What is the authentically human? What is the nature of the alien elements that are threatening and vitiating living, intelligent human beings? These questions are deeply rooted in Philip K. Dick's work, and to them he has provided a bizarre variety of answers, answers that are constantly being pushed aside and replaced by new possibilities. Finding an answer to the question of what is truly human and what only masquerades as human is, for Dick, the most important difficulty facing us. Some of Dick's richest metaphors stem from the profusion of electronic devices which populate his near-future wasteland landscapes—electronic constructs that in his early fiction menace the few humans surviving a nuclear holocaust; constructs that, evolving over the years toward ever more human forms, become instructors to man in the search for authenticity and wholeness.

The setting of Dick's near-future fiction is often a twilight world shrouded in smog and dust, decaying into rusty bits and useless debris. “Kipple” accumulates as the process of entropy advances. The wasteland may be a battlefield smouldering in radioactive ash, a vast “junkyard” containing the rotting remnants of West Coast suburbia, or a Martian landscape, virtually lifeless except for the Earth colonists whose electronic constructs assist in nearly fruitless gardening attempts. Manfred Steiner, the autistic but precognitive schizoid child in Martian Time-Slip (1964), agonizingly utters a single word to describe the horror of the accelerating entropic process: gubble (MTS, 9). How is man to survive and remain human in this desert of decay?

Dick's visionary landscape is dark, but not devoid of hope. He shares the arid wasteland view of contemporary culture held by other dystopian writers, but he struggles against capitulation to despair. He throws torches of possibility into the darkness of the future as he sees it. These torches reveal that survival can be achieved not by returning simplistically to an earlier pastoral world view, nor by a destructive repudiation of technology. Instead, technology must be transformed, and in turn man will be transformed. The future—if we survive—will be new, radical, unexpected. It will be a world where, as man and his electronic technology seed each other with possibilities, new forms will begin to appear.

Dick's Vancouver speech, “The Android and the Human” (1972), and his more recent “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976), emphasize the significance he assigns to the relationship between man and his machines. This chapter will trace the process of Dick's artificial constructs from their first appearances in his short stories of the 1950s, through the mid-1960s, and finally, through the last period, the late 1960s and 70s, when he becomes increasingly obsessed with metaphorical androids—humans who have lost their humanness and become mere mechanical constructs unable to respond with creativity and feeling. This journey through his fiction is indeed a process and not a progression. Dick's world is a world in motion where destinations are never reached, where utopia is never achieved. Like his Martian colonists in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, (1965), we (Dick's readers) are pilgrims without progress. But he will provide flashes of possibility to illuminate our way.

“The Preserving Machine” (1953), an example of Dick's early fiction, creates a metaphor for this process of the artificial. “Doc” Labyrinth, a present-day Los Angeles suburbanite, broods over the impending collapse of our civilization and all the fine, lovely things that will be lost. Music, especially classical music, the most fragile artifact, will be destroyed as bombs fall and musical scores are incinerated. To avert this loss, he contracts the building of a Machine to preserve the great musical scores by processing them into living forms. The Preserving Machine produces a peacocklike mozart bird, a schubert sheep, a brahms centipede, a stravinsky bird, a bach bug, and a wagner animal. But unexpected problems arise from Doc Labyrinth's act. He discovers that he has no control over the result. “It was out of his hands, subject to some strong, invisible law that had subtly taken over, and this worried him greatly. The creatures were bending, changing before a deep, impersonal force, a force that Labyrinth could neither see nor understand. And it made him afraid.”¹

The musical animals became increasingly brutal and Doc Labyrinth, more responsible than his prototype, Dr. Frankenstein, attempts to reverse his act of creation. He catches a bach bug (formerly a fugue) and returns it to the Machine. It is transformed back into a musical score. Doc Labyrinth plays the score on his grand piano, but the sounds are diabolical, hideous. The order of the Bach fugue has been lost. Return is impossible.

Dick is himself a literary Doc Labyrinth whose wild imagination transforms the artifacts of our contemporary culture into new and unexpected forms. To follow the evolution of his electronic constructs through the maze of his large body of fiction is no easy journey. We often become confused, lost, or disoriented. For every path we select, we uneasily suspect that we have neglected another, more fruitful route. But occasionally he lifts us out of the labyrinth, and from this broader perspective we are given fleeting glimpses of hidden patterns and possible meanings.

One such pattern is the evolving reciprocal relationship between man and the artificial constructs (machines) which he builds. From the earliest to the most recent of Dick's fiction, his presentation of machines undergoes a series of transformations. At first he presents electronic constructs as merely automatons; then they become will-less robot-agents of enemy or alien forces, while masquerading as humans. Next, robots become increasingly more like humans, with a sense of personal identity and a concomitant will to survive; and finally robots actually become superior to humans. At the same time, humans follow a reverse process of devolution. They first fight automated machines; next they become more vitalized and machinelike themselves; then they withdraw into schizophrenia as they reject exploitation by economic and political machinery; and finally schizoid humans become like androids, with mechanical programmed personalities.

Electronic devices animate the devastated settings of almost all of Dick's novels. Typically, few animals have survived the radiation fallout, but objects have become animated. In their smallest forms, they may be metallic “insects” spouting forth shrill commercials or attacking humans. Other small homeostatic devices include whirling spheres with knife-sharp claws, lazy brown-dog reject carts, or electronic animal traps. There are friendly automatic automobiles, homeopapes (electronic newspapers), talking suitcases and vending machines, and a gallery of electronic simulacra of animals and famous people—from squirrels and sheep to presidents, soldiers, and world leaders. Computers advise presidents, teach children, serve as oracles, and perform as psychiatrists. Satellites create communication links encapsulating the globe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's “noosphere” is distorted by Dick's imagination into an “electronosphere” where the artificial becomes animate.

