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Before he became known as a science fiction writer, Dick tried to write a series of contemporary, realist novels about the struggles of young working class people in 1950s California. These novels, In Milton Lumky Territory in particular, are nowhere near as well known as they should be and are, along with the works of John Fante, the initial wellspring of what would later come to be known as ‘Dirty Realism’ – a movement which showcased such luminaires as Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Charles Bukowski. This was the first time American fiction focused exclusively on the under class and Dick bought his own personal frustrations and bad days to bear on its pages. In Milton Lumky Territory is a Southern California analogue to Death of a Salesman, a profoundly moving and heartbreaking deconstruction of the American dream. These realist novels have yet to be properly excavated and given their rightful place within the canon of modern American literature.
A strange book, even by Dick’s standards, Martian Time-Slip is set on a bedraggled Martian colony and includes some smart satire on the nature of civic organisation and power politics – but at its heart is a story of schizophrenia and the slippery nature of time. Like all of Dick’s great novels, this one begins small and slowly, the humdrum frustrations of the colonists’ lives not unlike those of the failing businessmen of the realist period – but, as the novel progresses, things begin to turn seriously weird. A profound analysis of mental health and the contingencies of reality, Dick sees autism and schizophrenia as time-based disorders and the tale of Manfred, the afflicted boy, is one of Dick’s most heartfelt and poignant.
Probably the most warped and terrifying novel ever written. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a horror story wrapped in a sci-fi tale, encased in a philosophical riddle. Dick is firing on all cylinders in this narrative of lowly Martian immigrants whose lives are so brutal and unremitting that their only escape is through taking a drug which creates communion among its members. When the suitably-named Palmer Eldritch returns from a long journey in space with a new, cheaper and better version of the drug, the colonists swarm to it with hideous results. A meditation on religion, transubstantiation, the nature of time and evil, it is Dick’s empathetic portrayal of working class people trapped in a situation beyond their control which gives the novel its power. It also has one of the most shocking and vertiginous endings ever written, like Borges on acid.
Famous for its adaptation as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of the author’s most satisfying works. Using the template of the private eye novel, Dick wants to ask what makes us human? And, more pertinently for 2017, what is real and what is fake? In a world where animals have become almost extinct, bounty hunter Decker keeps an electric sheep on his roof as a status symbol, hoping the neighbours will take it for real. The important and integral sub-plot of Mercerism, a new religion which promotes empathy, was totally left out of the original film, thus depriving Decker’s odyssey of its necessary and essential counterpoint. A book of sublime grace and theological depth, powered by a raging anger at those who would destroy humanity in the name of humanity, it stands as one of Dick’s most melancholy and elegiac works.
Possibly the best book about the intoxicating grace of drugs and the price our bodies and minds pay for their abuse. It’s also wickedly funny, massively disturbing and one of the deepest investigations into the ‘self’ in literature as well as being a superb private eye novel in which the detective ends up investigating himself. With some of Dick’s best prose, A Scanner Darkly reads as one of his most heartfelt books, made clear by the long end-of-book dedication to friends recently fallen from drugs. Well served by the Richard Linklater film, Dick envisions a hellish modernity where chain stores render every neighbourhood an exact simulacrum of the next. The hilarious ‘bike gears’ conversation was referenced in a homage by Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice, a novel that shares a lot of attributes with A Scanner Darkly.
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Also by Stav Sherez
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