Philip K.

Dick Criticism 1982-2010

Author(s): Howard Canaan
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) , Fall, 2013, Vol.
19, No. 2 (Fall, 2013), pp. 307-322
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS

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Philip K. Dick Criticism 1982-2010
Howard Canaan

Philip
and t
bound
vision
in the texture of American culture in the second half of the twentieth
century. As Eric Carl Link frames Dick's influence, "To read the work of
Philip K. Dick is not only to read of the future, but also to read a version of
the history of U.S. culture throughout the entire cold war era" (9-10). Dick's
central themes - the elusive nature of reality, the uncertain boundaries
between the human and the artificial, and the invasion of simulacra and
counterfeits into the substance of life - are not just political, but existential
in nature. Given this fact, and the imaginative and intellectual energy of his
writing, the considerable critical attention given to Dick, most notably his
science fiction, is understandable.
First, a few words on chronological and generic matters appear in
order. Regarding chronology, this review, with the exception of several
important articles appearing in 1975, will cover scholarship from 1982 to
2010. 1982 is a convenient starting point for two reasons. First, it is the year
of Dick's death, thus making the materials covered here almost entirely
posthumous, and, second, it is also the date of the release of Bladerunner ; by
far the most influential film based on Dick's writings, which can be seen to
mark the beginning of the wider cultural diffusion of Dick's influence. I will
focus on Dick's science fiction rather than on his earlier realistic novels,
essays, and philosophical works (except as they enter into critical analysis of
his science fiction), or the films based on Dick's science fiction that have a
less direct relation to his written work itself.
Several previous reviews of Dick criticism both merit attention in
themselves and also mark its progress, growth, and possible saturation
point. In 1984, in "The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick," Carl Feckete
criticizes the lack of new publications among the eleven selections in Joseph
Olander and Martin H. Greenberg's Philip K Dick and the lack of original
scholarship in that publication as well as in Hazel Pierce's 1984 Philip K
Dick. He calls for a better understanding of aesthetic issues in Dick
scholarship and criticizes what he terms its "content fetishism," regretting
that at that point, Dick had "only very slowly been attracting energetic and

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 19.2. 2013. Copyright © 2013
by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.

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serious scholarly attention" (119). By 1988, in his editor's introduction to a
collection of Dick criticism in Science Fiction Studies , Carl Freedman writes that
"today one can at least detect the beginnings of a critical T)ick industry"'
(119). Freedman's well-noted statement that "the defining features of Dick's
work are commodities and conspiracies" (119) signals the generally
postmodernist approach that SFS has continued since then, an approach to
Csicsery-Ronay对
which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has certainly contributed. By 1991, in '"Pilgrims 迪克的综述（左
in the Pandemonium," Csicsery-Ronay presents a far different picture of 边一整段
Dick scholarship, citing the infiltration of postmodem reality into diverse
fields as the prime reason for Dick's growing influence. Csicsery-Ronay posits
three stages of Dick criticism - breakthrough, disputation, and diffusion -
and accurately envisions the increasing attention to the visionary and religious
PKD that has developed since 1991. In a later collection of Dick criticism,
Philip K Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations (1995), edited by Samuel
Umland, Csicsery-Ronay implicitly acknowledges the development of Dick
criticism since 1991, pointing out his judgment (contrary to Feckete's) that
ten out of the twelve selections in the Umland and Greenberg collection of
Dick criticism are new, "filling the niches that earlier critics had left empty."
He notes, however, that the collection has no "focused feminist criticism, no
queer criticism, not post-cyberpunk literary history" ("Gregg Rickman" 430).
By 2008, Dick criticism had proliferated to the extent that, in a review of the
four Dick novels in the 2007 Library of America publication of Man in the
High Castle, Three Stignata, Do Androids, and Ubik, Andrew M. Butler cautions
that Dick criticism may have reached its saturation point: "Whether the
continual canonization of Dick is a good thing remains to be seen - he is not
the only exceptional figure in sf" ("Legit Dick" 491).
Several influential pre-1982 Dick articles- all appearing in SFS in
1975 - deserve preliminary mention. Stanislaw Lem in his seminal "Philip K.
Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans" in SFS 5 (March 1975) focuses his
analysis on Ubik but by setting Dick apart from all other American SF
writers - whom Lem views with undisguised disdain - establishing Dick's
fiction as deserving of special attention. Lem's own status as a SF writer has
added to the impact of this article. His praise for Dick's rejection of the
conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel and what he calls Dick's
"fusion of the 'natural' and the 'artificial"' (63) set the tone for later
postmodernist approaches to Dick.1 Darko Suvin's "The Science Fiction of
Philip K. Dick (first appearing in the same edition of SFS as Lem's piece and
later slightly revised and retitled "Artifice as Refuge and World View: Philip K.
Dick's Foci" in Olander and Greenberg) extends Lem's postmodernist

