Microworlds

1

On reading In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight and The Issue at Hand by James Blish, a couple of questions, the answers to which can be found nowhere, came to my mind.[3]

For example: in science fiction fandom rumor has it that science fiction is improving every year. If so, why does the average production, the lion’s share of new productions, remain so bad?

Or: we do not lack definitions of this genre. However, we would look in vain for an explanation for the absence of a theoretical, generalizing critique of the genre, and a reason why the weak beginnings of such criticism can be found only in “fanzines,” amateur magazines of very low circulation and small influence (if any at all) on the authors and publishers.

Furthermore: Blish and Knight agree that science-fiction readers cannot distinguish between a high-quality novel and a mediocre one. If they are right, how are readers selected to belong to the public who reads this literary genre, which intends to portray the (fantastically magnified) outstanding achievements of mankind?

The important question is: even if science fiction was born in the gutter, and lived on trash for years on end, why can’t it get rid of the trash for good?

My essay tries to answer these questions. Therefore, it is a “Prolegomenon to Science-Fiction Ecology” — or an “Introduction to a Socioculturally Isolated Realm of Creative Work” — or a “Practical Guide for Survival in the Lower Realm of Literature.” These pompous titles will be justified below. The books by Blish and Knight were of great assistance to me in writing, but I did not regard them as only collections of critiques, but more as ethnological protocols of several explorations into the exotic land of science fiction — i.e., as raw material to be subjected to a sociological analysis. For me, the facts collected by these authors were often more valuable than their opinions; that is to say, I arranged this material in a way not completely corresponding to the spirit of the sources.

2

I call science fiction a “collective phenomenon” of a sociocultural nature. It has the following parts: (a) the readers — on the one hand, the mute and passive majority of science-fiction consumers; on the other, the active amateur groups that constitute fandom proper; (b) the science-fiction producers — authors (some of them also critics) and publishers of magazines and books.

Science fiction is a “very special case” because it belongs to two distinct spheres of culture: the “Lower Realm,” or Realm of Trivial Literature, and the “Upper Realm,” or Realm of Mainstream Literature. To the Lower Realm belong the crime novel, the Western, the pseudo-historical novel, the sports novel, and the erotico-sentimental stories about certain locations, such as doctor-nurse romances, millionaire-and-the-playgirl stories, and so on. I’d like to spare the reader a detailed description of what I mean by mainstream. Perhaps it will suffice to quote the names of some of the authors who inhabit this Olympus: Moravia, Koestler, Joyce, Butor, Sartre, Grass, Mailer, Borges, Calvino, Malamud, Sarrault, Pinget, Greene.

It cannot be maintained with universal validity that these authors do not descend to the lower floors occasionally, for we know of crime novels by Graham Greene, “fantastic” novels by Orwell and Werfel, and Moravia’s “fantasies.” Some texts by Calvino are even considered science fiction. Therefore it should not be conceived that the difference between authors of the Upper and Lower Realms is that one of the first does not write fantasy or other literature related to science fiction, while one of the second does just this: the difference can be examined according to neither intrinsic type nor the artistic quality of a single work. To be a subject of the Lower or Upper Realm does not only and exclusively depend upon the product made by the author. There are much more complicated interrelationships of a sociocultural nature. I will talk about them a little later.

At this point I want only to propose a practical rule of procedure, which will predict with ninety-eight percent accuracy whether an author will be considered as an inhabitant of the Upper or the Lower floor. The rule is simple and can be stated as follows: if someone starts to write in the mainstream, and the public and critics get to know him by name, or even as a world celebrity (so that, on hearing the name, they know that they are talking about a writer, not an athlete or actor, so his attempts at science fiction and/or fantasy are regarded as “excursions” or “side leaps,” even if repeated) then that man lives on the Upper floor. For instance, the “entertainments” of Graham Greene express a private mood or tactic of his.

During H. G. Wells’s working life, there was no such clear-cut border between these two realms of literature. They shaded into each other gradually and continually. At that time Wells was known simply as an English writer, and the readers who appreciated his prose often knew of both his ambitions — the realistic and the fantastic. Only much later did an Iron Curtain descend between these two kinds of literature so that the typical science-fiction fan often knows the works of science fiction written by Wells, but ignores the fact that Wells also wrote “normal” realistic prose (and highbrow connoisseurs value it highly today, and more so than his science fiction). This curtain, this concrete ceiling (to maintain the image of a two-story building), has grown little by little, and this ceiling, hermetically sealed, became an impenetrable barrier only during the twenties. We can recognize this by the fact that Capek’s works are still classed with the literature of the Upper Realm, while Stapledon, who was writing about ten years later, is not accredited with being there. Therefore some authors do not earn their classifications exclusively on their merits. On the contrary, their works are subject to higher rules of taxonomy, rules that have developed in the course of history and know no exceptions.

If, in spite of all this, a classificatory exception is made, the judgment is given that the (literary) case under consideration is not essentially science fiction, but wholly “normal” literature, which the author intentionally camouflaged as science fiction. However, if we proceed by disregarding all these “extenuating circumstances,” some novels by Dostoevsky become “crime novels,” though in fact they are not regarded as such. The experts say that the plot of a crime novel served the author only as a means to an end, and he definitely did not want to write a crime novel. This is the same situation as is the case of a brothel searched by the police. For simplicity’s sake the nameless, ordinary guests are regarded as customers of the prostitutes, but a prince or a politician defends his presence on the pretext that he descended to these lowest floors of social life because he longed for something exotic, because his fancy took him on such an excursion. In short, such people stay in the land of pestilence as extravagant intruders or even as curious scientists.

3

The status of trivial literature can be recognized by several typical attributes.

First: its works are read only once, just like the cheapest mass products which are also intended for but a single use. Most of them become obsolete in the same way as mass products do. If crime novels were selected according to their literary merits, it would be superfluous to keep throwing new ones onto the market, because we could find so many good ones among the multitude there already that nobody could read the choicest of them during his lifetime. Still, publishers keep on putting “brand-new” crime novels onto the market even though there are quantities of crime novels of undisputedly better quality that have sunk into oblivion. The same goes for refrigerators and cars: it is a well-known fact that today’s models are not necessarily better, technologically, than those of yesteryear. But in order to keep going, the machinery of production must put new models on the market, and advertising exerts pressure on the consumers to make them believe that only the current year’s models have the best quality. The dogma of continual change of models becomes a law of the market, although every specialist can distinguish clearly between fictitious obsolescence of the product and authentic technological obsolescence. Off and on there are real improvements in technological products. More often, change is dictated only by fashion, a dictatorship in the interest of profit by supplying new goods.

The entanglement of real progress and economic laws constitutes a picture of a situation quite similar to that which reigns in the market of trivial literature. On principle, publishing houses like Ace Books could put on the market science fiction from the first half of the century exclusively, in ever-renewed reprints, because the number of this kind of book has already increased to such an extent that nobody could read even the better ones among them, even if he devoted all his time to this genre. Printing new books, ninety-eight percent of which are miserable products, published for purely economic reasons, makes many older works fall into oblivion. They die in silence, because there is no place for them on a clogged market. The publishing houses provide no filter to bring about a positive selection, because to them the newest book is also the best, or at least they want the customer to believe this, the justification for the well-known total inflation of publishers’ advertising. Each new title is praised as the best in the science-fiction genre. Each science-fiction writer is called the greatest master of science fiction after one or two of his books have been published. In the science-fiction book market, as well as in the whole market of trivial literature, we can perceive the omnipotence of economic laws. The literary market, moreover, has in common with the whole market the typical phenomenon of inflation. When all books and writers are presented as “the best,” then a devaluation, an inflation of all expressions of value is inevitable.

Compared with these carryings-on, with this escalation of advertising, the behavior of mainstream editors is quite shy and silent. Please compare the blurbs on the jackets of science-fiction books with those that serious publishers put on the jackets of a Saul Bellow or a William Faulkner. This remark seems to be banal, but it isn’t. Although instant coffee or cigarettes of every brand are always praised as the best in the world (we never hear of anything advertised as “second best”), Michelangelo’s frescoes and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are not offered, with the same advertising expenditure, as the best works of art possible. The activities of the publishers of trivial literature make us recognize that this literature is subject to economic laws exclusively and to the exclusion of any other laws of behavior.

Second: I must remark that a reader of trivial literature behaves just like the consumer of mass products. Surely it does not occur to the producer of brooms, cars, or toilet paper to complain of the absence of correspondence, fraught with outpourings of the soul, that strikes a connection between him and the consumer of his products. Sometimes, however, these consumers happen to write angry letters to the producer to reproach him with the bad quality of the merchandise they bought. This bears a striking similarity to what James Blish describes in The Issue at Hand, and, indeed, this author, more than five million of whose books have been printed, said that he received only some dozens of letters from readers during his whole life as an author. These letters were exclusively fits of temper from people who were hurt in the soft spot of their opinions. It was the quality of the goods that offended them.

Third: the market of trivial literature knows only one index of quality: the measure of the sales figures of the books. When an “angry young critic” snubbed Asimov’s Nightfall and Other Stories as old hat, Asimov put up the defense that his books, this year and for years previously, had sold excellently and that none of his books had been remaindered. Therefore he took literary merit for the relation of supply and demand, as if he were unaware that there have been world-famous books that have never been printed in large quantities. If we use this yardstick, Dostoevsky is no match for Agatha Christie. There are many fans of science fiction who have never read a novel by Stapledon or Wells in their lives, and with an easy mind I can assert that the silent majority of readers does not even know Stapledon by name. Blish and Knight agree that the public cannot distinguish a good novel from an abominable novel; and this is correct, with the proviso that they are talking about only the readers of the Lower Realm. If this generalization were valid for all readers at all times, we should have to consider the phenomenon of cultural selection in the history of literature as a miracle. For if all or almost all readers are passive and stupid beings, then who was able to collect Cervantes and Homer into the treasure troves of our culture?

Fourth: there are crass and embarrassing differences between the relations that link the authors of Upper and Lower Realms with publishers. In the Upper Realm it is the author who alone determines the title, length, form, and style of his work, and his right to do so is guaranteed unequivocally by the letter of his contract. In the Lower Realm, the publishers appropriate these rights. We can recognize from paragraphs of the printed contracts of large science-fiction publishing houses like Ace Books that it is the publishers who can, at their own discretion, change titles, length, and even the text of a book without express permission of its author, just as fancy dictates. Naturally, the editors of the Upper Realm also make encroachments. In practice these actions are quite different; they occur before the author signs the contract — i.e., first the editors propose to the author what they want changed, and only after he has agreed is the contract made, and not one syllable says that the original manuscript must be revised. The difference is because in the Upper Realm literary texts are considered in their integrity untouchable and taboo because they are almost sacred art objects. This is an old custom, in the spirit of the historical tradition of Western culture, though the practice of publishing, even in the Upper Realm, is not always so pious and fair as we are told. However, this difference between the two realms is of great importance.

In the Upper Realm one always strives at least to keep alive the appearance of intact virtue, in the same way as in high society women do not permit themselves to be called “prostitutes” although they indulge in open promiscuity. The “ladies” of the underworld do not have such pretensions, and it is no closely guarded secret that one can buy their favors at the appropriate price. Sad to relate, the authors of science fiction are quite similar in behavior to those “ladies,” and they do not feel the disgrace of making transactions, either, as part of which they willingly hand over their works to the publishers, who are allowed to revise the texts at will. Thus James Blish[4] tells us that his A Case of Conscience is only the length it is because his publisher at the time, owing to certain technical circumstances, could not produce a work of greater length! Just imagine if we read in the memoirs of Hermann Hesse that his Steppenwolf was only so long because his publishers… Such a disclosure would cause a shout of wrath from literary circles, but Blish’s words do not affect either him or any other author or critic because in the Lower Realm the station of a slave is taken for granted. Publishers are within their rights when changing the title, length, and style of science-fiction books as these encroachments are determined by economic considerations: they act like people who must find a purchaser for their goods, and they have a firm conviction that they work hand in glove with the author, like project leaders and advertising managers for Ford. Naturally, nobody thinks it strange that the project leader for a new model does not have the right to think up a name for it.

However, these particular differences should not make us wonder. American science fiction descends from the pulps; English science fiction had as its father, not Hugo Gernsback, about whom nobody outside of U.S. science fiction knows a thing, but H. G. Wells. What else? American science fiction worked itself up from the gutter of literature (though it could not fly into the sky); English science fiction has Americanized itself partly for commercial reasons, and partly has stepped into Wells’s shoes, something that should not be taken as praiseworthy. The “classical” successor to Wells, John Wyndham, worked like a huckster, seeking to supplement the work of the master and teacher by filling what was, in his eyes, a gap. But even as anyone who paints like Van Gogh today cannot become a Van Gogh, so Wyndham did not add anything major to Wells’s work. Wells worked according to the known principle of escalation, so that in The War of the Worlds, earth is attacked only by the Martians; but in Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, the author does not think it sufficient to let all mankind go blind — he foists poisonous plants upon it; but because those plants do not seem dangerous enough, he adds the gift of active motion as spice.

After all, there are two distinct traditions in science fiction: the English, with the better manners and customs of the Upper Realm, and the American, which has lived from its beginnings in the slums of the Lower Realm, this slave market, which has no overabundance of courtly manners. Also, the language of English science fiction has always been more cultivated.

4

Seen in isolation, a number of the traits of trivial literature, as described above, are quite unimportant. However, when added up, they form an ordered structure of the environment in which science fiction is born and gains a scanty living. These traits are clues, pointing out how in different ways the status of a work of literature is determined; it depends upon whether it is born in the Upper or Lower Realm.

Thus science-fiction works belong to the Lower Realm — to trivial literature. Thus sociocultural analysis finally solves the problem. Thus words said about it are wasted; the trial can be closed with a sigh of relief.

But this is not so. Without a doubt there is a difference between science fiction and all the neighboring, often closely related, types of trivial literature. It is a whore, but a quite bashful one at that; moreover, a whore with an angel face. It prostitutes itself, but, like Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladova, with discomfort, disgust, and contrary to its dreams and hopes.

True, science fiction is often a liar. It wants to be taken for something else, something different from what is really is. It lives in perpetual self-deception. It repeats its attempts to disguise itself. Has it got the shadow of a right to do so?

Many famous science-fiction authors are trying to pass for something better than their fellow writers — the authors of such trivial literature as crime novels or Westerns. These pretensions are often spoken out loud. Moreover, in the prefaces to their books, embarrassing praise is given to the authors by the authors themselves. For instance, Heinlein often emphasized that science fiction (that is, his own science fiction) was not only equal to, but also far better than mainstream literature, because writing science fiction is more difficult. Such pretensions cannot be found in the rest of the field of trivial literature.

This does not mean that there is no standard of quality for crime novels. Here, too, we distinguish bad, boring novels and original, fascinating ones. We can speak of a first-rate crime novel — but it does not occur to anybody to consider such a hit as equal to the masterpieces of literature. In its own class, in the Lower Realm, it may be a real diamond. When in fact a book does cross the borders of the genre, it is no longer called a crime novel, just as with a novel by Dostoevsky.

The best science-fiction novels want to smuggle themselves into the Upper Realm — but in 99.9 percent of cases, they do not succeed. The best authors behave like schizophrenics; they want to — and at the same time they do not want to — belong to the Realm of Science Fiction. They care a lot about the prizes given by the science-fiction ghetto. At the same time, they want their books to be published by those publishing houses that do not publish science fiction (so that one cannot see from the book jackets that their books are science-fiction books). On the other hand, they feel tied to fandom, write for fanzines, answer the questions of their interviewers, and take part in science-fiction conventions. On the other hand, publicly, they try to stress that they “do not really” write science fiction; they would write “better and more intellectual books” if only they did not have to bear so much pressure from the publishers and science-fiction magazines; they are thinking of moving into mainstream literature (Aldiss, Ballard, and several others).

Do they have any objective reasons for surrendering to frustration and feelings of oppression in the science-fiction ghetto? Crime novels are another, an open-and-shut, case. Naturally, a crime novel reports on murders, detectives, corpses, and trials; Westerns, on stalwart cowboys and insidious Indians. However, if we may believe its claims, a science-fiction book belongs at the top of world literature! For it reports on mankind’s destiny, on the meaning of life in the cosmos, on the rise and fall of thousand-year-old civilizations: it brings forth a deluge of answers for the key questions of every reasoning being.

There is only one snag: in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it fulfills its task with stupidity. It always promises too much, and it almost never keeps its word.

For this reason, science fiction is such a remarkable phenomenon. It comes from a whorehouse but it wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored. From the time it was born, science fiction has been raised by narrow-minded slaveholders. Thomas Mann was allowed to work on one novel for fourteen years; John Brunner complains that there was a time when he had to write eight novels a year in order to stay alive comfortably. From shame, science fiction tries to keep some sides of this situation a well-guarded secret. (Often we hear from science-fiction authors how much freedom they enjoy in their work.)

Science fiction is subject to the rigid economic laws of supply and demand. It has not completely adapted itself to the “editor’s milieu,” meaning that there are recipes on how to write a science-fiction work that appeals to a certain editor and gains his appreciation (for instance, the late John W. Campbell, Jr., was an authoritative man who published only a certain easily definable kind of science fiction, and some authors knew how to foresee his demands). In Geis’s Science Fiction Review, Perry A. Chapdelaine gives us a detailed account of how he was carefully briefed by well-known science-fiction authors when he wrote his first novel. Special care was taken to include those qualities that maximize sales; no mention was made of the immanent quality of the work itself. Often the same is the case in the Upper Realm — but only for beginners. However, science-fiction authors remain minors in the eyes of their publishers — all their lives. Such circumstances breed frustration and compensatory behavior. Indeed, the same sort of thing abounds in the science-fiction ghetto. All these compensatory phenomena, taken together, clearly have the character of mimicry.

(a)

In the science-fiction ghetto there is no lack of makeshift and ersatz institutions which exist side by side with those of the Upper Realm. The Upper Realm has the Nobel Prize and other world-famous literary awards. The science-fiction ghetto has the Hugo and Nebula awards; and American science fiction poses (still) as “world” science fiction, as can be seen from anthology titles such as The World’s Best S/F.

