Mark Thomas's Blog - Posts Tagged "phillip-k-dick"
Dr. Bloodmoney, by Phillip K. Dick
There are a lot of Phil Dick movie adaptations: the Bladerunner films, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck. There’s also a beautiful 10-episode British TV series based on his short stories called “Electric Dreams.”
Apparently, there is even a film version of RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, about a US president (Ferris F. Freemont) who embraces conspiracy theories, tramples civil liberties and is a Russian asset. I’ll have to check that out.
I’m a big Dick fan (you know what I mean) and my favorite novel is an especially weird one: DR. BLOODMONEY.
The title character is a floridly psychotic physicist who believes he has the power to destroy the earth using mind-power alone. Dr. Bloodmoney thinks people blame him for a disastrous high-altitude atomic bomb test. He worries that angry people will try to kill him, and powerful self-defense mechanisms will kick in, and his brain will scatter-bomb the planet.
It sounds crazy, but he really does have that power. Dr. Bloodmoney wipes out the planet’s infrastructure by initiating a world war, and survivors are forced to rebuild tiny primitive communities. He attacks the planet again, seven years later, but a phocomelus with strong telekinetic powers dashes his brains out before damage is too extensive.
I’d never encountered the word “phocomelus” before reading this book. It refers to a person afflicted with the extreme birth defects associated with the anti-nausea drug, Thalidomide, in the 1960s. “Hoppy” Harrington is repeatedly referred to as “the phocomelus” or “phoc.” He was born without arms or legs, and moves in a crappy, battery-powered government-issue cart with mechanical limb extensions. You’d think Hoppy’s situation would invite sympathy or pity, but it doesn’t. He’s childish and vindictive and people both fear and despise him.
That part of the book reminds me of a famous Sci Fi story called “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby. In it, three-year-old Anthony Fremont has God-like powers and everyone in his town desperately tries to placate him, so they won’t be tortured or mutated. Phil Dick was likely influenced by that story, since he echoes the name (Freemont) in RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH. And Dick’s smiling, nervous townspeople remind me of Anthony’s family, walking on eggshells near the powerful little person. In DR. BLOODMONEY, a delegation calls on Hoppy to officially thank him for killing the physicist, and they hope he will be satisfied with their offerings of herbal cigarettes and counterfeit whiskey.
“It’s a Good life” ends with Anthony radically altering the climate after his simple-minded Aunt Amy complains about the heat. Most of the community’s crops are destroyed in the ensuing blizzard, but people still smile and say, “it was a good day,” for fear of something even worse.
In DR. BLOODMONEY, Hoppy doesn’t win; he is killed by someone with even greater telekinetic powers. Bill Keller is a tiny, unborn putative twin who can communicate with the dead. Hoppy recognizes that Bill is a threat and so teleports him from his parasitic lodging in his sister’s abdomen. Floating outside of sister Edie’s body, Bill is quite vulnerable, and he is almost immediately swallowed by an owl. But Bill is a determined little lump. Once the owl vomits him up (it’s what owls do) Bill rolls into Hoppy’s home and forces the phocomelus to swap bodies.
Like I said, it’s an odd book.
DR. BLOODMONEY is mostly concerned with the human stresses of post apocalyptic survival. Bonny Keller sleeps with every man in her community, thinking she is keeping up appearances with a sham faithful marriage. Other people tolerate the behavior because she is so beautiful. Admittedly, standards are low—Bonny Keller is one of the few people who still has her own teeth—but the world is now such an ugly place that any example of beauty is highly valued.
Stuart McConchie used to sell Television sets but after the bombing he sells intelligent vermin traps that can follow mutated cats, dogs and rats into their dens. Psychologically, Stuart is insulated by his old-fashioned salesman’s patter, and his dreams of hitting the big time, if only he can find the right gizmo to sell.
My absolute favorite part of the book is Stuart McConchie’s dazed acceptance of his post apocalyptic world. He goes to San Francisco to buy salvaged electronic parts and casually chats with an army veteran about animal mutations. The veteran says, “I got a pet rat . . . he’s smart; he can play the flute . . . it’s practically an Asian nose flute like they have in India.” But Stuart isn’t impressed by something as mundane as a musical rodent. “I bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.” Later, Stuart mentions a rat that “worked out a primitive system of bookkeeping.” Now THAT'S first rate.
There’s no fuel for motorized vehicles so Stuart rides a horse named Edward Prince of Wales. Stuart locks the horse’s legs together with a device like a “club,” so people can’t steal him when he’s left unattended. Unfortunately, when Stuart returns from his short boat trip across San Francisco Bay “someone had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head.”
The horse’s death upsets Stuart, but he isn’t entirely sure why. At one point, he says he “loved” the horse, but he essentially treated it like an inanimate object, a bicycle that could be ignored if it was properly locked up.
