WebliminalBlog

Philip K. Dick has left us with several good reads. I had read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and The Man in the High Castle last year. The former deals with the future, empathy, and how humans handle the situation of very human-like androids and the destruction of wildness. The other puts us in the mind of a person living in San Francisco who has stumbled into an alternate history- with the Axis powers  having won the second world war of the twentieth century.

His works, though seem always to be form the mind of the narrator. This seems to be most evident in A Scanner Darkly where the narrator’s mind splits and is almost destroyed. The book has a poignant Author’s Note at it’s end. The note is more significant after reading the book, but it is worth recording here. It serves as a memorial and a warning.

” This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but hey were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed, destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow.

…

If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to go on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all.

…

the “enemy was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again , in some other way, and let them be happy.”

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DoD Confirmation ListLatest Coalition Fatality: Dec 20, 2007

Source: Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count