This volume collects chapters written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Philip K. Dick's transformative 1974 mystical experiences, through which he ultimately contextualized his influential and posthumously much-adapted science-fiction and speculative fiction.
Contributing authors here examine the enduring significance of Philip K. Dick and his work, drawing on diverse scholarly perspectives that engage seriously with his self-understanding as Christian, gnostic, mystic, and theologian. Including contextual introduction and overviews, individual chapters focusing on specific works of PKD (as well as some of their adaptations), critical analysis, and examination of their significance within the life and worldview of PKD and his milieu, this collection continues foundational work that has characterized PKD's contributions to science fiction and speculative fiction as significant to its increasingly gnostic trajectory, as well as opening new avenues of exploration that situates PKD's impact within the broader appeal of esoteric worldviews as they have continued to propagate through the counterculture into the mainstream. PKD's commitment and dedication to Christian belief, faith, and practice, as well as Christian gnosis and mystical experience, are foci of particular interest, and this volume challenges the frequent misconception of PKD as exclusively relevant to Gnostic counter-cultural mysticism. Instead, his esoteric Christian gnosis is identified and analyzed as the basis of his ultimately moral and consistently humanistic theology.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Section I: Foundations of Esoteric Theology
Chapter One: This is the Gospel of Philip K. Dick: A Self-Referential Science Fiction Theology, Riccardo Gramantieri
Chapter Two: The Conquest of Death and the Divine Afterlife: Philip K. Dick’s Life and Fiction of the 1960s, M. Blake Wilson
Chapter Three: Consuming Communion: Transcendence, Moral Clarity, and Community in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Justin Cosner
Chapter Four: When the Dickian Time Drives on, Laying Bare the Ubik Landscape: Ubik as Philip K. Dick's Early Exploration of God before his 2-3-74 Mystical Experience, Laurie Jui-hua Tseng
Section II: Theological Themes
Chapter Five: Groove Override: The Defeat of Heimarmene in Dick’s “Exegesis”, Gabriel Mckee
Chapter Six: What is Human: Humanism in Philip K. Dick’s Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?, Maxwell E. Stevenson
Chapter Seven: A Structure of Belief: The Function of Conspiracy in A Scanner Darkly, Richard Johnston Jones
Section III: Who Do You Say That I Am?
Chapter Eight: Do Elohim Dream of Spirit Sheep?, Joshua Snell
Chapter Nine: The VALIS Confession: Esoteric Compassion and the Struggle for Recognition, Scott Maybell
Section IV: The Freedom of the Logos
Chapter Ten: Do Dictators Dream of Listless Grasshoppers?: Counter-Totalitarianism, Exceptionality, and a Materialized Political Radicalism, John C. McDowell
Chapter Eleven: “I Gotta Figure This Out”: Philip K. Dick, Calvinism, and the Hermeneutics of Spielberg’s Minority Report, Stephen Daly
Chapter Twelve: Fabulations of Theory, Aaron French
Conclusion: Disclosure of the Worlds to Come
About the Contributors
About the Author :
Michael C. Barros teaches philosophy at University of the People.
George J. Sieg teaches philosophy at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he is the Area Chair for Esotericism, Occultism, and Magic for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association.
Review :
Philip K. Dick has had a fantastic impact on American science fiction, film, and television. Here, however, we find a sci-fi master that is not generally known: the gnostic author who is inspired by his own direct mystical experience of some cosmic mind but who had long been involved in intensely religious questions about death, free will, capitalism, colonialism, and the end of all things (and people). Here is a stunningly honest interpretation of God (and Satan) that is superhuman, that is, fully human and historical, even rogue, but also transcendent to any local society or personalized ego. Here is a ‘gospel’ about our doubled identity coming from the future.
