The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings by Philip K. Dick

Rather than writing stories about doom, perhaps we should take the doom for granted and go on from there. Make the ruined world of ash a premise: State it in paragraph one, and get it over with, rather than winding up with it at the very end. And make the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve the problem of postwar survival.

At worst, we can suppose that nobody will survive. But this is like taking pictures of coal bins at midnight: It can be done, but if there is nothing there, then what the hell. It is quite possible that a few dozen and even a very large number of people may survive the war, in which case a story dealing with various attempts at setting up societies can be developed. Of course, we want to avoid the English doom novel: the struggling primitive colony of the postmachine type, the “back to nature” thing. Let’s bypass that, and presume basic technology; maybe not atomic-powered rocket ships, but at least gasoline combustion engines and telephones.

However, I can’t seriously believe that much of our cultural pattern or physical assets will survive the next fifty years. Our present social continuum is disintegrating rapidly; if war doesn’t burst it apart, it obviously will corrode away. At the very best, at the most optimistic, there won’t be any death and destruction. I’ll assume the brighter side, the possibility of a limited war and only partial retrogression — Bradbury is perhaps too pessimistic — but to avoid the topic of war and cultural retrogression, as some schools of science fiction writers and editors have done, is unrealistic and downright irresponsible.

Such pollyanna noises are designed to increase circulation. They shouldn’t fool anybody who reads newspapers.

“Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert Heinlein?” (1966)

Recently I took yet another dose of LSD-25, and as a result certain dull but persistent thoughts have come creeping into my head. I will herein retail [sic; retell] a few of them, in chaotic form. If you find them all false, good for you. If you find them all true, good for you likewise.

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne’s story of travel to the moon is not SF because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much SF if they went by rubber band.

Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately. Those such as Waldo are freaks and prove nothing.

Because of a present-day rocket travel to Mars et al., the general public is at last willing to accept SF as reasonable. They have stopped laughing, but they have not started reading. They probably never will, because reading is too hard for them. But now we know that we were right. (Of course, we knew that all along. But it’s nice to see it proved.)

No one makes any real money off good — I repeat, good — SF. This probably indicates that it has artistic worth. If Lorenzo de Medici were alive he would pick up the tab for A. E. van Vogt, not for John Updike.

The best SF novel I have read is Vonnegut’s Player Piano, because it actually deals with men-women relationships (Paul Proteus and his bitch of a wife). In this matter the book is unique in the field. Brave New World only seems to do this; 1984 in this regard is awful.

If I were to dredge up one SF novel that, more than any others, would cause me to abandon SF entirely, it is Robert Heinlein’s Gulf. It strikes me as fascism pure and simple, and — what is worse — put forth unattractively. Bleh.

Heinlein has done more to harm SF than has any other writer, I think — with the possible exception of George O. Smith. The dialogue in Stranger in a Strange Land has to be read to be believed. “Give the little lady a box of cigars!” a character cries, meaning that the girl has said something that is correct. One wonders what the rejoinder would be if a truly inspired remark had to be answered, rather than a routine statement; it would probably burst the book’s gizzard.

Once I read a terrific short story in If by an unknown writer named Robert Gilbert. It was poetry, beauty, love, perfection, and I wrote him and told him so. He wrote back and said he’d written the story while listening to Harry James records.

I started reading SF in 1941. I’m old.

There is one accurate way — and only one — by which you can tell you are growing old. It is when the SF magazines that you bought new on the stand at the time they came out have begun to turn the same yellow color as the ones you picked up as collectors’ items from specialty dealers . . . i.e., already ancient.

Is it possible that Lovecraft saw the truth? That realms and wickedness such as he describes, for example in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, actually exist? Imagine taking a dose of LSD and finding yourself in Salem. You would go mad.

Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint, as in Gather, Darkness [a novel by Fritz Leiber]. God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else’s. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I don’t. I wish I had never written it; there are too many horrid forces loose in it. When I wrote it I had been taking certain chemicals and I could see the awful landscape that I depicted. But not now. Thank God. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God who lifts the sins of the world].

Avram Davidson [an SF writer] fascinates me — as a person, I mean. He is a mixture of a little boy and a very wise old man, and his eyes always twinkle as if he were a defrocked Santa Claus. With beard dyed black.

I’ll give anyone fifteen cents who can imagine [SF editor] Tony Boucher as a small boy. Obviously, Tony was always as he is now. But even more difficult to imagine is the strange truth that once there was no Tony Boucher at all. This is clearly impossible. I think there must always have been a Tony Boucher; if not the one we know, then some other, very much like him.

I have written and sold twenty-three novels, and all are terrible except one. But I am not sure which one.

If Beethoven had lived just one additional year he would have entered a fourth period of his evolving talent. We can imagine this by listening to his last composition, the alternate ending for the thirteenth quartet. What we cannot imagine is — what about later, in his old age? Suppose he, like Verdi, like Haydn, had lived to compose in his eighties. Under LSD I have a vision of a seventh or eighth period of Beethoven: string quartets with chorus and four soloists.

Out of all the SF that I have read, one story still means more to me than any others: It is Harry Bates’s Alas, All Thinking. It is the beginning and the end of literate science fiction. Alas.

For fifteen years, the entire period in which I have written SF, I have never seen my agent or even talked to him on the phone. I wonder what sort of person he is, assuming he exists at all. When I call his number his receptionist says, “Mr. Meredith isn’t here right now. Will you talk to Mr. Rib Frimble?” Or some such unlikely name. On the basis of that, in my next call I ask not for Mr. Meredith but for Mr. Frimble. Then the receptionist says, “Mr. Frimble is out, sir; will you talk to Mr. Dead?” And so it goes.

If I knew what a hallucination was I would know what reality was. I have examined the topic thoroughly, and I assert that it is impossible to have a hallucination; it goes against reason and common sense. Those who claim to have had them are probably lying. (I have had a few myself.)

Once in a while somebody in the neighborhood who is rich enough to own a hedge, and is always busily clipping it, asks me why I write SF. I never have an answer. There are several other questions that get asked but that obtain no response at all from me. They are:

1. Where do you get your plots?

2. Do you put people you know into your stories?

3. Why aren’t you selling to Playboy? Everyone else is. I hear it pays a hell of a lot.

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