How does a genre energized by immediate, desiring transformation and going-beyond, as SF is, come to terms with reason and with historical conditions? What kind of relations does SF maintain with the untranscendent democratic ordinariness that the realist novel has often affirmed as a value but which SF tends to denaturalize? This chapter pursues these questions by considering Dick's depiction of children, concentrating on Martian Time- Slip. The discussion then broadens to take in the grim prospects of the social and of the ordinary in the world of the novel, before coming to rest on the survival of the schizophrenic but decent Jack Bohlen.

As regards the image of the child, what romantic innocence or power can survive in an age of psychology? Dick has profound affiliations with Romantic poets of childhood, in his sense of the subjective variety of human time, though he connects this with a particular critique of modernity and in so doing makes it very problematic and disturbing. Still, he is like Wordsworth in his sympathy with the notion that prevailing reality is a cover for a lost or forgotten world of value, sometimes a childhood one, that may be recovered or redeemed, and he is like Blake in his ambition to rewrite the Christian myth so as to restage its reconciliation of transcendence and incarnation.

Yet, among SF writers, he is the most thoroughgoing in his embrace of the Freudian notion that to define our innnermost personhood is to define the way in which we are all, adults and children alike, at best neurotic. If so, children are not distinct from adults and will not easily stand as images of values that adults have lost or are busy extirpating in children—a view of children that the romantic side of Dick is otherwise drawn to. Children are more likely to remind us of what determines the instability that adults exhibit: that is, the adults’ childhoods. And among SF writers Dick is also one of the most explicitly diagnostic. When he does not himself classify this or that character as schizophrenic or paranoid or autistic, this or that behaviour as regressive or infantile or insane in some way, he often clearly invites his readers to do so.