On "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick (ca. 9000 words) ***

Made into the movie Total Recall twice now, the original story features aspects that are picked up in both films but goes in a different direction by its end. The opening of the story is somewhat similar to those films: a man leading a humdrum life discovers that he was once a secret agent. In this case, he was an agent on Mars, though of course, that is the very memory he's gone to Rekal Inc. to have implanted as a means of escaping his humdrum life--to fulfill his dream of going to Mars. From there, the story becomes a trip. Is the memory real or implanted? And now that his life has been changed--or returned to what it was?--how does he solve the problem that he is supposed to have lost this secret agent identity? The story has a number of great themes, but it feels forced in terms of the quickness with which it is told. The dialogue serves the plot more than the character. The tale feels as if it need to the breathing space of a novel. But Dick here is writing pulp, and it serves that purpose well. Just as it served well as the basis for a couple of movie versions, which feel like they have the breathing space required. You can read the story here.

On "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" by Philip K. Dick ***

Philip K. Dick's last novels were much more boldly religious. This, his very last, doesn't even bother with a science fiction plot. And probably, Dick was happy with that, since he himself had originally set out to write literary texts, or so say some of his biographers. Since his science fiction was all that would sell, he stuck to that and worked his themes into the genre. The genre is richer for it, and probably Dick was better off as a sci-fi writer. Talented, yes, as his novel Valis proves, but not terribly interesting much of the time when he was writing straight.

Timothy Archer is first of the final novels--all of them religious in  theme--that I actually found pretty good. It is about a bishop who comes to recognize certain truths about the world around him and who subsequently changes his life. It begins where it ends, with him dying in the wilderness in search of a psychotropic mushroom he believes is what Jesus' disciples were really ingesting when they took the bread and wine.

But really, it's not a novel about Bishop Timothy Archer at all but about his daughter-in-law's search for the meaning of the various lives and deaths around her: the deaths of her husband Jeff Archer (Tim's son) and of her friend Kirsten (Tim's mistress), and also of Tim.

And it's also a novel about knowledge, about spirit versus materialism. Tim Archer, strangely, rejects the teachings of Jesus in favor of believing that they are actually predated by an earlier sect, that Jesus wasn't the son of God but a person trumpeting ideas of this other tribe, the a mushroom is his body and blood that transforms via a druggy high. And yet, at the same time, it is Tim Archer's faith, that the dead, for example, can communicate with the living, that spurs him toward many of his final actions.

Angel is the materialist from start to finish (or maybe not?), as is the schizophrenic Bill (Kirsten's son; except, once again, maybe not?). Characters move between these two states of belief settling perhaps on an idea that most important of all is our compassion toward one another.

On "The Divine Invasion" by Philip K. Dick *

When I was younger, I was a huge fan of John Steinbeck. It's been a long while since I picked up one of his works, and the last time I did, I couldn't find myself as interested in it as I hoped to be. I think there are likely some books I could read of his and enjoy a lot, but for now, they rest more as great works in my memory.

One of Steinbeck's regularly employed techniques was allegory. It is the use of that technique that probably has me less interested in him now than I once was. Allegories can be good, if used subtly, and Steinbeck's sometimes are.

Dick's Divine Invasion is another allegory, and it is not subtle at all. It is the story of a man living on another planet who is commanded to take up with a woman who is a virgin and who becomes pregnant with a child. The family is commanded to immigrate back to Earth, at much personal peril. While the woman dies in an accident, her offspring survives. This offspring, as we learn, is in fact Yah--God. Add in a prophet named Elisa, and you've got a retelling of the Advent.

The world isn't too kind to Emmanuel, the name given to Yah as a human boy. It wants to kill him, to rid itself of this divine invader--and that mostly in the name of a religion that doesn't understand the true faith. I could go on. The novel is full of discussions about faith and religion and reality, but really, if I'd wanted to read the Bible, I'd have read the Bible and gotten more out of it.

On "VALIS" by Philip K. Dick **

In places, this seems to me one of Dick's best-written novels. This is especially true in the first half of the book. And it is in the first half of the book that the text is in fact mostly autobiographical--and realistic. Dick's one strange plot device: he splits himself into two. So there is a first-person narrator (the first in the novels I've read of his) and a third-person character who is also, in a sense, himself. The third-person character is there to help him deal with his troubles, to be able to write this all down. In that sense, that character, Horselover Fat, is akin to a secondary personality in a person with a schizophrenic disorder. And indeed, one gets the sense that that is exactly that Dick intends.

The reason for the disorder is this: Dick's friend Gloria has committed suicide. He tried to stop her, or he didn't try to stop her well enough. Whichever is the case, it doesn't matter. She's dead. How could she do this? And how could he not stop her? Likewise, why does his friend Sherri suffer from an incurable cancer that also eventually kills her? And why did Fat's friend Kevin's cat die?

