Sandner_7789-7-9

Philip K. Dick’s Futuristic Ecologies

Ursula Heise

Philip K. Dick is one of the most influential American science fiction writers of the twentieth century. His storyworlds, characters, and style have shaped not only futuristic fiction from cyberpunk to video games, but have also made their way into science fiction film. It is easy to see what recurring themes have made his work a productive source for much subsequent thought and writing about human futures: his interest in simulated environments, technologically created humans, artificial memory, nostalgia for historical spaces and figures, and technologies that are hard to control once they are released into the world has resonated in many later engagements with the transforming impacts of information and communications technology as well as biological engineering. So have his characters’ unreliable perceptions and anxious realizations that they cannot always tell what reality is or how they should relate to it—an ontological uncertainty that permeated a great deal of postmodernist literature and art.

Other dimensions of Dick’s voluminous oeuvre have remained more anchored in the context of the 1950s and 1960s: his recurring explorations of nuclear war and its aftermath, for example, his characters’ frequent lapses into paranoia or schizophrenia, and their experimentation with mind-altering technologies that range from drugs to “mood organs” that allow the user to dial a state of mind seem centrally tied to the Cold War and the California counterculture that he formed part of. Yet other aspects of Dick’s novels and short stories have remained more idiosyncratic, especially his obsession with esoteric religious beliefs and occultism, which is particularly visible in his late works.

Rereading Dick’s wide range of works from an environmentalist perspective is not an easy task, since his major interests undoubtedly focused more on the fate of the human than the nonhuman world, and on the transformative impacts of technology more than on ecological change. Yet in the context of the Anthropocene—that is, the idea that humans now live on a planet that they have so fundamentally and pervasively transformed that the traces of their activities will be visible in the Earth’s geological strata for millions of years to come—many of Dick’s settings, themes, and turns of plot begin to resonate with environmentalist thought in new ways. Three dimensions of Dick’s fiction in particular stand out in this context: his conception of post-apocalyptic environments and the futures they offer, his vision of humans as “natural aliens” who might be forced by ecological change to inhabit their own planet as a novel ecosystem, and his foregrounding of the repairmen who maintain fragile new communities of humans and nonhumans with their often flawed technologies.

1. Apocalypse and Anthropocene

Many of Philip K. Dick’s novels and short stories are set in ecological wastelands that have been generated by perpetual war or global nuclear conflagration. His short stories from the 1950s feature, for example, military confrontations between Russians and Americans that have ravaged both Earth and the moon in “Second Variety” (1953), and humans’ successive wars with alien species over materials they seek to extract from the aliens’ home worlds in “Some Kinds of Life” (1953). Several of his major novels from the 1960s, such as Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), are set in postnuclear scenarios of devastated natural landscapes, disintegrated societies, and the perpetual risk of violence at both large and small scales. For this reason, he is often considered a dystopian writer. Yet Fredric Jameson has noted how, in Dick’s works as well as many other science fiction texts, “global cataclysm so often serves as a mere pretext for the dreaming of a far more positive Utopian wish-fulfillment … the coming into being of a small community beyond big city or nation” (2005: 378): this pattern repeats itself from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) to James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand (2008) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013).

But Dick’s deepest interest may not have been the exploration of utopian or dystopian futures so much as the question of what it means to be human in environments that have been altered, for better or for worse, by advanced technologies, as many critics have noted.1 His work has generally been analyzed according to two major avenues of interpretation. In one reading, Dick’s technologically altered environments mark him as the quintessentially postmodern novelist of inauthenticity, simulation, and hyper-reality: the writer whose work abounds in robot animals and artificial humans, as well as in varieties of perception and experience so mediated by drugs, technological devices, and psychological fractures that the authentic and the inauthentic, perception and simulation, reality and hallucination often can no longer be told apart. His fictions, in this perspective, articulate some of the ontological skepticism about the nature of reality, representation, and self that more generally characterize postmodernist American fiction (see McHale 2003).

A second, related way of reading Dick’s work puts the main emphasis on his reconceptualization of identity in a thoroughly technologized and mediated world. Dick’s writings are populated—one might say overpopulated—with androids, robots, “robands,” mental patients, mutants, persons with supernatural abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition, and of course a wide variety of aliens: from the interstellar pollen called the “drifters” in The World Jones Made (1956) and the extraterrestrial amoeba in The Simulacra (1964) all the way to the mysterious Proxers in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), the warring “Starmen” and insectoid reegs in Now Wait for Last Year (1966) and the gigantic, protoplasmic Frolixan Morgo Rahn Wilc in Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970). Interpretations of this universe of human, quasi-human, and alien identities have often taken their cue from Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1984). Haraway’s manifesto took up a term that had been coined in the early 1960s and was mostly associated with masculinity, military, police, and surveillance by the 1980s, and turned it instead into a trope of hope for sociocultural revolution, suggesting a turn away from pure origins to mixed genealogies, pure blood to hybridity, and more generally a constructivist understanding of class, race, and gender. Some critics, accordingly, read Dick’s fiction as critical of essentialist notions of identity and as consonant with the cultural investment in diversity that only manifested itself fully after his death in 1982.2

