Fake World: Everything You Think Is a Lie

Reviewing Philip K. Dick’s Fever Dream, ‘The Penultimate Truth’

George Orwell imagined that novels could be manufactured without writing. “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery,” he wrote in his 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” A few years later he gave the idea some shape in 1984, where “versificators” and “novel-writing machines” churn out mindless material for mass…