It is the search for the answers to these questions, the search for the answer to why their is pain and suffering in the world, that causes Fat and Phil to eventually become familiar with a cast of other characters and situations that lead him toward a partial answer.

In this book, Dick's concern with gnosticism is explicit. Long passages are devoted to theories of the universe and of God. Dick posits that there are in fact two gods, a god of the earth and a god above that god. The higher god is all good, but the lower one is not. It is the lower one with which we deal--and the reason that there is suffering.

Add to this a few science fiction plot devices in the second half of the book, and we get back to slightly more typical Dickian fare. It turns out the world is a toxic place and we're all being fed an antitoxin by a "VALIS" system that keeps us alive but that also keeps us from understanding the ultimate reality. For to understand the ultimate is to die. There's also a movie called Valis that reveals some of this info to the characters and ultimately helps Dick and his compatriots get in touch with a baby who is also a messiah figure who can tell them all. Sent out into the world to make disciples, their messiah dies, leaving them with seemingly no meaning.

So what then does it all mean? It means, I suppose, what we want--we are god, we assign meaning. This is the existential truth. But in the end, the novel seemed to me too weighed down by these lofty themes and discussions to be the usual fun text that I've come to relish from Dick's other better works.

On "A Maze of Death" by Philip K. Dick **

This is not one of Dick's stronger books. More an allegory than a novel, the characters largely serve the plot and the themes. As such, many of their actions are pretty much nonsensical, as their personalities turn radically from page to page in order to aid in the novel's twists and surprises. This is something Dick has shown a tendency to do in other books I've read, but here it is at its full splendor, if one wishes to call it such.

The particular allegory here has to do with the life we lead and the religion we live by. Why are we here? is the big question of the book. It's posed by the fourteen people who end up alone on planet. They're there to start for a project--perhaps to forge a colony, perhaps to explore the planet, perhaps something else entirely--but none of them, it appears, have any particularly useful skill sets. One's an economist. One's a psychologist. In other words, these are a group of white-collar workers with no skills worthy the hands-on projects they'll need to complete to survive.

A problem arises soon after they arrive, however. The true mission of their trip to this planet is bound up in a satellite transmission that, midway through its message, goes bad. "Your purpose is" ends with three dots on the end that will never see a finale. To make matters worse, they've arrived on one-way transport vehicles, so they can't get off the planet. Without a means to communicate and without a means to leave, they now have to make do as a colony of misfits.

The "death" part of the title doesn't take long to arrive. The planet features various small, man-made creatures--bugs that take photos, forts that scrabble around like mice. Some of these might not have the colonists best interests at heart. Some of the colonists die, and it doesn't take long for the rest of them to turn on one another.

There's an interesting twist that comes later in the book that at least partially redeems it and partially explains the silliness of the characters, but that's not something I'll reveal here, even though I'm not sure I felt like the hundred-plus pages leading to it makes the reading worth it. Suffice to say, much is not as it seems.

On "Understanding Philip K. Dick" by Eric Carl Link ****

This is the first book from University of South Carolina Press's "Understanding" that I have read, and if this book is anything like the others, I'm going to have to read some more. The book is a very short introduction to Dick's life and work, discussing his biography and major themes and giving closer readings of a few select works.

The biography I was very aware of by now, having read two books about Dick's life. But it was nice to have someone summarize it so well. Likewise, having now read six of Dick's novels and a small assortment of his stories, I'm familiar with most of his major themes and motifs, but having someone write those out for me--and explore what those things really mean--was satisfying as well. Having left off the academic study of literature fifteen years ago now, I don't tend to read as closely or as methodically as I used to, and I felt a bit silly not to have picked up on some of what now seems very obvious in some of the works that Dick has written. Most specifically, Link linked some of the reading in Jung, Binswanger, and the I Ching that I've done in a concrete fashion, something I'd been too lazy to think through thoroughly myself.

Of central concern to Dick is the ability to know--or to know transcendence--as Link puts it in hs book's conclusion. This is, of course, where he connects up with many of the concerns of the gnostics. And it also links to his concerns about the nature of reality and of the self--for if we can't know who or what "god" is, then how can we even know the world around us or within us? Or as Link puts it in his chapter on themes, Dick essentially sets out to know two thing: What is real and what is human? If some kind of transcendent existence is real, how do or can we know? Isn't it just as possible that such experiences are the workings of a madman's mind? Or are the mad the ones who truly understand the world (as in the case of the schizophrenics who populate many of Dick's works and who figure in Jung's own work)? For humanness, Dick posits his concept of empathy--it is our ability to feel with others that makes us human. However, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, even this can be problematized.

