Philip K. Dick may have inspired more Hollywood films than any other science fiction writer. 
Reading his novels and stories, you can understand why. The plots move quickly, diversions are brief, and within the space of a few paragraphs, the narrative can do a back flip and take off in an entirely new direction. His characters often resemble the cast of a science fiction B film, making long, philosophical speeches about the nature of humanity and how there is no universal truth. The hero switches allegiances, reality shifts, and the steely menace of some authoritarian regime is always glittering in the shadows. Blade Runner and Total Recall may have added a glam finish to Dick’s literary creations (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, respectively) but they’re faithful to the originals in their violence-steeped atmosphere of paranoia.
The theme of time travel often weaves its way into the threads of Dick’s stories, in the form of alternate reality (The Man in the High Castle), simulated reality (Now Wait for Last Year), and precognition (“Minority Report”—his 1956 short story that inspired the film). He deals with time travel most directly, however, in the 1960 novel Dr. Futurity. The hero, a doctor named Jim Parsons, is whisked from 2012 to 2405 in order to save an elder of the Wolf Tribe who has been shot with an arrow. Dick uses time travel to explore perceptions of history and reality, and also to point out a flaw in any plot to go into the past and change things: someone else could just as easily follow you and change them back.
The Doctor Is In
Although Dr. Futurity begins in the early 20th century, Parsons himself seems more of an artifact of the 1950s. As he leaves for work his wife stands on the porch in her apron:
She stood small and slender in her green slacks and close-fitting foilite sweater. He waved to her, grabbed one final vision of his pretty wife, their one-story stucco house, the garden, the flagstone path, the California hills rising up in the distance, and then hopped into the car.
Dick does, however, predict the rise of self-driving cars—though a bit prematurely, in 2012, and the cars are controlled externally by something called a “guide-beam”. On his way to work this day, however, the guide-beam throws him off the road and into a bush—and when he comes to he is in 2405. Being a Philip K. Dick hero (think of Schwarzenegger in Total Recall) he skips the whole freak-out-and-run-around-in-a-panic phase of unintentional time travel and moves straight to adaptation:
A doctor would always be needed. He could master the language—an area in which he had always shown skill—and the social customs. Find a place for himself, survive while he discovered how he had gotten here. Eventually get back to his wife, of course.
What Dr. Parsons doesn’t expect is a society where nearly everyone is under thirty, death is embraced, and children are born from zygotes carefully stored in a Soul Cube contributed to by the different social tribes based on merit. The people of this future have no need for doctors, and seem to have forgotten the very concept of medicine. But other technologies have gone forward—including research into time travel. Parsons must evade the viscous shupos—a teenaged paramilitary force reminiscent of the Hitler Youth—and escape a rocket to a prison colony on Mars in order to find the people who had brought him to the 25th Century in the first place. And their reasons for doing so turn out to be very odd indeed.
Time Ships and Galleons
Dick never explains the mechanics of the time travel technology used in Dr. Futurity, but he does describe a “dredge” capable of pulling in objects (and people) from the past, and a “time ship” that a secret group within the Wolf Tribe employ to go back into the past. The plot involves New World explorers and conquistadors, Sir Francis Drake in particular, and the object, as one would expect, is to rewrite history. But as Loris, the leader of the time travelers, explains:
Since my father’s time there has been continual experimentation with the results of altering the past, seeing exactly how the historic process proceeds after a change—even a minute one—has been made. There is a general tendency for the vast, inertial flow to rectify itself. To see a sort of level. It’s almost impossible to affect the far future.
This seems to suggest that in the world of Dr. Futurity, there is only one universe, but the outcomes of certain events can be changed. Or can they? Because Loris and her group are not the only time travelers voyaging into the past, any change they make is subject to further tampering. Parsons begins to have an almost fatalistic view of time, acting so as to fulfill future outcomes he has already seen. The credo of “first do no harm” that he follows in practicing medicine, can, it seems, also be applied to time travel.
Those Damn Kids
An eclectic mix of biology, dystopia, and time travel, Dr. Futurity feels uneven and abbreviated in places, as if the author was in a great hurry to get the novel written. Which, being a starving writer at the time, Dick probably was. There are many inconsistencies. For example, when he first travels to 2405, Parsons can barely understand the strange dialect of half-English spoken by the inhabitants. But within a few pages they can be found conversing plain English. Either Dick forgot about the language barrier, or Parsons really does have an amazing facility for languages. For these and other reasons, the novel is not considered one of his best, even by Philip K. Dick fans. For all that, it’s a quick and engaging read; Dick packs quite a ride into a slim 163 pages.
Dr. Futurity is one of PKD’s earlier novels, written in 1960 when he was 32 (the exact age of Parsons in the story). Even then, however, he might have started feeling his age. The oldest of the Baby Boomers, born in the early ‘40s, were in their late adolescence. Rock & Roll was in ascendency, the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum, and a lot of revisionist history was starting to appear. The youth-dominated culture Parsons encounters in 2405, with its underground cells and identification with Native American culture, could be seen as tracing some of the fault lines of Dick’s own era.
His own personal life seems to have had less influence on this particular book. It was written during one of the more stable periods of his life—he’d just gotten married to his third wife, Anne Williams Rubinstein, his first daughter had just been born, and he was beginning to be known as an up-and-coming sci-fi writer. In the later ‘60s and ‘70s, as his later marriages dissolved, he became addicted to amphetamines, attempted suicide and began to have religious visions (events he recounts in A Scanner Darkly, one of his most highly-acclaimed novels). As Dick himself wrote in Dr. Futurity: “How close the idealist, with his fanatical passion, was to the mentally disturbed.”
Philip K. Dick died from effects from a stroke in 1982, at the age of 53—but not before writing 44 novels and over 100 stories. So if you enjoy your appointment with Dr. Futurity, as I did, there’s a whole library of his work left to explore. Hollywood certainly has.
And in case you missed the previous installments of Vintage Time Travel…
H.P. Lovecraft – the Dark Abyss of Time
L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall – An Alternate History
Christopher Priest’s Infinite Summer
The Prehistory of Time Travel: Utopias, Time Cheques, and Clocks that Run Backward
C.L. Moore’s “Vintage Season”
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