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approach to an overview of Dick's' novels that breaks ground by treating an
array of topics - structuralist relationships in the narrative, political and
ontological themes, and the moral and cognitive concerns explored through
"Dick's allegorically exaggerated characters" (75). Suvin also argues for a three-
part pattern to Dick's career from a period of apprenticeship to "the second
high plateau in his opus" (73) to a falling-off in die last phase of his writing
when it shifted to ontological and theological concerns - a judgment that critics
who share Suvin's Marxist views have tended to follow. Peter Fitting's " Ubik :
The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF" is the most specifically Marxist of the
March 1975 SFS articles. It argues that the text of Ubik undercuts "the
traditional 'representational' novel . . . and reinforces a transcendental
conception of reality which mystifies the actual reality of the capitalist mode of
production and the resultant repression and alienation" (155). Taken together,
these three articles treat the mystery and ambivalence of Dick's work as a veiled
criticism of the contradictions of capitalism, and their impact on subsequent
Dick criticism has been lasting. One further piece on Dick, Carlo Pagetti's
"Dick and Meta-SF," explores the metaphysical and existential aspects of a
number of Dick's novels, including Man in the Hight Castle, Martian Time-Slip , The
Simulacra, , Three Stigmata, Do Androids and several earlier ones. Pagetti's
contention that Dick is distinguished from other SF writers by "actually writing
SF about SF' is a theme that carries over into later criticism.
What follows is a review of Dick 1983-2010 research on the basis of
several broadly distinguishable critical approaches: biographical, political-
postmodernist, psychological, formalist-aesthetic, and philosophical-
theological. Political-postmodernist readings of Dick, influenced by cultural
critics such as Fredric Jameson and the three critics cited above, as well as
by the Dick scholarship published in SFS , still dominate the field. But in
spite of the generally acknowledged uneven craftsmanship of Dick's writing,
a good deal of post- 1982 criticism has focused on its narrative strengths or
on its formal or aesthetic design. Dick's personal and authorial interest in
altered or abnormal mental states has also, naturally enough, led to
psychological analyses of Dick's writings. Philosophical-theological
approaches to Dick's writing, developing from, but not limited to studies of
his late novels, have increased in frequency over the past decade. And on a
parallel track with what is the definitive complete biography of Dick,
Lawrence Sutin's 1989 Divine Invasions : A Ufe of Philip K Dick , there have
been a number of shorter post-1982 critical studies of Dick that follow or
include biographical summaries of Dick's career and that seek to provide an
overview of his fiction from a chronological perspective.

