Whose Novels Are We Living In?
Is this Philip K. Dick’s World? What about Vonnegut, Percy, O’Connor, or Didion?
Sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick died in 1982 but lives on ways too weird to ignore. We’re all living in one or more of his stories, says Reason magazine editor
. He began flagging this strange reality at least two decades now, sharing headlines mentioning people and events that map to Dick’s bizarre universe or evoke its through-the-looking-glass qualities.In the worlds conjured by Dick, nothing is as it seems, nor adds up in any rational way. Reality is wobbly, unseen forces play havoc with the world, and people trapped inside can’t fully trust their own perceptions or identities. Have you read the news lately? And while we’re at it, can you believe the news lately?
In a world where our perceptions are manipulated by governments, corporations, media, not to mention algorithms and bots, what’s real? Can anyone say? Being bombarded by these “pseudo-realities,” as Dick said,
begins to produce inauthentic humans . . . spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.
How did he get my X feed?
We’re up to our eyeballs in fake everything, alternative facts, disinformation, conspiracy theories, scams, digital echo chambers, and more. And once we untether ourselves from what used to pass for the real—but was it ever?—it all gets pretty strange in a hurry.
“Saying we’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel is shorthand for just how fucking weird our world is, and how much weirder it continues to get on a daily basis,” says Gillespie. And as reality and unreality spin along in this negative feedback loop, it all gets more laughably absurd as it goes. “What writer could have created Hunter Biden, or Lauren Boebert, or Elon Musk?”
Toss in the ubiquitous surveillance of our every move in real life or online and this all starts to feel too familiar. Others have picked up on the point.
“This is not the dystopia we were promised,” says Johns Hopkins professor Henry Farrell. “We are not learning to love Big Brother. . . . Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming. . . .” No, says Farrell after reviewing the present state of bizarre affairs, “we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.”
There are reasons to argue that point, as Suzanne Smith does here, tossing C.S. Lewis into the discussion. But Dick, Orwell, Huxley, and Lewis aren’t the only possible prophets of the now anyway. Many mid-twentieth century writers tapped into fears, anxieties, and developments we were too busy, numb, or distracted to notice at the time. If we look back, we can see how they anticipated aspects of the sometimes zany and nightmarish world we inhabit today.
What other Vergils might guide us through the depths and up the mountain? Here are my opening suggestions, and I’d love to hear yours: Shirley Jackson, Kurt Vonnegut, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury.
Shirley Jackson
When I first read Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Sundial, I thought: Here’s an author who gets the self-serving nature of mass psychosis. When we all buy a delusion, we’re doing it for selfish reasons. There’s something in the narrative we want to be true, either for elevated hope or nefarious purposes. Our minds aren’t simply taken over by lies; we consent to one degree or another. We’re complicit in our own illusions.
This willing participation, even if it’s egged on by social forces, means we have agency to stop participating if we choose. Most of us won’t. That’s clear from her novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. When the mob starts tearing things down, we’ll join right in, even if we later feel ashamed. It’s also clear from her famous short story, “The Lottery.” Some of us will support the charade to the end—that is, right up until the we realize we’ve become the target.
Along with this focus on the group, Jackson takes us into the claustrophobic minds of individuals who lose touch with reality, their panic, fear, and isolation. As we watch cancel mobs on social media, or boomerang responses from the opposition, and discuss our deepening mental health crisis, Jackson was already there. Society is composed of individuals and manifests collective forces of its own. Jackson understood the interplay and how it all disintegrates before our eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve only read one Kurt Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, though I hope to read the rest. All of it. I found Slaughterhouse-Five that compelling.
We’re so accustomed to a world at war, we scarcely fathom the tremendous amount of human effort and agency required for an enterprise so monstrous. From mining the minerals for the bombs all the way to dropping them on civilians, billions of individual decisions are made that tend toward murder. So it goes. But why? Can we choose differently? Vonnegut forces us to at least ask. And if we remember Jackson’s insights, it’s worth adding: what’s self-serving about our answers?
It doesn’t stop there. I’m a techno-optimist but respect and appreciate the insights of critics. Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano, depicts a future in which automation completely replace human workers. Eventually, the irrelevant laborers revolt and destroy the machines—only to rebuild them for want of their convenience. “He saw a lot of things coming,” says Texas A&M professor Robin Murphy.
