Description

Once the sole 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 analyses 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. Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Part I 1. Philip K. Dick and the Postmodern 2. Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism 3. Static and Kinetic in Dick’s Political Unconscious Part II 4. Mired in the Sex War: Dick’s Realist Novels of the Fifties 5. The Short Stories: Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family 6. The Man in the High Castle: The Reasonableness and Madness of History 7. Eating and Being Eaten: Dangerous Deities and Depleted Consumers 8. Critique and Fantasy in Martian Time-Slip and Clans of the Alphane Moon 9. Critical Reason and Romantic Idealism in Martian Time-Slip 10. A Scanner Darkly: Postmodern Society and the End of Difference 11. Gestures, Anecdotes, Visions: Formal Recourses of Humanism 12. Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Valis Works Cited Index Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Part I 1. Philip K. Dick and the Postmodern 2. Complications of Humanism and Postmodernism 3. Static and Kinetic in Dick’s Political Unconscious Part II 4. Mired in the Sex War: Dick’s Realist Novels of the Fifties 5. The Short Stories: Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family 6. The Man in the High Castle: The Reasonableness and Madness of History 7. Eating and Being Eaten: Dangerous Deities and Depleted Consumers 8. Critique and Fantasy in Martian Time-Slip and Clans of the Alphane Moon 9. Critical Reason and Romantic Idealism in Martian Time-Slip 10. A Scanner Darkly: Postmodern Society and the End of Difference 11. Gestures, Anecdotes, Visions: Formal Recourses of Humanism 12. Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Valis Works Cited Index