ABSTRACT
I have to admit I have some slight misgivings about writing an ‘academic’ chapter on Philip K. Dick. Not that I am the first to do so. In the twenty years or so since his death, Philip K. Dick has attracted a small army of interpreters. He has been seen as a prophet of hyperreality and as a gnostic visionary of the suburbs (Starr, 1993). In discussions on the internet he is often referred to as the ‘Godfather of Cyberpunk’. Certainly, Dick created a body of fiction that brings to life the indeterminacy between originals and simulacra that is the hallmark of virtual reality – both as metaphor and as technology – of post-industrial society (Sutin, 1995). Dick’s landscapes tend to be highly commercialized spaces in which the boundaries between autonomous individual and technological artefact have become increasingly permeable (Hayles, 1999). But more of this later. My misgivings have to do with the fact that Dick, a writer who spent most of his life working within the tight confines of the pulp markets, felt animosity toward ‘mainstream’
academicians who sought to adopt SF, as it were, and make it respectable or important (notwithstanding the fact that, at the same time, the lack of mainstream attention for his work was a source of pain for him). The following extract of an unpublished book review captures this animosity:
If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death . . . Professor Warrick’s pound-and-a-half book with its expensive binding, paper, and dust jacket staggers you with its physical impression, but it has no soul and it will take our soul in what really seems to me to be brutal greed. Let us alone, Dr. Warrick; let us read our paperback novels with their peeled eyeball covers. Don’t dignify us. Our power to stimulate human imagination and to delight is intrinsic to us already. Quite frankly, we were doing fine before you came along.
