As a writer, though, I’d sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just special effects of my ideas, used. For all its dazzling graphic impact, Alien (to take one example) had nothing new to bring us in the way of concepts that awaken the mind rather than the senses. A monster is a monster, and a spaceship is a spaceship. Star Trek, years ago, delved more into provocative ideas than most big-budget sci-fi films today, and some of the finest authors in the science-fiction field wrote those hour TV episodes. I’m getting a little tired of people turning out to be robots, harmless-looking life forms evolving into stupendous but predictable space squids, and, most of all, World War Two’s Battle of Midway refought in outer space. But I must admit that the eerie, mystical, almost religious subtheme in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back enchanted me. Now and then the sense of wonder is there. Okay, if they would just stop blowing up the orbiting space station at the end — but it looks so nice, that acid-trip color-burst display. This is the great written rule: Sci-fi films end not with a whimper but a bang. And maybe that’s as it should be, in the best of all visual galaxies.
“Headnote” for “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1981)
The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of “human.” The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex — a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying — but an organism that is human in terms of its soul.
I’m sorry if the word “soul” offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, when I wrote the story “Beyond Lies the Wub” back in my youth in politically active Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the “android or reflex machine” that looks human but is not — the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 [“The Android and the Human,” included herein] — twenty years after “Beyond Lies the Wub” was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape.
In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very young person!
I liked the blurbs that Planet Stories printed for “Beyond Lies the Wub.” On the title page of the magazine they wrote:
Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools, proclaimed the slovenly wub, after death.
And ahead of the story proper they wrote:
The slovenly wub might well have said: Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.
Reader reaction to the story was excellent, and Jack O’Sullivan, editor of Planet, wrote to tell me that in his opinion it was a very fine little story — whereupon he paid me something like $15. It was my introduction to pulp payment rates.
Just a week ago while going through my closet I came across an ancient pulp magazine with ragged edges, its cover missing, its pages yellow. . . . Wondering what it was, I picked it up — and found that this ancient remnant, this artifact from another epoch, was indeed the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories with my first published story in it. Profound emotions touched me as I gazed down at the illustration for “Wub”; it is a superb little illo [illustration], done by Vestal, and under it is written, ” ‘The Wub, sir,’ Peterson said. ‘It spoke!’ ” Well, here we are in the eighties, twenty-eight years later, and the gentle wub still speaks. May he always speak. . . and may other humans always listen.
Part Three
Works Related to The Man in the High Castle and Its Proposed Sequel
Readers should consult the “Introduction” to this volume for a discussion of the Dick novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel the following year.
“Naziism and the High Castle” was first published in the science-fiction fanzine Niekas in September 1964. It was written in response to a politically charged review of High Castle in an earlier issue of Niekas by fellow SF writer (and friend) Poul Anderson. It was reprinted in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, No. 14 (June 1987). As the essay raises a number of unusually important factual issues, it is essential to note that the assertion by Dick that “many” Jewish refugees who lived, during World War Two, under Japanese rule in the Far East “set up Hitler organizations” and performed the Nazi salute is utterly unsubstantiated by the numerous scholarly studies that I have consulted. Dick’s own source for this assertion is unknown.
Both the “Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen” (1974) and the two chapters (1964) of the proposed sequel to High Castle are published here for the first time. The quality of the two chapters is remarkable; see the “Introduction” for a discussion of the factors that led Dick to abandon this project. One historical clarification is in order: In the first chapter, reference is made to the suicide of Field Marshal Rommel by shooting. In fact, he poisoned himself. It should also be noted that an audiotape cassette released as PKDS Newsletter, Nos. 9-10 (January 1986) includes, as one of its sides, notes dictated by Dick (whose arm was in a splint due to a shoulder injury, which precluded him from his usual typing) on this proposed novel. The tape describes one scene in which Hawthorne Abendsen is brutally interrogated by the Nazis as to the truth of the Nebenwelt (or alternate universe) in which the Allies, not the Nazis, were triumphant. But Abendsen cannot provide them with the truth — he does not know. The secret is ever elusive.
“Naziism and The High Castle” (1964)
Many moon have passed since white man (i.e., Poul Anderson) review my book Man in the High Castle, and fen [sic; perhaps “fan” intended] (e.g., too many to note, with, however, one exception, a certain John Boardman) have commented, not on the book nor review per se, but on Naziism — which is right and proper, because that is the true topic, far more so than any novel or any review, and only proves that I am right: We are still very much afraid, still rightly so very much disturbed, and, as Harry Warner so correctly said, “. . . we might identify with the war guilt of the Germans because they’re so similar to us. . . .”
However, although these comments, etc., took place back in March, I have just now seen them, and would also like to comment.
John Boardman calls Dr. Friedrich Foerster “the greatest modern critic of Germany.” There is no one “greatest modern critic,” etc., of anything; this is just a way of saying that you believe your source, and it is right that you should believe your source; however, I will dispute his uniqueness, or any claim to his Platonic Ideal-type perfection as a sole and utter source. Even though, as a matter of fact, I agree with the quoted passage from him (v. John Boardman’s comments March ’64 Niekas). In fact it is just this sort of thinking that worries me (however, it is early in the morning, I have not had breakfast yet, so everything worries me; let it go). Anyhow, we just cannot say for sure if there are “two Germanics” in the sense of two traditions of thought, or that Naziism is the absolute culmination, the logical fulfillment, of all that is German; we don’t know; please, let’s admit our ignorance. We know what they did, we know what their stated ideologies were. . . but we do not actually know why, in the deepest sense, they — i.e., the Nazis — did it. Truly. I have talked to some of them. All they knew was that they were afraid — afraid as we are, but not afraid of the same things: They were afraid of us, of the U.K., of Russia (which we are, too, now), and — most of all, of the Jews, which we are not, and which we cannot comprehend; i.e., this fear. To us, a Jew is, for example, a nice tall guy with a glass in his hand next to us at a party. To them — well, there the curtain falls. But a Nazi friend of mine, living in the United States after the war, started to enter an apartment with me, and I said, “By the way, this fellow who lives here is named Bob Goldstein,” and my Nazi friend actually paled and blanched (i.e., drew back); he was literally afraid to go into the apartment — and, in addition, he felt somatic, horrible aversion. Why? Ask Hannah Arendt, whom I regard as the “greatest modern critic of Germany,” a Jew herself. I feel even she, raised among them, does not know. It is subrational; it is psychological, not logical. Why do some people fear cats or streetcars or redheaded goats? They themselves do not know. Phobia is phobia; it springs, as Freud and Jung and H. S. Sullivan showed, from depths of the self unknown to the self. Ipse dixit.