Nomad Codes

their hopeless struggles is palpable as well as odd. Not that Dick didn’t undercut the pathos with comic gags. In A Scanner Darkly , Charles Freck tries to kill himself by consuming wine and a handful of reds: “However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics ... Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off . . . The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down on him disapprovingly.”
    Dick’s characters battle not only themselves, but also the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is a major trope in sci-fi, but in Dick’s hands it’s a dark god. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? features the semi-retarded Jack Isidore living
    alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical ... buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here alone with the lungless, penetrating, masterful world-silence ... Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on.
    This move towards the TV was characteristic, because Dick was obsessed with communications technology—radio, records, tapes, television, phones, computers—using it as a metaphor for the social web people build from their individual signals to keep entropy at bay. Technology only reinscribed for Dick the signals, noise, distortion, and overlapping frequencies that we are already simultaneously trapped in and estranged from.
    He usually wrote in the subjective third person, jumping among the variable perspectives of the characters that made up his narratives. By switching viewpoints, Dick formalized and toyed with his contention that objective reality is both synthetic and fragile, a “hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.” Most of his tales contain false worlds, spurious environments simulated and controlled by nefarious powers using drugs, technology, and psychic power. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch , the eponymous figure returns from space and markets Chew-Z, a drug which projects users into a world he controls. As Dick’s creations discover off-kilter clues in their environment, their paranoia and sense of unreality grow, until their suspicions are not only fulfilled but often grossly exceeded. Dick was a narrative trickster, a master mindfucker. He pulled the whodunit inside out: Decoding small meaningful details doesn’t put the picture together so much as rip it apart. By twisting the page-turning groove of pulp into a Möbius strip, Dick attempted to undermine the political, social, technological, and psychic structures of “reality.” He wanted a pulp guerrilla ontology that deconstructed everyone’s power trip—Nixon’s, IBM’s, God’s, the author’s.
    Dick’s fully fake world appeared in Time out of Joint (1959), which shivered with the Cold War. In it, Ragle Gumm spends his days drinking beer in ’50s suburbia, supporting himself through his unusual skill at playing a newspaper puzzle called “Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?” Strange slippages in normal reality occur—he finds a phone book with unfamiliar exchanges, picks up unlisted programs on his ham radio—and Gumm becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced his world is spurious. We eventually find out that it’s 1996, the Earth is at war with lunar colonists, and the puzzle takes advantage of Gumm’s uncanny ability to predict the next hostile bombing. It turns out that Gumm had become sympathetic with the colonists and refused to continue aiding Earth, so the military-industrial complex created the false environment and drugged him into useful forgetfulness.
    Dick engaged the mutant logic of late capitalism and the technological simulacrum before Baudrillard knew a megabyte from a baguette, coming to the conclusion that only an antagonistic relationship with reality—even to the point of madness—is sane. In a world of crystal-clear transmission, Dick tuned to the static between channels, turned up the volume, and listened for hidden messages. His skepticism constitutes an increasingly fervent metaphysics. He was obsessed with the Gnostic concept of a demiurge, a false god who obscured