The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Universe Makers... and Breakers" (1981)

[The opening biographical note

was written by Dick himself.]

Philip K. Dick is the author of 48 books and 150 stories, with four movies currently in the works. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Graouilly d'Or Award of France, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Playboy Award for Best New Contributor of Fiction for 1980 [for the story "Frozen Journey," later retitled "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon"]. This February, Bantam Books releases his new novel Valis, and in April Simon & Schuster its sequel The Divine Invasion. The London Times wrote of him, "One of the most original practitioners now writing any kind of fiction, Philip K. Dick makes most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac." He lives in Santa Ana, Orange County, California, and has been a SelecTV subscriber for over two years.

Science fiction films have put one over on us. Like the veil of maya, your special effects department down there in Hollywood can now simulate anything the mind can imagine... and you thought it was all real. No, they really don't blow up planets. It's true; they make it up. And a great deal of skillful imagining is going on these days. Not content with destroying whole planets, inventive scriptwriters and directors will soon be bringing you peculiar new universes with inhabitants to match. Watch for it. What you thought an alien looked like... well, it is going to look a lot worse. What burst through Kane's shirt in Alien is not the end of the line of monsters but more the beginning.

It takes megabucks to match the imaginations behind sci-fi films, and that money exists because the profits are there. Not for the story line of the film; that isn't what Hollywood goes for, now that Hitchcock has left us. Why do you need a story line if your special effects department can simulate anything? Graphic, visual impact has replaced story. Authors of science-fiction novels know this and grumble; what they wrote is not what you get when the film is finished. But this is as it should be. We are seeing a story, not being told it.

Ridley Scott, who directed Alien and who now intends to bring into existence a $15 million film based on my novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, confessed to an interviewer from Omni magazine that he "found the novel too difficult to read," despite the fact that the novel appeared as a mass-circulation paperback. On the other hand I was able rather easily to read the screenplay (it will be called Blade Runner). It was terrific. It bore no relation to the book. Oddly, in some ways it was better. (I had a hell of a time getting my hands on the screenplay. No one involved in the Blade Runner project has ever spoken to me. But that's okay; I haven't spoken to them.) What my story will become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch. Makes my book seem dull by comparison.

Still, you wouldn't want to see my novel on the screen because it is full of people conversing, plus the personal problems of the protagonist. These matters don't translate to the screen. And why translate them, since a novel is a story in words, whereas a movie is an event that moves? They're not called movies for nothing. I have no complaints.

Sometimes we sci-fi writers tell ourselves that the recent mass excitement over our wares is due to the successes in the actual space program, all those manned and unmanned probes, all those pictures sent back of moons no one knew existed, not to mention rings that are braided together in an affront to known laws of physics. But this isn't the case. The real reason for the wild financial successes of recent sci-fi films is: Human imagination takes a quantum-leap breakthrough by the special effects people; films such as Close Encounters and Alien and 2001 would be just terrific, just as awe-inspiring and wonderful if we were still driving Model A Fords -- perhaps even more so.

The fact is, spaceships no longer dangle on strings, no longer fizz, hesitate, or wobble past you, as in the old Flash Gordon serials. The monsters are no longer inflated rubber toys haltingly mimicking what the average ten-year-old could dream up. There is great sophistication at the dream factory these days. If I as an author can think it up, they can build it in such a way as to scare or amaze you, and in all cases convince you. And this is why, really, sci-fi films work now, in contrast to the old days, when kids at Saturday afternoon matinees hooted and giggled at Lon Chaney, Jr., emerging from a fake swamp to inflict the mummy's curse on yet another idiotic lady.

As a writer, though, I'd sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just special effects of my ideas, used. For all its dazzling graphic impact, Alien (to take one example) had nothing new to bring us in the way of concepts that awaken the mind rather than the senses. A monster is a monster, and a spaceship is a spaceship. Star Trek, years ago, delved more into provocative ideas than most big-budget sci-fi films today, and some of the finest authors in the science-fiction field wrote those hour TV episodes. I'm getting a little tired of people turning out to be robots, harmless-looking life forms evolving into stupendous but predictable space squids, and, most of all, World War Two's Battle of Midway refought in outer space. But I must admit that the eerie, mystical, almost religious subtheme in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back enchanted me. Now and then the sense of wonder is there. Okay, if they would just stop blowing up the orbiting space station at the end -- but it looks so nice, that acid-trip color-burst display. This is the great written rule: Sci-fi films end not with a whimper but a bang. And maybe that's as it should be, in the best of all visual galaxies.