Fantasy as a genre and the fantastic as a mode have attracted much recent attention. This attention is an episode in the politics of a literary criticism become intensely alert to the menace of ideological complicity that waits on every literary form and critical practice. Liberal humanist criticism is seen as having privileged ‘classic realism’ and as having practised a mimetic criticism. As the fiction of, for instance, George Eliot both reflects reality and reflects on it discursively, so liberal humanist criticism of Eliot's novels both mirrors the texts, rehearsing themes and moral implications without attempting theoretical distance, and engages in sympathetic dialogue with their moral concerns and lessons (see Eagleton 1983, ch. 1). More recent criticism, on the other hand, privileges the fantastic, which is seen to subvert the ideology behind classic realism, not at the level of theme and social comment, but at the level of form—a ruptured syntax of plot, dismembered characters, a refusal of explanation or closure. There is a sharper split, likewise, between literary text and critical text; the latter does not mirror or attempt to serve the former. The critical text privileges both the subversive irrationality of the fantastic text and its own discursive rigour and theoretical acumen.

Science fiction, as an impure form, often fantastic, but often spelling things out explicitly, presents an interesting challenge here, especially in Dick's case. It might be said that by its adherence to extrapolation and explanation SF ensures that fantasy will always be under final (ideological) control, but the case is more open than that. Dick is a writer who stands at a tangent to the SF of his own time. He mixes parable and fantasy with licentious impurity, and some of the problems and rewards of this emerge strikingly from a study of his short stories, which were mostly written in the period 1952–55, often at the rate of several a week.

The directness of these stories might surprise readers of novels such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, and A Scanner Darkly ; they are often parables or polemics and their moral/political point is clear, yet, like the later novels, they very often dissolve the texture of reality, hollowing out nightmare worlds into which the ‘real’ world may be sucked in a few moments, jeopardizing the epistemological confidence that would seem necessary for political judgments and moral actions.