I did so, without preamble; I simply sat down and wrote. And what I wrote was The Man in the High Castle. It sold right away, received a number of reviews suggesting that it should win the Hugo, and then, one day, I got a letter from my agent congratulating me for winning the Hugo. Another point had been passed in my career — and, as before, I didn’t realize it. All I knew was that I wanted to write more and more books; the books got better and the publishers were more interested in them.
Now, most readers do not know how little SF writers were paid. I had been earning about $6,000 a year. In the year following the Hugo award, I earned $12,000, and close to that in the subsequent years (1965-68). And I wrote at a fantastic speed; I produced twelve novels in two years. . . which must be a record of some sort. I could never do this again — the physical stress was enormous. . . but the Hugo was there to tell me that what I wanted to write was what a good number of readers wanted to read. Amazing as it seems!
Recently I have sat back, reflecting on my twenty-eight novels, which I have sold between 1954 and 1968, wondering which are good. What have I accomplished? Here I am, thirty-nine years old, rather moth-eaten and shaggy, taking snuff, listening to Schubert songs on the phonograph . . . “although bearded, elderly, and portly,” someone said about me, “he is still a confirmed girl-watcher.” This is true. And cat-watcher. They are the great joy for me, and I wish I could squeeze Willis, my huge orange and white tom, into a novel, or if they make a movie of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Willis could play a walk-on part (no lines), and we would both be happy. Four years ago I divorced my jewelry-welding wife and married a very sweet girl who paints. We now have a baby and we must find a larger house (we did find one, and, as I’m writing this, we are preparing to move into it: four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a level backyard, fenced, where Isa can play safely). So that is my nonliterary life: I have a very young wife whom I love, and a baby whom I almost love (she’s a terrible pest), and a tomcat whom I cherish and adore. What about the books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky [1956]. Then The Man in the High Castle [1962]. Martian Time-Slip [1964] (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney [1965] (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun [1967] and The Penultimate Truth [1964], both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra [1964].
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965]. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a “human.” When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn’t correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968] and another as yet untitled [Ubik (1969)]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it’s a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody. . . and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he’ll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.
“Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer” (1968, 1972)
Here I am, almost forty years old. Seventeen years ago I sold my first story, a great and wonderful moment in my life that will never come again. By 1954 I was known as a short story writer; in June 1953 I had seven stories on the stands, including one in Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF, and so on down. Ah, 1954. I wrote my first novel, Solar Lottery; it sold 150,000 copies of itself and then vanished, only to reappear again a few years ago. It was reviewed well, except in Galaxy. Tony Boucher liked it; so did Damon Knight. But I wonder why I wrote it — it and the twenty-four novels since. Out of love, I suppose; I love science fiction, both to read it and to write it. We who write it do not get paid very much. This is the harsh and overwhelming truth: Writing SF does not pay, and so writer after writer either dies trying to earn a living or leaves the field. . . to go into another, unrelated field, as for example Frank Herbert, who works for a newspaper and writes Hugo-winning SF in his spare time. I wish I could do that: hold an unrelated job and write SF after dinner each night, or early in the dawn. Then the pressure would be off. Let me tell you about that pressure. The average SF novel obtains between $1,500 and $2,000. Hence an SF writer who can write two novels a year — and sell them — gets back between $3,000 and $4,000 a year. . . which he can’t live on. He can try, instead, to write three novels a year, plus a number of stories. With luck, and unending effort, he can raise his income to about $6,000 a year. At best, I have managed to earn $12,000 in one year; usually it runs less, and the effort of trying to bring in more money collapses me for as much as two years on end. During these two-year dry periods the only money coming in is for what are called “residuals.” These include foreign sales, reprint in paperback, magazine serialization, TV and radio purchases, etc. It is awful, these dry periods, when you exist on the uncertain drip-drop of residuals. For example, an air mail letter arrives from one’s agent. It contains royalty payments in the sum of $1.67. And the next week an air mail letter comes with a check for $4.50. And yet we who write SF go on, to some extent. As I say, it’s love for the field.
What is there about SF that draws us? What is SF anyhow? It grips fans; it grips editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in my mind Henry Kuttner’s Fairy Chessmen with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see — outside my mind, right beside my desk — a complete file of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, plus Astounding back to October 1933. . . these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. Hence separate from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file, which protects these magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I own — or hope to own.
The magic that grips us is in there, in the file. I have captured it, whatever it is.
As to my own writing. Reading it does not mean anything to me, all considerations as to how good it is or isn’t, what I do well and what I do badly (such as putting in the kitchen sink, as Ted Sturgeon phrased it, in regard to The Three Stigmata). What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I’m writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I’m finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever — that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no longer move. I’m alone, without much money, and, as I said before, nearly forty. Where is Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist in Man in the High Castle? He has left me; we are cut off from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again where I can hear him talk. Once written, the novel speaks generally to everyone, not specifically to me. When a novel of mine comes out I have no more relationship to it than has anyone who reads it — far less, in fact, because I have the memory of Mr. Tagomi and all the others. . . Gino Molinari, for example, in Now Wait for Last Year, or Leo Bulero in Three Stigmata. My friends are dead, and as much as I love my wife, daughter, cat — none of these nor all of these is enough. The vacuum is terrible. Don’t write for a living; sell shoelaces. Don’t let it happen to you.