Engaging in Context

Learning intention: To understand the context of our Origin text.

What is context?

If you could draw context and its interrelationship to literature, how you would you depict it? How would you draw the different aspects of context? Would you draw it as an visual metaphor or as a diagram?

In context "In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Philip K. Dick blends his lifelong interest in the nature of reality with influences from the political sphere.

Composer context

Early Life

Philip K. Dick and his twin sister, Jane, were born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 16, 1928. Jane died around six weeks later. Dick felt his twin's absence throughout his life, feeling as if her spirit accompanied him everywhere. He repeatedly wrote about characters who had an inexplicable twin or a phantom twin. Dick's family moved to San Francisco when he was quite young. His father, Joseph, worked for the Department of Agriculture and was transferred to Reno when Dick was five. His mother, Dorothy, refused to go, and the couple divorced. Both wanted custody of their son, but the court awarded it to Dick's mother. She moved with Philip to Washington, DC, for work and then moved back to California in 1938. From that point on, Dick grew up in California. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1947 and, after working briefly in radio, attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year. While at UC Berkeley, Dick read widely in philosophy. He was fond of Plato, and early in his adult life, he began to develop a view that would appear in his fiction in various ways: the idea that reality is illusory or can't be fully known.

Career

In 1952 Dick published his first short story, "Beyond Lies the Wub," which marked the beginning of an extremely productive career. He often wrote a story every two weeks. Dick published his first novel, Solar Lottery, in 1955, and followed it with a string of stories, collections, and other novels. He finished 36 novels and more than 100 short stories, along with five collections, between 1952 and his death in 1982. Dick published almost all his work in science fiction magazines. These magazines paid poorly, so the author had to write fast to make a living. As a result, some of his work was sloppy, and despite the number of works he published, Dick remained poor through much of his life. However, some of Dick's works were highly influential and earned the author great praise. His 1962 novel, The Man in the High Castle, won the Nebula Award (given by science fiction writers) in 1963. Other novels won the John W. Campbell Award in 1975 (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said), the British Science Fiction Award in 1978 (A Scanner Darkly), and major awards for science fiction in France and Germany. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia ranks Dick as one of the most important science fiction writers of the 20th century. The Philip K. Dick Award is a juried award given annually to the best original work of science fiction in paperback form. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was nominated for a Nebula Award and drew praise and attention. In 1998 the science fiction news magazine Locus organised a poll of the 100 greatest science fiction novels, and the book ranked 51st. However, given the high profile of some of Dick's other works and his productivity, this novel was not considered a milestone in Dick's career until director Ridley Scott used it as inspiration for his 1982 movie, Blade Runner.

Changing Realities

Many of Dick's works explore multilayered and changing realities. Characters often wrestle with questions of what is real, or deal with shifting realities without being given an explanation as to why reality changes as it does. Dick uses different approaches to address this theme. For example, in the short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (1966), human characters have artificial memories implanted. The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history novel in which Germany has won World War II. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) includes drugs that don't just change perceptions of reality: they change reality itself. In Valis (1981), the lead character receives visions from another entity that reveal the true nature of reality.

Factors That Shaped Dick's Life

Beyond his work, Philip K. Dick lived a complicated life. He married five times and had three children. Dick himself wrote and spoke about his unhealthy attraction toward a certain type of woman he called the "dark-haired girl." Two other factors shaped much of Dick's life: his drug use and his mental health. These influences intersected with one another, and all appear in his fiction. Dick used drugs extensively and indiscriminately for decades. There are reports of his using LSD, marijuana, mescaline, and PCP. He most often used methamphetamines to enhance his productivity. Some sources say he took as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week. His extensive drug use did not help his mental health issues, which were varied and longstanding. Dick blamed his mother for his sister's death; his mother kept a tombstone with Dick's name carved on it while he was growing up, which coloured his worldview. He suffered from eating disorders that he traced to his sister's early untimely death.

