The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert Heinlein?" (1966)

Recently I took yet another dose of LSD-25, and as a result certain dull but persistent thoughts have come creeping into my head. I will herein retail [sic; retell] a few of them, in chaotic form. If you find them all false, good for you. If you find them all true, good for you likewise.

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not SF because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much SF if they went by rubber band.

Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately. Those such as Waldo are freaks and prove nothing.

Because of a present-day rocket travel to Mars et al., the general public is at last willing to accept SF as reasonable. They have stopped laughing, but they have not started reading. They probably never will, because reading is too hard for them. But now we know that we were right. (Of course, we knew that all along. But it's nice to see it proved.)

No one makes any real money off good -- I repeat, good -- SF. This probably indicates that it has artistic worth. If Lorenzo de Medici were alive he would pick up the tab for A. E. van Vogt, not for John Updike.

The best SF novel I have read is Vonnegut's Player Piano, because it actually deals with men-women relationships (Paul Proteus and his bitch of a wife). In this matter the book is unique in the field. Brave New World only seems to do this; 1984 in this regard is awful.

If I were to dredge up one SF novel that, more than any others, would cause me to abandon SF entirely, it is Robert Heinlein's Gulf. It strikes me as fascism pure and simple, and -- what is worse -- put forth unattractively. Bleh.

Heinlein has done more to harm SF than has any other writer, I think -- with the possible exception of George O. Smith. The dialogue in Stranger in a Strange Land has to be read to be believed. "Give the little lady a box of cigars!" a character cries, meaning that the girl has said something that is correct. One wonders what the rejoinder would be if a truly inspired remark had to be answered, rather than a routine statement; it would probably burst the book's gizzard.

Once I read a terrific short story in If by an unknown writer named Robert Gilbert. It was poetry, beauty, love, perfection, and I wrote him and told him so. He wrote back and said he'd written the story while listening to Harry James records.

I started reading SF in 1941. I'm old.

There is one accurate way -- and only one -- by which you can tell you are growing old. It is when the SF magazines that you bought new on the stand at the time they came out have begun to turn the same yellow color as the ones you picked up as collectors' items from specialty dealers... i.e., already ancient.

Is it possible that Lovecraft saw the truth? That realms and wickedness such as he describes, for example in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, actually exist? Imagine taking a dose of LSD and finding yourself in Salem. You would go mad.

Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint, as in Gather, Darkness [a novel by Fritz Leiber]. God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else's. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I don't. I wish I had never written it; there are too many horrid forces loose in it. When I wrote it I had been taking certain chemicals and I could see the awful landscape that I depicted. But not now. Thank God. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God who lifts the sins of the world].

Avram Davidson [an SF writer] fascinates me -- as a person, I mean. He is a mixture of a little boy and a very wise old man, and his eyes always twinkle as if he were a defrocked Santa Claus. With beard dyed black.

I'll give anyone fifteen cents who can imagine [SF editor] Tony Boucher as a small boy. Obviously, Tony was always as he is now. But even more difficult to imagine is the strange truth that once there was no Tony Boucher at all. This is clearly impossible. I think there must always have been a Tony Boucher; if not the one we know, then some other, very much like him.

I have written and sold twenty-three novels, and all are terrible except one. But I am not sure which one.

If Beethoven had lived just one additional year he would have entered a fourth period of his evolving talent. We can imagine this by listening to his last composition, the alternate ending for the thirteenth quartet. What we cannot imagine is -- what about later, in his old age? Suppose he, like Verdi, like Haydn, had lived to compose in his eighties. Under LSD I have a vision of a seventh or eighth period of Beethoven: string quartets with chorus and four soloists.

Out of all the SF that I have read, one story still means more to me than any others: It is Harry Bates's Alas, All Thinking. It is the beginning and the end of literate science fiction. Alas.