Other themes of Dick's work, to give a short list, include: what is real, what is the self, what is human, the nature of power, the effects of technology and media, the effects of drugs, and what is madness. One of the most interesting readings of a Dick novel, I think, was Link's critique of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. He sees the work as largely one about love--or different messed-up forms of love. He attaches Dick's biography to this, as it was written during the breakup of Dick's fourth marriage. The novel itself details various forms of betrayal amid love, including the incestuous brother/sister-man/wife relationship at much of the novel's core and the love of one's child (in the form of that family's own child). Indeed, Jason Taverner, who I see as more the focus of the book, loses his identity largely through an act of betrayal: his betraying of his friend with another woman, the other woman's vengeful act in return for Taverner's dumping of her, and his friend's betrayal in the form of her own affair.

Having read this book, I certainly came away having felt like I knew Dick's work even better than before.

On "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick *****

I enjoyed this novel of Dick's more than any of the previous one's I've read. Here are some reasons I think this might be so: (1) I saw the movie and liked it first; (2) it's more like a regular book than a sci-fi novel; or (3) it's about drugs and includes some cool plot devices.

The movie, directed by Richard Linklater, is an animated feature--or really, it's a live action theater that has been traced over with ink. Such seems appropriate in a way for the trippy subject matter. Starring Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves, Wynona Ryder, and Robert Downy Jr., the piece had no shortage of big names attached to it. Downy was the highlight of the film to me, and his character James Barris is a highlight of the book as well--extremely funny. Would he have been as funny in the book if I hadn't seen Downy's portrayal first? I don't know. Unlike many a film adaptation, this one actually seems to have followed the book fairly closely, so I've been hard pressed to say whether I actually like one more than the other. I can't even say they're that different, other than the fact that they are different mediums.

The tale itself has barely any tie to science fiction. The main reason it could be classified as such: a suit that police investigators wear that allows their identities to be hidden. The suit essentially changes its appearance several times a second, so you can't really describe a single person. At the time of the book, this was probably fantasy; today, it's likely possible, since it's possible now to wear a suit that would make you invisible. Cool technology.

Other than that, however, this is a book about druggies and about the police who try to catch them. But like many a noir novel, the line between the two is not very easy to see. Police engage in drug deals in order to work their way further up the drug chain; they take drugs themselves to fit into the culture. And because they work undercover and don't know their identities, many are the times when one agent is investigating the drug-related activity of what turns out to be yet another agent, who is also simply trying to find people higher up the pecking order to bust. In fact, one gets the sense that the entire system might be run by some kind of drug conglomerate.

In the middle of this is Bob Arctor (think Actor--he after is one of the police/druggie posers) or Fred or Bruce. Bob, as in the novel The Big Clock is eventually assigned the job of investigating himself. But in the process, he begins to lose his mind: Is he Bob or Fred or Bruce? Is he all three?

This gets back to a continuing theme in Dick's world--namely, that of identity. While Jason Travener, in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loses his identity completely to the world, Bob loses his identity to himself. In both works, Dick seems to be suggesting that personal identity is at the least significantly created by the society around it rather than within the individual. The individual, ungirded from that social link, is nothing. Conversely, I suppose, one could argue that Travener has an identity because he spends the novel trying to regain it. Here, in A Scanner Darkly, however, Bob/Fred/Bruce isn't working to regain any one of those identities. At his core, he doesn't know who he is, and he comes apart as a result.

On "I Am Alive and You Are Dead" by Emmanuel Carrere ****

In reading this biography, I was reminded a bit of the life of L. Ron Hubbard, another science fiction writer whose tales became eventually the reality of his life. Philip K. Dick seems to have gone similarly insane. Both were "crap artists" of a sort, though Hubbard was into the con, whereas Dick merely told tales--and took odd positions--for amusement. But in the end, they both seem to have been mentally sick gentlemen.

I had previously read the biography of Philip Dick by his third wife Anne. In that book, she comes across as a bit crazy and high strung but largely sympathetic and very much still in love with her husband. In this book, she is the subject only of a chapter or so, and she does not come off all that well at all. High strung, she pushes Dick over the edge. But then, every woman except Kleo, his second wife, seems to do that eventually. He was, it appears, a very difficult man to live with. (After all, what kind of loving man offers a dedication to his wife that also takes a swipe at her--namely, "For Anne, who stayed quiet long enough for me to write this.")

Carrere traces Dick's life from its beginnings, when Dick's sister dies in infancy, the survivor guilt from which Dick would carry throughout life and an event that would play a role in many of his novels (wherein Dick imagines one character in a dream world and the other--the dead one--in the real world). This is in part the subject of Ubik, apparently one of his best novels (unfortunately not among the books I chose for my reading list). The biographer also, as a more-distant observer than Anne, offers various critical views on Dick's work, beyond Ken in this book equals Albert in real life (as Anne was wont to do, a practice that seems somewhat dubious, since characters might be based on reality but aren't reality).

