In a fascinating new essay for The Paris Review that expands upon a speech he gave this summer, MacArthur-winning author Jonathan Lethem explores the age-old question: Did Philip K Dick dream of Palestinian sheep?
Okay, well I suppose the central thesis is slightly more complicated than that. Lethem—a longtime Dick fanatic, who edited the 2011 letter collection The Exegesis of Philip K Dick—uses a curious detail from Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip as a jumping off point to consider his own relationship to the ongoing Palestinian conflict. In the book, human colonists on Mars have displaced an earlier group of human settlers, and now occupy a community they've named Camp Ben-Gurion. As Lethem writes:
Those stories of colonization that uncover political implications that might matter in thinking about Palestine are, of course, those in which an indigenous population exists before the arrival of Dick's settler population. The most disturbingly relevant, by far, is Martian Time-Slip. This isn't because of the presence of the Israeli settlement, though that does feel like a tell—a stray signifier that also functions as a kind of neon arrow directing us to pull off the road and pay attention. It's because in this novel, the indigenous Martian population—they're called Bleekmen—aren't even aliens. They're nomadic foragers capable of interactions with the settlers on a variety of human-to-human levels: linguistic, professional, and sexual. They are specifically defined as human; they arrived and naturalized to Mars at some unspecified earlier time. However, their marked cultural differences, and their deep acclimation to the conditions of Mars, allow the Earth settlers a margin for apartheid exclusion based on a muddling of the notion of the "alien" and the "human"—or, to be more precise, these qualities allow the settlers to affirm a population's humanity while systematically violating their human rights.
To some, this description may make Martian Time-Slip sound like an intentional allegory. Yet beyond those few plot details, Dick seemed otherwise uninterested in talking about Israel, or Palestine, or the human displacement in the Middle East that has happening as he wrote his novel. It's a strange oversight for an author who was otherwise interested in embracing empathy and critiquing consumerism and imperialism.
But, as Lethem notes, it's also not the kind of oversight that many people have seemed to notice, or care about. In fact, it's one that Lethem himself, as someone born to a Jewish mother in Brooklyn, also made without realizing it—an anecdote that he shares later in the essay, as he ponders his own complicity and ignorance.
If you're a fan of science fiction, colonialism, and human rights, it's an essay that's absolutely worth your time to read.
"Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist": Philip K. Dick and Palestine [Jonathan Lethem / The Paris Review]
Previously: Ireland, Norway and Spain recognize Palestinian state
