A Study of Philip K. Dick´S Science Fiction Dystopias

Podlesny, Damian. "Utopias Turned Sour: A Study of Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction Dystopias." US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions. Ed. Saskia Fürst, Yvonne Kaisinger, and Ralph J. Poole. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2017. 161-174. ISBN 978-3-643-90931-2 (pb). Utopias Turned Sour: A Study of Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction Dystopias Damian Podlesny Chad Walsh announced the gradual but imminent decline of utopian fiction in 1962, stressing that "most 20th century writers who care to speculate about possible societies seem to have lost their utopian dreams" (16). The decline of utopia and the rise of its "nightmare cousin" (15) is strikingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, parallel to the history of the strangely surrealist 20th century. The 20th and 2! 51 centuries have seen an immense production of imaginary societies. The overwhelming majority are negative utopias or dystopias; some of them have the luck to have appeared in hard cover, most of them were published in cheesy covers of pulp Science Fiction paperbacks or cheap Science Fiction magazines, where they went out of print never having reached wider readership. Still among these 'trashy' fantasies many works exist that are worth deeper analysis, as they propose ideas powerfully plausible; and what is more important, because they try to give answers to the questions which mankind has asked for a long time: 'Where do we come from? Wl1ere are we heading?' The early prose of Philip K. Dick, whose oeuvre has never been easy to classify or label, belongs to the tradition of dystopian Science Fiction. Dick projects his societies into the future (usually not too distant) and invents amazing forms of the 'perfect' means of governing societies. However these inventions always tum more or less sour and the utopia subtly shifts toward dystopia or in extreme cases absolute paranoia. Thus this chapter analyzes the elements of dystopian Science Fiction in Dick's early short stories and novels, presenting how the utopias go wrong and how easy it is to sabotage the ideas that initially appear to be innocent idealistic concepts. Science Fiction in part is a direct descendant of utopian and dystopian traditions and speculation is the tour de force of the genre. Dystopias in general reveal the rigidity and over-ratiocination of the utopian concept; 162 DAMIAN POOi.ES Y they ridicule a somewhat mechanistic vi ion of society and the individual. Dystopian Science Fiction focuses mostly on alternative structures as such using them as a warning, a sort of future projection of the "ultimate maladies to be expected from the extension of a scientist or collectivist ethos" (Aldridge 66). It is however extremely difficult to make hard and fast distinctions among certain types of utopias, dystopias, and Science Fiction, as they overlap in many areas. One may argue that George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Yevgeny Zamyatin 's We belong to the tradition of Science Fiction, but they would rather fall into a category of the 'anti-scientistic' dystopias (Aldridge 66), where society is ordered according to instrumental values and on the assumption that people are standardized and manageable. Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin provide a more precise division of at least two distinct strands of dystopian fiction. One which considers more fully what Wells called 'human ecology' and is central to science; and another, more purely political, which is less concerned with scientific development and the impact of technology on man, and more inlerested in making concrete certain tendencies in political thought. (34-5) In the age of technology it is only natural that dystopias have become more preoccupied with the use of technology; fittingly dystopian Science Fiction has always been skeptical about the application of scientific development. Scholes and Rabkin stress that it is "the tendency among later British and American writers of dystopian fictions to assume that technological and biological processes have extended beyond governmental control and will effectively shape human life regardless of the nominal system of government" (35). Dystopian Science Fiction then does not focus on an activated and thus corrupted version of utopia; its central theme is actually the destrnctiveness and the maleficent impact of science and technology on society (Aldridge 67). The novels and sho1t stories discussed in this chapter all come from the early stage of Dick's career. They deal with the problem of mechanical devices that have started thinking independently and eventually go amiss. Dick's fear of the mechanization of human life is clearly discernible, but what seems most fearsome is how Dick sees the threat that artificial intelligence poses. Vulcan's Hammer, "Second Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction Dystopias 163 Variety," "The Defenders," and "Autofac" represent the notion that an artificial brain is unable to