tag: Simulated Reality

Time Out of Joint

Time out of Joint
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Time Out of Joint, which Dick wrote while he still had aspirations of being a literary novelist, is my favorite of his minor works. It has similarities with his mainstream books (all of which were still unpublished in the late 50s), but it introduces a page-turning story alongside the suburban malaise.

In the 1990s a civil war has broken out between colonists on the moon and Earth. Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year Ragle Gumm is the only one who can predict where the missiles fired from the moon will land, and he’s able to keep Earth safe, that is until he has a change of heart and begins to side with the lunatics, as those on the moon are called.

A psychotic break follows and he regresses in his mind to the 1950s America of his childhood. The military then carefully constructs a fake 1950s small town filled with a few handlers along with a majority who are brainwashed into also thinking it’s real. Ragle still makes his predictions, although now it’s under the guise of a newspaper contest where he earns a 1950s wage figuring out Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?

It would be easy to pick apart the book’s logic (how exactly does Ragle’s gift of prediction work and what do the strips of paper that Ragle finds when he begins to see through the simulated reality really mean?) but I love how Dick anticipated a baby boomer nostalgia for the 50s as he watched the Eisenhower years come to an end.

Cast of characters

  • Ragle Gumm – all-time winner in the newspaper’s Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest. Lives with his sister’s family
  • Margo Nielson – Ragle’s sister
  • Vic Nielson – Ragle’s brother-in-law
  • Sammy Nielson – Vic and Margo’s young son
  • Bill and Junie Black – Vic and Margo’s neighbors
  • Stuart LoweryGazette representative
  • Kay Keitelbein – neighborhood volunteer for Civil Defense
  • Walter Keitelbein – Kay’s son
  • The Kesselmans – Ragle encounters them in their house on the outskirts of town when he first tries to escape

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
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Often at the beginning of a Philip K. Dick book I think to myself ‘this has to be one of Dick’s craziest ideas’ before I remember I think that about almost all of his stories. Colonists who have been forced to emigrate to Mars occupy their time by communally taking a drug (Can-D) that lets them inhabit the minds of the Barbie and Ken-like dolls Perky Pat and Walt. While on the drug they are temporarily transported (as Perky Pat and Walt) to an Earth that mimics their carefully constructed Perky Pat layout.

Back on the real Earth the pre-cog employees at P. P. Layouts try to determine which consumer goods will be popular so that they can be minified and sent to Mars for the colonists to use in their Perky Pat environments. This balance is upset when the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system with a potent new drug that he plans to market to the colonists as a more effective escape from the drudgery of Mars.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch remains my favorite PKD book even after having read them all. You might assume it was inspired by the use of LSD, but Dick claims to have not yet tried that particular drug at this point in his life. Instead, fueled by large quantities of amphetamines, he wrote this during an incredibly prolific two-year period in 1963-64 when he also wrote some of my other favorites including The Game Players of Titan, Now Wait for Last Year, The Simulacra and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Is the world of Perky Pat the same world from The Crack in Space? Who knows, but while in the mind of Walt, one of the colonists catches Jim Briskin, everyone’s favorite newsclown (or maybe just mine), on TV.

Cast of characters

  • Barney Mayerson – a pre-cog. Head of pre-fash marketing at  P. P. Layouts
  • Roni Fugate – a pre-cog. Barney’s assistant and mistress
  • Leo Bulero – chairman of the board at P. P. Layouts
  • Emily Hnatt – Barney’s ex-wife
  • Richard Hnatt – Emily’s current husband
  • Palmer Eldritch – the interplan industrialist who returns from Proxima
  • Sam Regan, Mary Regan, Tod Morris, Norman Schein, Helen Morris, Fran Schein – Mars colonists
  • Allen and Charlotte Faine – disc jockeys in a Mars satellite
  • Felix Blau – head of the police agency
  • Dr. Wily Denkmal – runs an E therapy clinic in Germany

A Maze of Death

A Maze of Death
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In A Maze of Death a group of strangers all receive job transfers to a remote planet and await instructions as to the purpose of their colony. We have a mystery on our hands when those instructions don’t arrive, and the members of the group are murdered one by one.

The LSD-inspired plot that follows has a great ending when we find out the colonists have been in a simulated reality all along. They are actually crew members of a ship stranded with no hope of rescue, and so they enter these computer-created artificial worlds again and again, with an amnesia of their actual plight, in order to pass the time before their inevitable death in space.

The religion they all follow in their invented world was generated by the ship’s computer. It resembles Christianity, although with a logic based on the existence of a physical God.

