‘Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick’ by David Lapoujade, translated by Erik Beranek

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Worlds Build to Fall Apart by David Lapoujade

Philip K. Dick was an author of his time, his Cold War-era science fiction often imagining Earth after an annihilating conflict. Survivors emerge from shelters, living from scratch in a desolate landscape, isolated planetary colonies or adrift in space. But at the same time, Dick was eerily prescient about the world we live in now, where everything can be falsified, all data is suspect, all truths can be lies.

In Worlds Built to Fall Apart, French philosopher David Lapoujade largely ignores Dick’s biography in favor of analyzing his words and their meaning(s). In his preface, translator Erik Beranek explains that Lapoujade situates Dick’s prolific work “in conversation” with the author’s influences, including Jungian psychology, the random insights of the I Ching and the nascent field of cybernetics. If the obligation of a SF author is to create believable new worlds, Dick created worlds whose characters found few certainties to believe in. Lapoujade quotes one of Dick’s essays: “I like to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued.”

The “reality” experienced by many of Dick’s characters is revealed to be “false”—or perhaps just one “reality” among many possibilities. And maybe that “reality” is being imposed by … who? It’s The Matrix, but perhaps with multiple matrixes threatening to impinge on one another. Sometimes an easy metaphor for America is discernable. In Dick’s Clans of the Alphane Moon, an Earth colony is governed by paranoids and managed by obsessive compulsives.

The digital society of today would have given Dick material for paranoia as well as fiction. His best characters were artisans and repairmen, his villains were the sort of technocrats and engineers who constructed our digital universe from binary codes.

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