empathize, and that once it becomes independent it will strive to eliminate all inconsistencies and illogicalities, thus trying to limit or even eradicate human life. Dick's stories swarm with interesting technological innovations; his wonders of teclrnology are not much more imaginative than those of many other Science Fiction writers, it is Dick's crooked imagination, as far as the implementation of those ingenuities is concerned that makes the difference. Usually technology is not implemented as means to secure a breakthrough in society's development; rather it is introduced to improve the operation of existing practices. Dick leaves no place forideal ism; it is the struggle for profit and power that gives bi11h to such systems of corrupt and business-infiltrated governments. For example in "Minority Report" (1956), the Police apparatus is aided by an elaborate facility that makes use of tlu·ee clairvoyants foreseeing future or possible crimes. Yet the supposedly unbiased and incorruptible system may also become corrupted as the machines have adopted terrifyingly human traits such as self-awareness, will of self-preservation, guile, or paranoia. As a result, Dick's seemingly utopian mechanical devices serve the authorities to keep society under control, thus becoming dystopias, which warrants the label dystopian Science Fiction forhis early work. Dick's Early Oeuvre as Dystopian Science Fiction [n the shol1 story "Second Variety" (1953), which evidently is Cold-War paranoia, the fighting is ca1Tied out by robots, which leaves humans as irrelevant bystanders at best or collateral damage at worst. Robots, here named claws, 1 have evolved to a point where it is impossible to discern if a person is a machine or a man. In underground factories, robots devise newer varieties in order to fool the enemy. Variety I is a wounded soldier appealing to the feeling of charity and compassion in people, only to brutally annihilate his opponents. Variety Ill is a young, innocent boy, a killer kid, which provides a horrific touch to the story, especially when a whole army of them marches towards enemy positions. There is a 1 The same motif is used in Dick's time-travel fantasy "Jon's World" where the claws eventually wipe out nearly the entire human population. 164 DAMIAN PODLESNY profound feeling that humans have eventually been 'outevolved' by their creations. Every single element of imminent human catastrophe however stems, with the cold brutal logic of a machine, from the original assignment of defeating the enemy. In this way, the utopian dream of creating an army that could annihilate the enemy without any damage to humans crumbles dramatically as the mechanization of warfare, i1Tespective of intentions, inadvertently leads to the inescapable destruction of mankind. A morbidly cynical twist is given to this theme in the short story "The Defenders" ( 1953), where the warring humans are forced to move underground into huge 'tanks,' leaving the robots to continue the war on the evidently radio-active surface. This time, as the robots' main credo is to serve their creators, the robot logic assumes that war is antithetical to human wellbeing and, as a consequence, the machines decide to stop the war, repair the damage, and wait until humans lose their hatred and obsessions. The robots understand that this will take time, so they decide to keep the entire human population misled until the war craze ends. With this in mind, they report continuous nuclear fighting on the dead, barren surface while at the same time preparing an ideal envirnnment for human life. This time it is the logic-driven machine that realizes the downright stupidity of senseless war. This is one of the few stories where Dick finishes on a hopeful note, but at the same time, the utopian vision is attributed not to humans but to robots. Although such denouement contradicts the overall tone of the writer's early fiction, the story proves Dick's belief that human beings are not able to create a truly utopian society, no matter what technological means they might posses. Another striking example of robot technology possessing utopian capacity, but implemented for the wrong purposes, is found in the story "Autofac" ( 1955). A homeostatic factory set up during an apocalyptic war continues its production of now useless goods even after the war decimated the population. The factory is one more projection of utopian thought: a fully automated plant which assesses demands, collects raw materials, and distributes finished products. Moreover it sends out robot representatives and repairmen to deal with complaints. Human beings are free from work routines and everything is taken care of by machines. One problem which arises is the lack of demand because of the destructive war-there are hardly any (human) consumers left. Another complication Philip K. Dick's Science Fiction Dystopias 165 is that the factory maintains a total monopoly of the raw materials, leaving nothing forthe remnants of the human race that would rather use the natural resources for different purposes.

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