Philip K. Dick’s Penultimate Truth strikes one as an example of science fiction that Dickens would have been a reader of, though that Great would, of course, feel himself compelled to edit as he went along. In particular, the opening chapters are a wonderful example of an author who well knows what authorship is supposed to be, one who can perfectly mask a very deep and very important criticism of society behind the veneer of fictional entertainment.
Chapter One gives us our first view of the “Uppers,” the hoaxers who rule the world with their total-war narrative, beings at once reminiscent and opposite to the Morlocks of Wells’ The Time Machine. Evidently human — with names readily familiar to us — their terminology and behavior is foreign to the reader, and the overall effect is an inhuman feel, like watching aliens in human form. Chapter Two, meanwhile, gives us our view of the “Lowers,” the Eloi of 2025, who lived crammed underground in inhuman conditions but who, in their motivations and meanings, strike the reader as eminently human. In short, Dick uses his first two chapters to show us without telling the situation of an upper class made disgusting by choice and a lower class made disgusting by design, though with flashes of a long-ago humanity peeking through the filth, and one may read into this what one will.