“Maybe Sherri overrode God,” I said. “God wanted her sick and she fought to get well.” The thrust of David’s impending argument would of course be that Sherri had neurotically gotten cancer due to being fucked up, but God had stepped in and saved her; I had turned it around in anticipation.
“No,” Fat said. “It’s the other way around. Like when he cured me.”
Fortunately, Kevin was not present. He did not consider Fat cured (nor did anyone else) and anyway God didn’t do it. That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-canceling structure. Freud considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. Someone is accused of stealing a horse, to which he replies, “I don’t steal horses and anyhow you have a crummy horse.” If you ponder the reasoning in this you can see the actual thought-process behind it. The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations—brought on by Fat’s supposed encounter with the divine—the two-proposition self-canceling structure would appear like this:
God does not exist.
And anyhow he’s stupid.
A careful study of Kevin’s cynical rantings reveals this structure at every turn. David continually quoted C. S. Lewis; Kevin contradicted himself logically in his zeal to defame God; Fat made obscure references to information fired into his head by a beam of pink light; Sherri, who had suffered dreadfully, wheezed out pious mummeries: I switched my position according to who I was talking to at the time. None of us had a grip on the situation, but we did have a lot of free time to waste in this fashion. By now the epoch of drug-taking had ended, and everyone had begun casting about for a new obsession. For us the new obsession, thanks to Fat, was theology.
A favorite antique quotation of Fat’s goes:
“And can I think the great Jehovah sleeps,
Like Shemosh, and such fabled deities?
Ah! no; heav’n heard my thoughts, and wrote them down—
It must be so.”
Fat doesn’t like to quote the rest of it.
“ ’Tis this that racks my brain,
And pours into my breast a thousand pangs,
That lash me into madness . . .”
It’s from an aria by Handel. Fat and I used to listen to my Seraphim LP of Richard Lewis singing it. Deeper, and deeper still.
Once I told Fat that another aria on the record described his mind perfectly.
“Which aria?” Fat said guardedly.
“Total eclipse,” I answered.
“Total eclipse! no sun, no moon,
All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
Oh, glorious light! no cheering ray
To glad my eyes with welcome day!
Why thus deprived Thy prime decree?
Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!”
To which Fat said, “The opposite is true in my case. I am illuminated by holy light fired at me from another world. I see what no other man sees.”
He had a point there.
VINTAGE BOOKS BY PHILIP K. DICK
Clans of the Alphane Moon
When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they’ll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward.
Science Fiction/0-375-71928-8
Confessions of a Crap Artist
Jack Isidore is a crap artist—a collector of crackpot ideas and worthless objects, a man so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But seen through Jack’s murderously innocent gaze, Charlie and Judy Hume prove to be just as sealed off from reality.
Science Fiction/0-679-74114-3
The Cosmic Puppets
Yielding to a compulsion he can’t explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind—and never did.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3005-6
Counter-Clock World
In Counter-Clock World, the world has entered the Hobart Phase— a vast sidereal process in which time moves in reverse. As a result, libraries are busy eradicating books, copulation signifies the end of pregnancy, people greet with, “Good-bye,” and part with, “Hello,” and underneath the world’s tombstones, the dead are coming back to life.
Science Fiction/0-375-71933-4
The Crack in Space
A repairman discovers that a hole in a faulty Jifi-scuttler leads to a parallel world. Jim Briskin, campaigning to be the first black president of the United States, thinks alter-Earth is the solution to the chronic overpopulation that has seventy million people cryogenically frozen. But when the other Earth turns out to be inhabited, everything changes.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3006-4
Deus Irae
With Roger Zelazny
In the years following World War III, a new and powerful faith has arisen from a scorched and poisoned Earth, a faith that embraces the architect of worldwide devastation. The Servants of Wrath have deified Carlton Lufteufel and rechristened him the Deus Irae. Science Fiction/1-4000-3007-2
The Divine Invasion
In The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick asks: What if God—or a being called Yah—were alive and in exile on a distant planet? How could a second coming succeed against the high technology and finely tuned rationalized evil of the modern police state?
Science Fiction/0-679-73445-7
Dr. Bloodmoney
Dr. Bloodmoney is a post–nuclear holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; and Stuart McConchie and Bonny Keller, two unremarkable people bent on the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil.
Science Fiction/0-375-71929-6
Dr. Futurity
Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now he is caught between his own instincts and a society where it is illegal to save lives.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3009-9
Eye in the Sky
While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry—a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3010-2
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that thirty million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was—a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. Science Fiction/0-679-74066-X
Galactic Pot-Healer
What could an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other odd creatures it has lured to Plowman’s Planet? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology, Galactic Pot-Healer is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.
Science Fiction/0-679-75297-8
The Game-Players of Titan
Poor Pete Garden has just lost Berkeley. He’s also lost his wife, but he’ll get a new one as soon as he rolls a three. It’s all part of the rules of Bluff, the game that’s become a blinding obsession for the last inhabitants of planet Earth. But the rules are about to change— drastically and terminally—because Pete Garden will be playing his next game against an opponent who isn’t even human.
Science Fiction/0-679-74065-1
Lies, Inc.