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 Sutin's Divine Invasions remains the fullest and most reliable pure
biography of Dick, with the fullest access to those closest to Dick we are
likely ever to have. But it is not a critical study and has no bibliography.
Gregg Rickman's To the High Castle : Philip K Dick a Life, 1928-82 (also
republished in 1989), is (at least thus far) a misnomer since it covers Dick's
life only up to age thirty-two. Rickman's approach is speculative and
psychoanalytical, tracing the sources of key themes in Dick's SF to early
childhood traumas, most notably tracing the search for the missing female
member of a transcendent syzygy in Dick's fiction to the trauma occasioned
by his twin sister's death in early infancy. The earliest comprehensive
(though not lengthy) critical study of Dick's SF is Kim Stanley Robinson's
The Novels of Philip K Dick (1984). Robinson also includes some analysis of
Dick's non-SF novels but excludes analysis of his SF short stories. His is a
perceptive, balanced study that sets a good standard for the several later
works of fewer than 200 pages that seek to give a broad, general perspective
on Dick's oeuvre.2 Patricia Warrick's 1987 study Mind in Motion : The Fiction of
Philip K Dick identifies eight main themes in his work and focuses chapter
by chapter on eight of his SF novels. Although Warrick provides useful
insights into these novels, her approach is marred by a confusing
presentation of what she calls "Dick's dynamic four-chambered metaphor"
(30) - a presentation that she admits "must be grasped intuitively" (31) and
that she does not consistently develop in subsequent chapters. She provides
a bibliography of Dick's writings but not of Dick criticism. Douglas
Mackey's Philip K Dick (1988) is a competendy written book in the Twayne
United States Authors series intended primarily for readers relatively
unfamiliar with Dick. Similar in length to Mackey's study, Eric Carl Link's
Understanding Philip K Dick , part of a planned Understanding Contemporary
American Literature series, might be of more interest to Dick researchers.
Like in most of these studies, Link begins by identifying central themes in
Dick but then discusses Dick's work in the context of SF as a genre and of
postmodernism. He identifies Dick's special contribution as "bringing
metaphysical and epistemological dilemmas into the street" (30), something
that Link treats quite well in the limited space allotted to this study, which
briefly covers Dick's career and major themes and concludes by analyzing
six novels - Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip , Now Wait , Three
Stigmata, Flow My Tears, and VALIS? He also provides a useful bibliography
of books and articles on Dick (the most up-to-date so far), including brief
summaries of them. Lejia Kukukalic's Philip K Dick : Canonical Writer of the
Digital Age (2009) presents a serious discussion of Dick's work in general

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and of five novels in particular - Martian Time-Slip , Androids , A Ma%e of
Death , A Scanner Darkly , and VALIS - from a philosophical perspective and
in the context of the digital technology culture. It deserves the attention of
serious Dick scholars. Its bibliography is wide-ranging, if not extensive, and
its condensed biography of Dick in chapter 2 is tactful and informative.
Turning to individual articles on Dick, those providing political-
poststructuralist readings are in toto the most common. Peter Fitting's
important 1984 article on Dick, "Reality as Ideological Construct: A
Reading of Five Novels by Philip K. Dick," discusses "the reality problem"
(220) central to Eye in the Sky , Time out of Joint , A Scanner Darkly^ Three
Stigmata, , and VALIS (and to many readers central to all Dick's SF) as a
manifestation of the political ideologies that control the fictional worlds of
these novels. The majority of articles in Samuel Umland's 1995 collection of
Dick criticism, Philip K Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations is
political/poststructuralist. Carl Freedman's influential 1984 essay "Toward a
Theory of Paranoia" offers a Marxist-Lacanian reading of Dick. Freedman
is one of the earliest critics to comment on Dick's blurring of the
boundaries between humans and objects as a comment on commodity
fetishism and the capitalist ideology that represents "human subjects caught
in the web of commodities and conspiracies" (116), which Freedman sees at
the core of Dick's SF. Martin Abrash, in "Man Everywhere in Chains: Dick,
Rousseau, and The Penultimate Truth f analyzes Dick's novel as an expression
of Rousseau's political philosophy. For Abrash, the metaphor of the
underground and propagandized inhabitants in the novel "makes The
Penultimate Truth the weightiest social and political statement among Dick's
novels" (39). Neil Easterbrook's "Dianoia/Pranoia: Dick's Double
'Imposter'" reads Dick's story "Imposter" as a study in the subversion of
the orthodoxy of self-identity and a postmodernist narrative that "explodes
the modem myth of self-identity" and asks us to "rethink all the old
categories and conventions, both of ontology and of ethics" (36).
Christopher Palmer's "Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family," a book
chapter, discusses how a number of Dick's stories express the author's
sense of the precariousness of "typical American life" (70) as they portray
the efforts of beleaguered family members to preserve their humanistic
values in the face of a threatening outside world. Palmer concludes that in
his stories, unlike in his novels, Dick fails to reconcile his metaphysical
openness with either ethical or political closure. Jake Jakaitis's "Two Cases
of Conscience: Loyalty and Race in The Crack in Space and Counter-Clock
World ' argues that Dick fails to resolve contradictions in his personal and

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political attitudes towards race and social justice in these as well as in two
other earlier novels - Solar Lottery and Eye in the Sky . Jakaitis's main purpose
is to correct what he views as the critical neglect of the two late- 1960s
novels, Crack and Counter-Clock World and to suggest what he thinks may be
the "internal guilt over racial injustice" (186) expressed in these novels. And
as part of the argument between political and metaphysical reading of Dick
that have surfaced over the past two decades, Jakaitis describes the spiritual
elements that enter into the four novels he reviews as symbolic gestures of
"containment" (192) that Dick uses in his fiction to displace his racial and
political anxieties. Darko Suvin is perhaps the most prominent critic to treat
Dick's spiritual speculations as diversions from his political themes, and in
"Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating within the Later P. K. Dick" (2002),
Suvin treats Dick's theological themes, especially in R adio Free A Ibimuth and
the VALIS trilogy, as conceptual noise that must be filtered out in order to
arrive at what Suvin considers Dick's important theme: not the search for
metaphysical salvation, but for "worldly salvation" (394). Finally, Sándor
Klapcsik's "Politics, Multiplicity, and the Mythical Time in the Oeuvre of
Philip K. Dick" (2004), while centered on the treatment of time in Time Out
of Joint , The Man Who Japed, ' Three Stigmata, , the VALIS trilogy, and Radio Free
A Ibimuth , ultimately connects Dick's view of time with a Dickian
postmodem reading of history by which the linear historical sense of the
realistic novel is replaced by the alternate histories or realities of Dick's
novels. Finally, in "Dick on the Human: From Wubs to Bounty Hunters to
Bishops," Ryan Gillis examines a key ethical concern central to Dick's - the
central role of empathy in defining what is human - in the story "Beyond
Lies the Wub" and two novels, Do Androids and The Transmigration of Timothy
Archer :

Both Dick's life and his writing provide material for psychological
readings of his work. His childhood traumas, his agoraphobia, his drug use,
his unstable marital relationships, his interest in existential psychologists
such as Rollo May and Ludwig Binswanger, and the extensive depiction of
altered and abnormal mental states in his fiction are a matter of record.
Lawrence Sutin's and Greg Rickman's biographies of Dick and Dick's own
comments on his psychological history are clear sources for such studies.
Rickman is particularly interested in Dick's personal and psychological
history. In "The Nature of Dick's Fantasies," a review of Lawrence Sutin's
edition of Dicks Exegesis and of Paul Williams's edited letters of Dick,
Rickman criticizes what he considers the neglect of "the psychological
context" of Dick's visionary ideas (277). In this review and elsewhere, he