(b)

The Upper Realm has academic and other highbrow literary journals, containing theoretical and hermeneutical articles. Science fiction also has its highbrow fanzines (Riverside Quarterly from Canada, Science Fiction Commentary from Australia, and Quarber Merkur from Austria). These are parallel, although not analogous phenomena. The highbrow periodicals of the Upper Realm command real authority in cultural life. The most famous critics and theoreticians of the mainstream are all known to the cognoscenti and to almost all intelligent readers, at least by name (e.g., Sartre; Leslie Fiedler). Yet the names of the best science-fiction critics are not known to one soul outside the inner circle of fandom, and the silent majority of science-fiction readers does not know of the existence of the highbrow magazines. Even if they did know of them, they would not care for the evaluations of the cognoscenti — i.e., they are not influenced by these fanzines when choosing the new science-fiction books they are going to buy.

The structure of the flow of information is quite different in the Upper Realm than in the Lower Realm. In the Upper Realm the highbrow periodicals form the peak of a pyramid whose base is mass culture. The popular critics of the dailies need not agree with the judgments of the initiated highbrow experts, but if one of them opposes a man like Sartre, he knows quite well that he is fighting a world-wide authority. Nothing of this sort in science fiction. Its pyramid is hidden deep in the fan underground, the best fanzines have only insignificant circulations, and they cannot count on financial help from social or cultural institutions. (There are rare exceptions, such as New Worlds, which at one time received essential aid from certain British cultural institutions, but this is no longer the case in the United States.)

(c)

Science-fiction conventions are intended to form a kind of match for the meetings of the PEN Club and other similar gatherings. This also involves mimicry, because PEN meetings do not have in the slightest the character of a party that is so characteristic of science-fiction conventions. At conventions, theoretical reflections are nothing but seasoning; at PEN meetings, however, as well as at similar conferences of professional writers, they are the main course.

I must stress that no esoteric highbrow magazine of the Upper Realm has any direct influence on the policies of publishers. These magazines possess only a purely moral authority, founded on tradition. They do not try to wage open warfare upon the typical phenomena of mass culture today (e.g., normally they hide all data about one-day best sellers) and their activity becomes visible only in the long run, as all of the institutions in the structure feed the slow process of the Upper Realm. They should be the (often quite powerless) conscience and memory of world culture, its highest tribunal, which is at the same time an unbiased witness and judge. Often this tribunal loses a single skirmish but wins the great, epic wars — just the way Great Britain did. It cannot give a guarantee of today’s fame to a great, misjudged poet, but it provides a memory, helping the next generation sometimes to dig up treasures that are almost lost. In short: these tribunals are not subject to the economic rules of the market, and because of this they are able to defend the cultural heritage against the chaotic onslaught of mass culture.

Nothing like that can be seen in the Lower Realm. Science fiction has no independent periodicals that supervise critically the whole production and form a similar fraction of the bulk of publications in the field, as in the case in the Upper Realm (measured by the yardstick of the circulation of books and especially of literary periodicals). The evidence of the best and best-known science-fiction authors is suppressed when it is contrary to the interests of the publishers — a fact that Knight reports on. The highbrow fanzines are known exclusively to a very small circle of initiated readers, and their influence on publishers’ policies is nil. These amateur magazines often publish analyses and reflections that are equal in quality to the best of what is published in the Upper Realm. But this does not change the fact that no one listens to the voices of the critics. This important fact shows clearly that it is not the immanent quality of a statement that determines its scope of action, but this radius is contingent on the broader structure of the whole network of information with which the medium that published this statement is connected.[5]It is a typical science-fiction custom that critiques are not produced independently, but are written by either the authors or the editors of anthologies, who evaluate each other’s works. This state of affairs only helps to cloud the line of demarcation between apologetics (a public-relations affair) and objective criticism.

Taken as a whole, science-fiction institutions (cons, fanzines, and awards) appear similar to those of the Upper Realm, but dissimilar as regards the function of furthering social values and selections. In the Upper Realm, as time goes by, the worst and the best literary works drift apart from each other; in science fiction however, the forces that are the result of economic laws of the marketplace, an absence of independent criticism, and a lack of cultural assistance are all directed toward the opposite tendency. They put trash next to valuable books; they impede any experiments in literary creation, choke independent, demanding, probing criticism, and they assist publishers in camouflaging as true criticism the advertising that boosts the sales of their products.

Furthermore, the chain of publishers who specialize in science fiction — and the silent majority of mute, passive readers — forms an environment to which even the most gifted science-fiction authors must adapt themselves eventually. The authors are initiated early into the rules of the game, and they must either obey or take immense risks. Suppose an ingenious, even inspired author enters the realm of science fiction. This man must adapt rapidly and without scruples to the simple truth that it is impossible for him to be valued and esteemed according to his extraordinary achievements. The silent majority of the readership will devour his valuable books in just the same way, at best, as they are used to absorbing the worst nonsense of mass production. Taking into account just the economic barometer of the market, the publishers will treat him in the same way as they treat his colleagues — i.e., as authors who willingly allow the titles, lengths, and structures of their books to be changed in advance according to the wishes of their masters. This author will watch helplessly the embarrassing sight of his books submerging in an ocean of trash, for the stigma of science fiction links them irrevocably to this sea. Surely Sturgeon is right in maintaining that ninety-nine percent of all books in every genre are trash, but the fact remains that in the Upper Realm of culture there are forces that never cease furthering positive selection. In the Lower Realm, the best books are placed beside the worst and most stupid, and submerged by them under the pressure of the objective situation.

Thus, science-fiction institutions only seem to be the equal of the institutions of the Upper Realm. In fact, we see before us a superficial mimicry. Science fiction merely apes and simulates the Olympian quality of literature, without reproducing the same performance capability. No famous author from the Upper Realm concerns himself with disqualifying trashy literature or defending himself against the attacks of graphomaniacs. For a while, the Knights and Blishes tried to do this, but in the end their aggressiveness had to give way to a moderated, more passive attitude. To some extent these intelligent men are conscious of their own defeat. They feel that this behavior, typical of science fiction, merely apes grown-up literature. They can see how grotesque such goings-on must look to an outside observer. The unauthenticated (because not earnest) quality of fandom, with its letters, parties, and friendly exchange of opinions, is for the authors only a weak substitute, an asylum where they can play the part of the great writer by confessing in fanzines with circulations of two hundred or less the secret of their creative writing and their deep psychological secrets.

We could consider these phenomena as insignificant and pay no attention to them, because in the end the ways in which the literati compensate their inferiority complexes, their feelings of frustration, and their Wille zur Macht are not necessarily those aspects of literature that flourish in the Upper Realm. However, in the Lower Realm these are symptoms of the chronic illness that impedes so embarrassingly the growth of the science-fiction genre. Thus the only way to better the prevailing situation is to make an outspoken diagnosis. We could support this conclusion with hundreds of examples. In an article by a contemporary science-fiction critic, the names of authors, including Farmer, Joyce, Sturgeon, and Kafka, are listed indiscriminately. But mainstream critics never reciprocate this striving for equal status. In today’s science-fiction anthologies we find, apart from science-fiction authors, such writers as Grass, Calvino, Ionesco, and Michaux, but the Upper Realm does not offer any just return. The inhabitants of the Upper Realm are invited to the Lower; they accept these invitations, but there is no return service. The inhabitants of the Upper Realm treat those of the Lower Realm properly, just as the gentry treat the rabble properly. A lady may enter a honky-tonk, but the “ladies” who reside there permanently are not allowed into a respectable house.

5

We shall now show how the work of a gifted science-fiction writer grows in the science-fiction environment and how it is accepted there. (The fate of the untalented does not concern us — but we will report on it, too, if only marginally, as it turns out in quite a characteristic way in the Lower Realm.)

The substance that fills the entire milieu of science fiction, and upon which the work of its authors feeds, is kitsch. It is the last, degenerate form of myths. From them it inherited a rigid structure. In myth the story of Ulysses is the prestabilized structure of fate: in kitsch it becomes a cliché. Superman is a spoiled Hercules, the robot a golem, even as kitsch itself is the simplified, threadbare, prostituted, but original constellation of values central to a given culture. In our culture, kitsch is what was once holy and/or coveted, awe-inspiring, or horrible, but now prepared for instant use. Kitsch is the former temple that has been so thoroughly defiled by infidels for so long that even the memory of its ancient untouchability has been lost. When hitherto untouchable idols get the status of mass products, through mechanical reproduction, and become obtainable as everybody’s objects of enjoyment, we observe how the originally sublime is degradingly transubstantiated into kitsch. The venerable paradigm is reworked in order to make it easily consumed and as simple as possible. And — quite important — kitsch does not present itself as such to its consumers; it believes in its own perfection and wants to be taken seriously. Even the psychic process that originally kept the mass of the uninitiated at a distance from the object of worship, because it was an obstacle that had to be overcome, comes wrapped up with the goods as an appetizer. Kitsch, free from all difficulties of consumption, is a product that has been prechewed for the consumer. In literature, kitsch results when all the complexity, multi-sidedness, and ambiguity of the authentic product is eliminated from the final product.

However, the people concerned (both authors and customers) have a splendid feeling of well-being if this final product retains the air of being an objet d’art, in full bloom, without restrictions. Kitsch is composed exclusively of ersatz products: of heroism, of need, misfortune, love, etc. In science fiction, kitsch is made from ersatz science and literature. From reading “inner circle” critiques and considering what science-fiction prospectuses have to offer, you would hardly believe that the authors who are reviewed display an abundant ignorance of the grammar, syntax, and style of their mother tongue; it is as if one suddenly hears that a team of athletes preparing for the Olympic Games cannot yet get up and stand.

