We received this issue of Worlds of Tomorrow from Paul Di Fillipo in trade for the most recent issue of Chunga. I don't read everything that Paul sends us, but on a whim I read this one.

It wasn't completely whimsical. The main thing that attracted me was the "complete short novel" by Avram Davidson. Davidson seems to be a writer's writer, and because I'm not that kind of writer this must explain why I haven't read much by him. The short novel is called Valentine's Planet, and it's apparently not typical of Davidson's work. There's a longer version that was published as a novel called Mutiny in Space, and in an astute introduction that Michael Swanwick wrote for a reprint, he speculates that instead of expanding the short version for book publication Davidson may have cut down the longer version for magazine publication. This might explain why Valentine's Planet feels so choppy at times. The first few chapters were particularly hard for me to follow.

The story begins with a mutiny on a spaceship. The Captain, First Officer, and six loyal crewmembers are allowed to leave on a small lifeboat, and they eventually land on the titular planet. They need some kind of fuel to get themselves back to civilized parts of the galaxy, but soon they are attacked by armored warriors who in a shock surprise turn out to be women. Gradually, we learn more about the culture of this planet, and I started getting irritated because it was feudal and it all began to seem like the worst kind of science fantasy. Then I realized that what it really was was planetary romance. Davidson's heart clearly isn't in it, and this isn't up to the level of the best planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett. Still, once I'd gotten myself attuned to what he was up to, I did enjoy the story.

The men on this planet are a third as big as the women, and there's an element of wish-fulfillment fantasy of the human men being what the alien women have always dreamed of. As Swanwick notes, however, Davidson treats the women with respect, and he actually treats the diminutive men with respect as well. He gives their culture some complexity, and he also brings a critical perspective to human behavior. There's a rather sly take on heroism presented throughout.

The other story that jumped out at me when I first looked at the table of contents was "The Little Black Box" by Philip K. Dick. For whatever reason, I haven't read much of Dick's short fiction, and I'd never even heard of this one. It turns out to be a story about Mercerism, which is the religion that he explores in more depth in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The little black box in question is the empathy box used to connect people to the curious pilgrimage toward death of the mysterious, possibly alien, Mercer. This story is interesting as a preliminary take on Mercerism, and it features some other familiar Dick tropes, such as a troubled couple and the FBI and Chinese Communists collaborating behind the scenes. Overall, however, the story didn't really go anywhere.

Christopher Anvil is a writer I've heard of but possibly have never read before. His "We from Arcturus" is a humorous alien invasion story with some slightly tired shtick and a pretty funny punchline. Jack Sharkey is someone I've never heard of. His novelette, "The Colony That Failed", gives us a colony on an alien planet that's slowly being picked off by mysterious forces. A scientific team arrives to investigate, and the big reveal is meant to fire off the sense of wonder. It's okay, but nothing special.

The last story, "Way of the Egg," is by another writer I'd never heard of, Allen Kim Lang, but I really liked it. It's another humorous story, about humans from two different colony planets, one controlled by the British and one by the Germans, who are trying to reach an exclusive treaty with the bird people of a third planet. The world-building and the plot aren't actually all that interesting, but the writing is punchy and vivid: "The breakfast Mountchessington-Jackson prepared for himself, working in a kitchen a-flutter with dismantling-crews, was a meal to pale the palate of a Texas fry-cook. Fat kippers, burnt black port and starboard, lay on the Admiral's plate like victims of a mine explosion." The Internet Speculative Fiction Database indicates that Lang didn't publish much SF, but I'd read more of it.

This magazine was edited by Fred Pohl, and he contributes an editorial espousing cryogenics, surprisingly enough, although at least he acknowledges that the freezing process would cause cellular damage of its own. There's also a non-fiction article by Joseph Wesley called "What Weapons Tomorrow?" that I didn't bother reading. All in all, this issue was a pretty good read, and the Davidson got me interested in finally delving further into his oeuvre. Real Soon Now!

I've read this book once before, probably not that long after it came out in 1982, although I don't remember for sure. I also didn't remember much about it other than the fact that it featured a lot of philosophical talking and a character named Bill who was incapable of abstract thought and who was completely focused on the material and the tangible, especially cars. Funny what makes a lasting impression!