What is clear is that while philosophical ideas, psychological ideas, and religion fascinated Dick, he also liked to be a contrarian, one who simply took whatever position others weren't. And in the end, he began to believe his own crazy ravings and rants, his own books full of paranoia. Amid bad marriages, he heavily inundated himself with prescription drugs (which would allow him to write a book in two weeks). When his marriage to Anne ended, he moved on to living among a young crowd of druggies. In the midst of this, his house was robbed, and this robbery would become the focus of much of his obsession in later life: Who did it? Was it the Feds? Was it communist agents? Was it himself? He became so obsessed with such ideas that when his work found some following among Eastern Europeans, he wondered if it might not be a communist plot of some sort and started up correspondence with the FBI, which bemusedly ignored him.

Later, having given up the drug lifestyle (though not necessarily all of the drugs), Dick became even more heavily steeped in religion, such that he sometimes thought he was having visions. At some points, he claimed to believe he was a John the Baptist-type personage, announcing the coming of the One, the next prophet down the line to come from the beyond. And his books might indeed be part of this.

Carrere makes a case that at the end of Dick's life, he possibly had a change of view: toward a belief that this world, this concrete world we're in, is real. No use pretending otherwise. But because Dick was one to constantly change positions, to arouse a person's ire, there's no way of knowing how sincere he was even in this position.

On "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" by Philip K. Dick ****

This may rank as my favorite Philip K. Dick work so far (though I have fond memories of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I read nearly two decades ago and thought intriguing but poorly written; I'm not so sure I'd have the same opinion now, and of course, much of my nostalgia actually comes from the movie, which is a very different animal and, actually, not as interesting in terms of theme).

Flow My Tears is an It's a Wonderful Life tale, but without the pleasant vibe. It took me a while to recognize the basic plot line as one that's been done many times before. Rather, my mind went to stories in which a character wakes up with amnesia. Here, however, the main character wakes up and knows exactly who he was the day before--only no one else knows him or remembers him, and his ID cards have been erased. Essentially, he doesn't exist.

But this isn't some tale where we learn just how many people depended on our character to survive. He doesn't, in fact, appear to have changed many people's lives at all, despite his seeming importance in the world as a pop star and variety show host. Like the empty entertainment he provides, he as a person is short on value.

Worse, he lives in a totalitarian society, a police state. Where once he was a man of privilege, he is now wanted. After all, it's illegal to go without your ID--and you can't get an ID unless you have a birth certificate, which you don't have if you don't exist. He's looking a slave labor, and so instead, he hires someone to make him some fake IDs, which proves to land him in just as much trouble.

Dick is asking big questions here--about fate (what value do we really have in the scheme of overwhelming forces?) and about identity. In the case of the latter, he seems to be suggesting that ultimately we don't control it; rather, society and circumstance forge identity for us. If we're lucky enough to host a talk-show, we're one person; if we're less fortunate, then we're likely some slave in a labor camp. The individual, in the end, isn't much value.

I've barely skimmed the surface of this text. As one would expect from pulp sci-fi, there are plenty of plot twists, and as with most of Dick's titles, there's some interest in psychological neuroses (though less than in the three previous texts I've read this year), in hallucinogenic drugs, and in altered states of reality.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that it's actually too short. I felt like he only told half the story, then got tired of it, and chopped out a summary epilogue chapter for the ending. Until then, this text was humming along, and the questions Dick seemed to be asking were still begging us to go further down the road. I could have seen something akin to Kafka's The Trial for the second half of the book, but it wasn't to be.

On "Being-in-the-World" by Ludwig Binswanger **

Binswanger was an existential psychologist that Philip K. Dick thought highly of. In some ways, Binswanger seems very much of his time and in line with Jungian psychology, which Dick was also a fan of. But in others, Binswanger seems to depart quite a bit from Jung, at least in my reading/understanding of him.

The understanding is based in part on the substantive introduction to this book, by the translater Jacob Needleman. When I say "substantive," I mean nearly 50 percent of the pages of this text. Needleman lays Binswanger out in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. As such, the work in total felt a bit over my head. I've never been that much of a fan of pure theory, and that's much of what is on hand here.

Needleman starts with Kant and with ideas about what is "real." Is the real the exterior world of things, or is it the interior world of thoughts? Do our thoughts compose those things, or do the things compose our thoughts? Kant finds a way to meld these two ideas with his concept of understanding--that we understand the exterior, essentially, thus bringing it into the interior.

But for Binswanger, an even bigger influence is Heidegger, whose work I've never had much enthusiasm for. Thus, most of my interest went more toward Needleman's later passages when he writes of Binswanger's actual closer tie (in terms of ideas, not influence) to Sartre. Sartre claims in a way that we compose our world, our reality--but we compose it with the things that are in the external world. Essentially, we have objects, but our interpretation of those objects is what makes the world.

Within this comes Binswanger, whose interest in these topics revolves in large part around treating psychological problems, especially schizophrenics. Here, he departs from Freud a bit (and I would think Jung too) in his concept of a meaning matrix. It's not enough, Binswanger seems to suggest, that objects have universal meanings (e.g., cigars as penises). We need to know why they have those meanings, what that meaning's significance is, and whether that meaning applies to a given person's situation. In this, I think Binswanger is a bit more practical--dreams do ultimately need to be seen in a personal rather than universal context for interpretation.

Binswanger's ideas of schizophrenia rest in these ideas of what constitutes reality. To him, a schizophrenic is one who loses "being-in-the-world." Such a person creates a world of his or her own, a world that is ultimately dislodged from the world and from the true self. The neurosis and fear becomes the center of existence, and thus the person ceases to exist in a real way. If All facts are interpreted through a twisted worldview. Thus, old clothes might become, for one person, for example, a harbinger of death, of old skin, and all actions then work their way out to avoid this.

If freedom of choice is based on the opportunities presented to us, the insane person actually lacks choice. He or she is handed a sleight of predetermined ideas or interpretations of the world, and all sensory perception is thus guided by them, as are all decisions. In this idea, it seems, Binswanger merges ideas of existentialism with those of psychology.

Binswanger is at his most lucid in his essay on the case of Lola Voss. Here, his theoretical discussions take on a concreteness that allows one to see them in action. It was in this essay that I began to feel, finally, like I was sort of beginning to understand what was being argued.

I suppose, if one wanted to try to apply Binswanger's ideas to Dick's books, Now Wait for Last Year, might be one that one could twist into appropriate shape. For in a sense, that book--about alternative universes--is also a book about interpreting one's reality, and changing one's past and future through such. But Dick's novel works on a very exterior/literal level--thus whatever psychological focus the work has arguably has been literalized as a surface part of the story.

On "Now Wait for Last Year" by Philip K. Dick ****

At heart, this science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick is a love story. Having read a biography of Dick, I find it hard not to see elements of his own life scattered across the novel--and elements of his own wishes and desires. Eric Sweetscent has a wife who is mentally unstable. Does he stick with her or does he leave her for an easier path? In real life, it was Dick who was the more unstable one (though he did once have a wife committed), and he never did manage to stick it out with one of his women, though at base, that's what he wished for: a stable middle-class American family.

The waiting for last year referred to in the title has to do with time travel, which forges a major portion of the novel. Sweetscent is an organ transplant doctor. Early on in the book, he is drafted by the head of the United Nations as one of the man's personal physicians. The man is not in good shape--he seems to intuit others' sicknesses as his own. And perhaps this too is a kind of wish fulfillment, a death wish, because years before, he brought Earth into a war with another civilization, a long-lost set of aliens whose ancestors are actually the same as humans. They're at war with a buglike race on yet another set of planets. The problem: The Starmen, Earth's allies, are not the good guys humans thought them to be.

Meanwhile, Kathy, Eric's wife, goes to a party where she takes a drug called JJ-180. Created as a weapon of war, the drug is instantly addictive and guaranteed to eventually kill you. It also allows you to temporarily transfer to other times--or other universes. For some people, those times are the present in parallel universes; for some, those times are in the past; and for still others, those times are in the future. (It's this latter possibility that becomes essential to the plot, since it is by going into the future that an antidote is found and brought back to the past--a nice loop, no?)

Kathy hates her husband, and Eric hates his wife, and yet neither of them seem able to ultimately break away from each other. Duty calls. So too does duty call for Molinari, the head of the UN. The will to live outpowers the will to die, just as the will to do one's duty outpowers the desire to do as one pleases. Marriage is a war, Dick seems to be saying. You're comrades to the end. Or so it is in this particular universe that Eric inhabits, even if not Dick's own.

The novel is full of surprises; I haven't given away the whole of them here. And it's that which made for it such interesting reading. As for the characterizations, some of the characters do things that seem, at times, utterly nonsensical--except that such actions are needed for the plot. Let's just say women don't come off looking too well in this book.

On "The I Ching" by Peggy Jones **

Not a book I would have ever expected to have found myself reading, the ancient book of divination, The I Ching, finds a new, more modern voice in the words of Peggy Jones. It is precisely for this reason that I chose Jones's version: it seemed more interesting than standard editions. Jones, in addition, is a Jungian analyst, which means one gets a perspective that fits well with C. G. Jung's own work. And, I would have hoped, Philip K. Dick's.

In the biography written by his wife, however, she had noted not only the influence of the I Ching on Dick's life but the lack of influence on his writing. He said the I Ching was a waste of time, yet he used it at times almost religiously. Other than that the two novels of Dick's on this list I've read so--Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney--center, in part, around attempts to read the future, I didn't really see much connection to Dick's work.

What I did note was how useful it is to me that a book has a narrative or a clear argument. Without those things, as in a work like the I Ching, I have a have hard time keeping focus. Jones's I Ching had many interesting lines and comments, but I couldn't order them into any kind of schema that would help me to be able to keep them in mind. The next to last hexagram "After Completion," for example, encourages us to enjoy the moment after something has been completed. That one would come upon this by luck (or fate, I suppose, if one actually believes in the I Ching system) suggests to me that every moment is a moment after completion, a moment to be appreciated. And a moment that cannot be hung on to--nothing stays completed.

There was a thought about fire, how it devours and yet is not anything "real" in the sense that we can lay our hands on it. This seemed somehow profound to me at the moment I read it, but I can't think of why so now.

The system itself can be put into practice by the tossing of coins. A certain number of heads versus a certain number of tails leads to a broken line or a solid line. Six lines compose a single hexagram, which leads us to the book for the interpretation.

Alan Watts suggests that the real point of the I Ching isn't so much the divination principles but that it is an expression of the rather spontaneous and from-the-gut nature of all decision making. We might think that we reason out our decisions, but we never have full information, and in the end, we are choosing by feeling, by the moment, haphazardly--and as such, we might as well be tossing coins.

On "Dr. Bloodmoney" by Philip K. Dick ***

This was one really odd novel. "Dr. Bloodmoney" refers to a certain physicist who is either insane or had superpowers, such that he can rain down fire from heaven in the form of nuclear war. The book itself is a postapocalyptic one, with multiple characters and storylines. In this post-nuclear-war world, civilization is slowly recovering. Without oil refineries, horses once again are the main form of transportation. Most live without electricity. Water is a precious commodity. And meat is a rare treat for a meal. But in addition, radiation has set in motion evolutionary changes such that some animals can now talk or fly that before couldn't and some humans have gained extrasensory powers that allow them to perform magical deeds (or did they have these powers before the war and kept them secret, in an age when machines could perform our magic).

Most of the plot revolves around a Hoppy, a legless and armless handy whose dexterous use of his metal extenders allows him to work wonders on machines and other things that need fixing. But Hoppy has other powers. He can see into the future (in characteristic Dick style, during epileptic fits). And he can, as we learn later, also control things with his mind far beyond the reach of his physical body. And it is there, in this spirit world, that most of the story's plot unfolds, for Hoppy isn't the only one with such powers. A man by the alias Dr. Tree, for example, also has such powers, as does a little girl's brother, Bill. But like Hoppy, Bill lacks full use of his limbs--in fact, he lacks a body completely and lives as a growth inside his sister's body. But he can communicate with the dead, and with that power, is able to wield control over others in the living world, a power that proves useful once Dr. Tree decides to cause the world war to resume and Hoppy sets his site on world domination.

The most poignant part of the novel is played by Walter Dangerfield, an astronaut to Mars. It is during the trip to Mars that the world erupts in global war, and as a result, Dangerfield is stuck in space, his rocket having lost communication with the people who control it on Earth. He'll never get to Mars, but he'll never get back to Earth either. And so, he spends his years broadcasting pleasant messages back to Earth's survivors, reading to them literature and playing music for them. It is Dangerfield's indominatable spirit that keeps the world hopeful. And it is a spirit that is in danger of being snuffed out by illness and greed.

It is hard to say what Dick was aiming for with this book. Most of the characters, especially the women, come across as selfish hooligans. But it isn't that war pushes them toward that. Rather, they were that way to start, and the war simply gives them even more opportunity to exert their base instincts. It is only in believing in the power of someone above us (i.e., Dangerfield) that we can survive, and is only through the aid of psychoanalysts who can draw out the stories of that someone above us that we have any hope.

On "Symbols of Transformation" by C. G. Jung *

Not easy or enjoyable reading in any manner, Jung's classic text at least manages to provide some interesting observations to think on and to pretty thoroughly relate a wide set of various mythological, religious, and literary images. In fact, in reading this book, I often thought not only on how widely Jung must have read but also on how much early psychological ideas rested in literary criticism.

In this book, Jung sets out to discuss symbols and their importance to our understanding of dreams and various psychological states (namely, the conscious versus the unconscious). He does this largely through an extended interpretation of one woman's written fantasies, a Mrs. Miller. To interpret these fantasies, he draws on similar images that show up in Christianity, in myth, in philosophy (Nietzche), in drama (Cyrano de Bergerac), and in one extended discussion in American poetry. Quotes from the latter, in fact, proved so interesting that I am tempted at some point to pick up Longfellow's Hiawatha.

The point of all this thought is, as Jung notes in his epilogue, to try to abolish the dissociation of the unconscious and conscious. By drawing these two spheres closer together, people will be less neurotic, less prone to schizophrenia. And this in turn takes us back to the book's start, where in Jung points out two ways of thinking. The two lists run something like this:

Conscious	Unconscious
Directed	Subjective
Adaptive	Inner motives
Uncertainty	Dream
Human knowledge	Myth
Verifiable experience	Prophetic
Will	Autism
More individual	Schizophrenic
	Faith
	Certainty
	No control
	Fantasy
	Libido/energy
	Less individual
	Secret

The list, is of course very rough. In other passages, Jung points to schizophrenia being related to a nonintegration of the two spheres, but he also seems at times to relate it to an active fantasy life, a living in the world of fantasy.

