"Dick,_Philip_K._I hope I shall arrive soon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of A flew through the
room when he punched one new!1 in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereu the world
disappeared. However, it also disapn? for the other characters in the story . . . which tj no sense, if
you think about it. Unless the o2 characters were figments of his punched-tape fanta Which I guess is
what they were.
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?",
to some day get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote
over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not find out what was real. One day a
girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her
philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is
that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was
back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.
But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in
which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, governments, by big corporations, by
religious groups, political groups-and the electronic hardware exists bywhich to deliver these
pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my
eleven-year-old daughter watch TV I wonder what she is being taught. The problem if miscuing;
consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and
done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the
thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What
is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy and reality? What about the cop
shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are
always good and they always win. Do not ignore that one point: The police always win. What a
lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is,
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Be passive. And-cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because
Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities
manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I
do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing
power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in
such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope.
However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them
come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a
secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe- and I am dead serious when I say
this- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old,
the ossified, must alwa ys give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things are
born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization because it tells us that we must eventually
part with much of what is familiar to us. Unless we can psychologically accomodate change, we
ourselves will begin to die, inwarardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways
of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who
matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides
and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln
Simulacrum and finally it began to die and they had to regretfully retire it. The simulacrum, like
Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is
true of each of us, like it or not.
The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things
which never change...and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything