Now, to separate science fiction from fantasy. This is impossible to do, and a moment’s thought will show why. Take Psionics; take mutants such as we find in Ted Sturgeon’s wonderful More Than Human. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not [cannot be] objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.
Now to define good science fiction. The conceptual dislocation — the new idea, in other words — must be truly new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his mind and wake it up to the possibility of something he had not up to then thought of. Thus “good science fiction” is a value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.
I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an SF story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good SF the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain reaction of ramification ideas in the mind of the reader; it so to speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus SF is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by and large does not do. We who read SF (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain reaction of ideas being set off in our mind by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create — and enjoy doing it: Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.
“Predictions” by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981)
1983
*The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against that country impossible. At the same time the USSR will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The United States will turn, then, to nerve gas.
1984
*The United States will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel source, eliminating the need for oil.
1985
*By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the USSR or in the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants.
1986
*Such satellites as HEA0-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high-energy phenomena in the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit.
1989
*The United States and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information coming into existence.
1993
*An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the USSR, thus reducing our interest in locating life forms on other planets.
1995
*Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
1997
*The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and on Mars. Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments.
1998
‘The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
2000
* An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
2010
*Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
“Universe Makers. . . and Breakers” (1981)
[The opening biographical note
was written by Dick himself.]
Philip K. Dick is the author of 48 books and 150 stories, with four movies currently in the works. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Graouilly d’Or Award of France, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Playboy Award for Best New Contributor of Fiction for 1980 [for the story “Frozen Journey,” later retitled “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”]. This February, Bantam Books releases his new novel Valis, and in April Simon & Schuster its sequel The Divine Invasion. The London Times wrote of him, “One of the most original practitioners now writing any kind of fiction, Philip K. Dick makes most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac.” He lives in Santa Ana, Orange County, California, and has been a SelecTV subscriber for over two years.
Science fiction films have put one over on us. Like the veil of maya, your special effects department down there in Hollywood can now simulate anything the mind can imagine. . . and you thought it was all real. No, they really don’t blow up planets. It’s true; they make it up. And a great deal of skillful imagining is going on these days. Not content with destroying whole planets, inventive scriptwriters and directors will soon be bringing you peculiar new universes with inhabitants to match. Watch for it. What you thought an alien looked like. . . well, it is going to look a lot worse. What burst through Kane’s shirt in Alien is not the end of the line of monsters but more the beginning.
It takes megabucks to match the imaginations behind sci-fi films, and that money exists because the profits are there. Not for the story line of the film; that isn’t what Hollywood goes for, now that Hitchcock has left us. Why do you need a story line if your special effects department can simulate anything? Graphic, visual impact has replaced story. Authors of science-fiction novels know this and grumble; what they wrote is not what you get when the film is finished. But this is as it should be. We are seeing a story, not being told it.
Ridley Scott, who directed Alien and who now intends to bring into existence a $15 million film based on my novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, confessed to an interviewer from Omni magazine that he “found the novel too difficult to read,” despite the fact that the novel appeared as a mass-circulation paperback. On the other hand I was able rather easily to read the screenplay (it will be called Blade Runner). It was terrific. It bore no relation to the book. Oddly, in some ways it was better. (I had a hell of a time getting my hands on the screenplay. No one involved in the Blade Runner project has ever spoken to me. But that’s okay; I haven’t spoken to them.) What my story will become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch. Makes my book seem dull by comparison.
Still, you wouldn’t want to see my novel on the screen because it is full of people conversing, plus the personal problems of the protagonist. These matters don’t translate to the screen. And why translate them, since a novel is a story in words, whereas a movie is an event that moves? They’re not called movies for nothing. I have no complaints.
Sometimes we sci-fi writers tell ourselves that the recent mass excitement over our wares is due to the successes in the actual space program, all those manned and unmanned probes, all those pictures sent back of moons no one knew existed, not to mention rings that are braided together in an affront to known laws of physics. But this isn’t the case. The real reason for the wild financial successes of recent sci-fi films is: Human imagination takes a quantum-leap breakthrough by the special effects people; films such as Close Encounters and Alien and 2001 would be just terrific, just as awe-inspiring and wonderful if we were still driving Model A Fords — perhaps even more so.
The fact is, spaceships no longer dangle on strings, no longer fizz, hesitate, or wobble past you, as in the old Flash Gordon serials. The monsters are no longer inflated rubber toys haltingly mimicking what the average ten-year-old could dream up. There is great sophistication at the dream factory these days. If I as an author can think it up, they can build it in such a way as to scare or amaze you, and in all cases convince you. And this is why, really, sci-fi films work now, in contrast to the old days, when kids at Saturday afternoon matinees hooted and giggled at Lon Chaney, Jr., emerging from a fake swamp to inflict the mummy’s curse on yet another idiotic lady.