In a number of works, the electronic constructs shift from the background setting to the foreground and become major participants, central characters, in the narrative. The fiction of Dick's first period, the 1950s, is primarily short fiction; its tone is dystopian as it explores the horrors of paranoid militarism, totalitarianism, and the manipulation of people through the mass media. Robots and electronic constructs threaten or actually annihilate humanity in a number of these stories.² Three stories written in 1953 (“Impostor,” “Second Variety,” and “The Defenders”) and another written in 1955 (“Autofac”) are among the most powerful of Dick's short stories. In “Impostor,” Earth is attacked by the Outspacers, aliens from Alpha Centauri. Spence Olham, working on a military research project, is accused of being a humanoid robot landed by the Outspacers, who have replaced the real Olham. The alien robot is an immensely powerful bomb, programmed to explode and destroy. Olham's problem is to prove he is not a robot. In the surprise ending, Olham discovers—just before he (and much of Earth) blows up—that he really is the robot. This story is a paradigm for much of Dick's fiction exploring artificial intelligence. It details the invasion of the alien into the human realm, the problem of differentiating between the masquerading robot and the authentic man and the accompanying paranoid suspicion, the threat of imminent destruction that will be released if the wrong choice is made, and finally, the unexpected outcome.

In “Second Variety” the enemy invasion involves Russian robots and soldiers rather than an alien robot from outer space. Warfare has reduced Earth to a slagheap of ashes, dust, and radiation. A few surviving UN soldiers stare across the battlefield at a few surviving Russians, while robots and other machines—now become “living things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash”—fight on. The surviving humans agree to a truce, but the robots, mechanically programmed to kill, cannot be halted. Nor can they be definitely identified as robots, since they masquerade as humans—as a wounded soldier, a woman, and a little boy. They “look like people, but they're machines,” and the protagonist (Major Hendricks) notes that they just may be “the beginning of a new species. The new species. Evolution. The race to come after man.” What end, he wonders, awaits man when he designs machines to hunt out and destroy human life wherever they find it?³

Whereas “Second Variety” is told entirely from the point of view of the humans involved, “The Defenders” is told in part from the viewpoint of machines, in part from the viewpoint of human beings—a common Dickian technique. In this story humans have lived underground for eight years after decimating Earth's surface with nuclear bombs. They now attempt to continue the war above ground with electronic constructs called “leady.” It turns out, however, that the leady quit fighting as soon as the humans went underground; they have since restored the cities, villages, and countryside, and now send down false messages about the progress of nonexistent war while they live in peace above ground. Here Dick first used a dichotomy that is often found in his subsequent fiction—that of the upper and under worlds, and our shifting perspective as we move from one realm to the other. The Penultimate Truth (1964), a complex expansion of “The Defenders,” also employs this pattern.

“Autofac” is one of the earliest and best stories warning of the ecological disaster likely to be precipitated by uncontrolled, automated production. The setting is a fire-derenched landscape cauterized by H-bomb blasts, where “a sluggish trickle of water made its way among slag and weeds, dripping thickly into what had once been an elaborate labyrinth of sewer mains” (“Autofac,” 3). Under the ruined plain of black metallic ash, an automated factory still produces goods for consumers who are now mostly dead. How does one stop automation when it is no longer required? Not easily, answers Dick, who says the story germinated from the thought that “if factories became fully automated, they might begin to show the instinct for survival which organized living entities have … and perhaps develop similar solutions.”⁴ In the story's conclusion, the factory—when it has almost been destroyed—shoots out a torrent of metal seeds that germinate into miniature factories. Dick's technique here is first to create a metaphor—automated factories behave as if they were alive—and then to create a fictional world where the metaphor is literally true.

The last major work of interest to our study in Dick's first period is Vulcan's Hammer (1960). This novel is preparatory exercise for Dick's subsequent works exploring the theme of totalitarian control, the most notable of which is The Man in the High Castle (1962). In Vulcan's Hammer a sophisticated computer, Vulcan 3, is used to help run the world government after a devastating war. The totalitarian rule of this machine provokes the hostility of the population, especially that of a fanatical group called The Healers. The killer robots of Dick's earlier short stories have now become killer computers. Vulcan 3 is the third in a series of increasingly sophisticated master computers and is directly linked to its predecessor Vulcan 2. The cumulative effect of this linkage and increased sophistication is the generation of a will to survive so powerful that Vulcan 3 does seemingly paranoid or irrational things. Everyone surrounding the computer is regarded as an enemy to be destroyed. North American Director William Barris, the primary narrator of the novel, wonders whether we have merely anthropomorphized the mechanical construct of whether it really possesses the characteristics of intelligent life. How, he ponders, are we to relate to rulers who are willing to murder anyone as needed, “whoever they are. Man or computer. Alive or only metaphorically alive—it makes no difference.”⁵ The two political organizations, Unity and The Healers, struggling against each other for domination, are no more than pawns for two machines. At the end of the novel, Father Fields, leader of the revolutionary Healers, says:

“We humans—god damn it, Barris; we were pawns of those two things. They played us off against one another, like inanimate pieces. The things became alive and the living organisms were reduced to things. Everything was turned inside out, like some terrible morbid view of reality.”

(VH, 14)

The military machine, the political machine, the economic machine: these are important concerns for Dick. Vulcan's Hammer is his first lengthy study of humans who have become so tightly locked into a rigid structure that their roles as members of the organization form the totality of their lives. He suggests the irrational darkness of the mechanical drive to dominate by killing in his description of Vulcan 3, as “buried at the bottom level of the hidden underground fortress. But it was its voice they were hearing” (VH, 11).

In this quotation the computer functions simultaneously and equally on a literal and metaphorical level. The unique richness and depth of Dick's writing may be attributed to the way he fuses the literal and metaphorical so tightly that his images and concepts reverberate in our minds in an almost “stereoscopic” manner. His technique, best described as a complementary process, is to create a fictional world where metaphors from our mundane or everyday world become real: “Computers seem like intelligent beings” becomes “Computers are humans.” A shift of mental perspective is required to go beneath the surface of the plot and catch the meaning. The fictional image is consciously and deliberately a literal metaphor. Beyond that, in reversal it tells us: Men, driven by unrecognized impulses deeply hidden in the substrata of their minds, become machines who kill.

Dick's next novel, The Man in the High Castle, deals further with the theme of the totalitarian state as a machine of domination and destruction. Vulcan 3 now becomes the Nazis, whose paranoid suspicions lead them to plot a sneak nuclear attack on their Japanese allies, whose world view is in many ways the polar opposite of that of the Nazis. This juxtaposition of opposing viewpoints is at this point the essence of the Dickian creative process. Reality is for him a bipolar construction; the closest we can come to grasping it is to mirror in fiction the polarities. (And finally, to fully understand his fiction, certain groups of short and long fiction must be read as single units.)