In a stabilized culture, the sphere that kitsch might inhabit is quite small. In mass culture, it tends to overflow into neighboring genres; it has an aggressive and explosive pressure; it is a tumor that grows exuberantly, devouring that part of the body which is still intact. It is quite hard to justify morally a defense against its attacks, because the dilemma always arises as to which is the lesser evil: the trashy deformation of an art object, or its total absence from the circuit of a mass culture that cannot assimilate the real thing. Science fiction is a clinical case of a region occupied exclusively by trash, because in kitsch, the culturally and historically highest, most difficult, and most important objects are produced on the assembly line, in the most primitive forms, to be sold to the public at bargain prices.

Knowing no discretion and no reverence for things inconceivable by the human mind, piling universes upon universes without batting an eyelash, mixing up physics, metaphysics, and trite trash from misinterpreted philosophical systems without end, science fiction is the true embodiment of kitsch, because of the cheekiness of its total ignorance, which even denies the existence of a higher knowledge, toward which it finds no path, and denies it triumphantly and obstinately.

Even if there are subjects about which philosophers dare not even think, topics about which world-famous scholars can say scarcely anything at all, they can be bought for 75¢ to $1.25 at every newsstand for immediate inspection. Science fiction provides a pleasant substitute for the study of the handbooks of the greatest thinkers, cosmologists, astrophysicists, and philosophers who have ever lived — yes, it can even report on what scientists born a thousand years from now will know. I am not ridiculing this maximum offer; I can only repeat what you read in the science-fiction advertisements. If somebody ridicules somebody else, you could not tell from the earnestness of these statements; it is just another case when you can’t take a single word seriously, for this is advertising, which is used to talk only about the best possible and previously nonexistent products. If all this is not meant to be taken seriously, then what is the real content of all their cipher language?

One of the most incredible secrets of science fiction (although one not too closely guarded) is the fact that ninety-nine percent of its authors do not know even the titles and authors of today’s learned works, but still they want to top these scholars with their knowledge of the year 6000. If an author understands schoolteacher’s physics, he is praised by Knight, quite in earnest, and presented as a model to authors who seem to have been forced to drop out of school after three years because of general mental weakness. The public does not seem to wait to find out about these interesting facts, probably because such news would annoy them. It is quite embarrassing to find out that for the least amount of money and mental effort, one has been convinced that one was initiated into the vastest secrets of the universe and existence.

6

The exception mentioned in the title of this essay is the work of Philip K. Dick. Because of the lack of a selection process to struggle against trash and promote real value, the works of Dick are sometimes compared with those of A. E. van Vogt.

The novels of both authors share the common characteristics that (1) they are composed of trashy parts and (2) they are full of contradictory elements. The contradictions include those of an external nature (as when the world depicted in a book runs counter to empirical scientific knowledge) and of an internal nature (as when during the course of a novel the action becomes self-denying — i.e., contradicts itself).

Such a diagnosis does not automatically invoke a subsequent condemnation. It is true that literary judgment is undemocratic, but nevertheless in the course of each critical trial it is also just. Yet it must be ascertained why the case under scrutiny allows a sacrifice of values. These works contain local nonsense and a local destruction of values (sense is always to be preferred to nonsense), but this local inroad might aid the construction of a higher sense of the totality. This point is connected with the general relativity of all values: even a murder may be justified in a civilization where it is considered a link in a chain of connections in which, according to prevailing belief, the lesser value, a man’s life, is sacrificed to the greater, the godhead.

Judged prima facie, there are no relevant differences between the two cases under review. Both authors disregard empirical knowledge, logic, and causality, categories upon which our knowledge is founded. They seem to sacrifice these basic values to the momentary stage effect; therefore, they destroy the greater values in order to create a lesser one — something always culturally taboo.

However, our authors are writers of quite different ranks, when read thoughtfully. As Knight and Blish have proved, the phantasmagoric acrobatics of van Vogt do not add up to a meaningful whole. He does not solve the riddles posed, he does not draw conclusions from the things depicted early in his books, and he sketches only ephemeral ideas, piling them chaotically on one another. With all that, he does not hypnotize the wary reader, but only lulls him to sleep; this sleep comes from increasing boredom, not fascinating magnetism. The only problem posed by van Vogt’s prose is its financial success, at the same time irritating and annoying an intelligent reader like Knight. Why is it possible that work the stupidity of which was amply and unequivocally demonstrated by Knight still enjoys such great popularity?

But no deep secret awaits discovery. The van Vogt fans do not care a jot about the Knight line of deduction. Most probably they do not know of it and do not want to, either. From van Vogt they get the whole cosmos, with its inhabitants, wars, and empires, excellently served up, because the plot can be seen without thinking at all, and they close their eyes to the knowledge that they are being fed with stupid lies. We will say no more on this topic.

Philip K. Dick seems to write in a vein similar to van Vogt’s, although he does not, like van Vogt, violate grammar and syntax as well as physics. Dick, too, works with trash. Yet his novels are structured with more logic. He is accustomed to let action issue from a clearly and precisely built situation, and only later in the course of a novel does decay, perplexing the reader, begin to undermine initial order so that the end of the novel becomes a single knot of fantasies. Dreaming and waking are mixed, reality becomes indistinguishable from hallucination, and the intangible center of Dick’s world dissolves into a series of quivering, mocking monstrosities so that in the end each novel of Dick’s mainstream (for Dick has also written second-rate, insignificant works) destroys the order of things that he erected at the beginning. Even if Dick’s worlds owe their explosion to a technology or a disease (or madness) of the space-time manifold, in ever-increasing speed they multiply their “pseudo-realities” so that (as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) the levels of hallucination and reality, which initially were separate from one another, become a space-time labyrinth. But Dick always moves among the typical trash of science fiction in the realm of androids, of the usual prophets (“precogs”), “psi,” “esp” fields, brain transplants, and hundreds of other similarly scurrilous products and phenomena.

Trash is present everywhere in Dick’s books; from time to time, though, in some of his novels, he succeeds in executing a master stroke. I am convinced that he made this discovery unconsciously and unintentionally. He has invented an extremely refined tactic: he uses elements of trash (that is, those degenerate molecules that once had a sacramental, metaphysical value) so that he leads to a gradual resurrection of the long-extinct, metaphysical-exotic values. In a way, he makes trash battle against trash. He does not deny it, he does not throw it away, but he builds from it a ladder that leads straight into that horrible heaven, which, during this operation, ceases to be an “orthodox” heaven, but does not become an “orthodox” hell. The accumulating, mutually negating spheres of existence enforce the resurrection of a power that has been buried for eons. In short, Dick succeeds in changing a circus tent into a temple, and during this process the reader may experience catharsis. It is extremely difficult to grasp analytically the means that make it possible for him to do so.

On the contrary, it is easy to say that this catharsis justifies the sacrifice of values that shocks the reader at the beginning. I cannot devote this essay to the Dick Transubstantiation Method; therefore, I will make only a few remarks on his tour d’adresse.

The promise of “almightiness” is implicit in science fiction. This omnipotence has a bipolar nature — the omnipotence of the bad (as in the dystopia) and of the good (the Utopia). In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole — that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallization, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the pleasant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. I believe it is a very sad phenomenon to witness the indifferent workmanship with which such novels are produced. There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns. A space occupied by trash is a vacuum in which lead and feathers fall at the same speed. It is indeed a great venture to coerce the resurrection of dead metaphysical values from such a novel.

* This point of view may prompt some fans to ask the question why science-fiction writers should not be allowed to make an intellectual game out of the topic of mankind’s doom, and why the science-fiction field should be forbidden that which is done with complete justification in the field of the crime novel? My answer is: Surely nothing in heaven or on earth prohibits us from doing so; in the same way as there are no “absolute” prohibitions to hinder us from playing with corpses or the genitalia of our fathers or from concentrating our whole love life on the goal of sleeping as fast as possible with as many women as possible in order to establish a record. We could do all these things as a matter of course, but surely nobody praises such programs as something to further social values: neither can we deny that these actions promise certain new liberties only annulling forever taboos that have stayed intact until today. As the English put it: you cannot have it both ways; you cannot respect a life, a topic, a feeling, and prostitute it at the same time. At the utmost you can falsify the real appearance and real meaning of a situation brought about by your own actions deliberately or unconsciously; but hiding one’s head in the sand is fraught with well-known dangers. According to the whole historical tradition of our culture, truth has inherent value, whether pleasant or depressing. If crime novels follow their own schemata to falsify reality, it does not matter, since nobody looks into these novels for the highest revelations and initiations into the abysses of human nature. If science fiction adapts itself to the crime novel, it must stop claiming to be considered as something better than the crime novel. Its peculiar state of continual oscillation between the Upper and the Lower Realms of literature is a symptom of its repetitive attempts to have it both ways. But this is impossible without self-deception.

It cannot be maintained that Dick has evaded all the traps set for him: he has more defeats than victories in his work, but the latter determine his rank as an author. His successes are due to his intuition. Average science-fiction authors form their hells of existence, their flaming grounds to head for, in social institutions, especially police-tyrannies-plus-brainwashing, as from Orwell’s school, but Dick makes his out of ontological categories. The primary ontological elements — space and time — are Dick’s instruments of torture, which he uses with great versatility. In his novels he constructs hypotheses that are prima facie wholly nonsensical (because of the contradictions they contain) — worlds that are at the same time determinist and indeterminist, worlds where past, present, and future “devour” each other, a world in which one can be dead and alive at the same time, and so on.

