Non-Speculative Similes
Philip K. Dick is an author who specializes in speculative science fiction. As with his other stories, this novel is filled with the strangeness of things which do not (or, in some cases, did not yet) exist. Despite that, it is impossible to ignore that Dick is writing from a perspective of only what is, not what yet may be. This has long proven to be a source of dramatic tension within the world of science fiction: do you engage comparisons serving the fictional reality of what isn’t yet know or facilitate immediate understanding by taking the readers out of that parallel world? In some cases, the choice is obvious and easy. You facilitate reading understanding by using figurative imagery with they are already familiar:
“Darling, when I came around I thought you were a corpse. So help me— you looked like a corpse, all white and silent and not moving.”
Speculative Metaphor
Then there are those occasions when the best choice is to go the other way. In these cases, metaphor becomes a tool for engineering the fictional speculation about a future (and past) that went another way from the one we know. In this particular case, World War II did still take place and the Nazis were still the enemy. The metaphorical referencing to the events and organizations of the past have undergone a transformation, however:
“...the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns.”
“You mean the—Nazis?”
“I’m familiar with that term.”
The World You Know
The world in which the novel takes place may in what was then a near-future speculative version of 1959, but in most ways it is still quite recognizable as 1950’s America. Or, as the case may be, communist Russia.
“Like a government building in the Soviet Union, it had been designed by men lacking artistic sensibility.”
The World You Don’t Know
In other ways, however, the world of 1959 as presented in a novel published in 1957 resembles neither the past nor the present with which the average 21st century reader is familiar. Which is not to suggest, of course, that there are not places in the world of the 21st century where figurative fog such as that described here is not oppressively represented:
“Both the building and the people were infested with the stern nearness of (Tetragrammaton). He could feel Him everywhere; like a thick, oppressive fog, the Islamic God lay over everything.”
The World That Never Changes
One interesting thing about science fiction is that some aspects of society seem so firmly embedded into the fabric of reality that even the borderless badlands of speculative fiction do not comfortably facilitate introducing an alternate reality that veers off the grid so wildly that it violates the fundamental precepts of suspending belief. Some metaphors remain literally true across the infinity of parallel universes. Such as:
“The bloodsucking, capitalistic beasts of Wall Street?”
