The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

by Philip K. Dick

  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.

  "Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1981)

  The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of "human." The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex -- a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying -- but an organism that is human in terms of its soul.

  I'm sorry if the word "soul" offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, when I wrote the story "Beyond Lies the Wub" back in my youth in politically active Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the "android or reflex machine" that looks human but is not -- the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 ["The Android and the Human," included herein] -- twenty years after "Beyond Lies the Wub" was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape.

  In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else's place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very young person!

  I liked the blurbs that Planet Stories printed for "Beyond Lies the Wub." On the title page of the magazine they wrote:

  Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools, proclaimed the slovenly wub, after death.

  And ahead of the story proper they wrote:

  The slovenly wub might well have said: Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.

  Reader reaction to the story was excellent, and Jack O'Sullivan, editor of Planet, wrote to tell me that in his opinion it was a very fine little story -- whereupon he paid me something like $15. It was my introduction to pulp payment rates.

  Just a week ago while going through my closet I came across an ancient pulp magazine with ragged edges, its cover missing, its pages yellow... . Wondering what it was, I picked it up -- and found that this ancient remnant, this artifact from another epoch, was indeed the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories with my first published story in it. Profound emotions touched me as I gazed down at the illustration for "Wub"; it is a superb little illo [illustration], done by Vestal, and under it is written, " 'The Wub, sir,' Peterson said. 'It spoke!' " Well, here we are in the eighties, twenty-eight years later, and the gentle wub still speaks. May he always speak... and may other humans always listen.

  Part Three. Works Related to The Man in the High Castle and Its Proposed Sequel

  Readers should consult the "Introduction" to this volume for a discussion of the Dick novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel the following year.

  "Naziism and the High Castle" was first published in the science-fiction fanzine Niekas in September 1964. It was written in response to a politically charged review of High Castle in an earlier issue of Niekas by fellow SF writer (and friend) Poul Anderson. It was reprinted in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, No. 14 (June 1987). As the essay raises a number of unusually important factual issues, it is essential to note that the assertion by Dick that "many" Jewish refugees who lived, during World War Two, under Japanese rule in the Far East "set up Hitler organizations" and performed the Nazi salute is utterly unsubstantiated by the numerous scholarly studies that I have consulted. Dick's own source for this assertion is unknown.

  Both the "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974) and the two chapters (1964) of the proposed sequel to High Castle are published here for the first time. The quality of the two chapters is remarkable; see the "Introduction" for a discussion of the factors that led Dick to abandon this project. One historical clarification is in order: In the first chapter, reference is made to the suicide of Field Marshal Rommel by shooting. In fact, he poisoned himself. It should also be noted that an audiotape cassette released as PKDS Newsletter, Nos. 9-10 (January 1986) includes, as one of its sides, notes dictated by Dick (whose arm was in a splint due to a shoulder injury, which precluded him from his usual typing) on this proposed novel. The tape describes one scene in which Hawthorne Abendsen is brutally interrogated by the Nazis as to the truth of the Nebenwelt (or alternate universe) in which the Allies, not the Nazis, were triumphant. But Abendsen cannot provide them with the truth -- he does not know. The secret is ever elusive.

  "Naziism and The High Castle" (1964)

  Many moon have passed since white man (i.e., Poul Anderson) review my book Man in
the High Castle, and fen [sic; perhaps "fan" intended] (e.g., too many to note, with, however, one exception, a certain John Boardman) have commented, not on the book nor review per se, but on Naziism -- which is right and proper, because that is the true topic, far more so than any novel or any review, and only proves that I am right: We are still very much afraid, still rightly so very much disturbed, and, as Harry Warner so correctly said, "... we might identify with the war guilt of the Germans because they're so similar to us... ."

  However, although these comments, etc., took place back in March, I have just now seen them, and would also like to comment.