On a second read, I still found Bill a fascinating character, but I found all the characters fascinating. It's a novel of ideas, but it's also very much a novel of character. The first person narrator, Angel Archer (did any of Dick's other novels feature a female protagonist?), is a skeptical, compassionate, conflicted, practical woman -- well-educated and eternally full of self-doubt and the ability to talk herself out of doing what she knows is right. Her best friend, Kirsten, is an older feminist who is acerbic, funny, self-loathing, temperamental, materialistic, and addicted to downers. Timothy Archer, Bishop of California for the Episcopalian Church, is a brilliant, logorrheic, charismatic, patronising, absent-minded intellectual and political activist who is searching for spiritual revelation. He is a heretic who is the head of a church. Kirsten's brother, Bill, is a mentally unstable man with an encyclopedic knowledge of cars and a complete inability to fend for himself. He can see right through Tim Archer's self-serving intellectual bullshit, but only because he's completely unable to follow symbolic logic. The one major character who is a bit of a cipher is Jeff Archer, Tim's son and Angel's husband. He is mostly characterized by his need for his powerful father's approval, but he's another character, like Angel and Tim and to a lesser extent Kirsten, seeking intellectual answers for what are really emotional or spiritual problems.

I had long been under the misapprehension that this was the third volume in the so-called VALIS Trilogy, but it isn't, in fact, a VALIS novel at all. However, reading it right on the heels of three books that were VALIS novels, it's easy to see that it shares the same preoccupation with religious ideas about theophany, revelation, and salvation. The religious ideas discussed in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer are less gnostic than Dick's other religious novels, but they are still often heretical. Early on we learn that Bishop Archer has come to believe that the Holy Spirit does not exist, and in the course of the novel he is tried (but not convicted) of heresy. The other heretical element of the novel is the discovery of scroll fragments that predate the birth of Jesus and contain Christ's wisdom sayings. This seems to prove that Jesus was not Christ. Unlike the lack of evidence for the Holy Spirit, this revelation throws Bishop Archer into a spiritual crisis, although it also ends up giving him hope that he has discovered the pathway to true theophany -- a way to experience the direct Presence of God.

This is a novel about desperate people struggling like mad to find the purpose and meaning of life. It's a story of madness, depression, addiction, spiritual crisis, self-doubt, and suicide. On that level it feels a lot like A Scanner Darkly and the novel VALIS. The emotional terrain is bleak, and Angel tells us right at the beginning, as she goes to a self-help seminar the day that John Lennon is killed, that she has watched everyone she loves die. We then go through this long exploration of religious ideas and relationship failures of various types to learn how Angel has reached the level of despair that introduces the book. In some ways this novel is the ultimate statement of Dick's perspective, and a self-critique as well. Bishop Archer's fantastic ability to endlessly spin ideas and theories about the higher realms and the world beyond is analogous to Dick's ability to tell fantastic tales full of grandiose ideas. Ultimately, the bishop's vast intellectual ability is shown to be a kind of fascinating and absorbing charade, and Angel's epiphany is that what's important in the end is not wisdom but compassion. That could be Dick's philosophy in a nutshell, but his fascination with ideas and knowledge is compulsive. Thus it's impossible for the survivors of this tale, Angel and Bill, to really disengage from Timothy Archer. Like Palmer Eldritch, he seems to have found a way way to invade their lives with his ideas and impractical agenda even after he has died.

This is not a science fiction novel, and it really isn't a novel of the fantastic at all. There are characters who believe that other characters have returned from the dead, but it's entirely possible that they are only imagining it. They may just be nuts, and in fact they probably are. Dick asks us to be compassionate with them. For him, people are always broken and in trouble and in need of help. The search for salvation may be delusional, but we're all looking for it in some form or another. With any luck we'll find a bodhisattva sympathetic to our cause, but in the meantime maybe you could be a bodhisattva too. It might even give you a reason to live.