In the early twenty-first century, Dick’s emphasis on environments where conventional notions of “nature,” “authenticity,” or even “reality” have lost much of their traction resonates in new ways. Fears about the destructive impact of atomic war have given way in public debate to dire predictions about the consequences of climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, biodiversity loss, and other dimensions of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene.” Where Dick foresaw a world reshaped by technology in such a way that little that can be called “natural” is left, the concept of the Anthropocene seeks to capture a world in which the unintended consequences of human activity are pervasively reshaping the globe directly and indirectly, to the point where some environmentalists have understood climate change as the end of nature—a point that the writer and activist Bill McKibben made forcefully in his eponymous book (The End of Nature, 1989).

The term “Anthropocene,” originally coined in the 1980s, gained notoriety after the publication of a brief article by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000.3 The current geological era, the Holocene, they suggested, should be renamed the Anthropocene because of humans’ pervasive and lasting impacts on global ecosystems—impacts that, the two scientists argued, will leave permanent traces in the Earth’s geological strata. Whereas humans have for a long time altered the planet’s biology, they have now also transformed the composition of its atmosphere and oceans: as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, humans have become geological agents as well as biological ones (2009: 206).

It remains to be seen whether geologists will accept the proposition to change the current era’s name. But in the meantime, the Anthropocene has taken on a cultural life of its own, with multiple exhibitions and symposia by museums, foundations, and research institutions in Europe, Australia, and North America, as well as a profusion of publications. It has become a shorthand for referring to climate change—although Crutzen and Stoermer understood it to include a much wider spectrum of transformations from land use and nitrogen cycles to species loss—and more generally to global ecological change. Often, it implies a narrative of decline, a deterioration of the global ecosystem caused by humans that is not likely to end anytime soon. Some journalists and scientists have taken the Anthropocene, on the contrary, as an invitation to reimagine environmentalism in the context of a world that has been humanly altered, but that can also be conserved, restored, and made more habitable for both humans and nonhumans. At least one writer, Diane Ackerman, has even appropriated it for a techno-utopian vision of the future in her book The Human Age.

The Anthropocene, then, has unfolded into not just one story about humans’ histories and futures in their natural environment, but several different ones.4 To the extent that these stories project future environments, species, and human ways of interacting with them, they are distant cousins of science fiction. And indeed, the idea of the Anthropocene itself, reliant on the figure of a far-future geologist discovering the traces of contemporary humans’ activities in the Earth’s strata, can be understood as a science fiction trope, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Heise 2016: 215–220).5 This family resemblance between Anthropocene narrative and science fiction enables an environmentally oriented rereading of Dick’s visions of Earth’s futures—not to suggest that Dick was an environmentalist (he was not), but to highlight what understanding of habitats and nonhuman species his techno-futurist scenarios explicitly or implicitly rely on, and what this understanding might contribute to the reimagination of environmentalism in the Anthropocene.

2. Natural Aliens

Environmentalists themselves are currently rethinking their commitment to nature with the help of narrative strategies, themes, and tropes that typify science fiction. This is particularly true of books about climate change such as James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren (2009), which includes a chapter in which aliens arriving on Earth in the future lament the mess humans have made of it, or Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), a science fiction novella in which a Chinese historian in 2393 looks back on the climate policy irrationalities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

But it is also obvious in environmental writing that references science fiction more indirectly. Even before the concept of the Anthropocene began to circulate widely, the environmental studies scholar Neil Evernden put in question the idea that humans were originally at home in nature and lived in harmony with it until the advent of modernity. Tool usage, he argued, very early on effectively transformed humans into a different species than they had been before, and this transformation turned them into exotic organisms even in their place of origin, Africa.

A person with a tool is capable of a kind of behavior which was formerly difficult or impossible. A man who invents a spear instantly becomes a new and more dangerous kind of predator. Both his life and that of his prey are radically transformed. The consequences of technology are subtle but extensive, and one such consequence is that humans cannot evolve with an ecosystem anywhere. With every technological change we instantly mutate into a new—and for the ecosystem an exotic—kind of creature. Like other exotics, we are a paradox, a problem both for our environment and ourselves…. For it is not just the biotic community that is puzzled by the arrival of the exotic; so too is the creature itself. Figuratively speaking, just as the environment does not know how to cope with the new creature, neither does the exotic know what it ought to do [Evernden 1993: 109].

For this reason, Evernden argues, environmentalists should consider humans “natural aliens” even when they inhabit the ecosystems in which they originally evolved.