But in the first world even the “precogs” prove to be powerless to evade their own cruel end, which they foresaw themselves. Their wonderful gift only makes their torture harder to bear. In the second world time becomes a Laocoon’s snake that strangles its inhabitants. The third world embodies the saving of Chiang Tsi, who, upon waking, posed the famous question of whether he is Chiang Tsi who has just dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreams that he is Chiang Tsi. Dick writes about a technological realization of an ontological problem that has always occupied philosophers (i.e., the controversy between subjectivists and objectivists) so that it may be considered as an earnest problem of the (far) future, and not just a speculative question.

The common opinion that philosophical problems can never change directly into technological feats is an illusion caused by the relatively brief period of the technological era. In the year 1963 I discussed this problem in my Summa Technologiae, in the chapter entitled “Phantomatics.” One possible way to build a synthetic reality is to “encapsulate” the consciousness by connecting the brain of the person in question to a computerlike apparatus in the same way as it is connected normally to real environments through the senses and nerves — i.e., with feedback. The most interesting puzzle is whether a “phantomatically imprisoned” man can divine the real state of things, whether he can distinguish the machine-simulated environment from the real one, by means of any one experiment. From either a logical or an empirical standpoint, it seems that the person could not make a correct diagnosis if the program of the machine was insufficiently developed. In a civilization which has such phantomatic techniques, there may be much mind-napping. But also there may be many legal uses of such methods, so that a person could witness while awake as many happenings as could be programmed, and since in principle there are no obstacles, the phantomated person would realize the counter-empirical (he could, subjectively, live through many metamorphoses of his body).

In Dick’s book Ubik, we find a literary variant of a similar project. He deals with a biotechnological method that is complicated by the fact that it allows dying people to remain in a specific state between life and death — i.e., “half-life.” Dick develops a quite horrible game, so that it is not clear at the end which of the main characters lie in half-life and which live in normal reality. The action zigzags. With different ideas of what the reader is led to believe to be true. Also there are such macabre effects as the dissolution of earth and jumping back in time. You can find similar things in science fiction, but this masterly, gripping guidance of the play, in particular the behavior of all the characters, is psychologically depicted without fault. The border that separates the adventure novel from mainstream literature is transgressed in Ubik, something I want to prove later in this essay.

Now I want to review the “message” that several of Dick’s novels communicate to us in an unequivocal way, embedded in the action. He seems to want to prove an equation, in the form of “We exist, therefore we are damned,” and this equation is supposed to be valid for all worlds, even for impossible ones. His novels are the results of pessimistic ontological speculations about how the face of men would change if total revolutions in the basic categories of existence occurred (e.g., revolutions in the space-time system, in the relationship between dreaming and waking, etc). The result is the same, since insofar as these changes are induced by biotechnologies or drugs (as in Palmer Eldritch) they can only worsen the fatality of earthly existence. The greater a technological innovation is, says Dick, the more horrible its consequences.

In his first “major” novel, Solar Lottery, Dick has not yet tried to destroy the fundamentals of existence completely. He “shyly” introduces a new sociotechnology in which all men are supposed to have an equal chance to gain political power, because the allocation of power depends upon a comprehensive lottery. As can be expected, the result is a new kind of misery and inequality. Thus Dick has good reasons to sacrifice logic and causality; he shows that even the variants of existence that violate causality and logic are inherent in the invariance of texture and doom. One could call Dick an inverted apologist for “progress,” because he connects unlimited progress in the field of the instrumentally realizable with bottomless pessimism in the field of human consequences of such progress in civilization. His novels are pieces of fantastic belles-lettres, but his underlying philosophy of life is not fantasy. Dick seems to foresee a future in which abstract and highbrow dilemmas of academic philosophy will descend into the street so that every pedestrian will be forced to solve for himself such contradictory problems as “objectivity” or “subjectivity,” because his life will depend upon the result. With all his “precogs,” “cold-packs,” and “Pen-fields,” he tells us, “And if you could achieve the impossible, it would not alleviate your misery one bit.”

Dick’s main characters are engaged in a battle not only for their lives, but also to save the basic categories of existence. They are doomed to failure in advance. Some exhibit the patience of Job, who gazed quietly into the face of what was coming, since everything that can happen to a man had already happened to him. Others are valiant wrestlers, striving after power, while still others are small and petty people, officials, and employees. Dick mans all his misleading worlds with contemporary Americans. Probably this is the reason why they seem so living and authentic — because there is a feedback between them and the world surrounding them. The authenticity of these people corroborates the fantastic background, and, vice versa, the background makes the normal people seem especially noteworthy and true to life. Dick’s main characters do not become greater during the apocalyptically terrifying action of his novels; they only seem greater — or more human — because the world around them gets ever more inhuman (that is, more incomprehensible to the mind of man).

There are moments when they have a tragic effect. In the Greek sense tragedy is inescapable defeat, with several ways of being defeated. Some of these ways, if a man chooses one of them, give the opportunity symbolically to save an inestimable value. For one of Dick’s heroes, the love of a woman or a similar human feeling is the kind of value that is worth saving, a value to be guarded even if the world goes to pieces. They are the last islands of spiritual sanity in a world gone mad, a world that heaps on them objects used in ways other than originally intended and that thus become instruments of torture and objects that spring from the sphere of the most trivial consumer goods and behave like things obsessed (e.g., a tape recorder or a spray can). Dick’s main characters engage in conferences with monsters, which, however, are not little BEMs (“bug-eyed monsters,” the embodiment of trash), because an aura of grotesque and dramatic worth clings to them, and they have the dignity of misshapen, tortured creatures. With the example of such monsters — one of which is Palmer Eldritch — we can see how Dick vanquishes truth; in the shape of a mutilation, he makes simple the macabre and the primitive by giving them a trace of fragile humanity.

In Ubik, the twitching world reminds us of the “will” of Schopenhauer, will gone mad; spurned into everlasting time explosion and implosion, devouring itself. As an aside, measured by the yardstick of Dick’s black pessimism, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of life seems to be real joie de vivre. Dick sees our world as the best of the worst, and there are no other worlds. According to him, we are everywhere damned, even where we cannot go. Dick once said that he does not consider himself a limitless pessimist. Possibly, though conscious of reason in the cosmos, he does not draw the nihilistic conclusion because he does not ascribe an exclusively negative value to the agony of man. But this is my private speculation.[6]

Dick’s planets, galaxies, men, children, monsters, elevators, and refrigerators are all symbols of a language that, mix it as you please, always crystallizes into the same form of a mene tekel.

With that I don’t want to say that Dick’s novels — even his best, like Ubik — are faultless masterpieces. The surfaces of his books seem quite coarse and raw to me, connected with an omnipresence of trash. I like what he has to say in one chapter more than what a page shows, and that is why his work forces me into fast reading. Upon looking his details in the face, one beholds several inconsistencies, as in looking at an Impressionist’s painting from too close. Dick cannot tame trash; rather, he lets loose a pandemonium and lets it calm down on its way. His metaphysics often slips in the direction of cheap circus tricks. His prose is threatened by uncontrolled outgrowths, especially when it boils over into long series of fantastic freaks, and therefore loses all its function of message. Also, he is prone to penetrate so deeply into the monstrosities he has invented that an inversion of effect results: that which was intended to strike us with horror appears merely ridiculous, or even stupid.

With that I’ll stop this immanent review of Dick’s work and pass over to its sociological aspect. The science-fiction environment is unable to separate and make distinct the types of works that are being born into it. This environment is incapable of distinguishing clearly between the work of Dick, which is artistically bunched together into sense, from that of van Vogt, which collapses into nonsense. On a higher plane a title like The World of Null-A belongs to Dick, not to van Vogt, although it was the latter who actually wrote it; but only with Dick can we talk about a “non-Aristotelian” logic, whereas this title is merely tacked onto van Vogt’s book without any justification. In its actions the science-fiction environment is by no means chaotic; obeying its own laws and regulations, it extols the stupid and denigrates the valuable until both meet “halfway” -on the level of insignificant trifles. In science fiction, Dick has not been honored according to his merits. Some people acknowledged the entertainment values of his novels, and one of the best living science-fiction critics, Damon Knight, also spoke about Dick’s distorted pictures of contemporary reality (in In Search of Wonder) when he reviewed Solar Lottery and some other early books by Dick.

But that was all the praise this author came to hear. Nobody saw that his “unchecked growth” is quite strikingly similar in content and form to what goes on in the Upper Realm. Judged according to the problems he deals with, Dick’s novels belong to that stream of literature that explores the no man’s land between being and nothing — in the double sense.

(a)

We can count Dick’s novels as part of the prose that is today called “Literature of Ideas” or “Literature of Possibilities.” This type of experimental prose tries to probe the neglected, latent, untouched, as-yet-unrealized potentialities of human existence, mainly in the psychological sphere. Probably one can find fountains of such prose in, among others, the works of Musil (Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften — The Man Without Qualities) in which the outer world, randomly manifesting itself, affixes to the individual, so that he remains a soul “without qualities.” In such books as his Le Voyeur, Robbe-Grillet tries other tactics; this prose seems to fit the motto Quod autem potest esse totaliter aliter — “that which, however, can be something wholly different” (which in Poland is represented by J. Andrzejewski in his Miazga, a work that is written partly in the future subjunctive mood and therefore describes what could possibly happen, and not what has unconditionally happened), which has its parallels with Dick’s work. Robbe-Grillet proceeds from the typical science-fiction blueprint of “parallel worlds,” but whereas most science-fiction writers flatten this motif into unbearable trash, running over it like a steamroller, Dick knows how to raise the problems that grow from this inspiration to a fitting level of complexity. Therefore he is an original representative of the Literature of Ideas in science fiction — a wide field, but one with which I cannot deal here exhaustively.

