I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

In Ubik, a group of “inertials,” paraphysical technicians who make a living neutralizing psychic spies, are sent on a routine business trip to the moon. They experience a reality-shattering event, an explosion which they believe to have survived. Upon returning to Earth, however, they begin to notice strange phenomena of decay: their cigarettes are stale, their coffee goes moldy as soon as they order it, their money is obsolete. These conditions, initially minor, ramp to fever-pitch as forces of decay wreak havok on their world. Reality begins to revert to earlier forms all around them. Formerly high-speed pneumatic elevators turn into brass-caged contraptions staffed by vacant-eyed operators. Automated appliances become wood-burning stoves, flat-paneled televisions morph into old Victrola radios. The changes happen in fits and starts, varying from one individual to the next; for some, it’s 1992. For others, 1939. It’s like a literal version of William Gibson’s overly quoted truism: The future (or, rather, the past) is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

This isn’t time-travel, to be clear: each object in the world and its place remains the same, only in increasingly primitive versions. It’s a subjective withering of modernity, a hefty, sped-up obsolescence. “The past is latent, is submerged,” Dick writes, “capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately–and against ordinary experience–vanished.”

Like most of Dick’s novels, Ubik centers around a group of people trying to make sense of an inconsistent and shifting reality. Why is it suddenly 1939? Will the phenomena continue until the very structure of the world blinks out into nothingness? As the world devolves and entropy laps everything, the inertials desperately seek order, or a cause, among the shifting ruins; science-fiction critics warily familiar with Philip K. Dick refer to this as the “reality problem.” Thankfully, another force seems to be keeping the inertials alive, a mysterious product called “Ubik.” The titular Ubik is a reality support spray that helps shore up the edges of the crumbling world: “One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically-priced Ubik banishes obsessive-compulsive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk…plus other, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.” This life-preserving force is a fairly transparent metaphor: Ubik derives from the latin ubique, the root of ubiquity, the defining attribute of the Christian God.

Here, more so than usual, the dimensions of Dick’s experiment are metaphysical. Ubik/God, applied sparingly, as the manufacturer indicates, not taken internally, in the recommended dosage, keeps the walls from caving in.  It props up that ever-shifty mental construct we call reality. Of course, like God, Ubik isn’t an eternal manifestation of spiritual grace or guidance, but a human invention, a kind of jargony scientific made-up thing, a commercial product, if anything just a totem of the struggle against entropy. So God is the end of the road, but the signposts are manmade, plunking names and measurable boundaries down where there really are only undifferentiated, formless lagoons of reality.

Ubik is a fascinating novel, proceeding at a sensible clip while simultaneously caving in on itself at every turn–really, the purest distillation of Dick’s maddening, anti-literary style.  Its mysteries compound on one another in ragged concentric circles until there is nothing concrete left to hold onto, but it somehow retains the formal elements of a propulsive work of fiction. The story works, despite–or perhaps due to–a narrative constructed from contradictory events. Like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, it presents new variations on narrative time: cycles which shade over one another in overlapping shapes, pinned to alternate sources of light, creating a wash of gray. Is regret just nostalgia for a half-remembered alternate timeline?

Not that it necessarily clarifies or enhances a reading of his work, but Dick in the Ubik years had reconciled himself to the belief that we were all living in a static timeline (which happens to be Biblical Judea) masked by a shifting, artificial modern world. Sometimes, he believed, shamans, mystics, and science fiction writers could cut through this veil of Maya and gawk unflinchingly at the stone-cold real shit, where time breaks down. “I have an abiding intuition,” he wrote in 1978, “that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation.” There’s an eerie logic to this, and it’s the bottom line of his later work, but then again, he had a hell of an amphetamine habit.

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn’t really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end.

The scene is a basement repair shop, 1982.

Work benches, tools, and a prone robotic simulacra of Abraham Lincoln, being turned on for the first time. In the presence of its makers, the Lincoln is slowly emerging from objecthood into the scrum of sentience. It flails to sit up, big hands grasping around, jet-black eyes beginning to survey their surroundings. Gears whirr and click. Suddenly, what was once a sculpted mask of a famous face begins to register wariness, a wariness “beyond the capacity of man to imagine.”

