Well, fwiw, having a conversation with Phil could be a chore. Oh, lose the conditional, David, was a chore. You would look Phil in the eye, over drinks or whatever, and you could seem him lose focus. While he conversed with you, he got lost inside his own head. Or had conversations with imaginary people who hovered in the vacant spaces that surround us all. Was he talking to me? What did he just say? How does that remark fit in with our conversational topic?
All of which is unfair of me to recollect now, decades later. I was an enterprising young SF fan in Los Angeles who became quickly consumed with its SF community: Harlan Ellison, of course, but also Ted Sturgeon, Norm Spinrad, David Gerrold, and Phil Dick to name only a handful. This was the early-70s, before Hollywood discovered the rich vein of gold that PKD offered its studios. I was a socially maladroit kid, not well-versed in handling Phil's audible and visual tics (batting away unseen things off his shoulders, etc) and so I moved on to more accessible people. My loss. If I only knew then what I learned later about having empathy for people, etc, I would be that much richer today. Of which you deftly describe above. Thank you.
It seems to me that humans have always created unreality. Whether animism panpsychism, [religious] deities to anthropomorphize nature, to seeing malevolent entities in other humans, like demons and witches. Gossip that mutates is creating fake realities. Our societies are larger today, and multi-way communication is far easier than it was even 20 years ago.
Therefore, even though a fan of PKD's stories, I don't see them as particularly standout, other than his particular descriptions of his worlds. I also find your characterization of dystopias far too limited. isn't the nihilistic dystopia of the "Mad Max" franchise different from your 2 characterizations? Science fiction has been replete with many dystopias for as long as I have been reading the genre, for the last 60+ years. Isn't Kapek's "R.U.R. a warning of a dystopia similar to PKD's?
One can also cherry-pick parts of any dystopia to fit the current era. Orwell's "1984" - the surveillance state, NSA's capture of all communication, cameras everywhere, and AI to make this easy to use. Huxley's "Brave New World" - genetic engineering coming to somatic cell repeat, designer babies, eugenics via genetic testing of embryos, anxiolytics, and other legal lifestyle drugs as well as illegal ones. Did PKD's irritating doors come before Douglas Adam's talking doors in Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe? Conversely, we have no flying cars, or physical "papes" intruding upon us, but we do have [passenger] drones and news delivered via the internet and increasingly via social media platforms.
In summary, if this is PKD's dystopia we have had a lot worse (c.f. Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, to name two). Is the current political situation worse than the English and American civil wars? Are the current artificial spreaders of mis- and disinformation worse than earlier methods using print, radio, and TV? I really don't think so, and I am an older "fuddy-duddy" who is at that "get off my lawn" age..
Well, fwiw, having a conversation with Phil could be a chore. Oh, lose the conditional, David, was a chore. You would look Phil in the eye, over drinks or whatever, and you could seem him lose focus. While he conversed with you, he got lost inside his own head. Or had conversations with imaginary people who hovered in the vacant spaces that surround us all. Was he talking to me? What did he just say? How does that remark fit in with our conversational topic?
All of which is unfair of me to recollect now, decades later. I was an enterprising young SF fan in Los Angeles who became quickly consumed with its SF community: Harlan Ellison, of course, but also Ted Sturgeon, Norm Spinrad, David Gerrold, and Phil Dick to name only a handful. This was the early-70s, before Hollywood discovered the rich vein of gold that PKD offered its studios. I was a socially maladroit kid, not well-versed in handling Phil's audible and visual tics (batting away unseen things off his shoulders, etc) and so I moved on to more accessible people. My loss. If I only knew then what I learned later about having empathy for people, etc, I would be that much richer today. Of which you deftly describe above. Thank you.
I hadn't heard the tale of the biology book costing over $23 million, so if anybody else reads this and is also curious, here's a link:
https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Then again, Dick was the one who said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
truisms in an all too real false world
It seems to me that humans have always created unreality. Whether animism panpsychism, [religious] deities to anthropomorphize nature, to seeing malevolent entities in other humans, like demons and witches. Gossip that mutates is creating fake realities. Our societies are larger today, and multi-way communication is far easier than it was even 20 years ago.
Therefore, even though a fan of PKD's stories, I don't see them as particularly standout, other than his particular descriptions of his worlds. I also find your characterization of dystopias far too limited. isn't the nihilistic dystopia of the "Mad Max" franchise different from your 2 characterizations? Science fiction has been replete with many dystopias for as long as I have been reading the genre, for the last 60+ years. Isn't Kapek's "R.U.R. a warning of a dystopia similar to PKD's?
One can also cherry-pick parts of any dystopia to fit the current era. Orwell's "1984" - the surveillance state, NSA's capture of all communication, cameras everywhere, and AI to make this easy to use. Huxley's "Brave New World" - genetic engineering coming to somatic cell repeat, designer babies, eugenics via genetic testing of embryos, anxiolytics, and other legal lifestyle drugs as well as illegal ones. Did PKD's irritating doors come before Douglas Adam's talking doors in Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe? Conversely, we have no flying cars, or physical "papes" intruding upon us, but we do have [passenger] drones and news delivered via the internet and increasingly via social media platforms.
In summary, if this is PKD's dystopia we have had a lot worse (c.f. Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, to name two). Is the current political situation worse than the English and American civil wars? Are the current artificial spreaders of mis- and disinformation worse than earlier methods using print, radio, and TV? I really don't think so, and I am an older "fuddy-duddy" who is at that "get off my lawn" age..
Very good indeed. The ideas are v reminiscent of Baudrillard's simulacra, of which I think Trump is, perhaps instinctively, an absolute master.