(b)

In connection with Dick, we can think of authors like Beckett, because of the “unhealthy curiosity” that both have for death, or, more exactly, for the flow of life as it approaches its end. Beckett “is content” with natural processes that will devour man from the inside, slowly and continually (as when growing old, or becoming a cripple). Dick devotes himself to grander speculations, in the true spirit of the genre he is working in.

We could say many interesting things about his “theory” of half-life (not as a sensible empirical hypothesis, but as a variety of fantastic-ontological speculation) but, once again, I cannot dig too deep into an exegesis of a desacralized eschatology.

We draw these two parallels to show how an area of creation, closed into a ghetto, suffers from the situation of its own isolation. For such parallel courses of evolution are not accidental coincidences. It is the spirit of time that mirrors itself in them, but science fiction knows only short-lived fashions.

The peculiarity of Dick’s work throws a glaring light upon relationships within the science-fiction milieu. All science-fiction works have to give the reader the impression of being easy to read, as has all fiction. Science-fiction works before which two hundred Nobel Prize winners in the department of physics kneel down are worthless for the science-fiction market if, in fact, the precondition of being able to evaluate a work of science fiction is a minimum of knowledge. Therefore it is best for science-fiction books not to contain any deep meaning — either physical or metaphysical. But if the author smuggles any sense into his work, it must not stir the phlegmatic and indolent reader, or else this invaluable man will stop reading because of a headache.[7] The deeper meaning is admitted only if it is “harmless,” if we can neglect it entirely while reading. The following anecdote may explain this problem: If many colored flags are put upon the masts of a ship in the harbor, a child on the shore will think that this is a merry game and perhaps will have a lot of fun watching, although at the same time an adult will recognize the flags as a language of signals, and know that it stands for a report on a plague that has broken out on board the ship. The science-fiction readership equals the child, not the adult, in the story.

Their trashy surface helps Dick’s novels to survive in the milieu of science fiction. I do not maintain that Dick is a Machiavelli of science fiction who, under the cover of science-fiction trash, intentionally carries out a perfidiously thought-out camouflage in order to deceive his readers (i.e., in giving them gold disguised as iron trinkets).

Rather, I believe that Dick works intuitively, without knowing himself that he plays hide-and-seek with his readers. Please note the difference between an artist and an artisan: the artist grows in his environment, deriving from it the elements that serve him as a medium of expression — of those differences of tensions to which his personality is subject. The artisan is a producer of things for which there is a demand and which he has learned to produce — after the models that enjoy the highest popularity. Ninety-eight percent of science fiction is a craft, and its authors are day laborers who must obey to demand payment. Almost any artist can become an artisan when he strangles his inner voice — or he has no such voice at all.

For a long time Philip K. Dick has been only an artisan, and a skillful one, too, since he knew how to produce the things that were bought immediately. Gradually he began — and I must continue to speak in metaphors — to listen to his inner voice, and, though he still made use of those elements that science fiction put at his disposal, he began to put together patterns of his own.

But this is not an infallible explanation. As is always the case, it arises from a land of cross-breeding between what is in the books I read and what I can do with this material as a reader. Therefore I can imagine other explanations for Dick’s novels, explanations that differ from mine, though naturally the role of such an explanation cannot be played by just any idea. There is no doubt about the fact that with trashy elements Dick tries to express a metaphysics of an extremely “black” nature, mirroring authentically the state of his mind. A logical, one-hundred-percent unequivocal reconstruction of the deep semantic structures of a complex work is impossible because there are no discursive series of phrases to which a work of art may be reduced without leaving something remaining.

Thus it must be; for if it were otherwise, this essay would be entirely superfluous. Why should I talk in so complicated and obscure a manner about a theme, if this theme may be put into clear and simple words? That which you can say briefly and intelligibly you need not describe with long and unintelligible words. For this reason, every authentic work of art has its depths, and the possibility that such a work of art carries a message about existence for subsequent generations of readers, although in society, in civilization, and in life there is endless change, bears witness that the transitory things that do not disappear in a masterpiece are buried in its semantic variability. Out of the glaring clichés of trash, behind which yawns a horrible vacuum for every science-fiction artisan, Dick makes for himself a set of messages — i.e., a language — just like somebody who puts together from separate colored flags a language of signals according to his own judgment. Science-fiction criticism could help Dick to collect the colored flags, but not to put together sensible entireties from this crude material, because in practice it denies the existence of semantic depth.

Those science-fiction readers who are keenest of hearing feel that Dick is “different”; however, they are unable to articulate this impression clearly.

Dick has adapted to the science-fiction milieu — with positive as well as negative effects. He invented a method to express, with the aid of trash, that which transcends all trash. But he was unable to withstand to the end the contaminating influence of this quite poisonous material.

The most striking lack is the lack of penetrating, detailed, and objective criticism. The critical books by Blish and Knight are an exception to this rule; the book by Lundwall (Science Fiction: What It’s All About, 1970) is not a piece of criticism or a monograph, but is merely a traveler’s guide to the provinces of science fiction. The innocent sin of Blish and Knight is that they only and simply reviewed current science-fiction production, paying attention to all the authors. In their length and detail, the negative, destructive critiques written by Knight are totally superfluous, because it is impossible to help authors who are nitwits, and, as I said before, the public does not give a damn about such disqualifications.

Literature has no equality of rights: the day laborers must be dealt with in one sentence, if not with scornful silence, and a maximum of patience and attention is due to the promising author. But science fiction has different customs. I am no enthusiast; I do not believe that shrewd critiques would make author Dick into a Thomas Mann of science fiction. And yet it is a pity that there has been no critical selection among his works (although this state of affairs is consonant with the lack of selection in the whole science-fiction field). Unfortunately, the work of Dick praised above also has its reverse side. One is used to calling such work uneven. The contradictions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik (and also partly in Solar Lottery) are of a fleeting nature. These seeming contradictions constitute the claim of completeness — the semantic value of the work (as I tried to show very briefly). Therefore the local contradictions are meaningful messages that direct the reader’s attention to the problems that underlie the works. The novel Galactic Pot-Healer is only negligible. Every author is free to produce works of different value; there is no law against a great epic master allowing himself a novel of pure entertainment.

Our Friends from Prolix 8 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are not unimportant literature, but they cheat the reader. Especially in the latter do we see the sad picture of an author who squanders his talent by using brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers. This is far worse than putting together a valueless whole from valueless parts. The idea of the “Pen-field apparatus,” with which one can arbitrarily change one’s own mental disposition, is a brilliant one, but it does not play a role in the novel. In order to unravel the logical mystery that makes up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a whole study would be necessary, but it would have to be written with the embarrassed feeling that it is wholly superfluous.

But I must say this without furnishing proof. The first premise of the plot is that a policeman may kill on the spot everyone who is discovered to be an android, because on earth only androids kill their masters. (This premise does not hold good in the face of what is written later in the book.) We get to know that some androids do not know their true nature, because they have been filled with the incorrect information that they are normal humans. The police system has been undermined by androids who, disguised as humans, kill policemen in order to bear false witness that the dead human has been unmasked as an android. At the same time, we discover that some policemen have the same type of android nature — i.e., with an artificially implanted consciousness that they are humans. But if somebody does not know himself whether he is an “android replica” or a normal policeman, in what sense is this “infiltration”? If an android has a synthetically “humanized” consciousness with a falsified memory, for what is he called to account? How can one be responsible for that which one has no knowledge of? With these actions did Dick intend to present a model of discrimination, such as the kind of persecution of the Jews administered under the label “final solution”? But then (1) the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something that the novel does in places, and (2) people who are persecuted — e.g., persecuted because of their race — are certainly conscious of their innocence but at the same time conscious of their identity, which is not the case with the androids. In other ways the parallel is not valid. It remains obscure whether every android is killed on the spot because of what he once did (he is supposed to have killed his master) or because of what he is. As I have shown, the claim that every android is a murderer because it is unthinkable there is an android without an owner is not valid. Why are there no humans, masters of androids, who die natural deaths in their beds? As for the difference between human and android, we hear that it is almost impossible to distinguish between humans and androids with one hundred percent accuracy. To do this one needs a psychological test that measures the suspect’s reactions with a psychogalvanic apparatus. The test is nonsense; besides, on another occasion we hear that androids have a life span of only a few years, since the cells of their tissue cannot multiply. Therefore it is not child’s play to discover the difference by means of an organic examination of a microscope slide preparation of cell tissue, a procedure that takes about three minutes.

