I did so, without preamble; I simply sat down and wrote. And what I wrote was The Man in the High Castle. It sold right away, received a number of reviews suggesting that it should win the Hugo, and then, one day, I got a letter from my agent congratulating me for winning the Hugo. Another point had been passed in my career -- and, as before, I didn't realize it. All I knew was that I wanted to write more and more books; the books got better and the publishers were more interested in them.
Now, most readers do not know how little SF writers were paid. I had been earning about $6,000 a year. In the year following the Hugo award, I earned $12,000, and close to that in the subsequent years (1965-68). And I wrote at a fantastic speed; I produced twelve novels in two years... which must be a record of some sort. I could never do this again -- the physical stress was enormous... but the Hugo was there to tell me that what I wanted to write was what a good number of readers wanted to read. Amazing as it seems!
Recently I have sat back, reflecting on my twenty-eight novels, which I have sold between 1954 and 1968, wondering which are good. What have I accomplished? Here I am, thirty-nine years old, rather moth-eaten and shaggy, taking snuff, listening to Schubert songs on the phonograph... "although bearded, elderly, and portly," someone said about me, "he is still a confirmed girl-watcher." This is true. And cat-watcher. They are the great joy for me, and I wish I could squeeze Willis, my huge orange and white tom, into a novel, or if they make a movie of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Willis could play a walk-on part (no lines), and we would both be happy. Four years ago I divorced my jewelry-welding wife and married a very sweet girl who paints. We now have a baby and we must find a larger house (we did find one, and, as I'm writing this, we are preparing to move into it: four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a level backyard, fenced, where Isa can play safely). So that is my nonliterary life: I have a very young wife whom I love, and a baby whom I almost love (she's a terrible pest), and a tomcat whom I cherish and adore. What about the books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky [1956]. Then The Man in the High Castle [1962]. Martian Time-Slip [1964] (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney [1965] (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun [1967] and The Penultimate Truth [1964], both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra [1964].
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965]. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968] and another as yet untitled [Ubik (1969)]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody... and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.
"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968, 1972)
Here I am, almost forty years old. Seventeen years ago I sold my first story, a great and wonderful moment in my life that will never come again. By 1954 I was known as a short story writer; in June 1953 I had seven stories on the stands, including one in Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF, and so on down. Ah, 1954. I wrote my first novel, Solar Lottery; it sold 150,000 copies of itself and then vanished, only to reappear again a few years ago. It was reviewed well, except in Galaxy. Tony Boucher liked it; so did Damon Knight. But I wonder why I wrote it -- it and the twenty-four novels since. Out of love, I suppose; I love science fiction, both to read it and to write it. We who write it do not get paid very much. This is the harsh and overwhelming truth: Writing SF does not pay, and so writer after writer either dies trying to earn a living or leaves the field... to go into another, unrelated field, as for example Frank Herbert, who works for a newspaper and writes Hugo-winning SF in his spare time. I wish I could do that: hold an unrelated job and write SF after dinner each night, or early in the dawn. Then the pressure would be off. Let me tell you about that pressure. The average SF novel obtains between $1,500 and $2,000. Hence an SF writer who can write two novels a year -- and sell them -- gets back between $3,000 and $4,000 a year... which he can't live on. He can try, instead, to write three novels a year, plus a number of stories. With luck, and unending effort, he can raise his income to about $6,000 a year. At best, I have managed to earn $12,000 in one year; usually it runs less, and the effort of trying to bring in more money collapses me for as much as two years on end. During these two-year dry periods the only money coming in is for what are called "residuals." These include foreign sales, reprint in paperback, magazine serialization, TV and radio purchases, etc. It is awful, these dry periods, when you exist on the uncertain drip-drop of residuals. For example, an air mail letter arrives from one's agent. It contains royalty payments in the sum of $1.67. And the next week an air mail letter comes with a check for $4.50. And yet we who write SF go on, to some extent. As I say, it's love for the field.
What is there about SF that draws us? What is SF anyhow? It grips fans; it grips editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in my mind Henry Kuttner's Fairy Chessmen with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see -- outside my mind, right beside my desk -- a complete file of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, plus Astounding back to October 1933... these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. Hence separate from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file, which protects these magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I own -- or hope to own.
