The Introduction by Prof. Gerry Canavan, the meritorious editor of the 1979 enlarged MOSF edition is here reproduced for the interest it has, and by his kind permission. The opinions are of course his.

“The Suvin Event”

Gerry Canavan

In “What Is an Author?” (1969), Michel Foucault proposes a category of authorship that goes beyond the creation of a single text: the “founder of discursivity,” who produces “the possibilities and rules for the formation of other texts.”1 Founders of discursivity establish both the theoretical template for the works that follow in the tradition they have called into existence, as well as setting the terms for what will not be included in that tradition, what will be thought of as beyond or outside or heretical to the newly created discourse. Foucault’s primary examples, Freud and Marx, suggest a heuristic that might partially distinguish this kind of foundational thinking, the widespread adoption of one’s name as an adjective, which might in turn prompt us to recognize other examples beyond the two he gives: “Nietzschean,” “Lacanian,” “Deleuzean,” almost certainly even “Foucauldian” itself. In contrast to the vision of “foundation” that one might find in the sciences – in which “the act that founds […] is on an equal footing with its future transformations” – the founder of discursivity becomes a “heterogeneous” origin point to which “its subsequent transformations” must situate themselves in relation.2 We do not seek to explain how, despite their apparent gaps in knowledge or incorrect calculations, Galileo or Newton really understood modern physics in its fullness after all – and yet this is precisely the apologetics that is characteristically performed on behalf of the founder of discursivity, whose apparent errors are always only the chance for a new reevaluation. The “inevitable necessity” of this “return to origin” sets discursivity apart from either science (in which foundations

1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in Josué V. Harari,trans. and ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (New York, 1979), p. 154.
2. Ibid., pp. 155–156.

lose their validity in the face of new empirical observations or more robust theoretical paradigms) or religion (in which foundations are imagined to be unchanging sacred texts); in discursivity, the perpetual reexamination and revision of the founder “constitutes a effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself.”3 Discourses are vitalized by the continual return (with difference) to origins; this is how they are renewed, and how they adapt themselves to changing circumstances without falling into obsolescence or obscurity.

Darko Suvin’s publication of “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” in December 19724 – alongside his co-founding of the journal Science Fiction Studies with R.D. Mullen the following year, and the expansion of “Poetics” into Metamorphoses of Science Fiction in 1979 – constitutes precisely this sort of foundational moment for the field of SF criticism. Of course SF studies did not begin with Suvin, nor did Suvin solve all its problems in a single move. But what Suvin did was establish a discourse, in this Foucauldian sense, that subsequent SF critics have needed to contend with, whether positively or negatively. Suvin’s work established contours for the subdiscipline that have come to structure not only SF criticism but the criticism of related speculative genres like fantasy, fairy tales, and horror, the scholarly approaches to which have been defined (usually with significant frustration) by Suvin’s totalizing rejection of them in Metamorphoses. Not all criticism of SF is Suvinian, by any stretch – but the field as a whole is Suvinian, or at least post-Suvinian, in the sense that reaction to his work by his disciples and by his detractors has framed four subsequent decades of the work in the field.

Suvin’s influence can be registered in the way his definition of science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”5 has become ubiquitous in scholarly introductions to the field, which frequently introduce Suvin’s critical work before mentioning H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley,

• Ibid., p. 156.
• Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34.3 (Dec. 1972): 372–382.
• MOSF (2016), p. 15.

Hugo Gernsback, or any other foundational author associated with the early production of SF texts. In a subfield famously devoted to squabbling over definitions and policing generic boundaries, Suvin’s definition has become a kind of consensus starting point, a place where we might at least begin to speak to one another. Suvin’s name appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction; the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction and Blackwell’s A Companion to Science Fiction both wait until page two. This tendency can perhaps be especially recognized in those critics who will ultimately find themselves at odds with Suvin’s work; Rob Latham, the editor of The Oxford Handbook,for instance, devotes as much time to enumerating the shortcomings of the Suvinian approach to the genre as he does articulating what that approach entails, even as he admits Suvin’s “enormous influence” as “the signal accomplishment” of the heroic early period of SF criticism.6

Few texts embody this push-and-pull between influence and anxiety more fully than Mark Bould and China Miéville’s edited collection Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009),which examines the relationship between the SF genre and the leftist politics with which it is commonly seen to be in conversation (an understood affinity that exists, as we shall see, in large part precisely due to the critical interventions of Suvin himself ). Bould frames the book as a variety of responses to what he calls the “Suvin event” of 1972/1973: “From that moment on, SF theory and criticism have inhabited – not by any means always contentedly – the Suvin event horizon, or attempted to escape it.”7 The deliberate science fictional imagery – Suvin as supermassive black hole, scholars hopelessly caught in his orbit – is soon doubled; Bould writes that Suvin’s 1970s work “itself arrived like a novum, reordering SF theory and criticism around it, idiosyncratically and contingently wedding SF to Marxism.”8 And this too

• Rob Lathan, ed. and introduction, The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford, 2014), pp. 2–3.
• Mark Bould, “Introduction: Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet, from Nemo to Neo,” in Mark Bould and China Miéville, eds., Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT, 2009), p. 18.
• Ibid., p. 19.

is a book whose chapters are frequently in the “fighting to escape” mode of engagement with the Suvin event – perhaps nowhere more aggressively than in Miéville’s own afterword, “Cognition as Ideology,” which calls for a radical reconsideration not only of Suvin’s privileged categories of “cognition” and “utopia” but even a reversal of his preference for SF over fantasy! “Precisely to continue the project of theorising a conjoined SF and fantasy,” the afterword and book concludes, “SF, with its tendency to hegemonise the conversation, might have to be temporarily excluded”9 – a particularly revealing demonstration of the way that even a call to abolish Suvin altogether remains fully inscribed within the circuit of discursivity Suvin founded.

Suvin’s early work on SF, beginning with “Poetics” and culminating in Metamorphoses, is thus best understood not simply as a “Big Bang” for SF studies but as an ongoing and highly contested conversation in which even many of those who prefer non-Suvinian approaches to SF are, for better or worse, debating largely within the terms of the argument as he originally established them. Miéville’s call to replace “utopia” with “alterity”10 – or the orthogonal call of critics like John Rieder, Patricia Kerslake, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and David Higgins to replace “utopia” with “violence,” “racism,” and “empire” as the critical categories at the heart of SF’s generic imagination – frequently replicate Suvin in form if not in content, using parallel strategies of allegorical and analogical reading to cut through SF’s surface disavowal of the real-world political order to which it responds (and frequently discovering, as in the case of the “imperial turn,” a submerged left critique of empire that is not all that far removed from the glimmers of utopia with which Suvin and closely related critics like Fredric Jameson, Carl Freedman, and Tom Moylan have been so concerned all along).

That pull – the pull towards optimism, towards utopia – remains the overwhelming call of Suvinian criticism of SF, which for Suvin is properly

• China Miéville, “Cognition as Ideology,” in Bould and Miéville, eds., Red Planets, p. 245.
• Ibid.

understood as a “fundamentally subversive genre”11 that is “wiser than the world it speaks to.”12 His early critical work positioned SF studies as a site where scholars interrogate notions of futurity and difference, and explore the possibility of radical historical change. As Tom Moylan has noted, in the early 1970s, when Suvin began his project, this work was in conversation with a spirit of world transformation nurtured by a political left that seemed, if only for a time, politically ascendant. Moylan links Suvin’s work to “the wider culture of opposition” of the period, a moment when “the Left […] was undeniably strong, when it held substantial cultural, if not political or economic, power” and “when scholarly work in sf and utopian studies (along with utopian sf itself ) developed in opposition to the reigning orthodoxies of academic literary studies.”13 Suvin’s work certainly draws energy from the optimism of that moment. But Suvin’s work seems quite able to escape this context as well, speaking directly to a contemporary cultural moment when unleashed turbocapitalism, neoliberal paralysis, renewed and vicious militarism, and foreboding ecological pessimism conspire against all hope for a better tomorrow. In fact in the contemporary moment it seems more urgent than ever to take up Metamorphoses’s excavation of the ethos that permeated SF, in all its media forms, across its two-hundred-year existence as a literary genre: a study of the survival and persistence of utopian thought in unhappy times. Suvin’s work traces the story of that persistence – and has also, through its wide influence, itself become part of the story of utopia’s continued, unlikely, and deeply necessary survival.

It’s unsurprising then that critical interest in Suvin has intensified, even as 1960s and 1970s hopes for utopian historical change have withered. As the world grows more and more science fictional – looking, one might say, more and more like the opening montage to some darkly dystopian SF

1. MOSF (2016), p. 42.
2. MOSF (2016), p. 50.
3. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Boulder, CO, 2000), p. 9. For an extended discussion of Metamorphoses in its original historical moment, as well as consideration of the role Suvin’s personal biography played in its development, see especially chapter two of Scraps.

film – SF studies is experiencing renewed renaissance in the academy, with Suvin still an inevitable and necessary reference in these conversations. Web of Science (a digital citation index) records twenty or more citations of Metamorphoses a year in articles since 2009, up from only 5 a year in 2005, while in 2014 ProQuest’s index of over 300 citations for Metamorphoses saw 117 dissertations citing the book between 2000 and 2009, and 91 in just the first four years since 2010.14 The ongoing influence of this text is all the more impressive given that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction has (until now) been out of print for several decades. Scholarly engagement with Suvin’s work has persisted through a online market whose price now regularly passes $100 for a used copy, or though library recall wars, or through illicit, blurry photocopies of the entire manuscript like the one I used in graduate school to write my own dissertation. All told hundreds of scholarly articles, dissertations, and books have cited Metamorphoses in recent years,the majority of these in the years since the book has been very difficult to acquire. When I polled the online discussion lists for the Science Fiction Research Association and International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (the two primary organizations for the study of SF and related speculative genres) to gauge interest in this reprint, the result was overwhelming. Scholars told me it was “shocking” and “shameful” that the work was out of print, given its continued importance in the field; Benjamin Robertson of the University of Colorado Boulder perhaps best summed up the general mood of my inbox when he wrote: “Imagine if Watt’s The Rise of the Novel was out of print. That’s what having Metamorphoses of Science Fiction out of print is like.”

This rerelease, then, offers SF scholars a long-delayed opportunity for a collective return to origins, a chance to revisit Suvin in light of the years of SF criticism that have come since.

* * *

1. My thanks to LeslieKay Swigart for providing me with these and other numbers demonstrating Metamorphoses’songoing relevance.

The theoretical intervention at the center of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction has already been mentioned: the defining of “SF” as “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” a superficially oxymoronic formulation that matches the paradoxical relationship between “science” and “fiction” in “science fiction.” This has always been a notoriously thorny problem for writers, critics, and fans of SF; indeed, as Gary K. Wolfe has suggested, the widely adopted move to use the initials “SF” has been motivated in part precisely by the desire to sidestep this issue altogether.15 Is science fiction mostly about “science,” or mostly about story? Is it an extrapolative genre offering us “tomorrow’s headlines today,” or an unrestrained flight of fantasy and goofy irreality (as in the ubiquitous ledes in popular journalism that proclaim the latest gadget “not science fiction, but science fact”)? Should we, as some have suggested, replace “science” with “speculative” to denote that not all (or perhaps not even most) of what is called science fiction has genuine investment in what actual real-world science tell us is true, preferring instead what it tells us is almost certainly not: time travel, FTL drives, mutant superpowers, and on and on? Suvin’s restatement of the oxymoronic relationship between “S” and “F” in his proposed conjuncture between cognition and estrangement does more than simply restate the problem: it is a judo-like embrace of this opposition that reorients SF around this very paradox, and in the process transforms both horns of the dilemma, opening the S of “science” into as much sapientia (wisdom) as scientia (knowledge),16 and remaking the “F” of “fiction” not so much as “falsity” but as “possibility,” or, even more precisely, as “theoreticity” – “fiction” better understood not as deviation from truth but as an alternative orientation towards it.

Suvin thus develops not simply a consensus definition of SF for SF studies (from which discussions, debates, and further differentiations can then proceed) but the larger critical apparatus that makes SF studies (as we have come to know it) possible. He also, in the process, produces a robust history for the genre that reaches back much further in time than the niche

1. Gary K. Wolfe, “Coming to Terms,” in James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, eds., Speculations on Speculation (Lanham, MD, 2005), p. 21.
2. MOSF (2016), p. 50.

marketing practices of mid-twentieth-century publishers. Suvin’s SF includes within itself not only Verne and Wells (two natural starting points for the genre) but also More’s Utopia,Swift’s Gulliver, and pre-modern tales of faroff voyages to lost islands or cities on the Moon. Early in Metamorphoses Suvin even suggests both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the myth of Eden as at least quasi-science-fictional, proto-SF,17 a move which suggests SF as in some sense intrinsically related to the imagination of alterity, difference, and the unknown as such. Such stories are characterized by their interest in the figure of what Suvin calls the novum, the “strange newness” around which a “strange-covariant coordinate systems and semantic fields” might be organized18 – the imagination of which is an almost inescapable facet of human life.

It seems easy to understand what makes such visions of alternative worlds an example of “estrangement” – but what makes them “cognitive”? For Suvin it is precisely the fact that these historical, pre-modern reports of alternative worlds are supposed to be, and presented as though they are, “factual”: SF “takes off from a fictional (‘literary’) hypothesis and develops it with totalizing (‘scientific’) rigor.”19 Estrangement – which Suvin points out is indebted to both Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie and the famous Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht – is the principle of difference that fuels the soaring imagination of science fictional difference, while cognition is the reality principle that adheres to our real conditions of existence and thereby keeps the imagination honest. SF thus operates precisely in the paradox of the realistic dream, the dream that is or might be (or could yet become) real. This complex interrelationship between cognition and estrangement produces a “feedback oscillation” that “moves now from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality to the narratively actualized novum in order to understand the plot-events, and now back from those novelties to the author’s reality in order to see it afresh from the new perspective gained.”20 Together cognition and estrangement

1. MOSF (2016), p. 17.
2. MOSF (2016), p. 18.
3. Ibid.
4. MOSF (2016), p. 88.

thus produce SF as something intellectually distinct from mere fantasy on the one hand) or nonfiction and mimetic “realism” (on the other): SF is a “dynamic transformation” of our history rather than a “static mirroring” of it, “not only a reflecting of  but also on reality.”21

A crucial correction here is required for those who have mistakenly taken Suvin’s use of cognition to be scientistic, or even a form of science fetishism. In fact what Suvin means by cognition is closer to the German word Wissenschaft, including “not only natural but also all the cultural or historical sciences and even scholarship,” crucially the Marxist intellectual tradition chief among them.22 Cognition in a work of SF requires not simply mastery of the “cold equations” of physics, chemistry, and biology but a full accounting of capital-H History as such, how the world got this way and how it might yet become different – if, that is, its attendant estrangement is to have any more weight than a mere dream. Carl Freedman, whose Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) has been one of the most successful extensions of the Suvinian paradigm in recent years, has proposed that cognition be replaced with cognition effect to indicate that the most important aspect of the “cognitive” in “cognitive estrangement” is “not any epistemological judgment external to the text itself on the rationality or irrationality of the latter’s imaginings, but rather (as some of Suvin’s language does, in fact, imply, but never makes entirely clear) the attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being performed.”23 I would argue that the vision of cognition that Freedman elaborates is, in fact, what Suvin was always talking about in Metamorphoses: the central role of cognition in SF is not to facilitate squabbling over the rightness or wrongness about this or that limited scientific claim, but rather to facilitate our return from the science fictional estrangement back to the context of the world in which we all actually live and work and struggle.24

• MOSF (2016), p. 22. 22              MOSF (2016), p. 26.
• Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH, 2000), p. 18.
• In an email to me while preparing this volume, Suvin described this role for cognition as an “epistemological poetics,” a formulation I find quite lovely.