The idea that humans might be aliens in their own habitats, or conversely that the planet they live on might have become an alien one because of their own impact on it, has also been deployed in more recent environmentalist writing. The well-known writer and activist Bill McKibben, founder and director of an organization that fights against the continued use of fossil fuels, uses the sci-fi trope of humans settling on an alien world to begin one of his climate change books, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010):

The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has—even if we don’t quite know it yet. We imagine we still live on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they’re not. It’s a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth…. It still looks familiar enough—we’re still the third rock out from the sun, still three-quarters water. Gravity still pertains; we’re still earthlike. But it’s odd enough to constantly remind us how profoundly we’ve altered the only place we’ve ever known [2–3].

By asking us to look at our own planet as an alien one with a name that is difficult to pronounce, McKibben invites us to rethink even the most basic and taken-for-granted dimensions of daily life in view of fundamental ecological change.

This idea that humans might no longer be naturally at home on the planet on which they evolved, due to both intended and unintended consequences of their own actions, is also a recurring motif in Dick’s fiction. Dick, of course, did not envision these scenarios in terms of climate change, which only became a frequent topic of scientific and public debate after his death (although one of his novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, already features a world grown so hot that city dwellers cannot venture outside their “conapts” without special protection). Rather, it is nuclear fall-out after a global war that typically transforms nature in his fiction. While nuclear radiation leads to widespread death and devastation, it also sometimes generates new forms of life in Dick’s imagination of the future: cataclysm not only gives rise to new forms of community—as Jameson points out—but also to new organisms and ecosystems. The short story “Planet for Transients,” for example, which was first published in 1953, is set on the North American continent three hundred and fifty years after a global nuclear war. Instead of nuclear winter and the devastation of organic life, radiation has given rise to an explosion of new biological forms: the planet actually teems with life.

To his right the towering column of orange shrubbery rose, wrapped around the sagging concrete pillar. Spread out over the rolling countryside was a vast expanse of grass and trees. In the distance a mass of growth looked like a wall, a jungle of creepers and insects and flowers and underbrush…. Two immense butterflies danced past him. Great fragile shapes, multi-colored, racing erratically around him and then away. Life everywhere—bugs and plants and the rustling small animals in the shrubbery, a buzzing jungle of life in every direction [327].

This planetary environment, obviously, differs sharply from the barren postnuclear environments of “Autofac” (1956) or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in its exuberant explosion of life forms. But humanity in its conventional guise is excluded from this vibrant new biosphere. Old-style humans have had to withdraw to underground habitats and can only venture to the surface in space suits with lead lining to protect them from radiation, with oxygen tanks that provide them with air they can breathe, and with food supplies that are not radioactive. The story follows such an old-style human, Trent, on his quest for other remaining human communities, since basic supplies and technological devices in his own have finally run out. On his walk through the new jungles and grasslands, he encounters several of the novel human species that have evolved from accelerated mutation rates due to pervasive radiation. He encounters eight-foot-tall humans nicknamed “toads” for their horn-like bluish skin, shorter ones called “bugs” for their chitinous shields, “worms” who are blind and live underground, and “runners” who resemble humanoid kangaroos. All of them are adapted to the new radioactive environment: they move about outdoors with no special protective gear and nourish themselves from the foods the new ecology yields.

Trent, meanwhile, toils on in his heavy suit with dwindling oxygen supplies. He finally discovers a settlement of conventional humans outside Montreal, but it has been recently abandoned. Just as he radios this disappointing find back to his dispatcher in Pennsylvania, a spaceship appears and lands. A team of former residents of the community has come back to pick up supplies from the old dwellings—as it turns out, for a new settlement that the group has established on Mars. They offer to take Trent and his community of thirty along to their new village. “It’s pretty dry and barren, but it’s not radioactive,” the crew leader, Norris, explains. He sees no possibility of restoring Earth to livable conditions for old humans. When Trent insists, “We’re the true humans” (338), Norris responds:

“Not anymore. Earth is alive, teeming with life. Growing wildly—in all directions. We’re one form, an old form. To live here we’d have to restore the old conditions, the old factors, the balance as it was three hundred and fifty years ago. A colossal job. And if we succeeded, if we managed to cool Earth, none of this would remain.”

Norris pointed at the great brown forests. And beyond it, towards the south, at the beginning of the steaming jungle that continued all the way to the Straits of Magellan.

“In a way, it’s what we deserve. We brought the war. We changed Earth. Not destroyed—changed. Made it so different we can’t live here any longer” [338].

In Norris’s view, it is now humans who are “visitors on a strange planet.” He explains: “Look at us. Shielded suits and helmets, spacesuits—for exploring. We’re a rocket-ship stopping at an alien world on which we can’t survive. Stopping for a brief period to load up—and then take off again…. Closed helmets. Lead shields. Counters and special food and water.” (338). Humans can no longer inhabit Earth in any traditional way, whereas the “natives,” as Norris calls them, are the new posthuman species who can build villages on the Earth’s surface, breathe its air, drink its water, and eat its food (339). Old humans, by contrast, have become aliens on their own planet.

