The Military-Industrial-Fur-&-Dye Complex
Now Wait For Last Year (1966) by Philip K Dick
“Tell me about the hallucinations.”
“I can’t; that’s classified military information.”
I’m a huge Dick-head.
Since high school, Philip K. Dick has been my favorite sci-fi writer. Depending on the day, I might call him my favorite writer of any genre. He’s now famous as the writer of the books that were adapted into major movies or TV like Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall (based on the story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”), A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, but at the time of his death in 1985 he was a comparatively uncelebrated writer. Now he’s well-known as a prophet for eerily predicting the kinds of relationships we now have to technology, corporations, governments, and each other, but I’d argue that as a writer he’s more misunderstood than ever. The movies ostensibly based on his work almost completely fail to reflect the qualities that make PKD’s writing special. (A Scanner Darkly is the only good adaptation of a PKD story—change my mind.)
In my mind, the essential features of a good PKD novel are simple but distinctive. First, every character has a real job and an unglamorous daily grind. Whether he’s depicting blue collar working stiffs on Mars, the C-Suite of an exploitative interplanetary conglomerate, or some middle manager in between, PKD has a way of dropping you into the utterly convincing professional anxieties and day-to-day grievances of men of questionable moral integrity. Second, he has a touching tenderness for outcasts, losers, and sad bastards of all kinds. For all the ‘trippiness’ PKD is often credited with, he also possesses a kind and generous perspective on his flailing protagonists, pathetic supporting characters, and their cruel, damaged wives and mistresses. You feel that he’s fallen in love with every woman he ever wrote. Third, nothing is what it seems. The sands of reality are constantly shifting beneath his characters’ feet. As soon as you think you have a handle on what’s going on, the rules change again.
PKD’s corpus can be divided into two broad eras: pre-1974 and post-1974. In February of 1974, following dental surgery, PKD had an intense religious experience during which he believed that he received divine knowledge from a bright pink light that revealed truths about the nature of the world. The light taught him that his son had a rare congenital condition that could have been fatal; when he took him to the doctor, this was proven to be true, so PKD accepted the knowledge as being divine in origin. Over the course of two months, he came to believe that the reality that he experienced of 1970s Southern California was in fact a thin veil of illusion covering the deeper reality that he was part of a group of early Christians living in secret in the Roman Empire circa the first century AD.
He would spend the rest of his life trying to understand this experience that he lived so vividly in February and March of 1974. In his writings, he referred to this episode as 2-3-74. (R. Crumb brought this episode to life in a comic strip that is very much worth the read, here.) Believing himself to have been an unwitting conduit for divinity before the truth was revealed to him, PKD mined his own previously published novels for meaning as though they were scripture. The end result was the VALIS trilogy, written in the years between 2-3-74 and his death in 1985. VALIS is a strange, complex, self-referential novel that blurs the boundaries of fiction, theology, memoir, and philosophy— in which Philip K. Dick himself appears as a character.
In the past year, I read two new-to-me PKD novels: Martian Timeslip and Now Wait for Last Year. Both are novels of the early Sixties, written in 1962 and 1963, respectively (although published later). This was more than a decade before 2-3-74, but a time period in which he was already using lots of amphetamines and incubating the themes that would be more fully explored in ouroboros-like fashion in his later novels.
I’ll briefly say that I found Martian Timeslip very unpleasant and difficult to get through— it entertains interesting but clearly half-baked theories about Jews on Mars and autism and contains the most disturbing sex scene I’ve ever read. Just thinking the word ‘gubbish’ makes me squirm. Its use of the N-word by ignorant characters to describe indigenous Martians is pointed and probably, in a pre-Civil Rights-movement sense, quite progressive satire, but I still found it uncomfortable and gratuitous. I wouldn’t say that Martian Timeslip was ‘bad,’ per se, but I did find it challenging. I would not recommend it to someone who’s never read PKD or has only read 1-2 other books by him. In my mind, it doesn’t belong on the ‘major works’ list, despite being included in volume 1 of the Library of American set. In fact, it’s the first novel in the first volume, which I think is a mistake. I don’t think it’s representative of Dick’s work as a whole.
Now Wait For Last Year, in contrast, was a delight. It has all the elements of what I consider ‘Classic Dick’— a marriage on the rocks, a demanding job within the military-industrial complex (at a furrier-cum-defense-contractor called Tijuana Fur & Dye), reality-altering drugs, time travel (question mark?), and sinister aliens who aren’t what they appear.
At the book’s heart is the troubled relationship between Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife, Kathy. Both work for Tijuana Fur & Dye, a defense contractor grudgingly mobilized in the war between the humanoid Lilistarmen and the insectile Reegs. Kathy, a chronic drug-user, gets her hands on a new military-grade psychedelic called JJ-80, which is produced by a subsidiary of Tijuana Fur & Dye and, unbeknownst to her, has some unusual side effects: it seems to cause the user to time travel and addiction is guaranteed after one use. When Dr. Sweetscent gets a new job as the personal surgeon for the UN Secretary General (who rules over all of Earth from Washington, DC), he and Kathy are pulled into interplanetary political intrigue, which they must navigate by using JJ-80 to travel backwards and forward in time.
This is not a straightforward time travel story. PKD doesn’t care to play around with grandfather paradoxes or any other common tropes of the genre. Whether or not the time travel actually occurs is ambiguous. In a sense, the book is a love story with a healthy dose of the grotesque.
The premise of a military-grade psychedelic drug leaking to the public is remarkable, in part, because of how early it was written. Remember, this was 1963, still five years away from the Summer of Love and the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Since finishing Now Wait for Last Year, I’ve been brushing up on my hippie/drug history because 1963 struck me as an entirely different cultural moment than the one, later in the decade and into the 1970s, when the use of hallucinogens became widespread. Maybe I’m naive or just misinformed, but to put 1963 into perspective: Lawrence of Arabia won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1963. Gregory Peck won best actor for To Kill A Mockingbird. The American public was not generally turning on, tuning in, or dropping out at this point. Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard for dosing undergrads with LSD in 1963. And PKD was writing a sad love story soaked in prescient psychedelia.
People have been using naturally-occurring psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca since time immemorial, but synthetic hallucinogenics didn’t gain a central place in American counterculture until the mid-1960s. LSD was first synthesized in 1938, but it wasn’t incorporated into psychiatric experiments until the 1950s. Project Chatter, US Navy project that illegally tested various interrogation techniques on unwitting subjects, started experimenting with using LSD and mescaline as a ‘truth serum’ in 1947. The project was later folded into MKUltra, the long-running CIA program that experimented with interrogation and brainwashing methods—it was through MKUltra that Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the original Merry Prankster, first encountered psychedelics. However, MKUltra wasn’t made public until 1975.
Ultimately, though I enjoyed the main time travel/drug trip/alien warfare plot, the book captured my heart in the first few pages with a minor subplot. A QC technician at Tijuana Fur & Dye was revealed to be spending his own money to purchase defective munitions from his employer because the production method involved a shape-shifting alien amoeba that instinctively mimics any material at the cellular level. Believing these amoebas to be sentient and deserving of life, the tech rigs a little cart for each amoeba to wheel themselves around, then sets them loose in the streets of Tijuana. The other characters think he’s a total lunatic. But we know that he’s right; that we’re all just fucked up little amoebas who could use a tiny measure of grace and tenderness.