After struggling with VALIS, I found The Divine Invasion a complete breath of fresh air. This is considered another VALIS novel, in the sense of a novel about Dick's 1974 theophany, but VALIS is only mentioned in passing in this one, as are a few other attributes of Dick's visionary experience. This one feels more like Galactic Pot-Healer or A Maze of Death, with an overtly science fictional setting that serves as a platform for religious revelations. In The Divine Invasion we start out on a colony planet where Herb Asher gradually learns that the Earth god Yah (Yahweh, Jehovah) has been exiled for thousands of years by a malignant deity named Belial, which controls Earth under a theocracy ruled by the Catholic-Islamic Church. But Yah is ready to invade Earth to re-establish His rule, and Herb is to be the Joseph of this scenario, serving as the step-father to the reborn deity.

The book has a strange flashback structure in which we learn that Herb has actually been in a coma for ten years after an accident that occurred when he and Rybys (the mother of the reborn Yah) returned to Earth. The god-child Emmanuel has forgotten who He is, and his slow process of remembering, with the help of another divine child named Zina, seems to trigger the flashback narrative of how Herb and Rybys met on the colony planet and were talked into returning to Earth by an avatar of the prophet Elijah. It was unclear to me at times whether Herb ever actually comes out of the coma he's in, or if reality itself is shifted by Emmanuel and Zina so that he never was in a coma. Or something.

The theology seems more straight-forwardly Judeo-Christian than the theology of VALIS or Radio Free Albemuth, although with a similar Gnostic bent. In particular, there's a lot more Jewish mysticism in the mix, with the Torah being the scripture most discussed and the secret identities of a couple of characters apparently derived from Judaic doctrine. (This is not something I know much about, although I did recognize the female God-principle, Shekhinah.) The concept of Original Sin is specifically rejected, and judgment and salvation is depicted as something that each individual faces on their own, not as part of a fallen race.

Even though the science fictional elements are largely incidental to the story, I think the framework made it more accessible to me. The idea that Yahweh has been exiled to an alien planet and has to invade Earth is the kind of lunatic notion I find very appealing, even though the theology that's endlessly discussed by the characters is only moderately interesting to me. There's a prime Dickian scene late in the novel where Herb is accosted by a cop, who charges him with importing a terrorist alien to Earth, and Herb tries to convince the cop that none of this is really happening and the he (Herb) is actually in a coma. The scene is played for deadpan humor as the cop and his superior, who is listening in on the radio, wrestle with the weirdness of what Herb is saying, while the reader knows that Herb is speaking the truth. There's also a sense that Emmanuel really *is* a terrorist, who is planning to scourge the Earth with fire as only a fierce desert God knows how in His effort to cleanse the planet of the evil of Belial. On that level that theology is actually fascinating, as Dick holds up Yahweh to intense scrutiny, just as he did any idea he pursued. Yahweh may be the ultimate judge of good and evil, but Dick has some questions to ask Him first.

As ever, Dick finds reasons for hope in the end. For that matter, The Divine Invasion is never as bleak as, say, A Maze of Death or A Scanner Darkly. It's more of a comedy, with serious theology thrown in.

[How odd is it, by the way, that Rowena was chosen to do the original cover for this book?]

People who were keeping up with Dick as his books came out read VALIS before Radio Free Albemuth, even though they were written in the opposite order. I read them in composition order rather than publication order, and I have to say that VALIS suffered in the process. Both novels are attempts to fictionalize the "pink beam" event that Dick experienced in 1974, which he came to believe was a contact from some kind of divine alien entity that he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). Radio Free Albemuth sets the experience in an alternate history where America has been taken over by a fascist dictator, and while Phil Dick himself is a character in the novel, the pink beam experience happens to another character named Nicholas Brady. VALIS seems to be set in the contemporary world, and the pink beam experience happens to a character named Horselover Fat who is gradually revealed to be a depressed, suicidal projection of Philip Dick. (Philip is a Greek word for "horse-lover", and Dick is German for "fat".)

