Although Philip K. Dick passed away in 1982, his novels and stories still have a feel of immediacy. These works of speculative fiction dealt with themes that still preoccupy our minds — the overreach of governments that lie to their subjects in order to increase their power, corrupt corporations that attempt to control every aspect of peoples’ lives, and the nature of identity in an increasingly confusing world. Hollywood studios love him, because his personal stories of alienation in modern society appeal to modern filmmakers, who have turned his fiction into classic films such as Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and at least three other films that I have seen, but whose titles escape me at the moment.
For me, one of his best works is the novel The Penultimate Inconvenient Truth, which is the story of a conspiracy among scientists and various world governments to convince people that the planet’s temperature (“planetemp”) is rising. In fact, there is little evidence of this — the scientists and governments are just using it as an excuse to consolidate power. The first chapter, reprinted below, is so prescient that it almost feels like it could have been written today, just now, by me, as a satire. Except for all those classic Phildickian terms, of course:
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Tags: books & writing, politics & government by Ricky Sprague
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