In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams discusses ‘To Penshurst’, Ben Jonson's poem about the good life (1985: 28–33). The poem seems down to earth and straightforward: the good life is largely a matter of things to eat: fruit, cheese, fish, meat. Even people are seen as consumables, or as ‘fruitful’. But nonetheless Williams enters a criticism; something is left out, because this is a good life of consumption. Williams proceeds to take a long view of the implications of this omission; Christianity, he says, has always been a religion of consumption, centring on communion, the love feast of believers. Production has received short shrift (1985: 30–31).

Certain themes in this strike a response in the reader not of ‘To Penshurst’, with its wholesome ‘blushing apricot and woolly peach’, but of Philip K. Dick, who creates worlds whose harassed inhabitants ingest nasty-tasting flakes of Proxian lichen, or tabs of Substance D, or, perhaps most dismaying, hamburgers made of ‘turkey gizzards’ and ‘ground up cow's anuses’. For Dick is aware (most tellingly in A Scanner Darkly, from which those last phrases are taken) that we live in a consumer society. He does try to rehabilitate production, in his many portraits of repairmen, potters or pot-healers, and craftsmen. These men and women are imagined as makers of special, ‘wu’-invested things, humble antagonists of entropy. Dick tries to restore value to the individual thing, made or fixed, as against the non-thing, as it seems to be, mass produced and rapidly discarded or superseded.

Yet he is also inspired by the Christian ideal of fellowship and communion. He adheres to an ethic of kindness and empathy; he frequently centres his novels on a beleaguered group of ordinary people. These novels are often based on a stereotype of popular fiction (Stagecoach, The Poseidon Adventure, most of Agatha Christie): the random selection of ordinary people, thrown together to make common cause or to be rent by individual egos and individual histories. Dick is contributing to popular culture's staging of the claims of the group against those of the individual. And in his case the effect can also be found where the group is less explicitly separated out…