Eye in the Sky

Dick's Eye in the Sky is a novel on so many things, such as simulated reality, the Cold War, McCarthyism, religious fundamentalism, race relations (Bill Laws, an African-American with an advanced physics degree, is screwed in all the universes imagined by the whites in the group), mental illness, and psychology. Ostensibly about the fuzzy nature of reality and imagination, the 8 characters who experience the accident with the Bevatron are forced to experience reality as seen by others in the group, including a retired soldier (as well as a religious fundamentalist and racist whose fierce religion combines Islamic and Christian fundamentalist concept), a neo-Victorian middle-aged woman, a paranoiac, and a Communist. However, what is most interesting of this, is how Dick shows the limitations of each of the aforementioned idealist formations of reality.  However, we see how the Communists attacked individualism (the "cult") through McFeyffe's false accuations against Marsha Hamilton, bringing to mind Richard Wright's experiences with the Communists in Chicago (he wanted to be a writer, to express himself, but the Party wouldn't allow it). Perhaps this helps explain Dick's personal inclinations and political sympathies, since he's certainly sympathetic to left-wing causes (such as Jack Hamilton's friendship with Bill Laws, and defending Laws against the segregationist Silvester) and critiques of corporations and capitalism, he's also drawn to the significance of individual experience and rejecting larger groups. 

Perhaps this explains a pattern in Dick protagonists being alienated men working for large outfits or the government, or, alternatively, small business owners struggling against the chains and the dangers of postwar US capitalism.  Thus, Dick could poke fun at Communist interpretations of American society as overrun with debauchery, class exploitation, hedonism, and Chicago gangsters while expressing sympathy for the masses, an appreciation for the importance of religion or spirituality (without a fatalistic Islamic God), the necessity of the arts, and a sense of trust for one's environment and in others. In other words, Dick was too noncomformist and open-minded to the 'weird', the spiritual, and the idealist conceptions of the world to ever fit in with some of the American Left of the 1950s, nor could he stomach the religious conservatives, segregationists and military warlords of the postwar military-industrial complex. Significantly, like his later famous novels of the 1960s-1980s an openness to a a spirtual renewal may be expressed here through the encounter with God in one of the reality simulations experienced in the novel. More will be said later....