Dickson uses the Oriental martial arts to study the attainment and control of that perennially fascinating phenomenon, the exaltation state. He can and on occasion has discussed the topic for long hours on end. What lies behind hysterical strength, stunning intuition, heroic virtue? Creativity is once again his answer. When human beings operate at the very highest levels their bodies, minds, or spirits permit, they enter a transcendant phase Dickson calls “creative overdrive.” In this condition, they can direct their conscious and unconscious powers to some otherwise unreachable goal. Salvation is integration and creativity integrates.
Thus, cerebral, artistic adventure heroes are Dickson’s specialty. For instance, in The Final Encyclopedia, Hal Mayne is a poet who has passed through previous incarnations as a soldier (Dorsai!) and a mystic {Necromancer). Michael de Sandoval in Lost Dorsal is a musician and Cletus Grahame in Tactics of Mistake has tried painting. Dickson endows his heroes with the talents he himself esteems and lets them demonstrate
overdrive by their deeds. They are offered as examples of what the entire race could achieve if only its creative energies were fully liberated.
Dickson himself is an advertisement for his theories. His memory lapses are legendary—once when making introductions, he could not recall his own brother’s name. He often confuses the titles of his books, scrambles the locations of his planets, and forgets the lyrics to his own songs. Nevertheless, his mind becomes astonishingly supple and efficient when overdrive directs it in the service of his art. In this heightened state, he can move briskly through public appearances though exhausted and can soar to fresh imaginative insights. For Dickson, creativity is both the journey and the journey’s end. It enables him to unite the plumy and swordlike extremes of his own nature in order to work.
He has an unparalleled sense of vocation, a commitment to his artistic mission as keen as any crusader’s vow. By writing the Cycle, he hopes to bring the evolutionary progress he describes that much closer. When asked if he expects the Childe Cycle to appear on some thirtieth century list of Ten Books That Changed the Cosmos, Dickson replied with a smile, “And what are the other nine?” His idealism has been dismissed as naive in some quarters but events within and without the sf field continue to vindicate him.
Some authors stumble into their trade for lack of anything better to do; others are forced into it by economic necessity. Not so Dickson: “I’ve been a writer all my life, as far back as I can remember. Nobody ever told me not to until later on, by which time it was too late.” His talents were encouraged by his parents, an Australian-born mining engineer and an American school teacher who met and married in Canada. Hisolder half-brother is the distinguished Canadian novelist Lovat Dickson, but his mother’s influence was the crucial formative one. Her reading him books and telling him stories are among his fondest early memories.
Maude Dickson, a wonderfully gracious and spry lady of ninety-one, modestly disputes the importance of her efforts. Nevertheless, her son was a precocious writer: a newspaper published his poem “Apple Blossoms” when he was only seven years old. In 1939, at age fifteen, he entered the University of Minnesota to major in creative writing but his studies were interrupted by military service during World War II. Army aptitude tests predicted he would have a bright future as a dentist.
Dickson graduated in 1948, planning to take his doctorate, teach, and write on the side. He abandoned this “unduly sensible” scheme to follow his gift and write full-time. It was a desperate gamble. He supported himself by selling his blood—twice as often as permitted—and subsisted on a diet of stale bread, peanut butter, and vitamin pills. His sacrifices were rewarded when his first sf story, “The Friendly Man,” appeared in Astounding in February, 1951.
Three decades, 40 novels, and 175 shorter works later, the gamble may be said to have paid off in honors and prosperity. Dickson has won the Hugo for “Soldier, Ask Not” (1965), the Nebula for “Call Him Lord” (1966), the Jupiter for Time Storm (1977), and the British Fantasy Award for The Dragon and the George (1978) as well as receiving many other award nominations. These days, a dedicated staff including a full-time business manager and part-time secretarial and research workers assist him. Maintaining his affairs in good order requires an otter-keeper’s patience but the task should become easier once the intricacies of his
newly purchased computer system are unraveled.
