I finally understood what PKD was all about when I read his early novel CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST which was his not very good attempt to write realist fiction, set in a tedious suburban Marin County in the 1950s
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I liked Confessions of a Crap Artist. It was deeply uncomfortable in exactly the same way as his science fiction, but it hit harder because of the setting. I interpreted it as being about the way toxic masculinity can interact with economic precarity (much like his noir novels).
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Honestly, all of PKD's books are set in 1960s California, even the ones that are set in space in the far future.
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That’s a better way to think of PKD and most social science fiction. Space as a convenient allegory for talking about eart. Foundation saga was basically fall of Rome with 1950s Cold War bureaucracy thrown in. The robot stories were really about bureaucracies, not robots.
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So I guess my point is you can draw no useful conclusions about the future of space exploration from these kinds of works, since they really just use space lazily to talk about unrelated things.
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Unlike Nils, I do believe colony sized settlements might become viable. Despite what seem like prohibitive costs and hardships today. Stranger things have happened in human history.
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This honestly seems like a trivial insight to me (PKD’s not Nils). Sure, the future is never what you hoped, be careful what you wish for etc etc. And it’s one interesting thought experiment in getting what you added for and not liking it. But that’s all it is.


