What I want to stress is not that I am either one of the most respected writers in the world or that my agent thinks so or said so but that here I am, after twenty-five years of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and gas and electricity if I don’t pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for? Well, recently I read an article by Barry Malzberg in F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction, a prominent SF magazine] in which he says he’s leaving SF forever because — well, read it yourself; it is the greatest bunch of whining I ever heard in my life. I don’t propose to whine, although probably what I’ve said so far seems to be whining. Really, though, I am more asking a question than making a statement, whining or otherwise. What have twenty-five years of work done to make me financially secure? I have a new novel coming out next January [1977] by Doubleday (A Scanner Darkly), which I honestly believe to be the best work I’ve ever done. I have the collaboration with Roger Zelazny coming out this year, the novel Deus Irae [1976] — there was that long article on me in Rolling Stone [“The Worlds of Philip K. Dick,” November 6, 1975, by Paul Williams], which gave me a lot of publicity, and (and here it comes; get ready) I am just about to make it big. The key words: just about to. It is another case of waiting for Godot; the little boy says, “Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but surely he’ll come tomorrow.” But I say, If it does come for me, will it matter? Will it make up for twenty-five years of shivering with fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on?
One time in early 1972 I came home and the utility company had shut off the electricity, and put a padlock on my circuit-breaker box. I got my tool kit, got out tools, and cut through the padlock and turned the power back on again. Technically, that’s a crime, but the utility people were so surprised that they let me get away with it. I paid them the next day, but if you cut that padlock, you go into the slammer. I cite this to show that my fears are not merely neurotic. And the house that I was in then — it was repossessed by the finance company that held the mortgage. So these are real and valid fears. After I moved down here to Southern California I had to start out from the bottom all over again; no car, no furniture, no house. And one day down here I got up and the electricity had been turned off. In early 1973 down here I was in bed with pneumonia, with no phone, no money to go to a doctor, to buy medication — I remember that very well, because while I was lying there propped up in bed (so I could breathe), Mr. Death walked into my bedroom. Really. I saw him as clear as I see you now, my friends. He wore a sharp, modern, polyester suit and carried a briefcase, which he opened to reveal some simple puzzles, the sort you give grammar school children. I failed to pass, and Mr. Death said, “Then you can come with me.” And I saw (I’m not kidding you) a vision of a long winding road up a hillside, with many trees, to a sort of lovely large safe-looking old building, which was a sanitarium of some kind. “I’m taking you there,” he said. “These tests prove that your brain is totally burned out, so now you can rest. You can rest up there at the top of the hill forever.” And I was flooded with a sense of total joy and relief. However, at that moment my chick came into the bedroom, on impulse, to see how I was. And I realized who I’d been talking to. After that I began to mend.
You will say, now, that this piece I am writing rambles, and it is supposed to, having no topic but the head of the author writing it, which is well known to be a rambling head that produces rambling writing — with even a bit of chaos thrown in. What is my point? My point is that (1) twenty-five years of devoted writing haven’t in any way given me financial security; (2) the fact that I am sure my new novel, A Scanner Darkly, is my best novel doesn’t stop the fear; (3) I am not quitting. It’s going to take more than all this to make me give up science fiction writing, for one simple reason. I love to write it. I am working on a thing now, called, To Scare the Dead, and already I’ve done two hundred thousand words of notes. It won’t produce any financial security. The big break, just around the corner, will never come. One of these days I’ll be back in the hospital, sick as hell, but I’ll no doubt get out. . . and receive another $2,000 bill I have to pay off or go to jail. There are, in human beings, irrational drives. “Why don’t you get a real job?” people say to me, mostly in fun, but not always in fun, and sometimes I say it to myself. They [sic; the big break] will always be on its way but not quite here yet; my agent will always help me (I should mention that he is Scott Meredith, and I’ve been with him about twenty-four years, and in 1973 when my son Christopher was born, Scott sent him the most beautiful silver rattle you ever saw) — I guess there are eternal verities in the universe, all right, and the one that appeals to me is that man will keep on striving no matter how many times he is pushed down, which was what Faulkner said so thrillingly in his Nobel Prize speech. Man will be planning and scheming amid the ruins; the sound of his voice will still be heard.
So that is what’s happened to me recently: three times in the hospital in a couple of years (plus the pneumonia), months of really being poor. . . one day I had to box up and mail off my collection of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, which was complete and which I had held on to through thick and thin, just to pay the landlord, BUT:
In this business of being an SF writer I have met either face-to-face, or talked with on the phone, or gotten letters from, some of the best goddamn human beings in the world. Schoolkids, for instance. Last week a black chick in Oakland. Today a guy from West Germany. Yesterday I wrote to a Swedish guy who came to this country mainly to meet me (sorry if that sounds egoish, but the point is, that was back in 1971, and we’re still writing back and forth: Goran Bengtson; you may have seen letters of his printed in fanzines). I’m looking now in the stack, very huge and sloppy, beside my typewriter. A chick who did her master’s thesis on me.
Oh yes. I find another letter, too. The return address:
OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY.
So you can see what I mean, as my heart skips a beat and thuds itself with the old, old fear.
Dear Carl [editor of Scintillation, in which this piece appeared],
You should have received by now the five-page piece I wrote for you, yesterday. Well, I decided to send the carbon off to Germany, to Uwe Anton, who has asked me for something and to whom I’d already sent some fragments of Deus Irae, the new novel coming out by me and Roger Zelazny (Anton is putting together a PKD issue, you see). Today I added three more pages to go with the five, to be printed in Germany only, and then I thought, Shit. Why not send you the carbons on these pages and see if you want to add them, perhaps explaining that Phil had originally intended them for the German printing only. . . although I sort of say that in the pages themselves. It’s up to you. In any case, here are three additional pages to the untitled piece I mailed you on May first, and you are welcome to print them or not. Okay? But on second thought it seemed sort of chicken-shit for me to say stuff abroad and not here in the U.S. You’ll see what I mean when you read the enclosed.
This ends the part written to be published in the United States, but for my German friends I would like to add a little more. [The subsequent language did appear in the U.S. publication.]
During 1974 we who opposed the Nixon tyranny here exhausted ourselves in forcing that tyranny out of office, only to discover, the next year, that underneath it lay an even greater abuse of power and threat to freedom: a secret police apparatus that had worked since the forties, completely invisible in terms of its lawless acts against Americans. In fact, something much like the police state that I depicted in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said has come to light, and really to the astonishment of us all. I recall that back in the fifties, about 1953, two FBI agents came to visit me and asked me to spy on my wife, who at that time was attending the University of California at Berkeley and knew people — students — who were politically active. From then on, the secret political police apparatus grew.