The Electric Ant

Well, it is finally January, and I still can't decide what it is I want to read. I've been reading The Stand, and I'm on pace for January with this epic read. Since I finished How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe I've bounced around trying to decide what I want to invest my time in next. I've read parts of Galactic Pot Healer, Transition, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, but nothing seems to hold my interest. And time is running short, the busy season at work is almost upon us, so I don't have a lot of time to invest; ergo I guess it's time to implement my "one short story a week" strategy.

I received The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick for Xmas, so I read "The Electric Ant."

Take out his spare ribs for $100.

Garson Poole is the protagonist; he just lost his hand in a hovercar accident. He wakes up in the hospital to find out that he can't be treated there, because he's not human at all: he's a robot. And hospitals are for people, not robots, so he moves on to a robot repair shop. Garson winds up being billed for his treatment at the hospital for the time up until they realized he was a robot; just a funny little detail I liked.

What happens when an android changes his programming, especially in regards to how he perceives his own reality? I won't go into detail in my review here; suffice it to say, I had been looking forward to reading this story for a long, long time, and it more than exceeded my expectations. PKD manages to push all of my favorite PKD buttons in a story just 10 pages long or so: robots who don't know they're robots; identity crisis; paranoia; altered reality; twist ending.

Highly recommended.

Check back at the Reader next week when I review another short story. I don't know which one yet, but I'm going to try to (a) read one per week; (b) never read stories in any two consecutive weeks by the same author; and (c) try not to repeat authors within six weeks of a story by the same author.

Now go read something for yourself today!
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UBIK and Inception

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
If you don't want the book UBIK or the movie Inception spoiled, please stop reading now.
But feel free to bookmark this page and read it later!


When I first read Philip K. Dick's UBIK, I thought, "someone should really make a movie out of this." When I saw Inception for the first time last week, I thought, "wow. Somebody did." That somebody being Christopher Nolan.

In the interest of full disclosure, the two are not the same. There are similar themes, though, and some really neat instances of congruent storytelling.

First up is worldbuilding. Both stories take place in realities very similar to our own. (My favorite kind of science fiction; not the sci fi of laser blasters and warp drive, but the kind of sci fi that takes place 20 minutes into the future.) People still go to work. Corporations still make billion-dollar deals. People fall in love. And they die. But both stories have one or two technologies which are no where near their infancies in the universe in which we actually live.

In UBIK, corporations employ people with special abilities: telepaths, precogs, people who have telekinetic powers. And when a person dies, if they have the money, they can have their body frozen in a special kind of mausoleum where they enjoy a "second life." They can still be communicated with, as long as the tissues of the brain remain somewhat intact. The cold helps preserve it longer.

In Inception, it is possible to access the dreams of another. This is done in the name of big business and usually done in order to steal ideas. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to implant an idea. There are rules, of course. Time and space take on different qualities. It is possible to dream within a dream. If you are hurt, you feel it. If you die within a dream, you wake up.

While these aspects of these stories may at first seem similar, the fundamental story behind each is not: UBIK is largely the story of a man, Genn Runciter, who is trying to figure out what the hell went wrong on his last corporate mission. A bomb goes off. Then some of his colleagues mysteriously die off, aging rapidly as if they had drank from the False Grail. His boss' likeness starts showing up on coinage. It is my favorite kind of story: the ontological mystery.

Inception is a story that is part caper, part tragedy; but I dare to say it is, in the end, the simpler story archetype of the two: the story of a man, Dominick Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), trying to overcome his own inner demons. Both stories play with one of my favorite themes: "what is real, and how do we know it is real?"

Both stories also had the one quality I love and hate about unique fiction: I love it so much, I can't wait for it to be over, even though I know when it is over, I'll be sad about it because I know I'll never be able to read it again for the first time.

The end of both stories is very satisfyingly left ambiguous, and I won't spoil that for you here. The bottom line, though, is that if you liked Inception, you will probably like UBIK. If you liked UBIK, you will probably like Inception. And if you don't like sci fi in general, thanks for reading this far. You are probably lost.

A Quote from UBIK: "It was a tranquil sight, these faithfuls, coming as they did so regularly to pay homage. They brought messages, news of what took place in the outside world; they cheered the gloomy half-lifers in these intervals of cerebral activity. And they paid Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. It was a profitable business, operating a moratorium."

A Quote from Inception: "Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."

Philip K. Dick

Besides being Arthur Clarke's birthday, December 16 is also notable as Philip K. Dick's birthday.

The prolific Dick authored hundreds of novels and short stories over his lifetime; readers of this blog know I consider him a new favorite of mine, having recently read VALIS, UBIK, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle.

There are many of his novels currently on my bedside table waiting to be read; I will likely start A Scanner Darkly or The Galactic Pot Healer next. I'd like to read the short story The Electric Ant if I can get my hands on it.

Dick died on March 2, 1982.

The movie Blade Runner was based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and released in June 1982; he has since enjoyed a fame in death that he only began to appreciate in life, with story credits for the movies Total Recall, Minority Report, Screamers, Paycheck and next year's The Adjustment Bureau to his credit.

Quote of the Week

Two good ones this week! I couldn't pick between them:

"What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

And:

"I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence - a series of words - which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky, you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works."

-Philip K. Dick, VALIS

The Empire never ended

I finished VALIS on Wednesday: this book is a masterwork of religion, history and philosophy. I'm not sure I can completely understand it, short of a PhD in those disciplines. Philip K. Dick was either completely brilliant, or thoroughly mad. Possibly both.

I don't think this is for PKD beginners, but once you've read even just a few of his books, it is nothing to be afraid of. (I used to think his novels were impenetrable. They're not. It's just a matter of getting used to his style.) Also, I'm not particularly religious, but PKD's take on how all religions are unified was a fascinating journey to watch unfold.

Interestingly, while the book was featured at least a couple times on the tv show Lost, I think it bears at least a passing resemblance to some of the themes in that other great mid-00's sci fi tv show, Battlestar Galactica; especially Chapter 7. In Chapter 7, the protagonist Horselover Fat discovers that early christians knew how to reconstitute themselves after death, and that it had been going on since before humans came to Earth. It's not a complete 1:1 ratio, but the themes of death, resurrection, and monotheism central to the cylon characters is all there, and it may enhance my understanding of that show as a result.

Also, I'm basically where I want to be on The Stand. After being behind for most of November, it seems like I could be finished with what I want to read in December by the end of the weekend.
Good stuff. Now to finish The Wordy Shipmates...

The Masterpiece Years

Read this fascinating article about Anne R. Dick's new memoir over at the New York Times about Philip K. Dick and the years she was married to him - including the era in which he wrote The Man in the High Castle.

I finished The Man in the High Castle back in September, and I'm still wondering whether I read the book, or whether I'm merely a character in a book, reading that book, in an alternate universe, being read by someone else. Seriously.

You should probably check that one out too.

Currently Reading

Currently Reading: VALIS by Philip K. Dick. I read the first chapter tonight. It really got my attention.

I've read a lot of Dick this year. Besides VALIS, I have read The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik. He is officially one of my favorite writers of science fiction, maybe of any genre of fiction.