At this early stage in his creative development, Dick looks at one world view from the perspective of its opposite, and then in a separate work reverses the process. Thus Vulcan's Hammer is a metaphor for machines as destructive humans; The Man in the High Castle is a metaphor for humans become destructive machines. In the novels that follow—for example, The Penultimate Truth and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—both views are present in a single work. The skilled reader who has become used to these contradictions “sees” from opposite directions simultaneously. He is rewarded with a fleeting epiphany—Dick's vision of reality as process. Ultimately, however, one intuits rather than analyzes Dick's meaning. The totality of his complex fictional gestalt cannot be grasped by a mere part-by-part discussion. But perhaps something of the significance of Dick's work can be revealed by literary analysis. However, we must temper our analysis with a more or less intuitive groping if we are to find our way to the power and insight of the fiction.

In his prodigiously productive middle period, Dick published a half dozen very-good-to-excellent novels, three of which—Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), and Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)—are generally considered his finest works to date. Two of the other novels, The Penultimate Truth and The Simulacra (both 1964), are competent but unexceptional novels of interest because automata figure significantly in their plots. In this middle period, Dick's attention shifts from the military, his primary subject in the 1950s, to economic and political matters. His use of point of view also alters, as does his view of reality. He no longer uses a third person point of view, but rather multiple narrative foci, as Darko Suvin so effectively describes in his chapter in this book.⁶ The relatively fixed reality of his earlier works now begins to distort and oscillate in uncertain hallucinations, suggesting that our illusions of stable appearances are very fragile fictions.

Dick, exploring the difference between the short story and the novel, suggests:

If the essence of sf is the idea … if indeed the idea is the true “hero,” then the sf story probably remains the sf form par excellence, with the sf novel a fanning out, an expansion into all ramifications. Most of my own novels are expansions of earlier stories, or fusions of several stories—superimpositions. The germ lay in the story; in a very real sense, that was its true distillate.⁷

The complexity in meanings of the middle-period novels can often be penetrated by first examining some of the ideas incisively dramatized in his short stories. Two such tales, “Oh, To Be a Blobel!” (1964) and “If There Were No Benny Cemoli” (1963), illuminate the evolution of Dick's ideas about mechanical intelligence—ideas which are transformed in the novels in a myriad of bizarre forms by Dick's prodigious metaphorical inventiveness. These two stories describe the aftereffects of a war and suggest that these aftereffects, powerful and prolonged, are experienced equally by the winner and the loser, thus making military victory meaningless. In war, human creativity—impassioned by the drive to dominate and destroy—couples with technology, and monstrous opportunities to demean and displace commonplace reality arises. The common man, naively trusting and uninstructed in this perverted form of gamesmanship, is the victim. Dick's brilliance lies in his ability to dramatize a concept—such as the one we have just discussed—in a powerful and unexpected metaphor: a metaphor that works by reversal. “Oh, To Be a Blobel!” presents such an ironic metaphor. Here, a decade after a war on Mars between Terran settlers and Blobels (amoebalike natives of Mars and Titan, George Munster still suffers the aftereffects of the war. As a Terran spy, he had been required to assume Blobel shape to conduct his espionage activities. The government promised to eliminate this alteration and return George to his normal human condition. But they did not keep their promise. For eight hours every day George still turns into a Blobel. This transformation is emotionally traumatic, so he goes to Dr. Jones, a robot analyst, for psychiatric help. The homeostatic analyst, who functions when activated by a ＄20 platinum coin dropped into a slot, arranges for George to meet with Vivian Arrasmith, a Blobel spy during the war who had assumed human form for her work behind the Terran lines. In a reversal of George's problem, she keeps reverting from Blobel to human form. Each of them at first finds the “alien” form of the other disgusting. But in an ironic climax full of black humor, each finally turns permanently and completely into the form of the respective enemy. Thus, for Dick, the outcome of any war—whether military or economic—is not victory or defeat, but a transformation of the participants into the opposite. We become the goal we pursue, the enemy we fight. This metaphor of ironic transformation is Dick's paradigm for the process of the mechanical. We become what we do. The activities of the body transform the patterns of the intellect. Obsessed with building ever more sophisticated homeostatic machines, we in turn become human machines.

“If There Were No Benny Cemoli,” one of the great political short stories in the science-fiction canon, dramatizes the power of electronic media to manipulate reality. The story is set a decade after a nuclear holocaust in an American culture attempting to rebuild. A political group uses a computerized newspaper, a “homeopape,” to create an imaginary political revolutionary, “Benny Cemoli,” when they need a charismatic figure to distract the attention of the authorities from the group's activities. The homeopape, a reactivated version of the New York Times, prints daily editions describing the revolutionary activities of the nonexistent Cemoli. Anyone in a position to look at the real situation is aware that “the newspaper had lost contact with actual events. The reality of the situation did not coincide with the Times articles in any way; that was obvious. And yet—the homeostatic system continued on.”⁸ The reality experienced by Peter Hood, one of the authorities, becomes a discontinuous track of incongruity. There are the events he sees happening around him as compared with the account of those same events printed in the homeopape. The two bear no resemblance. He is disturbed that the fictional account of the nonexistent Benny Cemoli's activities begins to assume more reality than the actual political events. He realizes “we are real only so long as the Times writes about us … as if we were dependent for our existence on it.” The news media no longer describe the real world; they create it. The media images replace the actual in the minds of people everywhere.

These two short stories, then, present related ideas underlying many of Dick's novels. Technologies spawned by war transform man into new, unexpected, and often ironic forms; and technologies through communications media create fictional realities more powerful than the “real.” Now let us consider the novels of Dick's middle period.

