Philip K. Dick’s fiction abolishes the double, leaving no exteriority to simulation.

Evidence

And not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra - science fiction has always done so, but it played on the double, on doubling or redoubling, either artificial or imaginary, whereas here the double has disappeared, there is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, a projection, or a Utopia that can reflect it - simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority - we will no longer even pass through to “the other side of mirror,” that was still the golden age of transcendence. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 407

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the third-order simulacrum against the earlier science-fiction trope of the double — the key distinction between second and third order.
• XREF: The ‘no mirror, no the other side’ language resonates with the reader’s own work on mirrors in literature and with Lacanian mirror-stage theory.