The Enduring Relevance of Philip K. Dick

“We turned to technology as a substitute for our inability to deal with the persistent riddles of existence and the lack of meaning in our life in a post-God era.”

Introduction

The seminal cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has argued that at its best, science fiction is about more than developing fantastic and pulpy entertainment. Science fiction reflects the anxieties and hopes we feel about the future, much as medieval fantasies like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter demonstrate our efforts to work through a sacred past which is increasingly distant. This is especially important in the contest of post-modern culture, where our relationship to the future has changed quite dramatically. For earlier civilizations, time operated according to a cyclical process. While the future might exist for individual people, there was effectively no future for the species as a whole. It was destined to rise and fall like the tides, progressing momentarily and then regressing in turn.

Sadly, many science fiction authors were little convinced by the utopian possibilities offered by technological change, remaining convinced that humankind would continue to find new ways of exploiting and denying the dignity of their sentient fellows.

Many fantasy series reflect this cyclical account of time; consider Game of Thrones, where great civilizations like Valyria emerge only to be quashed by a combination of natural disasters and hubris. For other civilizations, time did indeed progress—but toward a future that would arrive and halt the movement of history. A good example would be the Christian worldview as presented in works such as St. Augustine’s The City of God. At a certain point, the human story would end, and the species would ascend or descend into a timeless eternal world where individuals were rewarded or punished as they were due. This perspective can be seen in works such as The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which are both great works by Christian authors reflecting on a time when humanity and its suffering would emerge from the darkness into salvation.

What science fiction begins to project is an image of an indefinite future, but not necessarily one characterized by constant progress on all fronts. For early science fiction authors, such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, the sense one finds is of a human species that continues to advance technologically but not necessarily morally or spiritually. The crew who follow Captain Nemo on his quest for revenge under the sea may be surrounded by technological wonders, but their moral outlook is no more nuanced than that of anyone else’s. Later on, new and more interesting genres of science fiction began to emerge; those focused on the dystopian and utopian possibilities that might be opened up by technological change.