"The Martians are always coming."
Adam Gopnik has written some truly dire things for the New Yorker at times, but his profile of Philip K. Dick is excellent. I'm glad Jonathan Lethem is the one compiling Dick for the Library of America (both Lethem and Dick deserve it), and I'm glad my favourite writer of my teenage years is apparently now a Genius. But I'm also glad Gopnik punctures a lot of the fuss that gets him fundamentally wrong:
Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.
Or, about VALIS:
What is moving in Dick’s madness is his insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the world outside him is the violence that we accept as normal. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, he had already glimpsed the possibility that normal governing might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth. “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one,” Fat writes. That this is followed by an explanation of how those deaf-mute three-eyed invaders arrived in ancient Sudan from a planet in the star system Sirius does not diminish its force; if anything, it increases it, by reminding us of the price the visionary paid for it... The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends.
That last point - the way the Black Iron Prison presents itself "as necessary and real" - is something that dovetails nicely with Capitalist Realism and k-punk's investigations thereof.
Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.
Or, about VALIS:
What is moving in Dick’s madness is his insistence that the surest sign of the madness of the world outside him is the violence that we accept as normal. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, he had already glimpsed the possibility that normal governing might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth. “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one,” Fat writes. That this is followed by an explanation of how those deaf-mute three-eyed invaders arrived in ancient Sudan from a planet in the star system Sirius does not diminish its force; if anything, it increases it, by reminding us of the price the visionary paid for it... The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends.
That last point - the way the Black Iron Prison presents itself "as necessary and real" - is something that dovetails nicely with Capitalist Realism and k-punk's investigations thereof.
