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Psychological Terror and Social Fears in Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction

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Psychological Terror and Social Fears in Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction Belphégor Giuliano Bettanin Psychological Terror and Social Fears in Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction As it developed during the twentieth century, the genre of science fiction has often used themes belonging to horror literature. In point of fact, these two genres have a good deal in common. Most obviously, science fiction and horror share a fantastic background and a detachment from the probabilities of realistic fiction. Also, the birth of science fiction is closely connected to the development of the gothic novel. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is commonly considered proto-science fiction, also represents a nineteenth-century development of the gothic novel. In addition, Herbert George Wells, whose work lies at the basis of modern science fiction, wrote at least one gothic novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau.1 The fusion of horror and science fiction has often generated figures of terrifying and evil aliens, robots that rebel against their human creators, and apocalyptic, post-thermonuclear-global-war scenarios. In this brief essay I shall analyze the ways in which Philip K. Dick incorporated horror themes into his oeuvre and the highly original results he obtained by mingling the two genres. For this purpose I shall discuss several of his short stories and his early novel Eye in the Sky. Besides the already mentioned motifs of the alien, the rebel robot and the atomic holocaust, Dick develops a mystical-religious motif as he explores a number of metaphysical problems that are strictly connected to his most characteristic interest in epistemological questions. From the moment of the publication of his first short stories and novels in the 1950s, Dick became one of the most representative authors of American social science fiction. According to Piergiorgio Nicolazzini, Dick's first novel, Solar Lottery (1955), is already an example of social science fiction (Nicolazzini, 25-26), and the same can be said for most of Dick's novels and a good number of his short stories. In the first decades of the twentieth century, science fiction focused on the celebration of science and progress. But after World War II, thanks to writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, and Dick himself, science fiction began to show an explicit awareness of the historical and social environment. In other Solar Lottery words, science fiction began to investigate and criticize society and the effects that science and progress had on it. Part of this social commitment fed on Cold War themes and produced pessimistic visions of atomic holocaust. In Dick's science fiction, for example, the theme of war is one of its most recurrent elements. The writers of his generation were children during World War II and grew up in a Cold War climate dominated by suspicion and fear. This existential climate certainly influenced young Dick's imagination and pushed him to explore the theme of nuclear war and the post-atomic wasteland. He also focused on the milieu of suspicion and paranoia that characterized small town America in those years. http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/vol3_no2/articles/03_02_Bettan_TerPKD_en_cont.html[11/22/2013 1:53:12 PM] Belphégor Regarding the threat of atomic war, in 1955 Dick wrote an essay titled "Pessimism in Science Fiction" in which he defends his work and that of his fellow writers as follows: Since science fiction concerns the future of human society, the worldwide loss of faith in science and in scientific progress is bound to cause convulsions in the SF field. This loss of faith in the idea of progress, in a "brighter tomorrow," extends over our whole cultural milieu; the dour tone of recent science fiction is an effect, not a cause. If a modern science fiction writer mirrors this sense of doom, he is only doing what any responsible writer does: If a writer feels that present-day saber-rattling and drum-beating are leading the world to war, he has no choice but to reproduce his feelings in his writings - unless he is writing purely for profit, in which case he never reproduces his feelings, only those sentiments that he feels will be commercially acceptable. (Dick, 1955, p. 54) This passage nicely captures how Dick felt: his sense of moral duty and his need to speak out against war and destruction in his works. Many of his short stories and novels deal with this theme, one of the most famous (although it does not actually deal with atomic war) being The Man in the High Castle (1962). Instead, Dr Bloodmoney (1965) describes the life of human survivors after a devastating atomic war. Instead of analyzing these well-known novels, about which a great deal has already been written, I would prefer to turn to one of Dick's short stories, The Man in the High Castle Breakfast at Twilight (1954), since it nicely captures people's sense of horror after an atomic conflict. In this story a middle-class American family is suddenly thrown into the middle of a nuclear war scenario. American soldiers burst into the house looking for survivors and supplies, under the family's amazed and frightened eyes. Unlike most of Dick's fiction, this short story has a positive and potentially optimistic ending. When they come back to their own time continuum during a bombing, and right before their The Man in the High Castle house is atomized, the members of the family are conscious of what may happen and willing to do all they can to avoid the future. At the end of the story, the words spoken by Tim McLean, the head of the family, rekindle the hope that men can work for a better future. Tim reassures his amazed and worried neighbors by saying that the damage to his house was caused by some problems with the central heating. Then he comments, "I should have got it fixed ... I should have had it looked at a long time ago. Before it got in such bad shape ... before it was too late"2 (Dick, Collected Stories vol. 2, 220).3 These words suggest how dangerous carelessness and the refusal to confront problems can be, especially http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/vol3_no2/articles/03_02_Bettan_TerPKD_en_cont.html[11/22/2013 1:53:12 PM] Belphégor when one has to cope with problems like those created by the Cold War. Tim's words also serve as a warning to all humankind; they encourage people to commit themselves to work for a better world and a better future. On the one hand, novels like Dr Bloodmoney and short stories like The Great C (1953), "Second Variety" (1953), and "Survey Team" (1954) are more pessimistic and disaster-oriented than "Breakfast at Twilight." On the other hand, the latter story is more effective in describing the atomic war as a horrific and irrational event. Irrationality also contributes to create the atmosphere of amazement and fright at the beginning of the story. In fact, there is no plausible reason why Tim McLean's house and family are transported through time to a future of destruction. Of course Dick does provide a pseudo-scientific explanation, according to which the concentration of energy due to the explosion of a nuclear bomb caused a distortion in the spatio-temporal texture and thus the transportation of house and family to the future during the night. Yet, this Dr. Bloodmoney explanation mostly serves to prepare us for the family's eventual return to their own time continuum and to raise a fundamental dilemma for the protagonists. Is it better to stay in the house and risk being pulverized during the next bombing, hoping that the bombing itself would produce an effect similar to that of the first and send the house back to the past; or is it better to follow the soldiers to the anti-atomic shelters and try to survive in that disastrous future. Tim has no doubts. He prefers to risk his life and those of his children rather than accepting the latter destiny. "You call that [being] alive?" he asks his wife when she expresses doubts about his decision. To the protagonists, and to the reader who shares their point of view, the situation is senseless and frightening. Suddenly, without any warning, the world they know disappears and gives way to a terrifying scene. Death and destruction surround the protagonists, and the horror of it all strikes the reader forcefully. Dick creates this effect to reinforce Tim's words at the end of the story: "Before it was too late." Also the fear of strangers plays an important thematic role in Dick's short fiction of the 1950s. In "The Skull" (1952)the protagonist is a time traveler who returns from the future to a small American town of the 1950s. Since he speaks with a strange accent, wears strange clothes, and sports a beard, he is immediately suspected of being a communist spy. Dick's critical attitude toward this kind of collective suspicion clearly emerges in stories like Martians Come in Clouds (1954) and Explorers We. In Martians Come in Clouds some aliens come to Earth from Mars and they are systematically destroyed by humans as soon as they land. The typical science-fiction motif of evil and monstrous aliens (memorably exploited in Ridley Scott's film Alien) is turned upside-down in Dick's story. The aliens are weak and defenseless while the humans behave like merciless villains. What turns men into evil doers is their fear of the other and the unknown. In this story they do not even try to communicate with the Martians. The only person who contacts the aliens is a boy.
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