E-Book Overview
Once solely the possession of fans and buffs, the SF author Philip K Dick is now finding a much wider audience, as the success of the films Blade Runner and Minority Report shows. The kind of world he predicted in his funny and frightening novels and stories is coming closer to most of us: shifting realities, unstable relations, uncertain moralities. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick’s work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyzes the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick’s fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick’s work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick’s ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging.
E-Book Content
PHILIP K. DICK: EXHILARATION AND TERROR OF THE POSTMODERN
Christopher Palmer
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
PHILIP K. DICK EXHILARATION AND TERROR OF THE POSTMODERN
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies General Editor DAVID SEED Series Advisers: I.F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford 1. Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future 2. David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors 3. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference 4. Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy 5. Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings 6. Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy 7. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come 8. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Foreword by George Hay, Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors 9. Qingyn Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias 10. John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews 11. Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard 12. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1870–1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come 13. Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction 14. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 15. Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction 16. Gwyneth Jones Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality 17. Patrick Parrinder (ed.) Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia 18. Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism Science Fiction 19. Chris Ferns Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature 20. E.J. Smyth (ed.) Jules Verne: New Directions 21. Andy Sawyer and David Seed (eds) Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations 22. Inez van der Spek Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine in the Light of James Tiptree’s ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ 23. S.T. Joshi Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction 24. Mike Ashley The Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 25. Warren G. Rochelle Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin
PHILIP K. DICK EXHILARATION AND TERROR OF THE POSTMODERN
CHRISTOPHER PALMER
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2003 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU © 2003 Christopher Palmer The right of Christopher Palmer to be ident