Why I Love 1950s Paranoid Scifi

Back in the summer of 2022, I finally managed to trick myself into reading books again, after about a 7 year period of no books, and I’m so happy I’ve been reading almost every week since then. I have been reading many different genres, and I’m also happy I haven’t “locked” myself into only a single genre.

However, there are two types of books I keep coming back to. CIA spy thrillers and scifi. The spy books are a bit ironic, because when I read them the CIA are the good guys, but whenever I read a history book, they are very obviously the Bad Guys in real life, and I don’t much care for them.

Every time I’m reading one of these books, I think to myself, “I could read only this and never read a bad book again,” which can’t be true, but it sure feels that way when I’m in that world.

The other genre I absolutely love is scifi, and I have a particular fondness for the 1950s era paranoid type. I have to say that my favorite author of these last few years is Philip K Dick. Everything of his I’ve read has melted my brain, and he wrote so much I have barely scratched the surface. His most acclaimed books seem to be Ubik and the Valis trilogy, and I have not yet read those.

You have almost assuredly seen movies based on his work, such as Total Recall, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, and Minority Report, to name a few. I’ve known of him and his writing since I was a kid in the 90s, due to these movies, but it’s only in the last few years I’ve actually read his stuff.

There’s this paranoid feeling in all of his books that really resonates with me, a paranoid schizophrenic. I don’t know how these books feel to other people, but to me they are like the truth? I’m not sure how to describe it, but the scifi novels and short stories about mind control, aliens, government shenanigans, and paranoid main characters just feel right to me. It makes me want to write the same stuff.

I don’t know if Philip K Dick himself was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but he writes like he could have been. I don’t know if that was due to drugs or not either. I don’t know much about him at all, because I have often found that it’s easier to enjoy a piece of art if you don’t know that the artist was an asshole. Which hopefully Dick wasn’t.

The best works by him I’ve read and who I’d most recommend are The Cosmic Puppets, The Variable Man, The Penultimate Truth, and Do Android Dream Of Electric Sheep? on which Blade Runner is based. Some short stories that I also really liked are Beyond Lies The Wub, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (on which Total Recall is based), Tony And The Beetles, The Hanging Stranger, and Mr Spaceship.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface of his total output of writing. There are 44 novels and 121 short stories according to Wikipedia. They can’t all be great, and I’ll never be able to read it all, but I just love the stuff I have read.

This week I’ve also read Ring Around The Sun by Clifford Simak, another book in the 1950s paranoid scifi genre. It very much felt like a Dick novel in my opinion.

There are some ideas in these 50s stories that are just so fresh to me, even though they’re over 70 years old by this point, but the ideas didn’t reappear much in the 90s and 2000s when I grew up, apart from the movie adaptations of the stories themselves. Some of these ideas are straight up blowing my mind with new thoughts, and I love it.

I thought for a second about why they were this paranoid and weird, but the obvious answer to that is that nuclear war was right around the corner and the Cold War was at its most tense in the 1950s of course. Maybe we’ll get back to more paranoid scifi in the 2020s again, at the rate things are going in the real world these days.

I’ve read other types of scifi too, and I love that as well. I read the original Dune books by Frank Herbert, and remember distinctly at one point thinking “I will never read anything this good ever again.” Now that I’ve read more than six books that seems rather silly, but I love that world.

My new favorite is the Foundation series, I absolutely loved the original trilogy, and greatly enjoyed the sequels. I still have one prequel saved to read at a future time.

I don’t know precisely what it is about scifi that speaks to me in such a way. The way these older books are written is pretty foreign to how we speak and write today? The worlds are alien, even the ones on Earth, because the distant future of the 1980s they envisioned in the 1950s is radically different from the world we live in today? Just the strangeness of it really appeals to me for some reason. Maybe I am strange myself? That can’t be it. But maybe it is.

There is a future where I keep reading both nonfiction and fiction of every genre, and there is a future where I only read spy thrillers, and another future where I read only scifi. And either future is fine, so long as I remain happy and content. There’s no shame in knowing exactly what you like and sticking to it. There is so much to read either way and I’ll never be able to read everything I want to or should.

And that’s fine.

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If you want to try out some paranoid scifi, Philip K Dick books are often on sale for just $1.99 and rarely more than $7.99 on Amazon Kindle if you use that platform, and it just so happens that yesterday, Flaming Hydra, a writer collective, published a short story very much in this vein.

https://flaminghydra.com/one-small-step/

There is a small paywall of $3 a month, but it is very much worth it for what they provide. This is in no way a sponsored post, I am just a big fan.

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This has been a different type of essay, conceived of and written in just the last few days. That is, the thought occurred while reading Ring Around The Sun two days ago, and I wrote it all earlier today. I thought I’d try to write something quickly and put it out quickly as an experiment. Writing it was fun, so maybe I’ll do this more in the future!