Discussion in the preceding chapter turned towards the complications which result when Dick's representation of postmodernity—for this is how I have characterized the historical context of his novels—begins to destabilize not only his characters but his narratives. Postmodernism is hostile to the very notion of representation, and there is an element of fantasy in Dick: his is fiction of presentation and transformation, rather than of representation and critique. This chapter pursues these issues, directly confronting Dick's ethical humanism, an indubitable scandal and anomaly in the conditions of postmodernity, but something that is staged —and even preached—in a variety of ways in his fiction.

Premises and Potentials of the Genre

McHale (1992: 254) has noted a particular bias in SF, which differentiates it from most other fiction. This is that SF privileges the ontological (as also, arguably, does film: a tantalizing connection). Strange and wonderful things are invented, devised and imagined: the content of the story is strange and wonderful. This need not, however, spill over into the style and form: the manner of presentation may remain straightforward, candid, carefully explanatory. (Something like this is still true of recent cyberpunk SF, though it is denser, glitzier and faster-paced than earlier SF.) It would not be correct to say that SF is a realist genre, but realism as a mode is very important to its workings. The result is that up until the late fifties SF lags behind or remains indifferent to modernist experiments with form, while genially inventing and manipulating societies, ways of life, life forms—all sorts of material possibilities. But in fact the situation has always been unstable. Because SF invents new societies and life forms, it always leans towards the proposition that nothing is given, everything is fabricated. As H.G. Wells himself observed, to invent an interesting future device or institution is in effect to commit yourself to a radical examination of the whole society in which it is set, though at the same time you may avoid pursuing this examination to the limit. For SF, whatever we can construct or imagine as human is human.