More Human Than Human

Philip K Dick was an author who I first discovered when I was 16 years old. I cant say I felt the same way then as I do now about his stories, at that age I didn't understand most of what he wrote! Much of the time travel paradoxes of 'Martian Time Slip', and the drug induced insanity of 'A Scanner Darkly' were lost on me. I struggled to keep up with the non-linear narratives, which would place the reader directly into new worlds, in mind bending situations, with no introduction or explanation. Worlds where farmers built canals on Mars, or robots built themselves, or where reading someones mind was commonplace. Every world was presented as if it was a reality, both as exciting and mundane as our own.

Though I was young I do still remember though the sense of dread, fear, and alienness his stories would bring to me. Now that Im older with the experience of 20 years of reading Science Fiction, his post apocalyptic worlds of telepaths, mutants, and psychotic robots make a lot more sense to me, and yet I still feel that sense of 'otherness' in his writing, he is still like no other author I have read. It is well known that Dick was never overly interested in character building, or world building, his strength was in his ideas. The science is his stories was rarely explained, there was no lengthy technological explanations for how a time machine was constructed, or how that spaceship could fly to the stars - in his stories they just were, but you never felt cheated, or lost any sense of believability. This makes him unique, I think, among science fiction writers because he used science fiction as a vehicle for his ideas, as it is such a malleable medium for this, rather than something to enjoy in itself.

His books to me seem to be divided clearly into two types. His initial writings, which were much more tradionally structured - stories of planetary exploration, nuclear paranoia, and oppressive governments. Then later when his stories became a lot less categorisable, stories of telepaths, time travel, drug addiction and parallel realities. I love them both, a great example of his early writing being 'Foster, You're Dead' a short story telling of a future where a cynical government forces people to buy there own nuclear shelters in face of impending war. As for his later books, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' is probably my favourite, a dystopian nightmare of replicants and the nature of humanity.

I have read other Sci Fi that can be grander in scale, characterisation, and scope, such as other favourites of mine - Iain Banks, or Alistair Reynolds - but none as thoughtful, imaginative, or as shocking, as Philip K Dick. DB