How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later – Philip K. Dick

How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later was written in 1978, though readers will be forgiven for taking Dick at his word and assuming it was in fact given as a lecture at Disneyland. Having circulated amongst writers unofficially, it has achieved cult status: although Dick's output in his lifetime was prolific, this essay is a rare insight into his poetics and theories of fiction.

How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later is at once a lecture on the aims of writing science fiction, an essay on Pre-Socratic philosophers, and reflections on similarities between the author's life and the Book of Acts. Dick's distrust of mass media information systems and those who operated them circa 1978 is so prescient that it seems the author may have uploaded himself into one of the androids in his fiction, so as to continue observing the world.

Dick is only a prophet, however, in the same sense thet John of Patmos is: he does not offer architectural drawings of the future, but visions in blinding, pulpy colour which startle our eyes such that we can no longer trust our view of the present. How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later is such a vision—both personal and intellectual, characteristically wild, stretching into the future and thousands of years into the past.