Cold Equations^*

Making Sense of an SF Writer's Opus (The Case of Philip K. Dick)

SFRA'2006 («When Genres Collide»), White Plains (Nova Iorque), 23 de Junho de 2006, organização da Science Fiction Research Association
in Thomas J. Morrissey e Oscar de los Santos (orgs.) When Genres Collide, Waterbury (CT), Fine Tooth Press, 2007, pp. 193-202
Licença Creative Commons: distribuição autorizada para usos não comerciais; interdita a cópia, modificação ou qualquer tipo de uso que não mencione a autoria original.

The following analysis was motivated by the need to certify if a logical structure can be applied – and, if so, to apply it – to the work of Philip K. Dick, the author I proposed to examine in my PhD thesis. The initial presupposition was that, if one tries to make sense of any writer’s oeuvre, particularly in the case of an author of genre fiction, biographical and psychological details, however relevant, must be subsumed to the themes that author chose to cover in his fiction, and even those may be considered in the larger frame of the «supersets» of themes that very same genre provides. This methodology was loosely suggested by the reading of the earlier attempts to come to terms with K. Dick’s work – Patricia Warrick’s Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Novels of Philip K. Dick, (as far as I know) the first PhD thesis on the author –, and tries to avoid some of its shortcomings while taking advantage of the potentialities of those approaches.

Patricia Warrick’s book, published in 1987, has been promptly criticized by scholars as Gary K. Wolfe¹, who accused her of not contemplating almost any other sources apart from her own personal conversations with Philip K. Dick. The book may also be devaluated on the account of being too «psychologistic», i. e., on the fact that Dick’s personal tribulations (especially his love life) are the single explanation for his evolution as a writer.

«Chronologically Dick’s writing divides into five periods. The divisions between these periods are somewhat arbitrary, determined as they are primarily by new phases in his thinking. […] the broad shapes of the periods emerge as clearly as mountains and valleys on a bright day and they coincide with his various marriages (except for the first marriage, which was brief and of little significance).

In his first or Apprenticeship Period when he was married to Kleo, he practiced his science fiction art primarily in the short story form […]. This period extended from 1952 to 1960. […]

In his second, or Mature Period, when he was married to Anne, he wrote some of his greatest novels, beginning with The Man in the High Castle and including Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. […]

The third or Entropic Period extends roughly from 1966 to 1973, and for the first half of these years, he was married to Nancy. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik are the great novels of this Entropic Period […].

The fourth or Regenerative Period began hen he remarried once again, this time to Tessa and wrote his brilliant drug novel, A Scanner Darkly […].

It is worth noting that in the fifth or Metaphysical Period when he wrote his religious novels, he was living essentially alone and had been for a rather prolonged period, the first in his writing career.» (Warrick, 1987, pp. 11-12, my emphasis)

However reproachable, this simplistic association between his life and his work highlights the importance of looking at the way Dick has shifted, throughout his career, across some distinct themes, from – in Warrick’s nomenclature – the «apprenticeship period» (or «magazine era») to the «metaphysical period»². But what may be accounted, in his or someone else’s work, as a theme? Warrick’s proposal is dependent on a psychological factor – it would never work with any other writer – and, in any case, it looks rather arbitrary. Kim Stanley Robinson’s «Table of Elements», a chapter of his PhD thesis (Robinson, 1984, pp. 25-37), tries to avoid that arbitrariness by appealing first to themes that are agreed as such in the field of science fiction studies; only after establishing their relevance for his analysis he connects them with Dick’s own handling of those themes.

These are, according to Robinson, 1) dystopias; 2) postholocaust worlds; 3) aliens, robots and artificial humans; 4) psychic phenomena; 5) time travel; 6) other planet colonies); 7) alternative histories; 8) spaceships; 9) reality breakdown. Almost everyone would agree that – with the exception of the latter, which Robinson himself concedes that is specific to Dick, not a «universal» of SF – these are in fact some (if not all) the defining themes of science fictional literature. But – apart from «reality breakdown», as was just mentioned – is this taxonomy, as Robinson seems to imply, a widely approved standard?