Illness and Death

Dick's mental health issues came to a head in 1974. In February of that year, Dick was at home after dental surgery. A woman came to his home to deliver pain medication, and Dick's reality ruptured. He had a series of visions that he claimed revealed the underlying truth of the universe to him. These visions, which can be understood either as part of a psychotic break or as divine inspiration, continued for months, distorting his relationship with reality. He saw figures from history (specifically Rome) and intuited what he saw as hidden truths. When the visions stopped, Dick tried to kill himself. He later recorded his vision of this experience in his 1981 novel Valis and in a journal of 8,000 pages. Dick died in poverty at age 53 on March 2, 1982, after suffering a series of strokes and not long after Valis was published.

Activity: Compose an obituary for Phillip K Dick.

Using the information in your notes as a guide, construct a 12 line obituary on his legacy as a writer and the impact of his personal life on his art.

Historical Context: World War 2

World War II Philip K. Dick had researched Nazi Germany for his 1962 alternate history novel, The Man in the High Castle. The Nazi Party (a shortened form of the name National Socialist German Workers' Party) came to power in Germany in 1933 under the leadership of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Hitler remained in control until his death in 1945. During Hitler's totalitarian regime, the Nazi Party murdered millions of "undesirables" who included Jews, gay people, and nomadic Roma or gypsies. Dick had read accounts of Nazis who served in the concentration camps where the party's targets were confined and killed en masse, and who complained that crying children were keeping them awake at night. Their lack of empathy struck Dick on a profound level: these men seemed no longer human.

The Cold War

Dick was 16 when American forces dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—on August 6 and 9, 1945. While the mass destruction caused by these bombs brought an end to World War II, it also opened the possibility of world war with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb four years later in 1949, making the nuclear arms race an integral part of the "Cold War." The nonviolent Cold War was a state of political hostility and threats waged between the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II. Its height was 1948–53, but tensions between the factions remained into the 1960s. Philip K. Dick published his first story in 1952, and his writing career paralleled the Cold War's nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many science fiction writers wrote works set during a nuclear war or in the aftermath of one. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of these, and readers can see it as part of a larger cultural anxiety over nuclear war. In the novel, nuclear war is the reason so many species in the novel are extinct and the world is so depopulated: World War Terminus killed many people and gave others the incentive to migrate to other planets.

The vietnam War

When Dick wrote this novel, the United States was fighting the Vietnam War (1954–75). North Vietnam's communist government and its allies fought South Vietnam's government, which was aligned with Western politics and backed by the United States and other countries. Coverage of the controversial war and its high number of casualties dominated the news and tarnished America's self-image as a wholesome, ethical nation. Dick claimed that American action in the Vietnam War left him wondering about the differences between good and evil, and the ability to distinguish between the two. In the novel, the character Rick Deckard embodies this concern. His job involves distinguishing who is human and who isn't and terminating those who aren't.

Robotics and Cybernetics

Robots and robotics—the technology of constructing and operating robots—have been a key element of science fiction for decades. Philip K. Dick was aware of this tradition, and his writing was partially a response to it. The tradition includes stories about love affairs between humans and robots or androids, such as Lester del Rey's well-known 1938 short story, "Helen O'Loy," in which a female robot falls in love with her creator. By the time Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published, many works had speculated on robot psychology, human–robot relations, and on whether robots could—or should—be considered human. Isaac Asimov, for example, had published nine short stories during the 1940s that were collected in one volume in 1950 as I, Robot. Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" helped shape other science fiction that featured robots.

The three laws are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.Do Androids Dream of Electric

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Dick drew on a wider array of influences in addressing the possibilities and implications of cybernetics, the science that compares human automatic control systems (such as the nervous system and brain) to those in machines.

Readers can see this in his 1972 lecture, The Android and The Human. In the lecture Dick discusses writings by thinkers such as Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch-Jewish philosopher who believed God existed within nature; and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), the American mathematician who invented the term cybernetics,a scientific field concerned with the regulatory systems and communications of machines and living things. He argues that as technology advances, the human and the machine will become more like one another. Machines will become more human, and humans more machine-like. This concept is at the heart of the conflict in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Page updated

Report abuse