And that’s the essence of any Phil Dick book. Characters desperately want to “care” about something or someone, and want to be cared for, in turn, but they don’t know how to do it. In several novels, including his most famous, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, Dick’s characters are compelled to own animals because they are supposed to be empathy starter-kits. The hope is that people will eventually learn to care for each other if they are forced to care for an animal. It generally doesn’t go well. Characters are automatons (sometimes in a figurative sense, sometimes in a literal one) and seem to be missing components necessary to activate the feeling.
When Mr. Hardy, Stuart’s boss, learns about the horse’s death at the hands of homeless army veterans he says, “Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds.” Mr. Hardy is one of the nicer characters because he is generous to his employees, but even he doesn’t see a significant difference between masses of unfortunate people and wharf rats. He has momentary impulses to care, but can’t sustain them.
Another likeable character in the book, Andrew Gill, abandons his wife and family just minutes after the first wave of bombs fall. An initial twinge of guilt is quickly dispatched. “What if Barbara and the boys are dead? he asked himself. Oddly, the idea carried with it the breath of release.” Within a few minutes, Andrew Gill “began to whistle with relief and glee.”
Bonny Keller also abandons her family and travels to San Francisco with Stuart McConchie and Andrew Gill. The novel ends with Bonny looking out Mr. Hardy’s window, watching “mutations of bulldogs,” one animal pulling “a sleigh-like platform . . . loaded with various valuable objects.” The intelligent, tool-making animals seem to be engaged in a type of business, hawking product, much like Andrew Gill with his ersatz cigarettes and Stuart McConchie with his vermin traps.
Bonny notices that the mutant bulldogs are being pursued by one of those intelligent automated traps and her reaction is to “smile.” “The business of the day had begun. All around her the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life.”
In a way, it’s a happy ending because people survive a nuclear disaster, and civilization is slowly rebuilding. But if society returns to the way it was before, to its “regular” robot-eat-dog routine, what has been gained?
After the first wave of bombs, Stuart McConchie hides in the TV shop basement, eats raw rat, and plays chess with a dying radiation burn victim. His situation is pathetic, but he can’t help but think that the old world wasn’t that great, either. His current despair is just “the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him.”
That’s science fiction in a nutshell; the genre’s not really about the future, it’s about the present day, exposing our problems by exaggerating them, offering story arcs with a “wider gulf.”
Phil Dick’s contribution to the genre is a talent for creative absurdity, featuring a revolving cast of androids, mutants, aliens and time travelers—and “normal” people like Stuart McConchie who don’t really know why they’re alive.
Apparently, there is even a film version of RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, about a US president (Ferris F. Freemont) who embraces conspiracy theories, tramples civil liberties and is a Russian asset. I’ll have to check that out.
I’m a big Dick fan (you know what I mean) and my favorite novel is an especially weird one: DR. BLOODMONEY.
The title character is a floridly psychotic physicist who believes he has the power to destroy the earth using mind-power alone. Dr. Bloodmoney thinks people blame him for a disastrous high-altitude atomic bomb test. He worries that angry people will try to kill him, and powerful self-defense mechanisms will kick in, and his brain will scatter-bomb the planet.
It sounds crazy, but he really does have that power. Dr. Bloodmoney wipes out the planet’s infrastructure by initiating a world war, and survivors are forced to rebuild tiny primitive communities. He attacks the planet again, seven years later, but a phocomelus with strong telekinetic powers dashes his brains out before damage is too extensive.
I’d never encountered the word “phocomelus” before reading this book. It refers to a person afflicted with the extreme birth defects associated with the anti-nausea drug, Thalidomide, in the 1960s. “Hoppy” Harrington is repeatedly referred to as “the phocomelus” or “phoc.” He was born without arms or legs, and moves in a crappy, battery-powered government-issue cart with mechanical limb extensions. You’d think Hoppy’s situation would invite sympathy or pity, but it doesn’t. He’s childish and vindictive and people both fear and despise him.
That part of the book reminds me of a famous Sci Fi story called “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby. In it, three-year-old Anthony Fremont has God-like powers and everyone in his town desperately tries to placate him, so they won’t be tortured or mutated. Phil Dick was likely influenced by that story, since he echoes the name (Freemont) in RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH. And Dick’s smiling, nervous townspeople remind me of Anthony’s family, walking on eggshells near the powerful little person. In DR. BLOODMONEY, a delegation calls on Hoppy to officially thank him for killing the physicist, and they hope he will be satisfied with their offerings of herbal cigarettes and counterfeit whiskey.
“It’s a Good life” ends with Anthony radically altering the climate after his simple-minded Aunt Amy complains about the heat. Most of the community’s crops are destroyed in the ensuing blizzard, but people still smile and say, “it was a good day,” for fear of something even worse.
