On Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death

A world assembled from need

A Maze of Death begins like a theological murder mystery. Fourteen strangers are transferred to Delmak-O, a nearly empty colony where the landscape answers belief with matter. A jellylike oracle accepts written questions, a mechanical insect plays the music its listener most wants to hear, and a tiny organism endlessly prints Egon Specktowsky’s sacred book. The settlers have doctrine in abundance: the Intercessor, the Demiurge, the Walker-on-Earth, and the Form Destroyer give suffering a cosmic grammar. What they lack is a reliable way to read one another.

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is usually introduced by its premise: Germany and Japan won the Second World War, the United States has been divided between the Japanese Pacific States, the Nazi East, and a weakened buffer zone, and inside this occupied world people read a banned novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Axis lost.

That is accurate, but it makes the book sound cleaner than it is. Dick is not mainly building an alternate history machine. He is writing about what happens when a political order becomes so complete that it starts to pass for reality itself — when power is no longer only law, army, flag, or terror, but taste, commerce, scholarship, etiquette, rumor, and even the private instruments people use to ask what is true.

Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney is usually filed as post-apocalyptic science fiction, which is accurate in the dull way a label on a morgue drawer is accurate. There has been a nuclear catastrophe. Civilization is damaged. Bodies are damaged. Institutions have thinned into rumor, barter, local authority, and whatever machinery still happens to work. But the book is less interested in the spectacular end of the world than in the smaller and more stubborn question of what counts as common life after the end has already happened.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick invents the Penfield mood organ. Dial a number, get a feeling. Want to watch television no matter what is on? Dial 888. The device does not persuade. It replaces the internal state with an external instruction, and the result feels genuine.

What makes the Penfield disturbing is not the mechanism — it is the consent. Iran argues with Rick about dialing a mood. Rick knows the device is artificial. He uses it anyway.

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a novel about a single working day. Rick Deckard wakes up, argues with his wife over the Penfield mood organ, goes to work, kills six androids, drives into the desert, finds a toad, and comes home. The whole thing takes about twenty-four hours. It reads like a procedural, and that is exactly the point.

The procedural frame forces a question Dick could not have raised otherwise: what happens to the person doing the job when the job gets done? Not in the heroic sense. In the mundane sense: the task list empties, and you have to live with what you did to empty it. Rick does not collapse under the weight of moral revelation. He collapses under the weight of having nothing left to do.