Philip K. Dick - Where antagonism really lies

I have been reading a couple of short stories from Philip K. Dick and must confess I didn’t like the first 4 or 5. I was getting drifted away by his peculiar drastic way of ending his stories and by the complete absence of a traditional hero. It took me a couple of stories to get used with his unique style.

He writes about a decadent future and normally narrates around the human characters that he builds as the story progresses. There are no heroes in his stories. He tends to draw characters very human-like and goes really deep into our emotions and the way we would react to uncertain future and chaotic environments.

But there is a recurrent trait in his stories that also caught my attention. He normally puts humans against third-parties (machines or aliens) but not in the traditional sense of antagonism so fiercely hammered on our minds by Hollywood. Instead of writing about machines that rebel against humans, he creates antagonism by exploring our own desire for machines to do something else.

In his mini-novel “Autofac” for instance, humans are desperately trying to make the automated factory-machines stop working. The factories were invented during the war and they were designed not only to be automatons but also to defend themselves from the outside world. The war ended but none of the few survivors knew how to tell this to the factories.

Survivors were willing to rebuild the planet but machines were constantly dragging resources away to create basic commodities humans were just fed up of having.

It is an interesting question when we look at where technology got so far (remembering Philip K. Dick wrote his stories before the wave of miniaturization and empowering of devices). It is with great recurrence that I find myself waiting my computer to respond for instance. Same with a very long array of automated devices that lay around me.

These devices sometimes are not doing what we expect them to do. Normally they are involved in some very costly and useless cycle due to either a design/development mistake or parallel needs not really concerning our main tasks.

Take for example the anti-virus system. It is constantly running even if I am just writing a small piece of text like this one. This should not dangerous at all. Same happens with rendering of advanced graphic interface all around my screen. Most of the time, I just want to send an e-mail and my computer is laboriously trying to draw a nice and colourful window that I really do not need.

Hope one day we learn to deal with this relationship before it is too late. For me, a simple acceptance should be out of question.