Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

But what is the positive motivation and personality that I feel, say, that Geo. Effinger, a new SF writer whom I met in August of last year, can be assumed to have? "I know where your head is," is what I think when I meet a man or woman who has just published his first SF piece. I know you don't want fame, power, the big best seller, fortune -- and therefore I know that you must want to or even need to write SF. One SF writer said to me one day, "I'd write it even if they paid nothing." Vanity to see your name in print? No, just an awareness that this is a chosen field, and chosen by him; he is not being forced to live out the ambitions of his thwarted parents and their aspirations that their son "amount to something," as, for example, by becoming a doctor or a lawyer -- all those good, classy, well-paying professions. His drive must be intrinsic; it is impossible to imagine one's mother saying, "I hope my son will grow up to be an SF writer." What is there in the SF writer, old pro like myself (twenty-two years of selling) or a new one after his initial sale, is a belief in the value of science fiction. Not necessarily a belief in his own ability to write the Great American SF Novel and be remembered forever -- novice pros are very shy and unpushy and humble -- but his belief in the significant meaning of his field. And he would not see this specific field as a high-value field unless he had read SF by other authors, previous authors, and had some sense of the nature of what SF is, can do, will be.

If anything, assuming he is going to write and sell, he will be looked down on; people will say, "But are you doing any serious writing?," meaning, of course, that they do not share this mystique, this understanding and conviction of what SF is. He actually risks losing status rather than gaining it. Not, of course, by his colleagues, but by those people who think SF consists of George Pal budget films about the Anchovie That Ate New York, such as one sees on TV late at night; he knows that this is not what SF is, really. Even if he can't come through with massive talent, the attitude is still there: SF is an accretional field, built up layer by layer, year by year with constant reference to all that has come before. Unlike the Western story writer, you do not sell the same story twice, with new character names and a new title; each time you must produce something genuinely new. The SF reader -- all exceptions granted -- insists on one thing before all else: The new stories and novels must not duplicate those that came before, and woe unto the novice writer who does not know all the SF classics back to 1930; he must -- and almost certainly did -- absorb them before he began writing himself. What he did, what I did back in 1951 when I sold my first story, was to go on to the next step in structure of fictionalized thought that is the growing public property of all SF readers and writers. In this sense SF must be avant-garde. And so it is. And the motivation I think that underlies many of us -- certainly it did me -- was to add one more bit of stone to a mosaic whose pattern, whose final gestalt, has not been explicated or frozen yet on the printed page. It is as if an SF writer is created when he reads a story by a previous writer and then says, "Next it could be that..." meaning this book, this story, this underlying theme should be carried on. Heinlein has written what he calls "future history," and much of SF is. And much of the motivation that drives the SF writer is the motivation to "make" history -- contribute what he sees, his perception of "... and then what happened?" to what all the rest of us have already done. It is a great colloquy among all of us, writers and fans and editors alike. Somewhere back in the past (I would say about 1900) this colloquy began, and voice after voice has joined in, little frogs and big in little puddles and big, but all croaking their sublime song... because they sense a continuity and the possibility, the opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing "future history."

I've watched high school kids grow from an avid reading appreciation of SF to their first hesitant submission, their first sale -- they may disappear soon, or become only one of many, or become like Ted Sturgeon a unique and powerfully lovely contributor... in any case there is a tremendous motivation to make the statement, the written submission. "Nobody has thought yet of this ," the SF writer says when an idea comes to him, but it is not merely an outre idea that he senses germinating in his head; it is an addition and a contribution to a vast, extant body. In the sciences proper, when experimental work reveals some law or principle previously unknown, the researcher knows he must publish his results; why determine that such-and-such is a universal scientific principle and then say nothing about it? This shows the affinity between the SF writer and the true scientist; having discovered something new, it is incumbent on him -- morally incumbent -- to publish a little piece in print about it, whether that publishing will make him immortal or rich -- the ethic is the same. In fact it would be purposeless, for example, to determine in scrupulous laboratory conditions that mice fed on nothing but canned mackerel live twice as long as the control group and then, the experiment having been conducted and the results obtained, never mention it to anybody. So, I think, we in our field have that grand great drive of the true research scientist, to acquaint people with something heretofore overlooked. All other factors -- the need to earn a living, to impress people, to be "immortal" -- those are secondary; spin-offs, so to speak, if they do occur.

Probably what we see in an SF writer (I will use myself as an example) is a boy growing up and originally wanting to be a scientist (I wanted to be a paleontologist, for example). But science does not leave room for a factor vital to us: speculation. For example, an anthropologist finds a humanoid skull in Africa almost 3 million years old. He looks at it, subjects it to tests, and then in his article in Nature or Scientific American tells us what he actually found. But I can see myself there with Leakey finding those incredibly ancient humanoid skulls with an 800 cc brain skull, back at the 2.8-million-year striation, and as I see it, wild speculations that I cannot prove would come to my mind. If X, then Y. If true, humans lived that long ago -- and I would imagine a whole culture, and speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person's world might have been like. I do not mean his diet or how fast he could run or if he walked upright; this is legitimate for the hard sciences to deal with. What I see is what I suppose I would have to call a "fictional" environment that that skull tells me of. A story that that skull might wish to say. "Might" is the crucial word, because we don't know, we don't have the artifacts, and yet I see more than I hold in my hand. Each object is a clue, a key, to an entire world unlike our own -- past, present, or future, it is not this immediate world, and this skull tells me of this other world, and this I must dream up myself. I have passed out of the domain of true science. If I wish to write about that ("What if these ancient humanoids had developed a method of controlling their environment by" -- etc.) then I must write what we call science fiction. It is first of all the true scientific curiosity, in fact, true wondering, dreaming curiosity in general, that motivates us, plus a desire to fill in the missing pieces in the most startling or unusual way. To add to what is actually there, the concrete reality that can only say so much and no more, my own "glimpse" of another world. A world I will never see fully or even to a great extent, but toward which this one object has pointed.