A parallel scenario unfolds in Dick’s novel The World Jones Made (1956), a world in which nuclear war has given rise to a variety of mutants. The novel opens with the description of an artificial biosphere with atmospheric gases, flora, and fauna that differ significantly from Earth’s.

The temperature of the Refuge varied from 99 degrees Fahrenheit to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Steam lay perennially in the air, drifting and billowing sluggishly. Geysers of hot water spurted, and the ground was a shifting surface of warm slime, compounded from water, dissolved minerals and fungoid pulp. The remains of lichens and protozoa colored and thickened the scum of moisture that dripped everywhere, over the wet rocks and sponge-like shrubbery, the various utilitarian installations. A careful backdrop had been painted, a long plateau rising from a heavy ocean [1].

One of the main characters perceives this environment as completely alien during a visit: “Only greens and blues were visible. The whole tank resembled a marine world, rather than the land world. A damp world, hot, steamy, compact, and utterly unfamiliar” (Kindle edn.).

Located in San Francisco, the Refuge is inhabited by eight dwarf-sized mutants who believe they are among the victims of radioactive fall-out. Their bodies are perfectly adapted to their artificial environment, but they cannot venture outside, since they cannot survive in Earth’s atmosphere and gravity for long. Instead, they face the prospect of spending their entire lives in the confinement of their artificial habitat. But, as is gradually revealed, these mutants are not in fact victims of radioactive contamination, but instead part of an ambitious biotechnological and ecological experiment. During a period of political turmoil and riots stirred up by a movement intent upon exterminating all the “drifters,” primitive alien life forms that crash on Earth and are legally protected, the scientists in charge of the experiment fear that the rioters’ resentment might extend to the strange inhabitants of the alien-looking biosphere. They therefore precipitously launch the mutants on the interplanetary mission they had long planned. The mutants crash-land on Venus and suddenly discover themselves biologically, if not otherwise, at home.

The scene was unbelievable. For a time neither of … [the first two that emerge from the crashed spaceship] could grasp it. “We’re back home,” the boy murmured, dazed and confused. “Something went wrong. We went around in a circle.”

But it wasn’t the Refuge. And yet it was. Familiar hazy hills spread out, lost in billowing moisture. Green lichens grew everywhere; the soil was a tangled floor of lush growing plants. The air smelled of intricate organic life, a rich, complex odor, similar to the odor they remembered, but, at the same time, far more alive. They gaped foolishly: there was no delineating wall. There was no finite hull confining it. The world lay stretched out as far as the eye could see. And above. The world was everywhere.

“My God,” Frank said. “It’s not a fake” [144].

Well adapted to their new planetary environment, the mutants—who would most likely be called posthumans in more recent science fiction—begin to adapt terrestrial technologies to their new environment. They explore Venusian fauna and flora, invent new domestication strategies, and create the nucleus of a new civilization. The first Venus-born child turns out to be biologically posthuman, not a reversion back to the old human gene pattern: a signal at the end of the novel that the new species has fully adapted to its new environment and can expect to sustain itself into the long-term future.

At the same time, a few human refugees from the political upheaval on Earth create a habitat with terrestrial flora and fauna on Venus that mirrors the enclosed biosphere portrayed at the beginning of the novel. The refugees have brought along pigs, cats, and dogs, even bugs and mice, because, the father of the family explains, “‘I wanted things to be natural…. I even boxed up some grasshoppers and flies. I want my world to be complete…. I want [my son] to know what he’s going to be up against…. So he’ll be prepared, when the three of us go back’” (198). “Natural,” of course, cannot help but be an ironic description of a habitat that had to be artificially constructed and differs fundamentally from that of the surrounding Venusian ecosystem, and the ending of the novel puts in question whether return to Earth is a realistic expectation: the Earth family may be as confined to its artificial habitat as the new Venusians were back on Earth. Like Trent and Norris’ species of humans in “Planet for Transients,” which has been superseded by posthuman species adapted to a radioactive environment, the Earth biosphere in the Venusian scenario of The World Jones Made becomes a somewhat nostalgic remnant of an ecology from which the most recent humans have moved on. Who is the native and who is the alien? Who belongs in a particular ecology, biologically and psychologically? Domestication, biotechnology, and terraforming make the answers to these questions difficult and ambiguous as biologically altered humans travel to other planets and Earth itself changes under the impact of human technologies.