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diagnoses Dick as a victim of multiple personality disorder caused by
parental child abuse. In "What Is This Sickness: Schizophrenia and We Can
BuildYoď (in or after 1992), Rickman reads Louis's destructive attraction to
Pris as a twin version of the human-android relationship between Deckard
and Pris in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and as a symbolic reenactment
of Dick's own passive terror in the face of early childhood abuse.
Other critics have explored this terrain, though not always as
focused on Dick's own personal history as Rickman. In "The Swiss
Connection; Psychological Systems in the Novels of Philip K. Dick,"
Anthony Wölk traces the influence of several Swiss existential psychologists
in various Dick novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Time Out
of Joint , We Can Build You9 Clans of the Alphane Moons , and Martian Time-Slip .
Wölk shows how Dick draws on the work of Binswanger, J. S. Kasamin,
John J. Benjamin, Albert Shedd, Wilder Penfield, and Eugene Minkowski,
all of whom "present an integrated view of the individual and the world"
(119). Wölk concludes Dick relies on the ideas of these psychologists to
legitimize the values of the seemingly alienated and schizophrenic characters
in the novels he discusses. In "Unrequited Love in We Can Build You?
Umland examines Louis Rosen's obsession with Pris in the novel as a
psychological fixation with cultural roots in the courtly model of the
Uebestod tradition of romantic love as death, with personal roots in Dic
repeated use of the destructive female figure in both his realistic and
novels. In "Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip
Dick," Anthony Ems argues that "the inherent connections between med
technologies and altered states of consciousness" (69) is a theme that ru
through all of Dick's SF and cites a wide range of Dick's SF to link med
technology with Dick's conception of the collective unconscious and wit
Dick's Gnostic speculations. Though some of the linkages he posits may
open to question, Ems develops a complex thesis worthy of attentio
Damien Broderick's "Philip K. Dick and Transrealism: Living What You
Write" in the 1999 New York Review of Science Fiction is a skillfully writt
attempt to weave together an overview that encompasses Dick's life a
writing from a psychological perspective. Borrowing the ter
"transrealism" from Rudy Rucker, Broderick treats Dick's SF as
expression of the transreal world that Dick experienced. He rejects (alo
with most of us) the truth of Dick's theological universe, and the focus
his review is to try to explain his art on the basis of his psychologica
peculiarities.

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 Finally, I Think I Am: Philip K Dick (2009) by Lawrence Rickels is a
study - or in Rickels' words "a thought experiment" - that intersperses
commentary on Dick's works with lengthy excursions into existential
psychology. But its prose is turgid and obscure, and its at-times interesting
insights lie buried in irritating wordplay and digressions. Moreover, the
sequencing of chapters has no discernable plan of organÍ2ation. Rickels
treats Dick more as a case study whose sanity he questions than as a literary
artist, but the book reveals far more about the quirks of Rickels's mind than
of Dick's. Those seeking useful analyses of Dick's work in this lengthy study
may well be disappointed.
Ever since Ursula LeGuin's much-quoted comment that in Dick,
Americans had "a homegrown Borges" in our midst, critics have
approached Dick from a formalistic perspective to consider the elusive,
paradoxical nature of his art. Formalistic inquiries have focused particularly
on The Man in the High Castle - a logical choice as the winner of the 1962
Hugo Award and as a novel in which aesthetic craftsmanship is a central
theme. Three articles in the 1988 special SFS Philip K. Dick issue by John
Huntington, George Slusser, and John Rieder deal to one extent or another
with Man in the High Castle. Huntington's "Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and
Insincerity" puts Dick very much in the tradition of Kafka and Borges
when he suggests that "it is precisely this freedom from controlling rational
structures . . . that gives Dick's writings their value" (176). Huntington
discusses the problematics of distinguishing the authentic from the fake in
VAUS, Androids , Palmer TLldritch, Ubik, and Man in the High Castle. Slusser's
"History, Historicity, Story" discusses Man in the High Castle at considerable
length in order to place Dick in a distinctly American tradition that loosens
his narrative art from what Slusser calls a European "monumental" sense of
history as an encompassing and restrictive order. For Slusser, Dick's fictive
world is not one of great men or of monumental events; but rather one that
expresses the Emersonian freedom of mind, one in which, "cleansed of
history, nature is rendered an open realm through which the storyteller . . .
can glide" (219). Rieder's piece on Man in the High Castle explores the ironies
that undercut efforts to bring ethical, political, or metaphysical closure to
the meaning of the story. For Rieder (as for Huntington), the novel resists
efforts to impose any final interpretative frame on it. Rieder's take on the
novel is ultimately apolitical, as he concludes that "the novel explicidy
undermines any determinate reference of its alternative histories to a
political agenda" (231). For him, as for Slusser, story - narrative art -
supersedes history.

