Kipple

The word kipple first appeared in a fanzine by Ted Pauls in 1960 and was originally taken from the joke about Kipling:

"Do you like Kipling?"

"I don't know, I've never kippled."

It was later given its more famous use by Terry Carr before being popularised by science fiction Author Philip K. [...] in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It refers to unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself. Some of [...]'s descriptions of it suggest an analogy to entropy. According to two characters from the book, John Isidore stated that the first law of "kipple" is that "kipple" drives out "nonkipple"; Buster Friendly liked to declare, "Earth would die under a layer — not of radioactive dust — but of kipple."

Other forms of the word used in the novel include "kipple-ized", "kipple-factor", and "kippleization". People can turn into "living kipple". An apartment can become "kipple-infested".

"There's the First Law of Kipple," he said. "'Kipple drives out nonkipple.' Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple."

This term comes up again in other PKD books such as Now Wait for Last Year. Here Dr. Eric Sweetscent is also under a pile of kipple, especially in relation to his wife and his employer.

Kipple is also mentioned in [...]'s novel Galactic Pot-Healer. Phrases idly run through the protagonist's head: "Do you like Yeats?" "I don't know, I've never had any." "Do you like Kipling?" "I don't know, I've never kippled."

It crops up again in A Maze of Death:

"I'll pile her stuff outside and then get mine aboard. I'm under no mandate to load her kipple".

In a deleted scene featured on the DVD of the 2000 documentary The Gospel According to Philip K. [...], Miriam Llord, a friend of [...]'s, claims kipple originated as a phrase she used for clutter around her house. [...] asked to borrow the phrase for the novel.

Uses by other authors

The shared world anthology Temps by Midnight Rose references [...]'s word with a character whose superhuman ability is generating rubbish, and who has been given the derogatary name "Captain Kipple, the paranormal garbage lady".1

Charles Stross's novel The Atrocity Archives refers to "a desk covered in piles of kipple" on page five.

Near the beginning of William Gibson's "The Winter Market", the term is also used. An appropriate homage to [...]'s pre-portrayal of the later-to-be coined "sprawl", a similar analogous conceptualization from "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" et al.

See also

• Entropy
• Grey goo