And it was not as if his secret inner world, the spirit world that he had nourished so long, had suddenly come crashing down around him. There were no ruins and sad remains to pick over. Rather, all the dreams and notions he had held so long had abruptly winked out of existence. Vanished silently, like a soap bubble. Gone forever. As if they had never existed.
“Introducing the Author” (1953)
Once, when I was very young, I came across a magazine directly below the comic books called Stirring Science Stories. I bought it, finally, and carried it home, reading it along the way. Here were ideas, vital and imaginative. Men moving across the universe, down into subatomic particles, into time; there was no limit. One society, one given environment was transcended. Stf [abbreviation for “scientifiction,” an early alternate term for “science fiction”] was Faustian; it carried a person up and beyond.
I was twelve years old, then. But I saw in stf the same thing I see now: a medium in which the full play of human imagination can operate, ordered, of course, by reason and consistent development. Over the years stf has grown, matured toward greater social awareness and responsibility.
I became interested in writing stf when I saw it emerge from the ray gun stage into studies of man in various types and complexities of society.
I enjoy writing stf; it is essentially communication between myself and others as interested as I in knowing where present forces are taking us. My wife and my cat, Magnificat, are a little worried about my preoccupation with stf. Like most stf readers I have files and stacks of magazines, boxes of notes and data, parts of unfinished stories, a huge desk full of related material in various stages. The neighbors say I seem to “read and write a lot.” But I think we will see our devotion pay off. We may yet live to be present when the public libraries begin to carry the stf magazines, and someday, perhaps even the school libraries.
— PHILIP K. DICK
“Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick” (1968)
Philip K. Dick attended the University of California, operated a record store, was an advertising copywriter, had a classical music program on station KSMO, lives now in San Rafael, and is interested in hallucinogens and snuff. Born Chicago, December 16, 1928. Although bearded, aging and portly, is a fanatical girl-watcher; does everything but carry a measuring tape. Sold his first story November 1951 and has had no occupation except that of science fiction writer since. Has to his credit twenty-seven books, of which twenty-six are novels. First novel: 1954. In June 1953 had stories in seven magazines simultaneously. Won the Hugo for best novel 1962, Man in the High Castle. Married, has two daughters and young, pretty, nervous wife, Nancy, who is afraid of the telephone. In two years (1963, ’64) wrote and sold twelve novels, plus many magazine-length stories. Loves ducks and sheep; lives on a slough where wild ducks pause in their migrations. Lost his seventeen sheep in his most recent divorce action. Has owned a strange variety of cats, including one — Horace — who all his life asked an invisible question which no one could answer. Spends most of his time listening to first Scarlatti and then the Jefferson Airplane, then Gotterdammerung, in an attempt to fit them all together. Has many phobias and seldom goes anywhere, but loves to have people come over to his small, nice place on the water. Owes creditors a fortune, which he does not have. Warning: don’t lend him any money. In addition he will steal your pills. Considers his best work to be the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? recently published by Doubleday, because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society in which a person’s dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than his house or car.
“Self Portrait” (1968)
Chicago: I was born there, on December 16, 1928. It was a frigid city, and the home of gangsters; it was also a real city and I appreciated that. Fortunately, however, my mother and father moved us to the Bay Area in California, and I learned that weather could be good, could be friendly rather than harsh. So, like most people in California, I was not born here but drifted here (I was about a year old at the time).
What, in those days, could be collected as evidence that I would someday be a writer? My mother (who is still living) wrote with the hope of having a literary success. She failed. But she taught me to admire writing . . . whereas my father viewed football games as transcending everything else. The marriage between them did not last, and when I was five they separated, my father moving to Reno, Nevada, my mother and I — and my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt — remaining in Berkeley in a huge old blue house.
Cowboy songs were my main love then. Music, in fact, has played a major role throughout my life. But in those days — when I was six — I wore a cowboy suit and listened to cowboy music on the radio. That and the funny papers were my whole world.
It is odd to think that a child could grow up during the Depression and not know it. I never heard the word. Of course I knew that my mother was broke most of the time, but I never managed to extrapolate from this. It seemed to me that the dull quality of the society around me — the city streets and their houses — came from the fact that all motorcars were black. Traffic progressed like a great and never-ending funeral.
But we had our amusements. In the winter of 1934 my mother moved the two of us to Washington, D.C. This gave me the sudden opportunity to find out what really awful weather was like . . . and yet we enjoyed it. We had our sleds in winter and our Flexies (sleds with wheels) in summer. In Washington, summer is a horror beyond the telling of it. I think it warped my mind — warped that in a fine conjunction of the fact that my mother and I had nowhere to live. We stayed with friends. Year in, year out. I did not do well (what seven-year-old child would?) and so I was sent to a school specializing in “disturbed” children. I was disturbed in regard to the fact that I was afraid of eating. The boarding school could not handle me because I weighed less each month, and was never seen to eat a string bean. My literary career, however, began to emerge, in the form of poetry. I wrote my first poem thus:
I saw a little birdy
Sitting in the tree
I saw a little birdy
looking out at me.
Then the kitty saw the birdy and there wasn’t none to see,
For the cat ate him up in the morning.
This poem was enthusiastically received on Parents’ Day, and my future was assured (although, of course, no one knew it; not then, anyhow). There then followed a long period in which I did nothing in particular except go to school — which I loathed — and fiddle with my stamp collection (which I still have), plus other boywise activities such as marbles, flipcards, bolobats, and the newly evented comic books, such as Tip Top Comics, King Comics, and Popular Comics. My ten-cent allowance each week went first to candy (Necco wafers, chocolate bar, and jujubes), and, after that, Tip Top Comics. Comic books were scorned by adults, who assumed and hoped they, as a literary medium, would soon disappear. They did not. And then there was the lurid section of the Hearst newspapers, which on Sunday told of mummies still alive in caves, and lost Atlantis, and the Sargasso Sea. The American Weekly, this quasi-magazine was called. Today we would dismiss it as “pseudo-science,” but in those days, the midthirties, it was quite convincing. I dreamed of finding the Sargasso Sea and all the ships tangled up there, their corpses dangling over the rails and their coffers filled with pirate gold. I realize now that I was doomed to failure by the very fact that the Sargasso Sea did not exist — or anyhow it did not capture many Spanish gold-bearing ships-of-the-line. So much for childhood dreams.
About 1939 my mother took me back to Berkeley and we began to have cats. We lived in the Berkeley hills, which in those days were mostly vacant lots. Mice rustled about, and so did cats. I began to think of cats as a necessary part of the household — a view I hold even more strongly today (at present my wife and I have two, but the male, Willis, is worth at least five regular cats [I will return to this subject later]).