Microworlds

the scrutinies of genuine critics. Perhaps such change would not have been all that much to the good. A second characteristic trait of Dick’s work, after its ambiguity as to genre, is its tawdriness, which is not without a certain charm, being reminiscent of the goods offered at county fairs by primitive craftsmen who are at once clever and naive, possessed of more talent than self-knowledge. Dick has as a rule taken over a rubble of building materials from the run-of-the-mill American professionals of science fiction, frequently adding a true gleam of originality to already worn-out concepts and, what is surely more important, erecting with such material constructions truly his own. The world gone mad, with a spasmodic flow of time and a network of causes and effects that wriggles as if nauseated, the world of frenzied physics, is unquestionably his invention, being an inversion of our familiar standard according to which only we, but never our environment, may fall victim to psychosis. Ordinarily, the heroes of science fiction are overtaken by only two kinds of calamities: the social, such as the “infernos of police-state tyranny,” and the physical, such as catastrophes caused by nature. Evil is thus inflicted on people either by other people (invaders from the stars are merely people in monstrous disguises) or by the blind forces of matter.

With Dick the very basis of such a clear-cut articulation of the proposed diagnosis comes to grief. We can convince ourselves of this by putting to Ubik questions of the order just noted. Who was responsible for the strange and terrible things that happened to Runciter’s people? The bomb attack on the moon was the doing of a competitor, but of course it was not in his power to bring about the collapse of time. An explanation appealing to the medical cold-pac technology is, as we have pointed out, likewise incapable of rationalizing everything. The gaps that separate the fragments of the plot cannot be eliminated, and they lead one to suspect the existence of some higher-order necessity, which constitutes the destiny of Dick’s world. Whether this destiny resides in the temporal sphere or beyond it is impossible to say. When one considers to what an extent our faith in the infallible beneficence of technical progress has already waned, the fusion Dick envisages between culture and nature, between the instrument and its basis, by virtue of which it acquires the aggressive character of a malignant neoplasm, no longer seems merely sheer fantasy. This is not to say that Dick is predicting any concrete future. The disintegrating worlds of his stories — inversions, as it were, of Genesis, order returning to chaos — are not so much the future foreseen, as future shock, not straightforwardly expressed but embodied in fictional reality; an objectivized projection of the fears and fascinations proper to the human individual in our times.

It has been customary to identify the downfall of civilization falsely and narrowly with regression to some past stage of history — even to the caveman or downright animal stage. Such an evasion is often employed in science fiction, since inadequacy of imagination takes refuge in oversimplified pessimism. Then we are shown the remotest future as a lingering state of feudal, tribal, or slaveholding society, inasmuch as atomic war or invasion from the stars is supposed to have hurled humanity backward, even into the depths of a prehistoric way of life. To say of such works that they advocate the concepts of some cyclic (e.g., Spenglerian) philosophy of history would amount to maintaining that a motif endlessly repeated by a phonograph record represents the concept of some sort of “cyclic music,” whereas it is merely a matter of a mechanical defect resulting from a blunt needle and worn grooves. So works of this sort do not pay homage to cyclic historiosophy, but merely reveal an insufficiency of sociological imagination, for which the atomic war or the interstellar invasion is only a convenient pretext for spinning out interminable sagas of primordial tribal life under the pretense of portraying the farthest future. Nor is it possible to hold that such books promulgate the “atomic credo” of belief in the inevitability of a catastrophe that will soon shatter our civilization, since the cataclysm in question amounts to nothing but an excuse for shirking more important creative obligations.

Such expedients are foreign to Dick. For him, the development of civilization continues, but is, as it were, crushed by itself, becoming monstrous at the heights of its achievement — which, as a prognostic viewpoint, is more original than the assuredly unilluminating thesis that, if technical civilization breaks down, people will be forced to get along by returning to primitive tools, even to bludgeons and flints.

