Daily Philip K. Dick

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[orchidblack]

Cover art for Phillip K. Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon by Davis Meltzer.

[cryingoflot49]

“We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

-Philip K. Dick, The Man In the High Castle

[cryingoflot49]

Book Review

Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick

Life is uncertain. Our perceptions of reality are shaky, incomplete, distorted, and inaccurate. If we use our perceptions of truth as a basis for making decisions and plans of action, how can we possibly know if we are doing the right thing or not? We can’t so we just do what we think is right and hope it works out for the best. This is the central, unstated theme of Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World.

Sebastian Hermes is at the center of it all. He lives in a future time when dead people reawaken and rise from their graves and after being reborn they get younger with the passage of time, eventually becoming children then infants and returning to the womb. Sebastian runs a business, assisting people as they return to life then selling them to whoever will be their caretaker for the immediate future. One night while working in a graveyard, he realizes that the leader of a religious cult called the Uditi, named the Anarch Peak, is about to come back to life. Sebastian realizes this is an opportunity to make a huge amount of money, so he helps to resurrect the Anarch Peak, but not everything works out as smoothly as he plans.

The antagonist of the story is the Library which is run by a secretive group called the Erads. Their mission is the control of information and they operate by erasing and destroying all works of literature that they decide are harmful for society. They realize that the Anarch Peak is about to return, so they hatch a plot to kidnap and assassinate him before he can spread his religious message further than it already has. They know his return will be even more important this time because during death he would have had direct contact with God. The Erads send a charming and beautiful woman named Ann Fisher to seduce Sebastian Hermes while an attempt on the Anarch Peak’s life is made since he is being held in the care of Sebastian’s office building. Ann Fisher’s plans get spoiled because two secret agents from Rome tip Sebastian off to her plot. These Romans are most likely unstated representatives of the Catholic church who have a vested interest in getting a hold of the Anarch Peak.

At this point in the book, it becomes obvious that this is an action/thriller story with science-fiction trappings and theological undertones. Since the world moves in reverse, people disgorge food rather than eating it and they blow smoke into cigarette butts which elongate until they can be put into a pack. The climax of sex happens when the male’s sperm separates from the egg and returns to the man. There are other science-fiction details like flying cars, robot people, and exotic high-tech weaponry. None of this feeds directly into the main point. The author wanted to write a story about resurrection and made time flow in reverse, then added these details in to make it feel more complete and maybe a little more trippy like some mind-blowing window decorations. This was written in the late 1960s after all. These details, aside from the dead returning to life, are more or less just gimmicks. But at least they are unique and interesting gimmicks. The theological conversations and meditations on the nature of time and mortality are not terribly original either and seem to be tacked onto the story to give it a more mystical atmosphere.

As the story progresses, the actual theme of the book becomes a little less obscure. That theme, being the uncertainty of our perceptions and the inability to understand the consequences of our actions, can be seen in how the action unfolds. While there are a lot of sub-themes throughout, one thing becomes clear: Sebastian is faced with a series of choices in which the uncertainty of the outcomes make it difficult to judge what the right plan of action should be. This can be seen in his attempts to negotiate with the Romans and the Uditi who both want him to turn the Anarch Peak over to them. This culminates in Sebastian’s attempt to rescue the Anarch Peak and his wife Lotta from the fortress-like Library which is held by the Erads. It seems that whatever he does in this situation, it will be the wrong thing from both a personal and a moral point of view.

To confuse matters more, Sebastian Hermes begins having dreams and vision in which the Anarch Peak visits him as a spirit and gives him information and instructions. Sebastian has no way of knowing if these are real or hallucinatory, but the Anarch Peak gives him one significant piece of information. He tells Sebastian that he is the most important man in the world. At this point, you can not tell if Sebastian is losing his mind or not. It appears that world events of religious and historical importance are happening all around him and maybe he is some sort of Christ-like figure that has been chosen as a messenger for God. But maybe this is all a delusional compensation for the way he keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into trouble by making decisions that are morally and pragmatically of a dubious nature. He may be somebody with a divine purpose or he may be a complete loser having delusions of grandeur to save his fragile mind from sinking into self-destruction.

What is truly great about this book is the way you see this whole mess from Sebastian Hermes’ point of view. His confusion becomes your confusion and the fact that, despite all his screw ups, he remains a sympathetic character to the end because he is motivated entirely by pure intentions and honesty. What are the ethics of this? Do insanity and honesty cancel each other out? If Sebastian isn’t insane, do his failures cancel out his purity of intent? The story leaves you hanging without any clear answers.