Noncognitive estrangements, however stirring, interrupt that principle of return. Suvin’s rejection of fairy tale, fantasy, supernatural or occult narrative, and other modes of “noncognitive” estrangement has been an undeniably contentious part of the reception of his theorization of SF since the publication of Metamorphoses (and as such is the subject of one of the three additional essays included in this Classics edition). Suvin reserves special ire in the text for “science fantasy,” space operatic or psychic superman stories which masquerade as SF with regard to producing (a purely rhetorical) plausibility and suspension of disbelief but which are in fact indelibly hostile to either physical or socioeconomic reality. Such stories are “misshapen,”25 “organized around an ideology unchecked by any cognition, so that its narrative logic is simply overt ideology plus Freudian erotic patterns”;26 thus “SF regressing into fairy tale (for example, “space opera” with a hero-princess-monster triangle in astronautic costume) is committing creative suicide.”27 Suvin’s later, partial reconsideration of fantasy can be seen in “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion,” discussed below; however, a potential line of interest in fantasy can be seen even in his original discussion of fantasy in Metamorphoses. “The thesis could be defended,” Suvin writes, “that the fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a superordinated maleficent world of its own, causing a grotesque between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate,” suggesting Nikolai Gogol’s “Nose” as one possible example of this “significant” fantasy done right (and Lovecraft as a version done very wrong).28 However, Suvin’s position (in both Metamorphoses and “Effusion”) is that most fantasy does not reach this level of reflexive sophistication, and that the mixing of genres implicit in the combined “Science Fiction & Fantasy” category frequently found in bookstores thus does severe disservice to SF.

But this is only one particular case of a ubiquitous issue running across SF publication, which is that for Suvin most work published under its

• MOSF (2016), p. 84-85.
• MOSF (2016), p. 85.
• MOSF (2016), p. 21.
• Ibid.

name (or under related names like “science fiction” or “speculative fiction”) is unworthy of serious critical consideration. In the original preface to Metamorphoses the number is said to be as high as 90 to 95 per cent “strictly perishable stuff, produced in view of instant obsolescence for the publisher’s profit and the writer’s acquisition of other perishable commodities” – though even this rejected mass is said to be sociologically significant given its influence and popularity. Only 5–10 per cent of SF is aesthetically significant, in Suvin’s view, a list that produces a stable of authors that, we have seen, is seen by many scholars as far too narrow a canon: “Lem, Le Guin, Dick, Disch, Delany, the Strugatsky brothers, Jeury, Aldiss, Ballard, and others.”29 In these authors we see the interplay between cognition and estrangement reaching its highest literary-aesthetic formulation, as well as the political valence of SF, and its historical affinity with a leftist, socialist politics, most fully and generatively produced.

The claim that the study of SF is indelibly inmbricated with the study of utopia is another provocative one, perhaps Suvin’s most radical intervention in the field (and also one that has been subject to significant reconsideration and revision by subsequent scholars). For Suvin, utopia and SF stand in close, quasi-science-fictional familial relationship to one another. He describes utopian fiction as “early and primitive branch of SF,”30 while suggesting that today the two genres stand in a daughter-mother and nieceaunt relation, each simultaneously parenting the other – and Suvin’s articulation of the mutual imbrication between science fictional futurity and utopian political speculation has certainly invigorated criticism in both fields. Suvin’s work has been nearly as influential in the field of utopian studies as in SF studies – particularly as so much utopian speculation and dystopian/apocalyptic warning in our moment is now, from a genre perspective, SF. In our time – with the world now fully mapped, and no hidden islands or isolated valleys yet lurking that might hold the secret of another sort of history – it is the imagination of the science fictional chronotope (the future, other dimensions, outer space) that yields the opportunity to

• MOSF (2016), p. 1.
• MOSF (2016), p. 73.

both imagine radical social difference and connect that radical difference to our own situation in the here-and-now. Cognitive estrangement constitutes precisely this twofold move: we transport ourselves to the other world (estrangement) so that we can better think about this one (cognition). Neither cognition nor estrangement is necessarily utopian in its own terms, by definition – however, cognition’s close relationship with leftist social and historical theory, when paired with estrangement’s irrepressible yearning for historical difference, somewhat inevitably produces utopian speculations, whether in positive form as eutopia (the good place) or in negative as dystopia (the bad place).

Similarly, as Moylan has persuasively argued in his own reading and extension of Suvin, the trope of the novum figures not only as the engine that “generates and validates” the diegetic milieu of the SF text, and not only as the “common denominator” between the SF text and the utopian text, but as the Archimedean point that allows us to evaluate whether a text “effectively intervenes in the author’s historical context.”31 We should, as Suvin says, judge the “degree of relevance” of a novum not on its fidelity to this or that physical law but on its relation to the ongoing struggle for liberation and justice. “A novum is fake,” Suvin writes, “unless it in some way participates in and partakes of what Bloch called the ‘front-line of historical process’ – which for him (and for me) as a Marxist means a process intimately concerned with strivings for a disalienation of people and their social life.”32 Likewise, so-called utopias that affirm existing injustices and inadequacies are unworthy of the name: “All utopias involve people who radically suffer of the existing system and radically desire to change it.”33 SF in the Suvinian mold speaks to that suffering, and to that radical desire. As Fredric Jameson (still another critic whose work on SF and utopia has importantly extended and transformed Suvin’s) has famously said, “history is what hurts”34 – and the intersection of cognition and estrangement in

• Moylan, p. 48.
• MOSF (2016), p. 99.
• Darko Suvin, Defined by a Hollow,Ralahine Utopian Studies, Vol. 6 (Oxford, 2010), p. 30 note 11.
• Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY, 1982), p. 102.

properly Suvinian SF thus directs its readers precisely towards that space of hurt, with hope it will be overcome.

These implications of Suvin’s study of SF suggest that the relationship between SF (as Suvin defines it) and the larger project of political leftism is in some sense unavoidable. When Karl Marx dedicates himself to “the ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be”35 – or, for that matter, when he projects the creation of a technologized future world of progress and plenty that has been freed from the class struggle corrupting our own – is it so strange to think he is writing SF? Carl Freedman, taking up the Suvinian perspective in an essay in Red Planets, has suggested as much. The interplay between cognition and estrangement, Freedman says, is not only the formal principle that produces SF but is also in some sense the buried logic of Marxism more generally, which seeks to destroy all the illusions that sustain our miserable world precisely in the hopes of someday creating a new and better one: “visionary transcendence is the necessary completion of astringent demystification.”36 A novum which fails to produce such a politically charged vision of genuine historical difference will be “of brief and narrow” relevance, precisely because “they make for a superficial change rather than for a true novelty that deals with or makes for human relationships so qualitatively different from those dominant in the author’s reality that they cannot be translated back to them merely by a change in costume.” This is the key not only to “aesthetic quality in SF but also to its ethico-political liberating qualities, its communal relevance.”37 What we ultimately long for in SF, Suvin argues, and what makes SF an important literary genre, isn’t its ray guns or its hyperdrives or its novel patent laws but its vision of a radically different social order that in the end is always

• Karl Marx, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher: Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm.
• Carl Freedman, “Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialetics of Science Fiction and Film Noir,” in Bould and Miéville, eds., Red Planets, p. 73.
• MOSF (2016), p. 100.

a critique of our own very flawed one, alongside the dream of our flawed order’s supersession. “Significant SF” – that 5 per cent or 10 per cent worth celebrating – “is in fact a specifically roundabout way of commenting on the author’s collective context – often resulting in a surprisingly concrete and sharp-sighted comment at that.” But this “better vantage point from which to comprehend the human relations around the author” is simultaneously “a device for historical estrangement” and “an at least initial readiness for new norms of reality.” The most essential, and most radical, novum – the exhilarating dream that characterizes the very best of SF – is “dealienating human history.”38

* * *

Suvin’s definition, though having come to function as a kind of consensus starting point for literary critical discussions of SF, is certainly not without its critics, many of whom describe it as overly narrow, overly specialized, overly political, and (perhaps most problematically) not sufficiently in conversation with the self-identity of science fictional and speculative writing that had been developed by SF’s own writers, editors, and fandom. Gary Westfahl’s critique perhaps is emblematic: he says Suvin’s use of the term “science fiction” “must be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to replace […] the traditional concept of the genre” with “his own ideas.”39 Suvin, for his part, has conceded to some degree the legitimacy of this critique, writing in Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988)that “genre traditions are legitimately established in retrospect” and that his study “(as any other study) was normative in the sense of possessing norms of value induced from both the critic’s presuppositions and the texts […] and reapplied to texts.”40 Suvin’s calculated dismissal of most of the domain of SF in the name of a selected, curated, and privileged few is, unquestionably, the imposition of his values upon a larger field – though one might also

• MOSF (2016), p. 101.
• Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (Liverpool, 1998), p. 35 note 5.
• Darko Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (Kent, OH, 1988), p. xii, emphasis mine.

take Suvin’s point that this is what any critic does in the formation and articulation of aesthetic judgment.

Nor is Suvin’s definition so far out of step with the mainstream genre’s own definitions and aspirations. It was Ray Bradbury – a writer whom Suvin spends little time on in his work, and who he twice names within the pages of Metamorphoses as a frequent purveyor of “science fantasy” – who once provided a definition of science fiction that is largely identical to Suvin’s: “That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make them different.”41 Isaac Asimov (a personal favorite author of my childhood, whom Suvin critiques within Metamorphoses for his “metaphysical gobbledygook”42), typically offered a much more bloodless definition of the genre: “Science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.”43 But when Asimov was pressed to elaborate, he would often describe the sense of futurity implicit in such “impact” in quite Suvinian terms: “SF teaches that there are numerous changes and that mankind by its actions can pick and choose among them. We should choose one which is for the better. That is the proper interpretation of the role of SF.”44 When Asimov said that there are only three science fictional scenarios – “what if, if only, and if this goes on”45 – we have utopia and dystopia (which is only ever utopia

• Ray Bradbury, “No News, or What Killed the Dog?”, in Quicker than the Eye (New York, 1996), p. 163.
• MOSF (2016), p. 37.
• Qtd. in James Gunn, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD,

2005), p. 163.

• Earl G. Ingersoll, “A Conversation with Isaac Asimov,” in Carl Freedman, ed., Conversations with Isaac Asimov (Jackson, MS, 2005), p. 32. In the same interview, Asimov makes a claim about SF and social change that is perhaps even more directly Suvinian, noting that the “SF attitude” stands in opposition to those who “take for granted that things won’t change or that if they do they shouldn’t, and you should make every effort to restore the status quo” (p. 31). Asimov again asserts that change is inevitable, and thus we ought to devote ourselves instead to figuring out which changes are desirable and which are not.
• Isaac Asimov, More Soviet Science Fiction (New York, 1982), p. 8. These three categories are frequently attributed to Robert Heinlein, but I could not find a definitive

in negative) as two of our three options, with the cognitive estrangement implicit in the radical difference of “what if ” almost always in practice producing a political charge as well. It would be very strange if it did not – if we were to imagine alternative worlds with literally no interest in the ethics, politics, economics, and hedonics of those times and spaces as compared to our own.

To draw a line from these thoughts to the more explicitly resistant politics of the authors Suvin tends to privilege, like Ursula K. Le Guin – who once said the “smear-word” of “internal émigré” deployed against Zamyatin by the Stalinists “is a precise and noble description of the finest writers of SF, in all countries”46 – or Philip K. Dick – who said he wrote science fiction as a “way to rebel”47 because “the world we actually have does not meet my standards”48 – and deliberately place political struggles over futurity at the heart of the generic imagination hardly seems like an overly aggressive rewriting of SF history. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a genre SF that acknowledged its articulation of radical change (estrangement) tempered by the reality principle of what is physically, biologically, and socially possible (cognition) that didn’t, in some way or another, charge itself with evaluating which alternative histories and potential futures were better or worse (utopia). Suvin’s definition has been so overwhelmingly influential because it names, clearly and succinctly, the two overlapping philosophical operations that really are at the core of the “speculative,” while leaving ample room for his intellectual descendants to quibble about the specific boundaries and limit-points of either term.

To object to Suvin’s definition of the genre on the grounds it diminishes or omits certain tendencies within the history of the field (for instance, the obvious presence of liberal and right-wing speculations alongside his

original source for the quote beyond the title of his 1940 novel If This Goes On. I have come to believe this is a popular misattribution and that the true source is Asimov.

• Ursula K. Le Guin, “Surveying the Battlefield,” Science Fiction Studies 2 (Fall 1973), http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/2/marx2forum.htm.
• Philip K Dick, “The Lucky Dog Pet Store,” in Vintage PKD (New York, 2007), p. 124.
• Ibid., p. 128.

preferred leftist, utopian SF, to say nothing of the militaristic, hypercapitalist, overtly racist, and deeply misogynistic fantasies that have been and frequently still are published within the genre49) is in this sense both trivially true and largely besides the point. Any proposed canon is always subject to debate; the loathed possibility of the construction of alternative and inferior canons is precisely the reason why one forms a canon in the first place! What Suvin proposes is a strategy of focusing on what he sees as the best of the genre first and foremost: “The genre has to be evaluated proceeding from the heights down, applying the standards gained by the analysis of its masterpieces.”50 And Suvin’s criteria for determining what qualifies for those lofty heights of SF is unrepentantly inscribed by contact with utopia, by the possibility of radical, and rational, world-transformation.

Criticism of Suvin’s method is thus in many cases precisely a dispute about the consequences of his strategy of hierarchization, as much as anything else. Such a strategy somewhat inevitably produces pushback in the name of saving this or that author (or this or that book, or this or that trope, or this or that sub-sub-genre) from the scrapheap – and indeed much of the criticism that presents itself in opposition to Suvin does so out of a desire to reject his dismissal of particular SF texts that do not meet his criteria, and/or to rescue fantasy and horror texts from second-class designation. But of course the formal and political principles that Suvin advances in Metamorphoses are only one of many possible versions of a core “SF canon” that might be formed, either using his definitions or finding some alternative; that task, and the inevitable incompleteness, over-specialization, and bottomless debatability of any such list once formulated, has always

• On this point in particular, consult Suvin’s “Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction,” in Darko Suvin, ed., Fictions annual no. 3, special issue on U.S. Science Fiction and War/Militarism (Pisa and Roma,

2005): 107–154. Reprint of Part 1 (“1945–1974: Fordism”), in Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, eds., New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (Columbia SC,

2008), pp. 115–144; Part 2 (“1975–2001: Post-Fordism, and Some Conclusions”), Extrapolation 48.1 (2007): 9–34.

• MOSF (2016), p. 49.

a crucial component of SF as a collective intellectual project, both in and outside the academy.

That project of canon construction – the casting back from the present into historical forebears, assigning some importance and leaving others aside – actually constitutes the bulk of the work of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, especially in its second part, “History,” which has frequently been overlooked in favor of the more theoretical interventions of part one, “Poetics.” Suvin’s longue durée, four-hundred-year history of the genre finds unexpected progenitors, for instance, in the form of the pastoral, whose stirring “imaginary framework of a world without money economy, state apparatus, and depersonalizing urbanization” stands in relationship to SF “as alchemy does to chemistry and nuclear physics: an early try in the right direction with insufficient foundations.”51 Unsurprisingly, he places especially close emphasis on the genre’s relationship with More’s 1516 Utopia, tracing the work of SF first through that novel and then into trips to other imaginary isles and (even off-planet alternatives, as in the roman planétaire of Lucian and Cyrano.) Suvin’s history of SF also finds close affinity with Gulliver’s Travels,particularly in its closing voyages to the floating city of Laputa and the pseudo-paradisal country of the Houyhnhnms (the sentient horses) – as well as the distinctly science fictional ethos of its satiric commentary on the fallibility of human (or “Yahoo”) institutions. Swift is in fact an exemplary case of how even “extreme anti-utopian despair” can be transmogrified “into a critique of the anti-utopian world which it mirrors” in the hands of the science fictional imagination: “The more passionate and precise Swift’s negation, the more clearly the necessity for new worlds of humaneness appears before the reader.”52 And on the story goes, through Shelley, Poe, Verne, Wells, Twain, Bellamy, onward to the crystallization of science fiction as a discrete and recognizable literary genre in the early part of the twentieth century. The crucial turn here is the turn towards anticipation of possible futures, “aesthetically structured by a

• MOSF (2016), p. 21.
• MOSF (2016), p. 131.

‘positive’ scientific cognition.”53 This sense of anticipation can be located, Suvin argues, even in SF that seems to transgress the general rule, as in the quasi-Gothic Frankenstein, which recoils from revolutionary novum of the future in horror at what the French Revolution had wrought.54

1. similar gap can be located in the time of Jules Verne, and especially his contemporaries and successors, whose work is discussed in a chapter called “Liberalism Mutes the Anticipation.” The period between Frankenstein and The Time Machine marks for Suvin an era when “any significant novum, in space as well as in time, grew untenable within liberal horizons.”55 Verne himself is presented as a genuine innovator producing significant SF, but most of his imitators are producing only “subliterature”56 – and on the whole the birth of liberalism coincides with the temporary squashing of SF’s capacity to imagine radical difference in favor of flattened continuations of the present. This antipathy is only the start of the mutual antagonism between liberalism and Suvin’s “significant SF,” an antagonism we can see quite clearly from our vantage point at (or after) “the end of history,” a time in which our own capacity to imagine alternative futures to capitalism has become deeply impoverished. This extended historical examination has important ramifications not only for Suvin’s later work but for the work of theorists working in a similar register, like Jameson and Slavoj Žižek – both of whom have been credited with the now-ubiquitous aphorism that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – and Mark Fischer, whose theory of capitalist realism describes precisely contemporary liberalism’s corralling of all possible horizons for the future.57 At a 1997 meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, Suvin argued that that the “most daring utopia” we might yet hope for today is no longer “Earthly Paradise” but only “the prevention of Hell on Earth,” articulating the possibility of an alternative future as a kind of desperate prayer: “May the Earth remain our habitable mother, rather than being
2. MOSF (2016), p. 137.
3. See MOSF (2016), chapter six.
4. MOSF (2016), p. 89.
5. Ibid.
6. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 2009).

pushed by greedy classes and imbecilitated masses (as today) the way of ecological catastrophe, and the ensuing great Migration of Peoples, the bitter State and corporation wars, the civil wars of constructed racism and ethnicity!”58 But all those crisis, our crises, were their crises too – class struggle, ecological devastation genocide, war – and Suvin’s assertion contra Thatcher that “there is no alternative – to utopia”59 finds its echo across the longer history of early SF as he first articulated it in the 1970s. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dawn of SF, the “increasing closure of liberal bourgeois horizons” produced a firce backlash, a “thirst for anticipations – fictional pictures of an excitingly different future”60 – produced, that is, a period of experimentation in and intense fascination with SF and its alternatives that is still reverberating today. When SF finally and fully erupts, Suvin argues, in the key turn-of-the-century texts of Bellamy, Morris, Twain, and especially Wells, it erupts as a blow against liberalism, against the world as it is, in an insistent, ecstatic cry that another sort of world than this must be possible. The history of SF’s utopian development inside and against liberalism that Suvin recovers here is thus highly relevant to the way we understand the ongoing metamorphoses of our own possible futures, as we contest the hopelessness of our own deeply troubled times.

1. crucial component of this underrecognized portion of Metamorphoses is its wide international scope, anticipating later movements within an academy that has only just begun to catch up. Unlike much SF criticism, Suvin’s Metamorphoses reaches far outside the constraints of the narrow AngloAmerican publishing market, often bemoaning the possible traditions of SF that might have emerged had French, German, or Russian authors been more widely translated or read (as well as emphasizing important precursors to the contemporary SF genre in pre-modern Europe and in antiquity). Indeed, the book unexpectedly ends outside the Anglosphere altogether, first with a chapter on “Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition” – an important part of the history of SF which contemporary SF studies has largely
2. Suvin, Defined,p. 259.
3. Ibid., p. 218.
4. MOSF (2016), p. 193.

ignored – and second with a lengthy exegesis and celebration of the Czech writer Karel Čapek, who has received too little critical attention given his development of several crucial SF tropes (chief among them his co-creation of the term “robot” itself ). It is the unlikely and too-much-forgotten figure of Čapek who (“rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs or Hugo Gernsback”) provides the “missing link” between Wells and the present form of SF as “a literature which will be both entertaining (which means popular) and cognitively (which means also formally) avant-gardist.”61 In this way the too-neglected end of Metamorphoses speaks directly (if forty years early) to the current moment in SF studies, which has at last become very interested in the SF imaginary outside Britain and America.

* * *

This Ralahine Classis edition reissues Metamorphoses of Science Fiction as it was originally published while offering additional material that reflects Suvin’s own expansion, revision, and further consideration of the propositions advanced in Metamorphoses at later points in this career. These were selected, in consultation with Suvin himself, to indicate crucial ways in which his theory of SF has not only adapted to changing times but also in response to both his allies and his critics. Our hope is that the presence of these appendices will mark the extent to which “the Suvin event” remains vital and ongoing, even thirty-five years after Metamorphoses’s original publication.

The first essay originates in Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, the book Suvin considers a companion to Metamorphoses (not sequel or successor so much as continuation). “Science Fiction, Metaphor, Parable, and Chronotope (with the Bad Conscience of Reaganism),” the thirteenth and concluding chapter from that book, originally published as an essay in 1984, takes up the thorny status of metaphor within SF, which inevitably arises in any discussion of the necessary dialectic between similarity and difference that manifests in the attempt to construct a science fictional world. This dialectic is matched by a new and equally difficult tension, that

• MOSF (2016), p. 311.

between metaphor and the concept of narrative as such. Suvin’s answer is to read SF through the mode of the parable which (following Ricoeur) is the “conjunction” of “narrative form” and “metaphorical process.”62 SF parables work by establishing a chronotope (a time and space that is both internally coherent and always importantly distinct from our own), which is then transformed in some fashion on the levels of diegesis or interpretation (or both) by the unfolding of the narrative. The intersection of these levels of presentation is structured by their mutual and necessary incompleteness; in accordance with Marc Angenot’s articulation of the “absent paradigm,” we never grasp the full chronotope, the full narrative, or the full metaphor, but always rather have “the feeling that more is going on under the surface.”63 This gap is a constitutive part of SF, rather than a flaw to be corrected: Suvin writes that “SF, just as parable and metaphor, relates to a significant problem of the social addressee in indirect ways, through estrangement into a seemingly unrelated concrete and possible set of situations; thus “the strange new chronotopes” of SF “always signify human relationships in the writer’s here and now,” but not in reductive, ossific, or uncomplicatedly one-to-one relationships.64 These remarks thus become the occasion for a redemptive reading of the Cordwainer Smith and Genevieve Linebarger story “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul” in which the story’s particular weaknesses and Smith’s own bad habits as a writer do not detract from its articulation of one of the most important implications of SF today, that politics might yet be “salvation” even in the dire context of “the bad ethical conscience of Reaganism” (and, from our perspective, post-Thatcher and post-Reagan neoliberalism more generally). SF – as much through its gaps and its implicatures as through its careful and deliberate expositions and confabulations – becomes here a particularly vital instance in the formal interplay between “utopianism and ideology” that characterizes “all significant stories.”65 Suvin here inverting Bloch, he argues that SF directs us

• “Science Fiction, Metaphor…” (2016), p. 363.
• “Science Fiction, Metaphor…” (2016), p. 372.
• Ibid.
• “Science Fiction, Metaphor…” (2016), p. 377

through both its affirmative constructions and its dialectical negations to the exhilaratingly radical proposition that – even in the bad years of Reagan (or Carter, or Nixon, or Thatcher, or Bush, either one, or Blair, or Clinton, either one, or Obama, or Putin, or…) – “in the stories things sometimes turn out right because we might and all might still be right.”66

The second additional essay, “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion,” first published in Extrapolation in 2001, is the most radical revision of Metamorphoses of the three additions, and likely the most welcome to those critics who found Suvin’s hard line between SF and related speculative genres (especially fantasy) too difficult to maintain. “Let me therefore revoke, probably to general regret,” Suvin writes, “my blanket rejection of fantastic fiction. The divide between cognitive (pleasantly useful) and non-cognitive (useless) does not run between SF and fantastic fiction but inside each.”67 But this is not the occasion for a retraction or an apology, or even for a significant rewrite of the conclusions of Metamorphoses,but rather an opportunity for further thinking about why the genre divide seemed so definitive and insurmountable in that time (and why it persists today, reinscribed in myriad ways across academic and editorial practice). The result is a provocative and rich – and, undoubtedly, still quite controversial – revision of Suvin’s originary refusal of the fantasy and the fantastic, one that now admits certain types of fantastic texts (Samuel R. Delany’s, or Ursula K. Le Guin’s, or the pre-Disneyfied folk tales lauded by Marxist scholar Jack Zipes as the proto-utopias of suppressed communities) while still insisting that many or most or nearly all fantastic texts commit the sins of Howard’s Hyborian Age or Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or Lovecraft’s many nightmare cities: crafting a world defined by essences and capital-E Evils that cannot allow the possibility of progressive historical change.

Suvin’s extended engagement with his pro-fantasy critics opens a door, but not all that wide, and without excessive enthusiasm, insisting in the end that the cognitive estrangement associated with his proposed vision

• “Science Fiction, Metaphor…” (2016), p. 378.
• “Fantasy” (2016), p. 388.

of SF (now, perhaps, admitting some fantastic texts in) remains politically galvanizing in a way Fantasy generally is not:

I’d think SF appeals to social groups with confidence that something can at present be done about a collective, historical future – if only as dire warnings […]. To the contrary, in a situation where people’s entire life-world has in the meanwhile undergone much further tentacular and capillary colonization, Fantasy’s appeal is to uncertain social classes or fractions who have been cast adrift and lost that confidence, so that they face their own present and future with horror or a resolve to have a good time before the Deluge – or both.68

In either its “Heroic” or “Horror” modes, by and large Fantasy for Suvin forecloses intervention points in favor of melancholy and political paralysis. And while the appeal of this sort of depressive thinking is undeniable, he concedes, it is not what we need. The essay thus closes in a somewhat unexpected place: a celebration of the greatness of Franz Kafka, and his literary descendants, in whom we see a kind of “indirect parable” confronting “grim times” in term that cannot be said to be SF, or even to possess much utopian courage, but which at the same time seem utterly necessary as a response to the many disasters of modernity (perhaps something on the order of the primal scream that, for Adorno, constitutes the spirit of poetry after Auschwitz): “the nightmare from which we cannot awaken into a dream.”69 Kafka’s fantasy is worthy precisely because it does not translate us to some fantastic world of magic or of horror, but rather excavates the horrors that so deeply infuse our own.

Suvin himself slides against his own more hopeful tendencies as a critic into the role of “the bearer of bad news” in the final supplementary essay, “Circumstances and Stances,” written for PMLA in 2004.70 Suvin’s strident articulation of the anti-utopian forces that have conquered and corrupted the university (and knowledge production under capitalism more generally) has become only more relevant in the decade since its initial publication. The stirring short essay names our present world as a dystopia – a difficult

68           “Fantasy” (2016), p. 430. 69 “Fantasy” (2016), p. 439.

70    “Circumstances” (2016), p. 446.

proposition to refute – and then dares us to respond. Suvin argues here that knowledge, and the practices that structure knowledge production, cannot be held independently from the need to respond to the ongoing disaster of history; epistemology and politics do not function independently, as we pretend, but rather as a kind of double helix, each one patterning the other: “Thus our answers can be found only in feedback with potential action.”71

“Those who do not put an explicitly defensible civic cognition at the heart of their professional cognition,” he goes on, “at best adopt the dominant epistemology of the time when they were students, and at worst adapt their cognition to the new epistemology of the Powers-That-Be.”72 For the study of SF, or the study of utopian thought, or the study of literature, or for work across the humanities in the broadest sense, here then is Suvin’s charge to us in our collective moment of danger; now let us get to work.

Gerry Canavan

Marquette University

October 2015

Bibliography

Asimov, Isaac. More Soviet Science Fiction. New York, 1982.

Bould, Mark. “Introduction: Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet, from Nemo to Neo,” in Mark Bould and China Miéville, eds., Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT, 2009. 1–26.

Bradbury, Ray. “No News, or What Killed the Dog?”, in Quicker than the Eye. New York, 1996. 158–169.

