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In this story, survivors of a global thermonuclear war live in isolated enclaves in California, surviving off what they can scrounge from the wastes and supplies delivered from Mars. The older generation spend their leisure time playing with the eponymous doll in an escapist role-playing game that recalls life before the apocalypse — a way of life that is being quickly forgotten. At the story's climax, a couple from one isolated outpost of humanity play a game against dwellers of another outpost (who play the game with a doll similar to Perky Pat dubbed "Connie Companion") in deadly earnest. The survivors' shared enthusiasm for the Perky Pat doll and the creation of her accessories from vital supplies is a sort of mass delusion that prevents meaningful re-building of the shattered society. In stark contrast, the children of the survivors show absolutely no interest in the delusion and have begun adapting to their new life.
en.wikipedia.org...
originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: Profusion
I think the reason that Dick could so closely describe our current social decline is that he could see it's rudiments back then when he was writing. For one, he clearly could see the way advertising was stealing the human spirit and how, with advancing technology, it would become the ever present, ever accepted and loved means of social and economic control that is has reached today.
Much of his work was dystopic though maybe not as dark as that of Orwell and Huxley yet certainly as predictive of future social controls. Yet now that I think about it he may have been darker. Trends and influences that they had written about were much more pronounced by Dick's time and he picked up and filled in many of the blanks that they had only suggested at.
I think that our Perky Pat is anything on the screen.
And I wish I could disagree with you assessment of bleakness, but I can't.
originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: Profusion
I think the reason that Dick could so closely describe our current social decline is that he could see it's rudiments back then when he was writing. For one, he clearly could see the way advertising was stealing the human spirit and how, with advancing technology, it would become the ever present, ever accepted and loved means of social and economic control that is has reached today.
originally posted by: jonnywhite
Science fiction writers have long warned of it. Back before fears of computers and robots it was machines. The fear we'd grow complacent and incapable as they serve our needs. Here's an example from 1909:
archive.ncsa.illinois.edu - THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster (1909)...
Is it a irrational fear of technology or change, or something else? One thing on my mind lately is how stories are usually a vehicle to either fortify our confidence in virtue or to warn us of sinister ends.
I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.
Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”
originally posted by: jonnywhite
Is it a irrational fear of technology or change, or something else? One thing on my mind lately is how stories are usually a vehicle to either fortify our confidence in virtue or to warn us of sinister ends.
originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: jonnywhite
F 451. I read that as a teenager in the late sixties. What struck me deeply about that one was not so much the memorization of books at the end but something in the middle. It was the TV's. TV's that filled a whole wall of a living room. And here we are, almost. But even more than just the size it was the enraptured nature of the viewers and how they were sucked up in the plots of the dramas. And how the characters in a show would go about the plot and talking and stuff and at the right moment they would all turn to the camera as if they were looking at the viewer, and a personalized computer program would fill in the views name and invite them to join the conversation. The viewer would say a few words, while the characters continued to look at the camera and then finally go back to the action. All the
viewers felt like they were in the show. Creepy in 67 and creepy in 16
originally posted by: Profusion
What is our "Perky Pat" game in modern life? I believe it's increasingly the Internet. Just as how the characters in the story above were more concerned with a simulacra of life as experienced through a game than they were about their real lives...
IMHO, we are increasingly more concerned with a simulacra of life as experienced through the Internet than we are about our real lives.
originally posted by: jonnywhite
a reply to: Profusion
Do you think this is in anyway at all related:
(Note the parallels to Philip's story. The man survived an apocalypse, just as the people in "The Days of Perk Pat" survived a thermonuclear war. And just like them, he finds his escape. It's not a doll.)
Books! Can books overtake our lives to unhealthy extremes, if we have enough books and enough time? I ask this because you're making a comparison between the doll(s) in "The Days of Perky Pat" and the internet. You're asserting both of them may absorb us so much we lose our hold on reality. They're delusions (or trances) capable of harming us, like drugs or hedonism or over-reliance on machines (or technology in general) or anything which divorces us from the reality in which we live and depend on for sustenance. Widespread and continued estrangement from our source of sustenance is like giving ourselves over to the Grim Reaper. Do you agree? Do I rightly summarize what you were arguing?