On Eye in the Sky (1957)

Eye in the Sky is a Philip K. Dick novel about worlds. Like much of Dick's fiction, the novel is concerned about how we come to know the conditions of the world around us. Eye cleaves close to a formula that Dick liked to use very often: a group of people are brought into proximity with one another, and forces beyond their control put them into psychic connection with one another. Like in Ubik or A Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky is about how the humans, often in concert with one another, mold the world into particular shapes.

The conceit of the novel is this: A missile engineer is told that his wife is a suspected communist because of the magazines and journals that she reads. Shaken, they attempt to spend the day at a science facility. They tour the building with several other people. The group pauses on an observation platform high above the "Bevatron," which does some thing or another, and at that moment a particle deflector breaks. A beam of energy slices the platform from the wall, and the group falls to the floor. They fall unconscious, and they wake up in a world with newly-written rules.

The plot of the novel takes us through several different worlds, and we learn that each world is the projected world of a human who was in the tour group. In these projected worlds, the creator is a god whose mind fully underwrites all things in that world. For example, the creator of the first world has rendered a cultish God completely real, and any form of blasphemy generates small plagues or damned existence; on the flip side, you repair your car by praying at it. Divine grace is rendered real, it governs all things, and there is no escape from it.

Dick uses these different worlds to prod at ideologies that he (or at least the "average" science fiction reader during the time of writing) might want to critique. We get fundamentalist religion (rendered as "Mohammadean faith", a kind of proto-antiIslam), the parochial bourgeois world of the middle class that desires niceness and frictionless life, pure paranoia, and radical leftism. Each of these worlds is stretched to their logical limit, using the assumptions of those ideas to then support an entire existence, and they appropriately fall apart very quickly.

Eye in the Sky, if you've not picked it up yet, is about ideology. It is about how thoughts can come to manipulate the world around them. While Eye's worlds work through pure fiat, the actual material world is only manipulated by thought in the sense that thoughts and their transmission necessarily reorganize the material world around them. You can insert infinite debates about base and superstructure, materialism and idealism, content and expression here, but I'm evoking the broad strokes of this book and what it wants to critique (or present us with) only because I find its negative valences so interesting.

The novel establishes all of these different worlds so that our protagonists have to navigate them, and they eventually get tired of it. We don't need the fiction to get us to this argument; the social worlds created by thoughts about the shape of the world create horrible little pockets of existence for all of us, whether we work in construction or document preparation, and I imagine it's a rare person who navigates those bleak spaces without some desire for escape.

Eye in the Sky sets up the politics of living within these ideological worlds as questions of existence and nonexistence. In the second world of the novel, a kind of parochial space where everything that is unpleasant to middle class life is "abolished" (swamps, factories, and cats all included), the novel runs right up against the limits of why we live within ideology at all.

To live is to live within social structure and its ideas about what makes it up and what it excludes. You try to exist, you get ideas about that existence, and you get caught up in ideology. Brilliantly, the conclusion of the second world in Eye comes at the hands of the proliferation of ideology itself -- the character who is controlling that world is both opinionated and highly impressionable. The other characters, desperate to leave this existence, simply convince her that all things that make up life are ultimately undesirable.

"All animals but man," Miss Reiss gasped breathlessly. It was done.
"All life forms but man," Hamilton topped her.
"Acids!" Miss Reiss shouted, and instantly sank down to her knees, face contorted with pain. All of them writhed in an ecstasy of discomfort; basic body chemistry had been radically altered.
"Certain metallic salts!" Hamilton screamed. Again, they were convulsed by internal agony.
"Phosphorus!" "Sodium chloride!" "Iodine!"
"Calcium!" Miss Reiss sank semi-conscious onto her elbows; all of them lay strewn about in postures of helpless suffering. The bloated, palpitating body of Edith Pritchet wriggled in spasms; saliva dribbled from her slack lips as she fought to concentrate on the enumerated categories. (181)

It is only through the total abolition of existence that the characters of the novel can defeat a force that slices the world into pleasant feelings and exclusion based on unpleasant feelings. Importantly, race is operative in each of the worlds created by the various ideologies on display in the novel. In the first world, the novel's only black character turns into a literal racist caricature; within the rules of that universe, the only existence for a person of color is as a horrifying stereotype, and that idea is written into reality. Similarly, the second world has a small plot point centered on "abolishing" the Irish; the god of this world is easily convinced that the Irish have never contributed anything to society, and as such is prepared to annihilated them completely.

The struggle within the novel, then, is centered around existing at all. Eye in the Sky seems to produce an argument for closing down existence itself for good. After all, the only way to escape worlds created by human thought (all of which have been shown as brutally destructive for many and unbearable for some) is to totally evacuate oneself from those worlds.

Toward the end of the novel, in a world created by a paranoiac conspiracist, the couple that frame the novel have this exchange about the possibility of continuing existence in that world.

"Well," she said, "that's our answer."
"To what question?"
"To the question, can we live? The answer is no. Worse than no."
"There's nothing worse than no," he said, but even to his own ears his voice lacked conviction. (192)

After this exchange, the trauma of the narrative is resolved. Our protagonists are saved from the terror of the mental worlds created by each other. They come back to the material world; they quit the military-industrial complex and buy fully into a world of abstract wealth creation. Two characters unite with the investment capital of a third in order to build things; whatever your consumer needs, they will create it. The sly point Dick is making here is that this world, too, is much the same as the ideological fable worlds that preceded it in the novel.

If our world is build the same way as these worlds, out of the same thought-and-material structure, then I think it's worth putting PKD's most negative thoughts into play. To take seriously that there is something worse than no, that existence might not be all that it's cracked up to be. It's worth reading this novel as a pessimistic text that holds that life is violence, and that violence might be worth opting out of. It's not something we normally associate with Dick (at best we might get the "God exists and it is evil" argument from something like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), but I think it is definitely at play here in Eye in the Sky. In this novel, the very process of creating a world is, in fact, like creating a trap, and the worst thing might be being forced to continue life within it.