Philip K. Dick

The Man Who Suspected Reality Was Fiction

In 1977, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick stood before an audience in Metz, France, and delivered a speech with the wonderfully ominous title “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”

What followed was more than a discussion of science fiction.

Dick described a worldview that may help explain how he produced some of the strangest and most enduring stories in the genre, including The Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that became the basis for Blade Runner and ultimately its sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

Dick did not simply write about unstable realities. He had begun to suspect that reality itself was unstable.

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Time May Move Sideways

Dick’s starting point was something he called orthogonal time.

We normally imagine time moving in one direction: past to present to future. Dick proposed another possibility — a second direction running sideways through reality.

To explain it, he imagined a wealthy art collector whose servants replace the painting above his fireplace every day. Normally, one painting disappears, and another takes its place. That is ordinary linear change.

But suppose the servants run out of paintings.

Instead of replacing the existing picture, they secretly alter it. They erase a tree, add a girl, and change other details.

The owner returns and experiences something peculiar. The painting is different, yet somehow familiar. He vaguely remembers a tree that is no longer there.

Dick wondered whether reality might work the same way.

What if the world could change while leaving fragments of the previous version behind in our memories?

From there, he proposed a “plurality of overlapping earths,” perhaps dozens or thousands of alternative realities existing alongside one another. People might somehow move laterally between them without those remaining behind knowing anything had happened.

Today, the idea immediately brings to mind parallel universes and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

But Dick went much further.

Reality Has a Programmer

Dick wondered why one possible world becomes real while another does not.

His answer was startling: perhaps reality is selected by a programmer.

He described this intelligence as choosing and reselecting variables, solving problems “as a computer would,” and generating branched alternative worlds.

He then imagined the universe as a chessboard.

Opposing the programmer was what he called a dark counter-player. The two forces made moves and countermoves, while what human beings experienced as history was essentially the resulting printout.

Then Dick made his most famous claim from the speech:

“We are living in a computer-programmed reality.”

This was 1977.

Long before The Matrix, and decades before simulation theory entered popular discussion, Dick was describing reality in terms of programming, variables, alternate versions, and a hidden intelligence capable of modifying the system.

Déjà Vu as a Glitch in Reality

Dick even proposed a way we might detect these revisions.

Déjà vu.

Suppose something in the past were changed and history subsequently unfolded again from that point. Most memories of the previous version would disappear.

But perhaps not all of them. You reach for a light switch that somehow seems to have moved. You remember something being different.

You suddenly experience the overwhelming sensation that the conversation happening now has happened before.

Dick proposed that such experiences might be remnants of a previous present, memories left behind after reality had been reprogrammed.

There is no scientific evidence that déjà vu represents memories from alternate timelines. Dick himself admitted that his ideas could not be scientifically proven.

But whether his cosmology was true is less important than what it reveals about his imagination.

The Worldview Behind the Fiction

Dick told the Metz audience that for twenty-seven years he had repeatedly written about “counterfeit worlds,” “semi-real worlds,” and private realities that sometimes engulfed his characters.

For years, he had no conscious explanation for this obsession.

By 1977, he believed he understood it.

Perhaps, he said, he had been sensing partially actualized realities lying alongside our own, “superimposed onto one another like so many film transparencies.”

That idea illuminates much of Dick’s fiction.

In The Man in the High Castle, the Axis powers won World War II, but within that reality, a book describes another world in which they lost.

In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, identity and political reality become disturbingly uncertain.

And in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick attacks the question from another direction: what makes a human being real?

The androids appear human. They think, speak, and struggle for survival. The supposed boundary between authentic human existence and artificial life becomes increasingly difficult to locate.

That question carried directly into Blade Runner: if an artificial being remembers a childhood, experiences fear, and desires to live, how certain can we be that our definition of “real” is adequate?

Again and again, Dick pulled the same floorboard from beneath his readers.

What is real? Who decides? Can memory be trusted? Can identity be trusted? Can history be trusted?

He Believed His Fiction Might Be Memory

The speech eventually becomes even stranger.

Dick claimed that in 1974, he recovered memories of another version of America, which he called Track A.

In that reality, the United States had become a brutal police state. The civil rights and anti-war movements had failed, and Richard Nixon remained in power.

Dick believed some of his novels contained subconscious memories of this alternate world.

“People claim to remember past lives,” he explained. He claimed instead to remember a different present life.

Our current reality has become Track B; an improved version.

Then Dick described briefly experiencing Track C, a peaceful garden world of extraordinary beauty that he believed might represent yet another, better reality.

His universe, therefore, had direction. Reality was being revised. And, like a novelist improving successive drafts, Dick imagined that the programmer was gradually attempting to produce a better world.

The Secret of Philip K. Dick

You don’t have to believe Philip K. Dick traveled between alternate realities to appreciate what this worldview did for his fiction.

Most science-fiction writers ask:

What if reality were different?

Philip K. Dick seems to have asked a more disturbing question:

What if reality is already different from what we think it is?

That difference may explain the peculiar power of his stories.

For Dick, alternative realities were not merely literary devices. Artificial humans, altered histories, false memories, counterfeit worlds, and invisible systems of control were all variations on the same fundamental suspicion:

The world presented to us may not be the real world.

Standing in Metz in 1977, Philip K. Dick was not simply describing ideas from his novels. He was describing the extraordinary worldview that allowed him to write them.

Speech available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQbYiXyRZjM