Philip K. Dick

elaborately explains his personal thoughts on the underlying meanings displayed in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. Sims essay The Dangers of Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, deconstructs a lot of philosophical theories of the famous philosopher Heidegger relating to technology. He uses Heidegger's philosophy to connect moments in the book to the humanity of Dicks futuristic Earth. Throughout the essay Sims does not lose sight of what Dick wanted his readers to question about humanity. He argues that the relationship between humans and technology is a unique one unlike any other relationships; technology reminds us of our humanity. I agree with many points Sims believes where motivating reasons for Dick and what he believes Dick was trying to accomplish. Although I disagree of how Sims use of the word "Haven" when he is addressing what Androids believed what Earth was.

in kaleme aldığı "Aldatmaca Oyunu" adlı hikâye yabancı bir gezegende yaşayan, sürekli saldırı tehdidi altında olan insanları ve onların kurduğu askeri kamp düzenini anlatıyor. Bu hikâye, bir grup paranoidin kurdukları düzen ve kurguladıkları hayat üzerinden özne, birey, öteki, bilimsellik ölçütleri gibi meselelerin ele alındığı bir yanıyla edebi bir yanıyla felsefi bir metin olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Philip K. Dick'in hayatı da göz önünde alındığında hikayedeki kahramanların kendi yaşamından kesitler yansıttığı da görülmektedir. Soğuk savaş döneminde kaleme alınmış bu hikâye her an değişebilecek bir dünyaya karşı sürekli bir saldırı olacakmış kaygısı taşıyan insanların halini yansıtmaktadır. Aldatmaca Oyunu hikayesi bir uzay gemisinde geçmektedir. Uzay gemisinde yaşayan insanlar bir kaza sonucu bataklığa saplanmışlardır. Bu gemidekiler sürekli bir savaş halinde yaşamaktadırlar. Maymun adam ve arzlılar olarak adlandırılanlar, en büyük düşman olarak görülmektedir. Ancak yaşanan saldırılar sonucu saldıranların yakalanamaması ve saldırıya dair kanıtların bulunamaması üzerine şüpheler başlar. Öncelikle yaşadıklarının gerçek olup olmadığını sorgulayan insanlar kendilerinin paranoid olup olmadıklarını tartışırlar. Gemide buldukları video kayıtları doktorların gemidekileri tedavi için başka bir gezegene gönderdiği bilgisini içermekte olmasına rağmen kendilerinin paranoid olup olmadıklarını anlamak için bir test uygulamaya karar verirler. Ancak testin sonucunu kabullenmeyip içlerinden birilerinin casus olduğunu iddia ederek aralarında bölünür ve savaşırlar. Gemide askeri kamp halinin hâkim olduğu görülmektedir. Hikâye O'Keefe'in duyduğu ses üzerine bastığı alarm zili ile başlamaktadır. Zile basmasıyla beraber bütün gemi ayaklanmış ve düşmana karşı savunmaya geçilmiştir. Sonrasında verilen tasvirler de askeri kamp halini yansıtmaktadır. Hikâyenin genelinde hakim olan bu hava paranoyak, her an düşmanla karşı karşıya gelmeyi bekleyen insanları yansıtmaktadır.

Planteada la cuestión de si hay influencia de la película "Blade Runner" o de la novela en que está basada, "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?" de Philip K. Dick, en la novela de Gonzalo Torrente Ballester "Quizá nos lleve el viento al infinito", procedo a su análisis en busca de elementos coincidentes. Basándome luego en los resultados obtenidos, dado que no ha sido posible establecer una influencia directa y observando el paralelismo que se puede detectar en la actitud interna de los principales personajes, así como el hecho concurrente del romance con una androide, llego a la conclusión de que nos hallaríamos ante un caso de poligénesis.

Mémoire de maîtrise en Études littéraires, UQAM, année 1999

À noter qu'il s'agit de la version 1, celle qui a été déposée à la fin de mes études, et qu'une version corrigée est en cours de préparation. (2022)

Le simulacre, mettant à l'épreuve les frontières entre réalité et fiction, est le faux qui se fait passer pour vrai, qui prend la place du réel. Ce que nous observons dans les romans 2001 : L'Odyssée de l'espace d'Arthur C. Clarke, Solaris de Stanislaw Lem et Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep de Philip K. Dick, c'est la mise en scène de personnages secondaires qui sont des simulacres d'êtres humains. Cette analyse s’applique à suivre le parcours identitaire du personnage principal de chacun des récits, déterminé par la relation avec les êtres factices. Deux types de simulacres interagissent dans les textes, désignés par les termes "anima" et "automata". L’être humain, bouleversé dans cette relation à l’automata par le biais du simulacre qui lui sert de miroir, subit les effets d'une scission, suivant un processus par lequel les personnages principaux vont renouveler leur rapport au réel et recréer leur identité. À noter que certaines citations sont en anglais.

Copyright: © 2010 Julie Martineau Standard Copyright License
Version : 2 (non définitive)

Dystopian literature is considered a branch of science fiction which writers use to portray a futuristic dark vision of the world, generally dominated by technology and a totalitarian ruling government that makes use of whatever means it finds necessary to exert a complete control over its citizens. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is considered a landmark of the dystopian genre: it portrays a futuristic where a totalitarian, fascist party rules London aiming to keep its citizens under their complete control. This paper will take two examples of contemporary dystopian literature, Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” (1967) and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982-1985), in order to closely analyze the influence that Orwell’s dystopia played in their construction. It will focus on how these two works took Orwellian vision of a totalitarian state, the different methods of control it employs to keep citizens under complete control and submission, and how they introduce them into their stories.

KEYWORDS: Orwell, V for Vendetta, Faith of Our Fathers, social control, manipulation, submission.



La ciencia ficción es uno de los géneros cuye auge se encuentra al alza hoy en día. De entre sus diversas ramificaciones, la literatura distópica es una de las más usadas por los escritores para proyectar una visión del mundo oscura y futurista, dominado por la tecnología y caracterizada por un gobierno totalitario que hace uso de todos los medios que encuentra necesarios para ejercer un control total sobre sus ciudadanos. La novela de George Orwell 1984 (1949) es considerada un hito del género distópico: en ella, Orwell retrata un Londres futurista, gobernado por un partido fascista y totalitario, cuyo mero objetivo es el control total sobre sus ciudadanos. El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar dos ejemplos de la literatura distópica contemporánea, por un lado "La Fe de Nuestros Padres" (1967) de Philip K. Dick, así como la novela gráfica de Alan Moore  V de Vendetta (1982-1985), con el objetivo de estudiar la influencia que el modelo distópico de Orwell desempeñó en la construcción de las distopías anteriormente mencionadas. De igual modo, este ensayo se centrará en cómo estas dos obras tomaron las representaciones de Orwell de un estado totalitario, los diferentes métodos de control que éste emplea para mantener a sus ciudadanos bajo un estado de absoluta sumisión y control, y cómo plasmaron éstas representaciones en sus respectivas obras.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Orwell, V de Vendetta, La Fe de Nuestros Padres, control social, manipulación, sometimiento.

Saggio sullo scrittore di fantascienza Philip K. Dick. Presenta una lettura della sua vita e delle sue opere in relazione alla storia sociale statunitense, una serie di schede critiche dedicate ai principali temi dello scrittore e testi specifici su tutti i suoi romanzi.

Pubblicato da Agenzia X, MIlano, 2006.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive, subversive, and entertaining authors of the last half of the twentieth century, and the increasing levels of respect and interest that his fiction and films have generated since the 1982 release of Blade Runner have made a comprehensive assessment of these films a virtual necessity.

This essay argues that Dick is as much a chronicler of human feelings as he is a prophet of futuristic strangeness. Dick writes in an emotionally heightened way, explores the nature of human feeling, and uses the portrayal of feeling as a way of engaging with his readers, setting out a philosophical and moral agenda in a singularly intense and driven way. Focusing closely on four scenes from three novels, the essay shows how Dick’s interest in emotion and emotional response offers a powerful social and political critique of his society and its persistent tendency to foster human alienation. The essay offers a broadly humanistic reading, shaped in the agendas set by Dick’s biographers, and inflected by cultural materialist and feminist thinking. It is designed to be useful to the general as well as the scholarly reader.

Corrected and update March 3rd 2024

The movement for animal liberation involves the attempt to break down the traditional conceptual boundaries between human beings and animals, in order to include the latter within the moral community. But this breaking down of boundaries is a double-edged sword that is simultaneously being wielded by opponents of animal liberation to uphold the notion of human domination over other species. I use the fiction of Philip K. Dick as illustrative material for discussing what is now the most influential grounds for rejecting animal liberation: what I call "the new argument from nature".

This dissertation used word-frequency analysis to differentiate the psycholinguistic characteristics of fiction writing, specifically genre writing with a focus on masterwork dystopian novels. The primary research question was: What does a word-frequency analysis indicate about the psychological characteristics of masterwork dystopian novels? This question entailed two primary support questions: Does the dystopian canon of masterwork novels exhibit more psychoaffective distancing than other genres of novels (i.e., is this distancing an individuating characteristic)? Can embodiment be represented and discussed through a quantitative psychological word-frequency assessment?

In the respective literatures, textual embodiment is characteristic of fiction writing, the dystopian genre is partly defined by psychological characteristics, and word usages reveal the disposition of a narrative voice. Addressing this intersection of fiction, genre, and psychology, word-frequency characteristics helped (i) distinguish novels from other types of writing, (ii) measure embodiment and emotional tone in a text, (iii) describe and individuate dystopian fiction, and (iv) differentiate dystopian works and authors.

This paper examines the mode of existence of realism under postmodernity. It is argued that contemporary realism faces two major challenges at the turn of the twenty-first century: the virtualization of experience due to information  technologies and the ostensibly infinite plurality of dialogized postmodern cultures. Classic postmodernist theory contests the capacity of the realist aesthetic to render justice to the virtualized and dialogized contemporary social field. This paper suggests on the contrary that postmodernist indeterminism may be counterbalanced by an equally legitimate approach based on cognitive trust in the minimal coherence of the lifeworld. This argument is developed on the basis of examples drawn from contemporary literature (William Gibson, Philip K. Dick,  Zadie Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston, Don DeLillo) and film (Ridley Scott, Cronenberg, Jarmusch, Cholodenko).

Despite Philip K. Dick’s penetrating portrayal of trauma in his most recognized work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), most critics avoid this topic, debating instead the novel’s treatment of “authentic” human subjectivity. To address this gap, this article aligns the novel’s much discussed binaries—human/android, authentic/artificial—with the its principal but overlooked concerns: trauma and ethics. Dick uses his fictional post-apocalyptic culture to articulate and critique cultural practices of trauma-deferment, which displace the effects of trauma onto the illusory model of a testable, privileged anthropocentric humanism. These deferment practices postpone the realization that the human has always already been the posthuman. In order to keep the myth of human exceptionalism alive, the animal and the android become part of an ideological dialectic that defers traumatic experience by reifying the essential human as superior to the android (who cannot empathize) and empathetic toward the animal (whose vulnerability necessitates human care). Engaging recent developments in posthuman theory, I argue that, in Do Androids Dream?, unmediated traumatic encounters perform a temporary erasure of the essentialized human subject, which, in turn, opens humans up to trans-subjective engagements with the android and the animal that facilitate a radical posthuman ethics of expansive vulnerability.

Origami unicorn, fandom edition, and Blade Runner: On the origin of an entertainment supersystem

The article studies the most important structural features of the film Blade Runner as well as historical and social factors connected with its reception, which predestine Ridley Scott’s work to be a forerunner of contemporary entertainment
supersystems.
Among the structural features of the film revealed by juxtaposing its different versions, two factors have been distinguished as determining most powerfully the film’s potential for a cult following.
The first factor is ambiguity and vagueness of the main character, Rick Deckard, concerning the fundamental issue of his identity as a human being or an android. It turns out that the right  reference point for the dispute of fans about the ontic status of the hunter of androids is neither of the major versions of film on its own – the original theatrical cut of 1982 or the director’s cut of 1991 – but the interpretive tension generated by the differences between these two versions. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the origin of the ambiguous ontic status of Deckard in the film leads to an interpretive tension already present when comparing the original novel by P. K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, with the earlier version of the film (1982).
The second factor is postmodern multiculturalism of the created image of the future world. But the multitude of elements making up the represented world does not amount to a synthesis of divergent cultural formations or deepened observation of how they mutually affect and permeate one another. The caleidoscopic multiplicity of elements from different cultures is conducive to the appearance of a great number of chains of references and associations going beyond the frames of the text of any version of Blade Runner and – paradoxically – leading back to the film, but already with meanings and knowledge enriching the film’s reception, mainly in secondary or even completely accidental aspects.
Furthermore, a historical and social factor has been pointed out, namely the introduction of the theatrical cut of the film into the circulation of video cassettes, independent of the media concerns, in the 1980s. What was an innovative technology at the time was used by the fans of Blade Runner as a social medium, capable of arousing an interest in a cult film within a niche genre so effectively that it made sense to R. Scott to risk reintroducing the film to cinemas in a slightly modified version, the first director’s cut in the history of the cinema.
Behind the “iron curtain”, a similar role of social transmission medium was fulfilled  by the technology of mimeographs and photocopiers. An analysis of the phenomenon of “fanclub editions” – amateur translations of science-fiction and crime stories, unavailable in Poland then, avoiding the communist censorship – makes it possible to show an original development of features characteristic for entertainment supersystems on the foundation of Blade Runner: dominance of visual aspects, imposition of a matrix of images and meanings of the film on other forms of transmission, transmedial repetitiveness leading to increasing simplifications.
These observations are confirmed by an analysis of the first official edition of Dick’s novel in Poland (1995) and the computer game Blade Runner by Westwood Studios (1997). Comparing the spontaneously created transmedial narration of Blade Runner with the universe of Star Wars by G. Lucas, deliberately created as a business project, one may legitimately state that, following the conception of entertainment supersystems advanced by M. Kinder, R. Scott’s work involves a spontaneous development of a framework of a supersystem based on what has become a cult film.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and influential SF authors of the 20th century. However, Dick’s literary success did not come without major biographical pitfalls. While Dick published thirty-nine novels in his lifetime, many of which were ground-breaking, radical reimaginings of the SF genre (such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip) many were trashy, underdeveloped and rushed (Vulcan’s Hammer, Dr. Futurity, and Our Friends from Frolix 8). On closer inspection, this literary division corresponds closely to issues in Dick’s own personal life. Dick was a torn individual. On the one hand he was a literary-SF genius who pushed the boundaries of the genre by redefining postmodernism as a spiritual phenomenon (as in Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?). On the other hand, he was an alienated failure who had numerous mainstream works rejected for publication. Interestingly his moments of literary genius correspond to high points in his life when he was doing well with family, friends and spouses, and his trashy lows link closely to struggles with amphetamine abuse, the death of friends and psychotic episodes. This paper will address the fluctuating mental health of Philip K. Dick by deconstructing the narrative dynamics of A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. I will show how these texts represent forms of biographical self-exploration where Dick addresses the material causes of psychological ill-health in postmodernity (and himself), at the same time as generating transcendent salvific responses to fragmentation and alienation through creating his own postmodern theologies.

En este trabajo se estudia el tema del doble en dos obras clásicas de la literatura de ciencia ficción: "Blade Runner", de Philip K. Dick y Solaris, de Stanislaw Lem. El marco utilizado para este estudio es el psicoanálisis.
Para ello, primero reviso las contribuciones teóricas al tema del doble a través de los autores que anteriormente lo trataron. Acto seguido, realizo una especie de glosario de términos psicoanalíticos donde trato de aclarar dichos términos, de forma que el lector no iniciado pueda comprenderlos con claridad.
Finalmente aplico este marco teórico a los casos prácticos mencionados.

"""Philip K. Dick et la Philosophie: une courte interview," tr. Sylvie Laine. Yellow
Submarine, No. 41, September, 1986, pp. 22-24.
"Philip K. Dick -- Interview." Niekas, No. 36, 1988, pp. 30-31.
"An Interview with Philip K. Dick." For Dickheads Only, No. 5, 1994, pp. 26-27.
"Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview," in The Shifting Realities of Philip
K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1995, hc, pp. 44-47.
"Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview," in The Shifting Realities of Philip
K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New
York: Vintage Books, 1995, pbk., pp. 44-47.]""

In this paper, I tried to present in a brief way the cyberpunk cinematographic sub-genre by connecting it a little to the literature. After this, I selected some movies for a brief analysis. I tried to find common characteristics for this sub-genre and, of course, to popularize it.

Un estudio crítico de la novela "¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?" de Philip K. Dick. En este acercamiento los conceptos de empatía y entropía se convierten en los principales ejes de análisis de la obra del autor estadounidense.

Ontological instability is a near constant across Dick's oeuvre. While these unstable worlds arise from a wide variety of causes, and can be understood in a correspondingly wide variety of ways, this work shows that Dick very specifically favours an agent of instability, a creative or controlling diegetic power capable of manipulating the ontological fabric of their projected reality. Across Dick’s canon, these destabilising agents or events are explicitly authorial in colouring. They alter and create worlds, they manipulate identities, they rewrite the lives of those around them. Furthermore, this impact can be seen not only in the textual reality, but on actual text itself, as we too are vicariously subjected to the epistemological and ontological obfuscation inflicted on the focalising characters.

This dissertation explores the mutability of reality and perception, and  its implications for character, narrative and reader, in The Man in the High Castle, Eye in the Sky, and Ubik.

The aim of this paper is to discuss thematic similarities between William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum" and Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. Both works feature characters transported into alternate realities through exposition to products of culture which do not conform to the cultural reality around them. The paper will examine both the common points between the stories and some of the important differences between them.

This  closely examines a passage from chapter 11 of Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly (1977) in which the ‘substance D’ addict Charles Freck attempts to commit suicide and instead finds himself beyond the ‘mundane universe’, having his sins endlessly read to him by ‘a creature from between dimensions’. The essay claims that in addition to the more obvious and immediate sources for this passage, it follows in its general trajectory and in many of its details the archetypal ‘romantic suicide’ of the eighteenth century English poet Thomas Chatterton. This reflects the tremendous range and durability of this archetype, exemplified in the essay by numerous comparisons with other ‘creative responses’ to the Chatterton myth.

Updated and corrected 1st October 2024,

Erik Davis (10th July, 2013) - The revelation of Philip K. Dick: Exegesis and event. The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness Salon, The Institute of Ecotechnics, October Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. (Host and compère)

Video here: https://vimeo.com/145926682

Besides being arguably America's most important science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick also experienced a fascinating and uniquely documented series of extraordinary experiences that he named "2/3/74." These experiences partake equally of religious revelation, psychotic break, scripted fabulation, and paranormal event. Dick's enormous hand-written Exegesis, which endlessly rehashed the meaning of 2/3/74, gives us an unusual opportunity to understand how one of the most unusual and prophetic minds of the postwar era tried to mint metaphysical meanings out of our polyglot, paranoid, cybernetic zeitgeist.

In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley reworked the myth of Prometheus into a story about a scientist who transgresses divine powers and secrets of human life by creating it in a laboratory. Her novel can be regarded as an inaugural science fiction novel and a model for later stories about creating mimetic forms of human life. Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? about artificially created humans, like Shelley’s work, reflects and comments on contemporary social and economic problems, particularly on anxieties and dilemmas about the irresponsible use and abuse of science and technology. Both novels describe attempts to animate lifeless matter into new human-like beings and the creators, due to transgression of the divine creation powers, suffer profound consequences. The creators who fail to love and respect the artificial beings they fathered, and the value of life given to them, see them as diseased creations that have become a threat to mankind, which leads to conflicts and desires to revenge upon one another. The creators and the created become the images of one another; however, the similarities between them extend beyond visual appearance – while the creators become increasingly dehumanized, their creations become progressively humanized. Blurred distinctions between the authentic and the constructed and the reversal of their roles question the notions of truth, reality and humanity.

La obra de Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) está siendo releída y reevaluada por la crítica académica, que cada vez está teniendo más en cuenta en sus estudios las narraciones del autor estadounidense. Cierta parte de culpa tienen las adaptaciones al cine de sus cuentos y novelas, que han
conllevado una mayor difusión de su obra. En este trabajo nos centraremos en analizar la creación y representación de la ciudad en los textos literarios de Dick y su posterior adaptación a la gran pantalla para comparar la repercusión que cada medio tiene en la configuración del espacio urbano, con especial atención a las variaciones que se producen interesadamente para recrear tópicos del actual cine hollywoodiense.

The work of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) has now the attention of academic criticism. This has increased the studies on this author’s works. This critical interest may be caused by the adaptation of his novels and short stories, which is also the reason for Dick’s current great diffusion. In this paper we are going to analyze the creation and representation of the city in Dick’s literary texts and their subsequent adaptation into films. We aim to compare the impact that each media has in the shaping of urban space, paying a special attention to variations due to the imitation of current Hollywood cinema topics.

Serija Čovek u visokom dvorcu primetno se razlikuje od romana Filipa K. Dika po kojem je snimljena, ali vernost adaptacije svakako je izgubila dominantno mesto u teoriji i kritici. Ukoliko se relevantnim kriterijumom za vrednovanje adaptacije smatra uspešnost u prevođenju i prenošenju ideje književnog dela, ova serija to nije uspela da uradi. Ona uvodi i naglašava elemente koji proizvode, intenziviraju i umnožavaju Dikovo lažno lažno umesto onih koji doprinose spoznaji unutrašnje istine. Usredsređivanjem na površinske posledice gubitka rata, a ne na Ameriku kao autoritarnu tvorevinu u kojoj se, zbog besomučne replikacije, ne samo predmetima, nego i stvarnostima više ne može pouzdano potvrditi autentičnost, ona ne uspeva da ukaže na ključne društvene, ekonomske i političke probleme i dileme tadašnjeg i sadašnjeg doba, kao što to Dikove jedinstvene fikcionalne stvarnosti čine. Ideja lažnog lažnog, nažalost, gledaocima je najuspešnije preneta transformacijom romana u proizvod sa potencijalom za besomučno replikovanje i komercijalnu eksploataciju.