“The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient…. The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences ‘of’ them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects….”
In other words, by applying Ockham’s razor to the basic Epistemological question of “What is reality?” the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external world is a “superfluous hypothesis”; that is, it violates the Principle of Parsimony—which is the principle underlying all Western science. Thus the external world is abolished, and we can go about more important business—whatever that might be.
That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that the self doesn’t exist, either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, whom I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.” I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.
“Book Review” of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980)
THIS is MIT Press’s first effort to cope with the reality of science fiction. Although less than 300 pages, it weighs almost a pound and a half, compared to Ballantine Books’ edition of Ted Sturgeon’s classic More Than Human, which weighs exactly a quarter pound. Therefore Warrick’s book must be six times as important as Sturgeon’s. Her study, Warrick tells us, “is based on 225 stories and novels written between 1930 and 1977.” She states her conclusions up front in her introduction: “This study demonstrates that much of the (science) fiction written since World War II is reactionary in its attitude toward computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill informed about information theory and computer technology and lags behind present developments instead of anticipating the future.” She then goes on to present a fully developed aesthetic approach by which to judge SF (here she does quite well). The three SF writers whom she deals with most fully are Asimov, Lem, and myself. I get the impression she considers the three of us important, and here lies my quarrel with her. As far as I am concerned the concept “important” is of no use in judging SF. I could quarrel with the vague style of the book (for instance, I cite “… a prison of false illusions” as being not only a double negative but also verbose, and “A shower of bizarre metaphors trails from Dick’s imagination as it journeys through the patterns of possibilities in the evolving reciprocal relationship between man and his artificial constructs” and “He throws torches of possibility into his dark future, and their flashes of light reveal a survival,” etc., as boring and sophomoric and a waste of the reader’s time). But I would prefer to quarrel with the purpose of the book instead, and start out by saying that it has no purpose. It is a parasitic thing, and its very existence suggests that SF as a field is beginning to die, because only an entity waning and failing attracts such suckers as the academic sports of this sort. As Jesus says in Matthew 24:28: “Wherever the corpse is, there will the vultures gather.”
The main complaint expressed repeatedly by Warrick in this book is SF’s tendency to emit warnings about the dangers of technology—dangers to individual humans and human society generally. Well, it is just too bad, but it is a fact: Science fiction writers worry about trends, worry about possible dystopias growing out of the present, and this is a cardinal value of the field. Admittedly, there was a time when science and progress were assumed to be identical. If we worry now we have cause to. This is not due to ignorance of the state of the world and the breakthroughs in science. Warrick devotes an entire chapter to my stories and novels that deal with robots, and she quotes me—fairly—as saying: “The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical.” Am I not to be allowed to view this with alarm? Who will legislate what SF writers will be allowed to write and to worry about? This book praises me by terming my writing important but it arrogates to itself the role of arbiter of viewpoint and proper concern. Viewpoint and concern in SF are a transaction among author, editor, and reader, to which the critic is a spectator. If the reader enjoys what I write, there you have it. If he does not enjoy it, there you have nothing. “Important” is a rule from another game that I am not playing. I did not begin to read or write SF for reasons dealing with importance. When I sat in high school geometry class secretly reading a copy of Astounding hidden within a textbook I was not seeking importance. I was seeking, probably, intellectual excitement. Mental stimulation.
If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death, despite what Delany, Russ, Lem, and Le Guin may think; as with a single mind they woo academic approval as if it were some ultimate court. However, I look to my left and see a coverless, tattered copy of the July 1952 Planet Stories—my first published story appeared in it, and I received a lot of kidding from serious-minded people for selling to such a market and for reading such a “trashy” magazine, to use Lem’s favorite term of derision. Frankly I would prefer the derision to the new praise; SF is now palatable to the educated, the lofty, and I say, Let me out. Professor Warrick’s pound-and-a-half book with its expensive binding, paper, and dust jacket staggers you with its physical impression, but it has no soul and it will take our soul in what really seems to me to be brutal greed. Let us alone, Dr. Warrick; let us read our paperback novels with their peeled eyeball covers. Don’t dignify us. Our power to stimulate human imagination and to delight is intrinsic to us already. Quite frankly, we were doing fine before you came along.
“My Definition of Science Fiction” (1981)
I WILL define science fiction, first, by saying what SF is not. It cannot be defined as “a story (or novel or play) set in the future,” since there exists such a thing as space adventure, which is set in the future but is not SF. It is just that: adventure, fights, and wars in the future in space involving superadvanced technology. Why, then, is it not science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate-world story or novel. So if we separate SF from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what then do we have that can be called SF? We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: It is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society—that is, our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate-world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which it is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society—or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or a bizarre one—this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about.
Now, to separate science fiction from fantasy. This is impossible to do, and a moment’s thought will show why. Take Psionics; take mutants such as we find in Ted Sturgeon’s wonderful More Than Human. If the reader believes that su
ch mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not [cannot be] objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.
Now to define good science fiction. The conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must be truly new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his mind and wake it up to the possibility of something he had not up to then thought of. Thus “good science fiction” is a value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.
I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an SF story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good SF the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain reaction of ramification ideas in the mind of the reader; it so to speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus SF is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by and large does not do. We who read SF (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain reaction of ideas being set off in our mind by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create—and enjoy doing it: Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.
“Predictions” by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981)
1983
*The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against that country impossible. At the same time the USSR will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The United States will turn, then, to nerve gas.
1984
*The United States will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel source, eliminating the need for oil.
1985
*By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the USSR or in the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants.
1986
*Such satellites as HEA0-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high-energy phenomena in the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit.
1989
*The United States and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information coming into existence.
1993
*An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the USSR, thus reducing our interest in locating life forms on other planets.
1995
*Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
1997
*The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and on Mars. Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments.
1998
*‘The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
2000
* An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
2010
*Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
“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 dan
gle 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.
“Headnote” for “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1981)
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick Page 13