Dick, Philip K. “The Lucky Dog Pet Store,” in Vintage PKD. New York, 2007. 123–135.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?”, in Josué V. Harari, trans. and ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca, NY, 1979. 141–160.

• “Circumstances” (2016), p. 448.
• Ibid.

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, NH, 2000.

——. “Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialetics of Science Fiction and Film Noir,” in Mark Bould and China Miéville, eds., Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction.

Middletown, CT, 2009. 66–82.

Gunn, James. Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. Lanham, MD, 2005.

Ingersoll, Earl G. “A Conversation with Isaac Asimov,” in Carl Freedman, ed., Conversations with Isaac Asimov,Jackson, MS, 2005. 21–33.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY, 1982.

Latham, Rob. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Oxford, 2014.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Surveying the Battlefield.” Science Fiction Studies 2 (Fall 1973). http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/2/marx2forum.htm.

Marx, Karl. “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher: Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/ letters/43_09.htm.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Boulder, CO, 2000.

Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow (Ralahine Utopian Studies, Vol. 6). Oxford, 2010.

——. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, CT, 1979. Reprinted herein.

——. “Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction,” in Darko Suvin, ed., Fictions annual no. 3, special issue on U.S. Science Fiction and War/Militarism. Pisa and Roma, 2005. 107–54. Reprint of Part 1 (“1945–1974: Fordism”), in Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, eds., New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Columbia SC, 2008. 115–144; Part 2 (“1975–2001: Post-Fordism, and Some Conclusions”). Extrapolation 48.1 (2007). 9–34.

——. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34.3 (Dec. 1972).

372–382.

——. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. Kent, OH, 1988.

Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction.

Liverpool, UK, 1998.

Wolfe, Gary K. “Coming to Terms,” in James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, ed., Speculations on Speculation. Lanham, MD, 2005. 13–22.

Darko Suvin                                                                                    (VERSION 2015, 14,960 words)

“You’ve read these?” Allen scanned the volume of
Ulysses. His interest and bewilderment grew. “Why?
What did you find?”
Sugermann considered. “These, as discriminated
from the other, are real books.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hard to say. They’re about something.”
(Dick, The Man Who Japed, ch. 9)
Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it
doesn’t go away. (Dick, VALIS, ch. 5)

1. Two Personal (But Not Only) Premises

1.1. Historical
It must have been 1972 or ’73 when my nose was first rubbed into the work of Philip Dick by a student at McGill, a young woman who went on to become a professor of psychology at Berkeley.
A friend of hers, a young Lithuanian-Canadian, was one of those fans having the entire opus of favourite SF writers in his flat, in this case all I was missing from Dick. I then asked my coeditor Dale Mullen whether he’d let me edit an issue of our journal, Science-Fiction Studies, on Le Guin and Dick, which soon became two separate issues. Among other matters in organizing that issue, I somehow got Dick’s phone number in southern California to solicit from him a contribution, which he eventually graciously gave. I had the feeling he was somewhat bewildered by academic attention, and it turned out later he had classical ambivalence toward it–he both wanted and resented our praise. Our conversations were entirely practical and unremarkable, except for one incident after he had received the SFS issue in 1975, when he gently complained about my slighting of his German, since he had been readily understood by the hotel he stayed in in Munich.
This turned out to be an instance of his talent for fabulation, for it appears he never was in Munich, but I was at the time entirely innocent of his psychic complexities…
Many years later, when his executor was preparing a volume of his letters for print, he asked me for permission to reproduce Dick’s 1974 letters denouncing me and two other prominent participants in the SFS issue, at the same time that he was cordially conversing with us, to the FBI as agents of a Soviet-bloc Communist committee situated in Cracow and going under the name of Lem; he knew that Lem wasn’t a single person because the latter had corresponded with him in several languages… I have since understood the terrible existential panic he was in when he tried to ingratiate himself with the FBI, and forgiven if not forgotten.1/ It is a case in point for Dick’s typically American cocoon, the political illiteracy to which I shall return in my conclusion. But away with memories of Atlantis! How is it proper today to talk about him? We could say this as in the title of Michael Bishop’s novel: “Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas”–and we are alive, at a time probably worse than his fears, 20 years later. We have therefore the benefits of hindsight, of having available almost all that matters which he wrote, including the mainstream novels, his letters, essays, and other expository prose. All of this, including a lot of critical literature, should of course be critically sifted, for beside benefits snares for the unwary have also multiplied since he died in 1982. And furthermore, most important, all of us who have loved (or love-hated) his work, but who at any rate have recognized his genius–that is, his cognitive importance to us the readers then and now–have cognitive, which means also ethical, obligations to his opus and his memory. Perhaps I should then start rather from 1975, when the first major collection of critical work on him was published in that SFS issue. This would for me personally be an obligatory starting point because I feel that my essay in that issue needs supplementing in two ways: by taking into account the new materials, and also new theoretical insights and positions some of us on the Left have arrived at examining the few splendors and many miseries since 1975–including among the splendors new thinking about salvation sparked by new needs and with help of Liberation Theology or a better understanding of Walter Benjamin.
My question would then be what does P.K. Dick’s fiction from Ubik on have to say to those of us, his readers, who have not given up trying to make sense–in however overdetermined and roundabout ways– out of our common world in order to find out possibilities of action in it. After all, we see the powerful social classes, all the Palmer-Eldritch-type mad capitalist and military groups lording it over us, that work successfully for destruction all the time–which proves that action is possible. We need horizons and orientations, today more than ever, which allow for radical change to counteract their destruction of material and moral life, of our bodies and our values. Let me be as clear here as I can: I do not wish to talk in the simplified language and conceptuality of a difference between “esthetic” and “committed” or engagé texts, nor, a fortiori, in that of “progressive” vs. “regressive” that lurks at its back. I hold with and Brecht that “to see how or as”–as opposed to staring or seeing only retinally–is to think as well as to see, that the optical nerve functions by way of the brain. The whole history of art and philosophy has shown us that we cannot understand any “what” without the “how,” for the “how” is in a way an inquiry into “what is what.” A navel-gazing “how” may engage our sympathies at moments of the gazer’s great navel pain.
But such a “how,” that denies it exists as a function of “what,” grows increasingly sterile. Thus I do wish to cleave to the fundamental opposition between Eros and Thanatos, fertility and sterility, making our lives easier or more difficult to understand.
Therefore: what can Dick’s late novels say to those of us who are not interested in theology as believers or even near-believers, but who are prepared to see theology and cosmogony as an interesting and perhaps highly important symptom of earthly relationships? Those interested in mystical experiences or Gnostic divinities are welcome to find pleasure in dealing intransitively with them, but I wish to explore whether they could be profitably treated as a highly abstract or coded form of transitive talking about individual vs. community and other crucial matters of relationships among people in Dick’s time–and by easy extension, in our unhappy times too.While I would like to investigate the significant post-Ubik novels of Dick with this in view, I can here manage only an overview of some foci in selected novels. I cannot, as one should, reconsider here the two “bridge novels,” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (written 1966, published 1968) and the much richer Ubik (written 1966, published 1969). I shall concentrate on A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth, and the “VALIS Trilogy.”

1.2 Methodological: The Emitter and His Signals
What I am looking for as far as method goes is a tool or lens which would allow us to approach the tug-of-war between simple psychological alienation or rebellious anomie on the one hand and, on the other hand, a more articulated delving into the collective reasons ceaselessly reproducing that alienation and reification, between a creativity or critique that is useful or useless for radical anticapitalist change; and only a “thick” version of such an approach, not only ideational but also formal, has a chance to be enlightening. This may be a central problem of all SF (not to say of all art today); at any rate, as befits a major creator, it is clearly a major and increasingly foregrounded dilemma at the heart of Dick’s opus. I have no wish to conceal that this is a variant of the permanent Left or radical critique of the bourgeois world, which is for urgent salvational reasons inevitably drawn to ideal polarities, although we know full well that in practice, and especially artistic practice, there is little black and white but rather various shades of grey and all other colours. The
point is that taking centrally into account the shifting spacetimes and value-systems in fictional texts can retain this political interest but supplement it not only with the tools of modern narratology and if you wish semiotics (let me invoke here only early Lukács, Bakhtin, and Jameson), but also of modern existential and phenomenological inquiry. Indeed, this approach can at its best embody the politics in its inquiry, while recalling it overtly and criticizing where need be any of its stripes, including the necessary simplifications of day-to-day activism. In other words, I wish to test and if need be clarify my 1975 thesis that in P.K. Dick’s opus we can see an oscillation between the horizons of transitive epistemology, where reality is undoubted but the characters’ or reader’s approach to it is in question, and intransitive ontology, where the reality itself is in question. I shall use the shorthand of “epistemological” vs.”ontological” for these horizons. Perhaps this distinction can be further focussed by borrowing the one between signal and
noise from the theory of information. Given a stream of information, signal means all that informs us about the source of that stream or that has “meaning”–in the case of a novel, a however roundabout or mediated meaning about possible relationships in the koinos kosmos (as Dick would rightly say), the Possible World Zero common to author and readers. It is then usually thought by engineers that noise is all that which carries no information or has no meaning. However, noise gives us another type of information, that about the channel. It is autoreferential information, indispensable for any technician who wants to repair a radio or TV and, as De Carolis points out, “listens to the buzzes and whistles to draw information about the device and not about modern music” (modern music then often incorporates the buzzes and whistles by upgrading them from noise to signal). I’d add that in a larger sense, this somewhat misnamed noise is also information, and indeed one about a specific subset of PW Zero, the psychophysical consciousness of the author as refracted through the writing conventions and genres she is using. In the case at hand, the “device” or subset is Dick’s existential situation as he understood it at the moment of writing, and (this seems important) through or indeed in part because of the writing.
The problem here is a dialectical one: on the one hand, the flow of information being received by the readers scanning the novel is single; on the other hand and simultaneously, at every and any moment optimal information about PW Zero can only be attained by distinguishing clearly between the channel noise–here, Dick’s psycho-theological encoding–and the meaning coming from and about the signal source. In the theory of information, this distinction is essential but only possible as the work of an external observer: “the channel itself is indifferent to it.”
In the classical case in which a system observes itself, which is the case of every artist, there is an inbuilt temptation to confuse signal and noise. The temptation grows particularly strong in the case of a badly functioning society which causes the appearance of isolated and anomic intellectuals and reinforces their anguish. I hold that this is the case of a good part of us, and that in the humanist intelligentsia the isolation–Karl Marx’s “alienation” and Hannah Arendt’s “loneliness”–is directly proportional to our clear-sightedness and significance as intellectuals, say writers. It causes what De Carolis calls a “primary solipsism.” Even conservative or Rightwing writers in SF have been known to share the anomie, witness Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and the interminable follow-ups in the novels of his senility. The pedigree of such solipsism is impressive, for it extends from Buddhism and Plato’s Myth of the Cavern to all subjectivist philosophy, say from Descartes through the German Idealists to early Wittgenstein and today. Their common horizon is one of taking the blend or confusion between signal and noise for a natural condition of our PW Zero. An epistemic beast, how to understand the source, is mistaken for an ontological beast, what the source is. The central materialist tenet that we can only have given interpretations of reality but that it exists outside of us and independent of any our group, is here abandoned.
Obversely however, for use in a highly sophisticated and sui generis context such as fiction or art in general, the engineering aspect of the theory of information has to be modified. No significant writer is able to quite forget the meaningful signal. The urge to communicate to readers matters not confined exclusively to herself as channel seems to make the difference between creativity and psychosis. We shall see that in Dick’s case there is a functional equivalent to the emitter’s indifference in an artful oscillation concerning the presence and nature of meaning within a spectrum of mutually exclusive explanations. While the civic persona of Phil Dick may have hovered very near psychosis and was most probably at moments deep within it, the control and clarity largely evidenced in his work disallow using this as a key to their interpretation: the writer’s persona, the implied author, was for all relevant purposes not psychotic or crazy.
The criteria I’m using as epistemic tools makes it mandatory for criticism (as I understand it) to scrutinize whether it is generally possible to extend the author’s understanding of his situation as exemplary to everybody else’s situation. A spread of answers is possible, which I tried to discussonce for the specific case of Victorian SF (Suvin, “Narrative”). In the pessimal case, the author is so idiosyncratic that it cannot be extended at all; the writings are then soon forgotten. In very rare optimal cases, the author’s understanding can be shared with some appreciable accuracy by large groups of people, entire social classes of a civilization–these are then the authors taught in Literature 101 or high school, your Shakespeares, Dostoevskys, Rabelaises, Homers or Lucretiuses.
More usually, the author’s take on reality cannot be extended outside of a small group sharing his existential position (his core fans, in SF parlance), or at least not without confronting it significantly with other types of understanding which the critic has good reasons for treating as more illuminating and useful–in brief, better. Any such more normative reasons are finally in the nature of a bet and neither necessarily nor (for sure) eternally valid. But for given purposes, those of discussing a worthwhile and significant but not quite optimal writer–which is, as a rule, what we do in SF–they can be supremely useful. Given the resonance that the works of P.K. Dick have now had for 30 or 40 years, and which may in the foreseeable future vary as to whom it affects and in exactly which directions but to my mind has no reason to abate, I believe this is his position in our present debates.
To discuss the significance of Dick’s later works, then, necessarily leads to some disentangling of meaning and noise. It also necessarily leads to some, I hope discreet, use of his biography. I shall assume as a given for this investigation what a number of us have been arguing about the epistemologically transitive and thus socially critical or “signalling” nature of his earlier novels, which culminates (as is by now generally accepted) in what I called his “plateau tetralogy” of The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, and Dr Bloodmoney (written 1961-64, published 1962-65). I leave here unresolved the stature of the contemporary Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, on which some critics heap one-sided praise2/ whereas others such as myself now doubt we should speak of a “plateau tetralogy.” Finally, I see no other way of seizing what Dick is getting at than to identify in each case the main nodes of his plots, which inevitably means also to interpret them, while getting at an encompassing evaluation only after having disentangled them. Dick’s truth lies in his plot or fabula.

