Upon the Dull Earth

"Upon the Dull Earth" was originally published in the November 1954 issue of Beyond

"Upon the Dull Earth" is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in November 1954 in Beyond Fantasy Fiction.

Plot summary

By offering up the blood of a lamb, Silvia, the protagonist of Upon the Dull Earth, is able to summon creatures she identifies as angels. She thinks that the creatures are her ancestors and she is sure that one day she will join them. At the same time, though, it is not clear whether the creatures are really good, as Silvia thinks, or wicked. Their behavior and their relation with Silvia scare the girl's relatives and Rick, her boyfriend. Rick thinks that Silvia's behavior is very dangerous, as "the white-winged giants ... can sear [her] to ash". During a quarrel with Rick, the girl accidentally cuts herself. Independently from her will, Silvia's blood summons the creatures. Unable to control their power, the angel-like giants burn Silvia's body and leave only "a brittle burned-out husk".

Unable to accept his lover's death, Rick tries to bring Silvia back, but in doing so he causes the degeneration and destruction of the world he lives in. The story also develops one of Dick's favorite themes, namely the definition of what is real. The reality we think we know well turns out to be insubstantial, due to Dick's use of multiple possible realities which ends up deconstructing the idea of reality itself. As it investigates these questions, first at an epistemological level and then at an ontological one, Upon the Dull Earth unfolds like a conventional horror plot. Rick manages to contact the light-creatures who apparently belong to a higher realm of being and he also manages to speak with Silvia. The girl now lives in the realm of the angel-like creatures, but she wants to come back and she explains that they made a mistake when they took her away. The creatures think that bringing Silvia back could be dangerous. Besides, Silvia explains that in order to come back she needs "some shape to enter" because there are no "material forms" in the higher continuum. She would have to take something from the human world, "something of clay".

At the end of the story, Silvia manages to come back, but the effects of her return are disastrous. As soon as she appears in front of Rick, Silvia realizes that something has gone wrong and that she has taken the place of someone else. In fact, she has taken her sister's body. There is a scene in which Rick sees Betty Lou (Silvia's sister) change and become Silvia, but it is just the beginning of the nightmare atmosphere which engulfs the story's ending. In fact, the process of transformation is not over. Slowly, every member of Silvia's family becomes Silvia. Rick runs away in a fright, but his body is destined to be invaded by Silvia, too. The girl has assumed the role of a revenant who invades the body and mind of any living person and spreads like a virus, a curse, leaving no hope for redemption. At the end of the story, after a useless flight, after he has seen service-station attendants, waitresses and common people change into Silvia before his very eyes, Rick looks at himself in a mirror and sees his face slowly becoming Silvia's. Suddenly, the man is gone and only Silvia remains. The girl finds herself alone and does not understand what has happened.

Themes

Old Testament allusions are littered throughout the story. The story assumes that many layers of reality exist, the higher the layer the more powerful it is. Silvia states that "the ladder ... seems to keep on going up and up. World after world". These statements constitute a kind of fantastic (not really science-fictional) explanation not only of creation but also of God's omnipotence. According to them, God is a being who belongs to a higher level of existence and who created other beings out of clay with his own hands. The universe of this story seems to be more influenced by gnosticism than by the Judeo-Christian religion, and the beings that looked like angels were probably not superior to Silvia. This is a horror story in the sense that it violates a Christian taboo. The taboo has to do with the assigned place of men in the natural and divine chain of being.

However, the New Testament theme of transmutation (from the ceremony of the eucharist where bread and wine represents the flesh and blood of Christ) might be the dominant one. This is a common theme in Dick's work, here carrying his characteristic gnostic twist where the transmutation goes awry under the hand of lesser divinity (the angels—in this tale they are ignorant and capricious, in many of Dick's works, especially the later ones, this divine figure is plainly malicious). The effect of this is that the entire world is transformed (transmuted) into a flawed, inhospitable form, mirroring the effect of Samael (the blind god) in gnosticism.

The title is taken from Proteus' ode to Silvia in Act 4 Scene 2 of Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare:

Then to Silvia let us sing,

That Silvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

Upon the dull earth dwelling:

To her let us garlands bring.

Works by Philip K. Dick

Novels

Gather Yourselves Together (1950)
Voices from the Street (1952)
Solar Lottery (1954)
Mary and the Giant (1954)
The World Jones Made (1954)
Eye in the Sky (1955)
The Man Who Japed (1955)
A Time for George Stavros (1956)
Pilgrim on the Hill (1956)
The Broken Bubble (1956)
The Cosmic Puppets (1957)
Puttering About in a Small Land (1957)
Nicholas and the Higs (1958)
Time Out of Joint (1958)
In Milton Lumky Territory (1958)
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1960)
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1960)
Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
Dr. Futurity (1960)
The Man in the High Castle (1961)
We Can Build You (1962)
Martian Time-Slip (1962)
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1963)
The Game-Players of Titan (1963)
The Simulacra (1963)
The Crack in Space (1963)
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
The Zap Gun (1964)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
The Unteleported Man (1964)
The Ganymede Takeover (1965)
Counter-Clock World (1965)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1966)
Nick and the Glimmung (1966)
Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
Ubik (1966)
Galactic Pot-Healer (1968)
A Maze of Death (1968)
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1969)
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)
Deus Irae (1976)
Radio Free Albemuth (1976; published 1985)
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
VALIS (1981)
The Divine Invasion (1981)
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
The Owl in Daylight (unfinished)