  John Boardman calls Dr. Friedrich Foerster "the greatest modern critic of Germany." There is no one "greatest modern critic," etc., of anything; this is just a way of saying that you believe your source, and it is right that you should believe your source; however, I will dispute his uniqueness, or any claim to his Platonic Ideal-type perfection as a sole and utter source. Even though, as a matter of fact, I agree with the quoted passage from him (v. John Boardman's comments March '64 Niekas). In fact it is just this sort of thinking that worries me (however, it is early in the morning, I have not had breakfast yet, so everything worries me; let it go). Anyhow, we just cannot say for sure if there are "two Germanics" in the sense of two traditions of thought, or that Naziism is the absolute culmination, the logical fulfillment, of all that is German; we don't know; please, let's admit our ignorance. We know what they did, we know what their stated ideologies were... but we do not actually know why, in the deepest sense, they -- i.e., the Nazis -- did it. Truly. I have talked to some of them. All they knew was that they were afraid -- afraid as we are, but not afraid of the same things: They were afraid of us, of the U.K., of Russia (which we are, too, now), and -- most of all, of the Jews, which we are not, and which we cannot comprehend; i.e., this fear. To us, a Jew is, for example, a nice tall guy with a glass in his hand next to us at a party. To them -- well, there the curtain falls. But a Nazi friend of mine, living in the United States after the war, started to enter an apartment with me, and I said, "By the way, this fellow who lives here is named Bob Goldstein," and my Nazi friend actually paled and blanched (i.e., drew back); he was literally afraid to go into the apartment -- and, in addition, he felt somatic, horrible aversion. Why? Ask Hannah Arendt, whom I regard as the "greatest modern critic of Germany," a Jew herself. I feel even she, raised among them, does not know. It is subrational; it is psychological, not logical. Why do some people fear cats or streetcars or redheaded goats? They themselves do not know. Phobia is phobia; it springs, as Freud and Jung and H. S. Sullivan showed, from depths of the self unknown to the self. Ipse dixit.

  Please forgive me if I ramble, but you see: I feel that simple, clear "answers" to this question ("Why the Nazis did what they did, and will we do it, and are we also guilty?") defy us; they cannot be had. Are we guilty of what the mad, subrational "planners" in Washington, D.C., are doing right now? I don't know. Was some old village German lady in 1939 "guilty" of a decision at Eichmann's bureau in Berlin? There are a few established facts, however, that we should remember. (1) When Himmler asked for and got the chance to witness an execution of innocent, harmless Jewish people (by firing squad), he had a convulsion of horror; he fainted, fell to the floor, rolled in a spasm of anguish; his aides had to drag him to his feet; and, there and then, Himmler decreed that no more Jews "were to be shot, but that some merciful method, painless and instant" had to be found. Remember, mark, this. So even this unman, this thing, reified into the top ranks of Nazi officialdom, had "feelings." (Hitler would neither have cared to watch, and if he had, he would not have had any emotional, ethical reaction; mark that, too.) Also, the Wermark Soldaten (the average German soldier) hated the Schwarzers, the SS... knew them as murderers. Mark that. German citizens poked bread into the sealed cattle cars carrying Jews to their death through the Reich; read that and ponder. Remarque records a German playing the theme from Beethoven's Fidelio that depicts the prisoners -- unjustly held by a tyranny -- as they are at last, for a moment, let up to see the light -- playing this as a team of Jewish concentration camp victims are led down the street past his house. Even German whores came to the walls of the death camps, hoping "to do something for" those within. In other words, good (and I will not put quotes around that word) impulses broke out constantly among average Germans as and when they became aware of what was being done to the Jews; many, admittedly, spat on, kicked, jeered at, Jews being hauled off... but not all. "Die Stille im Lande" [the quiet in the land] the Nazis called these Germans who did not approve of the racial policies; these Germans knew that if they showed themselves they, too, would be killed. Mark this: The first inhabitants of the concentration camps were non-Jewish Germans. And it did mean death, during the war, for a German citizen to show any dissent from official policy; a German woman, for example, was imprisoned because the newspaper with which she lined her garbage pail had on it a photo of Hitler; this was decreed by the court (the so-called Reichs Gericht) a "crime against the state." They made it stick!

