Philip K. Dick: Cat Joke “The Steak Gone”

Philip K. Dick: Cat American science-fiction writer whose best known works are Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Three Stigmata Palmer Eldritch and The Man in the High Castle. Oh, you can’t forget about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  Dick’s novels and short stories often depict the psychological struggles of characters trapped in illusory environments. Ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death. Dick is well-known as a cat lover and left a short ‘cat joke’.

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was born on December 16, 1928, Chicago, Illinois. Death of his twin sister 41 days after their birth influenced him tremendously. Later a string of bad marriages and followed drug-abuse would deprive his sanity.

In 1952 launched his full-time writing career working on short stories and novellas, and published his first novel, Solar Lottery in 1955.  Since then, he wrote 35 science-fiction novels and six short-story collections.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

Philip K. Dick Quotes (Brainy Quote)

Cat Joke

Dick is well known for his love of cats. He owned a number of cats throughout his life. Simply more than pets, cats had played notable roles to affect Dick’s philosophy. He began ‘rattling on’ cats when his big blue cat ran away. He wrote in a letter about gone five-pound stake and five pounds of cat. It’s about people at the home party conclude the cat ate the five-pound stake, which the hostess had prepared by weighing the cat and saw ‘five pounds’ on the scale. But where the cat itself go if the stake was in the cat?? Well, the figure of the cat takes on a supernatural power; its body disappears as it takes on, integrates, incorporates, the material remains of another animal: T-bone stake from a bovine. Cats are ever-mysterious creature or have power to make us think that way.

When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.

Philip K. Dick Quotes (Brainy Quotes)

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Dick won the highest award in the science fiction world in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle. The novel was loosely adapted as a serial drama (2015– ) that was streamed online by Amazon.com. What if the United States lost the WWII instead Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won and occupied the United States? That is the central theme in this novel. It depicts the details of daily life under the resulting totalitarian rule.

Japan has the West Coast to the Rocky Mountains, there’s a neutral zone, and the Nazis own everything else to the Atlantic Ocean.

Juliana Crain is a San Francisco woman who becomes entangled with the resistance when her half-sister Trudy is killed by the Kempeitai, just after giving Juliana a film reel that contains newsreel-style footage depicting an alternate history in which the Allies won World War II and Germany and Japan were defeated.

Joe Blake is a 27-year-old New Yorker who is a double agent working for the Nazis under Obergruppenführer John Smith. He is pretending to be a member of the resistance while he searches for the resistance contact in Canon City, which is Juliana, substituting for Trudy.

Those two characters on opposite ends of the country both blindly heading towards Colorado in order to pass along a newsreel for the secret underground rebellion…

Dick said he conceived The Man in the High Castle when reading Bring the Jubilee (1953), by Ward Moore, which occurs in an alternate nineteenth-century U.S. wherein the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War.

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

Philip K. Dick quotes (goodreads)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted for film as Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, the illusion centers on artificial creatures at large and grappling with what is authentic in a real world of the future.

The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in which genetically engineered replicants, which are visually indistinguishable from adult humans, are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation.

The use of replicants on Earth is banned and they are exclusively utilized for dangerous or menial work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and killed (retired) by special police operatives known as Blade Runners.

Dick made no secret that much of his thinking and work was heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Jung. Overall, his attempts to demonstrate the ever-expanding potential of the universe are personal journeys into his own realities, which often includes elements of paranoia, psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucination and more. Reading his novels let you experience a intense journey through many human emotions.

Dick died on March 2, 1982  at the age of 53, in Santa Ana, California where he’d spent most of his life. Throughout his works, there’s one ruminated question in his mind. What constitutes the authentic human being? Beings can appear totally human in every respect while lacking soul or compassion, while completely alien beings may be more humane and complex than Dick’s human characters. Today, we ask ourselves ‘Are we more humane or alien’?

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change… and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Philip K. Dick quotes (goodreads)

References

The Man in the High Castle (Wikipedia)
Blade Runner (Wikipedia)

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Also published on Medium.