The Martian desert of Martian Time-Slip and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, people with colonists from Earth, functions more as a metaphor for our twentieth-century wasteland culture than as a literal landscape of Mars. The settlers have either been conscripted to live on Mars by the government bureaucracy or lured there by the persuasion of economic interests on Earth. The greatest evil, Dick states in “The Android and the Human,” is placing restrictions on a man that force him to fulfill an aim outside his own destiny. The Martian settlers, victims of this evil, consume an illusion of existence supplied by the industrialists who control the world. In Martian Time-Slip, children are given the Establishment view of reality through the technology of the Teaching Machines. In Palmer Eldritch, the inauthentic reality is patently hallucinatory, induced by Can-D and Chew-Z, the drugs marketed by competing economic complexes. Even though they are aware of the falseness of the world created by Perky-Pat dolls and drugs, the colonists choose this easy escape to the barren existence possible in the lifeless Martian dust. Metaphorically, the drugs and the Teaching Machines mirror all the technology of persuasion—television, radio, schools, newspapers—sustaining the distorted brand of reality which the bureaucracy feeds the masses.

Two characters in Martian Time-Slip are of particular interest: Jack Bohlen, the electronics repairman, and Manfred Steiner, the autistic child Jack hopes to cure. Jack's struggle against attacks of schizophrenia succeeds, but Manfred's tomb world lies beyond struggle. Together they dramatize Dick's view of schizophrenia—a view, as critics have noted, similar to R. D. Laing's, for whom a withdrawal into the self may sometimes be the wisest choice in an inhuman environment.⁹ The schizoid, defined by Dick as an androidlike personality unable to respond with feelings, appears in later fiction—Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and We Can Build You (1969). Dick explains:

I draw a sharp line between the schizoid personality and actual schizophrenia, which I have the utmost respect for, and for the people who do it—or have it, whatever. I see it this way: the schizoid personality overuses his thinking function at the expense of his feeling function (in Jungian terms) and so has inappropriate or flattened affect; he is android-like. But in schizophrenia, the denied feeling function breaks through from the unconscious in an effort to establish balance and parity between the functions. Therefore it can be said that in essence I regard what is called “schizophrenia” as an attempt by a one-sided mind to compensate and achieve wholeness: schizophrenia is a brave journey into the realm of the archetypes, and those who take it—who will no longer settle for the cold schizoid personality—are to be honored. Many never survive this journey, and so trade imbalance for total chaos, which is tragic. Others, however, return from the journey in a state of wholeness; they are the fortunate ones, the truly sane. Thus I see schizophrenia as closer to sanity (whatever that may mean) than the schizoid is. The terrible danger about the schizoid is that he can function; he can even get hold of a position of power over others, whereas the lurid schizophrenic wears a palpable tag saying, “I am nuts, pay no attention to me.”¹⁰

Jack first “falls through the floor of reality”—to use Dick's language in describing one of his favorite techniques—in a schizophrenic attack. Viewing his personnel manager in an electronics firm, he sees through the skin to the bones. He discovers that the bones are wired together, the organs replaced with a plastic and stainless-steel heart, lungs, and kidneys. The voice comes from a tape. Everything about the man is lifeless and mechanical. Later, in a similar attack, he watches the psychiatrist, Dr. Glaub, transform into a thing of cold wires and switches—a mechanical device with a programmed view of reality which he spiels to Jack.

Along with these mechanical, shadowy humans who reveal their true nature only in the absolute reality of his recurrent insanity, Jack encounters an array of actual mechanical constructs or simulacra when somewhat against his will he is called to repair the Teaching Machines at his son's school. The Angry Janitor, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Kindly Dad, Mark Twain, the Emperor Tiberius—all the right personnel and historical characters for a school setting, except that they are lifeless, mere programmed machines unable to give genuine responses to human students, used ineffectually to indoctrinate students into the most rigidly conventional of thought patterns.

Manfred's autistic withdrawal into silence is as much an act of self-destruction as the literal suicide of his father, Norbert Steiner. Manfred's nightmare vision of an entropic future (the world of gubbish) pushes him to a psychic death; Norbert's exhausted awareness of his failed life in a desert world drives him to a physical death, a suicide, under the wheels of a bus.

The vision of Richard Hnatt, a minor character in Palmer Eldritch who is undergoing treatment to accelerate the natural evolutionary process, provides a key to the structure of Martian Time-Slip. In Hnatt's vision he sees that:

Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him; any aspect or sequence of reality could become either, at any instant. Hell and heaven, not after death but now! Depression, all mental illness, was the sinking. And the other … how was it achieved?

Through empathy. Grasping another, not from outside but from the inner.¹¹

(3SPE, 5)

In Martian Time-Slip, Jack Bohlen leads a rather ordinary life as an electronics repairman. However, in his schizophrenic visions, he breaks through to the upper and lower realms. Heliogabalus sympolizes the upper realm. A Bleekman (native Martian) and in a deep sense an authentic human, he lives with but remains impervious to Arnie Kott's exploitative empire, and his empathy establishes an immediate communication, lying beyond words, with Manfred. Manfred, trapped in the lower realm, a hellish tomb-world of death and entropy, finally drags Arnie Kott down to death when Manfred's hallucinatory world becomes reality for Arnie.

Dick delights in using a technique of sudden reversal, providing a climactic episode or revelation totally violating our expectation. One such ironic reversal full of impish horror is the scene when Jack brings Manfred to school to meet with the Teaching Machines. The reader shares Jack's expectation that the machines will affect Manfred, hopefully breaking into his prison of frozen silence and freeing him to respond. But in fact quite the opposite occurs. Manfred remains voiceless: the machines, electronically keyed to predetermined messages, are decimated by his presence into a chaos permitting only one word of response, repeated in a metallic voice: gubble, gubble …

Arnie Kott, the union leader who dreams of Martian economic domination in Martian Time-Slip, devolves into Palmer Eldritch in Dick's next novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Eldritch, having succeeded as an interplanetary industrialist by producing an overabundance of consumer goods and distributing them to the wrong places, aspires to extend his power to stellar dimensions. He sets out to the “Prox” (Proxima Centauri) system to modernize autofacs along Terran lines. What returns ten years later is a devil with a metal face bearing an “evil, negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality, and despair” (3SPE, 13). The three stigmata signal the transformation of the formerly human into the demonic: a mechanical arm, stainless-steel teeth, and artificial stainless-steel eyes in his gaunt, hollowed-out, gray face.¹² A mechanical Red Riding Hood wolf,¹³ Eldritch is equipped to function as a machine of destruction: to see, manipulate, and devour the unsophisticated masses of common people.

