The Detached Retina

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!)