That is hardly the case. One thing is to identify a narrative motif (e. g. «space travel») as an SF theme, something very different to include that theme in a systematic classification. As soon as we jump from the first – we could say naïf or common-sense – approach and look for such systems, any hope of consensus falls apart. We need only to take a look at a handful of some other attempts to acknowledge, no matter how similar they may seem at first glance, the (sometimes irreconcilable) differences that stand in the way of that consensus. To highlight both the similarities and the discrepancies, Kim Stanley Robinson’s proposition may be confronted with three others, more or less contemporary with it: Brian Stableford’s «minimal» taxonomy (also from his PhD thesis, The Sociology of Science Fiction) (Stableford, 1987), Gary K. Wolfe’s five icons of SF (in The Known and the Unknown) (Wolfe, 1979) and – the one which more closely resembles Robinson’s, even though it doesn’t aspire to be more than a somewhat tidy division of chapters – Paul A. Carter’s inventory of themes in The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction³ (Carter, 1977).

The following table summarizes those four proposals, with some adaptations⁴:

Kim Stanley Robinson’s proposal is still the broadest of these categorizations – maybe because it had been inspired by Dick’s work as much as by those more or less agreed SF themes –, but, as the table reveals, none should be taken as universal. All take for granted that the reader will accept their classification, but the SF field itself seems to elude those attempts. Even if the same fate ultimately falls on our effort, I would like to suggest a different approach: instead of imposing «top-down» a set of categories, we should build them «bottom-up», preferably from a starting point that, however wide in its scope (which may, after all, prove to be an advantage), can be accepted as canonical by the scholarly field of «science fiction studies». Luckily, that canonical starting point already exists: it is The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls⁵.

The thick volume has over 1400 entries that could be relevant for this purpose – a number that can be found by subtracting the 2900 author entries from the approximately 4300 that constitute the encyclopedia. But the organizers have eased what seems at first a Herculean task: of those 1400 entries, a subset of 210 comprise what they have named the «Theme Entries», considered more relevant and thus, «substantially longer (most over 1000 words, and some over 3000)» (Clute and Nicholls (eds.), 1993, p. xv); the others are merely what they chose to call «Terminology Entries». As explained in an introductory section,

«The theme entries are the connective tissue of this encyclopedia and constitute a quarter of its length. Through them it is possible to derive a coherent sense of the history of sf (itself a theme entry) and of what sf is all about. […] Together, the theme entries form a detailed lexicon of sf’s main concerns, its subgenres, the genres to which it is most closely related, and the terms we use in talking about it.» (Clute and Nicholls (eds.), 1993, pp. xiv-xv, my emphasis)

Only a collective work like an encyclopedia can afford to claim such a wide scope, because, unlike a «system», does not need to worry with being redundant or, otherwise, incoherent: systematic thinking rationalizes ante factum, from an encyclopedia we should expect no more than, at the best, that rationality will emerge post factum. That is, to cut this story short, our goal⁶. To elude some arbitrariness or bias in that choice, those 210 theme entries may be supplemented with the ones found in two other similar (although more modest) works, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by George Mann (Mann (ed.), 2001) and the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature, by Brian Stableford (Stableford, 2004)⁷. Confirming our initial intuition, most entries found in those works have a counterpart in Clute and Nicholls’ – often the very same terms –, although some others had to be added⁸, increasing the number to 264.

Up until now, what we have is no more than a (long) list of terms. The key steps are yet to be taken. But no more than a quick look is needed to dismiss some of those entries as irrelevant to our purpose, for several reasons. Please keep in mind that we are looking for narrative themes, something that does belong solely to the diegetic universe of SF works. Among that list of 264 entries, many concern SF «externally», i. e., as a literary domain, either from the point of view of literary studies or in the interdisciplinary connections with other fields of knowledge. Some illustrations: «Absurdist SF», «Children’s SF», »Fix-up», «Postmodernism and SF», «Scientifiction», or «Tie-in» may be eliminated on this first account⁹. A small set of other entries – «Astronomy», «Ecology», «Medicine», «Sociology», «Theatre» are suitable illustrations –, and can also be ruled out on the second account. Yet others seem to be too specific, and its scope is covered by another, wider, category. «Moon», «Mars», and «Outer Planets», for example, point to broader themes as «Colonization of Other Worlds» and «Life on Other Worlds», while «Scientists» points to «Discovery and Invention», and «Time Police» to «Time Travel».

