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.

In 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. It looked like Dick, dressed like Dick, and was completely autonomous. Capable of operating without the intervention of its makers, it could track people coming in and out of a room with face-recognition software, greeting those it knew. It could listen to conversation, and, using complex algorithms, could respond verbally using speech synthesis.

This “robotic portrait” was as much an art project as it was a feat of engineering. For several years, the android made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, Artificial Intelligence organizations, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. Horrified, I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness. Strange and poetic as it was, the story could have ended here.

And yet, the Philip K. Dick android has now been rebuilt. Behold:

The new android is being referred to as “New Phil.” Its vanished predecessor, “Old Phil.” To recap: a man who spends his career writing about about androids dies. Twenty years later, an android is made in his image, effectively bringing him back to life. That android disappears. A new one is built; at this point we’re three degrees of separation from the original. I can’t help but fantasize about a future model (New New New Phil?) becoming self-aware, and immediately being convinced that he is the real, original Phil. I mean, it literally reads like an actual Philip K. Dick story — life imitating art, imitating life.

The brain-boggling postmodern meta-irony is not lost on its makers, thankfully. On translating this particular writer — and not, say, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — into an android, they explain, “An android of Philip K. Dick is a sort of paradox. It’s certainly what Hofstader would call a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ This is something that you don’t get by making an android out of any other science fiction writer.” They point out that Dick didn’t just write about androids; he wrote about people thinking they were androids, or androids thinking they were people, and everything in between. The terrible crux of Dick’s canon often hinges on the question, “what is the difference between being human, and being programmed to believe you are human?”

Still, it’s hard to guess what Dick, who died in 1982, might have thought of his robotic likeness. In a 1975 essay called, “Man, Android, and Machine,” he wrote:

“Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them ‘androids,’ which is my own way of using that word. By ‘android’ I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.”

Would New Phil — or for that matter, Old Phil — embody this “coldness of the grave” to his namesake? I can’t help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son’s school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a machine, a mechanism. The profound sense of disconnect that this vision lends to his reality, the Philip K. Dick android does to me.

Dick’s books have been endlessly adapted to the screen, and yet this bearded machine does more to bring the philosophical mise-en-abyme of his work alive than any number of Darryl Hannahs or Arnold Schwarzeneggers (be they lurking in rainy alleyways or gun-fighting in the red-tinged Martian atmosphere) ever could. I mean, it is Philip K. Dick: both visually and theoretically. It’s a physical embodiment of everything he feared, loved, rhapsodized on, got paranoid about. It’s a “living” paradox; it’s science-fiction reality, a powerfully strange sculpture.

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

Illustration by the great Jim Burns.

Triad, 80s oeuvre of Sheila Finch, is unbelievably beautiful. It takes place on an extraordinarily sumptuous alien planet called Chameleon, or Omareemee,  which changes color every time it’s perceived; sometimes it’s described as being awash in bright reds and vermillion, all the plants glistening wet red in the tropical rainfall; other times it’s gray and lavender, the indigenous species’ fur coats undulating softly in gray-mauve-shades, gray grass, purple sky; wet, colored mist, perfumed, dripping with fruit.

There’s a lot going on, all of which deserves due diligence. The story is multi-tiered: it’s about language, reality, sexuality, feminism, colonialism, and machine ethics. An all-female crew from a post-male Earth travels to Chameleon for merchant purposes; the crew’s xenolinguist, Gia, is charged with learning the natives’ language and brokering some kind of trade deal with them. The methods used for this are fascinating — the linguist has a chip implanted in her brain, keeping her in constant contact with the crew computer system, HANA, that mechanically parses all the phonemes and breaks them down into semantic categories, then assigns Gia a battery of psychotropic drugs in order to properly break open her reality:

“Each species of intelligent life in the galaxy learned to limit its perceptions of thr world it inhabited in order to preserve itself from insanity, then petrified those few chosen sensations into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible for her to hold a concept that couldn’t be framed in that language. Therefore…the drugs [were] designed to break down her normally held world view, shatter her illusion of ‘reality,’ eliminate the mechanism by which her mind censored information it considered unimportant according to its preconceived categories of priority.”

Gia literally trips her way through Chameleon, the ground swelling up to meet her feet with each step, a sensuous communion with the natives, who she blurs into, lost in a sea of morphing color, every sound shooting through her brain. She struggles endlessly to comprehend the local language, which seems to operate in a different space-time continuum. They have no past tense, no future tense, no proper nouns, only variations of “we;” she comes to learn that the Omareemeeans exist in the pre-conscious Now, and comprehend themselves only as that which their planet uses to know itself. They have no concept of death, and murder each other thoughtlessly, lovingly, sensing everything as part of a complete and ever-changing whole.

It forms a lush and impossibly alluring worldview when juxtaposed with the crew of humans, who come from an Earth where machine intelligence has been dictating evolutionary development for generations — women self-impregnate and dominate culture, while men are mostly artists, prisoners, peripheral figures. A small men’s liberation movement is currently in bloom, but it is powerless against the steel will of the female hegemony, who hardly deign to touch the opposite sex.

As for the Omareemeeans, they’re groovy. Their language hangs lazily beyond of Gia’s grasp: each word has at least three meanings, only two of which Gia can identify at once, the third lingers unknown, a “carrier wave” pregnant with meaning. The fragments are like poems:

Much of Triad is concerned with Gia’s efforts to understand Omareemeean; it’s easily the most fascinating (and well-researched) aspect of the novel, even held up against the various mutinies and space politics that serve as a backdrop. The pragmatic crew-women, eager to make a trade agreement and colonize Omareemee, insist to Gia that the natives (they call them “Ents” for “entities”) aren’t sentient because they lack self-awareness; the tension is in identifying and defining self-awareness, and trying to understand just how much language molds reality.

There’s the usual colonialist conflicts, too, fear and misunderstanding of the other; the humans are trigger-happy to define the Ents as “sub-human,” but where does that distinction stand anymore in a Universe teeming with various forms of sentient life? What becomes the gold standard of consciousness or worth? It’s all relative, of course: even humans know they’re low on the evolutionary totem pole, as their own trade activities are monitored by yet another higher intelligence, which lurks unseen in the blackness of space.

Meanwhile the Omareemeeans change colors along with their planet, oblivious.

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