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The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick explores the deep affinity between two seemingly quite different thinkers, in their attempts to address the need for salvation in (and from) an era of accelerated mechanization, in which humans' capacity for destroying or subjugating the living has attained a planetary scale.
The philosopher and the science fiction writer come together to meet the contradictory imperatives of a realist outlook-a task which, arguably, philosophy and science fiction could only ever adequately undertake in collaboration. Their respective approaches meet in a focus on the ambiguous status of fictionalizing, or fabulation, as simultaneously one of mechanization's most devastating tools, and the possibility of its undoing.
When they are read together, the complexities and paradoxes thrown up by this ambiguity, with which both Bergson and Dick struggle on their own, open up new ways to navigate ideas of mechanism and mysticism, immanence and transcendence, and the possibility and meaning of salvation. The result is at once an original reading of both thinkers, a new critical theory of the socio–cultural, political and ethical function of fictionalizing, and a case study in the strange affinity, at times the uncanny similarity, between philosophy and science fiction.
Acknowledgments
Note on References
Introduction
Philosophy and Science Fiction
The Edge of the Known
The Ethics of Balking
Philip K. Dick Studies
Note on Terminology: Fabulation
Chapter One: Fabulation: Counteracting Reality
Mechanization and the War-instinct
The Biological Origins of Society
Countering the Intellect
The Morality of Violence
Open Morality and the Misdirection of Mechanism
True Mysticism: Immanent Salvation
An Incomplete Soteriology
Fabulation for the Open
Conclusion
Chapter Two: Fabulating Salvation in Four Early Novels
Solar Lottery
The World Jones Made
Vulcan's Hammer
Time Out of Joint
Conclusion: Super–everyman to Solar Shoe Salesman
Chapter Three: The Empire That Never Ended
The Open and the Universal
The Life-Death Chiasmus
The Fictitious Event
The Messianic Tension
The Remnant and Messianic Time
The Magic of Language
Sci-fi: the genre of 'as not'
Conclusion: Gnostic Politics
Chapter Four: Objects of Salvation: The Man in the High Castle
The Fabulation of History
Mechanization and Paralysis
Worldly Remains
Openings Between Worlds
The Tyranny of the Concrete
Objects of Salvation
Conclusion: Reality Fields
Chapter Five: How We Became Post-Android
The Mechanization of Pot-healing
The Alien God
The Saviour in Need
Robot Theology
Humans: the Cosmic Bourgeoisie
Android and Theoid
Creative Destruction
Conclusion
Chapter Six: The Reality of Valis
Salvator Salvandus
The Believer and the Sceptic
The Pharmakonic God
Reduplicative Paramnesia (Time Becomes Space)
The Fabulative Cure
Recursion: Valis as Limitlessly Iterative Soteriology
Befriending God
Conclusion
Epilogue: Soter-ecologies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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