With a legacy of one hundred and twenty-one short stories and thirty-six novels (several adapted to film and television, such as in Blade Runner, The Avenger of the Future, or Minority Report), Philip K. Dick became an inescapable author of science fiction and fantasy literature. Owner of a unique sensibility, he knew how to anticipate like no one else the future in which we live, a world already collapsed, crossed by control, delirium and falsehood, and that cries out to be "repaired".
David Lapoujade, a philosopher by profession -who already in Fictions of pragmatism and about the brothers William and Henry James, knew how to cross the channels that connect literature and philosophy- dedicated himself to reading the complete works of Dick and to tearing from there crucial notions to think about our present and becoming.
The dystopian pluriverse that Dick portrays is a world where not only do many worlds fit, but they constantly interfere with each other. And it is the quintessential anti-Cartesian locus, as the three classical principles of identity, reality and causality collapse one after another, like a house of cards. The boundaries between what is real and false, me and non-self, cause and effect, sleep and wakefulness, are diluted in a world subjected to control and human hunting, and where we witness a radical androidization of the social field.
But far from succumbing to dystopian determination, falling into depression or suicide, Dick offers salvific figures. The man of power, digital, cold, paranoid, empty and insensitive, always accompanied by his "engineer", is opposed by empathy, resistant and solitary irresponsibility, the operational analogy of the bricoleur, creator and repairer of worlds.