On the conscious side, we have uncertainty, which at first seems odd. But it in fact makes sense. The conscious side is continually verifying things, whereas the unconscious works on gut, on feeling, on faith--and as such, there is a kind of raw certainty that one can't have when all things must be verified by experience and facts. For Jung, the unconscious side is also less individual, because he believes in a collective unconscious. When we delve into the unconscious, we are in fact delving into a consciousness shared with the universe, the source of "symbols"--and of myth.

These symbols are not allegories or signs. There is no one-to-one correspondence in a symbol to something else in life. A symbol is not like a word. Rather, a symbol is an image whose contents transcends consciousness. A sign points to s specific thing; a symbol points to a general idea and remains, essentially, unknown, indefinable.

Some random thoughts of Jung's: The libido is a kind of psychic energy (not necessarily sexual), and it is commonly symbolized by fire or as a demon or a hero. This psychic energy creates the God image via archetypal patterns--man worships the psychic force within himself as a divinity. We can also call the libido desire or lust (without reason); meanwhile, will is wanting with reason.

We gain illumination or revelation while under or having just passed through distress. The distress corresponds to an archetype in the unconscious. The archetype has a specific energy that when transferred to consciousness is what brings about that revelation.

Love is the energy that connects man to God, the conscious to the unconscious, the outer to the inner. Christianity protects us from animal desire or instinct.

Secrets cut us off from others.

A schizophrenic mind is one that is unable to assimilate the unconscious/myth with consciousness, and thus the mind splits. "The more a person shrinks from adapting to reality, the greater the fear that besets his path"--this in turn is what creates neurosis.

The self is a ruler in the collective unconscious or inner world. The hero figure (in dream or myth) does what the unconscious wants to do but which consciousness won't allow.

I read Jung's book on symbols mostly because of its influence on Philip K. Dick. In what way does Jung relate to Dick's work? Not having read too much of his work yet, I can't say for sure how it permeates the writer's texts. That said, in Martin Time-Slip, which I finished fairly recently, there's quite a bit about schizophrenics. In that work, those with autism or schizophrenia are more tuned into the dream world and are, in fact, even able to foretell the future. In turn, however, they are unable to live in the everyday world with the rest of humanity. No doubt, as I turn to other works by Dick, my thinking will turn back to what I've learned about Jung.

On "Martian Time-Slip" by Philip K. Dick ****

The last and only time I read a Philip K. Dick novel was while I was an undergraduate in college, taking a class in film adaptation. I had not much enjoyed the movie Blade Runner, the basis for which was Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But as I watched the movie over and over and over for a class paper, I began to gain a certain appreciation for it (especially for the director's cut, since the narration is, to me, overbearing). The novel struck me as even more profound and direct in terms of its themes but at the same very much a pulp book: the writing didn't seem to me terribly sophisticated or strong.

Having just completed reading a biography of the man, I feel like virtually all of the elements of this most recent book I've read could be filtered through the things that that biographer--a former wife--had to say about it. I saw in the Mars setting certain preoccupations Californians have with landscape--namely, the need for water, and the way in which water comes from the mountains. Also, there's the preoccupation with real estate speculation, another common California motif. In fact, I'm not recalling exactly, but this might have been one of the novels the biographer mentioned as having been written straight, and then, failing to sell it, Dick simply reset the novel on Mars and sold it as sci-fi. That would make sense, except that the book veers more and more heavily into the fantastic as the plot progresses, such that Mars seems integral to the plot by the novel's end. Still, Dick himself did feel like, with this novel and Man in the High Castle, he had finally found a way to merge his desire to be literary writer with the fact that the only thing people wanted to publish or read of his was science fiction.

Indeed, if anything, this book is extremely focused not on questions of man in the universe per se but on psychological questions. Reading someone's ideas, from the 1960s, of what life on Mars would be like, it was kind of funny to see him referencing tape recorders and the like constantly, a technology that has pretty much gone away (I'm reminded of a really cool animation short that was nominated for an Academy Award a few years ago--it was sci-fi drawn as if Victorians were conceiving it, with space ships looking like huge wooden vessels). So too, the psychological themes stem to ideas that were in vogue at the time--Dick had a huge interest in Jung's work, as well as the work of existential psychologists'. And so we get vast sections--in fact, the heart of the novel--revolving schizophrenia and autism and the idea that these are related and might be related to a person's ability to live within time.

Sure, the book is about time travel, but interestingly, that travel takes place completely within the heads of the various characters, within schizophrenic seizures and dreams. In this way, the characters' can learn of the future, but they can't do anything to change the future (by going back to the past). What's there is already fated to happen, and that fate is death. The most we can do in light of this, it seems, is ignore such and struggle on.

