John McPhee to Reality and Perception

The path from John McPhee to "Reality and Perception" takes six hops, and each one is a trapdoor. McPhee's *The Control of Nature* documents humans physically rearranging landscapes—hauling fourteen million cubic yards of debris back into Burro Canyon, building a pyramid ten times Giza's size, then constructing debris basins to protect the debris they just moved. This is environmentalism as epistemological comedy: the system you intervene in reshapes the terms of your intervention. Step through ecology to Herbert's *Dune*, where planetary management becomes indistinguishable from religion—the Fremen don't just adapt to Arrakis, Arrakis rewires what they can conceive of wanting. Then the final hop to Dick's *The Man in the High Castle*, where the I Ching generates the novel within the novel, and characters discover their "real" world may be the fiction. What connects McPhee's engineers to Dick's oracular anxieties is Merleau-Ponty's quiet observation, surfacing in the telepistemology literature along the path: "I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me." McPhee's engineers believe they are imposing order on the San Gabriels. The San Gabriels are organizing the engineers.