Years later—after I had long since written THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and sold it to Doubleday, my first sale to Doubleday—I came across a picture of the face in an issue of Life magazine. It was, very simply, a World War One observation cupola on the Marne, built by the French. My father had fought in the Second Battle of the Marne; he had been with the Fifth Marines, about the first group of American soldiers to go over to Europe and fight in that ghastly war. When I was a very small child he had showed me his uniform and gasmask, the entire gas-filtration equipment, and told me how the soldiers became panic-stricken during gas attacks as the charcoal in their filtration systems became saturated, and how sometimes a soldier would freak and tear off his mask and run. As a child I felt a lot of anxiety listening to my father's war stories and looking at and playing with the gasmask and helmet; but what scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear. This was not my father any longer. This was not a human being at all. I was only four years old. After that my mother and father got divorced and I did not see my father for years. But the sight of him wearing his gasmask, blending as it did with his accounts of men with their guts hanging from them, men destroyed by shrapnel—decades later, in 1963, as I walked alone day after day along that country road with no one to talk to, no one to be with, that metal, blind, inhuman visage appeared to me again, but now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil.
I decided to exorcise it by writing about it, and I did write about it, and it did go away. But I had seen the evil one himself, and I said then and say now, "The evil one wears a metal face." If you want to see this yourself, look at a picture of the war masks of the Attic Greeks. When men wish to inspire terror and kill they put on such metal faces. The invading Christian knights that Alexander Nevsky fought wore such masks; if you saw Eisenstein's film you know what I am talking about. They all looked alike. I had not seen Nevsky when I wrote THE THREE STIGMATA, but I saw it later and saw again the thing that had hung in the sky back in 1963, the thing into which my own father had been transformed when I was a child.
So THE THREE STIGMATA is a novel that came out of powerful atavistic fears in me, fears dating back to my early childhood and no doubt connected with my grief and loneliness when my father left my mother and me. In the novel my father appears as both Palmer Eldritch (the evil father, the diabolic mask-father) and as Leo Bulero, the tender, gruff, warm, human, loving man. The novel which emerged came out of the most intense anguish possible; in 1963 I was reliving the original isolation I had experienced upon the loss of my father, and the horror and fear expressed in the novel are not fictional sentiments ground out to interest the reader; they come from the deepest part of me: yearning for the good father and fear of the evil father, the father who left me.
I found in the story The Days of Perky Pat a vehicle that I could translate into a thematic basis for the novel I wanted to write. Now, you see, Perky Pat is the eternally beckoning fair one, das ewige Weiblichkeit—"the eternally feminine," as Goethe put it. Isolation generated the novel and yearning generated the story; so the novel is a mixture of the fear of being abandoned and the fantasy of the beautiful woman who waits for you—somewhere, but God only knows where; I have still to figure it out. But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally, the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women. And thus I did. And thus I still do.
Reaction to THE THREE STIGMATA was mixed. In England some reviewers described it as blasphemy. Terry Carr, who was my agent at Scott Meredith at the time, told me later, "That novel is crazy," although subsequent to that he reversed his opinion. Some reviewers found it a profound novel. I only find it frightening. I was unable to proofread the galleys because the novel frightened me so. It is a dark journey into the mystical and the supernatural and the absolutely evil as I understood it at the time. Let us say, I would like Perky Pat to show up at my door, but I dread the possibility that, when I hear the knock, it will be Palmer Eldritch waiting outside and not Perky Pat. Actually, to be honest, neither has shown up in the seventeen or so years since I wrote the novel. I guess that is the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure. (1979)
STAND-BY ("Top Stand-By Job") 4/18/63. Amazing, Oct 1963.
WHAT'LL WE DO WITH RAGLAND PARK? ("No Ordinary Guy") 4/29/63. Amazing, Nov 1963.
OH, TO BE A BLOBEL! ("Well, See, There Were These Blobels…") 5/6/63. Galaxy, Feb 1964.
At the beginning of my writing career in the early Fifties, Galaxy was my economic mainstay. Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, "Nuts." By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on. So Galaxy provided a latitude which Astounding did not. However, I was to get into an awful quarrel with Horace Gold; he had the habit of changing your stories without telling you: adding scenes, adding characters, removing downbeat endings in favor of upbeat endings. Many writers resented this. I did more than resent this; despite the fact that Galaxy was my main source of income I told Gold that I would not sell to him unless he stopped altering my stories—after which he bought nothing from me at all.
It was not, then, until Fred Pohl became editor of Galaxy that I began to appear there again. Oh, To Be A Blobel! is a story which Fred Pohl bought. In this story my enormous anti-war bias is evident, a bias which had, ironically, pleased Gold. I wasn't thinking of the Viet Nam War but war in general; in particular, how a war forces you to become like your enemy. Hitler had once said that the true victory of the Nazis would be to force its enemies, the United States in particular, to become like the Third Reich—i.e. a totalitarian society—in order to win. Hitler, then, expected to win even in losing. As I watched the American military-industrial complex grow after World War Two I kept remembering Hitler's analysis, and I kept thinking how right the son of a bitch was. We had beaten Germany, but both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were getting more and more like the Nazis with their huge police systems every day. Well, it seemed to me there was a little wry humor in this (but not much). Maybe I could write about it without getting too deep into polemics. But the issue presented in this story is real. Look what we had to become in Viet Nam just to lose, let alone to win; can you imagine what we'd have had to become to win? Hitler would have gotten a lot of laughs out of it, and the laughs would have been on us … and to a very great extent in fact were. And they were hollow and grim laughs, without humor of any kind. (1979)
Here I nailed down the ultimate meaningless irony of war; the human turns into a Blobel, and the Blobel, his enemy, turns into a human, and there it all is, the futility, the black humor, the stupidity. And in the story they all wind up happy. (1976)
Volume Five
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX
Introduction by Thomas M. Disch
U/M
UNDERWOOD/MILLER
Los Angeles, California
Columbia, Pennsylvania
1987
VOLUME FIVE
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX
Slipcased Edition: ISBN O-88733-052-5 (set)
Trade Edition: ISBN O-88733-053-3 (set)
Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick
<
br /> Introduction © 1987 by Thomas M. Disch
Entire contents Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick. Individual stories were copyrighted in their year of first publication (see "Notes" at the back of each volume for more information) and copyrights have been renewed by Philip K. Dick and The Estate of Philip K. Dick as applicable. Previously unpublished stories arc Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick. All rights reserved.
The excerpt by Philip K. Dick which appears in the beginning of this volume is from a collection of interviews with the author conducted by Paul Williams and published in ONLY APPARENTLY REAL, Arbor House, 1986. Used with permission.
For information about the Philip K. Dick Society. write to PKDS, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442 USA.
An Underwood-Miller book by arrangement with the author's agent and estate. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without explicit permission, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages. For information address the publisher, Underwood-Miller, 515 Chestnut Street, Columbia, PA 17512.
Printed in the United States of America
Typesetting by Metro Typography, Santa Cruz, California
Book Design: Underwood-Miller.
All Rights Reserved
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
87- 50l59
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX
THE WAR WITH THE FNOOLS
A GAME OF UNCHANCE
PRECIOUS ARTIFACT
RETREAT SYNDROME
A TERRAN ODYSSEY
YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE YESTERDAY
HOLY QUARREL
WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE
NOT BY ITS COVER
RETURN MATCH
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
THE STORY TO END ALL STORIES FOR HARLAN ELLISON'S ANTHOLOGY DANGEROUS VISIONS
THE ELECTRIC ANT
CADBURY, THE BEAVER WHO LACKED
A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS
THE PRE-PERSONS
THE EYE OF THE SIBYL
THE DAY MR. COMPUTER FELL OUT OF ITS TREE
THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN
CHAINS OF AIR, WEB OF AETHER
STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH
I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON
RAUTAVAARA'S CASE
THE ALIEN MIND
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
By Thomas M. Disch
The conventional wisdom has it that there are writers' writers and readers' writers. The latter are those happy few whose books, by some pheromonic chemistry the former can never quite duplicate in their own laboratories, appear year after year on the best seller lists. They may or (more usually) may not satisfy the up-market tastes of "literary" critics but their books sell. Writers' writers get great reviews, especially from their admiring colleagues, but their books don't attract readers, who can recognize, even at the distance of a review, the signs of a book by a writers' writer. The prose style comes in for high praise (a true readers' writer, by contrast, would not want to be accused of anything so elitist as "style"); the characters have "depth"; above all, such a book is "serious."
Many writers' writers aspire to the wider fame and higher advances of readers' writers, and occasionally a readers' writer will covet such laurels as royalties cannot buy. Henry James, the writers' writer par excellence wrote one of his drollest tales, The Next Time, about just such a pair of cross-purposed writers, and James's conclusion is entirely true to life. The literary writer does his best to write a blockbuster—and it wins him more laurels but no more readers. The successful hack does her damnedest to produce a Work of Art: the critics sneer, but it is her greatest commercial success.