This first stage completed, we are now reduced to 68 entries, approximately a fourth of the initial 264. We may call this the «Level 1 List», as it contains only the subset of entries that point to (sufficiently broad) narrative themes that constitute science fiction as a literary field. Some narrow-scoped entries have been already «absorbed» by the remaining ones; however, another reduction of this kind is needed if we want a more functional set of (wider) categories, a «Level 2 List». To cut a long story short, some examples may clarify this new stage. Entries such as «Aliens», «Hive-minds», «Invasion», «Monsters», «Parasitism and symbiosis», and «UFOs» are usually instances – particular cases – of a well-known category or cluster that all of the above-mentioned authors consider relevant, the «Alien». Usually but not necessarily: «Hive-minds» is sometimes an instance of another category we may call «Mutants», and «Monsters» an instance of both «Mutants» and «Fantasy». To another category that had to be renamed as «Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence» belong the «Level 1» themes «Androids», «Cyborgs», «Robots», «Artificial intelligence», «Computers», and «Cybernetics», none of which repeated elsewhere.

Thus, with this «Level 2 List» we hope not only to arrive at a workable set of categories but also to get rid of some ambiguities that still plagued the former list. We are now reduced to only 12 categories, which are, after some renaming: «Aliens», «Alternate Worlds», «Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence», «Dystopias», «Space Travel», «Perception», «Machines» [excluding those in «ALAI»], «Holocaust and After», «Religion», «Mutants and Psi Powers», «Fantasy», and «Time». The resemblance with the ones that were proposed by Kim Stanley Robinson and the other authors may serve as an objection to our method: why bother looking at almost 300 entries in three encyclopedias to arrive at a similar result? My reply is very simple – we should not look at the similarities, but rather at the differences: 1) there are 12 categories, while none of the other classifications has more than 9 (one with a very problematic status, as it seems made to fit Philip K. Dick’s work); 2) since every writer is a singular case, one can always go back to a previous stage, i. e., to the 68 themes of «Level 1 List», and rethink the «Level 2 List» according to that particular situation¹⁰.

Now is the time to make use of that list of categories. As said previously, the proposed goal was to study the work of Philip K. Dick in the light of its themes. Every title he has written, from the shorter stories to the novels, was «labeled» with one or more of these 12 categories. It wasn’t always an easy task, particularly for the novels: as Kim Stanley Robinson has stated, K. Dick enjoyed «overloading»¹¹ them with almost all of these themes; some were minor details that had a residual importance to the advance of the narrative and had thus to be purged of.

A helpful tool for the accomplishment of this task was the usage of a software program called The Brain¹², which allowed the connection of every title with its corresponding themes. The result was a somewhat complex network of associations showing, in a graphical and thus almost instinctive way, how themes permeated each and every one of K. Dick’s works. If another kind of data is added to that network – namely, the date of composition of the titles –, we have yet another way of extracting new information. A (very simple) statistical «mining» of this data reveals, as expected, that some themes are more common in some chronological periods¹³. More precisely, if we want to interpret Philip K. Dick’s work through some kind of periodization, it is preferable that this periodization emerges from the data itself rather that imposing it from above or from some unexplainable «intuition», just as we said above about the themes.

