This review first appeared in BSFA Review 8 (Autumn 2019)
Electric Dreams by Philip K. Dick (Gollancz, 2017)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
Given that the electorate of both the UK and the US voted (narrowly) in 2016 in favour of some form of return to the 1950s, it seems particularly apt that a selection of Philip K. Dick’s stories from the 1950s should provide the source material for one of 2017’s high-profile television series. While the series itself is beyond the remit of this review, it is worth noting, as Adam Roberts did when reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement of 20 October 2017, that despite good points it tends to suffer the consequences of over-elaborating Dick’s short punchy tales. The advantage of this TV tie-in paperback from Gollancz is that, while it includes what are on the whole interesting short pieces from the writers who have adapted these tales for the screen, it allows Dick’s stories the space to stand or fall on their own merits some sixty years after they were originally written.
If like me, you’ve read at some point in the past pretty much all of Dick’s novels and the collected short stories, then it might seem as if this apparently random set of ten stories would have little new to offer. Indeed, following an initial look through the contents page, I was anticipating a set of dry runs for Dick’s first really great novel, Time Out of Joint (1959), which anticipates a future in which the hero Ragle Gumm is so haunted by a desire for the 1950s that we find him living in a pocket universe set in that decade. The first story in the anthology, ‘Exhibit Piece’ (1953), seems to bear out this prediction, as the curator of a mid-twentieth century ranch style Californian bungalow in a futuristic ‘History Agency’ disappears into his own exhibit. However neither his affectation of the accent ‘of an American businessman of the Eisenhower administration’ nor his penchant for colloquialisms of the period such as ‘dig me?’ equip him to deal with the essential Cold-War horror of a period lived under the shadow of the Hydrogen Bomb. What this and the other stories brought home to me was how the conformity of the 1950s – the white heterosexual married-with-kids world of suburban commuting and hire-purchase-fuelled consumption – was relentlessly driven by fear and repression.
Dick registers this hidden reality in a variety of ways; perhaps most movingly in ‘Foster, you’re dead’ (1955), the story of the teenage boy who can’t handle the fact that his family is the only one in town without a nuclear fallout shelter. His father knows that the production and marketing of these shelters is designed to maintain domestic consumption and yet ultimately he is unable to handle his son’s unhappiness and so gives in. Of course, almost immediately, changes in Soviet weapon technology render the shelter obsolete and in need of an expensive update, leading to the father complaining that the company has them over a barrel because they have to keep buying or otherwise run the risk of dying: ‘They always said the way to sell something was create anxiety in people’. What is particularly telling is the relief of their neighbours that now the Fosters also have what they have, everybody is the same. While, in this case, a father surrenders to conformity for the sake of his son, in ‘The Father-Thing’ (1954) a son has to fight the threat of conformity embodied by the alien form that has grown in the garden and taken over the place of his father.
Dick focuses on intergenerational familial conflict in these two stories, but more typically conformism was seen as a societal and ideological question of the time. The alien cocoons of ‘The Father-Thing’ are just one of a range of similar manifestations from the decade, the most famous of which being the pods in Don Siegel’s 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers – adapted from Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers (1954). It has never been clear to me when watching that film whether it’s a warning about McCarthyism or Communism; and maybe its strength is that it can be taken either way. The story in Electric Dreams which comes closest to expressing this kind of power is ‘The Hanging Stranger’ (1953), in which Ed Loyce can’t understand why people in his town are carrying on as normal although a dead body is hanging from the lamppost. It is another alien invasion story with a twist but as the screenwriter and director Dee Rees writes in her introduction to the story, ‘obliviousness is the real alien that destroys’. Too many people just go home after work with, in the words of the story, ‘their minds dead’. As Rees notes, the US presidential campaign was marked by exactly the same phenomenon of people not reacting to the body in the square right before their eyes.
Overall, therefore, Electric Dreams left me wondering not so much about America’s desire to return to the 1950s but whether it ever left that decade in the first place. Stories such as ‘The Commuter’ (1953) and ‘Sales Pitch’ (1954) are in their different ways fundamentally concerned with the difficulty of escaping from consumerist conformity into a warmer, brighter future. Sometimes Dick portrays his lower-middle-class protagonists – salesmen and store-keepers – as held back by the conformity of their wives and he is by no means immune to the casual sexism of the time. However, one story that has both a happy ending and a feminist twist, is ‘Human Is’ (1955), in which protagonist, Jill, finally escapes from the emotional neglect of her cold-hearted, careerist, workaholic husband, Lester, by covering up for the much nicer alien who takes over his body. Maybe there is a route out of the 1950s after all.
Prospective Cultures 