Philip K Dick You Were Spot On

I’m expecting some furious posting in the blogosphere following tonight’s excellent Four Corners examination of Second Life. Most other posts will be far more insightful and articulate than mine. And you can get another take on Second Life here. But I would mention about tonight's Four Corners that:

1. Ticky Fullerton’s report asked the questions I was thinking of;
2. She then asked a whole heap of questions that hadn't occurred to me;
3. That $7.50 virtual penis looked uncannily like mine;

But I was struck by how closely Second Life parallels a novel by prolific science fiction author Philip K Dick.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) concerns a UN program of hallucinogenic drug induced proto Virtual Reality developed for the diversion of homesick off-world colonists. Users can take the drugs and then integrate themselves into Barbie-like model scenes that are more expensive the more lavish they are. Expensive scenarios become status symbols and characters deperately try to keep up with the Joneses.

What a brilliant, visionary author he was. I think I even remember reading in Lawrence Sutin’s, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, (Carroll & Graf, 2005) that he was thrown out of a sci-fi writers conference in about 1980 for heckling keynote speaker Isaac Asimov. One year later, after his novella Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? had been adapted and would become the movie Blade Runner, he WAS the keynote speaker.

And I have something of a background in futurology myself. After all, during a 1982 sociology tute at uni, I correctly predicted that the following things would completely die out within a few short years:

1. Voting Liberal;
2. Alcohol;
3. Tattoos;