The plot itself revolves around a scheme to develop a portion of the FDR Mountains on Mars. A human settlement has been planted on the planet, but the lack of water has kept the place from thriving. Developers, however, have word that the best prospect for water is in those mountains, and so the native Martians (yes, Mars has natives, who like so many other natives in history are thought to be essentially primitive and are pushed aside by "humans," even though it seems clear that Martians are actually of the same stock), the native Martians are pushed out. Meanwhile, hearing of this scheme, one local immigrant named Arnie Kotts sets out to find out where the best place to develop is so that he can beat the Earth UN developers to the spot and sell out the undeveloped land for huge prices; unbeknownst to him, some Earth-side investors have the same idea. And the race is on to find someone who can tell Arnie the future.

On "Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K. Dick (2672 words) ***

This short tale of Dick's still manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Some animal rights activists might take heart in its major plot point--what to do when needing food and all you have left to eat is each other or a sentient pig? This pig has other talents too, however, which may not have been counted on. What makes it okay to eat another creature? What makes something human or not? In what way does humanity bear responsibility for what's around it? These are the questions Dick addresses here. (Note: I'll be reading various works about and by Philip K. Dick over the coming months, so expect more stories and reviews on the subject, along with the usual links to great online stories.)

On "Search for Philip K. Dick" by Anne R. Dick ***

This biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick by his third wife (of five) is in some ways rather untraditional. It is, after all, a biography by an ex-lover. And in many ways, it is a kind of personal mystery story, which is why it is set up the way that it is.

By set-up, what I mean is that the book is not in strictly chronological order. We don't start at Phil's childhood but rather at his meeting Anne. His adult life starts there, and the rest of the book covers his life until his death. And then--then--Anne returns to Phil's childhood and covers his life until the moment he meets Anne. This strategy lends the tale a kind of poignancy one might find in a movie--and a kind of shift in sympathies. What I refer to in sympathies is that one feels most of Anne--until the end--when now we see Anne's entry into Phil's life from another perspective, that of his previous wife, Kleo. Now, instead of a love story, it's a tale of betrayal. Anne, the devoted wife who rescues Phil, is now the other woman who steals him.

This isn't to say that I felt sympathy for Anne all along. It's always a bit hard to feel sympathy for the adulterer, but Phil--at least in his reckoning--wasn't happy; Kleo didn't want to have children (though later we learn it was Phil who didn't want them--alas, just excuses for leaving). Beyond that, Anne has some emotional intensity I can't sympathize with; she and her new husband have fights in which she throws dishes--rather scary to me.

But as time progresses, she mellows, and it is Phil who becomes increasingly detached and disturbing. And Phil is disturbing--abusive, depressive, dependent, and drug addicted. The dependence on drugs began early. The child of divorced parents, in high school, Philip becomes progressively more uncomfortable with his surroundings and eventually drops out. This discomfort intensifies as he begins his career as a writer in early adulthood, such that he is diagnosed with agoraphobia among other things and issued prescriptions, which would prove to be a bane throughout his life.

It is during his life with Anne that he becomes increasingly paranoid and dependent on these drugs--and on Anne. But he also becomes abusive and, to put it bluntly, crazy. At some point, he gets his wife put into an insane asylum. A constant liar, he's able to convince others she's trying to kill him. This, obviously, lends to further problems in the marriage.

Eventually, he leaves Anne. And in this is the mystery that Anne tries to solve. She was, despite all his troubles, greatly in love with the man--and hoped and wished for him to return ever after. She was willing to put up with his insanity. Why, why did he leave? she asks, and that is what she sets to find out. In the process, she learns that she didn't really know him--and can't.

Despite Anne's constancy, he moves onto other women and other parts of California. He also moves on to more drugs--lots of them--and eventually ends up in rehab, so that at the end of his life, he is much less dependent on them than in the middle portion of his life. Meanwhile, his writing finds its audience, and his books begin selling enough copies such that, always poor early on, he's now rolling in doe. And as such, he becomes an incredibly generous man, though also a crazy one, as all-consumingly dependent on those around him as at any other point in life. Most women, eventually, can't handle it and move on--or he moves on from them to another. This inability to keep a stable family angered him throughout life.

Also he was bothered by the fact that people were only interested in his science fiction. He was interested in ideas, the state of man, and as such thought of himself as a literary author, but the literary books didn't sell--at least until he was a very well-established name late in life. So he had to write literature through his science fiction.

But the science fiction, as fiction by most authors, revolves around some rather consistent themes and motifs--the same stories told time and again. And with many of them based in people and events he actually knew.

The book ends with Anne's dreams about Philip. These alone are fascinating, but they are especially so when written out by a wife who is completing a biography of the man.