What follows is one of the bleakest, most quintessentially Philip K. Dick descriptions of consciousness imaginable, in which a version of Abraham Lincoln, uncertain of who (or what) he is, is born into a fully adult body. The humans in the room can sense his fear, recognizing in it some echo of their own wailing arrival on the scene, a rupture which for them is obfuscated by time, but, for the Lincoln, is immediate. Is happening now.

In its birth pangs, there in the repair shop, the Lincoln’s face registers fear, “absolute dread…Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy.” This is a primeval, atavistic fear, the horror of existence itself. And it isn’t just a scene. It’s a worldview. Dick defines the catalytic spark of life not as a simple evolutionary impulse to get up and go, a but dread so powerful that it singlehandedly bootstraps us onto the grid. A profound, crazy malaise that we spend our entire lives attenuating (in Dick’s case, with prolific literary output and Benzedrine). He writes,

“Birth…is not pleasant. It is worse than death; you can philosophize about death–and you probably will: everyone else has. But birth! There is no philosophizing, no easing of the condition. And the prognosis is terrible: all your actions and deeds will only embroil you further in living more deeply.”

Like all of Dick’s quote-unquote lesser novels, We Can Build You is a dark character study/grim think-piece only half-assedly sheathed by a pulp-magazine conceit. Nominally: about a company that builds simulacra of historical figures. Actually: about how social constraints can turn people into automatons, can turn them on the whole sociopathic. This is so classic a Dick trope it scarcely bears mentioning: perhaps, the novel suggests, in a certain context, a programmed being–a robotic Lincoln, for example–can be more human than its programmers.

The robotic Lincoln in this novel (incidentally: can a graduate student somewhere please pen the be-all dissertation about animatronic Lincoln, Disneyland’s Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, Ray Bradbury‘s delight with the form, and PKD’s various horrified interpretations? There’s definitely a lineage.), like the real Lincoln, might be schizophrenic. The tragic undertones of his character, anyway, his radically depressive tendencies, his melancholy: all traits attributed to the historical Lincoln which make for a particularly self-conscious robot. Unlike the simulacra of John Wilkes Booth or Edwin M. Stanton, he cannot adapt to the modern world, nor can he ever truly come to terms with his transmutation into mechanical existence. Like Dick himself, he’s already crazy enough to imagine he might not be real, so the whole thing takes on meta-proportions which only serve to kick him into a depressive tailspin.

The hallucinatory delusions of its largely schizophrenic characters eventually become so nesting and protracted that this novel ceases to be about robots altogether. Rather, it develops into a love story that unfolds across a gradient of sanity. This departure from plot seems to be the main criticism of We Can Build You. Theodore Sturgeon griped that Dick’s “willingness to pursue some collateral and fascinating line at the expense–and even the abandonment–of his central theme” diminished the novel.

Of course, that’s my favorite thing about PKD, his total lack of interest in central theme, the way his narrative arcs deflate at the sight of an interesting line of inquiry, an opportunity to zero in on some truly horrible truth. Anyway, I see the continuum. After all, whose subjective reality is realer: an automaton with a precisely created set of epistemological prerogatives, or a schizoid mid-fugue? What about a schizoid automaton? The point is that the simulacra’s operating constraints begin to take on a particular kind of broken humanness, as though the Lincoln were created solely to give concrete form to the horror of being.  Through his birth, we re-experience our own. Some uncanny manifestation of our realest dread, doffed with a stovepipe hat.

Ray Bradbury always seemed out of synch with the contemporary science fiction milieu: he wrote on a typewriter until the end, was sentimental, loved circuses, dreams, toys, fantasies, myths, loathed technology to the point of never driving a car, and never concerned himself much with scientific fact. Reading Listen to the Echoes, a book of conversations between Bradbury and his biographer Sam Weller, is like entering another world entirely–a little like sitting cross-legged on the rug in Bradbury’s study, I’d imagine, poking around his papers, listening to stories about the old days, and occasionally taking a break to play canasta.

