I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon is a collection of ten short science fiction stories and one essay, written by acclaimed American author Philip K. Dick. The book explores themes of isolation and connection, authoritarianism and democracy, belief and doubt, and reality and fantasy, each one populated with classical sci-fi elements such as interstellar space travel, artificial intelligence, and as-yet-unheard-of technological advancements. I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon was edited by Mark Hurst and Paul Williams and first published by Doubleday in 1985, three years after Dick's death.

The opening work is a nonfiction essay entitled "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In it, Dick examines the nature of reality and how media manipulation feeds directly into popular understandings of what is real and what is not. Media influence, he argues, manufactures a pseudo, inauthentic reality that demands dissemination. However, according to Dick, therein lies the problem. Because the moment one starts investigating something as nebulous and profound as reality, one is not experiencing it, thereby making whatever reality is real significantly less so. Living in this environment naturally produces less authentic, and thus less real, human beings. Ultimately, for better or worse, "we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland."

Among the short stories that round out the majority of this collection is "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford." It tells the story of a man who acquires a machine that animates inanimate objects, an invention of an idiosyncratic scientist Doc Rupert Labyrinth. The narrator of the story puts an oxford shoe into the machine and discovers it coming to life. The shoe leaves of its own accord. Then, later, when the narrator gathers Doc and members of the press to witness the miracle of the living, breathing shoe, they find the oxford has fetched a woman's shoe and put it in the machine so it could have a companion.



In "Explorers We," a group of alien beings visits Earth disguised as humans. As various characters try to figure out the motivation for this visit, they eventually ask themselves if the aliens are even worth worrying about. Because, if they act like humans, doesn't it stand to reason they may someday adopt these human qualities as part of their natures and make themselves at least partly human in the process?

"What'll We Do with Ragland Park?" is set in a post-apocalyptic America, where a folksinger possesses the gift of prophecy. Given the inerrancy of his gift, Ragland Park becomes a target for dangerous forces in politics and the media. In the end, he foresees his own death at the hands of FBI agents, singing a song about his impending demise.

Bob Bibleman wins a "contest" at a fast food restaurant in "The Exit Door Leads In." The prize is a stay at a hardline military-style college, where Bob learns shocking information that could potentially save millions of innocent lives. Torn over whether to reveal this information, Bob finally decides to keep it within the walls of the college. Then, he discovers it was all a test to see if he would challenge authority and break rules to reveal classified information. However, Bob does not pass: The college expels him for conforming to the demands of authority.



The title story is one of Dick's classic later works. It centers on Victor Kemmings, a man on an interstellar voyage that will take the next ten years. For the length of the decade-long journey, Victor enjoys a long, cryogenic sleep—or he is supposed to, at least. He awakes prematurely, totally paralyzed but conscious, and the spaceship's artificially intelligent robot attempts to entertain him with memories of his past. Seeing the mistakes he has made in his life, Victor struggles with guilt over his missteps. When the AI's memory faculties stop working, the robot asks Victor what he wants most in life. Victor responds by intuitively transmitting to the robot that he would like the voyage to be over. However, once the decade passes and Victor arrives at his planet of destination, he thinks that this, too, is a memory shown to him by the onboard AI. He can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy, or memories from the present-day. This compels him to question the nature of reality, asking himself what makes for a truly authentic human being—a theme that brings the entire collection full circle. Dick asks himself these questions in the first essay. "The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves," Dick writes in "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." These words could easily describe any of the heroes and antiheroes that people this volume. "This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history."