Roads and Racism: The Dialectics of Infrastructure in Philip K. Dick’s Marin Novels

Using three early 1960s novels, this article reconsiders Philip K. Dick as a novelist of the San Francisco Bay Area. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and Dr. Bloodmoney share real Bay Area settings and concern themselves with residents’ responses to social change, as manifested in Black American social mobility. Picking up on the infrastructural turn in the humanities, the article highlights how the novels ponder the relationship between the racism of the Bay Area’s White residents and the dialectical properties of emerging transport infrastructure as it negotiated between the urban and the suburban in the Bay Area. Specifically, it suggests that scholars underestimate Dick’s nuanced understanding of the interrelatedness of social- and auto-mobility, and overlook the extent to which his fiction responded to infrastructural transformations in the world around him.