How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Beside most aspects that define our modernity—AI, social media, increasingly sophisticated propaganda—can be heard the voice of Philip K. Dick, exclaiming with both amusement and concern: "I told you so." Lauded by the critic and theorist Fredric Jameson as "the Shakespeare of science fiction", Dick now stands as the best known science fiction writer of the 20th century. Dick's worlds and characters have filled our screens and dictated our imaginings of both future and present: his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became Ridley Scott's Blade Runner; his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly was adapted into a film of the same name by Richard Linklater; and both Paul Verhoeven and Steven Spielberg have also adapted his writings into feature films. Something about Dick's worldview, extreme in concept and image yet always grounded in real anxieties, has seduced many of America's greatest storytellers.

How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later is at once a lecture on the aims of writing science fiction, an essay on Pre-Socratic philosophers, and a reflection on similarities between the author's life and the Book of Acts. Dick's distrust of mass media information systems and those who operated them circa 1978 is so prescient that it seems the author may have uploaded himself into one of the androids in his fiction, so as to continue observing the world.

Dick is only a prophet, however, in the same sense that John of Patmos is: he does not offer architectural drawings of the future, but visions in blinding, pulpy colour which startle our eyes such that we can no longer trust our view of the present. How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later is such a vision—both personal and intellectual, characteristically wild, stretching into the future and thousands of years into the past.