It is in its content—the themes, the imagined institutions, practices, devices and objects—that SF is radical; prose style and narrative forms usually remain more conventional. This separation of form and content is likely to be unstable: either those new or weird institutions and practices will in effect be presented as harmless, put within quotation marks as ‘entertaining SF idea’, or the form itself will alter to accommodate their political and existential implications. This chapter examines some formal issues to which radical content gives rise in Philip K. Dick's SF. The overall quality of action in Dick's novels tends to give system more power than individual agency, but this is an outcome that he resists. The focus of discussion will be on certain expressive units of narrative: incidents that can be classified as gestures, visions or anecdotes. These units of narrative are best seen as Dick's attempts to embody an alternative to the regime of system.

The complexity of the issues and effects under discussion can be suggested by the ending of Ubik (1969), a novel in which the grounds of reality and knowledge are drastically destabilized, both for the characters and the reader. The story ends with a twist: Glen Runciter's discovery of Joe Chip's head on a coin in his pocket (ch. 17, 202). We interpret this in relation to the novel's imagery of coins, coin-in-the-slot appliances and heads on coins: Fidel's head, Disney's head—and Runciter's head, inserted into the world of Joe and his companions to signify that he is alive and they are not. This last twist has a wonderful dual effect: it ties the text together (because of its relation to earlier bizarre but meaningful information about the general and special conditions of this world), but it deconstructs the story. We thought we had finally pinned things down with the conclusion that Joe and his friends were actually dead, with Runciter finding various ways to manifest himself to them in half-life, including putting his head on their coins, and now we see that Joe is manifesting himself to Runciter, which ought to mean that he is alive and Runciter is dead.