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A Genteel Black Hole

Tag: Philip K Dick

  • Bookish Ramble: The Man in the High Castle

    Ally

    Title: The Man in the High Castle
    Author: Philip K. Dick
    Year: 1962
    Country: USA

    Format: E-book
    Pages: 256
    Read: 17 – 27 April 2026
    First reading

    A disparate group of characters navigate life in 1960s San Francisco—now part of the Pacific States of America, following the Axis powers’ victory in the Second World War. Robert Childan is an antiques dealer, selling historical Americana to wealthy, prestigious Japanese clients whom he resents. One of Childan’s clients, a high-ranking Japanese official called Mr. Tagomi, needs a gift for a visiting Swedish industrialist called Baynes. Frank Frink, who must hide his Jewish heritage, works for a company that supplies the unsuspecting Childan with counterfeit Civil War antiques. Meanwhile Frank’s estranged wife Juliana, who lives in the neutral territory between America’s Japanese and German states, begins an affair with an Italian truck driver. Each of these characters’ lives are in some way touched by a controversial novel, Hawthorne Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which imagines an alternate history where the Allies won the war.

    The Man in the High Castle asks plenty of intriguing questions. “What if the Axis powers won the war?” is the first and most obvious question. The answer is quite horrifying. We learn of the Nazis’ destruction of Africa, the ovens in New York, and their plans to betray their wartime allies. But Philip K. Dick uses this scenario to explore plenty of his other preoccupations. The plot about counterfeit antiques asks what counts as genuine anyway, and what therefore counts as fake. (Dick would investigate this idea more thoroughly in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) Objects have no memory and aren’t materially changed by their mere presence at historical events, so does it matter that Childan’s “antique” guns weren’t really used in the Civil War? Not especially… until someone asks the question.

    Then there’s the I Ching, which various characters consult for advice and insight. This is one way in which Dick explores themes of cultural imperialism: the white American characters have Japanese culture imposed upon them, the same way actual America imposes its culture on the world. Dick also mentions the yin-yang cycle—light and dark, each giving birth to its opposite. The yin-yang symbol could be a diagram of this whole book. In reality, Philip K. Dick wrote a novel imagining the Axis powers won the war; in that novel, the fictional Hawthorne Abendsen wrote a book imagining the Allies won. The real and the imagined, each containing its opposite. When Juliana finally meets Abendsen, she discovers Grasshopper was written by consulting the I Ching. She interprets the Oracle’s message to mean that, in some way, the Axis powers really did lose the war. Does this mean that Dick’s own novel implies the reverse in our reality? Given our current situation, maybe he wasn’t far wrong. But the cycle will continue: darkness will again give way to light.

    These are all thought-provoking concepts, I really enjoyed pondering them; but the book’s structure and pacing are all over the place. (My buddy-reader Mark found it even more confounding than me! You can see his review on YouTube.) For much of the first half it feels like Philip K. Dick is slowly, meticulously outlining this alternate history, drawing tenuous but intriguing connections between all the main characters. I found myself wondering, half excited and half impatient, where exactly the story was going. Then, for a couple of chapters, there’s a sudden burst of action… which is soon over, giving way to the previous, slow pace. The ending feels less like a crescendo than a fade-out, or a nonchalant shrug. “And things continue pretty much like that—you get it, right?” Ultimately the book gave me a lot to think about, but the actual reading experience was somewhat mixed.

    That said, I’m still eager to read more Philip K. Dick.

  • Bookish Ramble: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Ally

    Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
    Author: Philip K. Dick
    Year: 1968
    Country: USA

    Format: E-book
    Pages: 208
    Read: 10 – 21 February 2026
    Reread

    Rick Deckard, proud owner of an electric sheep, is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco police. His targets are androids, escaped slaves who have killed their human owners on Mars and fled to this bleak, post-apocalyptic Earth. Deckard must track down the androids, using the Voigt-Kampff empathy test to discern android from human, and “retire” them. But is Deckard a match for these superhuman androids? And just how reliable is the empathy test anyway?

    I first read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in my early teens, having first seen the film adaptation, Blade Runner. I adored the film and watched it repeatedly. I remember being surprised by just how different the novel was. Revisiting it for the first time in all those years, I am once again surprised. This is a book stuffed with interesting philosophical and sociopolitical ideas, most of which were only hinted at (or outright ignored) by the makers of Blade Runner. I found it a fascinating, thought-provoking read.

    The setting is a future Earth, one where animals are all but extinct; owning a real, live animal is prohibitively expensive and therefore a status symbol. Failing that, one can keep up with the Joneses by purchasing a realistic electric animal, such as Deckard’s fake sheep. Deckard and his wife maintain the facade that their sheep is real, but they cannot care about it as deeply as a real creature. It simply doesn’t provoke the same empathic response. Similarly, Deckard feels no compunction about “retiring” androids. After all, they don’t count as people… do they?

    The Voigt-Kampff test (like in the film) measures a subject’s empathic responses to a set of hypothetical situations. Those who lack the proper response are revealed to be androids. But this is a poisoned Earth where humans are prone to developing cognitive disabilities. Such people are labelled “specials”—marginalised, banned from emigrating to Mars, despised and abused by humans and androids alike. And there’s a risk that a special could fail the Voigt-Kampff test and be mistakenly murdered by Deckard or his colleagues. Ultimately specials are seen as subhuman, just as unworthy of empathy as the androids Deckard is hunting. As a disabled reader myself, I found that theme particularly engaging.

    The novel’s dominant religion is Mercerism, in which humans can merge electronically with a martyr figure called Mercer and literally experience his suffering. But when Mercer’s authenticity is called into question, so is the validity of that experience. People can also use a machine to dial in the emotion of their choosing—including the desire to use the machine itself. If something so patently artificial can provoke real emotional responses, does that lend it a certain legitimacy after all? In our current age of chatbot therapy and AI-generated “art”, it’s increasingly clear that the answer is no!

    My only gripe with the book is a few moments of Male Author Syndrome: Women’s bodies, whether human or android, are frequently described in a little too much detail. Otherwise this is a fantastic novel. It’s a gripping, engaging, thought-provoking read. It works both as a hardboiled detective thriller and a piece of deeply philosophical sci-fi. I’m eager to read more Philip K. Dick in the coming months.