In recent decades, intrusive or authoritarian government policies have invariably been described as ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’. But these days, you will increasingly find more allusions to another past master of dystopian fiction: Philip K Dick.
A prime example of this arrived last week, following reports that the British state is now running a ‘murder prediction’ programme. Apparently, the authorities believe they can use the personal data of known offenders to ‘predict’ who is at risk of committing future murders. ‘Government creating Minority Report-style “murder-prediction tool” that uses personal data to identify most likely killers’, ran a Daily Mail headline. This was a reference to the 2002 film based on Dick’s 1956 novella, The Minority Report, in which a ‘precrime’ police unit, with the aid of psychic individuals called ‘pre-cogs’, hunts down those who – it is foreseen – will commit a crime.
The idea of ‘precrime’ is indeed the stuff of science-fiction nightmares, but Dick’s hellish forebodings in this area and others have been coming to fruition for some time. The idea that the police could apprehend individuals in anticipation of what they might do has been steadily gaining ground, especially with the rolling out of face- and pupil-recognition technology and hi-tech CCTV systems that detect, isolate and track individuals of concern.
Indeed, the film, Minority Report, appeared at a time when ‘precrime’ was already becoming a reality. A few months after its release in July 2002, the then UK home secretary, David Blunkett, announced plans to lock up mentally ill people who it was thought could commit future offences. By 2013, according to the FBI, ‘predictive policing’, whereby police forces use data based on past crimes to determine police patrols, was already being used widely across the US.
The revival of interest in Philip K Dick in the new millennium, with a plethora of films and television series based on his stories – A Scanner Darkly (2006), an updated Total Recall (2012), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and The Man in the High Castle (2015-19) – show how his fears and concerns have become increasingly resonant in the 21st century.
Alongside the excess power exercised by governments, corporations and technocrats, a recurring theme in his oeuvre was the rise of artificial intelligence – a pre-eminent source of anxiety among many today. Dick was especially worried about the physical and existential threat AI might pose to mankind. It was a concern raised in his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became, most famously, the 1982 film, Blade Runner.
In Dick’s tale, humanoid robots have become more intelligent, cunning and devious than the humans who had made them. ‘The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master’, reflects the novel’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job it is to pursue and ‘retire’ the renegade androids. That was merely the most immediate threat posed by the ‘andys’. The other was far more disturbing.
They had become so advanced that it was no longer clear who was a human and who was not. Their very existence – their lives and their deaths – called into question man’s uniqueness and the sacrosanctity of human life. ‘I’ve never killed a human being in my life’, protests Rick to his wife. ‘Just those poor andys’, she replied, sourly. As the story progresses, readers and viewers come to ask themselves if Rick is himself an android, or wonder if it’s possible for him to fall in love with one. In the end, these questions cease to matter, as Dick thoroughly erases the boundary between human and non-human.
He was preoccupied throughout his fiction by the porousness of the line separating the real and the imaginary, forever wondering if it might soon disintegrate entirely. He played with the notion most entertainingly in Time Out of Joint (1959), a novel in which the principal character believes he lives in an idyllic, cosy part of small-town America. It soon emerges that he is in fact living in a synthetic village in a war-torn 1997, and his character and all of his memories have been fabricated.
It’s an idea Dick explores again in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), conjuring up a whole world that faces being cast into a state of permanent, drug-induced illusion. Elsewhere, the 1966 short story, ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’, which inspired the first Total Recall movie in 1990, depicts an individual’s struggle to distinguish between what is real and what is fantasy.
By the 1990s, unmistakably Dickian themes were gaining traction across popular culture. The conceit of the 1998 film, The Truman Show, had more than a passing resemblance to Time Out of Joint, while the The Matrix, released in 1999, elaborated on the premise that the world as we experience it is an illusion concealing an ultimate reality.
The idea that there exists a ‘real’, hidden world behind mere earthly appearances is, of course, nothing new. It goes back at least to Plato and is the foundation of most religions. But the suspicion that ‘all is not as it seems’ has been heightened during our lifetimes with the dawn of cyberspace and hyperreality. The popularisation of theories from quantum physics, combined with the greater importance allotted to virtual reality, has made many people more receptive to the idea that we are living in a parallel universe, a simulation, or even – as Elon Musk once suggested – a computer game.
The fear of state overreach is nothing new, either, and the recent growing obsession among Western governments with ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensive’ words reminds us that Orwell’s forebodings on thoughtcrime remain as urgent as any on ‘precrime’. But do not underestimate Dick’s foresight. His upended visions and deranged fictions may have struck his readers in the 1950s and 1960s as fantastical and bizarre, but not anymore.
We live in a world in which it has become normal for scientific journals to refer to children being ‘born in the wrong body’, a world in which an American university in 2023 defined a lesbian as ‘a non-man attracted to non-men’. The term ‘non-man’ has an unmistakeable Dickian ring to it, while the idea that people might surgically change their body so as to align it with their ethereal, mystical ‘inner essence’ is also the very stuff of his stories – tales that abound with gnostics and gurus providing guidance for paranoid and rudderless people eager to divine the ‘hidden’ reality and true meaning to life.
As the boundary between the real and the artificial threatens to dissolve still further, be prepared to see more of Dick’s nightmare fictions become our truths. Whatever comes to pass as technology evolves, the ethical conundrums he posed will continue to remain as vital as ever. As Anderton, his protagonist in The Minority Report, explains ruefully to a new recruit: ‘You’ve probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback of precrime methodology. We’re taking in individuals who have broken no law.’
