Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

Their trashy surface helps Dick’s novels to survive in the milieu of science fiction. I do not maintain that Dick is a Machiavelli of science fiction who, under the cover of science-fiction trash, intentionally carries out a perfidiously thought-out camouflage in order to deceive his readers (i.e., in giving them gold disguised as iron trinkets).

Rather, I believe that Dick works intuitively, without knowing himself that he plays hide-and-seek with his readers. Please note the difference between an artist and an artisan: the artist grows in his environment, deriving from it the elements that serve him as a medium of expression — of those differences of tensions to which his personality is subject. The artisan is a producer of things for which there is a demand and which he has learned to produce — after the models that enjoy the highest popularity. Ninety-eight percent of science fiction is a craft, and its authors are day laborers who must obey to demand payment. Almost any artist can become an artisan when he strangles his inner voice — or he has no such voice at all.

For a long time Philip K. Dick has been only an artisan, and a skillful one, too, since he knew how to produce the things that were bought immediately. Gradually he began — and I must continue to speak in metaphors — to listen to his inner voice, and, though he still made use of those elements that science fiction put at his disposal, he began to put together patterns of his own.

But this is not an infallible explanation. As is always the case, it arises from a land of cross-breeding between what is in the books I read and what I can do with this material as a reader. Therefore I can imagine other explanations for Dick’s novels, explanations that differ from mine, though naturally the role of such an explanation cannot be played by just any idea. There is no doubt about the fact that with trashy elements Dick tries to express a metaphysics of an extremely “black” nature, mirroring authentically the state of his mind. A logical, one-hundred-percent unequivocal reconstruction of the deep semantic structures of a complex work is impossible because there are no discursive series of phrases to which a work of art may be reduced without leaving something remaining.

Thus it must be; for if it were otherwise, this essay would be entirely superfluous. Why should I talk in so complicated and obscure a manner about a theme, if this theme may be put into clear and simple words? That which you can say briefly and intelligibly you need not describe with long and unintelligible words. For this reason, every authentic work of art has its depths, and the possibility that such a work of art carries a message about existence for subsequent generations of readers, although in society, in civilization, and in life there is endless change, bears witness that the transitory things that do not disappear in a masterpiece are buried in its semantic variability. Out of the glaring clichés of trash, behind which yawns a horrible vacuum for every science-fiction artisan, Dick makes for himself a set of messages — i.e., a language — just like somebody who puts together from separate colored flags a language of signals according to his own judgment. Science-fiction criticism could help Dick to collect the colored flags, but not to put together sensible entireties from this crude material, because in practice it denies the existence of semantic depth.

Those science-fiction readers who are keenest of hearing feel that Dick is “different”; however, they are unable to articulate this impression clearly.

Dick has adapted to the science-fiction milieu — with positive as well as negative effects. He invented a method to express, with the aid of trash, that which transcends all trash. But he was unable to withstand to the end the contaminating influence of this quite poisonous material.

The most striking lack is the lack of penetrating, detailed, and objective criticism. The critical books by Blish and Knight are an exception to this rule; the book by Lundwall (Science Fiction: What It’s All About, 1970) is not a piece of criticism or a monograph, but is merely a traveler’s guide to the provinces of science fiction. The innocent sin of Blish and Knight is that they only and simply reviewed current science-fiction production, paying attention to all the authors. In their length and detail, the negative, destructive critiques written by Knight are totally superfluous, because it is impossible to help authors who are nitwits, and, as I said before, the public does not give a damn about such disqualifications.

Literature has no equality of rights: the day laborers must be dealt with in one sentence, if not with scornful silence, and a maximum of patience and attention is due to the promising author. But science fiction has different customs. I am no enthusiast; I do not believe that shrewd critiques would make author Dick into a Thomas Mann of science fiction. And yet it is a pity that there has been no critical selection among his works (although this state of affairs is consonant with the lack of selection in the whole science-fiction field). Unfortunately, the work of Dick praised above also has its reverse side. One is used to calling such work uneven. The contradictions in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik (and also partly in Solar Lottery) are of a fleeting nature. These seeming contradictions constitute the claim of completeness — the semantic value of the work (as I tried to show very briefly). Therefore the local contradictions are meaningful messages that direct the reader’s attention to the problems that underlie the works. The novel Galactic Pot-Healer is only negligible. Every author is free to produce works of different value; there is no law against a great epic master allowing himself a novel of pure entertainment.

Our Friends from Prolix 8 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are not unimportant literature, but they cheat the reader. Especially in the latter do we see the sad picture of an author who squanders his talent by using brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers. This is far worse than putting together a valueless whole from valueless parts. The idea of the “Pen-field apparatus,” with which one can arbitrarily change one’s own mental disposition, is a brilliant one, but it does not play a role in the novel. In order to unravel the logical mystery that makes up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a whole study would be necessary, but it would have to be written with the embarrassed feeling that it is wholly superfluous.

But I must say this without furnishing proof. The first premise of the plot is that a policeman may kill on the spot everyone who is discovered to be an android, because on earth only androids kill their masters. (This premise does not hold good in the face of what is written later in the book.) We get to know that some androids do not know their true nature, because they have been filled with the incorrect information that they are normal humans. The police system has been undermined by androids who, disguised as humans, kill policemen in order to bear false witness that the dead human has been unmasked as an android. At the same time, we discover that some policemen have the same type of android nature — i.e., with an artificially implanted consciousness that they are humans. But if somebody does not know himself whether he is an “android replica” or a normal policeman, in what sense is this “infiltration”? If an android has a synthetically “humanized” consciousness with a falsified memory, for what is he called to account? How can one be responsible for that which one has no knowledge of? With these actions did Dick intend to present a model of discrimination, such as the kind of persecution of the Jews administered under the label “final solution”? But then (1) the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something that the novel does in places, and (2) people who are persecuted — e.g., persecuted because of their race — are certainly conscious of their innocence but at the same time conscious of their identity, which is not the case with the androids. In other ways the parallel is not valid. It remains obscure whether every android is killed on the spot because of what he once did (he is supposed to have killed his master) or because of what he is. As I have shown, the claim that every android is a murderer because it is unthinkable there is an android without an owner is not valid. Why are there no humans, masters of androids, who die natural deaths in their beds? As for the difference between human and android, we hear that it is almost impossible to distinguish between humans and androids with one hundred percent accuracy. To do this one needs a psychological test that measures the suspect’s reactions with a psychogalvanic apparatus. The test is nonsense; besides, on another occasion we hear that androids have a life span of only a few years, since the cells of their tissue cannot multiply. Therefore it is not child’s play to discover the difference by means of an organic examination of a microscope slide preparation of cell tissue, a procedure that takes about three minutes.