THEMES

Here is my first story on the topic of: Am I a human? Or am I just programmed to believe I am a human... It's an important theme because it forces us to ask: What is a human? And - what isn't?

(Dick, on his short story "Impostor", in Notes to Collected Stories 2, 381)

Turning the cards face up, seeing reality whole - Phil had no deeper yearning than this.

(Sutin, 150)

The two questions, "What is Human?" and "What is Real?" are a constant obsession with Dick and he repeatedly examines them, searching for answers, and his novels are attempts to answer them. Dick's urgency to find answers makes him look everywhere, from the Church down to the gutter; from Kant and Jung to a Beatles song. His novels are, therefore, most often a confusing mumbo-jumbo of the universe's flotsam and jetsam, and the chaos it presents may certainly scare people away. The reader who has a need to fit all things into their appropriate boxes may quickly run into a dilemma with Dick because, as Lou Stathis says: "He fits nowhere conveniently..." (46). Just because we, the ordinary human beings, believe that what we see is real - that reality is really reality - does it necessarily follow that it is real? In Dick's mind there is an endless nagging doubt. When he was fifteen, a magazine editor, to whose magazine Dick had sent some short stories, said that "'little authors' shouldn't write about the big unknown - just things they know about!" This made young Dick furious. Thirty years later, he had been told over and over to leave the reality theme and go onto something else, to which he always had the same reply: "As if... there was a real reality out there ready at hand" (Sutin, 41).

For a man like Dick, who suffered from numerous phobias and anxieties along with paranoia, the possibility of reality disintegrating before his eyes was very real. His daughter, in Sutin's biography, commented: "He was one of the most frightened people that I have ever known. He wanted to make people happy. He was brilliant and empathetic. But he was trapped by his fears" (Laura, as quoted in Sutin, 262). Because of his fears Dick had trouble functioning in the real world. The psychological disorders caused him to experience frightening attacks, when he was in certain situations. As I have already mentioned, he had a terrible fear of eating in public. When he was young, attending school was even more of a problem. He would have attacks of agoraphobia and vertigo which were so serious that he finally gave up school, something he always felt guilty about, being a native of the Berkeley college community. A school friend remembers Dick's descriptions of these attacks:

The whole bloody world collapsed on him psychologically as he was walking down a classroom aisle. It was something of such pain... like the whole world disappeared in front of him and he was turned into this painful, vulnerable, embattled thing, and where at any moment the floor might open up and he might be canceled out as a living entity. (Sutin, 63)

If the world was like this to Dick, it is no wonder he became so obsessed with the deceptiveness of reality. As he used his own experiences as ideas for his novels, the novels tend to be deceptive on the surface, but very life-like at the core.

The real difference between the earlier novels and the Valis trilogy is a shift in focus and emphasis. Although he deals with religion in all of his books, he has never engaged in theological discussions, nor has he demanded of his readers that they debate his religious arguments. That Dick should leave the more political and social topics to focus entirely on religion is a natural transition in his career. In the Valis trilogy, he no longer approaches the religious themes from the side but turns to Christianity, as well as all other religions, directly. He delves into religious texts - be it the Bible, the Kabbalah, the Torah, the Talmud, Tao te Ching, or the Dead Sea Scrolls - draws them all together on their similarities and out of the mixture creates theory after theory in an attempt to arrive at the truth; the truth about life, the universe, reality, and God. Although there is no question that the 2-3-74 experiences triggered this transition, I have no doubt that he would have, as a novelist, gradually moved in that direction. Eventually he would have arrived at the point of dealing with religion directly in his search for an understanding of what the world is all about.

Dick felt a need to blame somebody for his twin sister's, Jane's, death but he also felt a need to understand a world that showed such cruelty. In view of the twinning motif, it hardly comes as a surprise that he should turn to Gnostic teachings and other related doctrines, for the Gnostic theory about the split in the Godhead (see "Gnosticism" and "Valentinus and the Valentinians") answered his need for understanding Jane's death. The Godhead, at the time when the world was created, was dual (similar to Yin and Yang in Buddhism). Then an accident occurred, and the Godhead split in two and the female half, Sophia, fell into a lower realm. She then spawns a creature, the demi-urge, sometimes called Yaldaboath, who creates the material world we now live in, and believes himself to be the true God. But actual, true reality, created by the actual, true God, is hidden behind the material world, just as the true God is also hiding. Our reality is therefore a false manifestation of the real thing. The Godhead must be healed for the true, united God to be able to, once more, assume control over the world he created, and when that happens, true reality will be revealed. The Valentinian system, one among many Gnostic systems, centres on the myth of the redemption acquired through the union: "[r]edemption is essentially accomplished through the union of the heavenly Soter with the fallen Sophia" ("Valentinus and The Valentinians"). Dick, combining Gnosticism with he yearning for his lost sister Jane, creates his own cosmogony, the "Two Source Cosmogony", expressed in detail in the Exegesis and, gives it life in Valis and The Divine Invasion. In the Appendix to Valis, Dick presents the Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura, which is a summary from the Exegesis, explaining Dick's/Fat's "Two Source Cosmogony":

It tells about the death of a woman. This woman who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy... The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone. (233)

"The suffering Mind" is Dick and he brings Jane back to life on the "meanest level of reality": in the science fiction novel.