Philip K. Dick was, in his time, both a writers' writer and a readers' writer; and neither; and another kind altogether—a science fiction writers' science fiction writer. The proof of the last contention is to be found blazoned on the covers of a multitude of his paperback books, where his colleagues have vied to lavish superlatives on him. John Brunner called him "the most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world." Norman Spinrad trumps this with "the greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." Ursula LeGuin anoints him as America's Borges, which Harlan Ellison tops by hailing him as SF's "Pirandello, its Beckett and its Pinter." Brian Aldiss, Michael Bishop, myself—and many others—have all written encomia as extravagant, but all these praises had very little effect on the sales of the books they garlanded during the years those books were being written. Dick managed to survive as a full-time free-lance writer only by virtue of his immense productivity. Witness, the sheer expanse of these COLLECTED STORIES, and consider that most of his readers didn't consider Dick a short story writer at all but knew him chiefly by his novels.
It is significant, I think, that all the praise heaped on Dick was exclusively from other SF writers, not from the reputation makers of the Literary Establishment, for he was not like writers' writers outside genre fiction. It's not for his exquisite style he's applauded, or his depth of characterization. Dick's prose seldom soars, and often is lame as any Quasimodo. The characters in even some of his most memorable tales have all the "depth" of a 50s sitcom. (A more kindly way to think of it: he writes for the traditional complement of America's indigenous commedia dell-arte.) Even stories that one remembers as exceptions to this rule can prove, on re-reading, to have more in common with Bradbury and van Vogt than with Borges and Pinter. Dick is content, most of the time, with a narrative surface as simple—even simple-minded—as a comic book. One need go no further than the first story in this book, The Little Black Box, for proof of this—and it was done in 1963, when Dick was at the height of his powers, writing such classic novels as THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and MARTIAN TIME-SLIP. Further, Box contains the embryo for another of his best novels of later years, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
Why, then, such paeans? For any aficionado of SF the answer is self-evident: he had great ideas. Fans of genre writing have usually been able to tolerate sloppiness of execution for the sake of genuine novelty, since the bane of genre fiction has been the constant recycling of old plots and premises. And Dick's great ideas occupied a unique wave-band on the imaginative spectrum. Not for him the conquest of space. In Dick the colonization of the solar system simply results in new and more dismal suburbs being built. Not for him the Halloween mummeries of inventing new breeds of Alien Monsters. Dick was always too conscious of the human face behind the Halloween mask to bother with elaborate masquerades. Dick's great ideas sprang up from the world around him, from the neighborhoods he lived in, the newspapers he read, the stores he shopped in, the ads on TV. His novels and stories taken all together comprise one of the most accurate and comprehensive pictures of American culture in the Populuxe and Viet Nam eras that exists in contemporary fiction—not because of his accuracy in the matter of inventorying the trivia of those times, but because he discovered metaphors that uncovered the meaning of the way we lived. He made of our common places worlds of wonder. What more can we ask of art?
Well, the answer is obvious: polish, execution, economy of means, and other esthetic niceties. Most SF writers, however, have been able to get along without table linen and crystal so long as the protein of a meaty metaphor was there on the plate. Indeed, Dick's esthetic failings could become virtues for his fellow SF writers, since it is so often possible for us to take the ball he fumbled and continue for a touchdown. Ursula LeGuin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is one of the best novels Dick ever wrote—except that he didn't. My own 334 would surely not have been the same book without the example of his own accounts of Future Drabness. The list of his conscious debtors is long, and of his unconscious debtors undoubtedly even longer.
Phil's own note at the back of this book to his story The Pre-Persons provides an illuminating example of the kind of
reaction he could have on a fellow writer. In this case Joanna Russ allegedly offered to beat him up for his tale of a young boy's apprehension by the driver of a local "abortion truck," who operates like a dog catcher in rounding up Pre-Persons (children under 12 no longer wanted by their parents) and taking them into "abortion" centers to be gassed. It's an inspired piece of propaganda (Phil calls it "special pleading"), to which the only adequate response is surely not a threat to beat up the author but a story that dramatizes the same issue as forcefully and that does not shirk the interesting but trouble-making question: If abortion, why not infanticide? Dick's raising of this question in the current polarized climate of debate was a coup de theatre but scarcely the last word on the subject. One could easily extrapolate an entire novel from the essential premise of The Pre-Persons, and it wouldn't necessarily be an anti-abortion tract. Dick's stories often flowered into novels when he re-considered his first good idea, and the reason he is a science fiction writers' science fiction writer is because his stories so often have had the same effect on his colleagues. Reading a story by Dick isn't like "contemplating" a finished work of art. Much more it's like becoming involved in a conversation. I'm glad to be a part, here, of that continuing conversation.
Thomas M. Disch
October, 1986
How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?
Not through the old-fashioned ways of writing while you're in the bathroom, but how does one do that in a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and independence to arise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the spirit that we can't anticipate?
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 4: The Minority Report Page 203
