Philip K. Dick : The Author
61). It is my contention that the good of
Kant's "goodwill" is none other than Philip K.
Dick's ability to be empathetic.

Philip Kindred Dick took too many
hallucinogenic drugs in his lifetime, and they
undid him. There is a very funny, yet very
grave, scene in A Scanner Darkly, a very
realistic novel of drug use with a minimal
science fiction overlay, in which a group of
friends are unable to analyse how the gear shift
on a bicycle works, due to the damage that they
have inflicted on their brains by taking drugs.
Philip Dick's hallucination-filled consciousness
wound up being an obstacle to truth; he fell for
the major fallacy of the 60s, that hallucinogens
would be a gateway to truth, not a path into
darkness. Sometimes he recognised this as the
tragedy of his life, but would soon after revert
to a search for mystical revelation. He spent
his entire life looking for God.

Time Out of Joint is an early novel (1959),
ringing some interesting changes on a
traditional science fiction theme: everything

you think you know is false (likewise with his
short story I hope I Shall Arrive Soon - (date
unknown, Gray, p. 307-319)). Good novels and
bad each contain one or more set pieces where
reality spins out of control; people fall
through holes, everything changes, dead things
come back to life or the protagonist falls into
the underworld. Many of these episodes are
based on real drug experiences of Dick's; he
plants them in the midst of a narrative, like an
embedded and strange jewel, and then brings you
most of the way back to the narrative
afterwards. He almost always leaves some
details unexplained so that the episode
continues to stand out; it is never entirely
integrated. One of Philip Dick's most expert
mindgames occurs in Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? The mentally slow J.R. Isidore,
being held hostage by fugitive androids, finds a
spider in his house. All living things are
precious in the future portrayed in the novel
because there are so few animals left. The
androids, who feel no compassion, amuse
themselves by cutting off the spiders legs, to
see how many it requires to walk.
[PAGE 13]