Philip K. Dick’s 80th birthday

If he had not died in 1982, today would be his 80th birthday.

Philip K. Dick is my favorite author. I’m not sure what it is exactly that I always liked about him. He wasn’t always the most eloquent writer, and he sometimes relied on the same patterns repeatedly in his work. But he always seemed so human to me, and his writing spoke to me. Like he was writing specifically to me, expanding upon what I was already thinking and taking it farther than I ever dared to, or even challenging what I had always taken for granted about reality and existence.

He wasn’t really a traditional science fiction writer — he rarely covered the sorts of topics that science fiction writers are expected to cover, and even when he did he ignored the hard science of it in favor of focusing on the moral, ethical, or philosophical implications of it. When I sat down to read one of his novels, I knew I’d come out the other side thinking a little differently. PKD changed the way I look at the world many times over, and even today reading VALIS can still screw with my head.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a fitting quotation to post here, and I’ve finally decided on this paragraph from PKD’s excellent essay, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep- learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.