living in worlds whose basic laws, whose everyday existence seem unknowable, threatening and generally out-of-this-world. In PKD’s SciFi we have many such examples. In DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? we have bladerunners who must kill humanoid robots while wondering if they are human themselves. In GALACTIC POT-HEALER we find an alien being so powerful that it may well be God Himself, except it is crazy. We meet, in UBIK half-lifers who, are frozen at the moment of death, and who exist in a world of dreams turning into worlds of horror as the process brings them inexorably closer to true death. Then in EYE IN THE
SKY we have a group of people forced to live in the dreams of others. The list is almost endless as one could spend pages and pages excerpting examples from PKD’s many writings. What is interesting here is how VOICES FROM THE STREET prefigures many of PKD’s central concerns and yet does so in our own world, using our own world’s laws and environments. In some ways the America of the 50’s seemed to Philip K. Dick an alien territory just as threatening as an outraged android or the red sands of Mars he would later detail.
Television and electronics salesman Robert Hadley lives in this hostile and unknowable world of the 50’s. As he tries to put together his life he feels within himself the same sort of unknowable forces that in PKD’s later works would be placed external to the main character.
Those who read PKD’s SciFi are well aware of the sensation that characters are being sucked down into a maelstrom of confusion and schizophrenic contradictions. But here, in one of his first outings as an author, PKD shows the process in reverse. Stuart Hadley is not caught in an external spiral of horrible circumstance or technological terrors causing a psychological meltdown. Rather Hadley is spiraling into madness from the inside out.
Those who read PKD’s SciFi are well aware of the sensation that characters are being sucked down into a maelstrom of confusion and schizophrenic contradictions. But here, in one of his first outings as an author, PKD shows the process in reverse. Stuart Hadley is not caught in an external spiral of horrible circumstance or technological terrors causing a psychological meltdown. Rather Hadley is spiraling into madness from the inside out.Hadley has a wife who is expecting and a life that seems, at first glance, to be everything he might want. But as the story progresses we begin to understand some of the deeper angers within him. There are filters of emotion through which he must see and that change the focus points of his life to make the goodness blurry and the disappointments sharp. A TV salesman now, he started life as an artist, a painter with a vision and somehow that all went by the wayside.
We see Hadley’s life through both his own eyes and his wife’s as well as his boss. No one quite understands why he is angry all of the time. Neither does he, nor does he even recognize this fact as he begins to sink into a depression. First he begins to drink more than he used to and he even attends a popular religious revival meeting. Although his liberal, Jewish friends are aghast he wants to search for something there, something unnameable. But, instead, whatever message there may be, whatever hope might be held out to others and even to him, he misses it.
In a memorable scene the Black leader of the religious group (a well-meaning group and without overt signs of cultism) fills in a membership card for Hadley in a private meeting. He offers Hadley advice that viewers of Dr. Phil today might find familiar. But Hadley feels that the leader has missed seeing Hadley’s actual presence. Later, he throws away the card and takes up with the leader’s ex-girlfriend, Marsha Frazier.
As it happens, Frazier is editor of SUCCUBUS Magazine, a glossy low-circulation book that Hadley first guesses to be literary but, on examination, finds out to be hate-filled neo-fascism. (Which suddenly calls into question much of the Dr. Philness aspect of her ex-boyfriend the religious leader). For some reason she is attract
ed to Hadley and Hadley, fuming interiorly all the while, allows her to tempt him. But as they progress, as such an affair would ordinarily turn to being lovers Hadley’s own spiral of hate takes them into an abusive scene as powerful as any in Literature.
ed to Hadley and Hadley, fuming interiorly all the while, allows her to tempt him. But as they progress, as such an affair would ordinarily turn to being lovers Hadley’s own spiral of hate takes them into an abusive scene as powerful as any in Literature.Following that and riding his spiraling descent, Hadley simply implodes. His wife, his new-born child, his co-workers, his boss all take the the full force of this explosion which finally tears Hadley into pieces. Yet, somehow, by the end of the book we can see that Hadley will rebuild.
In many ways this novel is the most optimistic of anything that Philip K. Dick would ever write. Would this optimism have continued into his future works, perhaps generating others than what we have, had this and his other mainstream novels have found publication at the beginning of his career instead of when it was too late for him? We’ll never know for sure. But I think that VOICES FROM THE STREET shows a side to Philip K. Dick that helps us to better understand his works, his feelings, and not only his own persona but the turmoil inside all of us as our dreams and our hopes mix and settle out amongst our everyday needs.
We will be discussing this book and the many others that Philip K. Dick wrote in the Forums. Drop on by and join us there.
VOICES FROM THE STREET by Philip K. Dick is published by Tor Books. $24.95 Hardcover.