Weller: You have long associated the space race with religion and faith. What is the connection?

Bradbury: Exploring space is our effort to become immortal. If we stay here on Earth, human beings are doomed, because someday the sun will either explode or go out. By going out into space, first back to the moon, then to Mars, and then beyond, man will live forever.

It definitely doesn’t make Bradbury come off as any more avant-garde, but it does clarify him as an authentic individual who cared deeply about the ephemeral magic of creativity. The artists he admired–John Huston, Frederico Fellini, George Bernard Shaw, to name a few–he loved, deeply, with the emotional resonance of a child. His relationship to the creative process was beautiful; he wrote every day and would sometimes sob when re-reading his old work, feeling that it came from somewhere beyond his mind. He was formed by experiences he chose to interpret as mystical: a circus performer who touched his forehead as a child and pronounced “live forever,” for example, or a glimpse at the Apollo lander through the window of the Smithsonian one night, lit up briefly by a bolt of lightning in a rainstorm.

Weller: Did you know Philip K. Dick?

Bradbury: Forty years ago we were together at a bar and we talked. You meet people and you realize they don’t like being alive. They don’t like talking. He seemed pretty negative.

In a climate of “hard” writing, Bradbury was the softest of the O.G. science fiction canonists. The man who famously, in The Martian Chronicles, put oxygen on Mars, didn’t care much for science–or any other system of knowing. He wasn’t impressed by any critical or formal approach to writing. As a self-educated person (and a dreamer), he burned bright for ideas, not ideologies. I think that for Bradbury, science was a functional metaphor, and science fiction a methodology for tapping into grander, more archetypal kinds of stories. When it comes down to it, he wrote fables and myths about the future, not extrapolations.

The Paris Review: Do you think science fiction offers the writer an easier way to get at ideas?

Bradbury: I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, into the face of Medusa, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield, then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of the truth that is immediately in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricocheted truth, which enables you to swallow it and have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and super-intellectual.

The original cover’s horny pronouncement: “Alien Satellites Circle the Earth–and Man’s Only Hope is a Mad Cartoonist!?”

The Zap Gun is one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser “pot-boiler” novels.

It was originally serialized, so it’s shitty in the way that novels always are when it’s clear a writer is being paid by the word, useless adjectives everywhere. The story chugs along at a variable pace, committing the unforgivable sin of being (*gasp*) boring more than once.

Being a slice of PKD’s consciousness, however, it’s also completely insane. The story is about para-psychic government weapons “fashions” designers who receive schematics for world-destroying bombs while in drug-induced fugues. To fuel what is essentially a Cold public relations War between East and West (here given the adorable monikers “Peep-East” and “Wes-Bloc”), they tap into what they believe is a higher plane and awake with sketched designs for things like lobotomy gas, the “Evolution Gun” and “weapon BBA-81D.” These weapons are designed and constructed in underground laboratories, then tested and disseminated in propaganda films, but never actually used on the enemy. Instead, each element of the weapon is immediately “plowshared” into useful commercial products. Before the action even unfurls, the essential premise is already an illusion: the weapons designing, the psychic trances, and the entire industry of war are just a front to keep the economies of the East and West mutually afloat. It’s purely formal technological development without purpose, a war of design espionage, without bloodshed. The greater public knows nothing of this elaborate pact between East and West. They believe they are at war.

Which…this was written in 1967, but obviously the joke is still funny.

The Zap Gun introduces a daisy chain of science-fictional future banalities: automated kitchen appliances, vidphones, autonomous robotic journalists, a talking house oracle called “Ol’ Orville,” all products of weapons plowsharing. The main character, a top US weapons psychic, respected and feared the world over (his pick of mistresses!) suffers. He knows his work is useless, and pines for his puff existence—his appearance of vitality—to be made real. As it later turns out, he’s even more useless than he imagined: instead of tapping into a higher level of consciousness, touching God, he is actually just in psychic contact with an African comic-book artist. As he discovers that his ideas are nothing more than stolen design fictions, he plunges into a reckless anomie. Suddenly, ravenous pulp aliens start hovering over the Earth, their intentions inscrutable; the more ships appear, the more obvious it is that generations of fake-warmongering have left the planet unprepared for conflict, and due for certain extraterrestrial enslavement. We wonder: is the war machine necessary? Does it keep us hungry, keep us vigilant? Is it the engine that drives both technological innovation and artistically productive dissent?

Cute.

Our hero becomes despondent. He is incapable of dreaming up a weapon that could possibly touch the new enemy. There’s simply no time, no resources to produce a smash-em-all nuke to obliterate the Slavers from Sirius. The solution—and I’m going to spoil the ending, because it’s interesting and odds are you’ll never read The Zap Gun—isn’t a weapon. It’s a toy. And this is where it gets really good, where the feverish rays of the true Dick Id start peeking out from behind the pulp-novel door. The toy is a kind of empathy feedback machine, a handheld maze in which a tiny, adorable creature is trapped. The maze is designed to be inescapable; as the creature reaches its end, the walls seamlessly re-arrange themselves. The user (gamer?) can control the difficulty of the maze, the harshness of the illusion, then rapid disappearance, of an exit. The catch is that the creature has a parapsychic ability to connect with the gamer. The gamer, essentially, feels a profound sense of empathy with the creature, and as they punish it with the shifting labyrinth, so they punish themselves. In the absence of a weapon of mass destruction, humanity instead sends an amplified version of this game to the alien overlords, banking on the evolutionary consistency of empathy. This works, and the aliens retreat with their proverbial tails in between their horrific, chitinous legs.

A couple of observations here. One, empathy is a fairly common science fiction tool; we often see empathy as a paranormal or psychic ability to sense others’ emotions—in this case, the word “empath” is used. The science, or speculative-fictional, empath often suffers from their gift, feeling the pain and confusion of others all around them. But empathy is also one of the fundamental elements of human morality. Our capacity to not only recognize the bodily and emotional feelings of others, but to port those experiences over to our own system, essentially neurologically replicating them, is an essential function of the human mind, undoubtedly key to our development as a social species. Those who do not have this ability are sadistic, autistic, and generally incomprehensible—not unlike aliens.

In fact, a lack of empathy, or, alternately, a lack of relatability, is one of the scariest things about aliens as they’re represented in popular culture; their inscrutable faces, their unclear—but obviously sinister—motives, their willingness to experiment upon us without any concern for our fragile psyches. Aliens are terrifying because they have no compassion, because their moral or ethical system, if they have one, has no bearing on our reality. They are not, in short, “human.”

For Dick to turn this entire construction on its head is brilliant. In a serialized 60s sci-fi novel, we expect the baddies to be slimy monsters from the great beyond, roundly destroyed by mankind’s martial ingenuity. Instead, in The Zap Gun, humanity employs the cornerstone of its neurological and spiritual makeup against the enemy—and the enemy is defeated by virtue of sharing that quality. The weapon of mass destruction is compassion. The conclusion is a philosophical grey area: the enemy is not so different, and so we can destroy him as we would destroy ourselves.

And, in a sense, we are destroying ourselves, because—ta-dah!—the alien is really us. Etymologically, alien is alienus, Latin, meaning other. But our perception of “other” is defined by the boundaries we place on the self; the more extreme the otherness (“Slavers from Sirius!”) the deeper it relates to some core quality of the self. The alien in science fiction is often the cold heart of man, the creature powered solely by evolutionary imperative, a horrific iteration of our animal origins. An empathy trap exorcises this demon, and we can all sleep at night.

At this point it’s impossible to say anything new about Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, so I’ll start by saying something really old: this is a fantastic book. It’s deep, man.

