Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (2 page)

Sources and Notes
313

Index
343

PREFACE BY LAWRENCE SUTIN

In the seventeen years since this biography first appeared, the reputation of Philip K. Dick has grown ever more widely. The explanation seems, on first thought, evident: the ongoing adaptation of Dick's works into movies at an astonishing rate exceeded only by Stephen King. But Stephen King is a prolific writer of bestsellers and still alive. Philip K. Dick has been dead for more than two decades, and none of his books ever sold particularly well when he was living. Further, the movies made from Dick's works, with the exception of the first of them, Blade Runner (1982), have been dreadful. Total Recall made lots of money, but Arnold Schwarzenegger did not so much as attempt to portray a Philip K. Dick protagonist-one who saves the world, not with blazing Uzis, but through empathic awareness of its suffering and perceptive insight into its ultimate irreality. The rest, from Impostor to Paycheck, succeed in doing what Dick so rarely did: bore his audience.

There must be a reason why Hollywood keeps anteing up for the rights to Dick's stories and novels. For there are still more film adaptations on the way, including a forthcoming version of A Scanner Darkly (1977), and here's hoping they're better than their predecessors. The point remains, however, that the steadily growing numbers of readers of Philip K. Dick's works-nearly all of which were out of print at the time of his death and nearly all of which are back in print today-are buying those works not because of the movies but rather because of the exceptional artistry and brilliance of Dick the writer. The film producers who today pay seven figures for stories that Dick originally sold to the pulps in the early fifties for two figures recognize that artistry and brilliance, even if they can't always transfer them to the screen.

We're getting to the heart of the matter now. The international status that Dick enjoys today is based upon the widespread recognition by readers that what they find in the works of Philip K. Dick cannot be found in the works of other writers, though would-be imitators abound. But Dick cannot be imitated, for his visions were not only intricately conceived but also passionately inhabited by him as he wrote. There are many minds that possess the ability to think up interesting "alternate worlds." But there are few indeed that can immerse themselves into those "alternate worlds" and proceed to inhabit them with a range of believably flawed and desperate and soulful characters who turn out so closely to resemble all of us who live in our "real worlds" that we begin to wonder whether anything is "real" in quite the way we thought it was.

Philip K. Dick is a master of the speculative imagination-the type of imagination that includes but goes beyond psychological, political, and moral explorations to challenge the very cognitive constructs by which we order our lives. It remains true, as it was when I wrote this book, that there is a certain percentage of academic and mainstream critics who, because of the evident slapdash quality of the style in many, though not all, of Dick's novels, consign him to a lower realm of achievement than other twentieth-century masters-such as Chesterton, Kafka, Borges, and Calvino-who so plainly resemble Dick in the nature of their concerns. My response to these critics would be that the best of Dick's writing beautifully captures the TV-psychopop-spinning cadences of our time, and that the most vivid and horrific of his "alternative worlds"-as set forth in novels such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Ubik (1969)-are as vivid and horrific as that of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Prague isn't California. Kafka is hermetic and epigrammatic, in the spirit of the Street of the Alchemists. Dick is wayward and sprawling, in the spirit of a new Orange County shopping mall. Both techniques require genius to work at their best.

One of the traditional tests of the skill of a science-fiction writer is his or her ability to craft technologies and ideologies that "predict" the future in the manner of Jules Verne's nineteenth-century rocket ship to the moon. Dick was, during his lifetime, severely marked down by the majority (though surely not all) of science-fiction fans on this score. He was not considered a "hard" science-fiction writer who actually knew anything about physics or biochemistry or genetics. Rather, he was regarded as a "soft" writer of the genre whose talking machines and manipulative political regimes were made up spur of the moment in homage to the potboiler standards of the pulps.

And yet, if there is anything on which present-day readers of Dick tend to agree, it is that his works-now decades old-retain the eerie effect of dead-on descriptions of our massaged and manipulated and fragmented daily realities, as clearly as if Dick were still living among us. It is now apparent that what Dick didn't know about science, he made up for by his extraordinary recognitions of the tendencies of human consciousness and behavior.

I gave him credit for this in Divine Invasions, but even so I may not have given him credit enough. There were, I recall, two of Dick's imaginative flights which back then I enjoyed as a reader but relegated to the realm of purely playful fantasy. The first of these was the concept of a television "newsclown" (most prominently developed in the character "Jim Briskin" in The Crack in Space [ 1964] ); the second was the creation of shrill, flying, unsought, insect-sized "Theodorus Nitz" ad agency commercials that, in The Simulacra (1964), torment various of the characters with whispered reminders on matters such as body odor: "At any moment one may offend others, any hour of the day!"

