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

Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are real. This is why
we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what he is about to read. Equally
true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are
animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic circuits. So no deception is
taking place.
And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title
"science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by
creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The
producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?
And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does
the author or producer believe it, but-Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good
yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth . . . and only
later on realize it.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the
meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this
clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their
perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do.
Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is
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only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to
influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility
of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleeplearning.
An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that
nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because
there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes
into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious
personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is
received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of
the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what
we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank spaces are filled
in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious
reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
And-and I say this as a professional fiction writer- the producers, scriptwriters, and directors
who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words,
they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much
of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have
fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.
And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an
author into correctly labeling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the
label. . . you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not
know.
It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn
later on-perhaps years later-that it is true. I would like to give you an example. It is something that
I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't.
In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a
nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the
criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is
working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure
fiction. Or at least I thought it was.
Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy-this was after I had finished the