Book Review: The Zap Gun by Philip K. Dick

I have been reevaluating a lot of my old favorites of late - William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, and now Philip K. Dick, and I find that all four have stood the test of time. In fact, if anything, I find that they have grown with me such that I find them perhaps even more relevant for me today as when I first became infatuated with their writing and ideas three decades ago. Back in the day, I was quite a Dickhead, as fans of the late Philip K. Dick call themselves.  I plowed through a good chunk of his 44 published novels, and got quite a bit out of them.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, his books were not about science, they were about the future, and the frustrations and challenges that ordinary people might face.  The characters lived in drab,  rundown tower flats (conapts) with annoying, overly-cheerful neighbors.  The talking machines were always making unwanted comments, and the vending machines didn’t work, and the government was terrifying, yet at the same time, inept. There were often intricate conspiracies behind even the most mundane events. People took drugs, and they were addictive, and tawdry, and had unexpected and strange effects, both in the short and the long term.  Time and space were plastic and unpredictable. More than any other sci-fi author, PKD’s novels are about everyday life in dystopia.

The Zap Gun is one of the ten-odd PKD novels I never got around to reading.  It was originally published in 1965, which is when I think Dick really hit his stride with his signature combination of paranoia, totalitarianism, time-bending, and drugs with universally acclaimed classics like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Now Wait for Last Year, and Dr. Bloodmoney.  Although I would not rank Zap Gun with the aforementioned must-read classics, it did not disappoint.

It is the not-so-distant future.  Something like NATO (Wes-bloc) and something like the Soviet Bloc (Peep-east) seem to have pretty much absorbed all the other nation states, and the insanity of the arms race has led to a twisted sort of detente.  Because of the indiscriminate power of the H-bomb, both nations have privately agreed not to attack one another, so there is no need to build an arsenal.  However, since Communism and Capitalism are so ideologically opposed, and to justify the continued existence of the military-industrial complex, both sides maintain the charade of an arms race.  To this end, both countries have weapons designers who take psychoactive drugs, and concoct weapons designs in their trance states.  Prototypes of the weapons are built, then filmed in elaborate war scenes that show the public how mind-numbingly lethal they are, then they are “plow-shared”, ie, converted to peaceful use as tools or toys.  Dick observes that the reaction to the indiscriminate wholesale destructiveness of the Hydrogen Bomb seems to be to create ever-more precise weapons, to where at some point, you could simply vaporize any specific person at will.

Lars Powderdry is the Wes-bloc weapons designer, and he feels guilty that the public doesn’t know that he is essentially a fraud.  He is also terrified that he will run out of weapon designs one day, and be replaced by another weapons designer. Just as this begins to come to a head, alien spacecraft begin to orbit the Earth. For the first time in decades, the two superpowers must collaborate for their mutual survival.  Will Powderdry and his Peep-east counterpart be able to come up with a real weapon this time?

It seems like the plot will continue down this path when suddenly, time travel and empathy and teleportation and telepathy emerge. Dick will often briefly introduce a very peripheral character early in a story, then bring them back as the malefactor causing all the trouble.  I will neither confirm nor deny that PKD uses this device in The Zap Gun.

A lesser character, Surley G. Febbs, lurks in the background.  He is an ordinary citizen who has studied weapons his entire life, and has just been selected to join the government.  He is racist, unfriendly, and convinced of his own genius.  He is confident that if the incompetent morons in charge just listen to him, he can win the war with Peep-east in short order.  Of course, he has no idea that the entire conflict between East and West is a charade at this point, and this knowledge probably wouldn’t stop him from wanting to obliterate the Enemy, anyway.  That’s just the kind of guy Febbs is.
I find the notion of building weapons to be used against non-threatening  enemies to be remarkably similar to our current arms buildup against ISIS, which under no imaginable circumstance poses an existential threat to the United States.  Without naming names, I think it’s safe to say that Surley G. Febbs’ ambition, intolerance and crusade to upset the political status quo is reminiscent of some of the current themes in US politics.  

Dick was not a scientist, and neither are his protagonists: at most they are garage tinkerers. His science is pretty weak - none of the devices in The Zap Gun would plausibly work. But they are ingenious and compelling and believable in the funhouse mirror of Dick’s imagined future. PKD’s vision of what the future would look like is a bit off, and his constant use of Orwellian compound words like conapt and Wes-bloc makes his technology sound rather dated. But he absolutely nails the feeling of helplessness, and the dreary ordinariness of technology and life itself that our future seems to be becoming.

I never noticed before how Dick manages to weave seemingly random knowledge that Dick insinuates into his stories.  He quotes Shakespeare, then goes into a deep analysis of Teutonic myth, including Parsifal and Siegfried, both from a Wagnerian and a medieval literary perspective. He regularly intersperses German phrases, Freudian psychology, and early greco-christian philosophy into the dialogue.  When Lars meets his arms manufacturer in a coffee shop, Dick opines that it was coffee shops and coffee itself that awoke the West after centuries of decline under the influence of increasingly potent forms of alcoholic beverage. Whether or not you agree with this conclusion, PKD’s history is unassailable.

In the afterword, Dick is quoted as saying what a ghastly hack job Zap Gun was, written very quickly and without much thought or planning. If that was indeed the case, then this book pays all the more tribute to this writer’s incredible inventiveness and talent.