Today we live in the epoch of the postmodern, and are subject to the condition of postmodernity. This book concerns the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), whose fiction gives a sometimes frightening, often funny rendition of the condition of postmodernity, and also struggles with its implications for humanist ethics.

The postmodern is related to the modern, and in discussion of the latter it is customary to make use of a trio of terms: ‘modernization’ (the economic process); ‘modernity’ (the consciousness that accompanies, facilitates and results from modernization); and ‘modernism’ (the artistic style that constitutes a response to the modern, and sometimes a critique of it). This book mostly uses ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’, and their equivalents, ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. For the purposes of discussion of science fiction in general and Philip K. Dick in particular, it is important to recognize that a text can reflect and reflect on a condition of society and consciousness (call it postmodernity, assuming that it continually overlaps and interrelates with postmodernization) without necessarily being postmodernist in style (and thence, importantly, in its view of the subject). The relations between reflection and representation, and the question of whether an intense reflection of, or let us say an immersion in, postmodernity itself involves postmodernism, will need be examined later.

There is a great deal about the concept and the periodization that is vexed: for instance, is postmodernity a complete break from modernity or an intensification and development of it? It is interesting that Henry Ford, so indelibly associated with modernization that his name has been given to one aspect of it (Fordism), also set up a kind of theme park that anticipates postmodernism in its blurring of the boundaries between the replica and the real thing (see Wills 1987: 373–75). It is certainly useful to distinguish between the dominant and the emergent in thinking about culture and society, but that the emergent postmodern should pitch its tent so close to the dominant modern challenges strict periodizations.