Philip K. Dick comes on without fanfare. All his novels are published as science fiction, which limits their "packaging" to purple-monster jackets, ensures but restricts their sales, and, above all, prevents their being noticed by most serious critics or reviewers. His prose is austere, sometimes hasty, always straightforward, with no Nabokovian fiddlefaddle. His characters are ordinary—extraordinarily ordinary—the inept small-businessman, the ambitious organization girl, the minor craftsman or repairman, etc. That some of them have odd talents such as precognition makes no difference, since they inhabit a world where precognition is common; they're just ordinary neurotic precognitive slobs. His humor is dry and zany…. Finally, his inventive, intricate plots move on so easily and entertainingly that the reader, guided without effort through the maze, may put the book down believing that he's read a clever sci-fi thriller and nothing more. The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation—this has escaped most readers and critics. Nobody notices; nobody notices that we have our own homegrown [Jorge Luis] Borges, and have had him for 30 years.
I think I'm the first to bring up Borges, but Dick has once or twice been compared with Kafka. One cannot take that very far, for Dick is not an absurdist. His moral vocabulary is Christian, though never explicitly so. The last word is not despair. Well as he knows the world of the schizophrenic, the paranoid, even the autistic, his work is not (as Kafka's was) autistic, because there are other people in it; and other people are not (as they are to [Jean-Paul] Sartre) Hell, but salvation. (p. 33)
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