The magic that grips us is in there, in the file. I have captured it, whatever it is.
As to my own writing. Reading it does not mean anything to me, all considerations as to how good it is or isn't, what I do well and what I do badly (such as putting in the kitchen sink, as Ted Sturgeon phrased it, in regard to The Three Stigmata). What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever -- that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no longer move. I'm alone, without much money, and, as I said before, nearly forty. Where is Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist in Man in the High Castle? He has left me; we are cut off from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again where I can hear him talk. Once written, the novel speaks generally to everyone, not specifically to me. When a novel of mine comes out I have no more relationship to it than has anyone who reads it -- far less, in fact, because I have the memory of Mr. Tagomi and all the others... Gino Molinari, for example, in Now Wait for Last Year, or Leo Bulero in Three Stigmata. My friends are dead, and as much as I love my wife, daughter, cat -- none of these nor all of these is enough. The vacuum is terrible. Don't write for a living; sell shoelaces. Don't let it happen to you.
I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I
tell myself this... and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972)
In 1969 Paul Williams said of Philip K. Dick, "I must tell you this... Philip K. Dick will have more impact on the consciousness of this century than William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Author of thirty-one novels and almost two hundred stories published from 1951 on, he won the Hugo Award in 1963 for the Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Man in the High Castle [1962]. His reputation, especially in intellectual circles, is worldwide; in France, for example, he has more novels in print than has any other science fiction author. The first U.S. science fiction novel to appear in Poland will be his recent Doubleday novel, Ubik [1969], acclaimed by Patrice Duvic of Editions OPTA, Paris (winner of the award for publisher of the year at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in L.A.) as "one of the most important books ever published." In February 1972 he spoke as Guest of Honor at the Second Vancouver Science Fiction Convention and lectured at the University of British Columbia. His most notable novels include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968], Maze of Death [1970], We Can Build You [1972], Martian Time-Slip [1964], Dr. Bloodmoney [1964], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965], Ubik [1969], and [The] Man in the High Castle [1962], Some of his best stories have been published in the paperback collection The Preserving Machine [1969]. Born in Chicago in 1928, Philip K. Dick has spent most of his life in the Bay Area, having attended the University of California at Berkeley. During the late fifties he lived in Point Reyes Station, Marin County, and in the early sixties in San Rafael. Now he resides in the Los Angeles area, where he lectures and writes. His early novels dealt with future societies of an anti-utopian nature; in later novels he pioneered an "inner space" multiple-reality universe presented as hallucinations drug trauma [sic]. His story "Faith of Our Fathers" in Harlan Ellison's mind-shattering anthology Dangerous Visions [1967] received a Hugo nomination and is considered one of the most "dangerous visions" in that superb collection. Recently he completed a massive new novel for Doubleday titled Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said [later published in 1974] and is currently working on a science fiction novel of a different sort: a study of one girl's mind projected onto the universe, in which her qualities, lifestyle, and values form not merely a sociological enclave but the entire world of reality. Its working title is Kathy-Jamis-Linda and threatens to occupy him for what remains of his life. In it he contrasts the authentic human versus what he calls the "android," the reflex machine posing as a living being.
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1973)
Professional science fiction writer since 1951, with almost two hundred stories and thirty-five novels sold. In 1963 Man in the High Castle [1962] won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Phil Dick was born on December 16, 1928 in Chicago but has lived most of his life in California. He attended the University of California at Berkeley but dropped out because of his antiwar convictions. His great passion is music: German Lieder, Wagner. He majored in German and greatly loves the works of Schiller, Heine, Goethe, Junger, Brecht. At one time he ran a classical music radio program and operated a record store. He is married, has three children, and a cat named Fred, and because of his experiences in Canada in the rehabilitation of drug addicts, is at work now on a major novel dealing with the tragedy of lives ruined by involvement with drugs. He identifies strongly with the protests and the angers of the younger generations versus the older establishment, and has lectured both in the U.S.A. and in Canada at universities and on the radio and in articles published throughout the world in favor of the rebellion of youth against age. His radicalism goes deeper than politics; it has become a worldview expressed growingly in his writing. Most of all he tries to express in his novels the fight against oppression of the free human spirit, of whatever kind: any tyranny, such as drug addiction or a police state or manipulative psychological techniques. The ordinary citizen, without political or economic power, is the hero of all his novels, and is his hero, too, his hope for the future.