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 Several other formalist/aesthetic approaches to Dick merit specific
mention. In a short 1988 piece, "How 'Dickian' is the New French Science
Fiction?" Emmanuel Jouanne asserts that since the 1978 publication of
VAUS (1978) Dick's image and influence have diffused into the culture of
French science fiction so that the post- 1978 generation of French SF
writers are "Dickian by inadvertence" (236), not by showing any specific
resemblance to Dick, but by showing the same tendency to subvert and
challenge the conventions of SF as Dick did in his time. In a 1988 short
review of recent criticism, "Phillip K. Dick is Dead," Peter Fitting argues
for an aesthetic approach to Dick by urging readers to focus on Dick's
writings and not to commit the intentional fallacy of judging Dick's writing
by his stated intentions. Fitting evaluates several then-current critics on the
basis of how they do or do not follow this approach. Christopher Palmer's
"Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's Valis" a
response to Fitting's "Philip K. Dick is Dead," argues that VAUS is an
aesthetic failure by undercutting the fictive nature of the novel and
presenting it as a reflection of Dick's personal belief. So though Palmer
does address Dick's theological concerns, he does so from a formalistic
perspective. Umberto Rossi's "The Game of the Rat: A. E Van Vogt's 800
Word Rule and P. K. Dick's The Game-Players of Titan" (2004), an incisive
study of Game Players , describes Dick himself as a metafictive authorial
"game player" who shunts the fictive worlds of his novels as he proceeds.
Rossi's approach has wide application to any number of other Dick novels.
In "Two Forms of Metafantasy," George Aichele examines Dick's Man in
the High Castle as an example of the postmodem aesthetic, citing especially
the novel's resistance to interpretative closure and its "metafantastic self-
referentiality" (66).
There has been increasing attention in Dick criticism over the past
decade or two to philosophical/theological themes in his SF novels. The
1978-82 publication of the VAUS trilogy and emerging information that
Dick worked continuously after his 1973 "pink light" epiphany on what
became the Tractatus Cryptical Scriptum in the appendix of VAUS help
explain this trend. More recent criticism has turned to Gnostic ideas -
primarily in VAUS but in various other works of Dick's SF as well.
Various readers have explored the connections between the central theme
in Dick's fiction of false seeming-realities and the Gnostic concept of the
phenomenal world as an illusion that conceals a transcendent reality.
Several studies lay the groundwork for examinations of Gnosticism
in Dick's novels. Two of them, "Salvation-Knowledge: Ironic Gnosticism in

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Valis and "The Flight from Lucifer"' by Robert Galbraith (1982) and
"Science Fiction and Gnosticism" (1984) by Douglas Mackey (though very
briefly), are among the earliest to mention Dick's Gnosticism. Jean-Noel
Dumont, in "Between Faith and Melancholy: Irony and the Gnostic
Meaning of Dick's Divine Trilogy" (1988), briefly discusses Gnostic
elements in the VALIS trilogy - the metaphor of the iron prison, the
platonie theme of forgetfulness, and the metaphor of the world as a cryptic
sign. But Dumont sees this Gnostic faith as modified and compromised by
Dickian irony by Dick's melancholy and by what he calls "the icy chamber
of despair" (242). In "Mystical Healing: Reading Philip K. Dick's VAUS
and The Divine Invasion as Metaphyschoanalytic Novels" (1991), Roger J.
Stilling extends Patricia Warrick's and Robert Galbreath's analysis of
Gnostic elements in Dick to a still more extensive analysis of the two
novels. Schilling sees a "thematic fusion of metaphysics and psychoanalysis"
in these novels, which he compares to their treatment in Freud's writings.
Of special interest from a literary perspective is Stilling's consideration of
Dick's Gnosticism "not only as an effective model of mind but also as a
telling metaphor for reading" (99). In "To Flee from Dionysus:
Enthousiasmos from 'Upon the Dull Earth' to VAUS " (1995), Samuel
Umland traces what he calls Dick's "theological preoccupations" in his
story "Upon the Dull Earth" (83) and posits a continuity of thought
between this Poe-esque supernatural story, Dick's Exegesis , and his VAUS
trilogy. Umland's hope that his study "will prompt a literary criticism of
Dick's entire corpus that more fully accounts for his philosophical and
religious obsessions" points towards subsequent criticism (94).
Such criticism considers Dick as a theistic thinker and philosopher
as well as an SF writer. John Garvey's short treatment of this aspect in
Commonweal, "A Real Gnostic Gospel: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick"
(2007), further evidences the diffusion of Disk's ideas into a broader
cultural perspective. Lawrence Sutin's The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick :
Selected Uterary and Philosophical Writings (1995) includes a number of Dick's
useful critical and philosophical documents (though not his Exegesis) that
give the reader greater access to Dick's religious thought and how his SF
reflects it. Scott Walter explores Dick's Gnostic ideas in "The Final Trilogy
of Philip K. Dick" (1997) through the lens of what he calls a
"bibliophenomenologica" based on Poulet's The Phenomenology of Reading. He
treats the Gnostic creation myth as a fragmented higher reality that binds all
three of the VAUS novels but that operates by different narrative
strategies. Noah Mass, in "Philip K. Dick's Conversion Narrative,"