Dick's cosmogony is complicated, created out of even more complicated religious doctrines. He searches the ancient Gnostic texts - plus Christian, oriental, and Jewish ones - in order to explain the world and find an answer to his themes of "What is Real?" and "What is Human?". The answer Dick gathers from his religious studies is revealed in the Valis trilogy, and as it happens, is the same answer he always found and revealed in all his novels: that human beings are not meant to live in single units but in pairs, because caring for another person brings out the humanity in us. Even the authentic God is not a single being, but a unit of two, where one balances the other. In The Divine Invasion Dick emphasises this point through the Christian myth about the Advocate and the Accuser. On the day of judgement the Advocate offers his help, to defend every person who asks for it against the Accuser. He defends them with his own innocence and wins every time. Robert Galbreath ("Redemption and Doubt in Philip K. Dick's Valis Trilogy") comments:

Just as there are cosmic Advocate and Accuser, so are there an individual Advocate and Accuser, a good spirit... and a bad spirit... in each person. A struggle between the contending spirits takes place in us all. Those individuals who choose the Advocate, the good spirit, are saved; those who do not are doomed... (112)

He also mentions the Greek word paraklein, "to call to aid", from which the English word "paraclete" is derived, a term in Christian doctrine for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. Out of these myths Dick has created the concept of the Beside-helper. Every person has his Beside-helper, and in The Divine Invasion, Linda Fox is Herb Asher's Beside-helper, and she saves him from the evil Belial (the devil).

Bishop's words, that Ubik is "private as well as universal" apply here: Linda and Herb are the two halves of the Godhead, on a private level, joined together for the equal benefit of both. In the words of Galbreath: "He cares for her and wants to protect her... [s]he in turn protects him from Belial" (110). Emmanuel, the Christ reborn, finds his missing half in Zina, thus repairing what was broken on the universal level, or as Emmanuel says about Zina, in the novel: "You the kind side, he thought; the compassionate side. And I the terrible side that arouses fear and trembling. Together we form a unity. Seperated, we are not whole; we are not, individually enough" (224).

Dick was an explorer of ideas, an analyst, and through his constant analysing he developed more hypotheses than is possible to enumerate. Barlow says: "Writing was, to him, a method of exploration and he used it so, extensively, even at the expense of 'craft'." I have to disagree that the constant explorations impoverished his fiction but it is true that in his writings Dick found a way of expressing the complex theories his over-active and ceaselessly analysing mind created.

What, then, is this truth? There is no single, simple answer to that question; however, Dick presents intriguing theories, opens up a whole new world of speculation, offering a diversity of answers - none of which may be correct - from which the reader can choose and pick. If he wants to. But choosing is difficult, for following the creation of a new theory is a counter-theory, contradicting the first and dissolving it into doubt. Consider Warrick's statement: "His method is a dialectic of the imagination. He creates an image of assertion and then deserts it as he creates an image portraying a counterassertion" (111). Dick can never be certain that the answer he has arrived at is the ultimate answer, for, like Warrick commented on earlier, "his mind is constantly in motion," and he always finds new aspects of the problem he has forgotten to consider, and in contemplating it, he creates yet another hypothesis. Valis is crowded with these, and The Divine Invasion is even more so.

Reality, as seen in the novels, is sometimes presented as a living entity out to get everybody. In novels like Ubik and Three Stigmata it appears to have a will of its own. Dick's method of giving credibility to reality - as an evil-minded, trap-setting character - is to dress it in such clothing as he finds in the SF wardrobe. In Ubik the shifting reality may be the result of some nasty chemicals released by the explosion on Luna. In Three Stigmata a strange and alien drug may be the cause.

I consider Dick's two themes - "What is Human?" and "What is Real?" - a search for authenticity, for that is what he searches for: to discover the authentic reality because he believes it to be hidden from us by a veil of illusory, not-real reality, and in the same way he wants to discover the authentic human characteristic; i.e., what constitutes a human being as opposed to an artificial, mechanical being. His novels are theories, attempts to probe into the problem. They are possible answers, each one valid until the next novel is completed. The more he probes, the more answers he comes up with and the infinity of theories are a maze in which anyone can get lost - and usually does. As Dick never leaves off inquiring about authenticity, it ultimately leads him into religion, the theme he becomes obsessed with in the 70's.

The central theme in Do Androids Dream? is "What is Human?", and it plays with the possibility that an android may not know it is only a machine and not a human being. The novel is set in a post-nuclear San Francisco, in the year 1992, when most "normal" people - normal meaning healthy and productive - have migrated to the Martian colonies. Population on earth being scarce by this time, people live in isolation from one another; most buildings house only one or two persons. Android-manufacturing has become big business since the colonies need slaves to do all outside work. Android designs have reached such an advanced level that distinguishing them from humans is becoming a problem: the latest type, the Nexus-6, is perfect except for the built-in four-year life span and the inability to feel emotions. Occasionally, robot-slaves on the colonies revolt and escape to Earth. Since runaway androids are illegal on earth, they must be hunted down and killed. The police force has a special squad solely for this purpose, and the protagonist in the story, Rick Deckard, is one of the best "bounty hunters", as they are called. The event that gets the story going is a revolt, followed by an escape to earth, by four "andys". Deckard is given the assignment of "retiring" them, which is the term applied to killing an android.

Early on in the novel, we learn that Deckard is having problems retiring some of the runaway andys; his conscience has started bothering him concerning the ethical justification of the deed. For example, Deckard can see no logical reason for retiring one android, Luba Luft, the opera singer, for she does no harm. In fact, she has something to give to society: her voice. When he meets Rachel Rosen, The Rosen Association's typical pleasure model, he falls in love with her, which generates a loss of faith in himself. This occasions a nagging doubt in Deckard's mind as to the justification of his profession. His feelings, he realises, are in direct opposition to what he is required to feel: humans, and bounty hunters especially, are required to feel no emotions towards androids. Moreover, there should be a certain hostility between the two "races" as androids are mechanical beings, made by man and in that sense an inferior species. The main difference between the two is that, although perfect in every sense, androids cannot feel compassion for another being, not even for each other. Deckard's discovery, that he feels sympathy for the androids, or at least some androids, frightens him: he fears he may be an android programmed so as not to know it.

