In his essay about American science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) ("Blows Against the Empire,“ The New Yorker, 20 Aug 07), Adam Gopnik explores the life and writings of this "genre-hack-to-hidden-genius“ writer, perhaps best know for providing the adaptation source for Ridley Scott’s classic movie „Blade Runner.“
Gopnik writes about the visionary aspect of Dick’s writing. "Dick tends to get treated as a romantic: his books are supposed to be studies in the extremes of paranoia and technological nightmare, offering searing conundrums of reality and illusion. This comes partly from the habit, hard to break, of extolling the transgressive, the visionary, the startling undercurrent of dread.“ For many, Dick’s writing is a form of cheerless prediction, a dark vision of our futures made artistically concrete.
Gopnik disputes the airless, paranoid take on Dick’s visions. "Dick in the sixties is a bone-dry intellectual humorist, a satirist – concerned with taking contemporary practices and beliefs to their reductio ad absurdum. If we oppress the Irish, why not eat them? Swift asked, in the model of all black satire – and if we can make quotidian and trivial the technology that has already arrived, Dick wonders, then why would we not do the same to the future yet to come, psychic communication and time travel and the colonization of Mars?“ His visions of the future are satiric. He does see the dark, but treats it with irony.
"Although 'Blade Runner,' with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic,“ Gopnik continues, „it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.“ Looking at the dark side of human behavior as it manifest currently, unless something changes, our future, too, will inevitably be dark.
While dark, Dick‘s vision of the future is not exactly terrifying. "Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized elite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.“ There is a odd sort of hope in such a view. This does not sound too terribly different from what we are currently experiencing in the U.S.
"The typical Dick novel is at once fantastically original in its ideas and dutifully realistic in charting their consequences. No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness. And the interesting corollary: it won’t matter, the world of speaking ghosts will work about as well as this one.“ Visions of the future as reality-checks for where current societial dreams as ideals and dreams as goals and aspirations may lead.
For Dick, Gopnik posits, his picture of the future is, above all, a reflection of the nightmares that humans are capable of and do, indeed, create in the present. This would be what a dreamful reader might consider: are these dystopias inevitable? Can we dreamers not dream a more balanced world and make it manifest?