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 consumption.

How do these machines work? Orwell only compares them to kaleidoscopes, leaving us to picture mechanical gizmos taking raw suggestions provided by bureaucrats (the “Planning Committee”), randomly shuffling and sorting nouns, verbs, and adjectives and producing texts later cleaned up by editors (the “Rewrite Squad”).

Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth.

Artificial Art

It’s an intriguing bit of foresight now that we live in the era of large language models. But Philip K. Dick pushed the idea further in his 1964 novel, The Penultimate Truth, where Joseph Adams—a long-straw survivor of the nuclear war between the Western democracies and the Soviet East, living above ground and jetting across a slowly rejuvenating landscape—is tasked with writing encouraging speeches for the short-straw survivors, who live below ground in vast, isolated fallout shelters.

Helping him craft these speeches? His “rhetorizor,” a computer that processes limited “semantic units,” such as “the substantive” (the topic) and a “limiting adjective” (to modify the topic). Those who use LLMs will recognize this as a prompt. When Adams feeds the rhetorizor the words squirrel and smart, the device begins churning out a banal passage along those lines. When he complains about the lousy output, his girlfriend points out the problem. “I only heard you type out two semantic units,” she says. Bad prompting: garbage in, garbage out.

The trouble is that Adams has been using the machine long enough that he feels dependent on it, even if he struggles to get it to work as he wants. “I don’t think honestly I could do it, in my own words, without this machine,” he thinks; “I’m hooked on it now.”

Somehow he manages, though. Adams—with a speech due the following day—hunkers down and lets his own synapses pull together the thoughts and words to express them. At first, he’s proud of his work. But when he goes to publish it, he’s shown up by a colleague and feels too ashamed of his speech to let it see the light of day. The real takes a backseat to the fake.

Everything in Dick’s post-WWIII world is fake.

The Big Lie

The basic situation? The war raged for two years, fought by robots (“leadies”) on the surface while humans took shelter beneath the earth, equipped with manufacturing equipment and quotas to produce more leadies, sending them up to the surface to continue the war effort. But thirteen years after the hostilities have ceased, most surviving humans are still below ground, believing the war continues, believing the surface is uninhabitable.

The lies required for the deception are manufactured by men like Joseph Adams with his rhetorizor. A small number of people on the surface realize they can keep the shelter-dwellers in place, producing robots who handle the labor they need on the surface, which they’ve carved up into vast private domains for themselves. The deception is maintained through the person of Talbot Yancy, the supposed war-time president, who is not a person at all.

Yancy is a fabricated, lifelike figurehead programmed with speeches from Adams and others—so-called “Yance-men”—daily piped into the shelters to provide live updates on the progress of the war and maintain morale. But as The Penultimate Truth begins, the model is breaking.

Breaching the Surface

Per his usual, Dick’s narrative provides the reader with very little context or orientation, down to the vocabulary used by its characters. The drama works because the reader is left navigating the world as the breakup unfolds, shuttling between multiple storylines. Adams, disillusioned with his work, provides one. Nicholas St. James, who begins in one of the shelters, provides another.

Forced by a medical emergency to leave his underground lair, St. James risks his life to surface and find an artificial organ for one of his friends. What he finds on the surface defies everything he’s come to believe. There were clues something was amiss. A fellow shelter-dweller has recently shown him evidence—scant but puzzling—that indicates something is off with Talbot Yancy. But he’s unprepared for what he discovers.

Adams and his fellow Yance-men work for Stanton Brose, an aging, decrepit man at the center of the conspiracy. Brose will do anything to maintain his control, which includes sabotaging the work of a nonpolitical rival, the developer Louis Runcible, who has been housing the shelter-dwellers who surface on land he controls. Brose’s entire edifice collapses if enough refugees make their way out.

Brose enlists Adams on a special project to shut Runcible down and seize his land, but Adams, conflicted, can’t go through with it. He’s not alone. A rising star among the Yance-men, David Lantano, has his eye on Brose as well.

Alongside them comes Webster Foote, who leads a detective agency with no particular allegiance to Brose or anyone else. While most of the characters are forced to operate amid the lies and deception, Foote—also in the dark—is uniquely positioned to separate fact from fiction in a world that is almost total fiction, engineered to keep Brose in power.

How long can the lie last?

Impish Delight

Written at the height of the Cold War and in a state of paranoia, The Penultimate Truth is not considered one of Dick’s best. Underdeveloped ideas, loose ends, plot holes, plausibility problems as big as Colorado—none of it surprises given the context. While Dick won a Hugo, one of sci-fi’s highest honors, in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, sci-fi paid peanuts, and he had to write like a madman to stay ahead of his bills.

Philip K. Dick. Photo by Arthur Knight.

Dick’s marriage was falling apart, along with his mental health, and he was downing amphetamines to manage the workload—arguably not the best strategy. Between 1963 and 1964, he wrote something like eleven novels, including The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, considered one of his best and included in the Library of America.

But, despite the novel’s reputation, amid our contemporary conversations about AI and deep fakes, I found an impish delight in reading Dick’s fever dream of our present. It is, after all, set in 2025 and provides a fun-house mirror of our current anxieties.

Under the circumstances, if anyone could have used a rhetorizor, it was probably Philip K. Dick. He turned to the I-Ching to help him plot The Man in the High Castle. What strikes me as important about the idea of machines writing novels, however, is that they’re unnecessary.

Fake Novels?

When Orwell imagined “writ[ing] books by machinery” almost two decades before Dick, he said “a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism,” citing the templated pablum churned out by “tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand . . . what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors.”

And this isn’t new at all. In 1883, the Westminster Review panned Arthur Kean’s The Bantoffs of Cherryton: A Story without a Villain or a Crime, regarding it as

an average novel; it is certainly better than some; only, like too many modern English novels, it seems as though one had read it all before. . . . The tricks of expression . . . are so familiar that the reader knows when to expect each one in its turn. . . . The book is not bad, but it is “banal.”

The reviewer then mentioned “praying machines” used in “some parts of the world,” which I take to mean prayer wheels that cycle prewritten prayers to save humans the trouble of saying their own, before adding, “one cannot help suspecting there must be novel-writing machines in England.”

We don’t need actual machines to produce unoriginal work, following templates and forms requiring little creativity or imagination to generate. We’re capable of doing that on our own. Whatever his faults, as the crazed imagination of The Penultimate Truth shows, Philip K. Dick did not have that problem.

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