Adjustment Team
By Philip K Dick
Welcome to our 3rd annual month of Philip K Dick (The Third Month of Dick, if you will. Unfortunately, it is not the sort of Dick that I prefer.{I remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor}), a science fiction writer who has had so much of his work adapted to screen and television, that you've seen his work. You just don't know it yet. Every year our ever-wise patrons assemble and vote on which work we will bend the review to for February and I am pleased to announce that the Adjustment Team was a very narrow winner. Now, Adjustment Team was a short story published in 1954, so it's one of his first works to be published. First published in the September-October issue of the Orbit Science Fiction, a science fiction magazine that only published 5 issues (Mr. Dick's work appears in the 2nd to the last issue). It was reprinted just 4 years later in The Sands of Mars and Other Stories in 1958, and in collected works of Philip K Dick throughout the years; most recently in The Early Works of Philip K Dick, Volume One, The Variable Man & Other Stories in 2009. You can also buy an electronic copy of the story for your Kindle for about 99 cents or find a free copy through google if you look hard enough and are used to exercising more anarchist options for your entertainment (I do of course encourage the use of Anarchist options.). Adjustment Tale serves as a good entry point to various themes and hang-ups that would appear in future works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and We Can Remember It for you Wholesale, or Bladerunner and Total Recall to use the more popular names. Let me sum up the plot real quick so I can explain.
Ed Fletcher is a regular guy with a regular life. He works in an office that handles real estate as a salesman (If such a fate ever befalls me, I wish to die.{Hey! I’m technically a salesmen. Besides it can’t be worse than claims.} It’s not the selling. It’s the real estate.{let people own a home bro}). His wife Ruth works for the government and together they afford a pretty good life with a house, picket fence, and a dog. Honestly, the brief look we get at his life is pretty good, his wife and he get along, he gets to have lazy mornings with a good breakfast and work a job he likes (There is something wrong with him. Capitalism has addled his brain.{Just because someone likes their job doesn’t mean they’re addled. I mean some people think you’re insane for loving jumping into swamps to play with bugs} Yes, but I am objectively correct.). Unfortunately for him, he is about to have a brush with the profound, and that always changes things. Because the sector his office is in is up for ReAdjustment by the PowersThatBe. However, due to a slip up by the minions of the Almighty, Fletcher doesn't show up early to work but late. This means he walks right into reality being readjusted and as you can guess seeing the very fabric of the universe rewritten by men in white robes with strange machines that are unfathomable to the mortal mind is not a kind of relaxing experience (No! I imagine not!). To be honest, the fact that he wandered around in a frozen grey surreal cityscape and everything and everyone he touched broke down into gray ashes that blew away on a non-existent wind likely didn't help. By the way, my gentle readers, a quick tip, if at your merest touch everyone falls apart? For Heaven's sake STOP TOUCHING PEOPLE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?! (But what if they’re Bourgeois? {I said stop touching people, did I fucking stutter?}. Anyways, Ed however manages to give the slip to the henchmen of the eternal and escapes and goes running to the one person he thinks he can trust with this insane story. His wife, because if you can't trust her, why the hell did you marry her? (The same can be said for any spouse. If you don’t trust them, don’t marry them.) So he meets her on her lunch break.
Ruth, to her credit, doesn't burst out into laughter or go running off to call someone to deal with the madman in front of her when Ed tells her what he saw. Instead, she patiently talks him into taking her back to the office where he saw behind the fabric of reality, being sure that he needs to confront it to get over it. She succeeds in this but this might not have been the wisest idea as after they arrive and she excuses herself to get back to her job. It's then that Ed notices that his office and his co-workers have all been subtly changed and rewritten somehow (Oh No.). Confronting his boss is the biggest shock of all as his boss has been restored to relative youthfulness (Wouldn’t people notice this, eventually? I mean, they don’t rewrite everyone, so what happens when someone’s brother from across town visits for Christmas and notices his sibling is five years younger? {I assume that their memories are adjusted beforehand. I mean we are talking about supernatural forces that can alter history, time and persons as needed. I mean who would know?}). This causes him to break and run, and that's when he is taken up to meet the Person In Charge. He's pretty quick to lay things out, reality was adjusted. It was necessary that Ed's boss buy a certain plot of Canadian forest and start developing it. In doing so he'll find artifacts that are culturally and scientifically important. This will attract scientists and specialists from the west and the east and slow certain more nationalist researches down. These people will find they have a lot in common and strike up cross factional friendships. This will lead to greater cooperation and an easing of tension between the nations of the west and the east. Ed is sternly told that this is for his and countless billions' benefit across the world and if he interferes with the process nothing good will come of it. After he frantically agrees to keep his mouth shut he is sent back with a mission to convince his wife that his story was the result of a nervous breakdown or some sort of episode. Ruth however is extremely upset that he's been missing all afternoon and is very strangely convinced he's having an affair (That is a very small threshold for “suspected affair”, but this is likely Dick’s “wife” hangups coming to the fore again.{I’d encourage people to look at our bio of Mr. Dick in 2017, he has an… Interesting relationship with marriage in general}). She's distracted from this by a door to door salesman and we end the story with Ed giving devout thanks.
Here we can see Mr. Dick starting to grapple with his themes of our perception of reality not being the truth of it and there being an unseen layer, a truer one beneath it. As well as the idea that reality is the result of someone's active manipulations (Yer a Wizard, Harry.). We also see Mr. Dick edging into the idea of the fallibility of memory and how unreliable our own memories might be and how easily edited they are (In this, he is correct. Our memories are stored… compressed, and have to be reconstructed with each remembrance. Each remembrance changes them subtly. For instance, white people literally do tend to think black people look alike - even though they don’t, clearly - because relative lack of exposure means they have fewer components of black people’s faces for use in memory reconstruction. So black people tend to get misidentified in lineups and “fit the description” fairly frequently. And that is before structural and personal racism even gets involved, which it frequently does.). We also see early hints of Mr. Dick's hostility towards wives here, with Ruth strangely turning hostile and flipping out on Ed when he returns. Another thing I find interesting is how Mr. Dick takes what would normally be mystical or occult elements of the story (reality being rewritten by the command of the Almighty) and papers over it with technological veneer and bureaucracy. There are no angels or otherworldly spirits, only put upon clerks, techs, and field agents. The world is divided into numbered sectors with dry bureaucratic efficiency. The change is done using machines and devices that at least look manufactured instead of conjured. This story could have easily worked as an Urban Fantasy but Mr. Dick chose to give it at least a surface gloss of science fiction. There's also a bit of what you could call the initiate's journey here. Where Ed learns about a secret world and is granted secret knowledge before being sent back to the mundane world forever changed by his experience with the sacred and profound, but I think I'll wait a bit to examine that theme. It's clearly an early work that doesn't quite reach the strange multi-layerness of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale or the complexity of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. That said you can see a good number of the ideas and themes starting here and realize this is just the beginning of a decades-long grappling with these ideas for Mr. Dick. I'm giving Adjustment Team by Philip K Dick a C+ here. I think its age also pulls it down a bit but maybe that's just me. Next week we'll look at the Matt Damon movie inspired by this, Adjustment Bureau.
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