Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

There could be room for more sex. E.g. Rick Deckard making love to Rachael and then dissolve to Isidore, trying same on his Rachael android, and fouling it all up, a la Peter Sellers. The possibilities here are enormous... to cite one reason, there is the exact duplication of sentences uttered by the two identical androids. Sentences to which Rick Deckard gives one kind of reply. Jack Isidore another. The Isidore romance could be a chilling travesty of the successful Rick Deckard makeout with the girl.

And this brings up the whole underlying subject: sexual relations between humans and androids. What is it like? What does it mean? Is it, for instance, like going to bed with a real woman? Or is it an awful, nighmarish, bad trip, where what is dead and inert seems alive and warm and capable of the most acute intimacy known to living creatures? Isn't this, this sexual union between Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen -- isn't it the summa of falsity and mechanical motions carried out minus any real feeling, as we understand the word? Feeling on each of their parts. Does in fact her mental -- and physical -- coldness numb the male, the human man, into an echo of it?

In the novel it is treated on page 165 [of the 1968 Doubleday first edition] in its most acute form, when, as Rachael and Rick prepare to go to bed, Rachael says to him, "Androids can't bear children... is that a loss? I really don't know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are... chitinous reflex machines who aren't really alive. I'm not really alive! You're not going to bed with a woman.

And then a bit later Rachael says,

"I understand -- they tell me -- it's convincing if you don't think too much about it. But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you're doing -- then you can't go on. For, ahem, physiological reasons."

Rick then bends and kisses her bare shoulder.

Now, this is about the extent of this subject as handled in the novel, but there are more possibilities, which might come out vividly in a film version. For example (to name the first that comes to my mind): Is this a way he can cheat vis-a-vis his wife Iran -- in other words, is it all right to sleep with an android? It doesn't count, etc. In any case, the key question comes up on page 168, where Rachael asks, "Would you ever go to bed with an android again?" His answer to this is gracious, very politic, and yet somehow evasive. "If it was a girl," Rick says. "If she resembled you." But Rachael has already made the point that she is not a person; she is a type, a subform of androids in general. His relationship, by having intercourse with her, has melded him to -- not an individual, human or android -- but to a whole type or model, of which, theoretically, there could be tens of thousands. To whom, then, has he really given his erotic libido to? An army of rachael rosens, a horde of them, all identical? This undermines the meaning of love -- at least sexual, erotic love -- because the basic parity is undermined, one man for one woman (or at least one at a time). But he has, in effect, made love to them all!

Here, I think, the crucial questions of What is reality? and What is illusion? come up strongly. The whole sexual scene with Rachael (and, if used, the one between Isidore and Pris) could be dreamlike, but not in the usual sense, not the wishful, daydreaming contemplations of infinite women, infinite prowess, and so forth. This could be -- not a vague dream -- but a horrifyingly mechanical episode of half dream, half reality, with Rachael melting superficially -- but by doing so, exposing a steel-and-solid-state electronic gear beneath. The more Rick strives to force her to become a woman -- or, more accurately, to play the role of a woman -- the more he encounters the core of unlife within her. In subtle ways (certainly not in gross ways) it should be shown that his attempt to make love to her as a woman for him is defeated by the tireless core of her electronic being. I don't mean that he opens a door in her chest, thus swinging her right breast away and exposing a maze of sensationally advanced selenoids and servo-assists and transistors. This is not the discovery he -- and the audience -- is making; this is already known. What is shown is just how far both the android woman and the human male can manage to force back the artificial and mechanical and smother it in their mutual yearnings. They are both pretending... but a good deal of ordinary, today and now sex is handled this way; during sex the faculty of judgment in many ways is suspended, by both partners. The question here is: How far can this go? Will that which both of them desire be successfully maintained, or will it, because of her makeup, recede farther and farther the deeper he goes -- much to the bitter disappointment of both of them?

It seems to me that after the soothing, endearing words, a very hateful conclusion -- or aftermath -- could spring up between them; their mutually arranged act has made each worse off than before, and this could be well expressed by the mutual hatred and disappointment each now feels for the other.

With this miserable outcome, perhaps the segue to Isidore and Pris, from time to time, could reveal a more optimistic scene than would be expected. Ironically, it might be Isidore who succeeds -- due to his worldly ignorance. And this would provide an augmented basis for his grief when the three andys die.

The failure of the sexual act between Rick and Rachael could, in the end, amount to a complete collapse of understanding between them, a theme on the order of A Passage to India [the E. M. Forster novel]. And if this deep and final estrangement aids Rick in his search-and-destroy mission against Pris Stratton -- makes it possible, in fact, for him to kill her -- then the sex theme will have served a vital purpose in terms of the book's plot (which up to now it really hasn't done; it was, in the printed form, sort of an interlude only). Yes, it could well be that Rick's recoiling from being close to Rachael -- or trying his damn best to be close -- may be vital in his determination -- and success -- in destroying the last three andys.

I will stop speculating at this point, and hopefully wait for a response, however slight it may well be, to what I've added here in the way of further analysis of the novel.

This section contains the principal published essays by Dick on matters other than science fiction.

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" was first published in Lighthouse (edited by Terry Carr), No. 11, November 1964.

"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" was first published in Niekas , No. 11, March 1965. It was reprinted in the PKDS Newsletter , No. 14, June 1987.

"The Android and the Human," delivered as a speech by Dick at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in February 1972, was first published in SF Commentary , No. 31, December 1972. It was most recently reprinted in the eclectic Dick anthology The Dark-Haired Girl (1988), published by Mark V. Ziesing. This essay is Dick's most extended nonfictional foray into social ethics. The rape-related humor has aged very badly, and the celebration of random ripoffs as the means of warding off centralized oppression may not convince readers who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. But the central distinction between the android and the human remains a suggestive one.

"Man, Android, and Machine" first appeared in the British anthology Science Fiction at Large (Gollancz, 1976), edited by Peter Nicholls, and was reprinted in The Dark-Haired Girl .