Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Now Wait for Last Year

I was about 18 when Philip K Dick became one of my favorite authors, and my enthusiasm for his novels was fervent but rather short-lived. I bought a bunch of his paperbacks, whichever ones I could find. I read them quickly. I told my friends about them.

But as time went by, I got a little quieter about my love for this brilliant writer. The more his stories and novels got adapted into crappy wannabe blockbuster movies, the more I felt like Philip Dick would always be vastly misunderstood. So I stopped worshipping him, gave up on trying to find all of his novels, and moved on to other authors. About a year ago, I noticed that all his novels had undergone a reprinting with some tasteful, attractive new designs. I picked up a couple that I never found when I was younger, read one that I didn't like too much (The Simulacra) and quickly forgot about the other one.



Recently I was looking for a short, light read and I found the forgotten Dick book, which had the slightly clunky title Now Wait for Last Year. Turns out this is probably one of his best. Or I just really miss the feeling I got when I read my favorites of his, like Valis and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and the like, so I'm just imagining that this book is as good as those were when I was younger. In any case, I really enjoyed this one.

Now Wait for Last Year has everything you could want in a work of futuristic fiction: highly addictive drugs that make people time travel, layers of secrecy, robot cab drivers, interplanetary war, insect-like aliens, etc. But here's the catch: something about Dick's writing style makes the most far out sci fi shit seem totally normal. His grasp of human psychology and emotion is what really made his writing work. As I read this novel, I realized that this adherence to reality even in completely bizarre  situations is the reason Dick's novels register on a much deeper than most science fiction does for me. I'm usually not much of a sci fi fan when it comes to literature, but I also think Dick is way more than just a sci fi writer.

True to the gnostic themes in a lot of his later work, Philip K Dick seemed to use the sci fi genre as an illusion to disguise the depth that was really contained in his novels. He would have been a genius at any time in history, writing in any genre. His stories often deal with layers of reality and illusion. He embeds philosophical puzzles into his work while still anchoring the plots in real human emotion that makes the characters relatable. Even though he includes tons of futuristic elements like robots and aliens and stuff like that in his books, at their core the stories are still about human cruelty or kindness. They're about our ability to remain human even as technology and bureaucracy threaten to erase our identities. They're about what it means to be alive, and why the thoughts in our heads can actually matter.

Ok, so that's about enough of all that. The important thing to know is that I still like Philip K Dick. I still think his books are worth reading, and I think more people should give him a chance. Hollywood will always be great at ruining just about any book it gets its hands on, so we shouldn't be surprised if the Now Wait for Last Year movie sucks. And yes, apparently it's being made right at this moment, probably ready to swiftly flop and further tarnish the name of this widely underrated author.