SOURCE: Abrash, Merritt. “Elusive Utopias: Societies as Mechanisms in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” In Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF edited by Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn, pp. 115-23. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Abrash examines Dick's early short stories and novels that portray technology and the institutional use of machines to symbolize “the values and operating principals of societies which … are clockwork worlds in their essential nature.”

Philip K. Dick is not a utopian writer. The word “utopia,” if it appears in his work at all, carries no overt thematic significance, and although many different types of societies serve as backdrops for his novels, none are described in the rounded ways traditionally associated with utopian fiction. Nevertheless, Dick makes a serious contribution to utopian thought (used here as a blanket term covering dystopian considerations as well) because his stories...