Eldritch's transforming shapes, as he gradually reveals himself to businessmen Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson, form a map of Dick's evolving vision of reality manipulators. Eldritch first appears as a voice emanating from an “electronic contraption.” The electronic contraption sprouts a handlike extension offering a smoking cigar filled with the drug brought back from Prox. Next, colored slides of the Prox system are offered. Eldritch does not appear in his real shape until two-thirds of the way into the novel, and even then he is first seen as a simulacrum.

Whatever Eldritch may be, he is no longer human. His human eyes, mouth, and hands have all been replaced with mechanical devices that enable him to see, speak and touch. His mask, as Mayerson realizes, infiltrates the lives of all who see him. His power of manipulation creates a hallucination which the settlers accept as reality or as an adequate substitute for reality. By the end of the novel, the outer appearances and inner awarenesses of the characters are transformed into a writhing, multiplying chaos of mechanical eyes and metallic hands. The grinning metal devil is ubiquitous.

The Simulacra and The Penultimate Truth return to Earth to study military dictatorship, economic exploitation, and bureaucratic manipulation. In both of these novels, a simulacrum serves as a figurehead-president. The masses of common people, seeing them from a distance, mistakenly assume they are real. The Simulacra creates doubly inauthentic leaders: Nicole Thibodeaux, latest in a line of actresses trained to play the role of the First Lady, and her husband, der Alte, a simulacrum (thought to be human by the populace) who is replaced every four years. Typical Dickian complexity of meaning abounds here. The hidden rulers, a council of nine, controlling from behind the scene, provide the public with a figurehead ruler who mouths the words of the scripts they write. The public is given the illusion of a democratic process by being allowed to elect the ruler's husband every four years; but, unknown to the public, he is in reality a mere machine. Electronic technology makes possible all these manipulations of reality whereby the artificial and the fake substitute for the authentic. In The Penultimate Truth, Stanton Brose, the hidden economic dictator, controls both the military and the government. President Talbot Yancy, a simulacrum programmed to send phoney video messages of hope to the mass of underground factory workers, is a metaphor for the fantasy of honest government and earnest leaders. Script writers create presidents and manipulate massess.

In Dr. Bloodmoney, Dick has mastered the complex narrative structure often obscuring the meaning in Simulacra and Penultimate Truth. The finest of his dystopian novels set in a post-holocaust world, it ends with the hope offered by the mutant homunculus, Bill. Dr. Bluthgeld (Bloodmoney), the mad scientist who created the bomb, and Hoppy Harrington, the mad technologist and mutant life form spawned by radiation, struggle for the power of world domination.¹⁴ Hoppy, by the time he destroys Bluthgeld, has become very nearly as paranoid and power-mad as the scientist. Dangerfield, a modern Everyman encapsulated in his artificial mechanical environment, is first deflected from his course into an endlessly circular orbit by Bluthgeld's bombs, then nearly killed by Hoppy's jamming of his broadcasts. In Palmer Eldritch, an evil god with a metal face penetrates the planetary system from outside and threatens every man. Here in Dr. Bloodmoney, a reversal of this pattern occurs:

The killing, the slow destruction of Dangerfield, Bonny thought, was deliberate, and it came—not from space, not from beyond—but from below, from the familiar landscape. Dangerfield had not died from the years of isolation; he had been stricken by careful instruments issuing up from the very world which he struggled to contact. If he could have cut himself off from us, she thought, he would be alive now. At the very moment he listened to us, received us, he was being killed—and did not guess.¹⁵

Man's alienation and despair, Dick now suggests, grow out of the new settings and the new forms his technology has spawned and out of the power to manipulate which they provide. Hoppy metaphors¹⁶ the merging of the animate and the inanimate, a new life form resulting from the cross-fertilization of science and technology. Dick explains:

The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reflection, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical. We hold now no pure categories of the living versus the non-living; this is going to be our paradigm: My character, Hoppy.¹⁷

Dick's early robots were machines sent by alien enemy forces to attack man. In his middle period, the actual man-made robot or simulacrum became the paradigm for the capitalist-fascist-bureaucratic structures locking the individual in a prisonhouse of false illusions created through electronic constructs. The technologist became a demonic artificer serving the devil of economic greed. In the fiction of the late 1960s, another shift in the evolution of Dick's imagination occurs, as evidenced by a shift in emphasis from the outer space of the social realm to the inner world of the mind. The robot no longer walks wasteland streets or peers from vidscreens via electronic images; rather he haunts the human consciousness and stares out through a mask of flesh.¹⁸ Dick has become aware, he tells us now, that “the greatest pain does not come down from a distant planet, but up from the depth of the human heart.”¹⁹ His attention moves to the human as a machine or android.

Dick's Vancouver speech defines these characteristics of the “android” mind that separate it from the authentic ally human: a paucity of feeling, predictability, obedience, inability to make exceptions, and an inability to alter with circumstances to become something new.²⁰ In his recent fiction exploring the mechanical, his earlier view of androids as artificial constructs masquerading as humans gives way to a view of androids as humans who have become machines. Now robots and men have reserved roles. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) creates a metaphor for this process. In We Can Build You (serialized in magazine form in 1969), automata assume the compassion and concern of the authentic human: the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum, although a schizophrenic character, is superior in his insight and humanity to the humans in the novel.

Read as a dramatization of inner space, Do Androids Dream? merits recognition as one of Dick's finest novels, a view contrary to most of the current critical judgment. Stanislaw Lem in “Science Fiction; A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions” recognizes the novel as “not important,” but then dismisses it as disappointing because it does not offer unequivocal answers to the questions of internal logic that it raises.²¹ But the point is, Dick is picturing an inner world that is without the logical consistency Lem demands. For Dick, the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become a kind of hallucination. We have a bimodal brain, or, more precisely according to Dick, two brains housed within the same skull. He recently applauded the research done in this area by Robert E. Ornstein at Stanford University, but indicates he had not been aware of it when he wrote Do Androids Dream?²²

Given its task of inner exploration, the novel discards the multiple foci narrative technique of his previous novels and uses a single point of view. Superficially, Do Androids Dream? traces the adventures of policeman Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who receives ＄1,000 for each android he kills. The androids, now so sophisticated they can scarcely be differentiated from humans, have been developed to serve as slave labor to the Lunar colonists. Occasionally a few rebel and flee to Earth, where they masquerade as humans and are hunted down and killed by men like Rick. Much of the human population has gone into space to escape a radiation-polluted Earth where almost no forms of life survive. Owning an animal that is really alive is a mark of status on Earth because real animals have become so expensive; many people must settle for cheaper electronic simulations, as does Rick. His dream is to accumulate enough money to buy a real sheep, instead of an electric one. He hopes to achieve this by killing androids.

