In the following excerpt, Wheale examines "the conflict between 'authentic' and 'artificial' personality".

It really is time to take science fiction seriously. The genre now forms about ten per cent of paperback fiction sales, and with the continuing success of comics such as 2000 AD and graphic novel fiction such as Watchmen there's every reason to think that the readership will continue to grow Literary syllabuses in schools and colleges have traditionally been slow to catch on to the study of contemporary forms of popular narrative, whether they are soaps, pulp romances, detective novels, or science fiction. But the growing number of self-constructed course work options does offer the possibility of bringing new kinds of contemporary writing and reading-experience onto the syllabus. I want to suggest some ways of approaching the writing of one of the most celebrated SF authors, Philip K. Dick, through a discussion of his...