I thought Radio Free Albemuth was a fascinating work of metafiction, but I really struggled with VALIS. To call it a novel is something of a misnomer, as for much of its length it feels more like an autobiography mashed together with extracts from the Exegesis that Dick wrote in an attempt to understand his religious epiphanies of 1974. We get lots of descriptions of Fat's struggles to understand why two women he loved died in horrible ways, his stint in a psychiatric ward after trying to kill himself, and then these completely bonkers bits of Gnostic speculation and assertions that the Roman Empire is still happening right now and three-eyed aliens live among us, the Immortal One is still amongst us and is about to return -- rinse, wash, repeat, rinse, wash, repeat. Then about halfway through Fat and three of his friends (including, by this point, Phil Dick, who has gradually dissociated himself from Fat into a separate personality) go to see a movie called VALIS, which appears to be set in the alternate history of Radio Free Albemuth. Things get more interesting at that point, as they go to meet the makers of the film and discover a cult dedicated to VALIS and the whole mad Gnostic secret history implicated therein. But are they really what they seem? Is anything whatsoever really what it seems?

A.E. van Vogt, in his early career, used a technique whereby he introduced a new idea into the story every 800 words. This famously produced narratives that swerved drunkenly from one damned thing to another, sense be damned. Dick was an acolyte of van Vogt (the debt Solar Lottery owes to the Null-A novels is pretty obvious, I think), and in VALIS it feels as though he's using that 800 word technique, with new explanations being thrown out one after another, each one seeming to finally reach the truth only to be tossed aside when the next explanation comes down the pike. One thing that makes VALIS feel so incoherent is that it keeps circling back to older explanations that have already been discarded, so that everything begins to feel true and false at the same time. As a evocation of madness, this may be completely accurate. The possibility that the contents of the book are crazy is something the character Dick is constantly weighing:

If Kevin were here he'd say, "Deedle-deedle queep," which is what he says to Fat when Fat reads aloud from his exegesis. Kevin has no use for the Profound. He's right. All I am doing is going, "Deedle-deedle queep" over and over again in my attempts to understand how Horselover Fat is going to heal -- save -- Horselover Fat. Because Fat cannot be saved. Healing Sherri was going to make up for losing Gloria; but Sherri died. The death of Gloria caused Fat to take forty-nine tablets of poison and now we are hoping that upon Sherri's death he will go forth, find the Savior (what Savior?) and be healed -- healed of a wound that prior to Sherri's death was virtually terminal for him. Now there is no Horselover Fat; only the wound remains.

Which is VALIS in a nutshell, except that for "deedle-deedle queep" Dick fills in page after page of incoherent (to me) Gnostic speculation. Not really my cup of tea, I must say. Aspects of it were fascinating, in a deranged way, but as a novel it suffers in comparison to the relatively lucid Radio Free Albemuth, which expresses many of the same ideas in a more focused (although equally slippery) way. On the other hand, VALIS ends with Horselover Fat in Micronesia, where the voice in his head (which he thinks is an AI) has sent him to seek further revelation, so I guess on a personal level I can relate, even if I'm skeptical that he'll find any healing there.

Here's a book that's been sitting on my To Be Read pile for more than two decades. Dick wrote Radio Free Albemuth in 1976, after his religious epiphany, but it wasn't published until 1985, three years after his death. According to what I've read about it, his publisher requested changes, but instead he set it aside and reworked the material into his next two novels, Valis and The Divine Invasion (neither of which I've read yet).

It's a fascinating book. Dick himself is a character in it, but instead of the one who starts getting messages from Valis (the Vast Active Living Intelligence System), it's another character, Dick's friend Nicholas Brady, who shares some biographical details with the real life Dick (for example working in a record shop in Berkeley). The novel is set in an alternate history where LBJ was succeeded not by Nixon but by a Nixonian figure named Ferris F. Fremont, who has established a repressive anticommunist dictatorship in America. Everybody lives in fear of the secret police, who are called FAP (Friends of the American People) and are continually trying to trap the characters into informing on each other. Brady starts receiving dream messages from a mysterious entity called Valis, and he tells Dick about them. They develop theories about what Valis might be -- perhaps people from the future, or an alternate reality, or an alien artificial intelligence. Whatever it is, Brady is convinced it is an aspect of God that's trying to reach out to humans after communication was destroyed by an evil deity.

