Rereading Philip K. Dick

REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg REREADING PHILIP K. DICK They were ugly little things. I mean the tner. Dick was only twenty-seven when first editions of Philip K. Dick’s first nov- Solar Lottery came out, a youthful begin- els—squat, scrunchy, cheaply printed ner who had appeared in the science fic- 1950s paperbacks, artifacts of a primitive tion magazines just three years before era in science fiction publishing. Ace with a double handful of ingenious short Books was the name of the publishing stories. I had already begun to sell some company—they are still in business, stories myself in 1955, so in terms of ca- though vastly transformed—and Ace reer launch we were virtually contempo- writers then were paid one thousand dol- raries, but I was only twenty, a college ju- lars per novel, which even then was the nior, and that seven-year gap in our ages bottom rate for paperback books, al- made me regard Dick as vastly older, though in modern purchasing power it’s vastly wiser, vastly more skillful in the a good deal more than most new SF writ- art of storytelling. I was an earnest be- ers can command today. ginner; he was already a pro. Still, there were harbingers of things to He was good, all right. But I don’t come in those early Dick books. The very think either of us realized, back there in first sentence of the very first one tells us 1955, that he was destined to make an that in the most literal way: “There had imperishable mark on American popular been harbingers.” That’s Solar Lottery, culture. Dick’s debut novel, an Ace Double Book of 1955, printed back-to-back, as Ace did Solar Lottery is a crisp, fast-paced in those days, with Leigh Brackett’s The book, unmarred by the convoluted, con- Big Jump. As the novel opens, the har- torted style of Dick’s later work, a style bingers include “a flight of white crows that led one astute critic to say that his over Sweden,” “a series of unexplained prose read like a bad translation from fires,” and the birth of a two-headed calf. the German. It hums along at an unre- For us, the readers of science fiction half lenting pace. The basic extrapolative sit- a century ago, the harbinger was the uation shows Dick’s early debt to the book itself, the announcement of the frantic, dizzyingly intense novels of A.E. presence among us of a brilliant, quirky van Vogt: out of the midcentury televi- new writer. sion-quiz popular culture has somehow How I read and re-read that book! How evolved a world ruled by the Quizmaster, I studied it, and its successor of just a few a dictator chosen by a random twitch of months later, The World Jones Made, an electronic lottery, who can be displaced and The Man Who Japed that followed from supreme power as readily as he has just a few months after that. How I loved been elevated to it. There is something of those books! And how I yearned to write Robert A. Heinlein in this, the early the way Philip K. Dick did! Like an earli- Heinlein of If This Goes On and Beyond er idol of mine, Henry Kuttner, whose This Horizon, but the main inspiration work Dick had plainly studied, he was had to be van Vogt. prolific, he was a compelling storyteller, Van Vogt, giving us similar situations he was a fountain of cunning ideas. I in The World of Null-A and The Weapons could not have chosen better models for Makers and other classic 1940s novels, the sort of writing career I hoped to have rarely made sense, but the breathless than Dick and his earlier avatar, Kut- tumble of one idea over another led his 6 Asimov’s readers to ignore or even welcome that. exposition carry the story along efficient- Dick, in Solar Lottery, does a van Vogt ly and powerfully. novel that makes sense . almost. He does one other thing that van Vogt never The World Jones Made came out, again achieved: his characters seem like real from Ace, just a few months later. It’s an people. They yearn, they suffer, they get even better book. Again we have the van angry, they get frightened. They fret and Vogt technique of concept piled on con- worry and bicker in a way that no one in cept, but again, where van Vogt simply any of the novels of van Vogt or Heinlein stacks one idea on another without much or Asimov in science fiction’s 1940s Gold- of an attempt at an integrated plot, Dick en Age ever did, and the strange world manages, astonishingly, to hold every- they inhabit becomes all the more real thing together to tell a coherent story— because of that. And the book ends not in an atomic war that fills the world with a slam-bang pulp-magazine climax but bizarre mutant humans, mysterious alien in a wistful, open-ended vision that tells creatures drifting in from space who may alert readers that Dick, even at the age of be planning to colonize Earth, a security- twenty-seven, wanted to break free of the minded government with a strong KGB mold that had shackled other science fic- flavor, and—the primary van Vogt touch— tion novelists in that era of the rigidly for- a sideshow performer who claims to be mulaic three-part magazine serial. He able to see the future, and, as it turns wanted, in fact, to be a novelist, period, out, actually can. It is that sideshow per- without the “science fiction” label. (Be- former—Floyd Jones is his name—who tween 1952 and 1958 he would write provides the unique Philip K. Dick flavor. eight mainstream novels, novels without In a van Vogt novel, Jones, the super- a shred of science fictional concept—Voic- man, would have been a remote and in- es from the Street, Mary and the Giant, In comprehensible figure who had made Milton Lumky Territory, etc.—which no himself emperor of the world before the publisher would touch during his lifetime. story opened. To some extent power of I saw them, once, stacked up in boxes in that sort is what Jones achieves in the his agent’s office. They all were published, course of the Dick novel; but Dick shows finally, after his death, when the movie his superman as a tragic, almost pathetic Blade Runner had conferred bitterly iron- figure, whose anguish under the burden ic posthumous fame and fortune upon of his extraordinary gift makes him far him.) more real than any of van Vogt’s miracle- Solar Lottery had a powerful impact on men. (“‘It’s not so much like I can see the me when I read it, in one wide-eyed sit- future; it’s more that I’ve got one foot ting, in the autumn of 1955. I had already stuck in the past. I can’t shake it loose. begun to pattern my short stories after I’m reliving one year of my life forever.’ Dick’s, and now his first novel would re- He shuddered. ‘Over and over again. shape my notions of what a longer science Everything I do, everything I say, hear, fiction story ought to be. I had it very experience, I have to grind over twice.’”) much in mind when his publisher, Ace The complexity of Jones’ predicament and Books, asked me to write a novel of my the pathos of his character lingered in my own the following year. Reading it again mind for decades, and traces of it showed now, at the far end of my long career, I up in such novels of mine as The Masks of still admire the mastery Dick showed at Time (1968), Dying Inside (1972), and, the outset of his. The book fizzes and most particularly, The Stochastic Man sparkles with ideas, and, miraculously, (1975). None of those books is anything they all hang together in a way that the like The World Jones Made in plot, set- myriad plot explosions of Dick’s prede- ting, or tone, and yet the spirit of that cessor in this mode, van Vogt, never man- 1956 Dick book hovered over all three as I aged to do. And his crisp dialog and lucid was writing them, many years later. 7 June 2012 He was twenty-eight years old when (which became the movie Blade Run- he wrote Jones, living in Berkeley with ner), nor is he departing from the norms the first of what would eventually be five of the science fiction novel altogether as wives, and trying to earn a living as a he did in the mysterious final books, free-lance writer in the wobbly and un- Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The certain science fiction market of the Transmigration of Timothy Archer. 1950s. (He had been working as a clerk Readers who go to Jones or his other in a record shop until his early flurry of early novels will not find the manic short-story sales encouraged him to take strangeness of the 1960s books in them the rash step of making writing his full- or the challenging philosophical intensi- time profession.) That decision meant ty of the later ones, and they will be dis- that he would spend most of the remain- appointed if that is what they are look- ing twenty-six years of his life living ing for.

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