Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

It is not, however, that the SF writer is a thwarted scientist who couldn't make it legitimately and so turned to fantasy fiction, to dreams; it is more that this person is impatient to see all the rest not visible in the actual skull, and inventive enough to spin such a myth, a tale about "that other world" that touches ours only here and there. We as SF writers see many objects again and again as clues to other universes, other societies. We sense the rest, and this sensing can't be separated from literary, artistic imagination. "This rock," the phrase goes, "could tell many stories, of battles fought here, of deeds done and now forgotten; if only it could talk ." The SF writer senses that story, or many stories from the clues of tangible reality around him, and does the rest; he talks for the objects, the clues. He is driven to. He knows there is more, and he knows that he will not live long enough to see all the scientific data actually brought forth... they may never be. The writer, then, begins to sing about those battles and those deeds. He places them in the future only for convenience; it is the placing of the story mostly in an imaginary world, but bound by small actual clues to this world, that drives him into expression. It might be said that where Homer sang about Troy after those events, the SF writer wishes to sing about events ahead because he feels that this is really the only reasonable place where those events could occur. It is as if Homer wrote the Iliad before those events, and had he done so it would be authentic speculative or science fiction.

This shows, I think, the affinity between the SF writer and the scientist as such: But his impatience, his inventiveness, his discovery that the pieces and bits around him (and they can be in our present actual world or in other SF) tell stories not yet told and that without him might never get told -- this is one facet characteristic of the SF writer's mind and shows why the term "science fiction" still lingers to describe what we do, even if we write about a purely religious society set not even in the future but in a parallel Earth. It is not that the stories are about science; it is that the writer is motivated along parallel lines motivating research scientists. But he is not content. He is stuck with a discontent; he must improve or change what he sees, not by going out and politically agitating but by looking deep into other possibilities and alternatives manufactured within his own head. He does not say, "We should pass laws regarding air pollution" and hence join ecology groups; his wish is the same -- he detests righteously what he sees of decay and corruption in our society as much as anyone -- but his manner of approaching the problem is acutely different.

He will create, on the basis of the known data or plausible data, how it could all be better, or how it could all be worse. His story or novel is in a sense a protest, but not a political one; it is a protest against concrete reality in an unusual way. He wishes to sing, rather than chant and carry signs. He will sing to us of hells far worse than what we actually endure, or better worlds, or just worlds in which these elements are simply not present: worlds based on other premises. I would say, he is an introverted activist, not an extroverted one. It does not occur to him, if he sees the freeways becoming death traps, to petition the city council for changes in speed laws and so on -- he sees the dangers but, being an introvert, the idea of social action, of acting out publicly and politically, is not his natural response. He would look funny out there marching and chanting. He is self-conscious and shy. He will instead write down rather than act out.

So I would say, the SF writer shares a little of the political mentality just as he does the scientific. Scientists improve things by staying in their labs; activists go out and petition. The SF writer glimpses totalities, some good, some bad, some merely bizarre, and he wants to bring these glimpses to our attention. Hence he is also a literary figure as well as a little of the politician and the scientist; he is all three and probably something more. But to speak of his work as escapist -- no view of SF, at least nowdays, could be less true. He is writing about reality with as much fervor and conviction as anyone could muster to get a bad zoning ordinance changed. This is his way, because he is none of the three types listed above but a fusion of all. Somewhere along the line he got the idea that words are things; they can exert force and accomplish desired ends. This he shares, with all writers, I suppose; but if you join this latter to his quasi-scientific basis and his quasi-political basis of personality structure, you can readily see that what he wishes to capture on paper, and his motivation, in toto are different from writers in other fields. They may wish to capture the lovely, the quaint -- freeze one block of a Bronx slum circa 1930 and the life of it for all future generations to read -- but the SF writer is not oriented toward freezing any one milieu except a vision -- one vision after another -- that he prepared in his own head. There is no actual boyhood world, once extant but now only a memory, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds, with no proclivity for the freezing of any one alone; for example, his own boyhood in a small town where there were nickel Cokes and so forth... he wishes to get down on paper all possibilities that seem important enough to him to be recorded and then at once communicate to others.

"Flexibility" is the key word here; it is the creating of multiverses, rather than a universe, that fascinates and drives him. "What if..." is always his starting premise. Part scientist, part political activist, but with the conviction of the magic power of the written word, and his restlessness, his impatience -- he will spin one new world for you after the other, given a set of facts or even one sole datum to take off from. He wants to see possibilities, not actualities. But as I say, his possibilities are not escapist (although, again, much hack SF is escapist, particularly when tending toward power fantasies) because the source of them lies firmly rooted in reality. He is a dreamer with one eye open, always coldly appraising what is actually going on. And yet he thinks, "It doesn't have to be this way. Because what if we woke up one day and found that all the men were sterile except for..." and the scientist in him will bond him to possibilities that have validity for us, in contrast to stories about Hobbits and looking glasses. He is, as Santayana once said, "dreaming under the control of the object," which was Santayana's definition of our waking life: "dreaming under the control of the object," yes, but for the science fiction writer there is a capacity -- and this is to me the thrilling part -- however powerful that immediate object is, he is able to speculate us out of its total grip; it still holds us, but not absolutely. The SF writer is able to dissolve the normal absolute quality that the objects (our actual environment, our daily routine) have; he has cut us loose enough to put us in a third space, neither the concrete nor the abstract, but something unique, something connected to both and hence relevent. So we do cut loose, but with enough ties still remaining never to forget that we do live in one specific society at one specific time, and no legitimate SF writer would want us to forget that, want us to drift away inside our heads and ignore the actual problems around us. It is just that he is saying, "Hey, you know it occurs to me that if by chance such-and-such were to happen, then ..." and it is the then that is fictional because this particular event (Washington, D.C., washed away by a mysterious tidal wave, etc., or whatever premise you wish), this event has not happened, probably will not, and we are not being asked to believe either that it has or that it will. It is just that the daily tyranny of our immediate world, which we generally succumb to, becoming passive in the hands of and accepting as immutable, this is broken, this tyranny of concrete reality.