So, Deckard begins to seriously doubt his own authenticity. He meets another bounty hunter called Phil Resch, whom he has never met before. Resch works for a puppy police force - a "cover-up" department - set up by the andys themselves in order to protect them. Resch and Deckard join forces for a while, and Deckard discovers a totally different attitude towards bounty hunting. Resch's ruthless view stuns Deckard; Resch's complete lack of emotion and guilt when retiring an andy - the two feelings that Deckard is burdened with - makes him suspect Resch of being an android. A special test, the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, has been designed to certify whether the suspect is an android, and as it tests empathetic responses, Deckard tests Resch. When Resch passes the test, Deckard has no option but to test himself. When he passes the test as well, he has to rethink the situation:

      "Do you have your ideology framed?" Phil Resch asked. "That would explain me as part of the human race?"
      Rick said, "There is a defect in your emphatic, role-taking ability. One which we don't test for. Your feelings toward androids."
      "Of course we don't test for that."
      "Maybe we should."
      ...
      "You realize," Phil Resch said quietly, "what this would do. If we included androids in our range of empathic identification, as we do animals."
      "We wouldn't be able to protect ourselves."
      "Absolutely. These Nexus-6 types... they'd roll all over us and mash us flat. You and I, all the bounty hunters - we stand between the Nexus-6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct."
(108-109)

What Deckard understands is that Resch has the right attitude, and he the wrong one: "There's nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch's reactions; it's me" (109). Resch has no feelings about his work; his attitude is unsympathetic towards androids. He believes they should be killed in order to protect humans. Deckard's position, however, is that because of the human appearance and behaviour of andys, he hesitates to retire some of them because he cannot help seeing them as humans, and identifying with them as such. Feeling bad about killing a machine as if it were a human being bothers him. He discovers that he actually feels guilty; he has feelings of empathy towards the andys, which, as he can rationally see, is not rational at all. How can anybody be sympathetic towards something that is not human? They are, after all, machines, without feelings.

By pitting Deckard and Resch against each other, Dick posses an important question about human nature. Where Resch is concerned, there does not seem to be much difference between the human and the android. Resch's answer to Deckard's doubts is: it is only sex. That is, Deckard's guilt stems from his feeling attracted to the female androids. Resch explains that he himself was once faced with the same dilemma, and he solved it by having sex with a female andy. He advices Deckard to do the same:

      Rick stared at him. "Go to bed with her first--"
      "--and then kill her," Phil Resch said succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile remained.

As simple as this sounds, it may not be so in actuality, and Deckard realises this after having had sex with Rachel Rosen: "This is my end, he said to himself. As a bounty hunter. After the Batys there won't be any more. Not after this, tonight" (149). The intimacy with Rachel has only made things worse for him. As we later learn, the android Resch had sex with - as a therapy, which cured him of his empathetic attitude - is Rachel. It is no coincidence that it happens to be the same android, for Rachel practices a game, so to speak, which is to have sex with bounty hunters so they will not be able to continue retiring androids:

      "You're not going to be able to hunt androids any longer," she said calmly. "So don't look so sad. Please."
      He stared at her.
      "No bounty hunter ever has gone on," Rachel said. "After being with me. Except one. A very cynical man. Phil Resch. And he's nutty...." (149)

So it seems, after all, that Resch's reactions are unnatural and unhuman, for he is the exception to the rule: the only bounty hunter, not only able, but willing to go on retiring andys after being with Rachel. He passes the empathy test, which means he is a human being, as opposed to a machine, but does that make him human? It is, as Dick says in the quotation at the opening of this section, an important theme - the theme "because it forces us to ask: what is a human? And - what isn't?" Resch is so devoid of all feelings that, although the Voigt-Kampff certifies his humanity, in what way is he different from an android? Is Deckard right when he claims that his own reactions are not human and Resch's are? We may find it unnatural to be sympathetic towards a machine, but when the machine looks, sounds and acts exactly like a human being, the empathy may be justifiable. After all, appearance is what triggers our first reactions, and if we see what we believe to be a human being, our first response will be to identify with it as a fellow human being, and a certain understanding is established.

On the most fundamental level the question being asked is: what constitutes a human being? In analysing what an android is, and seeing them posed as the opposite to a human being, we start to get close to the answer. Androids have no emotional components in their brain circuits, so they cannot feel sympathy. This is what distinguishes them from human beings, as Sergeant Garland says to Deckard:

      "You androids," Rick said, "don't exactly cover for each other in times of stress."
      Garland snapped, "I think you're right; it would seem we lack a specific talent you humans possess. I belive it's called empathy." (95)

Then we are confronted with Phil Resch, a certified human being, who has all the required hostility for androids, and Rick Deckard, who doubts his own humanity because he cannot kill androids in cold blood, and he thinks only an android could be sympathetic towards another android. So what constitutes the human being? The question we should ask ourselves here is not 'towards what do we have sympathy?' but 'do we have sympathy at all?' In a lecture called "Man, Android and Machine," Dick discusses this theme, and he says: "... does the composite entity... behave in a human way?... 'Man' or 'human being' are terms which we must understand correctly and apply, but they apply not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world..." (202). In other words, Resch's behaviour makes him no more human than any of the androids he retires, because he lacks empathy.

Kevin, in Valis, says, "condemn the deed, not the doer, and Dick in "Man, Android and Machine" claims that the terms "human" and "android" apply not to origin (the doer) but to a way of being, or behaving, in the world (the deed). Consider Rachael: her memories are implants - somebody else's memories - planted inside Rachael's brain as an experiment. Ultimately, she does not know she is a replicant and that her past is not hers. But the memories are in her mind, just as vivid as our own, building up a past just as concrete to her as ours is to us. The fact that what Rachael remembers is not authentic, i.e., not her own visions of childhood - since she never had one - does it make them any less real? If she has a past (she carries a photograph of herself as a little girl with her mother), is she in any way different from a human? Which is more real, and closer to the truth, our knowledge that she is a mechanical construct clothed in flesh and blood and nerves, with implanted memories, or her knowledge of her past, her experiences as a child and adolescent; her "knowledge" that she was born and raised by a mother, 20 or 30 years ago, and not made in a factory two or three years ago?

