LIES, INC.

The first half of this novel was originally published in book form in 1966 under the title The Unteleported Man. Dick expanded the novel, and its presently published form as Lies, Inc. (2004 edition), represents his intentions for its final form. The first half was a fairly routine political intrigue set in a world where much of Earth’s population is emigrating via teleportation to a distant planet. The second half has only a tenuous relationship to what proceeded it and is the most bizarre piece of writing that Dick ever produced. It is an account of what happens to the main character when he gets hit by an LSD dart: he experiences a series of psychedelic “paraworlds,” or different classes of hallucinated realities experienced in altered states of consciousness. This second half spins so far out of both the author’s and the reader’s control that the sense of objective reality dissolves altogether. We are immersed in total insanity. So it becomes a trip in a very real sense—but forget about any satisfaction from the artistic unity or structure. There isn’t any.

COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD              

This novel, first published in 1967, has a more serious and darker tone than most of Dick’s earlier works. It is an ambitious novel, underread and underrated in the Dick canon, in which the author attempts to integrate religious and metaphysical thought from a wide variety of writers across history. The premise is that time has started to run backwards due to something called the Hobart Phase. Dead people come back to life in their graves; living people grow continually younger until they reenter their mothers’ wombs. Food is regurgitated into its original form, and while eating is considered obscene, waste (“sogum”) is “imbibed” through tubes in public. People say “goodbye” when they greet each other and “hello” when they part. Critics have derided Dick’s use of time reversal as completely illogical and inconsistent. That doesn’t seem to matter really. The novel’s serious concerns, about the frailty of life and love in the face of monolithic external forces, lift it above its own contrivances.

THE GANYMEDE TAKEOVER

A minor Dick novel of the late 60s, The Ganymede Takeover was written in collaboration with Ray Nelson, and is derivative of The Game-Players of Titan, a much better book, with the situation of evil telepathic aliens who have conquered Earth. Here the aliens are large worms, who despite their form have a weakness for human culture: one collects model airplanes, another named Mekkis develops an obsession with the work of psychologist Dr. Rudolph Balkani. Balkani’s “oblivion therapy” involves sensory deprivation treatment and makes a schizophrenic of the chief female character, Joan Hiashi. It also short-circuits the Ganymedian Great Common to which Mekkis connected mentally. The reason for this devastating effect seems to be that the Nothingness at the basis of reality is too much for any mind, human or alien, to bear. Even in this slight novel, Dick’s philosophical concerns with the nature of subjectivity and consciousness march right to the forefront.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

This novel, first published in 1968, was the basis for Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), which despite its striking, evocative visuals, plucks elements of the novel out of their context, making them somewhat less intelligible and less radical than in the original. Additionally, Dick’s humor and his metaphysics are missing from the movie. The reader is continually challenged to evaluate how human the androids are and how mechanical the humans are. The androids are not mere machines like most of the simulacra in Dick’s other novels: they are artificial people made from organic materials; they have free will and emotions like fear and love. Physically and behaviorally they are indistinguishable from real people. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job it is to hunt down and kill escaped androids. His life is thoroughly programmed; but in the course of the novel he starts to wake up to his buried human nature and capacity for empathy and understanding. This novel is the place to look for a serious analysis of the question of what it means to be human; you get only the tip of the iceberg of that issue in the movie. The book is one of Dick’s best.

UBIK

In Ubik, first published in 1969, we find the first distinct appearance of the transcendental element in Dick's work.  In his earlier novels, he had been content to demonstrate that there is no "objective" reality irrespective of consciousness: the mind essentially constructs its own world. In Ubik, the protagonist Joe Chip, condemned to a perpetual "half-life" of suspended animation after a fatal accident,  finds his world inexorably deteriorating around him. The only thing standing between Joe and complete extinction is a product called Ubik, which comes in spray cans, and, when sprayed on, instantly counteracts the forces of destruction. Among other things, Ubik appears as a razor blade, a deodorant, a bra, a breakfast cereal, a pill for stomach relief, plastic wrap, a salad dressing, a used car, and a savings and loan. As its name implies, it is ubiquitous. Though a symbol of the divine, it is not a mere magical aid but a gift that can only be summoned by the person who needs it through an exercise of will and intelligence. The ending of Ubik has a twist that calls into question the substantiality of the "real world." This is my favorite PKD novel, the one that combines the most dazzling metaphysics with the most involving story and characters. After reading it, one can only start scanning one's own environment for hopeful signs of the redeeming Ubik!

