The Simulacra

In the United States of 2041, the government is a performance and the First Family a fiction: the President is an android, Nicole Thibodeaux an actress playing the eternal First Lady. Most citizens are aware of this — and don't care. Into this world Philip K. Dick drops a cast of marginal characters: a jug musician trying to audition for Nicole, a psychiatrist facing professional ruin, a time traveller harvesting antiques from the past. Published in 1964, The Simulacra is one of Dick's most formally ambitious novels — a savage satire of media, political spectacle, and a society that has learned to prefer comfortable illusion to inconvenient reality. A direct precursor to Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum.

Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose published work during his lifetime was almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his person …