Like Evernden and McKibben, then, Dick sometimes imagines humans as aliens on their own planet as a new ecology emerges, and at other times envisions humans technologically adapting their own bodies to new environments at the same time as they reshape the new natures they encounter. Already in some of his texts from the 1950s, but especially in Dick’s work from the 1960s, the new organisms and environments that emerge after a global cataclysm are entirely artificial biological or mechanical creations that develop a life and consciousness of their own. In the arc of Dick’s fiction, the self-replicating and evolving war weapons of the short story “Second Variety” gradually transform into the intelligent human replicas of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. As Patricia Warrick has pointed out,

[a]t first [Dick] presents electronic constructs as merely automatons; then they become will-less robot-agents of enemy or alien forces, while masquerading as humans. Next robots become increasingly more like humans, with a sense of personal identity and a concomitant will to survive; and finally robots actually become superior to humans. [1983: 191].

These products of biotech and robotics labs, whether they are imitations of animals or humans, increasingly replace natural ecologies that have been devastated by war or other technological impacts in Dick’s fiction (Warrick 1983: 192; Heise 2003: 71–74). But if biological nature gives way to its mechanical or electronic simulations in Dick’s later fiction, this does not imply that the question of humans’ relationships to their environments disappears. On the contrary, many of Dick’s texts raise questions similar to those that have recently been debated in the context of the Anthropocene: How do humans survive in an environment in which many fundamental processes have been altered by human activities, intentionally or unintentionally? How should they manage ecologies that are at the same time pervasively domesticated and yet often outside human control? What responsibilities do humans have in repairing ecological damage? How do environments that have little original or “wild” nature left change individual and collective identities?

These questions unfold most obviously in Dick’s best-known novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The novel’s human characters are confronted with two different sets of artificial beings. On one hand, they encounter human-like androids that have been manufactured for use in the off-world colonies where most humans live after planet Earth has been radioactively contaminated during World War Terminus, a global nuclear conflagration. Androids are theoretically not allowed to go to Earth, but some of them do so illegally to escape from the hardship of their enslaved lives in the Martian colonies. Arresting and killing them is made difficult by their close resemblance to “normal” humans, to the point where their difference can only be detected with the help of a psychological test that focuses on their inability to empathize with animals. On the other hand, humans keep robotic animals when they cannot afford costly real animals, which have become exceedingly scarce because of the war and radioactive fallout. While taking care of the remaining animals was a legal obligation in the aftermath of World War Terminus, it has become part of social etiquette by the time the plot starts. Robotic animals have mechanical parts and control panels, so their artificiality can be easily enough established by anyone who cares to look closely.

Even though humans and androids live in artificial environments, the critic Susan M. Bernardo has argued, both long for an authentic connection with the planet in what she calls “terraphilia.” But this longing “can have no consummation because the world for which they long does not exist. Simulation and substitution are the ways they deal with this deficit and manage to create a sense of place from an initially broad idea of space and environments” (2014: 156). This terraphilia, in her reading, is the true marker of humanity in Dick’s storyworld, as opposed to empathy, which is again and again held up as a standard of humanness but does not in the end unequivocally distinguish industrially manufactured from biologically born humans (Bernardo 2014: 168). Along somewhat different lines, Sherryl Vint has highlighted the importance of animals in the novel and the way in which the devotion and care for animals, whether they are mechanical or biological, defines humanness.

Both critics capture the continuing importance of nature in the depopulated and media-saturated world of postnuclear San Francisco in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Crucial scenes for both of their readings as well as my own earlier engagement with the novel in the context of species extinction (Heise 2003) occur when two of the novel’s protagonists, the animal repairman J.R. Isidore and the android hunter Rick Deckard, unexpectedly encounter what appear to be authentically wild animals. Isidore finds a spider in his apartment at a time when he is also offering sanctuary to three of the hunted androids, with whose predicament he has genuine compassion. Isidore takes his discovery of the spider as a sign from Wilbur Mercer, the central figure in a religious practice that in Dick’s future society involves the use of “empathy boxes.” These technological devices enable the citizens of this future to immerse themselves in a religious ritual in which they empathically connect with each other as well as the aged Wilbur Mercer, an old man who combines features of Sisyphus and Christ in his recurring ascent to a hill, fall into a netherworld, and resurrection.

But when the androids see the spider, they begin to perform a playful quasi-scientific experiment on it that consists of cutting off its legs consecutively to see how many it needs still to be able to walk—until Isidore snatches the animal from them and drowns it in the kitchen sink to end its suffering. The scene is clearly designed to generate revulsion and induce readers to question their own sympathy with the androids, who up to this point in the novel had been portrayed as victims of unwarranted discrimination and prosecution. In their total lack of empathy not just for the spider but for Isidore, their host, whose agitation and dismay at the mutilation they ignore, the androids seem to confirm what the reader had previously been invited to view as dubious stereotypes—their inhuman lack of compassion with other living beings. But as many critics have pointed out, the scene is not nearly as clear-cut as it appears at first sight, since mutilation and experimentation on invertebrates is of course part of normal human practice: children as well as scientists routinely injure, kill and dismember animals, either for play or for the acquisition of scientific knowledge. So Dick’s portrayal of the androids may be aimed less at discrediting their humanity than at questioning the inhumanity that we routinely accept as part of “normal” humanness. Isidore’s own reconnection with wild nature appears to be real enough, but he himself exists at the margins of this future society: mentally disabled because of radiation, he is denigrated by “normal” humans and legally outlawed from migrating to the colonies.

