Review by C.J. Bunce
By 1963 Philip K. Dick had written 25 novels and 85 short stories, so when he penned The Simulacra, he had already perfected his singular style. That’s a few too many characters to keep track of and a few too many layers of plot threads to stay riveting. The result was often another novel that contained some brilliant ideas bogged down by several merely great ones. Like Michael Crichton would later establish his own defining panoply of archetype roles to be tweaked for each new story, Dick crowded his stories with as many quirky types as possible. Most were plagued by despair and the specter of entropy, either slowly moving toward their downfall or seeming to rush as quickly as possible to embrace their own bitter fates–others were aliens, robots, or all-powerful dictators for the masses to blindly, soullessly obey.
In The Simulacra we meet another great cautionary tale in science fiction, featuring several common folk and the key American leadership in a parallel United States where Germany became the 53rd state, Nazism is at the front of politicians’ minds, and the U.S. is led by a man as President, but the First Lady really runs the show. And only a select few know the President is really an android.
Like Nostradamus, Dick is a figure whose writings you can twist and turn to reflect real prescient ideas as well as the oddball conspiracy variety. But the backbone of The Simulacra is like the 1993 movie Dave, which starred Kevin Kline as both the U.S. President and an actor hired to replace him when he falls terminally ill, with Sigourney Weaver playing the First Lady, and Frank Langella playing the vile leader actually pulling the strings. Each of those types is present here: Kalbfleisch is in the President role, called “der alte,” which means Old Man. The First Lady is Nicole Thibodeaux, a brilliant leader who takes her job of running the country seriously and she’s beloved like the era’s Taylor Swift. As in Dave, she hates her husband, which doesn’t matter because he’s a robot, and Americans only want to know about her every thought and move anyway. Those in-the-know about the secret of the robot Presidents (Kalbfleisch is only the latest to have been “elected”) and that Nicole Thibodeaux died decades ago, too (this Nicole is really Nicole #4, a lookalike actress named Kate Rupert) are known as the “Ges,” or bearers of the secret, and the rest of the citizenry the “Bes,” the rule followers. The Langella role in Dick’s tale is part of the secret of both the elite Ges and a secret he holds back until the end of his story.
But if you’ve read The Man in the High Castle or other Dick novels, you know it’s the puttering about of the apartment dwellers that you’ll spend most of your time with. Other than the First Lady, which has Dick giving the rare strong woman any attention, the only other woman of consequence is Julie Strikerock, who is mentioned only because she’s another woman cheating on a male protagonist. She’s married to Chic, but cheating with his brother Vince, who, like the rest of America, really only cares about watching First Lady Nicole’s next move. It’s here where you can see how 24-hour TV, the Internet, droid phones, and social media could be used in a TV or movie adaptation in the 2020s. Another Dick sidebar story is Vince and a friend wanting to leave Earth for Mars or Ganymede–low-budget space travel is also a feature of this reality, along with time travel devices (only controlled by the elite Ges) and the rare psionic human. The best example of psionic people in Dick stories are those submerged psychics in the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Dick’s Minority Report.
The psionic of the novel is a key story driver. Richard Kongrosian stinks. Only he doesn’t really. He is easily susceptible to ads of the day, including one that called viewers out for having body odor, and this ad stuck with him. He was seeing a psychiatrist for this and other conditions, but a new law, the MacPhearson Act, driven by a Big Pharma company called A.G. Chemie, made psychiatrists illegal. The First Lady is aware of Kongrosian’s psionic ability of being a premiere pianist (he can play via his mind, without using his hands), and she also might be aware he has greater potential, causing her to make an exception to the law for Kongrosian’s psychiatrist, who boasts the very oddball Dickian name of Dr. Egon Superb (with the way lawyers grossly exaggerate their firms in commercials, you could see how Dick saw doctors getting to this point someday).
Meanwhile First Lady Nicole has her radar on Bertold Goltz, who is trying to overthrow the country, and runs a religious-military terrorist cult called the Sons of Job. She’s watching Goltz as she uses her own access to time travel equipment–being the highest of the Ges elite–and decides to snatch Nazi Hermann Goering from the past to be her own personal political advisor. This doesn’t sit right with Wilder Pembroke, commissioner of the National Police, who is constantly a point of friction for the First Lady.
One more thing: Dick manages to weave a thread whereby modern Neanderthals play into Earth’s future. Fans of alternate histories who like seeing Earth turned into the boardgame Risk with new political borders, will be interested in Dick’s manipulation of “future history” in The Simulacra. Fans of Dick’s expertise in drugs, music, and cigars will find tidbits peppered throughout. See, for example, a pair of musicians named Ian Duncan and Al Miller, who have a classical jug band show. What more craziness could Dick have shoe-horned into this novel? The craziest part is that he brings all the threads together in the end. All the players come crashing together when the big secret makes its way to the media. With a history of robot Presidents and a permanent First Lady with no actual claim to power, who is going to take the world forward as leader?
Originally published in novelette form in Fantastic magazine as “The Novelty Act,” Dick rewrote the story (Dick frequently wrote stories into novels) into the book First Lady of Earth, retitled to The Simulacra. This was one of four books released by Dick in 1964. As a quick aside, every cover to any edition of this novel is a reflection of the often complete disconnection between cover artists and authors throughout the history of publishing–none of the art in any edition to date reflects the content, story, or key characters of this novel.
The Simulacra somehow has all the twistiness of his award-winning The Man in the High Castle, which seems unthinkable considering he was in that part of his career when he was known to be souped up on amphetamines.
Check out prior reviews in my ongoing series reviewing Dick’s novels and stories here:
Roog
Solar Lottery
The World Jones Made
The Man Who Japed
The Broken Bubble
Time Out of Joint
Now Wait for Last Year
We Can Build You
Philip K. Dick’s cover art archive
borg articles referencing Philip K. Dick
As a life-long Philip K. Dick enthusiast, I found The Simulacra as one of the more readable books from the author’s drug-induced era. It’s difficult to get into, but once you can keep track of the key characters you can see Dick’s writing artistry, and maybe even some brilliance. Somehow Dick skipped the cringier elements of sex and race references that plagued some of his other novels, which was refreshing change. With correlations in technology in reality to Dick’s ideas, the novel would be an easy adaptation for the 2020s. A recommended retro read, The Simulacra is available in several editions here at Amazon.
