Stanislaw Lem- Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

IS CREATIVE WORK WITHOUT
MYSTIFICATION possible in such an environment? An answer to this question is given by the stories of Philip K.
Dick. While these stand out from the background against which they have
originated, it is not easy to capture the ways in which they do, since Dick employs the
same materials and theatrical props as other American writers. From the warehouse
which has long 
since become their common property, he takes the whole
threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel. In his
stories terrible catastrophes happen, but this too is no exception to
the rule, for lengthening the list of sophisticated ways in which the world
can end is among 
the standard preoccupations of SF. But where other SF writers
explicitly name
and delimit the source of the disaster, whether social
(terrestrial or cosmic
war) or natural (elemental forces of nature), the world of
Dick’s stories
suffers dire changes for reasons which remain unascertainable to
the end.