At another time wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and readymades I imagined a "reciprocal readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!...

Another aspect of the "readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of a "readymade" delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the "readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.

A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse. Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.*

* Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Set) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 142.

The "fake fake" of Dick and the "readymade" (and its permutations) of Duchamp are, at root, cognate ideas expressing the shimmering indeterminacy between originals and simulacra that is the hallmark of the virtual reality -- both as metaphor and as technology -- of postindustrial society. It was Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," who first clearly delineated this tension. But it was Philip K. Dick, in numerous works including the pointedly titled The Simulacra (1964), who first created a body of fiction that brought the tension to life. The concept of the "simulacrum" has since become a staple of postmodernist criticism -- thus the praise offered by Baudrillard of Dick's works as "a total simulation without origin, past or future."

A brief note on the principles of selection of writings included in the present volume: The primary goal was to set forth the best of Dick's nonfictional efforts. But there was also the secondary aim of offering a representative sampling of his different nonfictional modes -- autobiographical; informal free flights of ideas (in the cozy obscurity of SF fanzines); critical examinations of the SF genre and of his own works in particular; and extended philosophical and theological analyses.