The results were revealing. Although there is no time or space to disclose them here – that would be, more than another paper, the substantial part of my PhD thesis –, a few words may be enough to give a general picture. As soon as the 12 categories were reduced to 7 «super-categories» the following periods emerge from the work of Philip K. Dick: «Aliens and space travel» and «Dystopias» are, with a generous overlapping between them, the dominant themes in the 50s and in the first years of the next decade. Both then recede to the background – Kim Stanley Robinson would say the dystopias were always in the background¹⁴ –, that is, although they do not disappear, they give way to «Human vs. non-human» and «Perception vs. reality» as his main concerns. These were already present in former titles – Time out of Joint and Eye in the Sky are the best illustrations of «Perception vs. reality» in his early works, while some short stories were beginning to experiment with the opposition «Human vs. non-human» –, but most of the time had a secondary role. During the 60s they simply exchange places with «Aliens and space travel» and «Dystopias», an exchange that may be read, à la Patricia Warrick, as the entrance in his maturity as a writer: no longer concerned with emulating the clichés of the genre (apart from a few «pot-boilers»), he has found his voice, progressively less concealed by those clichés. Almost the same can be said of «Religion»: the 70s and his unexplainable «2-3-74» experience mark a patent shift to the theme of religion, but, as the theme was latent in titles as Cosmic Puppets (from the early 50s) or A Maze of Death (60s), it is not an abrupt shift as much as a gradual transition.

The most problematic of these 7 categories – when looked at from a chronological point of view – are «Fantasy» and «Time». At first it may seem, from their dispersion throughout his work – as if they are mere genre devices that reappear now and then. A closer look shows that both are some kind of «sidekicks» to other themes: «Fantasy», as some early short stories as «The World she Wanted» or «Small Town» reveal, is the mode that engulfs the narrative when there is no other way to disentangle by a rational explanation the problematic rapport between perception and reality – an escape that, instead of solving the enigma, deepens it further. Something similar happens with the category of «Time», but in this case «Religion» comes, in his later works, to the rescue: as Dick himself has suggested in his troubled essays «Man, Android and Machine», «If you find this World Bad, you should see some of the others» and «How to build a Universe that doesn’t fall apart two Days later», the structure of time (especially when explored by the genre: time travel, time shifting, etc.) is for him closely connected to the structure of reality and can also be perceived as an illusion. Disclosing the «real» structure of time is then not only a way to uncover reality but also its fundament, i. e., God.

Although this complex relation between «Time», «Fantasy» and «Perception vs. reality» may be considered a late attempt, made by none other than Philip K. Dick, to rationalize his idiosyncratic use of SF’s themes – as Pamela Jackson has noted in her PhD, The World Philip K. Dick Made¹⁵ –, it is an attempt that should not be discarded, because it matches the temporal ubiquity of those themes in his work.

A final word concerning the method I have exposed: as the title of this paper implies, it is a method, not the method. It proved its usefulness in pointing to some aspects of Philip K. Dick’s work and in trying to confer it some sense of unity. Unity, of course, may be only in the eye of the beholder; however, if we do not thrive to pursue it, at least in a «weak» sense, literary criticism becomes a vain enterprise. As to a deeper understanding of the aspects of his work this method has drawn attention to, it is precisely at that point that its utility ends and other analytical tools must come to the fore.

Bibliografia:

Carter, Paul A.

1977 The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, New York (NY), Columbia University Press.

Clute, John and Nicholls, Peter (eds.)

1993 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Second Edition, London, Orbit, 1999.

Jackson, Pamela Renee

1999 The World Philip K. Dick Made, PhD thesis in Rhetoric presented at University of California at Berkeley, mimeographed.

Mann, George (ed.)

2001 The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, New York (NY)/London, Carroll & Graf/Robinson.

Robinson, Kim Stanley

1984 The Novels of Philip K. Dick, Ann Arbor (MI), UMI Research Press, 1984 (revised edition of a PhD thesis in Literature, presented at University of California at San Diego, 1982).

Stableford, Brian

1987 The Sociology of Science Fiction, San Bernardino (CA), The Borgo Press (revised edition of a PhD thesis in Sociology, presented at the University of York, 1978).

2004 Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature, Lanham (MD)/Toronto/Oxford, The Scarecrow Press.

Sutin, Lawrence (org.)

1989 The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, New York (NY), Vintage, 1995.

Warrick, Patricia

1987 Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, Carbondale and Edwardsville (IL), Southern Illinois University Press.

Wolfe, Gary K.

1979 The Known and The Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, Kent (OH), The Kent State University Press.

1988 «Not Quite Coming to Terms» (review of Patricia Warrick, Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick), Science-Fiction Studies, n. 45 (vol. 15, pt. 2), Montréal, SFS Publications, July 1988, pp. 234-236.