2. Approaching the Later P.K. Dick: Dead End and Necessity of Salvation

2.1. Both for my purposes and in fairness to Dick, I do not have to deal with works that do not represent him at his utmost stretch (except as testimonials to his dilemmas). In my judgment such is the case of five novels written in what one might call his crisis decade 1966-76, that is between Ubik and A Scanner Darkly. Stableford and Clute rightly call Deus Irae “a rather unsatisfactory collaboration with Roger Zelazny.” In Galactic Pot-Healer (written 1967-8, published 1969), the emblematic artist-craftsman is chosen as the necessary helper of a very unclear godhead. Though any novel by Dick will have its share of felicities, the central flaw of this one is a hesitant approach to an “inner space” quasi-Jungian allegory, which is neither clear nor cogent enough to sustain the weight put upon it. It also ends abruptly, and such perfunctoriness will increase in the following three novels. A Maze of Death (written 1968, published 1970), Our Friends From Frolix 8 (written 1968-69, published 1970), and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (written 1970-73, published 1974), are broken-backed narratives. Most of A Maze is a banalized ontology, with insufficient narrative control and a plot of successive murders in an isolated planet community à la Christie’s And Then There Were None, which is pulled back into epistemology in the last dozen pages. There the preceding narration is revealed as a collective dream generated by a mind-linking machine to alleviate the dead end of a crew’s endless voyage in an out-of-control spaceship. This superordinated reality seems even more hopeless, since it lacks the presence of divine manifestations from the universe of the realistic dream, but in Dick’s frequent sting-in-the-tail reversal one appears to the main character Seth who will be reborn as a cactus.
Our Friends is a story of competing supermen “races” out of van Vogt, where a redeeming man returns from the stars with a selfless Frolixian alien who wipes out the superior part of the supermen’s brains. The usual and prescient Dickian police state is in evidence hunting the little working man, and among the felicities which make it the most interesting text of the three is some excellent satire of fakely objective TV comments; however, the final discussion pits the superiority of private sentiments not only against the arrogance of power but also against intellect in general.
Finally, the protagonist of Flow finds out he officially does not exist in the US police state of an alternate reality, but in the last quarter of the story his original reality seeps back for reasons vaguely indicated as due to mind-altering drugs, that also ontologically alter reality. The main turns in the plot thus arrive like a succession of rabbits out of a hat, in a quite arbitrary way. These new drugs are associated with a subsidiary female character, one of the four or five who flit scattershot in and out of the protagonist’s life; there is also a subplot bearer, no less than a humane police general… Beside the grim background of concentration camps and besieged campuses, the novel has, as usual, some splendid passages of pain and bewilderment, and six pages of a great Parable of the Rabbit trying to overcome his biology, which however stands isolated in the narration.
All these novels are interesting documents–but not much more–for what Stableford and Clute call Dick’s “sense of a shrinking [and derelict] world,” full of pain and increasing loss of orientation for everybody involved, that has been coming intensively to the fore since Martian Time-Slip and is calling for extraordinary forces of salvation. The dead end in and of these novels, where the politics (if any are indicated) can only be totally oppressive and are to be forsaken in favour of new existential orientations, centered on an ethics of love and caring, threatens to dissolve even the powers of coherent narration. All of this indicates well the reasons for Dick’s receptivity to a sudden radical break of horizons which would hold the promise of starting anew. Robinson’s example of Our Friends From Frolix 8, where “For the first time since the 1950s, a world police state is overthrown, but the revolution is accomplished by an alien with God-like powers” (Novels 103), indicates the direction to be taken.
My question is, then, whether the remaining half a dozen novels–the two “bridge novels” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (written 1966, published 1968) and the richer Ubik (written 1966, published 1969), and then A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth, and the “VALIS Trilogy”–and their peculiar do-it-yourself theological focus and argumentation may be read–in terms of literary theory as well as of theological tradition–as a parable of collective earthly matters.
I am dealing here with Radio Free Albemuth and the “VALIS Trilogy.” A first tentative indication of the horizons within which to approach the later Dick is then that the theological aspect of his speculations may be a property of the channel, of the individualist psychology of Philip Dick, while the focus on the salvation of our common world below deals with the source in Dick’s reality, the USA of 1967 to 1981 (as emblematically represented by its different California locales). Not being a psychologist or theologian, I’m in the position of the engineer who is not interested in the channel except insofar as it is indispensable for articulating the source–but at that moment, I may be supremely interested in the channel. In fiction, the channel is even more intimately interwoven with
message or meaning than in information theory, for it codetermines if not the source, then our understanding of or take on it.
However, before I get to Dick’s last “vision” novels, I wish to sound the depths of his descent into despair in A Scanner Darkly as a logically and historically necessary introduction to my question. It is a powerful and almost unbearable novel, certainly his first masterpiece since Ubik.

2.2. Dick’s Second Plateau: A Scanner Darkly
In this novel (written 1973-75, published 1977), Dick’s frequent depiction of a US police State (“this fascist police state,” ch. 1) to whom the little man-protagonist is opposed grows almost totally dark since the little man Bob Arctor is himself an active agent of the police, a narc with the cover name Fred. While the rich live “in their fortified huge apartment complexes” (ch. 2), the little people–our almost exclusive focus in the text–live in a totally controlled State where surveillance cameras (upgraded to holograms) are routinely used, every pay phone is tapped, supersonic tigh beams are used for police assassinations (ch. 10), and the closest friends inform on each other (Fred, Donna, Barris) and suspect each other. Two themes are prominent: the universal use of drugs which not only cause hallucinations and loss of reality sense but finally make for physical death or at least brain death; and the SF gadget of the scramble suit, an invention that hooks up a multifaced lens to a mini-computer holding a million and a half physiognomies projected at random onto a spherical membrane that fits around a person. The suit makes police agents unrecognizable, and is used not only for spying on the public but also in all of the narc’s contacts with the police. This latter quite improbable ploy, which no police in the world would have authorized, serves to strengthen the paranoid situation where not only everybody informs on everybody but nobody knows who is who.
A thick web of correspondences obtains in the novel. The scramble suit resonates semantically with drug-induced scrambled receptor sites in the brain, or the split between its two hemispheres.
This was a popular hypothesis at the time, which is presented with a fair amount of pseudoscientific gobbledegook: “a toxic brain psychosis affecting the percept system by splitting it” (ch. 7) mixes about three incompatible theses. This can be taken either as one of Dick’s frequent fast shuffles as a virtuoso semantic cardsharp or more charitably as a sign he wasn’t taking the hypothesis too seriously as a causal explanation. Dick was usually (alas) little interested in causes, he was interested in the phenomenological results, which had then to be explained through the best analogies he could at the moment find. In other words, the cybernetically created shifting identities are not only parallel but in some unexplained way analogous to the drug-created split identities. A further almost Symbolist correspondence surrounds the acronym SD: it is the new superdrug Substance D, whose source the police can apparently never find; it is Spiritual Death or Slow Death; it is also Scanner Darkly (with the A edited out in another fast shuffle–and an early title was “To Scare the Dead,” Shifting 229). Finally, the omnipresent image of the novel is the materialized metaphor of a man divided against himself: when the narc “Fred” has to spy on himself he must edit enough out of the holo videos to keep his identity as Arctor secret.
The boundaries of fact and fiction begin to crumble in this “creative editing yourself out” (ch. 7) but leaving enough in to avert suspicion. Nonetheless, there are two villainous forces in the book, the total police control over his characters’ lives and the total invasion of drugs into it.
Though the novel is held together not only by the system of correspondences but primarily by the focus on how both these forces “scramble” Fred’s mind, their duality introduces a basic confusion of values. The police control which is ostensibly there to combat drugs is shown as not only abhorrent but totally counterproductive: in order to inform on the dope-dealers the narcs have to begin taking drugs themselves, and in fact our protagonist Fred /Bob Arctor becomes addicted to Substance Dand succumbs to it in the course of the novel. But on the other hand Dick’s animus is clearly against the drug culture, which he knew well but only marginally participated in during the 1960s (his thing was rather pills). True, his appended “Author’s Note,” which identifies this novel as a requiem for  the naive and wiped-out drug-taking generation of his, is entirely too oversimplified to account for
the book. Still, if the drugs are supremely bad, then the bad and grotesque police fighting it is in a way good. This contradiction is never explored nor even mentioned in the novel (it can obliquely be inferred through Fred’s sympathetic boss, and is accompanied by some dubious theology about God transmuting evil to good in ch. 14). It is of a piece with Dick’s permanent ideological type that I would call “the good ruler,” or finding the good in a bad ruler. How illusory and misleading this tends to be can be seen by comparing it with the Rampart scandal in Los Angeles, which revealed that the L.A.P.D. Crash sections had set up prostitution and drug networks to compete with the gangs they were supposed to be fighting…
Finally, there is also a hint that there has been a total take-over by commercial interests:
all places are the same, with identical McDonaldburgers everywhere: “Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed: it just spread farther and farther in the form of neon ooze…. How the land became plastic, he thought…” (ch. 2). However, this is not analyzed further; the economics of the drug-trade will only surface at the end, but then in an interesting way.
Instead, A Scanner focusses on the phenomenology, and primarily on Fred’s increasingly split and malfunctioning mind. This is both the novel’s limitation and its strength. On that level it is coherent and narratively consistent, even though it does creak in a few places (such as Arctor’s German quotes in ch. 11, or his final adventures as “Bruce”). As K.S. Robinson puts it, “There exists no finer character study of an undercover agent in contemporary America than this novel ” (Novels 109). Amid the thick gloom, the novel abounds in sympathy for the put-upon little people, primarily Arctor and his love Donna. Arctor’s possibly drug-induced visions, as when he hears a voice saying death will be vanquished and all the lives “backward right now” will be righted, do not help him to help himself. In the same culminating chapter 13, amid his withdrawal seizure, Donna recounts to him the story of Tony Amsterdam who saw God after an acid trip and felt very good;
however, after a year he realized he would never see God again: “he was going to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose.” What he had actually seen through a doorway was another mysterious world of silence and nighttime beauty: “And then later on, when he couldn’t see it any more, he’d be on the freeway driving along, with all the trucks, and he’d get madder than hell. He said he couldn’t stand all the motion and noise, everything going this way and that, all the clanking and banging.” After this parable, Donna tells the stupefied Fred /Arctor he’ll be restored: “On the day when everything taken away unjustly from people will be restored to them. It may take a thousand years, or longer than that, but that day will come, and all the balances will be set right.” (all in ch. 13). Such passages prepare the outburst of the soteriological theme in the “VALIS cycle” (Albemuth and the “Trilogy”).
Though not sufficiently developed, Donna is an interesting character. She’s both a federal
police agent and the member of a resistance movement, and uses Arctor’s illness to “plant” him inside a work farm which the resistance suspects of growing Substance D. Her speech about ripping off Coca Cola as a capitalist monopoly (ch. 8) is an instance of the genuine, somewhat crazy plebeian resentment not too far from Pirate Jenny’s song from Brecht-Weill’s Threepenny Opera, the downtrodden dishwasher girl dreaming of killing the whole class of her oppressors. The authorial voice is very near to Donna: after the Tony Amsterdam parable and some further meditation on this cursed, fallen, wrong world, she hears a police car siren in hot pursuit: “It sounded like a deranged animal, greedy to kill.” (ch. 13)
Arctor gradually loses his identity, evolving first into a cohabitation with the emotionless
informer Fred, while after the crisis both identities are lost in a seemingly brainless treatment patient called Bruce. Unbeknownst to him, Bruce has been secretly planted by Donna to work for the powerful and rich New Path company, which offers work-rehabilitation for the drugged. In their closed fields, we are shown Bruce discovering the pretty flowers that indicate the company grows the drug Substance D or Mors ontologica. It is made clear that even though he doesn’t understand what he saw, he will be able to report back. Thus finally, the spirit of rebellion and subversion is continuing on in spite of the overwhelming forces of the Police State and drugging. It must be confessed though that this is only a vague and in some ways unresolved indication, a little undying spark of hope amid the overwhelming gloom.
Among the novel’s strengths is sceptical self-reflexivity (Dick’s forte whenever used), so that epistemology and ontology are actually discussed on the final two pages. When Bruce thinks the blue flower are gone, the New Path boss who cut off his view tells him, “No, you simply can’t see them…. Epistemology….” (ch. 17). This fits well into Dick’s definition of reality as “that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away” (VALIS ch.5), but not with his less clear-eyed moments. Both of the themes here, the occlusion of reality by means of biochemistry or of electronic optics, are epistemological. So is all the talk about the split percept system, Fred’s selfdiagnosis that he has a “cognitive… rather than perceptive” impairment (ch. 7), or the realistic affair of the forged cheque (ch. 11). Ontology, a true change in reality, takes over briefly here and there, as when the picked-up girl’s face melds into Donna’s and this registers on the scanned holo-cube (at the end of ch.s 9 and 10). Yet doubts linger on: compared to Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians which
invokes a superior reality, Dick’s title is not only technologically upgraded from glass to scanner (ch. 13), but even in this largely epistemological novel lacks Paul’s monolithic confidence in a real and superior reality.
The private psychological problems of the small man culminate and self-destruct in this
descent into Hell, after which they cannot be of further fictional use for Dick. As in Dante, even though much more ambiguously, he emerged and looked at the stars.

