Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

Standing there at that point I did some deep thinking. It seemed to me that magazine-length writing was going downhill -- and not paying very much. You might get $20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I wrote The World Jones Made , and later on, The Man Who Japed . And then a novel that seemed to be a genuine breakthrough for me: Eye in the Sky . Tony gave it the Best Novel of the Year rating, and in another magazine, Venture , Ted Sturgeon called it "the kind of small trickle of good sf which justifies reading all the worthless stuff." Well, I had been right. I was a better novel writer than a short-story writer. Money had nothing to do with it; I liked writing novels and they went over well.

But then, at that point, my private life began to become violent and mixed up. My marriage of eight years broke up; I moved out into the country, met an artistically inclined woman who had just lost her husband. We met in October and the next April we had gotten married in Ensenada, Mexico. I had her and three girls to take care of, and for two years I was unable to produce anything except hack work. At last I gave up and went to work for my wife, in her jewelry business. I was miserable. As a child the misery had come from outside in the form of no money, no heat, no place to live; with Anne I could not fulfill myself because her own creative drive was so strong that she often declared that my creative work "got in her way." Even in the jewelry making I merely polished pieces that she designed. My sense of self-worth began to flag, so I hitched myself to the priest of our times, the psychologist-psychiatrist, and asked his advice. "Go home," he said, "and forget the jewelry business. Forget that you have a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house, with three girls to raise -- and a fourth coming. Go home, sit down at your typewriter; forget income taxes, even How to Make Money. And simply write a good book, a book you really believe in. You can stop fixing breakfast for the kids and assisting your wife in her welding. Write a book. "

I did so, without preamble; I simply sat down and wrote. And what I wrote was The Man in the High Castle . It sold right away, received a number of reviews suggesting that it should win the Hugo, and then, one day, I got a letter from my agent congratulating me for winning the Hugo. Another point had been passed in my career -- and, as before, I didn't realize it. All I knew was that I wanted to write more and more books; the books got better and the publishers were more interested in them.

Now, most readers do not know how little SF writers were paid. I had been earning about $6,000 a year. In the year following the Hugo award, I earned $12,000, and close to that in the subsequent years (1965-68). And I wrote at a fantastic speed; I produced twelve novels in two years... which must be a record of some sort. I could never do this again -- the physical stress was enormous... but the Hugo was there to tell me that what I wanted to write was what a good number of readers wanted to read. Amazing as it seems!

Recently I have sat back, reflecting on my twenty-eight novels, which I have sold between 1954 and 1968, wondering which are good. What have I accomplished? Here I am, thirty-nine years old, rather moth-eaten and shaggy, taking snuff, listening to Schubert songs on the phonograph... "although bearded, elderly, and portly," someone said about me, "he is still a confirmed girl-watcher." This is true. And cat-watcher. They are the great joy for me, and I wish I could squeeze Willis, my huge orange and white tom, into a novel, or if they make a movie of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Willis could play a walk-on part (no lines), and we would both be happy. Four years ago I divorced my jewelry-welding wife and married a very sweet girl who paints. We now have a baby and we must find a larger house (we did find one, and, as I'm writing this, we are preparing to move into it: four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a level backyard, fenced, where Isa can play safely). So that is my nonliterary life: I have a very young wife whom I love, and a baby whom I almost love (she's a terrible pest), and a tomcat whom I cherish and adore. What about the books? How do I feel about them?

I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky [1956]. Then The Man in the High Castle [1962]. Martian Time-Slip [1964] (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney [1965] (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun [1967] and The Penultimate Truth [1964], both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra [1964].

But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965]. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.

Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968] and another as yet untitled [ Ubik (1969)]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody... and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.

Here I am, almost forty years old. Seventeen years ago I sold my first story, a great and wonderful moment in my life that will never come again. By 1954 I was known as a short story writer; in June 1953 I had seven stories on the stands, including one in Analog , Galaxy , and F&SF , and so on down. Ah, 1954. I wrote my first novel, Solar Lottery ; it sold 150,000 copies of itself and then vanished, only to reappear again a few years ago. It was reviewed well, except in Galaxy . Tony Boucher liked it; so did Damon Knight. But I wonder why I wrote it -- it and the twenty-four novels since. Out of love, I suppose; I love science fiction, both to read it and to write it. We who write it do not get paid very much. This is the harsh and overwhelming truth: Writing SF does not pay, and so writer after writer either dies trying to earn a living or leaves the field... to go into another, unrelated field, as for example Frank Herbert, who works for a newspaper and writes Hugo-winning SF in his spare time. I wish I could do that: hold an unrelated job and write SF after dinner each night, or early in the dawn. Then the pressure would be off. Let me tell you about that pressure. The average SF novel obtains between $1,500 and $2,000. Hence an SF writer who can write two novels a year -- and sell them -- gets back between $3,000 and $4,000 a year... which he can't live on. He can try, instead, to write three novels a year, plus a number of stories. With luck, and unending effort, he can raise his income to about $6,000 a year. At best, I have managed to earn $12,000 in one year; usually it runs less, and the effort of trying to bring in more money collapses me for as much as two years on end. During these two-year dry periods the only money coming in is for what are called "residuals." These include foreign sales, reprint in paperback, magazine serialization, TV and radio purchases, etc. It is awful, these dry periods, when you exist on the uncertain drip-drop of residuals. For example, an air mail letter arrives from one's agent. It contains royalty payments in the sum of $1.67. And the next week an air mail letter comes with a check for $4.50. And yet we who write SF go on, to some extent. As I say, it's love for the field.