City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2005 How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, and Philosophy in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick Aaron Barlow CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/25 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] How Much Does Chaos Scare You? Politics, Religion, and Philosophy in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick Aaron Barlow Shakespeare’s Sister, Inc. Brooklyn, NY & lulu.com 2005 © Aaron Barlow, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Foreword n 1989, while I was serving in Peace Corps in West Africa, II received a letter from an American academic publisher asking if I were interested in submitting for publication the doctoral dissertation I had completed the year before at the University of Iowa. “Why would I want to do that?” I asked. One disserta- tion on Philip K. Dick had already appeared as a book (by Kim Stanley Robinson) and Dick, though I loved his work, just wasn’t that well known or respected (not then). Plus, I was liv- ing in a mud hut and teaching people to use oxen for plowing: how would I ever be able to do the work that would be needed to turn my study from dissertation to book? When I defended the dissertation, I had imagined myself finished with studies of Philip K.