2.3. Dick’s Second Plateau: Radio Free Albemuth
Diametrically oposed to Scanner in tone (but not only in that), Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976, further RFA) is Dick’s first full-blown attempt to translate his “mystical experience[s]” (RFA ch. 2) into fiction, to present them as fiction, and to cope with them by means of fiction. Since it was published only after the Valis Trilogy and Dick’s death, in 1985, it has been unduly overshadowed by the Trilogy and the debates it promoted about his sanity and his theological system, which I consider marginal to my purpose and to Dick’s significance. Unduly, for it is a coherent, lucid, and significant achievement, at least on par with the “Valis trilogy.” On the whole, it successfully melds the Police-State theme with the theme of invading extraterrestrial visions.
The police State is instituted by Ferris F. Fremont–a blend of Nixon, McCarthy, and Hitler– who had become US president in 1969. First of all, this locates the story in a parallel Possible World or universe, which is however a parable of what is coming about in the Possible World Zero, our universe in the mid-1970s. But dating the swing to full repression to before rather than after the novel’s appearance is strange. In this type of dystopian SF, the nearer the story date the greater the urgency. Orwell’s putting the Possible World in a shockingly near future was also a twisted way of talking exactly about what Dick too is talking about, for the date of 1984 simply inverts the last two digits of 1948, the year Orwell was writing. Thus, in a further twist on Orwell, Dick’s chronological
novum underscores the urgency of danger: in a very similar world, whose Berkeley and Orange County venues are described with detailed autobiographic realism, freedom has already been lost.
Fremont comes to power by denouncing a mysterious but ubiquitous subversive organization “Aramchek”: “Obviously no one can destroy it. No one’s safe from it. No one knows where it’ll turn up next…” (RFA ch. 3). As Valis reveals to Nick, Fremont is himself part of a vast secret organization which has assassinated the Kennedys, Malcolm X, King, and so on. Like Hitler, he institutionalizes ubiquitous “security” agents–specially zealous are the young– to check on “the moral state of hundreds of thousands of citizens,” and builds concentration camps (ch. 9).
I cannot but interpolate here that a bad limitation of Dick’s–which he however shares with the great majority of US SF–is his insularity. While vastly if unsystematically knowledgeable about music, literature, and the aspects of philosophy that interested him, he was not at all conversant with nor really interested in the world outside the USA–except for the Cold War rivalry with the USSR which subsumed the Vietnam War, but is here explained as a covert identity of the two “Fascist” powers. True, the USA is a very big island and up to the invention of the airplane, submarine, and ICBM could really isolate itself from the Old World, but at the same time it has since the 19th Century related to most of the world as the rich North to the poor South, and moreover a North which is rich because the South is poor. Therefore, Dick is reduced to noticing poverty only in the specific and overdetermined form of the US slums, mainly formed by immigrants, and he can easily forget economics in his otherwise totalizing explanations. Nonetheless, if we factor this limitation in, then Fremont’s canny political invention and strategy is prescient of, and continues to be highly apposite to, the present regime’s repression in Bush Jr.’s “Homeland” (including the use of the Social Security number for checking on people). And the objection that the huge US military establishment proves it cannot be in cahoots with USSR is met with another, to my mind prescient reply : “To keep our own people down. Not theirs.” (ch. 15) The prescience is again partial; the real reply would be, of course, “to keep both the US and other peoples down.”
The visionary experiences are discussed as they unfold between two alter egos of the author, Nicholas Brady and Phil Dick, who also function as alternative narrators in a tripartite Phil-Nick- Phil narrative.3/ Nick has the revelations from aliens that push him into an underground movement called “Aramchek” against the dictator Fremont. His friend Phil, an SF writer, functions not only as a dialogic sidekick but also as a doubter whose confutation adds to Nick’s credibility, and finally as an ally who remains as the focus in a coda to the novel after Nick’s death.
Dick’s message is heavily and multiply safeguarded and so to speak fenced in through
spinning a series of conflicting interpretations, a feat he excelled at. This is a staple of interesting SF, prominent in Wells’s foundational Time Machine, though Dick probably absorbed it rather through van Vogt’s Null-A series. As he put it, “Theories are like planes at LA international: a new one along every minute” (ch. 19). It has the function of forestalling, ventilating, and undercutting the reader’s objections. Phil’s first alternative hypothesis is one of psychosis: As far as I was concerned it was a chronic fantasy life that Nicholas’s mind had hit on to flesh out the little world in which he lived. Communicating with Valis (as he called it) made life bearable for him, which it otherwise would not be. Nicholas, I decided, had begun to part company with reality, out of necessity…. This was a classic example of how the human mind, lacking real solutions, managed its miseries. (ch. 5) Come back, Nicholas. To this world. The present. From whatever other world you’re
drifting away to from pain and fear–fear of the authorities, fear of what lies ahead for all of us in this country. We’ve got to put up one last fight. “Nick,” I said, “you’ve got to fight.” (ch. 14) However, Phil then witnesses Valis flashing a message to Nick which saves his small son from death by an undiagnosed hernial failure, and his second hypothesis is that Valis is God, more precisely the Christian Holy Spirit (ch. 7). A bewildering string of incidents and speculations taken from Dick’s life, including some frank admissions of the fear that made him collaborate with the FBI by denouncing others (ch. 10), is worked into the novel. It is revealed the messages from the star Albemuth are beamed to Earth through an orbiting satellite, which is discovered and blown up by the Soviets, covertly allied with the USA. The messages seem to imply also that the characters live simultaneously in the evil Roman Empire (an idea possibly stimulated by the masterpiece 334 by his acquaintance Thomas Disch), at a time when the first failed attempt of overthrowing it by
Christ will be repeated. It should be stressed that the soteriological speculations arising out of a channelling of the 1960s impulse for justice and peace into mystical visions are as usual, but perhaps more fully so, firmly rooted in a American demotic or plebeian language, a mix of innocence and arrogance, that makes up a great part of their charm and believability. When the vision allows him to see the trashy world around him with new eyes, Nick reflects: My incompetence had called these invisible friends forth. Had I been more gifted I would not now know of them. It was, in my mind, a good trade. Few people had the awareness I now possessed. Because of my limitations an entire new universe had
revealed itself to me, a benign and living hyperenvironment endowed with absolute wisdom. Wow, I said to myself. You can’t beat that, I had caught a glimpse of the Big People. It was a lifetime dream fulfilled…. (ch. 18)
Phil’s third hypothesis is that a parallel universe, possessing a more advanced science that had not divorced itself from Christianity, was assisting our backward Earth; or alternately, fourth, that the ancient Christians were returning and broadcasting to Nick’s through his unused brain tissue (ch. 19). A fifth hypothesis about a superior life-form from Albemuth materializing in his brain and making the chosen carriers immortal is broached later by Sylvia, a first sketch for the Sophia of the Trilogy. When this welter of conflicting interpretations has slyly established that what is to be interpreted is at any rate believable, we are given Nick’s most extended dialogue with Valis, a fatherfigure arranging for a usually fatal accident out of which Nick walks away reconstituted, understanding he has been reborn many times, “to work toward some distant goal unseen, not as yet comprehended…. Overthrowing the tyranny of Ferris Fremont was a stop along the way, not a goal but a moment of decision, from which I then continued as before.” (ch. 23). For all the echoes of Plato’s anamnesis, the mystical vision is here also a political one, which can be shared by total disbelievers in supernatural agencies. Dick constantly oscillates between rankest UFOlatry or mystification of the Scientology type and a shrewd realization of political oppression and a faith that enables resistance to it.
As Nick then correctly realizes, Fremont would win, the police would destroy their small
resistance group. Typically and self-reflectively, Dick envisages resistance by means of coded messages through art: Nick is a highly placed recording studio executive and he attempts to smuggle subliminal messages into popular records. This fails, Nick and his whole group are shot, and Phil is condemned to perpetual forced labour. However, an opening toward brighter perspectives is re-established in the novel’s coda, narrated by Phil as lifelong convict of the Fascist regime.
It is a double opening, ideological and pragmatic, on a continuing subversion against the
Fascist takeover. The ideological opening is achieved in the discussion, similar to the end of a Shavian play, with another convict friend, the plumber Leon, who prefers political resistance to religion but appreciates Aramchek’s actions and its reliance on the inner voice of simple people. His final judgment is however: “There has to be something here first, Phil. The other world is not enough…. Because… this is where the suffering is. This is where the injustice and imprisonment is.
Like us, the two of us. We need it here. Now.” (ch. 30) And at the end of the whole novel, the despondent Phil hears the latest hit rock release from a radio used by staring kids beyond the pressgang workplace, which features the exact words Nick was going to use smuggling in the revelation about Fremont. Nick’s group was a diversion that achieved its goal. The tune is suddenly cut off, but still it exists. The novel ends on this impenitent 68er note: The transistor radio continued to play. Even more loudly. And, in the wind, I could hear others starting up everywhere. By the kids, I thought. The kids.
It should be noted that this culmination of the novel, to me one of the high points of Dick’s
whole opus, articulates the typical Dickian, multilingually coded, title in political terms. For “Albemuth” carries strong echoes of “alba” from Latin which means both white and later, as in Provençal poetry, dawn and also a poetic form, the song about dawn when the lover must part from his damsel (best known in English literature from Romeo’s dawn parting with Juliet); while “muth” means courage in German, phonetically adjusted to proper Semitic sound as in the Biblical “behemoth”. The courage of waiting for the dawn of justice, the supreme earthly or societal virtue, hidden in an allusive metaphor. The whole title of Radio Free Albemuth imitates in its form the various “freedom stations”–true or fake–of anti-Nazi and anti-Stalinist resistance as well as some countercultural enterprises run by local communities in the 1960s as “the free University” and indeed “free” radio-stations (e.g. in the US and Japanese student revolt). Beyond that, it can be glossed as an emission by a more knowledgeable, artistically hidden source working for freedom from political oppression and instilling the courage of waiting for the dawn of justice. There are
many noises in the channel, and some outright fade-outs; and as any emission, it is liable to misinterpretation as to what the source is saying.

3. The “VALIS Trilogy”

3.1. VALIS
The novel VALIS (written 1978, published 1981) can be divided into two parts, before and after the viewing of the eponymous movie Valis in chapter nine. Both parts are rather prolix, but the first part especially so. They are situated in the 1960s California, to begin with the Bay Area where “[t]he authorities [had become] as psychotic as those they hunted” (ch. 1), and the author’s alter ego is suffering from “fear, helplessness and an inability to act” (ch. 4). As K.S. Robinson encapsulates it, the first part is of interest as a presentation of a character similar but not identical to P.K. Dick, split into Horselover Fat and Phil Dick: “the flamboyant science fiction thinker, with reality breakdown as his dominant theme [,and] the hard-headed realist observer of contemporary America” (“Afterword” 251). In my terms, Fat’s belief in a divine revelation from VALIS carries the ontological theme, bolstered by long excerpts from Fat’s exegesis, and Phil’s as well as his friend’s Kevin’s needling the epistemological theme.
Through most of the book, “Fat plunges into the flow of theories, terms, citations, accepting, forgetting (never refuting), collaging, stitching…. As we read, we lose the propositions in the process.” (Palmer 335) Confusingly if endearingly, right at the beginning the narrator, whose diagnosis is that Fat is going nuts, says “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” Phil the narrator keeps in the first eight chapters a running fire of shrewd observations about how Fat projects his hunger and his take on world as information onto the God that is supposedly firing independent info (the Logos) on him. Thus, Fat(as Phil) is writing very convincingly how Fat is a silly and whacked-out psychotic. Yet this ironic distance conveys in fact Fat’s (and even more so the author’s) sanity and believability. In the novel’s second part, sparked by the viewing of a movie which convinces the little group around Fat to visit
the movie-makers, it becomes clear Phil was a disbelieving patsy, and his frequent and quite shrewd sardonic observations and rude hyperbolae were set up so that they can be confounded, wiping out the reader’s disbelief too.
However, at the end it still remains unclear how Fat can go cavorting around the world–
unless Phil is truly a psychotic imagining this. This is only one main example of an intrusive, perhaps willed, lack of focussing in the novel as it develops: a lot of mutually incompatible  speculations, repetitive info dumping, repetitive fixations of Fat’s (such as the needless detour on his relation to Sherri for a chapter and a half), or simply bits of sloppy writing–the noise in the channel. Amid all this, the interesting aspect of Fat’s cosmology is his belief that we all live in “the Empire,” a Black Iron Prison for body and soul, composed simultaneously of contemporary USA/ California and the Roman Empire at the time of the first Christians. The less interesting aspects is Fat’s belief in a plasmatic quasi-divine species which from time to time bonds with people like Jesus, the Kennedy brothers, and Martin L. King, or–at different times–his belief in an irrational and evil ruler of the present universe (or at least Terra, as in C.S. Lewis) behind whom the real benevolent forces of creation also operate and venture down to help us. This is, as Dick knew, a form of Gnosticism. Therefore, Dick’s home-made cosmology added, the phenomenal world of evil isn’t real, and we deluded people are morally innocent–though neither necessarily follows from the rule of evil.
Fat has grown increasingly agitated by missing God (like Tony Amsterdam) and is coming to believe that his choice is immediate salvation or death. Therefore, when his group views the movie Valis, written and directed by the rock star Lampton who receives the same pink-beam burst as Fat did, after some decidedly delirious exegesis they contact the makers, and get invited to visit them in Northern California. The movie-makers appear to be from a race come to Earth in ancient times to counteract the Empire with help of VALIS, the satellite from Albemuth, though hints may be found that its info radiation is also toxic. The real godhead or Logos is Sophia, the preternaturally wise two-year-old daughter of Lampton’s wife and VALIS. At the first interview with her, Phil and Fat fuse back into one person, that is, Phil grows whole. The new female Christ’s or Wisdom’s teaching, where Dick rewrites the Sermon on the Mount, is a kind of humanist rather than theist religion: “Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself…. You… are to love one another as you love me and as I love you….” And further: “The day of Wisdom and the rule of Wisdom has come. The day of power, which is the enemy of wisdom, ends…. This has not been your world, but I will make it your world; I will change it for you. Fear not.” (all ch. 12) However, Sophia warns them not to trust the Lamptons, who turn out, in a Van-vogtian twist of competing supermen, to be on the wrong side. Immediately thereafter, Sophia is killed by the Lampton group, supposedly in an accident, Fat “returns,” and sets off on a search for her reincarnation. The rest remain in California; at first disenchanted, they keep getting hints that the true king may return.
They keep the faith and wait. It is a minimal and unresolved ending, when compared with the highflown
hopes of salvation or even (as K.S. Robinson points out) with the aching dream-glimpse of
harmonious life in a petty-bourgeois suburban Arcadia, taken from an earlier age or childhood memories (ch. 7).
What is one then to make of this novel, which is to my mind at best a half-success both ideationally and narratively? Ideationally, because it perhaps rightly refuses to present any coherent cosmo-theological system. But then the interest shifts out of the cosmological non sequiturs either into the analysis of Fat’s psychosis and/or into the interaction of Fat with Phil, Kevin, the deity, the superior race of Lampton’s, and similar. The urgency and importance of the salvational quest, as well as the grave charm of the encounter with Sophia, have undercut the assumption of simple psychosis. Yet the interest in the quest bogs down in narrative repetitions and meanders, for the novel abounds in false starts and dead ends; themes and motifs get picked up and dropped for no apparent reason except that another and more dazzling one occured to Dick as he was writing.
Reportedly, the major narrative success of his last period, A Scanner, was tightly edited by a New York editor. He could have profited from such help here.
The main hinge where a lack of clarity and narrative coherence makes itself felt is the ideationally central Sophia, who appears too late and is snuffed out after one bout of interviews and pronouncements. Maybe there’s a valid allegorical point there, something like “we see supreme and coherent wisdom only late and only briefly,” akin to incarnating Wisdom into a two-year-old girl, which I take to be a valid and indeed felicitous indication. In the theology of VALIS, Wisdom, even when revealed, will be destroyed by the forces of the Blind God just as Christ was. This is a tenable if despairing hypothesis. But the novel as a whole has a much too large investment in realistic questions of life in Orange County and Fat’s sanity to make such a sudden and brief irruption of allegory believable. The same holds for the ensuing second split of Phil and Fat, with a regenerated and active Fat roaming around Oceania (which suggests to me he hadn’t learned much from Wisdom). The echoes of Gauguin are out of place in a Tahiti and Bikini of nuclear fallouts and venereal diseases.
In the French 18th Century, a short prose form was found which came to be called conte philosophique. In the hands of great writers, such a “philosophical story”–that is, a narration whose goal was to reveal through a series of incidents and debates about them a major ideological and civic point– became a major social force, and by the way a major form of early SF. It faced the false pretenses of European civilizational superiority with the dignity and wisdom of Others–the superior political and sexual morality of the Tahiti chief in Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage or the superior cosmic stature, material and moral, of the inhabitants of Saturn and Sirius in Voltaire’s Micromégas. Dick’s final works, and perhaps most of his major achievements, aspire to the status of a novel kind of roman philosophique, indeed in the “VALIS Trilogy,” with its ambitions of a new Ulysses, of a roman-fleuve philosophique. The ambition is laudable and where it most nearly succeeds of major importance. But a do-it-yourself philosophy, even by an imaginative genius as Dick certainly was, will result in major problems. One way of putting it would be the significant fact that in VALIS the true God “takes on the likeness of sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters–he presumes to be trash discarded” (ch. 5)–though perhaps the superior extra-terrestrials do this as his agents. As in RFA and indeed earlier, Dick’s god is an artisan /artist–potter, writer or modern sculptor–who works in trash and discarded Americana. Dick knew of Stanisław Lem’s diagnosis that he makes art in spite of and out of trash, the metaphor for his world pinpointed by his famous neologisms “gubbish” and “kipple,” and went the atheist Lem one better by deifying trash.
The cosmology itself is like the above description of the divine force, cobbled together from bits and pieces of trashy Americana with a beautiful little glazed pot thrown in at some points, but with little unified impact except as they are typical objects of a realist gaze. This is to be followed in the other two novels of the Trilogy.

