Elsewhere, Elsewhen and Otherwise: The Wild Lives of Radios in the Worlds of Philip K. Dick

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).