Collected Essays

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating his favourite page of The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex, which showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside his bed, lay down with an Ayn Rand book and unfinished protest letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, although he kept remembering the girl being on the top, and then, with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once. After that, the deed being done, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book and letter on his chest, and waited.

However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact—considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed—that he was in for some trip.

The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.

The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll. ‘You’re going to read me my sins,’ Charles Freck said. The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.

Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, ‘and it’s going to take a hundred thousand hours.’

Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, ‘We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as “space” and “time” no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.’

Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.

A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade, when he was six years old.

Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.

The year he had discovered masturbation.

He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.

‘And next—’ it was saying.

Charles Freck thought, at least I got a good wine.

This unusual ability to mix tragedy with farce is matched by a paranoid’s ability to scramble—if not always unscramble—plots. The result is an oeuvre which presents a large scale portrait of the incursions of technological advance upon the psyche of the West, and its shattering under a series of hammer blows. Occasional protagonists may survive, but Dick never leaves us under any illusions about the magnitude of the incursion.

Thus his work represents an unrivalled unity in the SF field, a unity only reinforced by the way in which most of the texts of that oeuvre are staged—not far away in the galaxy, which might have afforded some relief—but in one of the epicentres of the disintegrating psyche, Southern California.

With the disintegrating psyche, as some might expect, the disintegrating family. The one portrait of a family in all of Dick’s oeuvre is four miserable junkies, spying on each other, dying or trying to die, together with their cat child-substitute, in A Scanner Darkly. With this absence of familial pattern goes a disconcerting absence of mother-figures, and indeed a certain lack of females all round. It’s hard to imagine a Mrs Palmer Eldritch, and the policeman who wants his tears to flow has for a wife merely a devilish sister.

For three decades, Dick unfolded this schizoid portrait of the coming age. Again, one must repeat, we can observe in his writing a steady deepening of his understanding and capacities, as we observe it in Dickens.

During the first decade, the 1950s, we admire the surface glitter of his puzzles—Time Out of Joint—and all that. His prankish short stories become increasingly sophisticated. In the 1960s, profound change continues: what was devised becomes felt; complexity of plot becomes matched to a complexity of thought. The Weltanschauung is not universally dark, though illusion is harder to disentangle. In this period stand three of Dick’s surest memorials, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. Slightly later, also in the 1960s, is another group of three, though I think a lesser group, Now Wait For Last Year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik. Here, unrealities have multiplied to such an extent that the result is a confusion we are tempted merely to reject as abnormal; the threatened illusions of the earlier group strike much nearer home.

The 1970s yield two remarkable novels in which the protagonists strive for reality, in one case finding and in one case failing to find it: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. The ‘explanation’ of Flow My Tears, whereby a group of people move into transposed reality because of another person’s, Jason Taverner’s, failings, makes no scientific and even worse theological sense, though for all that it is a sombrely glittering novel, the real hero being a corrupt police chief who does not enter until half-way through the book. But A Scanner Darkly is all too terrifyingly plausible, on both scientific and theological grounds, with the terrible drug, Death, which splits the corpus callosum, rendering the victim dissociated from himself. This, it seems to me, is the grandest, darkest, of all Dick’s hells.

Dick at one time came to some kind of perilous treaty with various drugs, just as Anna Kavan did with heroin. Kavan never came off heroin; it was her doppelganger, her bright destroyer, killingly necessary to her. Dick’s renunciation of drugs brought forth the 1980s group of novels, again a trio, Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It’s too early to judge this group. The last novel is set in what for Dick is a curiously sunny Southern California, and opens on the day John Lennon is shot. It thrills with intimations of death—but when I said that to someone he replied, ‘What Dick novel doesn’t?’

I have to say, ungratefully, that I so vastly enjoyed Dick giving me bad news, opening up whole new cans of worms at every turn, that I become peevish when a can opens and angels come winging out. That the narrator of Timothy Archer is a lady called Angel hardly helps matters. Despite these reservations, it is a complex and interesting novel, fairly light and sunny in tone. It bears the hallmark of Dick, a hallmark discernible even in the minor novels, genuine grief that things are as bad as they are. That’s a rare quality in SF.