Notas:

^* Texto realizado no âmbito de uma bolsa de doutoramento da Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, ao abrigo do programa POSI.

¹ Cf. the short review «Not Quite Coming to Terms», published in July 1988’s issue of Science-Fiction Studies, a special issue on Philip K. Dick (Wolfe, 1988). In spite of some enlightening interpretations, namely the chapter on Do Androids Dream…?, Wolfe acutely identifies some flaws on Warrick’s book, which is, he argues, «a kind of freshman introduction to literature, overexplaining familiar concepts» (Wolfe, 1988, p. 236).

² To be more precise, even though there are five periods, Patricia Warrick speaks of eight themes: «usage and abuse of power» (in the «apprenticeship period»), «madness», «war and holocaust», «reality vs. illusion» and also «good vs. evil» (in the «mature period»), «death» (in the entropic period), «drugs» (in the regenerative period), and «religion» (in the metaphysical period).

³ A chapter is missing from our adaptation. It is chapter 7, entitled «The Bright Illusion, The Feminine Mystique in Science Fiction», which deals with the persistence of male/female stereotypes in SF. Although transversal to themes (and nowadays an increasingly important approach in SF studies), it cannot be considered as a narrative theme.

⁴ E. g., Kim Stanley Robinson’s category of «aliens, robots and artificial humans» had to be sliced in two to fit the others, and extending, in Wolfe, «(space)ship» to time travel may also be disputed.

⁵ We speak, of course, of the 1993 edition. The first one, edited only by Peter Nicholls and published in 1979, has been largely superseded by the latter.

⁶ The first step towards it, the first attempt to give some order to this apparent chaos, was taken however by the editors themselves, by drawing the above mentioned line between «Theme Entries» and «Terminology Entries».

⁷ Remarkably, Brian Stableford was one of the most prolific contributors to Clute and Nicholls’ Encyclopedia.

⁸ Most of these were mere «terminology entries» in the Encyclopedia.

⁹ The elimination process isn’t always as easy as it seems from these illustrations. Some provide an interpretative challenge, and only the contents of the Encyclopedia can serve as a guideline.

¹⁰ Something I have not tried, as my subject was solely Philip K. Dick, but the point of having an intermediate level is precisely to avoid incautious generalizations. Only further researches may settle if the twelve «Level 2» categories are appropriate to other cases.

¹¹ That is particularly emphasized by Robinson in the way Dick populated his novels with characters with psi powers: «The element is never the principal one in any of the novels, but is rather part of the overload effect.» (Robinson, 1984, p. 30) We should however note that, while that topos is definitely inconsequential in most novels of the 60s, it is central in some short stories and novelettes written in the 50s (as «The Minority Report»), and also at least in one novel (The World Jones Made).

¹² The current version, «Personal Brain 3.0», is available at www.thebrain.com.

¹³ The correlation wasn’t that patent in our first attempt. However, a new clustering of themes – two categories from «List 2» (sometimes three, in the case of «Artificial life and artificial intelligence», «Machines», and «Mutants and psi powers») were combined in one new «super-category» – was enough for that correlation to emerge more clearly.

¹⁴ I am thinking in the following excerpt from The Novels of Philip K. Dick: «Some elements form the background or setting against which the action takes place, while other elements are part of the foreground action. A dystopia is an element of the former sort, and it is the most common element in all of Dick’s work. When those works that have utopian aspects to them, The Man in the High Castle and Dr. Bloodmoney, take place in worlds where nuclear was is imminent or has actually occurred, so there is still something of the dystopia in them.» (Robinson, 1984, p. 27, my emphasis)

¹⁵ As she said, «Dick’s quest for the Real takes him back, ironically, into fiction. […] Has he fallen into one of his own novels? Or could it be that his own novels have been telling the truth about our world all along – our real world whose perverse, science fictional, even demonic nature is only becoming evident? Either way, his novels are now acquiring, for him, the “ring of revealed truth”. The writer begins to study his books like a detective, looking for the cosmic secrets he now suspects might be encoded in their science fiction surfaces.» (Jackson, 1999, p. 3)