ORP: PKD: Dr. Bloodmoney

To give my brain a break from Dostoevsky, I am reading a few short novels by PKD. Here is a quick writeup on the currently completed story:

Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Learned to Get Along After the Bomb,” is a science fiction novel in the sub-genre of apocalyptic or ‘end of the world’ type stories. This story is truly representative of this type of story, because of PKD’s unique style of realism combined with typical science fiction speculation. It was written sometime between 1963 & 1965 which places it still within the ‘hot’ phase of the Cold War. Because the story was written at this time, the projected future of 1981+ is a bit dated. However this minor detail is easily overlooked, since the story is written well enough and follows a vein of American writing that tries to capture the voice of the common man. In addition to describing characters and giving dialogue that is realistic for the time that the story was written, PKD also deals with the psychology of his characters and in this story gives us some characters with unique hang-ups. By being in touch with the psychology, PKD shows us the humanity of humanity. Here is an example from that part of the story where the bombs are falling:

quote--

“We’ll fight back, we’ll fight back, we’ll fight back,” a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some kind of revenge? Would he reverse the natural forces at work, as if rolling a film-sequence backward? It was a peculiar, nonsensical idea. It was if the man had been gripped by his unconscious. He was no longer living rational, ego-directed existence; he had surrendered to some archetype.
The impersonal, Doctor Stockstill thought, has attacked us. That is what it is; attacked us from inside and out. The end of the co-operation, where we applied ourselves together. Now it’s atoms only. Discrete, without any window. Colliding but not making any sound, just a general hum.

--end of quote.

The story goes on with what happens to each of the characters introduced at the beginning and somehow they all end up in a little community in East Marin north of San Francisco (the story focuses on this group of characters from Berkley). Anyway, one can find more detailed analysis of this story somewhere on the web, but I wanted to show this little bit of PKD’s prose—it isn’t Earth shattering yet the use of simplicity rightly combined can give you a snapshot of how people would react.