In Do Androids Dream? we see the reality theme also at work. Rick Deckard is sent to arrest the opera singer, Luba Luft, who is a runaway android. She calls the police, who show up and arrest Rick Deckard instead, claiming they have never heard of him or his police department. Likewise, Deckard neither recognises the police officers nor is he familiar with the name of their sergeant. He is brought to the station, where he meets Sergeant Garland, who claims Deckard is an android, masquerading as a human:

      "This man - or android - Rick Deckard comes to us from a phantom, hallucinatory, nonexistent police agency allegedly operating out of the old departmental headquarters on Lombard. He's never heard of us and we've never heard of him - yet ostensibly we're both working the same side of the street. He employs a test we've never heard of. The list he carries around isn't of androids; it's a list of human beings." (92)

This statement comes as much of a shock to the reader as it does to Deckard. As the reader has been following Deckard around; has become familiar with his job and routines, the facts, as stated by Garland, are like a parody. It is simply funny - in a hysterical sort of way. For we know the truth - or do we? An uneasy sense of doubt makes us wonder whether we have been falsely informed all along. There is, after all, no guarantee that Deckard is telling the truth. He thinks he does, perhaps because he knows no better. This may be an instance of Dick's favourite topic in regards to human vs. machine - and one of the original ideas he contributed to science fiction as a genre: that Deckard may be an android without knowing it.

Ubikis Dick's best and most fascinating exploration into the idea of false realities. Glen Runciter, and his crew of inertials, are tricked to Luna where they are hit by a bomb. In the explosion, Runciter dies and his crew hasten to bring his body back to earth in order to get it into cold-pak. A person kept in cold-pak is maintained in a state of half-life; he is virtually dead but his mind can be contacted and discoursed with, being only half-dead. Following the incident on Luna, the crew start experiencing strange phenomena in their surroundings: the world appears to be moving backwards in time. Everyday objects, like cars and toasters, dissolve into their older models, again and again, each time becoming an older model than the one before. Moreover, the same objects do not function properly; they break down or do not function at all. There is a sense of decay in everything: food rots within the hour, and cigarettes crumble even as they are being bought. As if that is not enough, messages from Runciter start appearing in the most unexpected places: Al Hammond is with Joe Chip in The Lucky People Supermarket in Baltimore, where they pick up a carton of cigarettes, containing no cigarettes but a piece of paper.

      A scrawled note. In handwriting familiar to him, and to Joe. He lifted it out and together they both read it.

       ...
      "A random carton of cigarettes," Joe said, "at a random store in a city picked at random. And we find a note directed to us from Glen Runciter." (Ubik, 112-13)

Joe and Al try desperately to find out what is happening, especially after the members of their group start turning up dead. Naturally, they find no solution to the dilemma, until Joe is finally contacted by Runciter. It turns out that Runciter is the one who survived the bombing on Luna, the crew is in cold-pak with Runciter trying to contact them. A strange story with an even stranger twist and everybody is happy with the solution. Except Philip K. Dick, so he adds a little something right at the end. On the last page, Runciter discovers the money in his pockets all have Joe Chip's face on them. Earlier in the novel, Joe had experienced the same, except his money had Runciter's face on them:

      Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces...
      It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen.
      He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.
      This was just the beginning. (Ubik, 216)

So, the happy-solution-ending crumbles before our eyes, leaving us asking: why? We now have to begin working all over again on what it all means. Ubik is the ultimate "nothing-is-what-it-seems" novel by Dick, and the most difficult because it appears to have no actual answer. Michael Bishop ("In Pursuit of Ubik") comes close to the truth when he says that pursuing the meaning of Ubik is more exciting than arriving at it: "It invites our continued pursuit by its very elusiveness. Further, I'm convinced that three-quarters of the fun of Ubik... just happens to lie in the pursuit" (138). He does, however, arrive at a definite conclusion:

If Ubik seemingly thwarts our each and every attempt to give it a more specific christening, it does so because Ubik is multitudinous as well as singular, private as well as universal. Moreover, as the entire thrust of Dick's novel implies, Ubik operates at full potency only when a person conjures its unique qualities as a "reality support" from inner, or spiritual, resources rather than from external, or material, ones. (Bishop, 147)

Michael Bishop argues that Ubik demonstrates a lack of faith, resulting in escalation of entropy in the universe. Materialism has supplanted "spiritual resilience" as our reality support. Faith has retreated; physical and social hungers have taken its place. This change is pushing mankind closer to chaos; entropy gradually takes over. Materialism, realised as consumersim, in and through television commercials, which are ubiquitous. Ubik - a derivation of the word "ubiquitous" - is presented, at the beginning of each chapter, as everything from a breakfast cereal to a Savings and Loan firm, from sleeping pills to hair conditioners, in the form of an advertisement:

We wanted to give you a shave like no other you ever had. We said, It's about time a man's face got a little loving. We said, With Ubik's self-winding Swiss chromium never-ending blade, the days of scrape-scrape are over. So try Ubik. And be loved. Warning: use only as directed. And with caution. (61)

Ubik is our daily consumer product, the things we buy every day - our daily bread. The ads are everywhere, Ubik is everywhere, for every object is Ubik. Ubik is the pervading element:

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. (Ubik, 215)

This final "ad" is analogous to the beginning of the Book of John and, as Bishop puts it, equates Ubik with the Christian God. He then continues and states his analysis of Ubik: "Ubik is the affirmative principle. To put it another way, Ubik is whatever helps John Doe or John Foe make it through the Dark Night of the soul" ("In Pursuit of Ubik", 146-47). Ubik is not the Christian God, and yet it is. It is the Absolute, the Godhead. It is the almighty power, represented in every religion by various names. But the name does not matter. Understood this way, Ubik is affirming what Valis and The Divine Invasion are all about: Jory, the Adversary, the evil, reality destroyer - or false reality maker. Ella Runciter is the is the Beside-Helper and Runciter is the Saviour, saving Joe Chip with a spray can of Ubik. Ubik is Yahweh, Buddha, Valis, Zebra, whatever name it has ever been given.