In DR. BLOODMONEY, Hoppy doesn’t win; he is killed by someone with even greater telekinetic powers. Bill Keller is a tiny, unborn putative twin who can communicate with the dead. Hoppy recognizes that Bill is a threat and so teleports him from his parasitic lodging in his sister’s abdomen. Floating outside of sister Edie’s body, Bill is quite vulnerable, and he is almost immediately swallowed by an owl. But Bill is a determined little lump. Once the owl vomits him up (it’s what owls do) Bill rolls into Hoppy’s home and forces the phocomelus to swap bodies.
Like I said, it’s an odd book.
DR. BLOODMONEY is mostly concerned with the human stresses of post apocalyptic survival. Bonny Keller sleeps with every man in her community, thinking she is keeping up appearances with a sham faithful marriage. Other people tolerate the behavior because she is so beautiful. Admittedly, standards are low—Bonny Keller is one of the few people who still has her own teeth—but the world is now such an ugly place that any example of beauty is highly valued.
Stuart McConchie used to sell Television sets but after the bombing he sells intelligent vermin traps that can follow mutated cats, dogs and rats into their dens. Psychologically, Stuart is insulated by his old-fashioned salesman’s patter, and his dreams of hitting the big time, if only he can find the right gizmo to sell.
My absolute favorite part of the book is Stuart McConchie’s dazed acceptance of his post apocalyptic world. He goes to San Francisco to buy salvaged electronic parts and casually chats with an army veteran about animal mutations. The veteran says, “I got a pet rat . . . he’s smart; he can play the flute . . . it’s practically an Asian nose flute like they have in India.” But Stuart isn’t impressed by something as mundane as a musical rodent. “I bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.” Later, Stuart mentions a rat that “worked out a primitive system of bookkeeping.” Now THAT'S first rate.
There’s no fuel for motorized vehicles so Stuart rides a horse named Edward Prince of Wales. Stuart locks the horse’s legs together with a device like a “club,” so people can’t steal him when he’s left unattended. Unfortunately, when Stuart returns from his short boat trip across San Francisco Bay “someone had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head.”
The horse’s death upsets Stuart, but he isn’t entirely sure why. At one point, he says he “loved” the horse, but he essentially treated it like an inanimate object, a bicycle that could be ignored if it was properly locked up.
And that’s the essence of any Phil Dick book. Characters desperately want to “care” about something or someone, and want to be cared for, in turn, but they don’t know how to do it. In several novels, including his most famous, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, Dick’s characters are compelled to own animals because they are supposed to be empathy starter-kits. The hope is that people will eventually learn to care for each other if they are forced to care for an animal. It generally doesn’t go well. Characters are automatons (sometimes in a figurative sense, sometimes in a literal one) and seem to be missing components necessary to activate the feeling.
When Mr. Hardy, Stuart’s boss, learns about the horse’s death at the hands of homeless army veterans he says, “Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds.” Mr. Hardy is one of the nicer characters because he is generous to his employees, but even he doesn’t see a significant difference between masses of unfortunate people and wharf rats. He has momentary impulses to care, but can’t sustain them.
Another likeable character in the book, Andrew Gill, abandons his wife and family just minutes after the first wave of bombs fall. An initial twinge of guilt is quickly dispatched. “What if Barbara and the boys are dead? he asked himself. Oddly, the idea carried with it the breath of release.” Within a few minutes, Andrew Gill “began to whistle with relief and glee.”
Bonny Keller also abandons her family and travels to San Francisco with Stuart McConchie and Andrew Gill. The novel ends with Bonny looking out Mr. Hardy’s window, watching “mutations of bulldogs,” one animal pulling “a sleigh-like platform . . . loaded with various valuable objects.” The intelligent, tool-making animals seem to be engaged in a type of business, hawking product, much like Andrew Gill with his ersatz cigarettes and Stuart McConchie with his vermin traps.
Bonny notices that the mutant bulldogs are being pursued by one of those intelligent automated traps and her reaction is to “smile.” “The business of the day had begun. All around her the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life.”
In a way, it’s a happy ending because people survive a nuclear disaster, and civilization is slowly rebuilding. But if society returns to the way it was before, to its “regular” robot-eat-dog routine, what has been gained?
After the first wave of bombs, Stuart McConchie hides in the TV shop basement, eats raw rat, and plays chess with a dying radiation burn victim. His situation is pathetic, but he can’t help but think that the old world wasn’t that great, either. His current despair is just “the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him.”
That’s science fiction in a nutshell; the genre’s not really about the future, it’s about the present day, exposing our problems by exaggerating them, offering story arcs with a “wider gulf.”
Phil Dick’s contribution to the genre is a talent for creative absurdity, featuring a revolving cast of androids, mutants, aliens and time travelers—and “normal” people like Stuart McConchie who don’t really know why they’re alive.