The mixture of paranoid political dystopia, gnostic religion, and science fictional extrapolation gives the book a heady charge. There's also an interesting structural element in that the first half is from the Dick character's point of view, the second half is from Brady's point of view, and then there's a brief coda from Dick's point of view again. The structure implies that the characters are two sides of a coin, perhaps -- dual personalities in a symbiotic relationship. The tone is both downbeat and ecstatic. It's reminiscent of A Scanner Darkly in the way that the tightening noose of paranoia and repression seems to strangle all hope from the narrative before a tiny sign of possible salvation is discovered. Perhaps it resembles A Scanner Darkly too in the way that the two protagonists seem to be two sides of a split personality.

The politics of the novel are particularly fascinating seen from the far side of the Dubya years. It's a reminder of the American fascism that had bubbled to the surface under Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, but Dick didn't really live to see the Reagan revolution that consolidated the Bircher paranoia into a political coalition that didn't require dictatorship to impose itself on the American political system. In most ways, what really happened is a lot weirder than what Dick feared, but his insight into the true relationship between the USA and the USSR, the Stalinists and the anticommunists, makes poetic (or religious) sense of the Cold War in ways that political analysis can't. Dick couldn't know that the Cold War was about to become history, but his vision feels prophetic nonetheless.

On a religious level it feels a lot like Ubik in the way that the theories about what Brady is really experiencing in his visions of Valis keep shifting and changing like a live thing struggling to get free from your grip. Dick (the character) even makes a joke about it when Brady complains that he was saying something different just a minute ago. He says that ideas are like planes at LA Airport: there's a new one landing every five minutes. It's a fever dream of a novel that feels metafictional due to the appearance of the author as a character. Dick is swallowing his own tail, like the worm ouroboros.

Beware SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm rereading more than I expected to on this Dick binge. Like the other two rereads, however, it has been so long since I first read A Maze of Death that all I remembered about it was that it was vaguely dissatisfying. I felt that way again this time ... until I got to the end, where Dick pulls one of his patented reality shifts. This time it's almost literally "it was all a dream," which may have felt like a cheat to me when I was younger, but Dick actually rings some changes on the formula that make it more interesting than it might have been.

One reason I've reread the books I have -- Ubik, Galactic-Pot Healer, and A Maze of Death -- is that they were written around the same time, along with the one book I read for the first time, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? You certainly notice some common themes when you read theses books in close proximity. There's an exploration of group consciousness, for example, in Ubik and Galactic Pot-Healer that's taken up in A Maze of Death as well. Thus one change run on the "it was all a dream" formula is that it's a group dream. The group that initially appears to be a random aggregation of colonists on the planet Delmak-O turn out to actually be shipmates on an interstellar craft that has become disabled, dooming them all to a certain death. Their group dream is an attempt to distract themselves from their existential plight as well as to work out psychological tensions within the group as they wait to die. Those tensions, however, are infecting the group dream, turning an exercise in group building (the colonizing of Delmak-O) into a story about a bunch of convicted murderers who have been subjected to an experimental attempt to rehabilitate them in a fantasy about working together to colonize an alien planet.

One of the things Dick is playing with in these books is the advantages and disadvantages of social groups. Another thing that A Maze of Death shares with Ubik is a sense that separation from the group means death. This is depicted in the most primal way, without any theoretical apparatus to explain it. There's a sense that other people, as hateful as they may be (and almost everyone in A Maze of Death is hateful, even murderously so), are a source of life, as necessary to the survival of the individual as rain and sun is to a plant. The flipside of this sense of nourishment from society is the sense that we all die alone. Death is a private, singular affair that can't be shared with the group.