As enjoyable as this book can be, it isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s major works. The biggest flaw of the book is the inconsistencies of the time-in-reverse premise. While food is disgorged and cigarettes are un-smoked, bullets don’t fly out of people’s bodies and back into guns. The flying cars move forward. People don’t run or walk in reverse. Even worse, when people get shot or blown uo they don’t return to life the way people in their graves do. And how could the plot even move forwards in a world where everything goes backwards? Why can’t the characters even predict what is going to happen next? If you think about this too much you will ruin the experience of the story. It is just better to accept these flaws without dwelling on them too deeply. You actually have to do that if you expect to take anything away from the story.

The idea that we can never know what is real with any certainty and therefore can never know what to do with any certainty is the same theme that animates Philip K. Dick’s earlier novel The Man In the High Castle. He just transplants that idea into a totally different setting and plot line. Counter-Clock World is also a lot more entertaining. The way you can feel Sebastian’s confusion while he maintains a calm and certain exterior is a strong point and the story moves along nicely too, even if the main theme is obscured under all the details. This isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s most popular novels, but it possibly is his more underrated.

[cryingoflot49]

Philip K. Dick interview in France, 1977

[cryingoflot49]

Philip K. Dick interview in France, 1977

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There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. - Philip K. Dick

[apdistractions]

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[themuteprotagonist]

Sean Young, Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott

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[kekwcomics]

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (Daw edition, 1983)

Art: Bob Pepper

[gravity-rainbow-deactivated2024]

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. - Philip K. Dick

[alchemisoul]

"Philip K. Dick and I had a series of rather similar experiences. And out of his experiences he constructed Valis, which looks like a science fiction story most of the way, and then abruptly at the end, you suddenly find out maybe it’s not a science fiction story, maybe it’s an account of Philip K. Dick going crazy. Or maybe it’s an account of Philip K. Dick being contacted by extraterrestrials.

In Cosmic Trigger, I had pretty much the same structures. Why would Robert Anton Wilson be contacted by extraterrestrials? No, it’s Robert Anton Wilson going crazy. No, it’s just Robert Anton Wilson experimenting with alternative realities and coming out of chapel perilous at the end without believing in any of them. But structurally, they are very similar because they are based on very similar experiences."

"My feeling about the whole thing was that Phil was questioning me about my experiences in an attempt to decide how crazy I was. I think his attitude was if he decided I was crazy then that meant he was crazy too, but if he thought maybe I was I was sane then that meant maybe he was sane too...

...I seem to have passed muster, he seems to have considered me sane and I think that cheered him up in considering the possibility that he might be sane too (laughter)."

"In 1994, I think it was, somebody put up on the internet a report of my death and no matter how much I denied it - it seems most people accept that I'm still alive but there's a die-hard minority that insists I'm dead and the CIA has replaced me with an Android.

I'd be much happier if I never read Phil Dick because I would just think that, "I know I'm not an Android". But having read Phil Dick, I realize that if I was an Android, properly constructed, I'd still think I'm Robert Anton Wilson.

So that leaves me perpetually in a predicament of not being sure whether I'm Robert Anton Wilson or an Android programed to think, write, and talk like Robert Anton Wilson. But I guess I'm really grateful for Phil for that, it gives me a certain agnostic detachment which I think is necessary for mental health."

"Phil was no more of an ordinary person than James Joyce or William Blake were ordinary people, or Marilyn Monroe...Phil was an extraordinary person and he had some super ordinary experiences."

"Voltaire, who's one of my heroes, admired Confucius greatly and one of the reasons he gave was that Confucius was the first man in history who didn't have a Divine experience.

Well that's funny enough and I agree with it, but people who have had divine experiences - I judge them by how sane they remain after it. I think Phil remained quiet sane. He didn't get hung up on any system of dogma, or fanatacism, and he didn't set out to correct his friends morals and so on."

"In my meetings with him I always got the impressions of a warm, intelligent, nice, friendly, person. I never got any impression of any sort of fanaticism or lack of emotional stability. I know Phil was emotionally unstable at times, but it did not seem to me that he was the type of person that I wanted to avoid. I wish I had seen a lot more of him. I could deal with this kind of an instability better than a lot of the other kinds that are around in our society."

- Robert Anton Wilson on his Kinship with Phillip K. Dick

(Excerpts from The Gospel of Phillip K. Dick and Maybe Logic: The Lives & Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson Documentaries)

(Image 2: Phillip K. Dick by Nicolas Rosenfeld, Image 3: “Mr. RAW’s Psychedelic Hand” by Dimitri Drjuchinge)

[thevaultofretroscifi]

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

[coldalbion]

“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. ” ― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

[gravity-rainbow-deactivated2024]

Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.

Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick