Stranger than Science Fiction – An Irishman’s Diary about Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke, and Flann O’Brien

There are no bicycles in Philip K Dick's 1969 sci-fi classic, Ubik. On the contrary, the book is set in a then-distant future (actually 1992), when space travel has become routine, with the plot's pivotal event happening on the moon.

Even so, as a number of critics have noted, there are striking similarities between Dick's novel and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, which had been published only a year or two beforehand (although written in 1940).

In both books, the chief protagonist spends most of his time dead. Both plots also revolve around explosions.

And a running theme in each is the existence of a vague but omnipotent substance – “omnium” in O’Brien’s case, and the eponymous “Ubik” in Dick’s.

There is no evidence of conscious copying. The books are otherwise very different, so the parallels may just have been products of similarly warped minds.

Warps – of time, especially – were a favourite theme of Dick's. His characters are disturbed by frequent slippages of reality, in which the world around them seems to decay or regress. For this and other reasons, Ubik ends on an uncertain, disorienting note.

By contrast, we know exactly where we are at the end of The Third Policeman, when a loop closes and starts repeating, with the protagonist being asked, again: "Is it about a bicycle?" That a bicycle is a loose representation of the infinity symbol may or may not be coincidental.

Getting back to Ubik, it today suffers the fate of many vintage science fiction in that its author overestimated the extent of technological advance in his timeframe. We know now that 1992 came and went without regular Ryanair-style flights to the moon.

But as sci-fi anoraks will be aware, not all of that year's imaginary creations now seem so implausible – it also having marked the supposed birthdate of Hal, the psychotic computer in the (1968) film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It’s entirely believable these days that a computer could run a spaceship with minimal human intervention. And it’s disturbingly plausible that a computer might decide humans were surplus to the operation.

Hal’s execution for mutiny by the ship’s last-surviving human is therefore one of the great scenes of cinema, by turns funny, bleak, and moving. As his circuits are slowly unplugged, he first pleads for his life, then expresses fear (“My mind is going, Dave”), and then, when there’s not enough memory left for fear, regresses to computer childhood.

His last act is to sing the song with which he is programmed, Daisy Bell, an old music hall standard said to have been inspired – Flann O'Brien fans note – by an incident involving a bicycle.

Having brought one with him to the US in the 1890s, composer Harry Dacre was annoyed to find he had to pay import duties. Whereupon a friend quipped that he was lucky it wasn't "a bicycle made for two", or he'd have been double-billed. The phrase suggested a song, then became part of the chorus. And this is as far as Hal gets in the film. As his voice slows and distorts, in a twist of which O'Brien would have approved, the last word we can (just about) make out is "bicycle".

In one sense, at least, the scene was was rooted in reality, because Daisy Bell had been the first song ever sung by computer – an IBM machine in 1961. It has also since emerged that the company did not want the deranged HAL being associated with its products.

So when asked where the name came from, Arthur C Clarke (who wrote the original stor) claimed it was short for "Heuristic Algorithm", a reasonable-sounding explanation.

On the other hand, as a fascinating recent letter to the Financial Times pointed out, HAL can also be derived alphabetically by reversing one character from each of "I", "B", and "M". That could be coincidence. But as the correspondent added, the chances were "17,576 to 1".

Mind you, I was also struck by the letter-writer’s own curious name – Manny Aspe-College (from “Dublin, Ireland”). For some reason, this reminded me of the equally exotic Angela Polsen-Emy, whose letters to various journals we noted here a while back.

And speaking of Hal, I first found it spooky to discover that the letters of Manny Aspe-College could be rearranged into “all(y) spacemen gone”. Then I noticed they were also an anagram of “Myles na gCopaleen”, an even spookier coincidence for which the odds must have been a lot higher than 17,576 to 1.