Philip K. Dick’s Legendary 1977 Metz Monologue: “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”
This stunning 90-minute monologue he delivered as guest of honor at the Second Metz International Science Fiction Festival in France.
He didn’t talk about DeLoreans or machines. Instead, PKD laid out his mind-bending theory of orthogonal time a right-angle “sideways” axis running perpendicular to normal linear time.
In fact moving back and far forward in time is the same as all time happened all at once. Like being caught on the inner layer of an onion, the are other layers of this infinite onion representing forward and back time in one holographic whole onion.
Along the lateral axis, he said, parallel realities constantly branch off whenever a cosmic “Programmer” (a divine or simulation-like force) tweaks a variable in the past.
Déjà vu? He called it a literal glitch, a residual memory from the previous timeline that just got overwritten.
Reality, he argued, is like a programmable simulation or a divine chess game, constantly being edited into better versions.
Pure 1977 prophecy that feels like it predicted simulation theory decades early.
This is the same visionary genius whose stories became some of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made:
• Blade Runner (from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — questioning what is “real”)
• Total Recall (from “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” — false memories and alternate lives)
• Minority Report (precognition and changing what “will” happen)
• A Scanner Darkly (layers of fractured identity and perception)
• The Adjustment Bureau (fate manipulation across branching possibilities)