Week 7/8 Speculative Fiction vs. Science Fiction

According to Margaret Atwood (2010) science fiction has ancestry with the likes of H.G Wells with his works of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds where plots are written that are very unlikely or near impossible to happen. Speculative fiction has been categorized into an area where the plot could be played out in another time or had history not happened in the way that it did – whether the worlds written about be utopian or dystopian. Speculative fiction came about with the likes of Jules Verne where it the plot wasn’t about space invasions and outer space but rather things that we could actually do.

It has been noted that a lot of utopias were written about before WW1 however with the horror of war and disillusioned generations the idea of a perfect world was nothing more than a distant imagination. Atwood notes that when people attempted to create a Utopia (the Soviet Union) far more people were sacrificed in the name of having a perfect world than actually creating a perfect word – and so came about the writing of many dystopias such as Man in the High Castle.

Given the personality and beliefs of Philip K. Dick himself it is easy to see how and why he managed to write so convincingly about places that could exist one day – or could have existed had history been different. Brown (1962) notes that Dick was an anti-establishment intellectual who had an obsession with metaphysics and the nature of perceived reality.

This interest of Dick emphasises the speculation in speculative fiction of which is represented in Man in the High Castle but also A Scanner Darkly (which focus more on the idea of parallel realities). Ultimately, as Brown states, his art reflected his life.

 Man in the High Castle, being speculative fiction conforms to what Atwood (2010) defines where  the plot occupies a reality that could have existed and investigates the idea of interconnectedness using the I Ching (which he used himself) as a vehicle to represent a Jungian synchronicity (Brown, 1962). But it seems Dick’s main message of Man in the High Castle is that better worlds might exist – an idea which one of the main characters, Juliana Frink, becomes obsessed with. And again, the shattering of a  perceived reality when Juliana learns how Abdensen’s novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy came  to be written – emphasising Dick’s belief in parallel realities and metaphysics.