I hope I shall arrive soon Book

Keep Alive What You Love

PKD's story I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon was published in 1980 - in the Playboy magazine. It addresses one of the most interesting questions linked with space travel, namely the long distances that are to be covered and what people might possibly do with themselves in all those years they'll spend voyaging in space. One of the most obvious solutions would be to put space travellers into a kind of artificial sleep to keep them from getting on each other's nerves - just imagine having to spend ten years inside a spacecraft with the same bunch of people - and to be confronted with their own inner selves. In our story here, space pioneers are frozen down like peas in cryonic chambers to keep them fresh until they have arrived at their destination, but also to stave off the inevitable boredom or horror vacui their minds would fall prey to if they had to go through the trip in the full possession of their minds.

For Victor Kemmings, however, things go awry because as accident will have it, his cryonic chamber does not work properly, and so Kemmings is only in a half-slumber. There being no air and no food on board for Kemmings to walk around, the ship has to come up with a trick in order to keep Kemmings's mind busy somehow, and it falls on the solution to have him re-experience his earlier memories, which proves a very bad idea, though, because this involuntarily brings up a childhood trauma - a memory of how as a child, Kemmings helped his cat Dorky catch a bird that was trapped in a garage window - and the guilt connected with this incident. This memory starts haunting Kemmings and suddenly takes on a life of its own, creeping into all other memories or fantasies the ship is conjuring up to keep Kemmings sane, as it probably was working in the man's subconscious all the time, making him the pessimistic, guilt-ridden man he is.

In a way, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon is a very mature science fiction story because it shows that space exploration may just be an act of compensation with the help of which man wants to escape his inner self, his doubts, his feelings of smallness and insufficiency and guilt, and at the same time this drive to push on the final frontier may face him with this very awareness of smallness. Just imagine the countless days, months, years of time people would have to spend travelling in space, and how this would bring home to them the fact that for all their endeavours, they are just a tiny fraction of consciousness in a world of emptiness. Seeing that there is such a vastness of emptiness around them, will they not come to the conclusion eventually that the only real thing they have to face and be held accountable for in the end are their own individual lives? They might learn what Jordan B. Peterson put up as his sixth rule for life: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Or they will learn that no matter how large the universe is, they will always be stuck with themselves. Now in many science fiction tales, we have those larger-than-life, optimistic explorers or settlers, we have people who seem to have control over their lives and to be wiser, more morally aware than ourselves, but in the end, might the man of the future not be a Victor Kemmings, a person who is as much in doubt of himself than we probably are?

Interestingly, Dick's last short story, The Alien Mind takes up a similar topic as this clever and insightful story.