  Yet, the German people, or a good part of them, better than half, voted, legally voted, Hitler into power, and knowing his racial views. Read Goebbels' early diaries; the Partei had the support of the working class -- not the bourgeoisie. Mark that, too: The working class swung from supporting the Communists and the moderate socialists to the Nazis. Why? Well, I can hazard a guess. The Nazis, like the big city political bosses who used to run Chicago and New York and Boston, were always "open," always there and ready to listen, to help, to dole out food and support... and the Germans were starving, dying, being evicted, being deprived; it was the Depression, remember, and the people, as our people, were desperate. One of our favorite folk singers of today in those days (late 30s) not only sang against our support of the U.K. and defense plant activity but drawlingly spoke of being listed as a "Japanese spy"; in other words, this "now liberal, one of us" great folk singer -- his initials are P.S. -- was for Nazi Germany -- because of the German-Russian Pact. World Communism and Naziism were cooperating, for a time; the Nazis were not "rightists"; they were coleftists -- at least until the Nazi tanks entered the Russian-controlled half of ex-Poland.

  In his comments in Niekas George H. Wells speaks of "Jewish nationalists," and that they "were overlooked." This is a point, too; at the time of the rise of anti-Jewish ideology among non-Jewish-Germans, the Jewish-Germans were beginning, in great part, to think -- as not Germans or even Europeans, but as nationalists of the soon-to-be-reborn national state of Israel. (Moses Mendelssohn pleaded with the people not to accept this, but to "come out and be part of the European community"; generally, he failed.) So: We saw Jews, in Germany, arrive at the same idea as the pre-Nazi "racists," such as Wagner, and it always seems that Richard Wagner is the goat in this; he invented the idea that Jews were aliens, hostile to Germany. Catcrap. A thorough study of Wagner's ideas shows that he broke with Nietzsche in the end, saw a redemption of Germany (i.e., of man per se) in Christian love, not in military bombast (vide Parsifal). So even among the famous pre-Nazi theoreticians we don't find the uniformity of outlook; what we do find, however, is the Englishmen Stuart House Chamberlain, and Carl Rhodes... and of course Nietzsche; but we find English madmen-thinkers right at the "heart of darkness," so to speak. Teaching the idea, as Hannah Arendt says, of a small, worldwide elite of Nordics who will run things: a top caste who will tell the "darkies," i.e., the rest of us, where to go... and "where to go" may be into the false shower baths that are really cyanide gas chambers. Yes, Harry Warner, writing in Niekas, is right: We squirm and we remember because it is not "them" but "us" who thought those awful thoughts, and hence instigated those awful deeds; and the "us" includes the Jewish nationalist fanatics, some of whom live today in Israel, who invade schools, break up grammar school class meetings with their quasi-military (I think the form is paramilitary) thugs... because the teacher of the class is not racially "correct." In this case, however, not sufficiently Jewish, rathe
r than sufficiently German.

  The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs, supported -- i.e., kept from starving -- by the Quakers, are the greatest single lot of displaced persons on earth today. And don't let anyone tell you that those Arabs (i.e., non-Jews and hence aliens, although their people had lived there for two thousand years) wanted to leave. They were terrorized into leaving, and they cannot return. So the victims of World War Two have become the arrogant nationalists, ready to go to war (vide the Suez crisis) with their neighbors as soon as assured of adequate military support (and again it is Britain who gives it, Britain and France).

  This is all dreadful. In the Jewish refugee settlements in the Far East under the Japanese during World War Two, many Jews set up Hitler organizations, including the Nazi (or Roman, if you prefer) salute.

  We like to think of the victims of tyranny and cruelty as innocent (e.g., Chessman). But often the victim is blood-stained, too; i.e., he has participated actively in the situation that has at last claimed his life. Many Jews today won't ride in a VW, and some won't even listen to the music of Beethoven; is this not as neurotic and "sick" as was the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by both Germans and Jewish-Germans? Personally, I enjoy telling fanatical nationalistic, blood-oriented Jewish friends a fact they generally don't know: Many of the medieval German knight-poets, the minnesingers, were -- Jewish.