The USSR Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 2: The Empire Never Ended

The USSR Is Hiding in Plain Sight

In 1974, Philip K. Dick had an experience that was either a psychotic break or a mystical epiphany (or perhaps both at once):  history had actually ceased in the first century C.E., which means that the Roman Empire never actually ended. Still drugged after a visit to the dentist, he saw the fish symbol a delivery girl was wearing around her neck, and came to realize that the Empire (which he also called the "Black Iron Prison") had stopped the flow of time. Both he and the girl were actually secret Christians avoiding persecution by a hostile, heathen Rome. 

However one characterizes Dick's new outlook on the world, it was undeniably productive for his writing.  He had already single-handedly sparked an entire subgenre of science fiction with The Man in the High Castle, the first modern example of alternate history as well as the forerunner of the speculative plot that can be boiled down into the two words "Hitler wins" 

For Dick, the continued existence of the Roman Empire was not alternate history, but history itself, and he never wrote a story about an alternate twentieth-century Imperial Rome. [1] Instead, he explored this and other ideas in the thousands of pages of the Exegesis of his vision that he wrote from 1974 until his death in 1982, as well as bringing the never-toppled empire into his novels Radio Free Albemuth (1985) and VALIS (1981).

In the sort of alternate universe that Dick himself might have admired, one can imagine him living a few decades longer, but as a man who had spent most of his life in the now-defunct USSR.  Picture him, decades after 1991, writing a never-ending tract in Russian rather than English, arguing (among many other things) that the Soviet Union still existed all around us, if only we could see it. 

Or perhaps one might imagine Dick's post-Soviet counterparts mining a similar vein, but even Victor Pelevin, whose work comes close to the American science fiction writer's psychedelically inflected metaphysics,  has not postulated that he still lives in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the notion of a persistent USSR still persists. The forms it takes are less gnostic than Dick's Eternal Rome, but they do have much wider cultural currency.. 

Note

[1] Instead, it was the experience of revelation itself that inspired the semi-autobiographical novel VALIS (1978) and its quasi-rough draft Radio Free Albemuth (1976/1985).