Fitting in "Reality as Ideological Construct" says about The Three Stigmata, that the drug-oriented culture on Mars echoes the Television oriented society we inhabit, and since Can-D/TV is what People have come to believe in, the road is paved for entropy to enter into every corner of our lives:

As can be seen in the key image of the colonists huddled around their layouts, the Can-D experience is not so much an indictment of drug abuse... as a critique of the role and function of television in our lives... This future Earth is our own present, where the emancipatory and utopian potential of the media and of technologies... has been diverted to the trivialized products and ideological practices of manipualtion and representation which characterize consumer society. (101)

It is basically a lack of faith in spiritual things. In Do Androids Dream? technology kills God: Buster Friendly, the android, scientifically proves Mercerism to be a fake. Androids discard empathy because it cannot be scientifically proved. Our technologically oriented society refuses to believe in mental and spiritual experiences because we cannot literally place our hand on it; we cannot take it up, point at it, and say: this is it! By denouncing the spiritual, and embracing the material, external world, we place our faith in dead, unsubsubstantial things. The living ceases to matter as much. Androids represent the unfeeling intellect as opposed to human compassion. The inhabitants of the Martian colony in The Three Stigmata seek human compassion through, first, Can-D, and then Chew-Z. Fitting says: "[ ] we must recognize that the novel's starting point lies with the characters' need for illusion..." ("Reality as Ideological Construct", 100), but they seek it in the wrong direction, bringing about increasingly worse illusions and, eventually, a worse reality. They turn to false solutions to the meaningless of their lives, bringing about ever increasing chaos to their universe. Dick's kipple (Do Androids Dream?) represents entropy, which reaches ubiquity or all pervasiveness with Chew-Z, Palmer Eldritch's ploy to gain power as the demi-urge.

The typical Dick novel explores the possibilities of reality being an illusion. To Dick, the world is many different realities existing simultaneously, side by side. Everyone perceives the world differently; every human being has a separate version of reality because of the different perceptions. Dick, in a 1981 interview, comments on his use of the multi-foci viewpoint: "Since I do not hold there is one reality, I hold that each person has their own, somewhat unique reality, it would be natural for me to use a multi-foci type thing" (Rickman, 140).

A Scanner Darkly is not so much a science fiction novel as a semi-mainstream one. Bob Arctor is a drug addict who is slowly killing himself on the futuristic drug, Substance-D (D for death). He is also Fred, a narcotics agent, whose newest assignment is to focus his attention on an addict and possible pusher named Bob Arctor. The protagonist leads two separate lives which he manages to keep distinct from one another until the pressure of the situation, plus the growing brain damage from the use of Substance D, splits his brain so his two identities cease to be aware of each other. As in Ubik and Do Androids Dream?, Dick investigates the familiar topic of "What is Real?" in Scanner, only now from a different angle. The factor creating a shifty reality this time, comes not from the outside, but from the inside. Dick, in an interview, remarks: "Only instead of it being a question of what is real externally, it now invades the inner psyche" (Williams, 82). Scanner portrays the existence of separate realities as a tangible fact: the result of drug abuse and schizophrenia. The main characters in Scanner, Barris, Luckman and Bob Arctor, are all "junkies". Their conversation, most of the time, is absurd to the point of being silly, showing a typical junkie mentality. At one time, Luckman gets the idea that maybe there is another Robert Arctor, aside from the one they know, and Bob starts to wonder:

      To himself, Bob Arctor thought, How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I'm the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me? (Scanner, 96)

It is a good question, for fairly soon after this, Fred loses touch with his other self, Bob. In fact, when he - that is Fred - is told that he is actually Bob Arctor, Fred finds it too incredible to believe. To inquire which he is, Bob or Fred, is to inquire into the nature of the two worlds he inhabits. In one he is a cop, a narcotics agent, whose job it is to apprehend pushers. In the other he is a drug addict, whose main enemy is the police. Arctor cannot exist in both worlds at once. As Fred he is a different personality from himself as Bob. So which is the real him?

We might say, and it might be true, that many different perceptions of the world exist. However, the human being does not perceive his view as a mere perception of the world; he conceives it as reality itself. The cosmogony in the mind of the individual is his reality, and thus, for him, it is authentic reality and nothing less. Assuming that every individual possesses his own unique reality, what happens to the external reality of the world itself? Can we say that a single, external, actual reality exists when nobody perceives it the same way, and therefore nobody agrees on what it is like? It is too mind-boggling to think that perhaps external reality does not exist. So we assume that it is really out there. Then it may just be possible that it is something totally different from what we think it is, and if so, where does it leave us? What would we do if discovered this to be the case? Questions like these are constantly being asked in Dick's novels by drawing up a world where reality is as eccentric as an old man, and its behaviour is utterly unpredictable. Paul Williams notes:

... Dick's world is a world of specific ambiguity... a sinister paranoid world where each thing seems to be one way and then turns out to maybe be another, and eventually it becomes clear that you can't be certain of anything - since each of us perceives a different world, really large-scale communication breakdown and even sanity breakdown are possible and, in a Dick novel, probable. (17)

Take for example earthquakes. You go through life with the assurance that nothing is more solid and stable than the ground under your feet. If there is anything you can rely on, this is it. Then one day you experience an earthquake and in a flash your faith is destroyed. The earth has failed you once, it might do so again. So you realise you cannot trust the world around you; it may change, fall apart or even vanish in the blink of an eye. Your perception of reality has changed; the world has let you down when you thought you could trust it and the result is that you are now living in an altogether different reality. So, you could say with Dick, the world as we perceive it, is an illusion. But then again we might also join in with Herb Asher, our hero from The Divine Invasion, when he says that the illusionary world is only "a way of seeing the real world... An occluded way. A dreamlike way. A hypnotized, asleep way. The nature of world undergoes a perceptual change; actually it is the perceptions that change, not the world. The change is in us" (DI, 199).