GALACTIC POT-HEALER

In Galactic Pot-Healer, Dick’s attention was more on creating a myth than on writing a novel. The characters are relatively undeveloped, and the science-fictional conceits are used rather casually as vehicles for archetypes; the work is almost a Jungian allegory. It does not lack Dick’s characteristic humanizing touches, but its tendency toward myth makes it unique among his novels. It is certainly as dense with themes and ideas as any fiction he ever wrote. Joe Fernwright, the main character, is found at the beginning in an oppressive future dystopia where policemen stop people for walking too slowly, all phone calls are monitored, and everyone is programmed to have a common dream every night. He is a pot-healer; that is, he has the skill of not just mending but restoring broken pots to their exact original condition. A godlike extraterrestrial being called the Glimmung enlists him on a team made up of species from throughout the galaxy to help raise a sunken cathedral called Heldscalla on the Glimmung’s home world, Plowman’s Planet. From this Faustian undertaking, Joe experiences an awakening to self-knowledge. This is a story of hope and ultimately religious transcendence.

A MAZE OF DEATH

A Maze of Death is a strange mixture of science fiction, mystery, and theology. Fourteen people are assigned to colonize an uninhabited planet, Delmak-O. One by one, they meet mysterious deaths. It is unclear whether the malevolent agent is a military conspiracy, evil aliens, or each other. The solution to this puzzle is, however, in the end less important than the mystery of Delmak-O itself. This world gives indications of being a false reality; some of its life forms are organic, others are mechanical contraptions of unknown origin. Its central mystery is a monolithic Building that each member of the group sees in a different light. The lettering above the entrance changes according to the psychology of the viewer. The Building is the ultimate symbol, an irreducible core reality that cannot be entered and whose nature can only be inferred. Dick invented a completely original theology for this novel; it gives quite a fascinating dimension of meaning to the plot, but that religious system ultimately proves as unreal as any of the experiences of any of the characters. This is an essential novel for anyone interested in the “higher Dick” novels such as VALIS.

OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8

One of Dick’s less ambitious novels, this story is a bit thin compared to the density and dazzling complexity of his books of the early 1960s, and perhaps a bit of weariness with the standard conventions of science fiction is showing. The author seems very casual about controlling the plot and characters; both seem pretty random much of the time. We may not prize this novel as a masterpiece of structure, but it is typical Dick, involving and entertaining. The story is set in a world controlled by superintelligent “New Men” and telepathic “Unusuals,” who reign despotically together over the “Old Men,” or ordinary unevolved humans. In due course Thors Provini returns to Earth with a “friend” for the Old Men in the form of a telepathic, protoplasmic alien with extraordinary powers. This semi-divine intervention overturns the predictable order of the world and replaces it with a vision of the evolution of consciousness of every living thing on the planet toward some unimaginable fulfillment. In this preoccupation, it is congruent with Dick’s other interesting novels of the late 60s such as A Maze of Death and Galactic Pot-Healer.

FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

The premise of this novel is that by taking a toxic drug called KR-3 one can become "unbound in space" and start to inhabit alternate spatial corridors branching off from the "real" one. When Alys Buckman, a malevolent, sadomasochistic power-tripper, thoroughly decadent in all matters of sex and drugs, takes KR-3, she is able to pull Jason Taverner, popular TV entertainer, into an alternate reality where no one except her knows who he is. Taverner's "star" status is the reference point for his reality, until he wakes up in a world where people think he's insane, suffering from delusions of grandeur. He's solipsistic because he incorrectly believes the world still revolves around him. But Alys is a solipsist who happens to be right, for she makes Jason a performer on the stage of her mind, and her mind only. Terrifyingly for Taverner, he must survive as a nonperson in a police state where to be caught without identification can mean spending the rest of one's life in a forced-labor camp. Interestingly, the policeman Felix Buckman, Alys's brother, is portrayed sympathetically, even though he represents the State that crushes individuals like butterflies under its heel. He is the character who finally discovers love as a redemptive force. Dick holds out empathy as the only salvation from the unforgiving human and existential forces that try to expunge one's identity and cast one into the outer darkness of insanity.