A masterwo
rk by Philip K. Dick, this is the final, expanded version of the novella The Unteleported Man, which Dick worked on shortly before his death. In Lies, Inc., fans of the science-fiction legend will immediately recognize his hallmark themes of life in a security state, conspiracy, and the blurring of reality and illusion.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3008-0
The Man in the High Castle
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.
Science Fiction/0-679-74067-8
The Man Who Japed
A mesmerizing and terrifying tale of a society so eager for order that it will sacrifice anything, including its freedom. Newer York is a post-holocaust city governed by the laws of an oppressively rigid morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom.
Science Fiction/0-375-71935-0
Martian Time-Slip
On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated “anomalous” children for deportation and destruction, other people—especially Supreme Good-member Arnie Kott of the Water Workers’ Union—suspect that Manfred’s disorder may be a window into the future.
Science Fiction/0-679-76167-5
A Maze of Death
Fourteen strangers came to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that planet whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers found that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O, God is either absent or intent on destroying His creations.
Science Fiction/0-679-75298-6
Now Wait for Last Year
Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time—and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent’s newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest.
Science Fiction/0-679-74220-4
Our Friends from Frolix 8
Nick Appleton is a menial laborer. Willis Gram is the despotic oligarch of a planet ruled by big-brained elites. When they both fall in love with Charlotte, Nick seems destined for doom. But everything takes a decidedly unpredictable turn when the revolution’s leader returns from ten years of intergalactic hiding with a ninety-ton protoplasmic slime that is bent on creating a new world order. Science Fiction/0-375-71934-2
The Penultimate Truth
The Penultimate Truth imagines a future in which Americans have been shipped underground, where they toil in crowded industrial anthills and receive a steady diet of inspiring speeches from a president who never seems to age. Nick St. James, like the rest of the masses, believed in the words of his leaders. But that all changes when he travels to the surface.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3011-0
Radio Free Albemuth
In his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid.
Science Fiction/0-679-78137-4
A Scanner Darkly
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D—which Arctor takes in massive doses— gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn’t realize he is narcing on himself.
Science Fiction/0-679-73665-4
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
Written by Philip K. Dick
Edited by Lawrence Sutin
As Philip K. Dick wrote about androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human? Science Fiction/Literary Criticism & Collections/Essays/0-679-74787-7
The Simulacra
Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the president is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted. In classic fashion, Dick shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.
Science Fiction/0-375-71926-1
Solar Lottery
The year is 2203, and the ruler of the Universe is chosen according to the random laws of a strange game under the control of Quizmaster Verrick. But when Ted Bentley, a research technician recently dismissed from his job, signs on to work for Verrick, he has no idea that Leon Cartwright is about to become the new Quizmaster.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3013-7
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, populated by Godlike—or perhaps Satanic—takeover artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas.
Science Fiction/0-679-73666-2
Time Out of Joint
The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise.
Science Fiction/0-375-71927-X
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes VALIS and The Divine Invasion, is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress—and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ.
Science Fiction/0-679-73444-9
Ubik
Philip K. Dick’s searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.
Science Fiction/0-679-73664-6
VALIS
VALIS is the first book in Philip K. Dick’s incomparable final trio of novels (the others are The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser.
Science Fiction/0-679-73446-5
Vulcan’s Hammer
Objective, unbiased, and hyperrational, the Vulcan 3 should have been the perfect ruler. The omnipotent computer dictates policy that is in the best interests of all citizens—or at least, that is the idea. But when the machine begins to lose control of the “Healer” movement of religious fanatics and the mysterious force behind their rebellion, all hell breaks loose.
Science Fiction/1-4000-3012-9
We Can Build You
Louis Rosen and his partners sell people—ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there’s the added complication that someone—or something—may not want to be sold.
Science Fiction/0-679-75296-X
The World Jones Made
Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future—a power that makes his life a torment—his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal.
Science Fiction/0-679-74219-0
The Zap Gun
Lars Powderdry and Lilo Topchev are counterpart weapons fashion designers for a world divided into two factions—Wes-bloc and Peep-East. Their job is to invent elaborate weapons that only seem massively lethal. But when alien satellites hostile to both sides appear in the sky, the two are brought together in the dire hope that they can create a weapon to save the world.
Science Fiction/0-375-71936-9
VINTAGE READERS
Authors available in this series
Martin Amis
Nicholson Baker
James Baldwin
A. S. Byatt
Willa Cather
John Cheever
Sandra Cisneros
Philip K. Dick
Joan Didion
Richard Ford
Dashiell Hammett
Langston Hughes
Barry Lopez
Alice Munro
Haruki Murakami
Vladimir Nabokov
V.S. Naipaul
Michael Ondaatje
Oliver Sacks
Representing a wide spectrum of some of our most significant
modern authors, the Vintage Readers offer an attractive, accessible
selection of writing that matters.
Philip K. Dick
VINTAGE PKD
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally, going on to write thirty-six novels, including Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly, and Ubik, and five short-story collections. He won the 1963 Hugo Award for best novel for The Man in the High Castle and the 1975 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died in 1982.
Vintage PKD Page 21