Which brings us back to Ubik. If we stick to the explanation that Joe Chip and friends are "half-lifers", in cold-pak, then their perception of the changes taking place in their surroundings is "[a] hypnotized, asleep way" of seeing the real world: they are only dreaming. Runciter tries to wake them up to an awareness of the illusion; that what they are experiencing is not the real world at all. Dick once gave an explanation, in a lecture, of what Ubik is all about:

... we are like the characters in my novel Ubik; we are in a state of half-life. We are neither dead nor alive, but preserved in cold storage, waiting to be thawed out... What melts the ice and snow covering the characters in Ubik, and what halts the cooling-off of their lives, the entropy which they feel, is the voice of Mr Runciter, their former employer, calling to them. The voice of Mr Runciter is none other than that same voice which each bulb and seed and root in the ground, our ground, in our wintertime, hears. It hears: Wake up! Sleepers awake!
("Man, Android and Machine", 207)

In his own words, Dick equates Runciter with the Universal Ruler ( I refrain from using the word God, since Dick's theories on religion are far too complicated for such a simplification), which brings us to his last obsessive theme: the identity of God.

Dick's novels, by means of various devices, present entropy as an ongoing process: there is cold-pak in Ubik; Chew-Z in The Three Stigmata; "kipple" filling up empty spaces in Do Androids Dream? Coldness is word that recurs throughout Dick's novels, and connects with what he says in "Man, Android and Machine". In Counter-Clock World regular time flow has reversed itself so that everything happens backwards: people wake up from death, are "born" from the grave, revert back to infancy and finally enter a ready womb. The reborn always carry with them a memory of the "dreary coldness of the grave," and it is a chilling, haunting memory. In Do Androids Dream? there are constant references to the tombworld, the darkness and the cold. Mercerism is practiced by the individual by gripping the two handles on the so-called empathy box. A picture appears on the screen of the box, showing Wilbur Mercer, an old man clad in a robe, ascending a rocky hill. The individual, by gripping the handles, merges with Mercer, as well as everybody else holding their handles at the same time, and together they ascend the hill, hopefully to the top. In the fusion that occurs, all the individuals are together, sensing each other's feelings and voices and during the difficult climbing they support each other. For Jack Isidore, living alone in an empty building in the suburbs, this fusion is of vital importance. Isidore is a "special"; his genes are distorted because of the radioactive atmosphere, making him unacceptable on the colonies. Moreover, being a "chickenhead" - he failed to pass the minimum mentality test - no one wants to socialise with him, so he is always alone. The world of San Fransisco in 1992 is a world of decay: radioactive dust covers the earth and blocks out the sun; animals are either dead or dying; humans emigrating by the millions, leaving the cities to go to ruin. "Kipple" is the word Dick uses for the increasing decay; discarded refuse, empty houses crumbling to dust. "Kipple has a way of reproducing itself," Dick says, and entropy takes over. The emptiness of the uninhabited suburban apartment buildings becomes palpable:

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power... Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed... He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust... He reached for the doorknob that opened the way out into the unlit hall, then shrank back as he glimpsed the vacuity of the rest of the building. It lay in wait for him, out here, the force which he had felt busily penetrating his specific apartment. God, he thought, and reshut the door. He was not ready for the trip up those clanging stairs... The echo of himself ascending: the echo of nothing. (19-21)

Isidore, in his empty house, in his loneliness, senses the void and the kipplisation that is taking place all around thim. The tombworld is a world empty of human beings and full of kipple, destroying what life there is left. The cold is the defeating loneliness of people like Isidore.

Awakening, remembering - these are key terms with Dick. Herb Asher (The Divine Invasion) is kept in cryonic suspension for ten years because of an accident. During those years he hears soupy string versions of South Pacific (which in itself indicates the unpleasantness of the state he is in) and dreams. In his dreams he relives his past. Here again we see a character in "half-life", like the half-lifers in Ubik. When he finally wakes up, he meets his son, Emmanuel, who is ten years old, and God reborn. Emmanuel is brain damaged because the ship that carried his mother to earth crashed on arrival. The damage has caused amnesia in the boy and during Herb's sleeping years, Emmanuel has spent his time trying to remember who he is and what his purpose is. But he cannot do it on his own; Zina, his Beside-helper, aids his "awakening" by taking him to an alternate reality she creates: the paradise lost where everything is good and beautiful. Emmanuel hears the sounds of bells: "'I cannot, myself, produce that sound,' he said to Zina. 'How is it done?' By wakefulness,' Zina said. 'The bell-sounds wake you up. They rouse you from sleep... ' Gentle spring wind blew about them, the vapors of her realm" (170-71). Emmanuel needs Zina to make his world whole.

In a Dickian world can there be any hope for the characters of ever gaining control over their lives? Moreover, is there any hope for survival - mental and physical - in a world that appears to be hostile to its inhabitants? Dick answers yes, but only if you retain your sense of empathy. You cannot base your faith on material things - they are elusive, transitory. You have to place it in a different kind of substance, one that will endure, which is man's capacity to care. Lou Stathis, in Heavy Metal, says:

In Dick's universe you take nothing for granted. Not only have all authority figures lied to you, but reality has lied to you as well... But however paranoid, Dick's vision isn't despairing. There is always hopefulness within the entropic decay, humour in the absurdity, and redemption in the super human abilities of ordinary humans to cope with extraordinary circumstances. We can make it... Humans will survive as long as they retain their humanity, Dick says, and the measure of humanity is the capacity for caring.... ("Philip K. Dick 1928-1982",4)

