At first glance seem not to exist over a distance of two authors that Howard Phillip Lovecraft and Philip K Dick, but I think that reality is a bit 'different . In Lovecraft horror stems from an awareness of how thin is the real. Behind what we consider normal lies a universe alien, crazy, not articulated, with which the protagonists of Lovecraft found them unwilling to come to terms. In a novel like At the Mountains of Madness, a sense of restlessness of the protagonist was born - among other things-from the architecture of the city that meets architecture deny that the root not only the human proportions, but to a certain extent, the same physical laws. As often happens in novels and tales of Lovecraft, not what is seen in itself to be horrible, but what is suggested . The idea of \u200b\u200banother order - an order last, deeper than what we normally experience - in which human beings are nothing if not a child. What terrifies you, in short, that we not be at home in the universe. "
The reality of Dick is a subtle reality, but in reality when it comes to Dick, it is always subjective, depending observer. In Dick, compared to Lovecraft, missing the bottom. In his novels, the focus is often the reality of the deterioration of the protagonist, piece by piece, the negation of any point of reference until the victim was not reflected completely at the mercy of events that can not understand. Whether it's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, or Dark One Peer, the mechanism is basically the same. Place the star on an inclined plane and watch it slide inexorably towards the edge.
Already here we find an interesting point of contact. One other fact investigate the boundaries of reality, both starting from the assumption that what we call really is the ultimate depth of our experience. That reality is not, in other words, a solid base on which to rest your feet, but something that can be brittle, opening up doors in front of us incomprehensible world.
But this is not the only point of contact between the two authors. Dick and Lovecraft were both in their own way, outsiders. The other one lived in pain belonging to genre literature. Yet when Dick tried several times to leave (without much success), Lovecraft did not reject the label never authored fantasy literature, but contested the root that was fantastic to be considered fiction Series B. In the works of both then you feel the same urgency, same need to tell, a return obsessively to the same themes and in the same territories, as if the initial requirement could not ever be satisfied,
The ratio of these two authors with the genre deserves much more space to be investigated. A bird's eye you can still say that both, to date, can not find a certain location. Lovecraft certainly has dealt with fantastic - if not in the strict sense of horror - and Dick's fiction, but both are unique in their own way. Unlike, say, of Gibson, who created a movement, nor Lovecraft né Dick hanno fatto altrettanto. Hanno mostrato ai loro colleghi possibilità inedite, sono stati spesso citati, ma non hanno creato un movimento. Forse perché troppo personali erano le ossessioni alla base della loro opera.
Le cose si fanno però davvero interessanti quando si considera il secolo in cui questi due autori hanno operato, e cioè il Novecento, un secolo in buona misura governato dalle ossessioni che – in modi diversi – hanno animato sia HPL che PKD. Il Novecento è stato infatti il secolo che ha messo in discussione la struttura stessa della nostra realtà. Sotto i colpi del secolo breve sono caduti uno dopo l’altro i fondamenti – fino a quel momento intoccabili – the real. This is the time, the relationship between observing and observed, the nature of space, the obvious difference between matter and energy or the ultimate structure of what surrounds it, nothing is saved. And you can not even speak of simple re-definition. The twentieth century it was a century of great discoveries and fundamental theories, but I think we can agree that he asked questions rather than provide answers (and not coincidentally, today's physical attempts to bring together the pieces, whether string theory or extra dimensions, trying to reconstruct in a single framework that has fragmented the twentieth century).
The depths of Lovecraft and Dick - the non-centrality of man, the line blurred between subjectivity and objectivity, the anthropomorphic nature of the laws that govern the universe, etc.. - Occurred in all their strength. In modern physics, the territory is so alien that it can not be described in everyday language, but only in the abstract language of mathematics. To say that certain concepts and intuitions are not reducible to our language, as the architecture of the alien city of At the Mountains of Madness are not reducible to our fees. Still, it's hard not to think of Dick and go into the relationship between observer and observed as conceptualized by quantum physics. The idea that the line separation between what is happening and the viewer is so thin that it disappears, the two entities form a whole, where the viewer acts on what he sees as what is observed influence of the observer.
In short, the Western thought, engaged in research of the foundations of reality, he discovered that there is no bottom, but only one port on an extra layer of reality in which our "intuitive truth, prove false, and misleading.
I like to think then that two of the cultivated, out of sync with their contemporaries, but were in perfect sync with the universe around them. I like to believe, in other words, that something huge and alien to them is bent to whispers a story to tell.