There is no unequivocal answer to all these questions. Situations to shock the readers must be multiplied at all costs. A trial to identify a suspect is far less shocking than the situation in which two policemen, working hand in glove, may kill one another if either of them should suddenly be unmasked as an android. This is all the more thrilling if neither of them, subjectively, knows who he really is, android or human. Then, both are subjectively innocent, both could be androids, or only one, or none — all of which heightens the tension, but at the same time increases the nonsense. In order to shock us when applied, the differentiating test must be applied fast and surely, but then suspense is lost if it is not coupled with the uncertainty of whether the suspect is an android or not, but with uncertainty of whether the test itself might fail, which causes somebody’s death instantly, in error. Because the author did not want to do without these logically exclusive alternatives, the test must be at the same time reliable and unreliable, the androids must act at the same time with malice aforethought and in complete innocence; as an android one is at the same time conscious and unconscious of one’s nature; a girl who has slept with a policeman is sentenced to death because it is forbidden for androids to sleep with humans; however, at the same time the girl does not know she is an android, etc., ad lib. The problem that is spelled out originally and begins to unfold, of human conflict with humanlike creations endowed with spirit by humans themselves, is torn to shreds, while the game of cops and robbers continues merrily. This nonsense, offered by the author of Ubik, can be construed as an offense to the reader, an offense which, however, evaporates without trace in the highly concentrated thoughtlessness of the science-fiction milieu.

We cannot deny this: the author of Ubik knew quite well what he was doing. But did criticism catch him red-handed and hold him responsible? I do not jest: for he who could write Ubik must understand the fraudulent character of his work. Criticism only took offense at his novel for being, in a way, insipid — i.e., not as full of suspense as the best of Dick. Such a brew of trite remarks is held out as criticism in science fiction.[8]

Dick set me right, and for that reason — as a guidepost — his work is so important. With the tactics I was using I could write only humorous (or grotesque) works: this is worse than if one remains in earnest all the time. It is worse because humor shows up the rich ambiguity of an earnest way of narration in but a lesser degree. The reader must recognize that an example has been ridiculed, or else the reader and writer are as much at cross-purposes as when somebody does not grasp the point of a joke; one cannot misunderstand a joke and savor it at the same time. Therefore humorous prose is assured of a more ready reception than complex prose that wants to be taken seriously. Because of Dick’s method of “transformation of trash,” I have found a third (just this) tactic of creation. A novel by Dick is not bound to be — and often is not — understood, because of its peculiar maximum span of meanings; because trash is not ridiculed; because the reader can enjoy its elements and see them isolated from reciprocal relationships within the same work. This is better for the work, since it can survive in different ways in the reader’s environment, either correctly or incorrectly understood. Similarly, one can recognize a humorist at first glance, but not a man who makes use of Dick’s tactics. It is far more difficult to grasp the complexity of the work in its entirety, and in no other way can we deal with the “transformation of trash.”

Only a complete lack of a theory of science fiction makes it comprehensible why the New Wave of science fiction did not pick Dick as their guiding star. The New Wavers knew that they should look for something new, but they did not have the slightest idea what it could be. Surely there is no more diffuse definition of anything than that of the New Wave, which is supposed to be represented on the one hand by Spinrad, on the other by Delany, and on a third by Moorcock. Until now the New Wave has succeeded well in making science fiction quite boring, but this is the only characteristic in which it is approaching the state of modern prose in the Upper Realm. Repressed but powerful inferiority complexes are constantly at work, and we can detect this because all the experimenters seem to believe from the bottoms of their hearts that the medicine and models for redeeming science fiction can be found only in the Upper Realm. Out of this belief came Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage (no mean piece of prose, but of a markedly secondary, or even tertiary, character to Farmer’s model, Joyce’s Ulysses, which is itself modeled on The Odyssey) and Stand on Zanzibar, which, as we all know, was written by Brunner on the model of Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passes. The New Wavers seized expressionism, surrealism, etc., and so they completed a collection of old hats; it becomes a race backward which still arrives in the nineteenth century before they know it. But a blind search can give only blind results; just “blind shells” (duds).

As I said, I believe that a writer can either make a caricature of trash, and ridicule it, or throw it away. Dick found out how to blaze a third trail, a discovery that was important not just for himself, but that remained unnoticed. The newness of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness was observed instantly because it is localized in the action, but the more volatile discovery by Dick was misjudged because it cannot be localized and can be described only with the utmost difficulty for the reasons I have set out. It is not sufficient, milords critics, to enjoy a book, and criticism is not a cry of joy; one must not only know how to prove that one was delighted but also know how to explain by what one was delighted and charmed.

There is no justification for this primitive dalliance; there is only an explanation, of a general character, which transcends the work itself. Ross Ashby proves that intelligence is a quality that does not foster survival under all possible variants of environments. In some environments stupidity serves better the drive for self-preservation. He spoke of rats; I would like to apply this claim to that part of literature called “science fiction.” For in science fiction what does it matter if Ubik is a piece of gold and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a counterfeit coin? I don’t know what an average reader thinks while reading these two novels. If we could reproduce his thoughts as they correspond to his behavior as a library borrower, we must conclude that he has an extremely short memory; at the utmost he can remember what is printed on one page. Or he does not think at all; an alternative that scares me so much, however, that I’d prefer to drop it.

The problem remains that all science-fiction books are similar to one another -not according to their content, but according to the way they are received. Innumerable imitations of each original work appear, so that the originals are buried beneath mountains of trash, like cathedral towers around which garbage has been dumped for so long that only the spires project out of the rubbish that reaches toward heaven. In this context the question arises as to how many gifted beginners have insufficient power to preserve their individuality as writers — unless by way of compromise, like Dick — in spite of the equalizing trends of science fiction.

Probably the pressure of trivial literature has crushed many highly talented writers with the result that today they deliver the products that keep highbrow readers away from science fiction. This process brings about a negative selection of authors and readers: for even those writers who can write good things produce banalities wholesale: the banality repels intelligent readers away from science fiction; as they form a small majority in fandom the “silent majority” dominates the market, and the evolution into higher spheres cannot occur. Therefore, in science fiction, a vicious circle of cause and effect coupled together keeps the existing state of science fiction intact and going. The most intelligent and most demanding readers, who form a small minority, still long for “better” science fiction and feel ill at ease when reading its current production, showing their uneasiness in their letters of comment and essays in fanzines. The “normal” reader — i.e., the silent majority and their representatives in fanzines — gains the impression somehow that the others are tense, scurrilous, and even malicious creatures just like — I wrote something like this once in a private letter — missionaries in a whorehouse — i.e., people who feel that they are doing their duty but at the same time are conscious that their efforts at conversion are powerless and that they seem out of place. The missionaries, ready to make the greatest sacrifices, can just as little change a whorehouse into a temple as “genial” readers can change science fiction into a fully qualified citizen of the Upper Realm of Literature.

I’ll close this essay with one last remark: the disfigurement of Dick’s work is the price that he had to pay for his “science-fiction citizenship.” Dick owes his exuberant growth, as well as his own peculiar downfalls, to this circle of life, which, like a dull teacher, cannot distinguish its brightest pupils from the plodding grinds. This circle of life, like such a teacher, strives to treat all its subordinates in the same way, a way improper in schools, and disastrous in literature.

APPENDIX Ubik as Science Fiction

In Science Fiction Commentary 17, George Turner wrote: “In Ubik we are given the living and the half-living; the half-living are actually dead but exist in another version of reality until their vestigial remainders of consciousness finally drain away. Their “reality” is subject to manipulation by a strong personality among the half-living, which piles complexity on complexity, until inconsistencies begin to stand out like protest posters. The plotting is neat, but cannot override the paradoxes. The metaphor fails because it cannot stand against the weight of reality as we know it.”

Now I am ready to prove that there is a rational viewpoint from which Ubik can be seen as a novel based on scientifically sensible notions. Here is the line of proof.

In Ubik dying people are put into a state of “half-life” if medicine does not know how to heal them. The critically ill are placed in “cold packs” in which their bodies are intensively cooled down. At a very low temperature, their life functions decelerate so that death cannot occur. This is not fantasy. We know today that at temperatures close to 0° Kelvin for all practical purposes the growth of cancer cells stops, and even deadly poisons no longer destroy cells. Therefore an analogue of the process mentioned in Ubik can be realized today, except that it would be regarded as senseless to carry it out. Although cooling (better known as hibernation) will delay death and stop agony, one cannot speak of saving the patient: he is unconscious, he cannot be allowed to be warmed up to consciousness again, because then the death that has been delayed will occur. People speak of freezing a man and preserving him in this state of cryogenics until medicine discovers a method of healing this special case after years or centuries. We do not know yet whether reversible cold death, the idea of which lies at the base of this opinion, can be realized, because until the present day, experiments performed on mammals have shown no positive results; freezing and later defreezing wreaks irreversible damage on all tissues. Ubik presupposes that reversible cold death cannot be realized — something considered by specialists to be plausible or even highly probable. Thus hibernation can be regarded as useless, and freezing at low temperatures as unobtainable. But there is one escape route, viz., one could keep the body of the patient in a state of continuous hibernation and supply his brain with warm blood with a suitable apparatus (artificial heart and lungs), so that the patient will regain consciousness.

The patient would find himself in the same position as a paralytic, or maybe we should call it a situation much worse than that. His sense organs do not function, for only his brain can be supplied with blood; however, even if someone were ready to face such a cruel risk as near-death, even then he could not be helped. For we know that the idea of keeping intact the paraphysiological functions of an isolated brain is Utopian. When the normal flux of sense data to the brain ceases, and a state of sensory deprivation sets in, an ever-increasing decay of all, especially the higher, brain functions sets in. An isolated brain cannot function normally; therefore we meet a barrier even in this escape route.

