My Three Top Paranoid Fiction Writers and The Dreaded Future
The Axis flag unfurls over a map of North America divided into territories of the Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific states, as a sweet, young voice sings “Edelweiss” — an ode of innocence and longing we remember from Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music — at the beginning of each installment of The Man in the High Castle, live-streaming its third season on Amazon. Philip K. Dick, the most famous science fiction writer since Jules Verne, is credited with the story, but it is Ridley Scott who built this epic television series off a sketch about what might have happened if the Axis won World War II instead of the Allies.
Ridley Scott and 25 other directors deserve credit for making Philip K. Dick famous, something the author never achieved in his chaotic lifetime. I read a biography of Dick in the late 1980s, after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the classic film Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 just a few years ago, both films by Scott.
I wonder about how much madness it takes to produce brilliance.
No doubt Philip K. Dick lived in a self-destructive alternate reality by the time Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. The Man in the High Castle was written even earlier, in 1962, so the depictions of the German-Japanese-American world were written contemporaneously with the post-war Mad Men era, giving the story double impact: an understanding of a flawed United States culture overlaid with the cruelty of the Japanese military and the oppression and terrorism of the Nazis.
Philip K. Dick was most prolific in the 1950s when he wrote The Minority Report (made into a Tom Cruise movie by Stephen Spielberg in 2002) and dozens of other futuristic stories for science fiction magazines. Dick died in March 1982 before Blade Runner’s release so had no idea how pervasive his work would become. Since 2002, there have been 11 more movies and multiple episodes of seasons of television series. The Man in the High Castle is just the most successful iteration of his work.
I remember having a conversation with the owner of a bookstore in downtown Wheaton, Illinois where I lived from 1986–1992 about Philip K. Dick and Jim Thompson, another author who lingered in obscurity until the last decade of his life when he was discovered by Hollywood. Thompson’s genre was detective fiction and his breakout hit ended with a depressing glimpse into the future of outlaws when the lawlessness is over. Doc and Carol end up trapped in the only dystopian society that will have them —a place with other fugitives hiding out. (The Getaway was originally made by Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill and starred Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. It was remade in 2002 as a vehicle for Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.) The bookstore owner said it was a shame that Dick and Thompson had not found their audiences while they were alive, frequently the case with writers outside the mainstream.
I found some comfort in that idea: Even writers of great insight cannot predict or control their own legacies. Jim Thompson lived the longest to age 70 and achieved financial stability but probably starved himself to death. He was a long-term alcoholic.
Similarly, Franz Kafka, originator of the unreliable narrator in a nether world, died of starvation on account of the pain of eating with advanced tuberculosis, at the age of 40. Kafka was the prophet of writers who approached the future with dread. His narrators and protagonists never knew if they would wake up human, animal or insect. But whatever reality they were in, they had absolutely no control. Kafka’s worlds resemble Philip K. Dick’s in that nothing is quite what it seems, though the invented world is reminiscent of something real to readers. The governments in the alternate universes created by both Kafka and Dick have the goal of destroying history and the power to create it.
Kafka differs from Thompson and Dick in that he had no use for popular success as a writer. He did not need the money, he had a job. He destroyed his work regularly. But the self-consciousness of his writing is incompatible with no thought to legacy. His surviving manuscripts were left to his friend Max Brod, who, against Kafka’s wishes, published them. Kafka has been portrayed as wealthy and good-looking, but he has also been called depressed, lonely and possibly psychotic. Before his death he suffered with tuberculosis for at least six years, but he had attempted suicide five years before the fatal diagnosis. Even though there was less known about mental illness when Kafka wrote in the early 1900s, there was no shortage of crazy-making instability in the culture, especially during the social collapse between the two World Wars.
Jim Thompson’s most prolific period was in the 1950s, the same as Philip K. Dick. Though each focused on his own fears. For Kafka, Dick and Thompson, there was only hopelessness ahead. Like Cassandras, they were stuck endlessly foretelling the bleak future.
Dick, who died at 53, lived hardest of all, attempted suicide at least once, married five times, and was probably addicted to amphetamines and alcohol. By the end of his life he was psychotically paranoid. He wrote about his hallucinations, voices and contacts with parallel worlds. He died after a series of strokes and was eventually buried alongside his twin sister who died in infancy and haunted him his whole life.
Thompson wrote about fifty novels published in paperback and witnessed some box office success. But he did not live to see the hit movie Martin Scorsese produced of his story The Grifters starring Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Benning. The movie made more than $13 million in 1990.
Thompson’s vision of the future was grim, but not nearly as frightening as Dick’s. While Thompson’s characters could never let go of their own demons, Dick’s characters, like Kafka’s, could never escape their societies. And Dick’s narrators went beyond unreliable to simply unreal.
Kafka never attained the posthumous fame and fortune of the other two. But his ideas are transcendental and influenced many other writers and artists including Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Rod Serling. Only one direct translation from story to film was attempted by moviemaker Orson Welles, in 1962. The Trial, made in Europe starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider in addition to Welles, made a million dollars.
By that time, The Trial was in the public domain.