Isidore’s discovery of the spider is echoed in a scene near the end of the novel, when Deckard leaves San Francisco for the first time. Exhausted after a risk-fraught hunt for six androids, he seeks spiritual restoration in a barren stretch of land north of San Francisco that resembles the desolate virtual landscape on display in empathy boxes. Deckard experiences a similar fusion with Mercer in the desert-like landscape even without the help of an empathy box. Right afterwards, as if to confirm his extraordinary vision, he spots an animal in this unlikely setting: “An animal, he said to himself. And his heart lugged under the excessive load, the shock of recognition. I know what it is, he realized; I’ve never seen one before but I know it from the old nature films they show on Government TV. They’re extinct! he said to himself” (236). Like so much else in the novel, Deckard’s reaction to what turns out to be an extinct species of toad is both deeply spiritual and unashamedly materialist. He takes the discovery to be a gift from Mercer, at the same time that he considers the compensation he might receive: “Something about a star of honor from the U.N. and a stipend. A reward running into the millions of dollars” (237).6

But when Deckard returns home and happily shows his wife the toad, she discovers almost immediately that the animal has a diminutive control panel on its belly, proving that it is yet another artificial replica. This makes Deckard’s discovery of it no less miraculous: it is as mysterious how an electric toad would have continued functioning in the Northern California desert without any maintenance as it is that a biological toad would have sustained itself in a radioactive landscape. In a sense, then, the discovery of the toad might still be taken as some kind of religious epiphany, and Deckard is not as disappointed by its artificiality as one might have expected. He emphasizes that “‘it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are’” (241). This statement has often been taken as the novel’s ontological summation, emancipating androids and artificial animals alike from their secondary and discredited status. Katherine Hayles, for example, has highlighted “the mixed condition of humans who are at their best when they show tolerance and affection for the creatures, biological or mechanical, with whom they share the planet” (1999: 191).

As I argued in an earlier reading of Androids, Deckard’s reference to “electric things” (which the androids in the novel are not) and his characterization of their life as “paltry” make his statement a bit less of a full-throated embrace of cyborgism than it might seem (Heise 2003: 74). But however this may be, Deckard’s statement certainly does attribute life to robotic animals, in a final twist on the considerations of nature in the novel that puts humans’ empathic care for the natural world, and animals in particular, ahead of principled ontological definitions of what “nature” or “animals” might be in a global ecology pervasively transformed by humans. Whatever has a claim to life has a claim to human empathy and care—and that might include creatures that are wild and ones that are not, humanly altered or unchanged, organic or mechanic: this is as close as Dick’s novel comes to a definitive pronouncement about humans’ future relationship to nature. Deckard’s wife, Iran, highlights this attitude by ordering a supply of electric flies for the toad because, she declares to the supplier, her husband is “devoted” to the animal (244). Not only does this perspective invert that of Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s foundational novel, in that Dick’s characters are endorsed to the extent that they take responsibility for their creatures regardless of whether they are products of nature conventionally understood or not, it also speaks to contemporary environmentalists’ concern with how to value ecosystems and organisms that, in the Anthropocene, have been definitively transformed by humans.

3. Repair, Maintenance and Care: Dick’s Handymen

As a character type, J.R. Isidore in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? highlights another dimension of Dick’s futuristic ecologies: the maintenance and repair of systems perpetually prone to malfunction or failure. Isidore is dismissed as a “chickenhead” or “anthead” by other characters in the novel because his mental faculties have been damaged by radiation. His own limits and the discrimination to which he is subjected, though, have endowed him with extraordinary capacities for empathy. Not only does he have a unique talent for persuading grieving customers of a deceased pet animal to assuage their loss by acquiring an artificial animal, he is also so attached to the robot animals that he at one point mistakes a dying mechanical cat for a real one and speaks to it tenderly and encouragingly until it stops functioning.

The handyman or repairman with an uncanny knack for fixing troublesome appliances and broken artifacts, and sometimes also a genuine affection for both organic and mechanical fellow beings is a staple of Dick’s fiction, as both Darko Suvin and Jameson have noted (Suvin 1983: 87; Jameson 2005: 378): for example, Thomas Cole in “The Variable Man” (1953); Leon Cartwright, the “electronics repairman and human being with a conscience” in Solar Lottery (1954: 17); the time-traveling swibble repairman in “Service Call” (1955); Jack Bohlen, the protagonist and repair technician in Martian Time-Slip (1962); Hoppy Harrington, the thalidomide victim in Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), who starts out learning television repair and becomes a handyman without hands; Bruce Himmel, the quality-control inspector who refashions defective starship guidance units into small autonomous robots in his free time in Now Wait for Last Year (1966); Joe Fernwright, the ceramics repairman in Galactic Pot-Healer (1969); and Nick Appleton, the tire regroover at the center of Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970).

