Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

The novel Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1983) exploits the idea of parallel or alternate universes.  This is an idea more acceptable to physicists of the current day than it was in 1983, when Michael Bishop published this novel.  In the novel, something goes awry in the “space-time continuum” (for a lack of a word that would better describe what happens in the novel) year 1968, something connected to the Tet Offensive and the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon institutes restrictive and racist programs.  He’s elected to a third and fourth term. Dissenters disappear.  African Americans are returned to Africa.  Travel and freedom of expression restrictions make life difficult.  The United States becomes a totalitarian police state.  And it establishes a moon base.  Obviously, this version of United States history is different from our own history. 

This novel performs the science fiction version of It’s a Wonderful Life—it contemplates the what-if scenario of a United States considerably different from our own.  The novel is essentially comic, riven with dramatic irony as it explores the reality of a Nixonian world and invites us to compare that reality with our own.  

In one section, six guinea pig-like creatures called Brezhnev bunnies accompany the main character Cal and President Nixon to the moon.

Philip K. Dick plays a significant role in the novel, which more or less begins on the day of his death.  He appears to Cal and to others in different forms, in his “resurrection body.”  He seeks counseling from Cal’s wife Lia, a psychologist.  He appears as a horse.  He inhabits the body of an African American dwarf who falls, inexplicably, into trances during which he travels in some sort of astral manner all over the world and to the moon.  The so-called resurrected Dick is at the center of a plan to fix what has gone wrong with the world.  The absurdity of the novel is part of its charm.