A Maze of Death shares with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Galactic Pot-Healer the invention of new religious mythologies and beliefs. (Arguably Ubik does too, although it's less direct.) In the shared dream in A Maze of Death, the deities of the characters' religion are considered real and observable, not a matter of faith. Religion is therefore very matter-of-fact and barely subject to question, unlike Mercerism in Androids, which is treated skeptically by Deckard and by the androids themselves. Androids is probably the least metaphysical of the four books, although even in A Maze of Death the apparently empirical religion ends up being part of a dream, with the author of the scriptures that everybody quotes turning out to be the dead captain of the doomed spaceship. Dick seems obsessed already with theological questions, yet typically he weaves between prophetic certainty and skeptical ambivalence with disturbing ease. However, one of the fascinating moves in the final chapter is when Seth Morley meets one of the deities from the shared dream after he's awakened from it. He physically vanishes from the ship, leaving no trace, which implies that he's been taken away by the deity, but this is left ambiguous. Has the religion bled from the dream world into reality?

So why did I feel vaguely dissatisfied with the book until the end One was the welter of character viewpoints, which feels very messy and which Dick tries to defend in his Author's Foreword by claiming that while the viewpoint wanders between characters, it's mostly from Seth Morley's POV. I'm not sure that latter is actually true, but it's also true that when the nature of the shared dream is revealed, the wandering viewpoint starts to make more sense. This is a group consciousness, without a central viewpoint. The other thing that nagged at me was the simple-mindedness, if not stupidity, of some of the stfnal material, such as the little oneway spaceships that the people use to get to Delmak-O, which make absolutely no sense. Once again, once you discover that it's all a dream, the illogicality of these things makes more sense. In fact, the book feels more like a satire of SF -- or perhaps a commentary on the dreamlike, absurd qualities of the stfnal imagination.

I was a little surprised to see that the Library of America had included this book in one of their three collections of Dick's most important novels. However, the way that this one expands in the mind is starting to turn me around a bit. Perhaps I should actually read Now Wait for Last Year before I decide conclusively that they were crazy to include it!

Still bingeing on Dick, but this is another re-read. The first time I read Galactic Pot-Healer was back in college, when I read an essay by Le Guin where she called it one of her favorite Dick novels. At the time I found the first half hilariously funny, and the second half confusing, weird, and very dark. This time around I still found the shift in tone, although it didn't seem as dramatic. The religious or metaphysical themes seemed clearer to me this time around. I'm still not sure what I think of the novel as a whole.

The basic set-up is that Joe Fernwright is a sadsack pot-healer, just as his father was a pot-healer before him. What's a pot-healer? Someone who heals ceramic pots. Right up front we have an oddball occupation, and there's a lot of absurdist humor that plays off it. The SFE article on Dick says, "it begins almost as a parody." Joe is broke and unhappy, but out of the blue he is contacted by Glimmung -- a vast alien being who wants him to come to Plowman's Planet to help him and a collection of other artisans in some kind of act of restoration. Eventually Joe ends up on this planet, where he discovers that there is a great struggle going on between Glimmung and submerged forces of darkness. Not that Glimmung is all lightness and good itself.

Essentially Joe becomes embroiled in a cosmic battle between opposed forces, although the opposition isn't perhaps purely Good vs. Evil, Darkness vs Light, or Male vs. Female. Also, Dick is never about heroic battles. Joe is a schlub, and his participation in the battle is one of pratfalls, exhausted resignation, and bad decisions. Yet somehow even his failures aren't exactly defeats. Everything is mixed, each outcome is ambiguous or ambivalent, and there doesn't seem to be a one true way through the mess and morass of decisions and efforts and oppositions. This leaves the narrative feeling a bit aimless at times, as characters charge off to do something, only to be called back to do something else instead. Joe changes his mind repeatedly, his moods shifting like the weak ocean tides on Plowman's Planet.


Not the edition I read this time, but I love this cover

It feels aimless, yet there's something compelling about the mutating seesaw oceanic transformations of the plot. Part of it is the goofy sense of humor, which has a lot of fun, for example, with the ragtag collection of alien species brought to Plowman's Planet by Glimmung. One scene features "a chitinous multilegged quasiarachnid and a large bivalve with pseudopodia arguing about Goethe's Faust." Gradually Joe forms a bond with a few of these goofy aliens (including "Nurb K’ohl Dáq, the warmhearted bivalve"), and at one point he is even forced into a collective consciousness with all of them. Suddenly what began "almost as a parody" turns into a serious consideration of ideas about collective consciousness, layered on top of a range of gnostic ideas about a conflict between opposing creative/destructive demiurges. The tide shifts again.