The importance of characters who know how to repair broken-down devices and systems in Dick’s fiction highlights how fragile the social, ecological, and technological networks are that his imagined communities rely on. The scenarios in which the futuristic repairmen carry out their work range across a wide spectrum, from the postapocalyptic community in Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney that comes to depend on Hoppy Harrington and the precarious settlements on Mars where Jack Bohlen works in Martian Time-Slip, to the interstellar war efforts to which Thomas Cole is recruited even though he is just an uneducated and civilian handyman from an earlier time period. But all of these scenarios feature political, military, corporate or scientific authorities who are unable to control the technologies they have deployed and to manage the ecologies that have emerged from human use and abuse. In these situations, the repairmen intervene, sometimes in minor and sometimes in major ways, sometimes by legal and sometimes by illegal means, to help restore some degree of functionality and livability.

In at least one case, this intervention ends badly, not because the handyman proves incapable of solving practical problems, but because his success makes him too powerful: Hoppy Harrington turns into a tyrant and lethal danger for the postwar community that has made use of his talents and finally has to be killed to allow the community to continue in Dr. Bloodmoney. But in most other cases, Dick’s repairmen contribute in at least a minor way to the success of a major enterprise, as Joe Fernwright does in helping the monstrously large alien Glimmung lift a sunken cathedral and thereby bring back an extinct civilization in Galactic Pot-Healer. And in some cases, the handymen’s talent goes beyond mere repair: the most talented among them are able to take a broken device and develop it to a higher purpose. In this vein, Bruce Himmel indignantly defends broken spaceship units from being “groonked,” consigned to the junk heap, and converts them into tiny robots that develop a social life of their own in Now Wait for Last Year. In “The Variable Man,” similarly, Thomas Cole is recruited to complete a device that humans plan to deploy in their war against the ancient and powerful empire of Proxima Centauri. Originally, the inventors had intended to design a spaceship able to travel at the speed of light, but since the vehicle exploded on re-entry into normal space at the end of its journey, they work to convert it for use as an interstellar bomb of unprecedented power. Cole completes the construction that they were unable to finish on time for a decisive battle, and the bomb is sent to Proxima Centauri—but it does not explode. As the military leadership resigns itself to defeat, they discover that Cole has opened up interstellar travel beyond Proxima Centauri instead, by successfully converting the bomb into the functioning spaceship that it was originally designed to be.

In an indirect way, Dick here anticipates one of cyberpunk author William Gibson’s basic tenets regarding matters of technology, namely that “the street finds its own uses for things” (1986: 186). Like Gibson, Dick foregrounds characters who are not formally trained or officially in charge of a particular technology, but amateurs and bricoleurs with talent and a passion for a particular art form or technological device. They end up being able to develop it in ways unforeseen by those who designed it and were supposed to control it. As the cases of J.R. Isidore and Bruce Himmel highlight, this reappropriation and reinvention of technology often takes them to the fuzzy borderlines between the inanimate and the animate, object and organism, technology and ecology.

Isidore’s care for mechanical animals in need of repair leads him to empathize with the organic but equally artificial androids and thereby to function as a yardstick for what counts as human in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in an anticipation of Rick Deckard’s later insight that technological artifacts possess a life of their own that it is worth respecting. Himmel’s tiny robot carts analogously develop a society of their own and even enter into fights for dominance and survival:

The cart was pursued by another of its kind. They met, in a tangle of newspapers and bottles, and then the debris trembled and bits flew everywhere as the carts fought it out, ramming each other head-on, trying for the cephalic unit in each other’s center … now one … seemed to be triumphing. It withdrew and, like a goat, maneuvered to locate itself for the coup de grace. While it was positioning itself the damaged one, in a last burst of native wit, popped into the sanctuary of a discarded galvanized zinc bucket and was out of the fray. Protected, it became inert, prepared to wait things out, forever if necessary…

“I won’t hurt you,” Eric said to it, crouching down in order to get a better glimpse of it. The damaged thing, however, remained where it was. “Okay,” he said and straightened up. “I get the idea.” It knew what it wanted…. Even these things, he decided, are determined to live…. They deserve their opportunity, their minuscule place under the sun and sky [Now Wait for Last Year: 248–249].