So did Walker Percy.
Walker Percy
The Moviegoer, which I read about a decade ago, dramatizes what Gillespie calls “the agony of abundance,” the counterintuitive struggle to make meaning for ourselves in a world of endless choice and material wealth. While our lives are richer and more comfortable than ever before in history by almost any measure, we battle increasing rates of mental illness, depression, and alienation. We crave reality; failing that, at least we have Netflix and TikTok.
The Last Gentleman picks up on the same themes. All our shopping, consuming, medicating, and self-optimizing are attempts at solving metaphysical problems with material means. It drives some of us crazy. The hero of Love in the Ruins, a psychiatrist, develops a gadget called the Ontological Lapsometer, that can measure spiritual dislocation in patients, though it can’t do anything to cure it. Instead, the spiritual malaise under which we live drives us to seek ever-more desperate and futile solutions, none more ludicrous than politics and religion—or, worse, politicized religion.
Love in the Ruins practically predicts today’s wide and wild political polarization, pinging and echoing off the current moment like cartoonish prophecy:
The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation. . . . A blue banner beside the crucifix shows Christ holding the American home, which has a picket fence, in his two hands.
Turning a page and going out your front door are sometimes the same thing. Same with scrolling social media, and Percy saw that one, too.
The Message in a Bottle, a collection of his essays, explores problems in language and communication. What passes for dialogue today on X or cable news is mostly just noise masquerading as meaning. Buzzwords and talking points allow other minds to do our thinking, which we dutifully transmit like wires made of flesh and synapses. Between all the virtue signaling, truth bombs, and bullshit, we’re not communicating; we’re becoming those fake humans passing along fake realities Dick warned about.
Amid all this social and self alienation, Percy never shuts the door on the possibility of redemption. But we sure make it hard. In that we’re much like Flannery O’Connor’s characters.
O’Connor, Didion, Butler, and More
O’Connor’s characters often live in polarized realities fueled by prejudice, pride, and stupidity. No one in an O’Connor story willingly considers their own faults and errors, everyone is both wrong and insufferably righteous about it. I’m tiring myself with mentioning social media, but, yeah, you get the picture. And of course O’Connor is famous for her depictions of the grotesque. Naturally, we can hand out mirrors instead, but ironically enough O’Connor makes the truth more palatable.
Then there’s the deceptively elegant Joan Didion. Someone so poised could never be so ruthless. Wrong. I can’t speak for her fiction, but her journalism both accurately captured the moment of its writing and presaged many facets of our present moment, especially our social disintegration. We tell ourselves stories to live, but increasingly—as Dick and Jackson and Percy warned—we’re telling ourselves self-serving stories that bear little relationship to reality and aren’t received by those we intend to tell anyway; instead, they are calculated to entrench interests and amplify division. No surprise that Didion also speaks to our mental health crisis.
I could keep going. There’s Octavia Butler who predicted Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. There’s Ray Bradbury’s concern with destroying information and mass surveillance. And there are so many others.
I want to hear your suggestions. Which authors from the past predicted our present? And, please, they don’t have to be so negative as these; I fell in rut as I was writing. Surely there are examples of writers who nailed what was positive about our current moment as well. We can at least hope, right?
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It's been many years since I read it (back when I taught "The Giver" to my fifth graders), but Lois Lowry's "Gathering Blue" has been coming to mind a lot lately. The trepidation Kira felt when taking care of her cot (house), wondering whether it would be taken over by a hostile neighbor; the shifting alliances of neighbors, and their authority to report each other to the state; the idea of "disappearing" people who don't toe the line; the repetitive recitation of the ruling class's version of the history of the country...all of these things have parallels in current America. Lowry's later book in the same series, "Son," has salient themes as well: the desire of the villagers for the shiny new distraction(s) to the exclusion of their own lives and families, and the blind adoration of the evil character (who reeks of Musk, no pun intended) are pretty stark reflections of what we're all experiencing now. Children's books are often dismissed as simplistic (and some are), but many have incredibly deep insights that most adults overlook.
It’s more contemporary, but rereading The Hunger Games collection feels eerie these days. The propaganda, the media manipulation, king-like president calling the shots and simultaneously empowering his supporters and treating them as expendable tools for power and control… while manipulating the people to fight within and amongst themselves with only the bare minimum for their survival in their “specialized” districts.