This gestalt of action is a parable for Rick's inner journey as he discovers that he possesses both a rational and an intuitive self. Two plot lines are metaphoric representations of the two selves: Rick, one protagonist, is the intellectual, unfeeling self; he is the left hemisphere of the brain. John Isidore, the mutant with subnormal I.Q., is the intuitive self who empathizes with all forms; he is the right brain lobe. The novel sets up a series of opposing ideas: people-things; subject-object; animate-inanimate; loving-killing; intuition-logic; human-machine. Double character sets abound; Rick Deckard and Phil Resch; Rachael Rosen and Pris Stratton, John Isidore and Wilbur Mercer. We can only know the penultimate truth; we are always one reflection away from reality, and we see it as in a mirror. Thus the sets of characters mirror truths to each other. For Dick this encounter—not an encounter of truth, but only a reflection of the truth—is caught best in an image used by Saint Paul, who speaks of our seeing “as if by the reflection on the bottom of a polished metal pan.”²³

The complexity of structure and ideas in this rich novel point up the evolutionary process of the Dickian imagination in the fifteen years since those first short stories about robot warfare. But the question for which Dick invents his array of answers is the same as it was then: What happens when man builds machines programmed to kill? The answer Dick fears, is that man will become the machines that kill. This is what Rich Deckard learns about himself: in pursuing the enemy android with a view to kill or be killed, he takes on the characteristics of the enemy and becomes himself an android. In one of the most powerful chapters of the novel (Chapter 12), Rick encounters his double, the android bounty hunter, Phil Resch, who enjoys killing. This mirror episode provides Rich with the insight that he has been transformed into an android-killing machine.

The female androids, Pris and Rachael, both attract and repel Rick. These two simulacra foreshadow the cold, unresponsive female of We Can Build You, Pris Frauenzimmer (her name, translated, means “womankind,” or does it mean “street-walker?” The text suggests both—another example of Dickian ambiguity and irony). The android Rachael is “the belle dame sans merci”²⁴ who fascinates to the point of near destruction. She makes love to Rick without loving him because she, a mere machine, lacks emotional awareness and so is unable to empathize with others. She is, she realizes, not much different from an ant. She and her double, Pris, are mere “chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive” (DAD, 16).

The secondary plot of the novel records the encounter of John Isidore, a subnormal “chickenhead,” with the androids. Contrary to Rick, who hunts androids to kill them, John empathizes with them. He is a follower of Mercerism and is easily able to identify with every other living thing. Wilbur Mercer is a mysterious old man whose image on the black empathy box serves as a focus for the theological and moral system called Mercerism. Its followers unite through empathy, the energy capable of transporting the human mind through the mirror so that it unites with the opposite and sees from the reverse direction. Mercer, in a gentle test of endurance which transcends suffering as he endlessly toils up a barren hill, is reminiscent of Albert Camus' Sisyphus. John Isidore, grasping the handles of the black empathy box, undergoes a “crossing-over,” a physical merging with others accompanied by mental and spiritual identification, as follows:

for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They—and he—cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. But it was there. Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward under his feet. Today we are higher than yesterday, and tomorrow—he, the compound figure of Wilbur Mercer, glanced up to view the ascent ahead. Impossible to make out the end. Too far. But it will come.

(DAD, 2)

The novel is full of a pyrotechnic display of self-negating inventions. Rick's love-making with the android, Rachael Rosen—an act of identification with the other—explodes his will to kill into nauseated rejection of his work. But threatened by Rachael's double, Pris, while he is carrying a laser gun, he kills—thus violating his newly found sense of identity. He is instructed by Wilbur Mercer about this curse of man:

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

(DAD, 15)

Reversals and negations like Rick's in loving and killing, are compounded throughout the novel. Mercer, the mystic, turns out to be a fake—not a religious leader but an alcoholic has-been actor. The allegedly real toad Rick discovers on his desert journey and cherishes as an omen of spiritual rebirth turns out to be an electric one. What does it all mean? Rick's final insight answers the question: “Everything is true, everything anybody has ever thought” (DAD, 20). He could just as well have said that everything is false. It all depends on the perspective from which you view “reality.” Language limits because a given statement can only encompass one view at a time. Thus irony provides the only escape from language through language, for irony contains a negation of the assertion. Given Dick's view of a puzzling, undefined, metamorphosing cosmos, irony is essential to him in creating his fictional worlds mirroring that view.

How does one survive in this universe of uncertainty where everything is both true and false? Like John Isidore, one empathizes with and responds to the needs of all forms, blinding one's eyes to the inauthentic division between the living and nonliving, between the machine and man. Like the shadowy Wilbur Mercer, one endlessly climbs up, suffering the wounds of rocks mysteriously thrown, but never reaching a destination. Mercer's hill mirrors Sisyphus' fate, his rocks the stones of martyred Stephen, his empathy the forgiving, uniting love of Christ.

Only when the divisions Dick has mirrored in the novel are healed by an inner unity growing from an acceptance of all things will artificiality be replaced by authentic existence. If you hold the nineteenth-century view of yourself as a unique, concrete thing, says Dick, you can never merge with the noosphere. The left-hemisphere brain, the isolating android intellect, must merge with the right-hemisphere brain, the collective intuition that we all share. These dream images, if we will listen, partake of the creative power that can transform us from mere machines into authentic humans.²⁵

We Can Build You cannot be ignored in a study of Dick's androids because it proposes new pathways in the labyrinthian possibilities of machine intelligence: but it cannot be applauded because it creeps along in a dramatic near-paralysis uncommon to Dick's fiction. The failure is twofold. First, the novel relies on exposition, not metaphor, to make many of its statements. Additionally, it concerns itself with two themes which are not closely related. When, as he can, Dick yokes the unlikely in grotesque marriage, he is brilliant. In this novel, however, the two themes fail to resonate; we are left with a sense of dispassionate incongruity. The first theme concerns the creation of simulacra whose intelligence has all the attributes of human intelligence. How are such forms to be regarded—ethically, legally, and philosophically? What are the implications of destroying such high-level intelligence? Is there a difference between killing an intelligent being and an equally intelligent machine? A writer as different from Dick as Isaac Asimov has successfully dramatized these issues in what is unquestionably his greatest story, “The Bicentennial Man” (1976). Dick plays with the possibilities of this theme in desultory probings, but he actually seems to be more concerned with the second theme: the transformation of the protagonist, Louis Rosen, into an android. This theme makes use of an idea which apparently remained in Dick's mind after he finished the superb Do Androids Dream? It can be summarized as: What are we to make of the human who glorifies reason, logic, individual prudence, and self-concern while at the same time he suppresses emotional responses—love, fear, and passion? The answer Dick gives is that we can no longer regard him as human; he has become a logic machine, an android, a schizoid personality.

Both themes—the legal and ethical rights of artificial intelligence and the transformation of a human into an unfeeling machine—are quite substantial and worthy of literary exploration. But, strangely, in this novel Dick's metaphoric inventiveness is often absent. Ideas customarily transformed into unexpected images here become passages of abstract, psychology-text discussion about schizophrenia and encyclopedia excerpts about Abraham Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, and John Wilkes Booth.

We Can Build You is the story of Louis Rosen and Pris Frauenzimmer. She reminds us of the androids, Pris and Rachael, in Do Androids, Dream? In We Can Build You, she is a teenage schizoid who recovers enough from her mental illness to work in her father's small electronic organ factory. Because sales are poor, the factory turns to manufacturing simulacra, and Pris is the designer of two Civil War robots, Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war. She becomes obsessed with Sam Barrow, an enterprising and ruthless young millionaire who singlehandedly has opened up the way for housing developments on Luna, Mars, and Venus. Her fascination with his power and grandiose visions leads her to leave her father's small corporation and take her creative talents to Barrow's vast economic empire. The union is a destructive one, driving her eventually to kill a simulacrum.

Pris has the potential for Medealike tragedy as she creates, then destroys her electronic children. That potential must, however, remain undeveloped because of the role she is required to play in the second plot, which records Louis Rosen's mental illness. Louis, the narrator of the story, descends into a schizoid underworld whose final destination is a mental institute. His deterioration is marked by his increasing fascination with Pris, who is like a machine driven by logic and purpose. She has “an ironclad rigid schematic view—a blueprint, an abstraction of mankind. And she lived on it”²⁶ (WCBY, 14). Louis first jokes that he is one of Pris's simulacra. Then he realizes he has fallen in love with her, “a woman with eyes of ice, a calculating, ambitious schizoid type” (WCBY, 12). She is indifferent to his love and unable to respond with feelings. Louis is, he senses with foreboding, “doomed to loving something beyond life itself, a cruel, cold, and sterile thing …” (WCBY, 14). Pris reminds us of Diana, goddess of the hunt, who is chaste and cold.

So it is not surprising to discover Dick has read sixteenth-century poetry extensively and in creating Pris had particularly in mind a Sir Thomas Wyatt sonnet whose final lines read:

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven in diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.(27)

Pris is an inverted, technological Diana of the Wood, ruling not in a natural but a man-made world. The goddess described in Frazer's The Golden Bough blesses mankind with fertility; Pris condemns Louis with near-destructive madness.

Countering the schizoid Pris is the schizophrenic simulacrum, A. Lincoln, whose personality is reminiscent of Jack Bohlen's in Martian Time-Slip. While Lincoln is emotionally unstable, he is not cold and indifferent to the life around him.

He might have been remote, but he was not dead emotionally; quite the contrary. So he was the opposite of Pris, of the cold schizoid type. Grief, emotional empathy, were written on his face. He fully felt the sorrows of the war, every single death.

(WCBY, 14)

We have here a dramatization of Dick's view of the individual suffering from schizophrenia as contrasted with the schizoid personality.

Dick's view of the machine had evolved by the time he wrote this novel to the point where he could no longer find ground for differentiating between the animate and the inanimate. The simulacrum A. Lincoln proposes this position in a dialogue with the industrialist, Sam Barrow, where they debate the differences between man and machine. They recapitulate the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century argument about the existence of a “vital spirit” in living matter which differentiates it from inanimate matter. Barrow concedes that a machine now can talk, think, move—can in fact do anything a man can.

What then, asks Lincoln, is the difference? Spinoza held that animals were clever machines; the critical difference between man and animal is the presence in man of a soul.

“There is no soul,” Barrow said. “That's pap.”

“Then,” the simulacrum said, “a machine is the same as an animal.” It went on slowly in its dry, patient way, “And an animal is the same as a man. Is that not correct?”

(WCBY, 9)

We Can Build You, as we noted, must be considered in tracing the evolution of Dick's thinking about artificial intelligence because it documents important developments, but it cannot be admired artistically because it falters in converting idea to metaphor.

Interestingly, in the same year, as he was writing this somewhat disappointing novel (1969), Dick created one of the greatest short stories in all literature exploring man's perception of himself as a machine, “The Electric Ant.” This story contains all the lightning inventiveness, and the abrupt yoking of the impossible in calm, ironic understatement that shocks us into a new way of seeing things. This is Dick's literary genius: his metaphorical brilliance, a gift lying closer to the art of the poet than that of the traditional novelist.

“The Electric Ant” is an example of the qualities in Dick's writing that remind his critics of Franz Kafka. We think immediately of “The Metamorphosis,” where the first sentence matter-of-factly announces that Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Similarly, in “The Electric Ant,” Garson Poole awakens in his hospital bed after an accident which amputated his right hand and discovers that he is not a man but a robot. His skin covers not flesh and blood, but wires, circuits, and miniature components. The objective, restrained prose describing the metamorphosis of Poole's self-image from that of a free human agent to a programmed machine lies in awful tension with the emotional intensity of the event and gives the story its terrible and unique power. All the issues raised by the philosophy of mechanism are explored here in metaphoric form. Are we only bits of matter, controlled by the laws of physics governing inanimate matter? If so, then man's cherished free will is nothing but an illusion. How can we ever know true reality if our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us turn out to be unreliable? My summary comments are the language of philosophical abstraction: Dick's language makes use of the metaphor of the particular. Listen to Garson Poole after his discovery that he is a mere robot utilized by Tri-Plan Electronics Corporation.

Christ, he thought, it undermines you, knowing this. I'm a freak, he realized. An inanimate object mimicking an animate one. But—he felt alive. Yet … he felt differently, now. About himself.

Programmed. In me somewhere, he thought, there is a matrix fitted in place, a grid screen that cuts me off from certain thoughts, certain actions. And forces me into others. I am not free. I never was, but now I know it; that makes it different.

(“The Electric Ant”)²⁸

Having discovered he is a machine with a programmed “reality” tape, Poole next realizes that this insight gives him the option of altering his tape. He thinks,

if I control my reality tape, I control reality. At least so far as I am concerned. My subjective reality … but that's all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.

(“The Electric Ant”)

Is reality only a fiction, or must man make up fictions because reality is unknowable? Are space and time uncertain in their order because man has not yet learned to understand them; or does the universe of space and time eternally move with the mystery beyond human probing? Is the authentic human mind with its high intelligence unique and irreplaceable; or will machines become more intelligent than man? Can they explore new worlds from which man is barred? Dick in his fiction is a seeker who searches not for definitive answers to these puzzles, but for possibilities. His early short stories are straightforward metaphors, simple mirrors, presenting to us the bizarre possibilities his imagination sees. His later metaphors move into realms of increasing complexity and his mirroring device becomes a doubly ironic metaphor composed of opposites facing each other. In order to comprehend this type of metaphor, we have to see in several directions at the same time, to let our awareness slip simultaneously in both directions through the mirror, viewing the polarities of possibility from each direction in the same instant. Thus, for Dick, the enlightened human consciousness is not a state of being but an event or process of eternal passage between contraries.

We cease our labyrinthian journey through Dick's phantasmagoric worlds of evolving intelligence, human and artificial. It brings us to no conclusion, but perhaps to a peaceful, exhilarating delight at being lost in the metaphorical maze of his and our own imagination. We reach no goal, but share our guide's awareness that nothing can be preserved, either by machines or man. Dick's most recent words interrupt but do not conclude the process of his awareness:

We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes—we are perhaps the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us and especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality inasmuch as they may participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind. Perhaps we see not only a deforming veil, but backwards. Perhaps the closest approximation to truth would be to say: “Everything is equally alive, equally free, equally sentient, because everything is not alive or half-alive or dead, but rather lived through.²⁹

What future will unfold for artificial intelligence? Will it increasingly assume and perhaps eventually subsume human intelligence? What of the human brain's capacity to dream, to throw up fireworks of possibility lying outside mundane reality? Will machine intelligence achieve that gift, too? What is the answer to the question Dick's title asks: Do androids dream of electric sheep? We know that Dick, according to his own philosophy, would want us to accept only the answer we discover as we look in the mirror of his fiction and see our own awareness reflected back to us. But we can also be certain of his answer. Yes, as each form contains within itself the shadow-image of the potential forms that seed its inevitable transformation, so do androids also dream.

Notes

1. Philip K. Dick, “The Preserving Machine,” in The Preserving Machine (New York: Ace Books, 1968).

2. Other pertinent works not discussed in this chapter are the short novel The Variable Man, “The Great C,” “Progeny,” “War Veteran,” and “Service Call.”

3. Paul Dickson, in The Electronic Battlefield (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), describes the conversion of warfare to contests between electronic devices. This process began in the 1960s, a decade after Dick's stories; thus, his imaginary creations have turned out to be amazingly prophetic.

4. Dick, “Afterthoughts by the Author,” in The Best of Philip K. Dick (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977).

5. Dick, Vulcan's Hammer (New York: Ace Books, 1960).

6. Darko Suvin, “P. K. Dick's Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View,” Science-Fiction Studies 5 (March 1975), pp. 8-22. Reprinted in slightly different form in this volume.

7. Dick, “Afterthoughts by the Author,” The Best of Philip K. Dick.

8. Dick, “If There Were No Benny Cemoli,” in The Best of Philip K. Dick.

9. See Angus Taylor's brief but insightful comments in his Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light (Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1975).

10. Private letter from Philip K. Dick, 1978.

11. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.)

12. The source for the Palmer Eldritch face, Dick says in “Man, Android and Machine,” is the war-masks of the Attic Greeks. This essay appears in Science Fiction at Large, ed. Peter Nicholls (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

13. Suvin, “P. K. Dick's Opus,” p. 14.

14. Fredric Jameson, “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975), pp. 39-40.

15. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney (New York: Ace Books, 1965), p. 26.

16. I am aware that in using metaphors as a verb instead of a noun, I am either violating or augmenting the English language. But because Dick constantly creates images of processes rather than describing states, a verb form seems necessary. I prefer metaphors to the more mathematical verb models.

17. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine,” p. 203.

18. Ibid., p. 204.

19. Dick, “Afterthoughts by the Author,” p. 444.

20. Dick's Vancouver speech is published in Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd, ed. Bruce Gillespie (Melbourne, Australia: Norstrilia Press, 1975), pp. 57, 63.

21. Ibid., p. 86.

22. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine,” pp. 211-12.

23. Ibid., p. 206.

24. The story of a man destroyed by his love for a femme fatale has been told repeatedly in fairy tales, myths, and poems. One of the best-known treatments is John Keat's poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

25. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine,” pp. 214-15.

26. Dick, We Can Build You (New York: DAW Books, 1972).

27. The first line of Wyatt's untitled sonnet, which can be found in any collection of Elizabethan poetry, is “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.”

28. Dick, “The Electric Ant,” in The Best of Philip K. Dick.

29. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine,” p. 220.