Regarding Rick Deckard in this context makes certain things clear. Towards the end of the novel Do Androids Dream?, Deckard flies "up north" and finds an authentic, living toad. At this time, toads are supposed to be extinct, as are all living animals. The few remaining animals can be bought at exorbitant prices, and this state of affairs has generated a new social status symbol: animal ownership. Deckard is ecstatic, after finding the toad, and flies home to his wife, Iran, who discovers the toad is a fake - a mechanical duplication. Deckard's first reaction is disappointment, followed by an emotional emptiness. Iran, feeling sorry for her husband, packs him off to bed with the promise that she will look after him. At that Deckard discovers his exhaustion and with a feeling of gratitude goes to sleep. From the beginning of the story, Deckard and Iran have disagreed on almost every subject. In the end, however, what matters most to them, as Deckard realises, is their support for each other; sticking together, and caring. Christiansen remarks on this:

In his [Dick's] work, it is the aggressive animals that fail, whereas humans with the sustaining qualities despised by their domineering antagonists win. The victories, for female and male alike, do not produce material prosperity, or even a temporary fame. They do produce what does matter to a human being: a life worth living. (81)

Ubik and High Castle present the religious aspect differently, but still similarily, and in both, spiritual matters are closely linked with the reality theme. I have already touched upon the basic outline of High Castle. One important element is yet to be discussed: the novel within the novel. Hawthorne Abendsen is a novelist in occupied America (the rumour is that he lives in a "high castle", surrounded by walls and barbed wire), and he has written a controversial book, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which he pictures the world as it would be had Japan and Germany lost the Second World War. The characters find this "invention" extraordinary; some are fascinated by the idea, others apalled. Juliana Frink finds it more than fascinating; she feels compelled to go and see this Abendsen to thank him for writing the novel. She falls in with a man named Joe, who, as she finds out on the way, is on a mission to assassinate Abendsen. When she discovers Joe's true reason for seeing Abendsen, she does the only thing she can do to stop him: she slits his throat. Juliana manages to visit Abendsen on her own, only to find that he did not actually write the book - the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, I-Ching, had written it for him. ^[9] The I-Ching tells Juliana, when she asks it, that Abendsen's book is true; that it - the I-Ching - had written the book through Abendsen to reveal what really happened; i.e., that Germany and Japan lost the war. In an enigmatic scene, at Abendsen's house, Juliana discovers the truth, the present reality is not real reality, and the I-Ching, by writing the book, is trying to tell the world the truth. If only people would believe it - the novel - they might see what is real:

      Juliana said, "Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?"
      ...
      She began throwing the coins...
      "It's Chung Fu," Juliana said. "Inner Truth. I know without using the chart [ ]. And I know what it means."
      Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. "It means, does it, that my book is true?"
      "Yes," she said.
      With anger he said, "Germany and Japan lost the war?'
      "Yes."
      Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing.
      "Even you don't face it," Juliana said.
      For a time he considered....
      "I'm not sure of anything," he said.
      "Believe," Juliana said. (246-47)

Here the I-Ching is equivalent to Valis which fired a beam of pink light at Horselover Fat's head in Valis and revealed to him that reality is a fake. Beneath it lurks the real world in which time turns into space, i.e., time, as we perceive it, does not exist.

Another instance occurs in High Castle, where the truth is revealed through a semi-religious medium. Childan, the antique-dealer, sells Tagomi a new product - a jewel in the form of a pin, designed and handmade by Frank Frink. A Japanese business official, Paul Kasoura, has just told Childan that for some strange reason the pin contains wu, which, as a Taoist concept, means "spontaneity" ^[10] and Kasoura explains to Childan, that the wu means that the jewel has made its peace with the universe; that it is a balanced thing. He also emphasises that the wu is not inherent in the metal but has flown into it from the hands of the maker. Frink, in other words, gives the jewel its wu, and the reason he happens to have wu in the first place is because the only thing he wants to accomplish in making the jewel is to be allowed to do what he does best, and in such circumstances, the individual will produce quality, which is what gives his life meaning. Childan passes this information over to Tagomi, who takes the pin into a public park, sits down on a bench and tries to reach the wu inside. Wu (more accurately wu-wei) means literally "inaction", that is, as in "taking no unnatural action." It also means "spontaneity" (which I mentioned earlier): "to support all things in their natural state," and to "allow them to transform spontaneously" (Wing-tsit Chan, "Taoism"). Tagomi spends a long time watching the pin, handling it, this way and that, but gets no response. When at last he feels something is about to happen, he is interrupted. Consequently, he loses his concentration and the awareness disappears. Irritated, he decides to try no further and walks out of the garden onto a nearby street he knows; except that it no longer looks familiar to him. The cars are different, buildings seem to have changed or even vanished, and in their stead there are others completely different. He walks into a coffee shop which has changed into a diner. He notices that all seats are taken by whites but instead of giving up their seats to him, everyone remains seated. Tagomi, not being accustomed to such behaviour, demands a seat. The reactions he gets are rude remarks and angry glances. He is filled with horror and bewilderment:

      Mr. Tagomi looked to the other whites; all watched with hostile expressions. And none stirred.
      Bardo Thodol existence, Mr. Tagomi thought. Hot winds blowing me who knows where. This is vision - of what? ...
      He hurried from the lunch counter. The doors swung together behind him; he stood once more on the sidewalk.
      Where am I? Out of my world, my space and time. (222-23)

The wu in the pin shows him, by transforming reality spontaneously, the world in its natural state. Tagomi's reality is false and wu in pin reveals to him, for a brief moment real reality - our reality - where Japan and Germany lost the second World War.

In Do Androids Dream? Dick's invents a future religion, Mercerism, based on empathy. The novel puts forth important questions about Christianity and faith. Christianity, in its essence, unites people through their faith in Jesus and the unconditional belief in the redemption of our sins through his death. It exists because of the belief in the ultimate token of God's love for the human race, and in Jesus' empathy with every living being. Mercerism combines people through empathy; sharing your feelings with others, through the empathy box, for the benefit of everybody. When Mercerism is proven to be a hoax - Wilbur Mercer turns out to be an actor, paid to play the uniting role of a leader - it should mean the end of Mercerism. Yet, it lives on. With or without knowing it, Dick is asking us if it is of vital importance whether Jesus actually existed or not; whether he was authentic or not, or whether he died for our sins or not.

