes of love and loyalty, he asked, in a deceit-ridden world, in which all surfaces are suspect and all foundations can be unforged? Dick’s concise, somewhat saccharine and still moving answer was that empathy is the only ground for morality. The existence of the “other” is a sufficient reason for helping the other. The problem is that “we don’t have an ideal world where morality is easy because cognition is easy.” The substitution of circuity for nerve tissue can murder the possibility of empathy. Still, Dick insists that empathy is the only means to retain one’s humanity in a world that is “metal and cruel”. Many of his most memorable characters – Tagomi in High Castle, Leo Bulero in Palmer Edritch – grope towards an identification with others in defiance of their hostile and unyielding circumstances. Dick’s elevation of empathy is not a way to make morality easy; he was allergic to New Age bromides and to psychobabble of any kind. In the company of paste-and-wire executives and mechanical sweethearts, empathy is always a challenge.
Dick explored the problem of decency in a dead world most forcefully in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Rick Deckard is a bounty-hunter, paid to track down and destroy a party of androids that has infiltrated the planet. Deckard employs an “empathy” test that records his subjects’ responses to unpalatable thoughts of cruelty and death; the test can distinguish between androids and their identical-looking human counterparts. The typical Dickian twist comes when Deckard, unlike one of his partners, begins to empathize with the androids that he kills. Does this mean that he might be an android himself, or does his powerful feeling of empathy confirm precisely that he is human? Deckard investigates incidents of empathy with the care of an experiences detective, but he cannot take anything for granted. The special horror of the work is that a sudden “flattening of affect” might occur at any time, to others or to himself. The practice of empathy is fragile, uncertain and imperative.
IV.
Science fiction is a dangerous profession. Its practitioners have often mistaken themselves for prophets. L. Ron Hubbard began as a novelist, and his preliminary draft of Dianetics appeared originally in the pages of Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction. Dick, too, was often unable to distinguish his writings from reality (“All I know today that I didn’t know when I wrote UBIK is that VBIK isn’t fiction”). But he never regarded himself as a priest or a propagandist. He worked out no system of spiritual evolution, no fourteen-point program for cosmic harmony. In his later work he diligently recorded his own struggle to cope with disquieting experiences and difficult losses. He held strange views, but he held them provisionally, and with a healthy measure of doubt. In his mystical writings, Dick was not trying to convert others, he was trying to comprehend himself. (Lawrence Sutin has produced a fascinating selection from the Exegesis, but it is unlikely that Dick ever intended these writings to be published.)
Dick’s double compulsion to assemble and to disassemble fictional worlds might seem merely strange, the product of a fertile and eccentric mind. Yet both tendencies also inform the history of fiction itself. The traditional novel invents a solid material setting; it displays all the metronomes, mantle pieces and ledgers of middle-class life. Yet it also investigates the social world with a stringent and destabilizing skepticism, questioning the correspondence of reality and appearances, of motives and deeds. The objects that litter Dick’s novels are mostly empty matchbooks and rusty bottle caps, forgotten relics of modern domesticity, but like a latter-day archaeologist of the suburbs, he uncovered their underlying integrity and facticity. At the same time, he subjected his ordinary things and citizens to a bracing and expansive doubt.
Paranoia is the flip side of omniscience; and so it is not surprising that the paranoid writer became a writer about God. Dick’s social and psychological doubt was finally a kind of metaphysical doubt. He was exercised less by hidden intentions than by hidden substances. His fascination with the invisible foundations of the modern city led him to confront the problem of invisible foundations. And the breakdown of modern buildings and streets, which exposed the stuff of which they were really made, taught him that breakdown was also the occasion when hidden things might be revealed. In the most literal and physical way, modern life introduced Dick to the occult.
Dick was an esoteric writer who proposed dramatic revisions of reality whenever the inspiration came to him. But even at his most arcane, he was aware of the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of ordinary people. (The very antithesis of a Philip Dick character would be Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was disastrously miscast as the hero of Total Recall.) He did not believe that the arrival of universal simulation and information theory required the writer to relinquish his grasp on reality or to jettison his moral imagination. Rather, he regarded the novel as a laboratory in which to measure the tangibility of things and the shocks of sentience. Visionary literature and realistic fiction, fantasy and conscience, rarely meet. It took a man whose hunger was the match of his instability to bring them together.
in your future!
