Title: The Electric Ant

Author: Philip K. Dick

Date of First Publication: October 1969

Publisher: Place of First Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Mercury Press)

Bibliographic Reference: isfdb

Type: Short story

Keywords: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER; POSTHUMAN; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER

Critical Summary:   In “The Electric Ant,” Philip K Dick introduces Garson Poole waking up in a hospital bed and realizing he has no right hand and no pain. The doctor enters and Poole discovers that he is an electric ant, “an organic robot,” or “mechanical slave.” Upset and desperate, he begins to tamper with his roll of punch tape that is mounted in his heart mechanism, realizing that the roll of punch tape controls his subjective reality. He curiously tampers with and experiments with the tape, adding punch holes, which adds stimuli, covering punch holes, which mean no stimuli, to eventually rotating a cut strip. This need to experiment leads to a climactic moment where Poole decides to remove himself from the restriction of the “reality tape” and “know the universe and its entirety.” He cuts the tape. His experiment not only tampers with his own reality but with the individuals he interacts with, leaving Dick’s audience to question what is real by the last lines of his work.

Garson Poole, an android, felt limited by his programing and a maddening need to escape from his mechanical slaved self. Likewise, Victor Frankenstein desires to go beyond textbook knowledge on natural sciences to liberate and test his abilities. These protagonists, Garson Poole and Victor Frankenstein, are motivated by their deadly passions towards esoteric knowledge. Both protagonists bring death close at hand for themselves and to those closest to them. The encounter with what lies beyond Poole’s reality tape is brief but sublime, offering what seems like a lifetime of experience expressed in a couple sentences, something like viewing Mont Blanc or confronting the Creature.

Administrative Notes: Monica Mercado, CSUF. Edited by Molly Robertson, CSUF