What did I just read?
Lately I've been trying to be a more well read sci-fi fan, and more aware of what's going on in the genre. I'm also trying to pick a few classics. Philip K. Dick was a natural place to start. And, yeah, this had a lot to do with the Minority Report TV show starting up. I'd read a couple of Dick's novels before, and had bounced off of them. But this time I picked a collection of his short stories and was shocked not only by how much I enjoyed them, but how well they had aged. There were several stories that I could barely believe had been written in the 50's.
So, I went looking for more. I read his novel VALIS which I think even someone who likes Dick's novel could only concede is really fucking weird. (Dick got really bizarre as time went on.) I also picked up another short story collection. And that was how I came across "The Pre-Persons". An anti-abortion screed barely disguised as a sci-fi story, in which evil abortion advocates have passed a law that declares that children under twelve do not have souls and can therefore can be killed if their parents no longer want them. Calling this a slippery slope fallacy doesn't seem to go far enough.
Thomas M. Disch, who wrote the introduction to the collection (which is called The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol 5: The Eye of The Sibyl) tries to insist that "The Pre-Persons" raises really interesting questions, and you could totally make a novel out of it that was in no way an anti-abortion tract. The thing is, he's wrong. "If abortion, why not infanticide?" is no more a relevant ethical conundrum than, "If we eat beef, why shouldn't we eat people?" is. And there's no way to make this story anything other than an anti-abortion tract. That's all it is. It's not like it simply leaves the reader with the painfully obvious metaphor. No, there's paragraphs and paragraphs about how this all happened because abortion was legal, how there's no difference between killing an eleven year old and aborting a fetus, and how terribly evil abortion is. The arguments that the pro-abortion character use lead me to assume that Dick never had an actual conversation with a pro-choice person. And why does Dick think women have abortions? Because they hate "everything that grows." No, seriously. Women have abortions because they are evil. They hate men, children, and everything that is good.
Yeah, I'd suspected that Dick had women issues before this. The most common type of female character in a Dick story is the shrew wife who sucks the joy from her husband. But this was just over the top. Women are "castrators." Men and (male, of course) children can dream of being free of them, but women will never let them go. There's another type of woman, out there somewhere. Because Dick needs a few Madonnas to go along with his whores. But it's strongly suggested that these women are different because they are accommodating. (This is actually made crystal clear in another story in this collection, "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked." Women are either ball breaking bitches or sweet, submissive Madonnas. But mostly bitches.)
I think after I finish this collection, I may not read anymore Philip K. Dick for a while. Maybe some Joanna Russ instead.
This entry was originally posted at http://veleda-k.dreamwidth.org/446667.html. Please consider commenting there.
So, I went looking for more. I read his novel VALIS which I think even someone who likes Dick's novel could only concede is really fucking weird. (Dick got really bizarre as time went on.) I also picked up another short story collection. And that was how I came across "The Pre-Persons". An anti-abortion screed barely disguised as a sci-fi story, in which evil abortion advocates have passed a law that declares that children under twelve do not have souls and can therefore can be killed if their parents no longer want them. Calling this a slippery slope fallacy doesn't seem to go far enough.
Thomas M. Disch, who wrote the introduction to the collection (which is called The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol 5: The Eye of The Sibyl) tries to insist that "The Pre-Persons" raises really interesting questions, and you could totally make a novel out of it that was in no way an anti-abortion tract. The thing is, he's wrong. "If abortion, why not infanticide?" is no more a relevant ethical conundrum than, "If we eat beef, why shouldn't we eat people?" is. And there's no way to make this story anything other than an anti-abortion tract. That's all it is. It's not like it simply leaves the reader with the painfully obvious metaphor. No, there's paragraphs and paragraphs about how this all happened because abortion was legal, how there's no difference between killing an eleven year old and aborting a fetus, and how terribly evil abortion is. The arguments that the pro-abortion character use lead me to assume that Dick never had an actual conversation with a pro-choice person. And why does Dick think women have abortions? Because they hate "everything that grows." No, seriously. Women have abortions because they are evil. They hate men, children, and everything that is good.
Yeah, I'd suspected that Dick had women issues before this. The most common type of female character in a Dick story is the shrew wife who sucks the joy from her husband. But this was just over the top. Women are "castrators." Men and (male, of course) children can dream of being free of them, but women will never let them go. There's another type of woman, out there somewhere. Because Dick needs a few Madonnas to go along with his whores. But it's strongly suggested that these women are different because they are accommodating. (This is actually made crystal clear in another story in this collection, "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked." Women are either ball breaking bitches or sweet, submissive Madonnas. But mostly bitches.)
I think after I finish this collection, I may not read anymore Philip K. Dick for a while. Maybe some Joanna Russ instead.
This entry was originally posted at http://veleda-k.dreamwidth.org/446667.html. Please consider commenting there.