Collections

A Handful of Darkness (1955)
The Variable Man (1956)
The Preserving Machine (1969)
The Book of Philip K. Dick (1973)
The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977)
The Golden Man (1980)
Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities (1984)
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985)
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (1987)
Beyond Lies the Wub (1988)
The Dark Haired Girl (1989)
The Father-Thing (1989)
Second Variety (1989)
The Days of Perky Pat (1990)
The Little Black Box (1990)
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1990)
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1990)
The Minority Report (1991)
Second Variety (1991)
The Eye of the Sibyl (1992)
The Philip K. Dick Reader (1997)
Minority Report (2002)
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (2002)
Paycheck (2004)
Vintage PKD (2006)

Short stories

"Beyond Lies the Wub" (1952)
"The Gun" (1952)
"The Skull" (1952)
"The Little Movement" (1952)
"The Defenders" (1953)
"Mr. Spaceship" (1953)
"Piper in the Woods" (1953)
"Roog" (1953)
"The Infinites" (1953)
"Second Variety" (1953)
"The World She Wanted" (1953)
"Colony" (1953)
"The Cookie Lady" (1953)
"Impostor" (1953)
"Martians Come in Clouds" (1953)
"Paycheck" (1953)
"The Preserving Machine" (1953)
"The Cosmic Poachers" (1953)
"Expendable" (1953)
"The Indefatigable Frog" (1953)
"The Commuter" (1953)
"Out in the Garden" (1953)
"The Great C" (1953)
"The King of the Elves" (1953)
"The Trouble with Bubbles" (1953)
"The Variable Man" (1953)
"The Impossible Planet" (1953)
"Planet for Transients" (1953)
"Some Kinds of Life" (1953)
"The Builder" (1953)
"The Hanging Stranger" (1953)
"Project: Earth" (1953)
"The Eyes Have It" (1953)
"Tony and the Beetles" (1953)
"Prize Ship" (1954)
"Beyond the Door" (1954)
"The Crystal Crypt" (1954)
"A Present for Pat" (1954)
"The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" (1954)
"The Golden Man" (1954)
"James P. Crow" (1954)
"Prominent Author" (1954)
"Small Town" (1954)
"Survey Team" (1954)
"Sales Pitch" (1954)
"Time Pawn" (1954)
"Breakfast at Twilight" (1954)
"The Crawlers" (1954)
"Of Withered Apples" (1954)
"Exhibit Piece" (1954)
"Adjustment Team" (1954)
"Shell Game" (1954)
"Meddler" (1954)
"Souvenir" (1954)
"A World of Talent" (1954)
"The Last of the Masters" (1954)
"Progeny" (1954)
"Upon the Dull Earth" (1954)
"The Father-thing" (1954)
"Strange Eden" (1954)
"Jon's World" (1954)
"The Turning Wheel" (1954)
"Foster, You're Dead!" (1955)
"Human Is" (1955)
"War Veteran" (1955)
"Captive Market" (1955)
"Nanny" (1955)
"The Hood Maker" (1955)
"The Chromium Fence" (1955)
"Service Call" (1955)
"A Surface Raid" (1955)
"The Mold of Yancy" (1955)
"Autofac" (1955)
"Psi-man Heal My Child!" (1955)
"The Minority Report" (1956)
"To Serve the Master" (1956)
"Pay for the Printer" (1956)
"A Glass of Darkness" (1956)
"The Unreconstructed M" (1957)
"Misadjustment" (1957)
"Null-O" (1958)
"Explorers We" (1959)
"Recall Mechanism" (1959)
"Fair Game" (1959)
"War Game" (1959)
"All We Marsmen" (1963)
"Stand-by" (1963)
"What'll We Do with Ragland Park?" (1963)
"The Days of Perky Pat" (1963)
"If There Were No Benny Cemoli" (1963)
"Waterspider" (1964)
"Novelty Act" (1964)
"Oh, to Be a Blobel!" (1964)
"The War with the Fnools" (1964)
"What the Dead Men Say" (1964)
"Orpheus with Clay Feet" (1964)
"Cantata 140" (1964)
"A Game of Unchance" (1964)
"The Little Black Box" (1964)
"Precious Artifact" (1964)
"The Unteleported Man" (1964)
"Retreat Syndrome" (1965)
"Project Plowshare" (1965)
"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966)
"Holy Quarrel" (1966)
"Return Match" (1967)
"Faith of Our Fathers" (1967)
"Not by Its Cover" (1968)
"The Story to End All Stories" (1968)
"The Electric Ant" (1969)
"A. Lincoln, Simulacrum" (1969)
"The Pre-persons" (1974)
"A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" (1974)
"The Exit Door Leads In" (1979)
"Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr" (1980)
"Rautavaara's Case" (1980)
"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (1980)
"The Alien Mind" (1981)
"Strange Memories of Death" (1984)
"Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked" (1987)
"The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree" (1987)
"The Eye of the Sibyl" (1987)
"Stability" (1987)
"Goodbye, Vincent" (1988)

Adaptations

Films	Blade Runner (1982) Total Recall (1990) Confessions d'un Barjo (1992) Screamers (1995) Impostor (2002) Minority Report (2002) Paycheck (2003) A Scanner Darkly (2006) Next (2007) Screamers: The Hunting (2009) Radio Free Albemuth (2010) The Adjustment Bureau (2011) Total Recall (2012) Androiden Träumen (2014)

TV series	Total Recall 2070 (1999) The Man in the High Castle (2015) Minority Report (2015)

Adaptations

Upon the Dull Earth was adapted into an audio drama, "Silvia's Blood," by The Truth (podcast).

References

External links

Upon the Dull Earth title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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