So Dick began as a smart imitator of van Vogt and ended up as a wizard. Most careers in the SF field flow the other way about. Maybe it’s the Hobart effect.

Dick said that it was not the possibilities of SF that appealed to him but the wild possibilities. Not just, ‘What would happen if …’ but ‘My God, what would happen if …’.

This is partly why we like him. But ultimately the affection he inspires is beyond analysis. He had a way of dramatizing his inner fears which made you laugh. His novels are full of gadgets, sentient hardware and awesome entities, but nevertheless they are inward novels. He constantly invents new means of doom and destruction, but nevertheless a sense of gusto bounces up from the page. In some peculiar sense he was a world-league novelist, yet he meekly burnt two mainstream novels when Don Wollheim told him they were no good. There’s the paradox. If it wasn’t for Don Wollheim at Ace, we’d possibly never have seen any Dick novels ever, and the universe would have been different. And our inner lives, ditto.

Dick’s first American readers appear only to have found Dick depressing. Was he too wild? Did they not dig his humour? Were there too many worms in his can? It was in Britain that he first found a more realistic and welcoming appraisal. Accustomed by national temperament to sailing through seas of bad news without turning a vibrissa, we appreciated Dick’s ingenuity, inventiveness, and metaphysical wit. We taught the Americans to see what a giant they had in their midst, just as they taught us to admire Tolkien. If we do admire Tolkien.

The tide has turned. Hollywood made an over-heated, over produced, and over immoral film from a lovely book, and called it by an old Alan Nourse title, Blade Runner. (Then there was Total Recall. The rebarbative Stanislaw Lem said that Dick fought trash with trash. It looks like trash could win!)

Meanwhile, the SF world rallies round, aware that some awful grey shagged-out thing on Mars has now got Dick by the short hairs. I’ve never liked the SF community more. A real spirit of affection is in evidence. Hence this meeting.

The SF newspaper, Locus, put out an excellent Dick memorial number just after he disappeared, with tributes and memories from many hands. Perhaps I may quote here a paragraph from what I said then, writing in New York:

Dick was never out of sight since his first appearances in those great glad early days of the fifties, when the cognoscenti among us scoured the magazines on the bookstalls for names that had suddenly acquired a talismanic quality: J. G. Ballard, William Tenn, Philip K. Dick. Now he’s gone, the old bear, the old sage and jester, the old destroyer, the sole writer among us who, in Pushkin’s mighty phrase, ‘laid waste the hearts of men’.

The above was written in 1982. Some of us knew Dick was a towering writer long before that date. We did not foresee that he would be canonized after death, that even his rejected non-SF would be published to acclaim. Looked at detachedly, the blossoming Dick industry has its sad side. A writer needs appreciation in his lifetime; praise goes unheard when you’re six feet under.

For the purposes of this volume, I hoped to update the above, but cannot see how. Dick is in a process of being deified. Total Recall (1990) was a brutal and unscientific mess of a movie, which certainly made it look as if trash had won. On the other hand, we have had some excellent productions of Dick material. These certainly include an elegant Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1974 (1991), edited by the energetic Paul Williams, who has done so much to tend Dick’s reputation, and Lawrence Sutin’s brilliant and truthful biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, and, towards the rave end of the spectrum, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the ‘Exegesis’ (1991), edited by Lawrence Sutin.

Dick remains irreplaceable. One can name at least six of his novels which are startlingly good, witty and dark, in which even what is monstrous is treated with human sympathy: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Martian Time-Slip, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and Valis. While they are interesting, the non-SF novels are thinner; Dick needed the bitter lemon of futurity in his potion.

