Short Story Criticism | Dick, Philip K. - Ryan Gillis (essay date fall 1998)

Ryan Gillis (essay date fall 1998)

SOURCE: Gillis, Ryan. “Dick on the Human: From Wubs to Bounty Hunters to Bishops.” Extrapolation 39, no. 3 (fall 1998): 264-71.

[In the following essay, Gillis considers the question of what is human as it applies to Dick's role as a writer of speculative fiction.]

Philip K. Dick viewed the act of questioning as a fundamental part of his role as a science fiction writer. The “science” aspect of science fiction, according to Dick, comes not from the integration of strict or hypothetical scientific principles into a body of writing, as it does in gadget SF, but rather from the intense scrutiny that the science fiction writer puts his subjects through and his ability to conjure plausible theories by speculating about an idea in the same fashion that a scientist theorizes about the past by carefully examining an artifact or the universe by collecting physical data. Theology, reality, and sanity are...

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