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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Sure, but also, because social structures change very slowly (and social and technical structures evolve together, with technical structures that require or imply massive social change getting rejected or growing a protective sheath of norms) it's not wrong to use SF that way.
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PKD's work remains "relevant" because he knew enough history to recognize that 1950 wasn't *that* different from 1850 or 1650, and to project a 2050 that was based on systematic tendencies rather than naively projecting 1950 forward with progress in only one domain.
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Sure, it’s relevent and mild fun as social commentary and psychological insight. It’s just not that interesting as technological speculation because it underindexes on tech potentialities and overindexes on societal inertia. I look elsewhere for tech speculation.
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Pure tech speculation will tell you what is possible, but will not tell you whether or not anybody will be willing to actually do it (and how the technical problems change under social pressures). Most technical problems are mostly social problems, even when the tech matters.
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The vacuum of space, the ambient radiation, etc., are all genuinely hard technical problems that needed to be solved. And it's comforting to focus on them, because then you're not focusing on the much more difficult problems like how to get senators to sign off on a nasa budget.
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Because it doesn't actually matter if you solved the problem of sealing the atmosphere safely and getting the appropriate gas ratio unless you can actually get the coordination to do a launch. The real work is messy interpersonal politics shit.
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Ah the heart of the disagreement is clear now. Violently agree that pure tech speculation will open up underdetermined potential. Disagree that extrapolating the past is particularly useful to make meaningful predictions either. McLuhan rear view mirror principle.
“People will be disillusioned and turn to drugs and reactionary fantasies” is either a trivial tautology (it always happens to some extent) or not even wrong (it is unlikely to be a determinative feature of the future that reveals its meaningful contours)
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The problem is the auteur problem. New tech potentially tends to activate new kinds of political actors who bring more diverse patterns of agency to the party and do weird new things with the potential that turn extrapolations of pasts featuring fewer, less diverse agents moot.
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