Alarm at the impetus of civilization finds expression nowadays in the slogans of a “return to nature” after smashing and discarding everything “artificial,” i.e., science and technology. These pipe dreams turn up also in science fiction. Happily for us, they are absent in Dick. The action of his novels takes place in a time when there can no longer be any talk of returning to nature or of turning away from the “artificial,” since the fusion of the natural with the artificial has long since become an accomplished fact.

At this point it may be worthwhile to point out the dilemma encountered by futuristically oriented science fiction. According to an opinion quite generally held by readers, science fiction ought to depict the world of the fictional future no less explicitly and intelligibly than a writer such as Balzac depicted the world of his own time in The Human Comedy. Whoever asserts this fails to take into account the fact that there exists no world beyond or above history and common to all eras or all cultural formations of mankind. That which, like the world of The Human Comedy, strikes us as completely clear and intelligible is not an altogether objective reality, but is only a particular interpretation (of nineteenth-century vintage and hence close to us) of a world classified, understood, and experienced in a concrete fashion. The familiarity of Balzac’s world thus signifies nothing more than the simple fact that we have grown perfectly accustomed to this account of reality and that consequently the language of Balzac’s characters, their culture, their habits and ways of satisfying spiritual and bodily needs, and also their attitude toward nature and transcendence seem to us transparent. However, the movement of historical changes may infuse new content into concepts thought of as fundamental and fixed, as for example the notion of “progress,” which according to nineteenth-century attitudes was equivalent to a confident optimism, convinced of the existence of an inviolable boundary separating what is harmful to man from what benefits him. Currently we begin to suspect that the concept thus established is losing its relevance, because the harmful ricochets of progress are not incidental, easily eliminated, adventitious components of it, but are, rather, gains achieved at such cost as, at some point along the way, to liquidate all the gain. In short, absolutizing the drive toward “progress” could prove to be a drive toward ruin.

So the image of the future world cannot be limited to adding a certain number of technical innovations, and meaningful prediction does not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations in lieu of the future.

The difficulties encountered by the reader of a work placed in a remote historical period are not the result of any arbitrariness on the writer’s part, any predilection for “estrangements,” any wish to shock the reader or to lead him up the garden path, but are an ineradicable part of such an artistic undertaking. Situations and concepts can be understood only through relating them to ones already known, but when too great a time interval separates people living in different eras there is a loss of the basis for understanding in common life experiences, which we unreflectingly and automatically imagine to be invariant. It follows that an author who truly succeeded in delineating an image of the far future would not achieve literary success, since he would assuredly not be understood. Consequently, in Dick’s stories a truth value can be ascribed only to their generalized basis, which can be summed up more or less as follows: when people become ants in the labyrinths of the technosphere they themselves have built, the idea of a return to nature not only becomes Utopian but cannot even be meaningfully articulated, because no such thing as a nature that has not been artificially transformed has existed for ages. We today can still talk of a return to nature, because we are relics of it, only slightly modified in biological respect within civilization, but try imagining the slogan “return to nature” uttered by a robot. Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!

The impossibility of civilization’s returning to nature, which is simply equivalent to the irreversibility of history, leads Dick to the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfillment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature. This conclusion does not inevitably follow from the author’s assumptions, but it constitutes an eventuality that ought also to be taken into account. By the way, in putting things thus, we are no longer summarizing Dick’s work, but are giving rein to reflections about it, for the author himself seems so caught up in his vision that he is unconcerned about either its literal plausibility or its nonliteral message. It is the more unfortunate that criticism has not brought out the intellectual consequences of Dick’s work and has not indicated the prospects inherent in its possible continuation, prospects and consequences advantageous not only for the author but also for the entire genre, since Dick has presented us not so much with finished accomplishments as with fascinating promises. It has, indeed, been just the other way around — criticism inside the field has instinctively striven somehow to domesticate Dick’s creations, to restrain their meanings, emphasizing what in them is similar to the rest of the genre, and saying nothing about what is different — insofar as it did not simply denounce them as worthless for that difference. In this behavior a pathological aberration of the natural selection of literary works is emphatically apparent, since this selection ought to separate