For fifteen years, the entire period in which I have written SF, I have never seen my agent or even talked to him on the phone. I wonder what sort of person he is, assuming he exists at all. When I call his number his receptionist says, "Mr. Meredith isn't here right now. Will you talk to Mr. Rib Frimble?" Or some such unlikely name. On the basis of that, in my next call I ask not for Mr. Meredith but for Mr. Frimble. Then the receptionist says, "Mr. Frimble is out, sir; will you talk to Mr. Dead?" And so it goes.

If I knew what a hallucination was I would know what reality was. I have examined the topic thoroughly, and I assert that it is impossible to have a hallucination; it goes against reason and common sense. Those who claim to have had them are probably lying. (I have had a few myself.)

Once in a while somebody in the neighborhood who is rich enough to own a hedge, and is always busily clipping it, asks me why I write SF. I never have an answer. There are several other questions that get asked but that obtain no response at all from me. They are:

1. Where do you get your plots?

2. Do you put people you know into your stories?

3. Why aren't you selling to Playboy? Everyone else is. I hear it pays a hell of a lot.

4. Isn't science fiction mainly for kids?

Let me illustrate what I mean when I say I have no answer to these; I will do herein what I generally do. :

Answer to 1: Oh, well, plots; well, you can find them almost anywhere. I mean, there're a lot of plots. Say, talking to you gives me an idea for a plot. There's this humanoid superior mutant, see, who has to hide himself because the mass man has no understanding of him or his superior, evolved aims -- etc.

Answer to 2: No.

Answer to 3: I don't know. I guess I'm a failure. What other possibility can there be? And it was lousy of you to ask.

Answer to 4: No, SF is not for kids. Or maybe it is; I don't know who reads it. There're roughly 150,000 people who comprise the readership, and that's not a great number. And even if it does appeal to kids -- so what?

You can see how weak these answers are. And I've had fifteen years in which to think up better answers. Obviously I never will.

The TV news announcer says tonight that a ninety-one-year-old man has married a ninety-two-year-old woman. It is enough to bring tears to your eyes. What do they have in store for them? What chance is there, every time they close their eyes, that they will ever open them again? The small and unimportant silent creatures are far finer and worth a great deal more than Robert Heinlein will ever know.

Loneliness is the great curse that hangs over a writer. A while ago I wrote twelve novels in a row, plus fourteen magazine pieces. I did it out of loneliness. It constituted communication for me. At last the loneliness grew too great and I stopped writing; I left my then-wife and then-children and took a great journey. The great journey ended up in Bay Area fandom, and for a short while I ceased to be lonely. Then it came back, late one night. Now I know it will never go away. This is my payment for twenty-three novels and one hundred magazine pieces. It's no one's fault. That's just the way it is.

My mother shows her love for me by clipping out certain magazine and newspaper articles, which she gives me. These articles prove that the tranquilizers that I take do permanent brain damage. It's nice, a mother's love.

Under LSD I saw radiant colors, especially the pinks and reds; they shone like God Himself. Is that what God is? Color? But at least this time I didn't have to die, go to hell, be tormented, and then raised up by means of Christ's death on the cross into eternal salvation. As I said to J. G. Newkom [a friend of Dick at this time] when I was free of the drug, "I don't mind going through the Day of Judgment again, after I die, but I just hope it won't last so long." Under LSD you can spend 1.96 eternities, if not 2.08.

In fifteen years of professional writing I haven't gotten a jot or a tittle better. My first story, Roog, is as good as -- if not better than -- the five I did last month. This seems very strange to me, because certainly through all those years I've learned a good deal about writing... and in addition my general store of worldly wisdom has increased. Maybe there are only a given number of original ideas in each person; he uses them up and that is that. Like an old baseball player, he no longer has anything to offer. I will say one thing in favor of my writing, however, which I hope is true: I am original (except where I copy my own previous work). I no longer write "like Cyril Kornbluth" or "like A. E. van Vogt." But in that case I can no longer blame them for my faults.

A publisher in England asked me to write a blurb for a collection of my short stories. In this country someone else writes them, usually someone who has not read the book. I would like to have started the blurb by saying, "These dull and uninteresting stories..." etc. But I suppose I had better not.

Thus endeth my thoughts.