Redemption through trash: addiction in the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick

Abstract

Philip K. Dick's science fiction has attracted a lot of critical attention. Most of Dick's themes have been explored in this criticism. These themes include the nature of being for humanity, the nature of reality, political and economic ideologies, authoritarianism, gnosticism, and the contrast between the "authentic" and the "fake". But in all of this critical work very little has been said about another major theme in Dick's fiction. This theme is that of addiction, both in the narrow sense of drug addiction, and in the wider sense of addiction as a description of an entropic and death-oriented process which is pervasive throughout western society and culture. One of Dick's aims in writing science fiction was to construct a fictional world and then explore through the tale the ontological conditions that might pertain in that world. The aim of this thesis is to show that Dick's fictional worlds mirror addictive processes in both their structure, and in the ontological conditions which inform them. In other words, the nature of being for a human in Dick's fictional worlds is to be in a state of active addiction. In order to explore the addictive processes present in Dick's science fiction I have appropriated a sociological perspective - specifically the model of an omni-addictive society developed by Anne Wilson Schaef - and used this as a tool for literary analysis. I have also drawn on various other complimentary theories from science to further illustrate my argument. My critical approach is based upon three major assumptions: 1. That the world is currently undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift. 2. That the world can be described using the analogy of the hologram. 3. That western society can be described in terms of the process of addiction. The first section of this thesis develops a critical methodology based on these three assumptions. It concludes with a review of the criticism of science fiction, placing this criticism in the context of a society undergoing a shift in paradigms. Sections two, three and four apply this critical methodology to six of Dick's science fiction novels. The last section of the thesis is a discussion of Dick in terms of the genre of science fiction as a "trash" genre. By "trash" genre, I mean a genre of fiction which stands outside of, or as a supplement to, the mainstream of literature. This discussion will show that science fiction, and specifically Dick's science fiction, has redemptive value for the world. This redemptive value is placed in the context of a society which is addictive in nature.