3.2. The Divine Invasion
This second novel (written 1980, published 1981, further DI) is ideationally and narratively more coherent, though the following account streamlines not only Dick’s gradual revelations but also his sometimes competing explanations, confusingly overloaded details and layers, and simple inconsistencies (only a single set of planes will be landing on LA International Airport in my account, without collisions). True, for most of the first eight chapters it is located on a standard paranoiac planet where each colonist lives alone in an isolated dome, akin to Dick’s earlier and usually inferior SF. However, that planet is far from the influence of the evil Demiurge fashioning the reality of Terra (as in C.S. Lewis), so that Jehovah can arrange for the coming about of a latterday and somewhat weird Holy Family. It consists of Herb Asher as an unwilling Joseph, Rybys as a
combination of Virgin Mother and sick Bitch, and their child-to-be Emmanuel. Dick’s usual roles of the little-man protagonist plus the powerful protagonist are filled by Herb and–in a jump to Gnosticism–the boy Emmanuel or Manny, who eventually turns out not to be Christ but the fallen male aspect of a split Godhead that has for unclear reasons forgotten his divine character. The family, accompanied and aided by old Elias, then travels to Earth for the novel’s theological-cumpolitical battle evolving in the flesh and mind of the characters.
The central antagonistic conflict is, as in VALIS, between a reconstituted Manny and the satanic ruler of this world, Belial, who has crowned his dominion since the fall of Masada by setting up a clerico-fascist police State run by the combined forces of the Christian-Islamic Church and the Communist Party; in a Vanvogtian subplot, there is a behind-the-scenes struggle between Church and Party, on the model of the medieval Papacy vs. Empire. This dystopia is again a version of Plato’s Cave, the Black Iron Prison from VALIS: “They are living in a cheap horror film” (ch. 5).
There are two non-antagonistic subsidiary tensions: Manny meets the girl Zina, a refurbished female principle or Shekhinah much more articulated and charming than her predecessor Sophia in VALIS, and Herb finally gets to meet his idol singer Linda Fox who is in this universe not yet famous and thus not out of his reach. The first opposition is more weighty: the male aspect of divinity, aided by Elias–the prophet Elijah–and gradually remembering he is En Sof, wishes to reconstitute “substantial” reality by wiping out the enemy world as Lord of Hosts, a proceeding which discounts the unwilling victims of even the best power play, such as Rybys (ch. 5–the point is not fully clarified). The female aspect, equally opposed to the satanic Demiurge and dystopia, wishes to break reality down and to make the male principle remember their joint powers by using beauty and play in a subworld that Belial never penetrated, which I would interpret as art, playfulness, and epistemology, though in Dick it is also consubstantial with compassion (ch. 12). A series of reality fluctuations arises both from Belial’s temporarily getting the upper hand and from the contention between Manny and Zina; their ontology is somewhat unclearly superimposed on earlier epistemological fluctuations due to Herb’s cryogenic suspended animation–a contamination of recycling from Palmer Eldritch and Ubik. These fluctuations shape the tensions of the second opposition in the Herb-Linda subplot. However, the correct actions of the little man feed back into the macrocosmic level: Herb’s accepting Manny’s brute facts of reality (Linda’s menstruation) in spite of his esthetic idealization of her, as well as his turning back from his private interest at a key point, in turn enable Manny to realize his limitations and accept Zina.4/ In that sense Herb’s story is a sophisticated and optimistic semi-humanist rewrite of the bet in Job or Faust. Linda herself becomes then Herb’s intercessor or personal Saviour, the female principle on the micro-level, bringing mercy into the harsh world of Old Testament justice and divine wrath. Concomitantly, as the Godhead remembers its entirety and grows whole, Belial can be defeated without destroying the underlying reality his sway has occluded.
I would here too find the most interesting ideational aspect in the eventual fusion between
Zina’s beauty and Manny’s truth, which is a variant of Keats’s ending to the Grecian Urn, though I think it is unfortunately too optimistic about the powers of beauty to hold today’s
technoscientifically enhanced forces of destruction at bay without a Lord of the Hosts. I do not mind Dick’s creative rewriting of the Bible (see the witty discussion of it as a hologram in ch. 6) in a blend of Gnosticism, the Kabbala, Platonism, and scraps of half a dozen other mystery religions (cf. Shifting 337): by their fruits ye shall judge them. What I mind is that in DI the incompatibility between epistemology (that is, interpreting an underlying real reality–that which doesn’t go away when you disbelieve) and ontology (that is, changing the underlying reality or making it go away) is never fully faced; when briefly glanced at (in ch.s 5, 11, 13, and 15 for example), it is interpreted in different but always improvised ways. The trouble with the Gnostic-cum-Kabbalistic idea of two realities with competing supernatural powers running each, is that, in the SF parts or aspects, violating “the H.G. Wells Law”–to have only one (or let us say one set) of unbelievabilities in one narration–results in narrative incoherence; while in the “realistic” parts or aspects, it makes for case-studies of psychosis which are to me of some interest as articulations of real pain but of real inspiration only when its political causes are articulated–directly as in A Scanner or however indirectly.

3.3. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and the “VALIS Cycle”
“If The Divine Invasion is considered as the work of Horselover Fat, then The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is ‘Phil Dick’ at work,” remarks Robinson wittily: “the narrator… Angel Archer shares many qualities exhibited by the narrator of VALIS: a lucid, straightforward style, using the colloquial language of 1970s’ California; and a fascination with their visionary friends and their ideas” (Novels 120).
This final novel of the putative VALIS Trilogy (written 1981, published 1982, further TA) is
not SF–nor Fantasy nor writing about visions that seriously suggests they change reality–but mainly a flashback account by Angel about Bishop Timothy Archer (modelled on Dick’s friend Jim Pike) and subsidiarily about his lover Kirsten and his son Jeff. While it has some grim humour and a number of Dickian insights strewn scattershot throughout without much regard to characterization, it is a world in which all main characters except Angel and the somewhat unclear commentator Edgar commit voluntary–or in Tim’s case involuntary–suicide, while Kirsten’s hebephrenic son Bill is maimed through electroshock treatments. Tim dies last, while searching in the Palestinian desert for the anokhi mushrooms, which the sect of newly found, sensational pre- Christian manuscripts apparently used to attain illumination (this seems the only faint SF element left). In ch. 14 Angel’s narration returns to the present framework for a coda in which Bill believes he has been taken over by a Tim returned from death.
Tim is fascinating to Dick, and his loss painful, because he too strove to get at the meaning or sense of existence. But he has a central flaw: to see everything in the world in terms of competing written texts, such as the manuscripts which prove to him Jesus was not divine, rather than seeing suffering people. Therefore, his stance is undercut by Angel’s pragmatic scepticism: it is as if Phil from VALIS were succeeding to finally demolish a dessicated Fat. Chapter 7, one of the two culminations of TA, contains a not only hilarious but also brilliant and for the nonce quite coherent demolition (starting from ancient Hindu logic yet) of the role of self-delusion in Tim’s occult beliefs, as well as a remarkable outburst of Angel ‘s against Tim’s book detailing his belief inastrology and in being haunted by his dead son, which I cannot forbear citing for the edification of all believers in occultism:

Cast charts of the stars, cast horoscopes while the most destructive war in modern times is raging. It will earn you a place in history books–as a dunce. You get to sit on the tall stool in the corner; you get to wear the conical cap; you get to undo all the social activist shit you ever engineered in concert with some of the finest minds of the century. For this, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., died. For this you marched at Selma…. (ch. 7)

This leads to Angel’s scathing critique of “the otherworldly orientation of the revealed religions of the world” and of the bookish mind in Tim, failing to attain illumination. However, Angel not only notes at the end of this critique–eight pages of perhaps the most brilliant writing Dick penned after A Scanner–that she was herself also deluded in her opinions about Tim, and she turns out later to be deluded about other important matters, but as a narrator she participates in Dick’s fundamental confusion between occultist abstraction and conceptual abstraction in general. No human being can do without abstract concepts: in that sense, abstraction defines Homo sapiens. True, a purely “horizontal” abstraction, spinning concepts out of concepts, if unchecked by frequent “vertical” verifications in practice, can lead to irrelevant and highly pernicious systems, such as Tim’s (and sometimes Dick’s) occultism. It may be legitimate if a bit trite to deride a bookishness such as Tim’s, which does not notice he had run over a gasoline pump. However, the argument recurring in Dick’s whole Trilogy (and descending from The Brothers Karamazov) that the death of a cat or dog is ethically and indeed ontologically more significant than pretensions to divine omnipotence is itself a bit of high, if pleasingly materialist, abstraction; even Sophia in DI fails that test. And the refusal of abstraction is cannily caricatured in this novel, as Robinson notes, in the pleasant and wronged but also comically inefficient Bill: it seems appropriate that he is the polar opposite of the  equally inefficient Tim. Equally, the bookishness is redeemed in TA’s second culmination, Angel’s relation in ch. 9 of the impact on her of the end of Paradiso, which issues in initiating her into “the real world… of pain and beauty” as opposed to Tim’s use of books where “words pertained not to world but to other words.”
The novel’s world is quite sterile, as is for instance spelled out in the great ch. 5 passage about suicides in America, cited later. For, the alternative to careful and verifiable abstraction is (except for music and tending animals, about which Dick is usually at the top of his sympathetic form) a politically passive–if not outright reactionary–and psychologically deadening pragmatism.
From Angel’s own stance, which indicts Tim for a wrongly conducted search after illumination and salvation, there are strong indications that we find her in a rut at the end of the novel: “I am stuck, now, and… know but know not what” (ch. 13). Thus I don’t see much reason or justification for the novel’s coda (nor for its title) in terms of a believable “transmigration of Timothy Archer.” If there is a point to the coda, it is in the dead end Angel has arrived at in her job and life, instanced in the inconclusive discussions with, and the New Age banter of, her would-be new guru Edgar. She is not a Holy Fool as Parsifal (who haunts this book). No resolution is arrived at in Dick’s last novel: to the end he remains a bearer of bad news.

Finally, if one is to try for a synoptic view of what might be called the VALIS Cycle (the so-called Trilogy, which we might as well accept as such, and RFA), their common denominator would be the explicitly theological salvational quest, arising out of the deep despair evident in all the post- 1966 works and culminating in A Scanner. My thesis is that the superhuman godheads are allegorical projections of individualist psychic states that Dick cannot otherwise account for (cf. his interview with Lupoff). They come openly onstage in Palmer Eldritch and then Ubik and Do Androids? as either clearly evil or deeply ambiguous, the recourse to them grows hesitantly affirmative in Our Friends and A Maze, and crescendoes into a full-blown main salvational theme here. Very interestingly, the bearers of salvation are either disembodied info dumps or females. As earlier too in Dick, anchorage in reality and salvation is sometimes sought in a personal erotic relationship, but few female figures can bear such a load. Linda Fox in DI can function as Herb’s personal saviour (in a heretical US filiation of female Intercessors or Christs, present for ex. also in Bellamy’s Looking Backward) only because she is semi-divine, in a universe codetermined by the female part of the Godhead. Usually, exaggerated expectations lead to exaggerated, sometimes hate-filled, characterization of the blameworthy erotic partner, or to the figure’s downgrading into plot prop or ideological mouthpiece. Beside the divine females in DI, the only exception is Angel in TA, a late but significant amends of Dick’s.
A genological note: Dick subsumed the strengths of his then unpublished mainstream novels, culminating in Confession of a Crap Artist, in his first plateau beginning with Man in the High Castle. In this second, more hesitant plateau, he begins deliberately mixing SF and mainstream realism, drawing authorization for this from his heretical theology in which the Godheads are just as real as the Little Man. To my mind this does not fully work, but it makes for a bewildering richness of alternative hypotheses and plot twists. In a final welcome twist, the cycle culminates in TA, a realist novel about the quest for salvation which subsumes and subtly undermines the theological quests. For: all the objections Angel makes to Bishop Archer, the excessively book-fixated quester  and eldritch palmer, could be made to P.K. Dick’s mode of Theological Fantasy.

4. Looking Backward at PKD

4.1. Questions, Objections
Probably, any criticism that could be addressed to Dick’s erratic brilliance from a Left or materialist point of view, he already knew and in some way or at some point in his life shared. If we quoted the young fireball atheist Marx to him: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of people is to demand their real happiness” (Marx 175)–he would, possibly with some exaggeration, refer to his Berkeley phase as “a fireball radical and atheist” (Shifting 106)5/ and, more persuasively, refer us to his persona Phil from RFA and VALIS. If we told him what the real trouble was with the Gnostic-cum-Kabbalistic idea that there are two realities (the evil occluded one which we see and a more real underlying reality, consubstantial with the true God, which may displace it):namely, that it is extremely difficult to make a non-arbitrary or coherent narration out of it, and that he never succeeded in doing so–he could point to his prescient 1966 note, “Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint… God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else’s. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard.” (58) If we pointed out that, despite Angel Archer’s fulminations in TA against abstraction as deadly mechanical, no human being can (as I argued earlier) do without abstract concepts, and that concepts were certainly omnipresent in Dick–he could reply that the defining trait of SF readers is, “Basically, they enjoy abstract thought” (45), and that obversely, it is “the schizophrenic [who] is unable to think abstractly” (76). If we persisted in harping that whatever the means, the end is to solve people’s woes in this world, Dick could reply that even his wildest metaphysics never
forsook that goal, that for him Christ’s Kingdom of God was an actual, fleshly place existing not only in a possible but in a real alternative reality (238), and that his obstinate kicking against the pricks of the phenomenal world flowed out of his belief both in the utter necessity and the possibility of a just reality, to be attained by Blake’s mental strife (310). Insofar as the shifting and contradictory Dick clung to such answers, and never quite forsook them, he has remained the firebrand radical from his twenties, and it may then be secondary whether he was an atheist or a “panentheist” (46).
Nonetheless, if we then saw Dick not as a renegade, one of the many Collettis and Laclaus
intellectually fallen by the way under the terrible psychic pressures of Post-Fordism, but as a friend and comrade, we could still have legitimate, sometimes even strong, disagreements with some of his horizons and oscillations. Let me make it clear that I do not necessarily object to the theological coding: it may not be my way of seeing human relationships, but I am prepared to respect it. It becomes obnoxious if and when it hinders liberation on the reader’s Earth–as both Liberation Theology and the end of Dick’s RFA would agree. It is in that perspective that fuzziness leads astray. My objections would take different forms for different novels, but I shall here make only four points: the absence of strong yet mainly sympathetic female figures; the absence of urbanization and of the key production and speculation aspects of capitalist economics; the compositional fixation on what Dick calls his “love of chaos” which may be clearest in the “sting in the tail” reversal; and the characterological fixation on the “Good Magnate or Ruler” beside the Little Man. They converge in and largely constitute Dick’s political illiteracy, outside his clairvoyance about the police:

1/ I shall leave the first point to other critics since it is so blatantly obvious, and only state that there are to my mind deep subterranean links between the fascination with but also refusal to accept non-maternal femininity and the isomorphic refusals to acknowledge the city, capitalism, and little people acting together without the upper levels of power.6/ I do not mean to tell a writer what to write about; but Dick liked Spinoza, who knew that every determination is a negation and viceversa, and he knew that bringing light means shutting out darkness (206) and viceversa. It’s the writer’s business to choose what to write about; but it’s then the reader’s business to notice what his choice shut out.

