reading in hindsight: Maladjustment by Philip K Dick
When I was younger, I read a lot of science fiction short stories. I would go to used book stores and buy collected stories of individual authors and anthologies, themed and unthemed. I don’t have the ones I collected in high school, but I have I think made up for that in the years since.
One of the stories I remembered reading rang a bell, and I’d been trying to find it. Google helped a bit, once I had a bit more information, but a story involving people who warp reality through their perceptions doesn’t provide enough specification.
Once I’d remembered that it might be a Philip K Dick story, I had two choices. I could go back to Google and ask again, with this additional information, or I could back and reread (rereread? though it has been enough years that the pages have yellowed) his collected stories. In the end, life being busy, I opted for the former option and alighted on Maladjustment.
In summary, parakineticists have emerged among human beings. These are people who have a particular delusion but also have the power to impose their delusion upon the world. In the story, we encounter a few of these P-K individuals. One can fly. One can grow transport craft on a vine in his backyard. One can walk through walls but not fall through floors.
There is an Agency who attempts to keep the P-Ks in check, an all female Agency because all of the P-Ks are men, but when they rightfully target an important industrialist, he decides that the Agency needs to cease.
But they need then a way of keeping the P-Ks in check, and this is where for me the story got interesting. The idea isn’t well developed, but the idea is that we will rely on our collective understanding of reality to spot those individuals who are diverging.
Not meaning to take a sharp left turn here, but there is a reason this story rang a bell. I’ve been listening to a lot of news recently, the world being a complicated place these days, and I’ve come to realize the truth of something I’ve heard from multiple different sources.
One of the impact of the Internet is that our news ecosystem has atomized. I can remember the old days, in the before times, when we had only a few common sources of news. Now we can each find, if we wish, sources for the news and opinion we want to hear, without the news and opinion we don’t.
This atomization of news reflects the fracturing of reality that we see in Maladjustment. The idea that we can use the collective to ride herd on the individual doesn’t work in the story; this is the twist contained in the last line two lines. “A man who grew jet transports from a plant in his backyard was clearly a lunatic. It was so much simpler just to flap one’s arms.”
One of the things I like about reading PKD’s is precisely this. Sometimes the settings feel very dated. Sometimes, the characters can be a bit formulaic or staid. But there is always an idea at the core of the story that will reverberate, an idea that is a mirror in which we can some aspect of our world that requires some focus and attention.
multijimbo 