Life in Sci-fi

There is a no more troubling concept than the future. It is the rapid turning of time that threatens to erase yesterday’s glory to nothing but a memory. Yet, for the late sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, the laws of time do not seem to apply to him. His stories have been the inspiration for blockbuster flicks such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly, thus making yesterday’s failure into tomorrow’s glory. Oddly enough, this bending of time and space was marked by the fact that his mainstream popularity only peaked after his death.

So, after years of keeping my levels of literary geekiness at the bare minimum of the genetically altered misfits called the X-Men, I decided to venture off into the PhilDickian universe en route his novel Counter-Clock World, in which time is going in reverse. As a result, family reunions have become popular as the dead are starting to rise and de-age until they return to the host womb. Yes, “Eewww” is the word that comes to mind.

 Despite the lack of Spandex, I still struggled to breathe in this sci-fi space of cheesiness with its technically imagined jargon that often zipped past my head. I eventually bailed out of the flight midway and started looking for other literary adventures more firmly planted on the ground.

LIFE IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

I eventually landed back in reality and discovered Philip K. Dick’s life is asteroids of intriguing fun as compared to what he wrote. For starters, he was born with a twin sister Jane who died six weeks after their birth. This experience has been noted in his biographies as an influence on his themes of “What is real?” and human android relationships. Soon after, his parents were divorced. This events eventually snowballed into episodes of vertigo and psychological diagnoses shifting between schizophrenia and sanity. Later on, right before his death, this Hugo award winner experienced alien light beams from some extraterrestrial, godlike being. Despite these mental disturbances run amok, Dick was still able to get married four times, which proves that life is indeed stranger than fiction.

In such a counter-clock world, 12-year-old Dick comfortably fit into hiding in the corners of the sci-fi universe where he read Stirring Science Stories and he never turned back to Earth. When asked about his love for his genre, he has said, “I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.” He further added: “Okay, so I should revise my standards; I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if,’ it’s ‘My God, what if…’ in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.”

SCIENCE FICTION IS MORE NORMAL THAN LIFE

While there are people trying to grow Vulcan ears and speak in Yoda in awful colored Spandex, why does the average earth man take up a light saber from time to time? I speculate that the lure of sci-fi is the inner joy from realizing that future humans or those from other worlds will always remain the same and be basically predictable. All the technology is just a smoke screen masking glacial change. As cars zoom away to hyperspace and holograms float around skyscrapers, there will always be Human Being 1.0 and we never will upgrade to 2.0. As each generation passes, we will always commit the same mistakes, such as grand-scale wars, and gossip will always spread as fast as the latest disease. Yet, on a positive note, it is always good to remember that behind any technical advancement — say, Space Shuttle version 100 in year 3000 — is the fact that there will still be the same Human 1.0 behind the wheel who continues to chooses to love and inspire others to dream of the stars. With this thought in mind, the future looks bright indeed.

* * *

Philip K. Dick’s books are available at National Bookstore. Website: http://www.philipkdick.com.

* * *

Send your spaced out thoughts at http://readnow.i.ph.