Kipple

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The word kipple refers to unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself.

According to science fiction author Philip K. Dick, kipple is a kind of domestic version of entropy: household disorder, kitchen-sink chaos. The classic definition appears in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, famously filmed as Blade Runner, as explained by character J.R. Isidore to the replicant Pris:

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself ... the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization."

—Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Variant forms of the word used in the novel include "kipple-ized" and "kipple-factor". People can turn into "living kipple", and an apartment can become "kipple-infested".

The term appears again in Dick's A Maze of Death (1970) where it is not defined:

"I'll pile her stuff outside and then get mine aboard. I'm under no mandate to load her kipple".

—Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death

1 Origin
2 Uses by other authors
3 Notes
4 See also

[edit] Origin

The term first appeared in print in May 1960, when science fiction fan Ted Pauls started publishing a fanzine named Kipple. In the final issue of Kipple, in 1984, Pauls said that the name had originally had no meaning, and that he had borrowed it from a very old play on words:

"Do you like Kipling?"

"I don't know, I've never kippled."

According to Pauls' account, a Kipple reader had jokingly redefined the title to mean "worthless junk that seems to multiply, as for example coat hangars, paper clips, etc." As Pauls recalled, the reader in question was editor Terry Carr, after which Philip K. Dick (also a Kipple reader) picked it up and used that meaning of it.^[1]

A sequence incorporating the above "kippled" joke appears in Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer (1969):

Q. Do you like Yeats?

A. I don't know, I've never tried any.

For a time his mind was empty and then he thought this:

Q. Do you like Kipling?

A. I don't know, I've never kippled.

In a deleted scene featured on the DVD of the 2000 documentary The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, Miriam Llord, a friend of Dick's, claims that kipple originated as a phrase she used for clutter around her house and that Dick asked to borrow the phrase for the novel.

[edit] Uses by other authors

The shared world anthology Temps by Midnight Rose references Dick's word with a character whose superhuman ability is generating rubbish, and who has been given the derogatary name "Captain Kipple, the paranormal garbage lady".^[2]
Charles Stross's novel The Atrocity Archives refers to "a desk covered in piles of kipple" on page 5.
Near the beginning of William Gibson's short story "The Winter Market", the term is also used. An appropriate homage to Dick's pre-portrayal of the later-to-be coined "sprawl", a similar analogous conceptualization from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" et al.