With Martian Time-Slip in particular I have a rather long relationship. After protracted dealings, I secured for this beautiful complex novel its first hardcover edition. That was in 1976. In the same year, I was in contact with Stanley Kubrick, and suggested to him that Dick’s novel would make an excellent film. Nothing came of the suggestion.

In the 1980s, having founded the small company of Avernus Ltd with Frank Hatherley, I started negotiations with those at the top of Paramount UK for a movie. The heads were keen: then the heads started to roll. But I had opened protracted negotiations for an option on film and TV rights in the book. These I eventually bought. We’re talking now about the 1990s.

As a bit of agitprop, or agit-pop some might say, I wrote the imaginary conversation, Kindred Blood in Kensington Gore, which Avernus published as a pamplet in 1992. This represents Dick in the Afterlife. I have performed this surreal piece several times on stage, with two gallant actresses playing the multiple roles of Dick’s father, his sister, and VALIS itself. The ladies are Petronilla Whitfield in England and Colleen Ferro in the USA.

By this time, we had the TV Drama department of the BBC interested. More than interested, enthusiastic and involved, once they clearly understood this was not just a tacky length of sci-fi. Martian Time-Slip was to be a five-part mini-series produced with serious resources behind it. Given 250 minutes or so of air time, one can serve up more than one plot; characters and backgrounds get a chance to emerge. Not only were the BBC thoroughly behind it, but we managed to secure a considerable investment from Europe.

Hours, days, weeks, months, were taken up with various negotiations. Those who have written screenplays will know it is an elaborate, protracted business, not without its own dreadful attractions, every word being weighed in the balance, every page being written over and over.

Changes were overtaking the BBC as we wrote. Knowing how brilliant it was, knowing we already had the script editor’s approval and support, we delivered the first of five episodes. This was late in 1993. We were informed after some delay that the drama department wished to take the development no further. Martian Time-Slip was out in the cold.

Of course Frank and I have not given up. But two years of my working time have gone down the drain. For this reason, I must return to my own work and leave this article unmodified. Sorry, Phil!

SCIENCE FICTION’S MOTHER FIGURE (#ulink_cb6da8a1-9edd-555b-9e1a-24576824c2b6)

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My scrutiny of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modem Prometheus in Billion Year Spree in 1973 overturned a few old formulations and jerry-built temples. My argument was and remains that the beginnings of real science fiction can plausibly be identified in that novel. Here is no idle wonder; here is a man taking control of what was previously in the provenance of nature alone. Two decades on, and my once heterodox view has won wide favour.

Since Billion Year Spree was published, we have learnt more about the author of Frankenstein. Once regarded merely as the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley now shines forth as a vital part of the Romantic movement, and her most famous novel as a vital document of feminism.

Mary Shelley has become almost an industry. I list at the end of this article some of the most crucial books on and about the subject of the author and her circle.

The industry has also allowed us to know some of the other players better. The shelves are already well-filled with books on Byron and Shelley; now we can see more clearly the absent mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and that far from absent Claire Clairmont, bane and bosom friend of Mary Shelley. Both remarkable women, living in times that often seemed against them.

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Her Scandinavian letters are back in print again, to demonstrate her wild nature and descriptive powers. This true Romantic document, published in 1776, also contains a thought for the future which must have interested her daughter when she came upon it.

Wollstonecraft writes from the coasts of Norway. The passage, from Letter xi, runs as follows:

I anticipated the future improvement of the world, and observed how much man had still to do, to obtain of the earth all it could yield. I even carried my speculations so far as to advance a million or two of years to the moment when the earth would perhaps be so perfectly cultivated, and so completely peopled, as to render it necessary to inhabit every spot; yes; these bleak shores. Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Where was he to fly from universal famine? … The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison.

Wollstonecraft bore two daughters. One, Fanny, was fathered by an itinerant American, Gilbert Imlay. The second was fathered by William Godwin, born in 1797, and named after her mother.

In Anthony Burgess’s novel, Beard’s Roman Women (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girlfriend in an airport bar. Both work in ‘the media’; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says ‘I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of woman’s liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life …’