Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas

I believe I missed class this week, but I was able to read through a bit of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, and I do have some thoughts on this subject of discussion. This week is about 'the fiction of ideas', or the exploration of where the science fiction genre began to go in the late 60's and 70's after the initial high-adventure, hero's story space tales had been run through. Many authors began to write darker, more dystopian stories, and essentially explore the negative side of what could happen with the possibility of all the advanced technology coming out.

A Scanner Darkly is a story about drug culture and abuse. The main character, Arctor, lives a double life living in a house full of drug abusers and also as an undercover agent given the task to spy on the household. While on the job, Arctor becomes addicted to Substance D, the fictional psychoactive drug mainly portrayed in the story. As the story progresses, Arctor becomes progressively more and more incapacitated by his drug use, and it comes out that he has become unable to perform his job because of his addiction. He is sent to a rehabilitation center called "New-Path", and the reader learns that the police had wanted to infiltrate New-Path all along. They had intended Arctor to become addicted so that they could have a way into the rehabilitation center, and essentially ruined his life trying to get the job done.

The story raises a few questions about the real trustworthiness of law enforcement, and the extremes that they are required to go through in this day and age, where infiltrating a place or finding the source of some mysterious funding may not be as easy as it might have been 10 or 20 years ago. In the age of artificial intelligence and super-drugs and incredibly easy to access information, it has been made undoubtedly harder for law enforcement to bust people as they get smarter and more difficult to penetrate. What really is the worth of one person in the face of the greater good? In the presence of dangerous new super-drugs, is it really so bad to sacrifice one guy in order to help stop a drug more deadly than the world has ever seen before? Many of these stories raise questions such as this, questions not bothered to ask in the high-adventure scifi stories of previous, where the greater good has always been cut-and-dry and good and evil is clearly identified. These scifi stories have become more realistic and more sophisticated in the way they raise these questions. They become less of a complete escape and more of a way to invoke thought about the real questions one could be asking about this world.