Who Goes There?

Philip K. Dick is one of the most important SF authors to ever live, and this is despite dying at 53 with a string of failed marriages and financial hardship left behind him. He was the first genre SF writer to get a Library of America volume, preserving some of his novels with fancy hardcover editions. The Philip K. Dick Award, given annually to the best SF novel first published in paperback, is still going to this day. Stanislaw Lem considered Dick to be the only American SF writer at the time (we’re talking the ’60s and ’70s) worth taking seriously. Whereas most authors would see their reputations taken a dent or two in light of certain transgressions, with Dick his mental illness and bad habits (namely his misogynistic streak and toxic behavior with friends, especially later in his life) are part of the “charm” for Dick fans. Indeed the fact that Dick was a hot mess is the name of the game. But before he became one of the most acclaimed novelists in the field he was one of the most acclaimed (and prolific) short story writers. 121 short stories and novellas, about half of which were written over the span of just a few years. “Breakfast at Twilight” is a Cold War parable, and one of the most solid (he wrote several) that Dick wrote.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. It was then reprinted in the November 1966 issue of Fantastic. For anthology appearances we have Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wild Years 1946-1955 (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). As for Dick collections there are almost too many to count, but the big one is Second Variety, also titled We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Other Classic Stories, which is the second in the book series collecting Dick’s short fiction.

Enhancing Image

The McLeans are a normal family who live just outside the city. Tim is an accountant, his wife Mary keeps house, and then there are their three kids, those being their son Earl, along with two daughters whose names are not important enough. One fine morning they’re having breakfast and the kids head off to school, only to discover there’s no school to go to—indeed there doesn’t seem to be anyone around for miles. The sky has also gone dark and the air is thick with a mix of fog and ash. Looks like the McLeans aren’t going anywhere after all, and this ends up being doubly the case when a group of soldiers come knocking at their door. The soldiers, unsure of how a house has remained in this landscape intact, accuse the McLeans of being “geeps” in disguise at first, which is to say Soviet infantry. The Cold War has apparently gone hot, with the Soviets having effectively invaded the US via a mix of “geeps” and “roms,” the latter being “robot operated missiles,” what basically amount to armed drones. The captain of the troops considers burning the whole place down with the McLeans inside, given that they don’t have their papers or their masks; but at the same time the whole situation is so inexplicable that the captain decides to call in a “polic” (a political commissioner) to investigate. The McLeans find that their house has somehow been launched seven years into the future, to the year 1980, three years after the Cold War escalated.

(By the way, the introductory blurb in the story’s original appearance is inaccurate, as it says “a hundred years” into the future. This is way off, which makes me think Dick didn’t write it.)

“Breakfast at Twilight” is a nicely self-contained little piece that honestly reads like it could’ve worked just as well for radio or a half-episode TV episode; that it has apparently never been adapted to another medium is a little perplexing. We get one location plus a small group of characters: the McLeans, the soldiers, and then Douglas the political commissioner. Very Twilight Zone vibes with this one, although it was published five years before that series. Dick’s beige prose style works in his favor, as we waste no time in establishing the premise and what’s at stake, and while most of the dialogue is expositional, it’s a lot to digest in only about a dozen pages. Given that Dick wrote quite a few stories about how the Cold War might escalate, he was kind of a pro at this sort of thing; but whereas “Second Variety” and “The Defenders” are from military points of voice, and “The Minority Report” uses policing as an allegory for the Cold War, “Breakfast at Twilight” is more about how civilians might cope with an American that has been all but torn asunder by bombs and boots on the ground. The future that the McLeans see is not that far from where they once were, and understandably they’re horrified not only by the physical destruction of the environment, but the US sliding into fascism in the name of combatting Soviet communism. Dick’s politics were honestly all over the place, but one thing he remained consistent on was being against McCarthyism and general alarmism when it came to the Soviets. The US of the near-future is not only in shambles but has devolved into a fiercely anti-intellectual and utilitarian culture, in which even certain books have been burned publicly (Douglas suggests Tim ditch the Dostoevsky in his library).

The creepiest part is that we have no clue who is even winning in this war, with the implication that whoever comes out on top will have experienced a pyrrhic victory. Earl, who’s depicted as being the most pro-war of the family (that the rash and naive son would be the most enthusiastic is, of course, a dig at ’50s jingoism), asks the soldiers more than once who is winning in this war, and nobody answers him. It’s a big thing that goes unsaid, and while Dick is not the most subtle of writers, he’s capable of some really insightful moments that cut with a trained surgeon’s precision. Now, we get an explanation for how the McLeans’ house got sent forward (or is it backward?) in time, having to do with radio and nuclear radiation, but it’s a nonsensical “sci-fi” thing that’s only there because it has to be. Dick was not a “hard” SF writer in that he was not concerned with the mechanics, or rather he saw the semblance of mechanics as a means to an end. I would take more issue with the SFnal conceit here being more or less arbitrary if the results weren’t worth it. The dilemma the McLeans then face is whether to go with the soldiers and basically become slave labor for a fascist shithole, but at leasr being safe in the short term, or remaining in the house in the slim hope that it might shuffle back to its original point in time before the Soviets are due to bomb the joint tonight. So you’ve got a bad situation vs. possibly an even worse situation, but the McLeans decide to stay.

There Be Spoilers Here

Tim gathers the family in the basement and the family makes it out by the skin of their teeth, with the house being sent back in time spontaneously just like they’d hoped. This in itself is predictable, because like, either their plan was gonna work or it wasn’t. What happens once Tim and his family emerge from the wreckage of their home (everything above the basement had gotten blasted to shit), is however quite different, and also haunting. See, the problem is that while the family narrowly avoided getting bombed, the war that they suddenly found themselves in is still happening in the future; not only that, but the war has already started. It began years ago, only soon it’s gonna go hot. The war is already happening. We then get a kind of internal monologue from Tim, who may as well be Dick’s mouthpiece in this instance, and it’s a good one:

It’s war. Total war. And not just war for me. For my family. For just my house.

It’s for your house, too. Your house and my house and all the houses. Here and in the next block, in the next town, the next state and country and continent. The whole world, like this. Shambles and ruins. Fog and dank weeds growing in the rusting slag. War for all of us. For everybody crowding down into the basement, white-faced, frightened, somehow sensing something terrible.

It’s an ending that’s not as much of a downer as what happens in “Second Variety,” but it’s no less fatalistic. Imagine living in 2018 and suddenly getting sent to 2025, and having to catch up on… more than a few things. Then you’re sent back to 2018. What would you do? Can you do anything to ease the sense of oncoming horror? On paper it’s a standard ending for this type of story, but it’s elevated by Dick’s unique intensity of paranoia, which captures the borderline apocalyptic feeling people were experiencing in the ’50s and at other points.

A Step Farther Out

Dick wrote quite a few short stories that are gimmicky and/or forgettable, but “Breakfast at Twilight” is not one of those. This is a taut and serious-minded story about a future that was quite possible at the time, and even if the Cold War never escalated to a certain point like Dick feared, it’s a paranoia that speaks to any age in which the government and ruling class could screw everyone over at any moment. We are unfortunately being forced to live in “interesting times.” This is also an effective companion piece to “Second Variety,” arguably more so than with “The Defenders,” which Dick had more explicitly written in tandem with that story. Dick’s stories (same goes for his novels) tend to riff on the same basic ideas over and over, so that they can often be compared with each other.

See you next time.