Cast of characters

  • Ben Tallchief – Delmak-O’s naturalist
  • Seth Morley – Delmak-O’s marine biologist
  • Mary Morley – Seth’s wife
  • Betty Jo Berm – Delmak-O’s linguist
  • Bert Kosler – Delmak-O’s custodian
  • Maggie Walsh – Delmak-O’s theologian
  • Ignatz Thugg – Delmak-O’s thermoplastics expert
  • Milton Babble – Delmak-O’s doctor
  • Tony Dunkelwelt – Delmak-O’s photographer and soil-sample expert
  • Glen Belsnor – Delmak-O’s electronics specialist and the group’s leader
  • Roberta Rockingham – Delmak-O’s sociologist
  • Susie Smart – Delmak-O’s clerk
  • Wade Frazer – Delmak-O’s psychologist
  • Ned Russell – Delmak-O’s economist

Other things to know

  • How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You – their religion’s holy book written by Communist theologian A. J. Specktowsky
  • The Intercessor – a Christ-like manifestation of the deity
  • The Mentufacturer – the God-like manifestation of the deity
  • Walker-on-Earth – the ‘Holy ghost’ manifestation that completes the deity’s trinity
  • Form Destroyer – the yin to the deity’s yang

The Divine Invasion

The Divine Invasion
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The Divine Invasion has a funny set up. We find out Herb Asher was killed in an accident but is in cryonic suspension awaiting an organ transplant that will revive him. The Cry-Labs warehouse is close to an FM radio tower, and so as Asher dreams and relives the events leading up to the accident he also hears a faint muzak version of Fiddler on the Roof that no one else can hear. This gag comes up again late in the book during a farcical encounter with a cop when Asher isn’t sure what reality he is in.

Other than these brief moments The Divine Invasion is a mostly humorless story about a woman on a faraway colony planet who is impregnated by Yahweh who was driven there from Earth in 73 A.D. She travels back to Earth along with the Joseph stand-in Herb Asher and a reincarnated Elijah so that her soon-to-be-born son Emmanuel can overthrow Earth’s ruling powers and save mankind… or something along those lines.

It gets better in the second half when Zina transports them all to an alternate reality and there is some mystery about who/what Zina really is (Wisdom? A fairy queen? VALIS? Satan? Christ himself… which would make Emmanuel what?), but it still remains my least favorite book of the VALIS Trilogy.

Cast of characters

  • Emmanuel – the reborn savior
  • Elias Tate – Elijah reincarnated. Emmanuel’s guardian after Herb and Rybys die
  • Herb Asher – Emmanuel’s ‘father’
  • Rybys Rommey – Emmanuel’s mother
  • Zina – the young girl who is Emmanuel’s friend
  • Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms – Chief Prelate of the Christian-Islamic Church. Trying to use Big Noodle to verify St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God
  • Nicholas Bulkowsky – Procurator Maximus of the Scientific Legate
  • Linda Fox – intergalactic pop superstar, at least in the book’s beginning reality

Other things to know

  • Christian-Islamic Church – formerly the Catholic Church
  • Scientific Legate – formerly the Communist Party. One of the two ruling parties of Earth along with the C.I.C.
  • Big Noodle – Earth’s great Artificial Intelligence

Ubik

Ubik
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In Ubik Dick took one of his own tropes, a group of people trapped unknowingly in a simulated or false reality (used previously in Eye in the Sky and later in A Maze of Death) and created one of his most entertaining novels.

In 1992 Glen Runciter’s anti-psionic prudence organization duels with Raymond Hollis’s group of telepaths and precogs. Runciter’s employees end up stuck in the simulated reality of half-life storage after Hollis lures them to the moon and attempts to kill them. The group is tormented by a powerful fifteen-year-old half-lifer, and Runciter, still alive on the outside, tries to help them as time inside half-life regresses into the past (similar to the drug-induced time travel in Now Wait for Last Year).

It sounds absurd in summary, but the book is stuffed with some of Dick’s funniest and best ideas while dealing with his prevalent theme of the nature of reality.

Cast of characters

  • Glen Runciter – owner of Runciter Associates, an anti-psi prudence organization
  • Ella Runciter – Glen’s twenty-year-old dead wife in half-life
  • Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang – owner of Beloved Brethren Moratorium.  Also the owner of Beloved Brethren Mortuary in “What the Dead Men Say”
  • Jory Miller – a dead fifteen-year-old boy in half-life cold-pac storage
  • Raymond Hollis – employs telepaths. Runciter’s opposition
  • G. G. Ashwood – one of Runciter’s telepaths
  • Joe Chip – Runciter’s electrical tester
  • Pat Conley– an anti-precog
  • Stanton Mick – reclusive speculator and financier
  • Zoe Wirt – Stanton Mick’s assistant
  • Tippy Jackson, Edie Dorn, Al Hammond, John Ild, Francesca Spanish, Tito Apostos, Don Denny, Sammy Mundo, Wendy Wright, Fred Zafsky – Runciter’s inertials who travel to Luna

The Cosmic Puppets

The Cosmic Puppets
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The setup of The Cosmic Puppets wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s set in 1953. Ted Barton returns to the small Virginia town where he grew up and finds that everything—the buildings, people and even his own past—has changed.

This one is short, coming in at under 150 pages. It has a great hook, although Dick never really explains what the showdown between the two cosmic entities of good and evil ultimately has to do with the sleepy town of Millgate.

Cast of characters

  • Ted Barton – our protagonist
  • Peggy Barton – Ted’s wife
  • Peter Trilling – the antagonist. A young boy from Millgate
  • Mary Meade – a young girl from Millgate
  • Mabel Trilling – Peter’s mother and owner of a Millgate boarding house
  • Dr. Ernest Meade – Mary’s father. Operates a private hospital in Millgate called Shady House
  • William Christopher – a town drunk and the first person Ted comes across who is aware of the change to Millgate

Other things to know

  • Ahriman – the destroyer
  • Ormazd – the builder. Better known in Zoroastrianism as Ahura Mazda