Faith of Our Fathers

Faith Of Our Fathers is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in the anthology "Dangerous Visions" (1967).

The story is a horrifying vision of a God that is all-devouring and amoral, and is a sharp depiction of religious despair that prefigured Dick's own later crisis of faith and mental breakdown.

Plot summary

The story's protagonist, Tung Chien, is a party bureaucrat in Vietnam in a future where Chinese-style communism has triumphed over the entire world. The atheist Communist Party rules absolutely over a population that is kept docile by hallucinogenic drugs.

Given an illegal drug by a street seller, he sees the Party leader's appearance on television as a horrific hallucination. He later learns that the drug is stelazine, an anti-hallucinogen, and that what he sees is the true reality of the Party leader: or at least one of them, because different people see any one of twelve different possible visions of the leader. Some (including Chien) see a machine ("the Clanker"), others see a biological monstrosity ("the Gulper"), yet others see a whirlwind, and so forth.

An underground movement, fearing that the leader is not human, contrives to place Tung at a party where the leader will be present. Tung meets the leader, who is apparently an undistinguished elderly man, and takes the anti-hallucinogenic drug.

He learns that all the visions are true, and far more besides; the Party leader is not only not human, he is an almighty, godlike being - perhaps a demiurge, perhaps God himself - and one that is a predator on all living things. Chien says "A hallucination is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back." The story ends with Chien mortally wounded, his life ebbing away, but having had the entity reveal to him that "there are things much worse than I".

In many ways, this story prefigures Dick's later interest in Gnosticism. Dick later said about this story:

"The title is that of an old hymn. I think, with this story, I managed to offend everybody, which seemed at the time to be a good idea, but which I've regretted since. Communism, drugs, sex, God - I put it all together, and it's been my impression since that when the roof fell in on me years later, this story was in some eerie way involved." [cite book
last=Dick
first=Philip K.
authorlink=Philip K. Dick
editor=John Brunner (editor)
title=The Best of Philip K. Dick
year=1977
publisher=Del Rey
isbn=0345253590
pages=449
chapter=Afterthoughts by the Author]

ources and Inspirations

* The basic setting of the story - a dictatorship of the future with a single leader who addresses the citizens on a two-way television screen - is similar to George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four".

* According to the 1993 Philip K. Dick biography "Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts (I Am Alive and You Are Dead)" by Emmanuel Carrère, the story is "set in a totalitarian world inspired by the works of Orwell and Hannah Arendt."

* The rebels are explicitly compared to "college students of the United States during the Vietnam War" within the story.

* The idea that God is a predator who preys on other living things was also used in Dick's novel "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".

Notes

External links

* [http://www.philipkdickfans.com/pkdweb/Faith%20Of%20Our%20Fathers.htm Faith Of Our Fathers on PhilipKDickFans.com]
* [http://www.utne.com/2005-07-01/TheFictionalPharmaceuticalsofPhilipKDick.aspx The Fictional Pharmaceuticals of Philip K. Dick}
* [http://www.infoshop.org/sf/Drug_References_in_Science_Fiction Drug References in Science Fiction]
* [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ousfg/misc/pkd.html An essay which touches on the story]
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