One of Dick's great strengths as a writer is his ability to convey ambivalent and conflicted feelings in his characters. Joe perceives his ex-wife as a castrating bitch, yet he also knows that she's smarter than he is and humiliates himself by calling her up to ask for advice, knowing he'll be greeted with a blast of scorn. He's at least partly motivated by loneliness. Even her sneering contempt is a bit of almost comforting attention in a moment of despair. This sort of beat-down human neediness leading to unfortunate decisions makes his protagonists incredibly sympathetic to a lot of readers, which may be the real source of Dick's popularity. The identification with the protagonist can balance out a lot of narrative and ideational confusion.

One odd little sidenote is that Joe's alien (but humanoid) girlfriend in this book is named Mali. Deckard's wife in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is named Iran. I don't remember Dick naming a lot of characters after countries, but are there others?

I recently read Ubik for at least the third time, and it has inspired me to read some of the books by Dick that I've never read before. First up was Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was of course adapted into one of my very favorite movies, Blade Runner. In fact the edition of the book I read was the Del Rey that uses the title Blade Runner and features stills from the movie on the front and back covers.

I already knew that the book was a lot different from the movie, and I even already knew some of the ways in which it was different, including the greater focus on animals and their simulacra (thus the electric sheep of the title), which is passingly alluded to in the movie with the owl in Tyrel's office, and the religion of Mercerism, which is completely absent from the movie. Both of these things are part of the book's theme of empathy, which is something that the androids are supposedly incapable of. As so often in his books, Dick seems ambivalent about what the lack of empathy in the androids means. Deckard, the bounty hunter who makes his living killing androids, suffers empathy almost like a sickness. "Mercer said it was wrong [to kill androids]," he tells his wife, "but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right."

Dick is constantly embracing contradictions like that, which can make his books feel like they are reeling from one position to another without rhyme or reason. It was hard for me to draw a bead on what this book was about, although the constant thread was the price Deckard paid for his empathy with the androids. The character of Rachael in the book is all over the place, constantly shifting her plans and her attitude toward Deckard. It's dizzying after a while. She's the key figure in Deckard's growing empathy for the androids, but he never falls in love with her. Instead, Rachael uses sex with him as a kind of weapon straight out of film noir: to create a bond between them that will make him incapable of killing any more androids. It doesn't work out quite that way -- pretty much the opposite, in fact -- but he pays a price for his transformation nonetheless, and that price ties into the animal theme. Indeed, in the end Deckard's dream of owning a real animal is itself transformed into an almost religious veneration of an electric one.

I dunno. I confess I had a hard time clearing the movie out of my head so that I could see the book as its own thing. While some of the character names and situations are the same or similar, the only language from the book that made it into the movie was in the scene where Deckard applies the Voight-Kampff test to Rachael and determines that she's an android. The questions and her answers are taken almost word-for-word from the book. What's also interesting, in comparing the book and film, is that there's another bounty hunter in the book who turns out to be an android who doesn't know it, which of course Ridley Scott has tried to retroactively make the case for Deckard himself in the movie. Nothing much is made of that character in the book, although he's vivid while he's on stage.

However, that episode of the book doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of narrative continuity. Suddenly we're introduced to a nest of androids pretending to be a police station. One of them then turns out to be one of the group that escaped from Mars with Roy Baty. So when did the police station get set up, and where did the other androids come from? How was there time for one of them to be implanted with false memories of being a human? The whole thing feels like a random idea that occurred to Dick as he was writing the novel and which he made a haphazard attempt to integrate into the narrative. That's probably one reason why the novel isn't considered a major work. The core of it is quite strong, with the human/android division mirrored in animals/electric animals and in Mercerism, which turns out to be a false (or artificial) religion that still gives spiritual solace for those those who do wrong. "Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right." The finale in which Deckard in some sense becomes Mercer and discovers the toad in the wild is a powerful synthesis of the various loose thematic threads of the book.

Well, another reading is required to establish it as its own thing, separate from the movie, in my head.