My sense back in the 1980s was that modern societies fighting wars and facing crises would not tolerate the delivery of serious news in an overtly humorous fashion. I was also quite certain that omnipresent inescapable commercials were unlikely to be developed for, or permitted in, public realms. Of course, I was utterly wrong in both cases. The success of The Daily Show, which recently received a Peabody Award, has made Jon Stewart a powerfully influential "newsclown" to whom a huge audience turns to learn of the events of the day. And the ubiquity of "pop-up" advertisements on the Internet would be a source of pride and joy for Theodorus Nitz.

These are perhaps minor confirmations. Where Dick's writings have proven most prescient is in their portrayal of the possible range of permutations of "truth" and "reality" by governments and business interests. Our current acute awareness of the "spin" one can give to virtually any issue is prefigured boldly by the calculated lies that are technologically disseminated in Dick's dystopias. New generations of readers approaching Dick's works find chilling and hilarious confirmations of their distrust of all media and of their impulse to look for new truths in unlikely sources-even places that the dominant culture dismisses as "trash."

May this reissue of Divine Invasions serve to introduce those new generations to the remarkable life of a remarkable man.

June 2005

INTRODUCTION If Heraclitus Is Right-And "The Nature Of Things Is In The
Habit Of Concealing Itself"-Then Where Better To Look For Great Art Than
In A Trash Genre?

For without a doubt there is a difference between science fiction and all the neighboring, often closely related, types of trivial literature. It is a whore, but quite a bashful one at that; moreover, a whore with an angel face. . . . The best science fiction novels want to smuggle themselves into the Upper Realm (of the mainstream)-but in 99.9 percent of cases, they do not succeed. The best authors behave like schizophrenics; they want to-and at the same time they do not want to-belong to the (Lower) Realm of Science Fiction.... For this reason science fiction is such a remarkable phenomenon. It comes from a whorehouse but it wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.

STANISLAW LEM

... what he [the science fiction writer) wishes to capture on paper is different from writers in other fields.... There is no actual boyhood world once extant but now only a moment, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds... .

PHILIP K. DICK, 1980

PHILIP K. Dick (1928-82) remains a hidden treasure of American literature because the majority of his works were produced for a genrescience fiction-that almost invariably wards off serious attention.

You can't write about rocket ships and be serious, can you? A great white whale serves as a literary symbol, but surely the same can't be true of a telepathic Ganymedean slime mold.

Phil Dick used the junk props of the SF genre-the tentacled aliens, alternate worlds, and gee-whiz high-tech gimmickry-to fashion the most intensely visionary fiction written by an American in this century. In Europe and Japan, Phil is widely regarded as one of our most original novelists, period-SF and mainstream labels be damned.

But somehow, in his native land, Phil's books continue to be shelved in the whorehouse.

The problem is that Phil's best work-The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Martian TimeSlip (1964), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and the aforementioned Valis-comes under the heading of SF if it comes under any heading at all. And SF makes most serious-minded Americans smirk: Ray guns wielded by guys with ripped shirts and rippling pees, bug-eyed monsters (BEMs) distressing damsels in brass brassieres-all set in "bold new worlds of tomorrow" that remind you more of dreary B movies with flying saucers dangling on strings over toy cities, or of the sappy superhero comics you read as a kid. And speaking of kids, it is an obvious unsubstantiated fact that most SF readers-and writers (including Phil Dick)-first became fans well before they graduated from high school. What do you make of a genre that seldom attracts new readers who are self-supporting?

Some SF readers who tire of the smirks point out that certain Higher Realm official classics, such as Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), come within the genre because an alternative world is logically extrapolated from hypothetical societal innovations. They claim Edgar Allan Poe as the founding father of modern SF-forty years in advance of Frenchman Jules Verne-on the basis of stories such as "The Case of M. Valdemar" and "The Mystification." Thev cite the proud British SF tradition, which includes works by certifiable Higher Realm names such as H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Colin Wilson, and Doris Lessing.

But most American fans of SF scoff at such tortured scholarly apologetics. They know damn well what SF is and where it came from, and here's the story they'll tell you:

First off, SF wasn't born in the mind of More, who wrote in Latin, for chrissake, or in the mind of Poe or Wells or Verne, or even, for that matter, between the covers of any respectable bound book. SF grew like a rocket-finned silver orchid out of the rich mulch of the pulps that covered American newsstands from the end of World War I through the early fifties (when Phil's writing career began-he had stories in seven different pulp magazines in June 1953). As the pulps receded, the rise of paperback publishers revived the genre. SF sold and continues to sell to this day because its best writers know what writers in all great popular genresdetective story, western, true romance-know: The imagination can be an incredibly simple lock to pick if you know how to employ the tried and true rules.

In the case of the SF genre, the basic rule was, is, and always has been: Come up with a startling idea and set it loose in astonishing ways in a future world. The pulps didn't pay well but just enough ... if you had consistently startling ideas and could churn the stuff out at breakneck speed.

Phil was the man for the job. No one in the history of the SF genre-in which amazement alone buys new shoes for writers' kids-has been able to "What If?" as widely, wildly, and convincingly as Philip K. Dick.

He loved to tell the story of how he discovered SF: