“Vulcan’s Hammer” (written in 1953, published in 1960) is Philip K. Dick’s first foray into novel-length science fiction (although not his first published), and it’s a difficult book to judge. Its warning about a government handing power to a supercomputer is today an SF staple, with the entire “Terminator” franchise built around it.
But at the time of its writing, it was more eye-opening. And obviously the theme of rational but cruel artificial intelligence was fascinating to Dick, who went on to rework and remold this concept many times.
Short and fast-moving
“Vulcan’s Hammer” is short and fast-moving. This is to its detriment in a way, since bureaucrat William Barris flies back and forth from New York (his territory) to Geneva (Earth’s capital) so many times that it’s mind-spinning. Granted, PKD’s point is probably that future plane travel (or flying “ship” travel, as it were) is fast and easy.
“Vulcan’s Hammer” (1960)
Composition year: 1953
Author: Philip K. Dick
Genre: Science fiction
Setting: 2029, New York City and Geneva
But the climactic battle where the forces of good take on the supercomputer Vulcan 3 is logistically ridiculous, with soldiers being as easy for bureaucrats to utilize as pawns on a chess board. As such, PKD is unable to stick the landing, a problem similar to another early novel, “The Cosmic Puppets.”
I don’t know if PKD intended this, but “Vulcan’s Hammer” can be read as an argument that bureaucrats are people too, despite the fact that the novel is unquestionably a cautionary tale against big governments. This novel features the biggest of all possible governments; it’s worldwide and it’s brutal in its pursuit of an ideal that is also its name: Unity.
Barris exists within the system that rewards power grabs and internal connections, but PKD sympathizes with him. Partially it’s because he’s the POV character, and readers will always go easy on the person we’re in the trenches with. But partially, the author really does give him sympathetic (if undercooked) qualities, including Barris being good at his job and his admirable stance of never siding with killers.
As the story moves forward, Unity members are faced with the binary choice of siding with Vulcan 3 (the supercomputer leader of Unity) or the Healers (the resistance). Barris declines to side with the Healers, noting that they are killers.
Skimming over some horrors
While I admire his idealism, and his rejection of the false binary choice, it should be noted that PKD skims over something that must be a reality of this world: that Unity stays in power through ruthless means. Totalitarian governments are by definition ruthless. The only way they wouldn’t be is if no one desired freedom and were fine with having their lives mapped out for them, and that’s clearly not the case here.
That flaw aside, PKD makes several good socio-political observations throughout “Vulcan’s Hammer,” including schools as indoctrination centers, politics as an exercise in power-holding rather than societal improvement, the way socialism fixes the size of the pie and encourages backstabbing rather than cooperation, a government job as a path to financial success, and freedom as an innate human desire that goes beyond economic status.
He also starts thinking about how people can make the wrong decision because they misunderstand what’s missing from the information available to them; this would later be the centerpiece and twist of the short story “The Minority Report.” Vulcan 2, Vulcan 3 and the most powerful man in Unity, Jason Dill, all make decisions without knowing every piece of information.
They know information is being withheld by another entity, but they misunderstand the meaning of that. There’s some convoluted “He doesn’t know that I know he thinks I don’t know” logic (or false logic) at play here.
2029 feels a lot like 1960
PKD does his usual SF writing exercise, common in these early novels, where he moves society’s present-day (of his writing) behavior into the future (this story is set in 2029; I’m not sure if “The Terminator” was paying homage by also using this date for its Future War), but the only change is futuristic technology. So it comes off as a satire. But really, PKD is just writing down his observations about how big governments operate.
PKD tries a little too hard with the technology predictions, so we get his staple underestimation of the future wherein characters feed cards into computers to communicate with them. He would have been better off portraying human-computer interactions as something that just happens, something that’s almost magical. That’s how people understand the internet today, anyway.
He almost strikes comedy gold with the Hammers, which stand in for modern war drones, but overall “Vulcan’s Hammer” isn’t as crazily funny as the best PKD works. The book’s warnings are not only old hat in a world where a sixth “Terminator” film was recently released, but they are presented in sober, straightforward fashion.
But PKD’s theme of bloated and liberty-quashing governments is valid and always will be, so it’s by no means a waste of 163 pages to dig into it.