"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" (1976)
Hark! Each tree its silence breaks.
-- NICHOLAS BRADY (1692)
When I first met Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote More Than Human, this good man said to me right off, "What sort of universe is it that causes a man like Tony Boucher to die of cancer?" I had been wondering the same thing ever since Tony Boucher died [in 1968]. So had Ted Sturgeon, although he didn't expect me to give an answer. He just wanted to show me what he -- Ted Sturgeon -- was like. I've found I can do that, too: let people know about me by asking that. It shows that I cared a lot about one of the warmest men who ever lived. Tony was warm and at the same time when he stood in the midst of a group of people, sweat came out on his forehead from fear. Nobody ever wrote that about him but it's true. He was terrified all the time. He told me so once, in so many words. He loved people, but one time I encountered him on the electric train going to the opera and he was scared. He was a music critic and he did reviewing for The New York Times and edited a magazine and wrote novels and stories. But he was scared to take a drive across town.
Tony loved the universe and the universe frightened him, and I think I know where his head was at. A lot of people who are timid are that way because they love too much. They're afraid it'll all fall through. Naturally, it did with Tony. He died in middle age. Now, I ask you, what good did it do him to be scared? He used to carry his rare old 78 records to radio station KPFA every week for his program "Golden Voices," wrapping them in a towel so they wouldn't get broken. One time I decided to give Tony all my rare opera and vocal records, just plain give them to him as a gift of my loving him. I phoned him up. "I got Tiana Lemnitz and Gerhard Husch," I told him. Tony replied shyly, "They are my idols." He was a Roman Catholic, the only one we knew, so that was a strong statement. Before I could get the records to him he was dead. "I feel tired half the day," he had said. "I can't work as much as I used to. I think I'm ill." I explained I had the same thing. That was eight or so years ago. The doctor told him he had a bruised rib and taped it up. Someday I will meet that doctor on the street. Tony got bad advice from everyone who could talk.
We used to play poker. Tony loved opera and poker and science fiction and mystery stories. He had a little writing class. This was after he was famous and edited Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine and he charged one dollar a night when you showed up. He read your whole manuscript. He told you how rotten it was, and you went away and wrote something good. I never figured out how he accomplished that. Criticism like that is supposed to crush you. "Maybe it's because when Tony reads your story it's like he's reading it in Latin," Ron Goulart, a fellow student, said. Tony taught me to write, and my first sale was to him. I still can remember that nobody understood the story but he, even after it was printed. It's still in print, twenty-two years later, in a college-level sf course manual put out by Ginn and Company. There're only about fifteen hundred words to the story, about as short as this. After the printing of the story, Ginn and Company prints an impromptu discussion I had with a high school class about the story. All the kids understand the story. It's about a dog and how he sees garbagemen coming to steal the precious food that the family stores up every day until the heavily constructed metal urn is full and then these Roogs come and steal the harvest just when it's ripe and perfect. The dog tries to warn the family, but it's always early in the morning and his barking just annoys them. The story ends when the family decides they have to get rid of the dog, due to his barking, at which point one of the Roogs or garbagemen says to the dog, "We'll be back to get the people pretty soon." I never could understand why no one but Tony Boucher could understand the story (I sent it to him in 1951). I guess in those days my view of garbagemen was not shared universally, and now by 1971 when the high school class discussed it with me, I guess it is. "But garbagemen don't eat people," a lady anthologizer [SF editor Judith Merril] pointed out to me in
1952. I had trouble answering that. Something comes and carries off and devours people who are sleeping in tranquillity. Like Tony... something got to him. I think the dog who cried "ROOG! ROOG!" was trying to warn me and Tony. I got the warning and escaped -- well, we'll see about that; time will tell -- but Tony stayed at his post. You see, when you're so scared of the universe (or Roogs, if you will), to stay at your post takes courage of the kind they can't write about, because (1) they don't know how and (2) they don't notice in the first place, except maybe Ted Sturgeon, with all his own love, and his total lack of fear. He must have known how scared Tony was, and to be that scared and for the Roogs to get you... it's so goddam symmetrical, isn't it?
The Shifting Realities of PK Dick Page 5