It presents an interesting view on Ridley Scott's film, Blade Runner, when we see Dick mentioning God as the toymaker. ^[11] Tyrell, president of Tyrell Corporations is a manufacturer of replicants (that is androids). His latest model of replicants, the Nexus-6, have become so advanced, technically, that a special test is needed to distinguish them from human beings, the main difference being the replicants's lack of empathy. One of Tyrell's genetic designers is J. F. Sebastian, who is also a toymaker in his spare time. His flat is filled with creatures of all sorts who walk and talk and who are his friends. Sebastian's "toys" are imperfect; they break down, function erratically, etc. The difference between Tyrell and Sebastian is noticeable - Tyrell is the boss; he has the power and his products are near perfect, so perfect in fact that they can pass themselves off as humans. Sebastian is the employee, he has no power and his products are mere toys - dolls that you wind up and repeat lines planted in them by their maker.

The motivation is the interesting factor. Tyrell, who has become rich from his business, is eager to design and manufacture the perfect replicant: his motto is "More Human Than Human". He does not care for his products as such, only as his perfect creations. "His" is the keyword here; his ambition is entirely selfishly motivated. He is proud to be the owner of the most successful replicant making factory but has not the least desire to know what happens to his creations once they enter the real world. Sebastian's motivation for creating his "friends" is loneliness. Having no real friends, he makes them with love and care and they in return greet him every time he comes home from work. If any of them breaks down or malfunctions one way or another he dexterously tries to fix the fault. He genuinely cares for his toy-friends; he talks to them, discusses things with them and with loving tolerance allows for their imperfections.

Although this setup is not in Do Androids Dream?, it is very Dickian in terms of theme. Being toy-makers, both Sebastian and Tyrell are analogous to God. When Roy Baty meets Tyrell, the latter says to him: "How does it feel to meet your maker?" Sebastian, as God, is quite different from Tyrell. The former is merciful, caring, while the latter is ruthless and disinterested. Viewed this way, Tyrell is seen as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, merciless, unrelenting creator of man. Sebastian is God as preached in the New Testament, and embodied in Christ: forgiving, caring saviour of man. Pris introduces Sebastian to Roy in this way: "This is my saviour, J. F. Sebastian." The two are the same and yet not the same. Tyrell, the creator, makes the being, sends it out into the world and when it deviates from the law, it must die. Sebastian, the saviour, feels sympathy for Tyrell's creations when they come to him in need and with the same care as he feels for his own little toys he wants to and tries to help the runaway replicants.

Transmigration poses the same questions as does Do Android Dream? To find God and faith intellectually is not possible, according to Dick. Rummaging through texts, debating the existence and identity of God and thus arriving at the truth about true religion, or God, for that matter, is not the way to do it. Faith is an emotional experience and this is what Dick discovers and emphasises in Transmigration. The tragic story about Bishop Timothy Archer - a character supposedly based on Dick's personal friend, Jim Pike, bishop of California, whose fate was identical to Archer's - is the story about a man who first loses his faith and then loses his life in his intellectual search for the true identity of Christ. Dick pits Angel against Archer to prove his point. Archer travels to Israel in order to examine for himself the Dead Sea Scrolls, hoping to find in them what he has lost. The attempt leads to his death. Angel is the empathetic figure who realises the futility of his journey and she tries to stop Archer from going. She tries to tell him that he will not find and regain his faith through books, but he does not listen. Through Angel Dick is trying to convey a message to us, about life. Reading about Jesus till the eyes go blind will not bring him any closer to us. We have to experience him physically. To have an actual understanding, we must experience what we must understand, reading about it is not enough. On their own, books have no meaning; they have to be connected with the reality around us to if we are to hear what they are saying. Angel clarifies this in her anecdote about the night she suffered from an infected tooth, when she sat up, drinking bourboun to lessen the pain, and read Dante's Commedia, and started to understand. Timothy Archer's life, as described in Transmigration, is identical to Bishop Jim Pike's life. However, Archer is really Dick himself, and so is Angel. Dick, at the time of writing the book, had been spending years studying religious doctrines, trying to find the God that had sent information to him through a beam of pink light. Archer is the intellectual, analysing side of Dick, whereas Angel is that part of him which stays put, with the feet on the ground, and believes in people as the only substantial reality. In Sutin's words:

Timothy Archer is an exploration of the soul of a man for whom, like Phil, "vision" and "consciousness" are the essence of life. No other of Phil's novels delineates so clearly the radical difference between Phil the thinker and Phil the artist. For in telling the story of Bishop Archer's failed existence - his unhappy family life, bitter extramarital affair, and soulless intellectual justificaions - Phil is in essence rejecting the abstractions of his own Exegesis in favour of the simple, day-to-day virtues of human warmth and kindness. (279)

Turning to religion is just Dick's way of moving on in his search for authenticity and truth. As Warrick says: "Over his long writing career, he has remained intrigued with the same subjects, but the answers he gives to the questions he raises on these subjects are never the same. His mind is constantly in motion" (109). So, his search for authentic reality and authentic humanity led to questions and theories about God: where is he? What kind of God is it that runs this world? At the end of his long search he had come up with millions of theories, and had he lived longer, would probably have produced a million more. Yet, they all more or less reach the same conclusion: that true salvation comes from within the individual, and Christ, like Mercer, is simply a uniting force, causing us to care about each other and thus survive.

[8]    Hiawatha Bray, "Review of Blade Runner". Christianity Today 26, No. 14 (3 September, 1982): 97. Here used as cited in W. M. Kolb's "Bibliography" in Kerman's book Retrofitting Blade Runner, 234.    Back to text

[9]    Incidentally, Dick himself claims the same: while writing High Castle he consulted the I-Ching on plot development.    Back to text

[10]    For further information on wu, see Wing-tsit Chan's entry, "Taoism" in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1964 ed.    Back to text

[11]    Referring to the quotation in chapter 2. "I do seem attracted to trash..." From the Exegesis. Back to text