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discusses Dick as the author of Radio Free A Ibimuth and as an example of "a
countercultural figure . . . combining a newfound spirituality with the
rhetoric of revolution" (197). Lorenzo Di Tommaso deals with Dick's
Gnostic ideas in some of his earlier novels in "Gnosticism and Dualism in
the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick," and he traces the theme of Gnostic
salvation quest as presented through the five main characters in Man in the
High Castle in "Redemption in Philip K. Dick's Man in the High CastU '
(1999). I also have written two pieces dealing with Dick and Gnosticism.
"Metafiction and the Gnostic Quest in The Man in the High Castlť (2002)
expands on Di Tommaso's point about Gnosticism in the novel but also
argues that Gnostic ideas permeates Dick's SF novels from their inception
so that, for example, the Nazi control of the United States in Man in the High
Castle is one manifestation of the dark demiurge or false god that inserts its
influence throughout Dick's work. My second article, "Time and Gnosis in
the Writing of Philip K. Dick" ÇHJEAS 2008), makes the same point within
the context of Dick's treatment of time travel in his novels. It argues that
Gnosticism is not tangential, but central to Dick's inspiration as an
imaginative SF writer. Other readers of Dick, such as Darko Suvin and
Umberto Rossi, reject this position. As Rossi says in "Fourfold Symmetry:
The Interplay of Fictional Levels in Five More or Less Prestigious Novels
by Philip K. Dick," "this theological reformulation of the problem of
history and historicity cannot be seen ... as a repudiation of the human
world. Dick is not a Gnostic or Gnostic oriented writer" (414).
These different approaches to Dick and Rossi's essay are perhaps a
good place to bring this review of Dick criticism to a close, if not to closure.
Though some ten years old now, Rossi's piece touches on several areas of
Dick that continue to command critical attention. These include Rossi's
recognition of simulation and artifice as key themes in Dick, his criticism of
Slusser's argument that Dick's concept of "historicity' (notably as articulated
in Man in the High Castle) rejects a European "monumental" concept of
history, and his implicit disagreement with postmodem approaches to Dick
that ignore the moral dimension of his writing. Rossi's admission that no
paradigm, including his structuralist one, can be applied uniformly or
indiscriminately to Dick's work is an appropriate recognition of its richness
and complexity.

Mercy College, New York

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 Notes
1 The inclusion of Now Wait and Flow My Tears suggests the broadening of critical
attention to other previously neglected Dick novels.
2 Lem is far less complimentary to Dick about his personal and professional ethics
in his comments on a later dispute between himself and Dick. In Selected Letters.
3 It has, however, come under attack. Mettitt Abrash's harsh criticism of
Robinson's book and exchanges that followed among Robinson, Abrash, and George
Slusser appear in Science Fiction Studies 37, 41, and 42.

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Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Writers of the 21st
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