Jameson calls this emergence of new mechanical life forms “a very modest salvationism … from a very imperfect landscape” (2005: 382). Modest it may be in this particular case, but the development of new species from dystopian landscapes through the tinkerer’s dedication and knowledge also signals hope. Like Deckard’s acknowledgment of new forms of life in the midst of a postnuclear wasteland, Eric Sweetscent, the protagonist of Now Wait for Last Year, ends up recognizing the right of new techno-organisms to form part of the ecologies of the future.

In some of Dick’s fictional scenarios, recognizing the rights of new species that have emerged from transformed landscapes also includes granting them sovereignty over those territories. Let me return, to conclude, to the short story “Planet for Transients.” Trent expresses the hope that even after he and his friends join Norris’ settlement on Mars, they might come back to Earth to visit at some point.

Norris smiled ruefully. “I hope so too. But we’ll have to get permission from the inhabitants—permission to land…. We’ll have to ask them if it’s all right. And they may say no. They many not want us” [339].

Co-existence of a variety of species here turns into a scenario in which humans might not only have to ask permission to return to the habitat in which they evolved, but in which they might have to yield their dominance indefinitely to species that are better equipped to manage the ecosystem than they have been.

All three of the major tropes in Dick’s fiction that I have highlighted here—postwar environments, the portrayal of humans as aliens on a planet that they have transformed beyond recognition, and the power of the handyman-tinkerer to catalyze new forms of life at the edge of technology and biology—emerged out of the landscapes of pessimism and devastation occasioned by the Cold War and the threat of global nuclear war. In the early twenty-first century, we reread these tropes from amid a different scenario of global threat, that of the Anthropocene and its scenarios of climate change, pollution, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and other ecological crises. The power of Dick’s fiction in this context lies in its invitation to rethink some of the story templates on which environmentalist thought and writing have conventionally relied, and to move beyond narratives of a past natural home, harmony, or balance that we might return to. In the context of the Anthropocene, science fiction stories like the ones I have discussed here, which envision humans as aliens on a planet they themselves have irreversibly altered, take the risks of global ecological crisis for human and nonhuman life seriously, but also invite us to imagine new forms of agency and life emerging from the landscapes of change.

The anthropologist Anna Tsing, along similar lines, has used her exploration of matsutake mushrooms and the ecologies, economies, and communities that have developed around them to ask more broadly what might emerge from the damaged landscapes of the Anthropocene:

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons [2015: loc. 4147].

In rereading Dick in the Anthropocene, his postnuclear landscapes turn into our own environments threatened by climate change and species loss, and his natural aliens, human and nonhuman, into figures of thought for thinking about our own multispecies communities—including a few robots.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Diane. The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us. Norton, 2014.

Bernardo, Susan M. “A Case of Terraphilia: Longing for Place and Community in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Environments in Science Fiction: Essays on Alternative Spaces. Ed. Susan M. Bernardo. McFarland, 2014. 154–170.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, 2009, 197–222.

Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415, 3 January 2002, 23.

_____, and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’“ Global Change Newsletter 41, 2000, 17–18.

Dick, Philip K. “Autofac.” 1956. Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Ed. Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 145–166.

_____. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. Del Rey, 1996.

_____. Dr. Bloodmoney. 1965. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

_____. Galactic Pot-Healer. 1969. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

_____. Now Wait for Last Year. 1966. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

_____. Our Friends from Frolix 8. 1970. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

_____. “Planet for Transients.” 1953. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick. Vol. 2. Citadel Twilight, 1990. 327–339.

_____. “Second Variety.” 1953. Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Ed. Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 38–76.

_____. “Service Call.” 1955. Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Ed. Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 129–144.

_____. The Simulacra. 1964. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

_____. Solar Lottery. 1955. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

_____. “Some Kinds of Life.” 1953. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick. Vol. 2. Citadel Twilight, 1990. 109–118.

_____. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. 1964. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

_____. “The Variable Man.” 1953. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick. Vol. 1. Citadel, 1987. 163–220.

_____. The World Jones Made. 1956. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2012.

Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien. 1985. Second edition. University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Galvan, Jill. “Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Science-Fiction Studies 24, 1997, 414–429.

Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome.” 1982. Burning Chrome. Ace, 1986. 168–191.

Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” 1984. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. 149–81.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Heise, Ursula K. “From Extinction to Electronics: Dead Frogs, Live Dinosaurs, and Electric Sheep.” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 59–81.

_____. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Houswitschka, Christoph. “Dystopian Androids: Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982).” Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations. Ed. Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller. TWissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015. 121–138.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. St. Martin’s, 2011.

_____.The End of Nature. 1989. Random House, 2006.

Suvin, Darko. “Artifice as Refuge and World View: Philip K. Dick’s Foci.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. Taplinger, 1983. 73–95.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Vint, Sherryl. “Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Mosaic 40.1, 2007, 111–126.

Warrick, Patricia S. “The Labyrinthian Process of the Artificial: Philip K. Dick’s Androids and Mechanical Constructs.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. Taplinger, 1983. 189–214.