2/ Dick’s loci are rural, small town, and suburban; cities occur rarely and then usually as nightmarish habitats. This is an understandable reaction to Los Angeles, though less to the still beautiful San Francisco of the 1950s and 60s. However, it is coupled with the taboo on  large industry, industrial workers, and the workings of high finance (even in the US, never mind globally). True, except for the foreclosing local banks Dick had no experiential link to them, but he could have read up on them at least one tenth as much as he did on metaphysics.
He was very interested and shrewd about politics, until complete disillusionment set in at the end of the 1960s. In 1976, he wrote despairingly:
Perhaps my days of being a fighter for freedom are over, due to age, due to worry, but due mostly to the discovery–and existence–of the enormity of the secret political police apparatus… and the dreadful things they have done…. So my novel in progress [one of the drafts for the “VALIS cycle,” DS] has nothing to do with politics; it has to do with the mystery religions…. I have not made my peace with the “straight” society, but at the same time I am too weak, too worn out by illness and fear, to do anything but try to make financial ends meet…. (34-35)

Dick may be here too harsh on himself, for his mystery religions are also political. He also elsewhere rightly lists among reasons for his stance the disillusionment in oppositional movements (191). But politics rarely had for him to do with economics (the splendid system in Martian Time-Slip– cf. Suvin, “Opus” 8–and the unclear hints about Substance D in A Scanner would be among the exceptions): he knew all about reification and alienation, but little or nothing about exploitation.7/ He is nearer to Simak than to Pohl, never mind cyberpunk.
3/ I suggested earlier that the truth of P.K. Dick is to be found in his plots. This makes analysis doubly difficult. First, it ideally calls for a blow-by-blow discussion that results in exegeses longer than the texts they discuss, such as Barthes’s S/Z–and its pioneering imitation as applied to SF, Delany’s Angoulème–or previous works of the close reading school (Spitzer, I.A. Richards). The criteria for judging message vs. noise in the plot depend on believability and coherence; what may be believable is almost entirely, and what may becoherent is at least partly, a matter of cognitive (and finally ideological) horizons. Second, Dick could not only spin a new theory every minute (see the remark in VALIS) but he also, unfortunately, took to heart the worst teaching he could have got as a young writer, A.E. van Vogt’s device of a new idea every 800 words (66). John Huntington has clearly shown how this mechanical generation of complexity “give[s] the impression of deep understanding simply by contradicting [it]self” (172). It may make for richness and bedazzlement but it certainly enforces confusion. In particular, Dick has a recurring Vanvogtian habit of pulling a final rabbit out of the hat at the very end of a narrative so as to upset any conclusion about it. This may be a part of what he meant by his love of chaos, but as he also remarked, “a selfcancelling  othing… will not even serve as a primordial chaos” (Shifting 209).7/ His love of chaos is thus potentially fertile, especially when brought to bear on what was experientially known to him, the personal relationships around the Little Man protagonist in a world of grim pressures. But its downside is mystification. The introduction of new concepts and absence of orthodox conceptual coherence is potentially liberatory, an act of primal subversion or naysaying; but the absence of any coherence, including narrative believability, however papered over by dazzling footwork, opens wide the door to arbitrary associations from the latest source Dick has read (such as the double brain hypothesis in A Scanner) or privately encountered.

4/ As to Dick’s permanent ideological type that I would call the “Good Magnate or Ruler,” or finding the good in a bad upper-class representative, this may be ethically appealing as charity toward all, but it is only defensible when one totally gives up questions of  political responsibility. The best example is the supposedly good police general from Flow My Tears.
Reliance on the individual ethics of the powerful but good guy; mistrust of conclusions and
solutions; mistrust of strong women; disinterest in cities and exploitative economics: insofar as these obtain in Dick, his stories can only connect personal with universal redemption, “revolt and disobedience” (307) with changing the spurious world, by means of miracles. In such, often key places, they are not only ethically and politically but also narratively flawed. It might be fair to encapsulate Dick’s major strengths and weaknesses by noting that he–in the vein of Ibsen, Pirandello, much Post-Structuralism, and the Kabbala–tended to equate language and reality, “As if the world had become language” (DI ch. 14). He was quite right in refusing the prevailing reality, but his basic and irreducible philosophical as well as political mistake was, I believe, to envisage this refusal only from the vantage point of the lonely craftsman-creator, however allegorized; whereas reality can only be, and is constantly being, changed by bodies or classes of people.

4.2. Laudation, or What Remains
Finally, however, all objections would be sterile unless accompanied by a view of why do today, in our new body-killing and psyche-wasting global maxi-disorder, those of us who have no investments in born-again pentiti nor in the “Pink Beam” sects recur to Philip Dick? In brief, for a twofold reason: he never ceased to argue with the world, refusing the suffering of Joe Everyman yet also also solidarizing with his heroic endurance and active efforts under attack of the Powers That Be; he never ceased to search, and have him search, if often in contradictory, fuzzy or indeed flawed ways, for thisworldly salvation. (Alas, except for Angel in his last novel, this does not extend to her.) The first entry in Dick’s selected non-fiction, dating to 1949, has his protagonist think: “So it was not his world. If it were his world he would have made it differently. It had been put together wrong, Very much wrong. Put together in ways that he could not approve of.” (6) A quintessential countercultural figure of the Californian and US 1950s and 60s, he kept the faith to this root insight: saying NO in thunder and if need be galactic godheads. A quarter of century later, his definition of an SF writer was still, “He is stuck with a discontent” (74). Insofar as this holds, my apprehensions from 1975 do not obtain, for Dick has in these places not turned his back on illuminating the koinos kosmos, our common reality.
If few of us have anything to tell Dick about alienation, reification, and commercialization, on the contrary all of us can learn a lot from him about their effects in pain and bewilderment on normal Americans–which today, within the American and increasingly Americanized empire, means the pain and bewilderment of 95 or maybe 98% of all inhabitants of this globe. The Black Iron Prison from the “VALIS cycle,” a blown-up version of the dark scanning in A Scanner’s California, is diametrically opposed to the Reaganite fantasy of an Evil Empire–and today to Bush Jr.’s Forces of Evil–attacking the virtuously pure and free USA and “West” (whatever that may mean–“the rich North” would be more appropriate). Even in his last novel, his great gift of indignation was undimmed:

Thousands of young people kill themselves in America each year, but it remains the custom, by and large, to list their deaths as accidental. This is to spare the family the shame attached to suicide. There is, indeed, something shameful about a young man or woman, maybe an adolescent, wanting to die and achieving that goal, dead before in a certain sense they ever lived, ever were bom. Wives get beaten by their husbands; cops kill blacks and Latinos; old people rummage in cans or eat dog food–shame rules, calling the shots. Suicide is only one shameful event out of a plethora. There are black teenagers who will never get a job as long as they live, not because they are lazy but because there are no jobs–because, too, these ghetto kids possess no skills they can sell. Children run away, find the strip in New York or Hollywood; they become prostitutes
and wind up with their bodies hacked apart…. (TA ch. 5)

Dick fought hard against the temptation of weariness, leading people to look for a Fuehrer above them to whom they can delegate responsibility, the Man on the White Horse, which in practice means some form of Fascism. Mostly though not always, I think he avoided it. His godheads are either monsters to be fought, as Eldritch or Jory, or children, as Sofia, Manny, or Zina, working in tandem with, and in the best cases–as in my reading of DI–in feedback with the little people. Undeniably, there is a deeply salvational, and therefore in my book also political, aspect to this. His salvational godheads are sometimes overdogmatic, as Sophia or Manny until he learns better, but basically plebeian and liberatory. He passed judgment himself on dehumanized fanatics, whom he then called androids and schizoids:

Once I heard a schizoid person express himself–in all seriousness–this way: “I receive signals from others. But I can’t generate any of my own until I get recharged….” Imagine viewing oneself and others this way. Signals. As if from another star. [Maybe Albemuth?–note DS] The person has reified himself entirely, along with everyone around him. How awful…. (201)

There are two key phrases for me here. The first one is the generating of–not signals but–
messages. Dick’s oeuvre is full of messengers: from Juliana in Man in the High Castle and Walt in Dr. Bloodmoney, the theme grows omnipresent and mysterious in Ubik. In A Scanner, messages inside Arctor’s brain get so confused that they break down. By the VALIS Cycle, almost everybody is a messenger and everything a message (cf. Galbreath 113): the universe is practically nothing but information. Dick too was an urgent messenger.
The second key phrase may be “in all seriousness.” It has been noted that Dick was one of the most humourous writers of his time. His gamut was large: from grim to uproarious humour, passing through sympathetic pathos. Humour is seeing the same event or object in several incompatible frames at once. I cannot imagine an unhumorous SF writer I would care to reread.
An urgent message for salvation, with humour. This too, we have learned from Philip Dick.

Notes
*/ My thanks for help with primary and secondary materials go to Stefano Carducci, Alessandro Fambrini, Fabio Gadducci, Donald M. Hassler, Salvatore Proietti, and Mirko Tavosanis, as well to Prof.ssa Carla Dente, Dott.ssa Sara Soncini and the kind librarians at the Biblioteca d’anglistica, Università di Pisa; I could not have written this essay without them. It was sparked by the invitation to a keynote speech at the Dick Days of Mutamento ZC of Torino in May 2002, for which I also thank Giordano Vincenzo Amato and Gabriella Serusi.

1/ It is not fully clear just which of the 21 letters to the FBI Dick mailed and which he left in his trash expecting the FBI may sift it (cf. the debate in Mullen et al. eds., 246-64 and 275-78, and Sutin 215-17). In both cases he thought they may be read.

2/ Among those critics is Lawrence Sutin, to whom we owe the rich and refreshingly balanced, and thus so far the best, biography of Dick (albeit with a quite one-sided title), but whose readings of Dick’s texts often seem very dubious to me.

3/ To prevent confusion, “Dick” will henceforth mean only the author P.K. Dick, whereas his namesake in the various novels will be called Phil.

4/ I reluctantly part company here with Robinson, who thinks Herb’s subplot is from ch. 13 on in an illusory world, created only by Zina and not also validated by Manny (Novels 119-20). It seems both uneconomical and contradicted by as straightforward statements as one gets in the later Dick, though admittedly all of them call for more or less probable interpretations. Mine might be kinder than Robinson’s kind interpretation of what he sees as the ensuing murkiness (that is, failure) of the novel as deliberate on Dick’s part.

5/ Unless another name or title is mentioned, all quotes from Dick’s non-fictional writings are from Sutin ed. by page number.

6/ See Hayles for a first sounding into such interconnections.

7/ Rabkin’s article has the great merit of opening this discussion, but he takes economics as what impinges on Dick’s little people, not in the political economists’ sense of an encompassing system (a Dickian reality behind and within empirical reality, indeed).

8/ I have, except for this final section, rarely used Dick’s non-fictional pronouncements, for usually one can be found to buttress any thesis you want to set up. This is probably also true for pronouncements within his fiction, but there they at least serve to characterize the writing’s tone and horizon, and possibly the opinions of the narrator.

Works Cited

Primary (in order of writing)
Dick, Philip K. Galactic Pot-Healer. New York: Berkley, 1969.
—. A Maze of Death. New York: Paperback Library, 1971 [1970].
—. Our Friends From Frolix 8. New York: Ace, 1970.
—. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. New York: DAW Books, 1975 [1974].
—. A Scanner Darkly. New York: DAW Books, 1984 [1977].
—. Radio Free Albemuth. New York: Avon, 1985.
—. VALIS. Worcester Park [UK]: Kerosina Books, 1987 [1981].
—. The Divine Invasion. New York: Timescape Books, 1982 [1981].
—. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. London: Gollancz, 1982.
[—.] The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Ed. L. Sutin. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
See also Lupoff below.

Secondary
De Carolis, Massimo. “La condizione naturale del pensiero.” Il Manifesto Apr. 17, 2002, p. 14.
Galbreath, Robert. “Redemption and Doubt in Philip K. Dick’s Valis Trilogy.” Extrapolation
24.2 (1983): 105-15.
Huntington, John. “Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity,” in R.D. Mullen et al. eds.,
170-77.
Lupoff, Richard [and P.K. Dick]. “A Conversation with Philip K. Dick.” Science-Fiction Eye
(Aug. 1987), on http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/lupoff.htm. 13 electronic pp.
Marx, Karl . “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in idem and
Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: FLPH, 1975.
Mullen, R.D., et al. eds. On Philip K. Dick. Terre Haute & Greencastle: SF-TH, 1992.
Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Philip K. Dick. New York: Taplinger,
1983.
1Dickfin.wpd
Palmer, Christopher. “Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick’s Valis,”
in Mullen et al. eds. 265-74.
Rabkin, Eric S. “Irrational Expectations; or, How Economics and the Post-Industrial World
Failed Philip K. Dick,” in Mullen et al. eds. 178-87.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Afterword” to P. K Dick, Valis. Worcester Park: Kerosina Books,
1987, 242-55.
—. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984.
Stableford, Brian, and John Clute. “Dick, Philip K.,” in John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds., The
Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, rev. edn. Danbury, CT: Grolier Electronic Publishing,
1995.
Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony Books,
1989.
Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of SF: A Hypothesis,”
in his Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. London: Macmillan, & Kent OH: Kent
State UP, 1988, 61-73.
—. “Philip K. Dick’s Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View,” in the above, 112-33.