The Virtual Realist

We can download all of Brahms, Shostakovich, Nat King Cole and the Beau Brummels onto a single microchip and pick up Barcelona weather reports on our cellphones during an Orioles game. But shrink-wrapping ourselves in digital cocoons threatens to leave big blank patches in our intimate knowledge of the world and its history. We can find water on another planet's moon, but we don't know where to begin shedding indulgences to save our own glaciers--and ourselves. DNA is supposed to help us recognize and embrace individual difference. But we insist on abasing ourselves with sweeping generalities about race, gender, sexuality and class.

In short: These may indeed be the days of miracle and wonder, but we're still just as fucked-up-and-full-of-it as we always were. Whether we're ready to make that leap of judgment or not, it's always been science fiction that figures it out before we do. The wide open spaces between technological possibility and human limitation have provided fertile ground for inspired imaginative speculation going back almost 200 years to Frankenstein. It feels safe to say that no one has moved through those spaces with as much loony abandon and frenzied inventiveness as Philip Kindred Dick.

Somehow, it figures that someone as deeply, profoundly fucked-up-and-full-of-it as Dick has become, at millennium's turn, the most influential and prophetic of late-twentieth-century science fiction writers. Even a peer such as Thomas Disch, who could write far better sentences in succession than Dick, has been moved to proclaim him "a science fiction writer's science fiction writer" and go on in the same piece to quote other, similarly gifted stylists of the genre such as John Brunner, Norman Spinrad ("the greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century") and Harlan Ellison (science fiction's "Pirandello, its Beckett and its Pinter"). Ursula K. Le Guin's anointment of Dick as "our own homegrown Borges" still adorns slick paperback editions of Dick's novels. Polish science fiction novelist Stanislaw Lem (Solaris), one of the few writers in the genre to be taken seriously by mainstream literary critics, considered Dick the only American science fiction writer who mattered, "a visionary among charlatans."

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