In I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, Laurence A. Rickels investigated the renowned science fiction author’s collected work by way of its relationship to the concept and condition of schizophrenia. In Germany: A Science Fiction, he focuses on psychopathy as the undeclared diagnosis implied in flunking the empathy test. The switch from psychosis to psychopathy as an organizing limit opens the prospect of a genealogy of the Cold War era, which Rickels begins by examining Dick’s The Simulacra and follows out with readings of Simulacron 3, Fahrenheit 451, The Day of the Triffids, This Island Earth and Gravity’s Rainbow, among many other genealogical stations.

Nazi Germany hosted the first season of the realization of science fantasy with the rocket at the top of this arc. After World War II, the genre had to delete the recent past and start again within the new Cold War opposition. Certainly the ancestral prehistory was still intact (in the works of, for instance, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells). At the bulk rate of its generic line of production, however, science fiction would thereafter become a native to the Cold War habitat.

This study addresses the syndications of the missing era in the science fiction mainstream, the phantasmagoria of its returns, and the extent of the integration of all the above since some point in the 1980s. Rickels works through the preliminaries of repair that must be met in a world devastated by psychopathic violence before mourning can even be a need. While I Think I Am was the endopsychic allegory of Dick’s corpus, Germany takes that corpus as a point of context for the endopsychic genealogy of the post-WWII containment and integration of psychopathy.

LAURENCE A. RICKELS is an emeritus professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the Academy of Fine Arts-Karlsruhe. Currently he holds the Sigmund Freud Chair in Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School while serving as Eberhard Berent Visiting Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is the author of many works of cultural theory, among them Aberrations of Mourning, The Case of California, Nazi Psychoanalysis, The Vampire Lectures, The Devil Notebooks, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, Germany: A Science Fiction and The Psycho Records.