Dickson is one master who seeks perfection in his craft and freely shares his expertise with fellow guildsmen. He served two terms as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America (1969-71) and is currently working to extend the benefits of SFWA’s organizational experience to the fledgling Association of Science Fiction Artists. Much in demand as a speaker and resource person, he is one of the few non-academic professional writers in the Science Fiction Research Association. He took part in one Clarion Workshop for new writers and regularly attended the Milford Conference for established writers during the 1960’s. (However, he was never known as a member of the infamous “Milford Mafia.”) He has also been invited to participate in sessions of the Science Fiction Institute, a teacher-training program held annually at the University of Kansas. Thus, chat by speech, he fosters professional excellence and public understanding.
Dickson’s mastery of technique combines theoretical lessons acquired in university classes taught by such people as Sinclair Lewis and Robert Penn Warren with ruthlessly practical ones learned in the low-paying sf magazine market. His faith in his own ability saw him safely through both processes. “I was a fully-formed writer long before I got my degree,” he explains. “I had enough mass and momentum along the road I wanted to travel so that I couldn’t be jolted off.” Neither lethal classroom situations nor the pressure of gaining enough story skills to stay alive blocked his progress.
Now in the mellowness of his maturity, Dickson is reaching the destination he chose for himself half a century ago. He successfully merges style and content,
polished literary form and research-based substance, into one liquid whole. Although clarity can be a handicap when critics equate obscurity with profundity, Dickson’s art conceals his artfulness on purpose with a view to reaching the widest possible audience. He believes that “good fiction should become transparent so people end up reading it not so much for the words as for the ideas.”
Dickson has always been a highly conscious writer. There is nothing random or spontaneous in his tightly structured prose, never a wheel misplaced, never a gear unmeshed. He seeks the optimum configuration for his fictional drive train in order to transmit messages most efficiently. Philosophical convictions generate the relentless power of his best work.
He calls his method of rendering principles in fiction the “consciously thematic novel.” This technique, developed from mainstream models, enables him to argue a specific point of view without resorting to propaganda. It presents an unbiased selection of natural incidents to support its thesis. “The aim is to make the theme such an integral part of the novel that it can be effective upon the reader without ever having to be stated explicitly,” says Dickson. A consciously thematic story can, of course, be read and enjoyed for its entertainment value alone. But ideally, when the reader sees all the resonances and repetitions, the author hopes that “he will do the work of looking at this slew of evidence I’ve laid out and will, on his own, come to the conclusion I’d like him to reach.”
Dickson calls the Childe Cycle “my showpiece for the consciously thematic novel.” Curiously enough, the Cycle itself originated in this very way, through a deeper interpretation of pre-existing evidence—as though the unconscious side of the author’s mind were
operating on the conscious side via thematic methods.
During the 1940’s, Dickson started—but never finished—an historical novel entitled The Pikeman about a young Swiss mercenary serving in fifteenth century Italy. This plot, enhanced by ideas drawn from Rafael Sabatini’s Bellanon and from Astounding editor John W. Campbell, yielded Dorsm! in 1959. Then during the course of a night-time asthma attack at the following summer’s Milford Conference, a hitherto unsuspected pattern sprang at Dickson from the pages of Dorsai!. “Eureka! I had it!” he recalls. “I got up the next morning and spent three hours trying to tell Richard McKenna about it, a process by which I sorted it out in my mind. The essential structure was born fullblown at that moment.”
The Childe Cycle is an epic of human evolution, a scenario for mankind’s rite of passage. Over the course of a thousand years, from the fourteenth century to the twenty-fourth, interactions between three archetypical Prime Characters—the Men of Faith, War, and Philosophy—succeed in uniting the unconscious/conservative and the conscious/progressive halves of the racial psyche. The result is a fully-evolved being endowed with intuition, empathy, and creativity whom Dickson calls Ethical-Responsible Man. At that point, the human organism will no longer be a “childe” but a spurred and belted knight.