The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt--not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock of Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible.

When Nicolas St. James decides to go to the surface in search for an artificial pancreas for a friend, he knows it might be a suicide mission. If the robot "leadies" fighting the decades-long war between the United States and the Soviet Union don't kill him, the radiation might, or one any number of sinister diseases with names like the Bag Plague and the Shrink Stink. But what he finds is not a war-ravaged Earth, but an expanse of enormous, cultivated "demesnes," each belonging to a member of the world's ruling elite. These elite keep the surface population low--and thus hold on to their demesnes--by concocting a fictional war waged by a fictional president, a robot named Talbot Yancey. Yancey's speeches are written by a cabal of "Yance-men" who are among the surface world's most powerful.

The Penultimate Truth is a kind of riff on the ideas of "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas": prosperity, at its heart, depends on the repression of the subaltern, who are often ruled not merely by violence but by subterfuge and propaganda. But burying the subaltern below ground cannot prevent the rifts of hierarchy from straining the society of the elite. The Yance-men are administered by Stanton Brose, an eighty-year old whose physical grotesqueness comes from his firm control over the continent's store of artificial organs. The main plot of The Penultimate Truth, in fact, concerns intrigue between Brose and a pair of Yance-men named Joseph Adams and David Lantano who may or may not be hatching a plan to kill Brose. Meanwhile, the grip they have on those below proves very vulnerable. Besides St. James, there are thousands of others who have emerged above ground, being stashed away in giant apartment-style prisons, and happy enough to live in a limbo between the underground tanks and true freedom--for now.

There's much that's familiar in The Penultimate Truth: the power of propaganda, for instance, and the sense that what appears to be the real world is only the topmost of a layer of subterfuges that may have no real bottom. But something else that interested me about the novel, which I don't think I've seen before in Dick, is the way that it acts as a metaphor for the frontier and the settlement of the West. The Yance-men want to convince themselves that their claims (and they literally do claim them, like Oklahoma sooners, by being first into a particular "hot spot") are terra nullius, but they know that thousands toil beneath their beds, and they're tortured by this. St. James emerges into Lantano's demesne near what was once Cheyenne, Wyoming; a significant plot point involves the planting of spurious artifacts in Utah's "Dixie" region; the national government is operated outside of Estes Park in Colorado. Even Adams' demesne in foggy California suggests that this is a novel of the West.

Sort-of-significant spoiler here: one character, whose darker skin is thought to be the effects of radiation poisoning, turns out to be an Indian. Only St. James perceives it, not having known (as the surface-dwellers know) that the Indians were all wiped out in the war. And not only this, but the character is a veteran of the earliest Indian Wars on the American continent, having prolonged his life to six hundred years through the use of a complex time-travel device. (Here Dick makes a really simple mistake, identifying the man as a Cherokee, despite describing him as being part of a "war party" in Utah--he ought to be, like, Cheyenne--or is this, too, a half-truth?) Of course, a mistaken belief that Native Americans were wiped out, or were soon to be, sustained the belief in an open West there for the taking. Dick invests the Native man with incredible secret power, and by doing so, symbolically reverses familiar narratives about disappearance and conquest.

This one was really good, not perhaps in the top tier of Dick's work, but among his best pure genre fiction. Reading Dick, really reading him, I think, can only produce awe: he produced a couple of these books every year, and though they recycle many of the same concepts again and again, like "precogs," they are so endlessly inventive, and even the prose is of surprisingly literary quality. I don't think anyone in 20th century America really elevated genre work to literature the way he did, and the fact that no one ever talks about him that way is proof of how seamlessly he melded the two.