Tomislav's Reviews > The Penultimate Truth

This 1964 novel is one of Philip K. Dick’s works that has not had a film made based on it, and so is probably less well known than such as his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Blade Runner), The Man in the High Castle, or The Minority Report. It is built on concepts that were more typical of his 1950s works, because it re-uses concepts from stories of his published then.

In it, we follow Joe Adams, a Yance-man, who writes speeches for the national leader, Protector Talbot Yancy. Yancy is a synthetic personality, created and broadcast over audio and video to manipulate the opinions of a worker population that lives underground in fear of the ongoing global nuclear World War III. Refer to PKD’s 1955 story, “The Mold of Yancy”. We also follow Nicholas St. James, president of one underground tank of workers that produces and repairs “leadies”. Leadies are the android soldiers who the workers believe to conduct the surface war under conditions fatal to humans. However, the war really ended years ago, and the surface conditions are totally fake. In reality, leadies are guards and servants of the yance-men who live in great luxury on the surface. Refer to PKD’s 1953 story, “The Defenders”, which is now in the public domain and can be read freely online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28767.

Behind the scenes, Talbot Yancy and the Yance-men are commanded by Stanton Brose, an octogenarian oligarch. Adams has become involved in a complicated conspiracy by Brose to bring down rivals, when a co-conspiring friend of Adams is murdered. Numerous pieces of evidence at the scene are algorithmically sufficient to implicate Brose in a search of a master computer database. However, a sophisticated device was captured at the scene of the crime, which both performed the execution and planted the evidence. Perhaps the murder was faked by Brose in order to mislead the police investigators into thinking it was actually a frame-up, since he would not murder his own conspirator. Refer to PKD’s 1957 story, “The Unreconstructed M.” The story continues to unravel deeper layers of fakery, right up to the end.

All the fakery is an engaging thought experiment, and tells us that manipulation of public opinion is an aspect of all forms of governance. But in current times the idea feels unexpectedly relevant. The US has recent experience with governance by fairly transparent fakery. But is it fake fakery, as in the novel? Is Q-Anon a right-wing conspiracy so conspicuously wacky that it might actually be a left-wing effort to discredit right-wing fakery? Or maybe the truth is on an even deeper level, as fakery of fake fakery. This novel will stretch your conspiracy detection neurons.