Better known as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick was, during the fifties, also the author of numerous mimetic novels, mostly published posthumously, set in the years of the rise of suburban communities in the American West. The aim of this essay is to show how these novels address and foreground one of the main concerns in Dick’s fiction: the theme of community-building. Present in a number of his science fiction novels, which often connect the suburban ideal with images of the Cold War, here this theme becomes the central focus. At least until the mid-sixties, in Dick’s highly polyphonic fictional worlds, the early fifties leave their mark as the memory of a time of troubled healing after the trauma of World War Two, and the suburb is a site of necessary reconstruction after an experience of societal and psychological breakdown.