But all is not yet lost: if we succeed in creating a synthetic environment for the patient’s brain, he will continue to live, although not in our normal reality — he will live in a substitute reality. This pseudoreality is the common good (or bad, as you like) of all people in cold storage. The key question to answer is whether we can create a substitute world for those lying in cold storage, and if so, how? Now we cannot put into effect such an achievement at the moment, but the chances of doing so are quite good. Often during surgical operations on the brain the cerebral cortex has been irritated electrically and, circumstances permitting (with which I do not wish to deal here), this irritation may produce a series of hallucinations that the patient lives through as reality. The subject hears the voice of a dead acquaintance, sees him, witnesses whole scenes from his past, and so on. Please bear in mind that these are primitive experiments to which very little time was devoted, because the main purpose of the operation was to heal the patient, and one is not allowed to attempt tests that carry with them the slightest shadow of danger. Perhaps we will gain more knowledge, which will allow us to perfect this method. There must be machines, which we can call simulators or environment-producers, to which people lying in cold storage could be connected. The simulator becomes a source of information used necessarily to create a fictitious environment in the patient’s brain; it works according to a program attuned to the needs of each case and becomes a fountain of new facts and impressions previously unknown to the patient. (Even today we can bring about by irritation of the cerebral cortex not only sensory hallucinations, but also feelings, including, for example, erotic experiences.)

In principle, the technical problem in the real world is soluble, and so we come to the next, untechnological, question: how much knowledge can the patient have about his true situation? Ubik makes the assumption that sane people in cold storage, such as Runciter’s wife, have been conscious of their situation for years, but also some people, such as Joe Chip, who was put on ice after an accident, and those placed there because of incurable disease, do not know about their situation. Somebody — and this happens to Joe Chip — meets with catastrophe, loses consciousness, regains it after a period of time and finds himself returned to his well-known environment without knowing that it is part of a pseudoreality to which he is condemned “for life” because this is the only way to save him.

Morally it is quite questionable whether the false belief of these people that they are still living normal lives should be maintained — but this problem is irrelevant because a much more important one displaces it: i.e., his next-of-kin prefers the situation in which the patient lives to his death; though at the same time nobody could call it an agreeable situation. People are not content to keep the patient alive, because, from the point of view of people in the normal world, he is leading only a half-life isolated from the real world. They want to reach him, to talk to him, listen to him, etc. This is technically possible, but only under the most extraordinary conditions. Pseudoreality makes up an integral whole for the patient; therefore if someone who exists outside intrudes, the patient experiences this intrusion as an anomaly in his environment. The “quest” cannot reach into pseudo-reality in a fully plausible and harmless way. This is important if a patient such as Runciter’s wife is conscious of the situation. But it is extremely important if he or she does not know it — as in the case of Joe Chip.

Two curious phenomena must still be explained: (1) the “mad” behavior of pseudoreality, and (2) the manipulation by one man in cold storage of the consciousness of his fellow sufferers. (In Ubik the problem is the curious relationship formed among Emily, Runciter’s wife, Joe Chip, and the strange man named Jorg.)

The first phenomenon is a realistic presentation of a fictitious technology. We may, in advance, claim that whichever way the technology of reality-fission will be realized, it must be subject to certain malfunctions because no technology is invulnerable to malfunctions. The fact that at some time a breakdown in the production of pseudoreality will occur can be regarded as a realistic prediction, since none of today’s predictions can tell us what kind of mishaps will happen. Ubik’s author was justified in describing the “breakdowns” and “defects” of pseudoreality at his own discretion. Different types of disasters may occur.

In pseudoreality certain anomalies of the flow of time and space might happen, and both have a dreamlike character, i.e., they resemble what we experience in dreams. This type of creation of “reality breakdowns” seems to be correct insofar as (according to what we said before) the main source of the information that makes up pseudoreality is the brain of the man lying in cold storage; in this way we can account for the fact that each relaxation of the direction of psychic processes by the simulator correlates with changed appearances in the mind of the patient. He will experience this as a change of environment, as if in a dream. (At this point I should like to remark that as a rule a dream is not recognized as such by the dreamer; for this reason Joe Chip also does not think of such an interpretation of the events around him.)

We may assume that the “overgrowth” of one consciousness by another occurs because a lot of people are lying in cold storage and, for economic reasons, not everyone is allotted a separate simulator. Rather, a handful of people is always connected with a multichannel machine. Even if one circuit is insulated from the others, it may happen that electrical impulses flash across, or cause the induction of another current; subjectively, this may be experienced as the “devouring” of one consciousness by another, neighboring, one.

The last question to be answered is: who is really lying in cold storage: Runciter or Joe Chip? Because of all the facts found in Ubik, one may conclude that both men lie in cold storage — that all the men on the moon were killed by the explosion and subjected to cold-storage treatment.

Quod erat demonstrandum — and in several places we have “filled” the gaps left in the novel. But it would not be correct to speak in earnest about such “gaps.”

First, an author need not necessarily describe the technological details in a novel. As is well known, writers of contemporary novels do not describe the principles that underlie the functions of refrigerators, radios, and cars, and in these novels we would look in vain for the information that all the main characters are “vertebrates” and “mammals.” The basic assumption of Ubik is a technology of split reality, and it is not particularly important what kind of technology caused this split, so it need not be described in detail. It can occur in many ways; the technological details have secondary importance. The most important detail is that in a world where split reality has already been realized, its inhabitants face new, previously unknown dilemmas and must solve problems having the greatest impact. The existence of such a technology changes the ontological perspective of life and, as Ubik shows convincingly, the problem is not just that of people put in cold storage because they are severely injured. In principle, anyone can be incarcerated in a pseudoworld for his whole life. Whether this is legal or illegal is a problem of jurisprudence, not philosophy. In a world with split reality, general knowledge shows that, as well as the normal level of reality, other levels may exist, levels that may exist for some other people — or for everybody. As always, this is a question of the price to be paid for so-called progress (in Ubik, progress in the battle against death).

At any rate, the point set out above is a perspective from which the novel may be seen as a science-fiction work that depicts the human consequences of a biotechnological revolution. Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark in the second place that observers who watch the spectacle of a highway catastrophe do not usually indulge in reflections that call into question the facts of civilization and the history of technology; when people are looking at destroyed cars and maimed bodies they do not think about the price that has been exacted in human lives because Otto once invented the four-stroke engine and other inventors put this motor into the body of an old coach. So we may doubt whether the above technological exegesis is really necessary and whether we may think that Dick should of his own accord fill the gaps in technological detail that I have tried to fill.

Rather, I believe that Dick left no gaps in the novel, and in fact that the technological explanation is superfluous. It pursued only one object: I wanted to demonstrate that the novel is coherent as science fiction as well and that contradictions and loose ends in its structure are not in question. If technological details abounded in Ubik they would interfere with our reading; they do not add anything relevant to the text, and they can only rationalize it in a way that the author does not like. From the point of view of an artist, he is correct, for this novel is not “futurological” science fiction, though it may be read as such. However, Dick has taken a different point of view: he renounces all “empirical justifications” and “scientific” foundations. Primarily Ubik is a poetic achievement; we may draw this conclusion from the fact that the biotechnological premise, as outlined above, could also be the basis of a novel whose factual details were impeccable but, despite all this, a blind shell as a work of art. The contradictions in Ubik need not be defended at all costs by appealing to technological authority. The novel has neither gaps nor signs of the author’s negligence. The “contradictions” form a mode of expression that serves to expose to full daylight the messages that are stressed by affection and a special philosophy of life. In a word, they are metaphors that should not be examined for empirical content, even if that seems possible. As I could show, even if they withstand logical and scientific tests, this is not their main value as an experience that can be exchanged with the currency of practical knowledge. This experience is called catharsis.

POSTSCRIPT

The laws of science fiction form a dynamic structure at a balance of flow. Translated into the language of a futurologist, there are long-term, complex trends. There is no hope that they will be reversed. However, there are real possibilities that these trends will creep gradually into the Upper Realm of Literature, because of the ongoing explosion of information. The premise of selection that filters values implies a filter of sufficient capacity. But even today the capacity of this filter — the critics — as a value-selecting system is overtaxed by the quantity of books on the market. Generally, one is unaware of this situation. Consequently, the career of each literary work reminds us less of a directed trajectory than of something that takes on the motion of a Brownian particle — i.e., order becomes chaos. From the viewpoint of a critical filter, this chaos is not perceived easily, because a selection process is still taking place. But the fact that it takes place at all is no longer due to the filtration of the whole quantity of all the works that come onto the market, but to the random collision between prominent books and prominent critics. Since the number of books flowing onto the market increases continually, in the course of time the books form a kind of umbrella — i.e., they form a shield against the critics — and they frustrate an encompassing selection, something the critics do not realize for a long time because they are still fishing the “best” titles out of the stream of the market. However, they do not see those books that, although they are just as good as the ones picked out, or even better, remain unknown to them.

Selection no longer encompasses the whole quantity of published material, and this cultural area converts itself into a blind lottery. But this lottery takes only a marginal part in the selection of values. In due course, we can see that true values in abundance can have the same effect as a devastating flood. If they abound, these values begin to destroy themselves because they block all the filters intended to select them. Thus the fate of literature as a whole can become quite the same as that of trivial literature. Perhaps culture itself will be drowned in the Great Flood of information.

Translated from the German by Werner Koopmann