I Am Not A Crook

On the first impression, The Simulacra oozes 60's-era nostalgia and paranoia. PKD paints a political hellscape straight from the fever dreams of Richard Nixon, where fascism and socialism join together to brutally oppress the culture, livelihoods, and very spirit of the people.

Moreover, I can't shake the feeling that PKD writes all of his stories in the same world, or rather, skips the laborious world-building that so many science fiction authors rely upon, and instead pulls from more conceptual inspiration. Always the vague decrepit place where fantastic technology, such as a biological-recorder, pales in comparison to the funk of humanity. The barely-tolerated mutants, the one monolithic government, the ugly and frustrated protagonists with no discernible antagonist, and so on.

I imagined for a very long time that PKD's stories were always about the "Human Condition", an incredibly arbitrary term for being alive that I utilized as a critical crutch. Recently, I read T.S. Eliot's The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism, where Eliot addresses the conceptual slippery slope concerning leveraging poetry as a spiritual aide, or as an attempt to explain what humanity is (also people who italicize random words in their critical work); he enjoy neither. He argues that there is much ado about what it means to be human, but that the idea that poetry, or art in any fashion, can address that question is as infantile as sporadic italicization. This forced me to re-evaluate how I interpret PKD's works, as I agree with Eliot.

This leads me to The Simulacra. Two weeks ago, I would have gushed how it addresses the human condition, but now I feel that the novel is expressing a emotional commodity that is so often regulated to what is perceived to be modern: angst. That is to say, I feel that PKD has numerous bones to pick with a variety of organizations and concepts, but ultimately never comes to a conclusion. Every period in history feels somewhat-superior to the generations before themselves, and whether this is due to historic hindsight or simply because the living party can comment should be decided by someone more intelligent than myself, but the idea that we have "progressed" eats at our very core. This leads, I would argue, to a negative perception of society due to the overwhelming issues that have not been addressed or resolved: the people dying in the streets, the rich getting richer, the hate, bigotry, and otherwise unsavory human expressions. Amateur sociology aside, PKD's works are timeless due to the central themes of self-doubt, grim acceptance, and again, angst.