Science & Tech Quote by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s jab lands because it’s aimed at his own tribe, and it’s timed to puncture the genre’s favorite costume: authority. By confessing that science fiction writers “do not know anything,” he’s not performing ignorance so much as refusing the implicit contract that says futurism equals expertise. The sly move is that he drags “science” off its pedestal and reveals how often it functions in SF as stage dressing: a lab coat worn to make metaphysical anxiety look like a prediction.

The phrase “limited and unofficial” is doing heavy lifting. Dick isn’t just admitting he didn’t have a PhD; he’s admitting the whole enterprise is, at best, a kind of shadow scholarship. SF borrows the rhetoric of science (precision, systems, inevitability) to talk about what science can’t certify: paranoia, reality’s fragility, the feeling that power is lying. When he adds that “usually our fiction is dreadful,” it’s less self-loathing than quality control via insult. If you want the freedom to be weird, you also have to forfeit the pretense of being right.

Context matters: Dick wrote during the Cold War, a period drenched in techno-prophecy, corporate optimism, and state secrecy. His work kept insisting that the future wasn’t shiny; it was unstable, bureaucratized, hallucinatory. This quote is him drawing a boundary: don’t read SF as a technical blueprint. Read it as a diagnostic. The point isn’t to forecast gadgets; it’s to expose the narratives we let gadgets tell about us.