SOURCE: Wessel, Karl. “Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit: Dick, Lem, and the Preestablished Cacophony.” In Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations, edited by Samuel J. Umland, pp. 43-59. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Wessel explores the themes of forgery, conspiratorial “reality,” and paranoia in Dick's work and the writing of Stanislaw Lem, especially in the former's story “Shell Game” and the latter's novel Solaris.

In his 1975 essay “Artifice as Refuge and Worldview: Philip K. Dick's ‘Foci,’” Darko Suvin lamented Dick's increasing preoccupation in his later works with private anxieties and opaque metaphysical riddles, at the expense of his earlier social and political concerns (Greenberg and Olander 73-95). It is true, for example, that many of Dick's early works dealt either explicitly or implicitly with the cold war and the self-destructive paranoia it engendered within the American body politic; one need only recall novels such as...