As with much science fiction, we find stories of colonization—off-Earth colonization—throughout Dick’s writings. Often, it’s Mars, as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” In other novels, like The Crack in Space and The Unteleported Man, the destination is beyond the solar system.
Those stories of colonization that uncover political implications that might matter in thinking about Palestine are, of course, those in which an indigenous population exists before the arrival of Dick’s settler population. The most disturbingly relevant, by far, is Martian Time-Slip. This isn’t because of the presence of the Israeli settlement, though that does feel like a tell—a stray signifier that also functions as a kind of neon arrow directing us to pull off the road and pay attention. It’s because in this novel, the indigenous Martian population—they’re called Bleekmen—aren’t even aliens. They’re nomadic foragers capable of interactions with the settlers on a variety of human-to-human levels: linguistic, professional, and sexual. They are specifically defined as human; they arrived and naturalized to Mars at some unspecified earlier time. However, their marked cultural differences, and their deep acclimation to the conditions of Mars, allow the Earth settlers a margin for apartheid exclusion based on a muddling of the notion of the “alien” and the “human”—or, to be more precise, these qualities allow the settlers to affirm a population’s humanity while systematically violating their human rights.
The critic John Huntington wrote in Rationalizing Genius that “in popular SF, imagining the alien often consists of including or excluding it from the narrator’s sense of what is normal. There is, of course, literature in which beings somehow alien to the author—like Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India—may develop in complex ways because their alienness is not their essence.” Martian Time-Slip conforms precisely to Huntington’s description. It more closely resembles E. M. Forster’s novel than it does a tale of alien encounter, because it isn’t one. In A Passage to India, Mrs. Moore is the white Christian woman whose certainties become cosmically rattled in the Marabar Caves incident, in which a permanently ambiguous series of events gives rise, catastrophically, to an accusation of rape. Mrs. Moore’s subsequent flights of cosmic openness to the implications of her metaphysical revelation, to oneness with the universe, are a contest between Forster’s Orientalism and his critique of the racist paternalism of the British Empire.