In brief: the Allied forces have lost the war and the United States has been carved up between Japan and Nazi Germany, with a Rocky Mountain no man’s land in between. Americans cope haphazardly with living under these two varieties of totalitarianism; the Germans have razed Africa, sent rockets to the moon; on the Pacific Coast, American merchants sell pre-War folk “antiques” to interested collectors — bottle tops, lighters, civil war guns, baseball cards. Somewhere near Denver, a man named Hawthorne Abendsen writes a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a science fiction novel that postulates President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s survival of an assassination attempt and subsequent re-election, setting into motion a chain of events which culminates in Nazi war trials and a cold war between Britain and the United States. Everyone in The Man in the High Castle is reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, despite the fact that it’s banned in most of the occupied U.S.A. So, yes: it’s an alternate history novel that contains a second alternate history within its pages. Characters even debate whether or not Grasshopper qualifies as sci-fi:

“Oh no,” Betty disagreed, “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.”

“But,” Paul said, “it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.”

If we take seriously the conceit of fiction, then we must acknowledge that there can be no binary between the real and false, since there exist, potentially, multitudes of realities. Dick’s characters aren’t gazing across the uncanny valley at us, a mirror reflection: the alternate present they consider while reading The Grasshopper is different still from our world. It’s dislocated, and no more “real” than ours simply because the Axis fell. You can imagine a novel within-the-novel within-the-novel where history plays slightly differently. The Italians rise, Fascism fails, an agrarian future — or maybe a doomsday scenario?

In Dick’s canon, the distinction between “real” and “unreal” is necessarily vague, because he recognizes that the things we take to be the most unquestionably real — history, for example — are often the least tangible. What is history but a collective myth? How is it anything but a culturally-determined collection of words and stories in an individual’s mind? What is the difference between a regular Zippo lighter and the one that was in FDR’s pocket at the time of his assassination? Nothing but an idea.

This double narrative is the most literary (and obvious) presentation of High Castle‘s interlocking theme of the confluence of true and false realities. The buying and selling of American antiques to the Japanese, for example, who fetishize the “historicity” of objects, is thrown into question by the presence of counterfeit objects. And yet, the counterfeit is often better than the original, functional, at least identical, the electric sheep, if you will.

Should I stick to my trend of only reviewing Dick with poems? It seems like either I do that, or I continue into an unreadable graduate dissertation on the novel — there’s no real in-between. Perhaps, to stay true to High Castle‘s Eastern leanings, I should work in Haiku. After all, the events of the novel are determined (both within the narrative and by Dick himself as he wrote it) through consultation of the I Ching; when one of its main characters queries the oracle, essentially, about why the novel was written, it replies with Hexagram 61, Chung Fu, “Inner Truth:”

In Hexagram 61, the water stirs the still lake, making apparent the visible effects of the invisible: the true, concealed state of things is ever-present and yet impossible to grasp except in such moments of clarity. A classic Dick theme — that every character in The Man in the High Castle is living a false reality, a collective hallucination that history is material. Only through the water-ripple that is metaphor can the illusion be perceived, and then only fleetingly, before the lake calms.

Consult the oracle:
Can winter turn to summer?
Imperial red.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon Review of Dr. Bloodmoney (an acrostic)
Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Amazon link: The Man in the High Castle
Conceptual Fiction Review of The Man in the High Castle

Dawn of society: happened once, then
Repeated.

Bombs,
Limbs,
Obscurity,
Oh, nuclear
Destruction! Gone are
Marin, San Francisco, Berkeley…
One by one, the people along this
Newly
Emptied coast
Yoke together to survive.

Of course, they are all
Radioactive.

Haplessly, they
Organize themselves.
Watching out for outsiders.

Wives, TV salesmen, children, physicists, teachers, dogs, murderers,
Even mutants.

God is not in the picture.
Or government.
That’s what happens after the apocalypse.

Alone, they might not have
Lived. But the
Obituary of humanity had one footnote:
Never underestimate the power of a dedicated
Group of Californians.

Actually, this is not such a bleak
Future. “I would have enjoyed being
There,” wrote the Author. They have
Each other, and a kind of
Real purpose.

This is ultimately a
Hopeful novel. The
End of the World is the

Birth of something totally new.
Only Philip K. Dick could imagine such a
Morose
Beginning.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Amazon link: Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb