Interview with a Dead Man
Philip K. Dick Speaks Out on What Is Fake and What Is Authentic, the Celebrity Industry and the Demise of Empathy
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
In Ubik, one of many great novels by Philip K. Dick, intricate technologies allow for recently deceased people to be maintained in a lengthy state of hibernation. During this “cryonic suspension,” the dead are able to engage in limited communication.
Ubik’s plot mirrors today’s anti-surveillance struggle, but at a psychic level. Protagonist Joe Chip is a down-and-out “technician” employed by a “prudence organization” as an inertial — one who negates the powers of telepaths and precogs — to protect privacy. Written in 1969, it makes a good read for Edward Snowden. Defenders of Snowden could use Dick’s The Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, both surveillance state dramas, as exhibits 1 and 2 for why we benefit as a society from whistleblowers.
“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.”
Philip K Dick
Dick’s science fiction distinguishes itself from other works in the genre by highlighting in-depth characters. His exquisite sense of humor adds an extra layer.
Dick died at age 54 in 1982, just before the release of the film Blade Runner, and he missed at least a dozen other films based on his novels, including the above-mentioned Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, as well as The Truman Show, which failed to give credit to Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint.
In our current dystopian age, where fake and real are blurred, celebrities become tyrants and empathy is under threat, the voice of PKD raises urgent philosophical questions.
Hence, Welcome to Fakeville! discovers Dick in “cryonic suspension” in the moratorium, where he rests in the serenity that death affords. PKD’s responses to our interview questions are word-for-word quotes.
WTF!: Why are you not surprised by today’s competing realities?
PKD: We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, ‘What is real?’ Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
WTF!: You died before you could profit financially from your years of probing thought and your imaginative search for truth.
PKD: The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished, what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
WTF!: Perhaps if you had been a pundit, writing about ongoing events rather than long-term philosophical concerns, you’d have made a more immediate impact, like today’s “influencers” and other click accumulators. Your character Jason Taverner, in Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said, was a precursor of the influencers. How did he react to being suddenly shut off from his 30 million followers?
PKD: He asked himself, “Among all those 30 million people, isn’t there one who remembers me?”… He died in an exclusive nursing home. His passing was not generally noticed. [Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said, p. 20 and p. 246.]
WTF. So it seems you prefer long-term recognition, even after-death, rather than reveling in short-term fame. Or does it matter?
PKD: I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.
WTF!: I still need your take on today’s world. What about the businessman-entertainer who has converted the last five years into a soap opera surrounding his person, sucking people away from subjects of higher standards? In the first story you ever wrote, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952), human empathy related to whether an animal should be eaten. Do you think Donald Trump’s difficulty with empathy has any relation to his beef-loving diet? Even in the pandemic, he was signing an executive order mandating meat-processing plants to stay open, at a time when 5,000 meat workers had contracted Covid-19.
PKD: Empathy must be limited to herbivores, or anyhow, omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, p. 24]
WTF!: Back to “Flow, My Tears,” it seems that for your character Jason Taverner relations are based on transaction rather than empathy. The border between celebrity and tyrant seems blurred. In one scene a humble sculptress, Mary Anne, comes to the rescue of Taverner. In exchange he offers to make her famous through his TV show. If I can quote from your novel and then have you respond:
Mary Anne said quietly, “Leave me alone, please. I’m very happy. I know I’m a good potter; I know that the stores, the good ones, like what I do. Does everything have to be on a great scale with a cast of thousands? Can’t I lead my little life the way I want to?” She glared at him, her voice almost inaudible. “I don’t see what all your exposure and fame have done for you — back at the coffee shop you said to me, ‘Is my record really on the jukebox?’ You were afraid that it wasn’t; you were a lot more insecure than I’ll ever be.
PKD: This, to me, is the ultimate heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
WTF!: Today we see people surrounding the entertainer-tyrant, so afraid of him that they willfully expose themselves to a deadly virus. And it seems that today’s social-media generation strives for the opposite: the longshot opportunity to NOT be ordinary, to be recognized by large numbers of followers.
PKD: What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn’t it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small…and you will escape the jealousy of the great. [from The Man in the High Castle].
WTF!: Well you certainly lived those words, having chosen to settle down in Santa Ana instead of Santa Monica. Back to the theme of ordinary people, I go back to a main character in your only published non-science fiction novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist (written in 1959, not published until 16 years later). It seems to me that the character Jack Isidore may be the first example in modern fiction of Asperger Syndrome, a condition not officially recognized until 1994, more than a decade after your death.
Tell us more about this fascinating character (who eventually morphed into JR Isidore in Do Androids Dream…) who was labeled a “crap artist” by his detractors.
PKD: His painfully arrived-at opinions are in some strange, beautiful way, lacking in the preconceptions which tell the rest of us what must be true and what must not be…. Jack Isidore starts with no preconceptions, takes his information from wherever he can find it, and winds up with bizarre but curiously authentic opinions.…He is kind of a gutter sociologist among us. I like him; I approve of him.… He is, in many ways, a superior person. [Letter dated 19 January, 1975].
WTF!: We highly recommend Confessions of a Crap Artist, not only for the characters but for the profoundly critical view of the 1950s, way ahead of its time. The French made a film based on this novel, in case you didn’t know. Thank you, Philip K Dick.
Postscript
For researchers and fans: California State University at Fullerton holds the author’s original manuscripts, letters and ephemera, with a full menu of PKD materials for inspection, with permission to photocopy. They give you the menu, and the librarian fetches what you request from the reference stacks. We recommend trying their online service.
