PKD's Out-of-Book Experiences

If there's one person who best approximates the folly of the FACT phenomenon, it's science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Everything he wrote was Fictitious And Completely True.

Dick's 40+ novels and 1 million+ words of short stories uniquely envisioned the possibilites and horrors of future worlds full of techno-grit, depressed characters and shifting realities while revealing our modern world as a maze of twisty passages, all-alike. Reading Dick's fiction today seems strikingly like an Opinion Page Letter-to-the-Editor on current events and issues rather than some far-off vision of future imaginings.

Dick's stories nail us right to our virtual walls: the future's not what it used to be. The future is now. Our current world of rapid-fire IM relationships, enhancement pills, corporate lifestyle marketing and menus of instant reality-tunnel filtering fit well within Dick's pages. Robert Silverberg — like Dick, he's also a prolific Hugo Award-winning science fiction author — finds the same scenerio to be true in his article Reflections: The Days of Perky Vivienne:

At the core of [Dick's] thinking was an astonishingly keen understanding of the real world he lived in — the world of the United States, subsection California, between 1928 and 1982 — and it was because he had such powerful insight into the reality around him that he was able to perform with such great imaginative force one of the primary jobs of the science fiction writer, which is to project present-day reality into a portrayal of worlds to come.

To further his point, Silverberg finds great amusement and Dickian flavor in a new cellphone product being marketed by a Hong Kong company:

A case in point is the announcement last spring that a Hong Kong company, Artificial Life, Inc. — what a Dickian name! — is about to provide the lonely men of this world with a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne, who can be accessed via cellphone for a basic monthly fee of six dollars. If you sign up for Vivienne’s friendship, she will chat with you about matters of love and romance or almost anything else you might want to discuss, and you will be able to buy her virtual flowers and chocolates, take her to the movies, even — beautifully creepy Dickian touch — marry her. (Which will get you a virtual mother-in-law who will call you in the middle of the night to find out whether you’re treating her little girl the right way.)

Network this product with a Fleshlight and what more could a fella ask for? How far off can "The Days of Perky Pat" be? Soon enough we'll be subscribing to the "mood organs" of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Sign me up!

For Dick, these ideas were all too obvious. For us, they're novelties becoming common day subscription-based appliances.

Welcome to PKD's World where The Empire Never Ended.

Learn More:
Philip K. Dick - Official Site
The Quasi-Official Robert Silverberg Web Site

Science Fiction | Philip K Dick | Robert Silverberg

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