Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

She buttoned her short red pants and fastened her gray blouse around her. She sat down to tie her sandals. Now she looked the same as she always had, not white, bare, chunky. Her breasts were again curves under her blouse, not bulging wineskins hanging down. In the close-fitting pants and blouse she looked taller and slimmer.

She finished dressing and went off, across the lawn. He lost sight of her. She had disappeared. It was finished. He relaxed. His blood subsided. His heart began to return to normal, the color draining out of his cheeks and ears. He sighed, letting out his breath.

Had it really happened? He felt dazed. In a way he was disappointed. She had been white and short, bulging here and there. With legs for walking and feet for standing. Her body was like all bodies, a physical creation, an instrument, a machine. It had come into the world the same way as other things, from the dust and wet slime. After a while it would wither and sag and crack and bend, and the tape and glue and tacks would give way to let it sink back down into the ground again, from which it had come.

It would break and wear out. It would fade and pass away, like the grass and the flowers, the great fir trees above him, like the hills and the earth itself. It was a part of the ordinary world, a material thing like other material things. Subject to the same laws. Acting in the same way.

He thought suddenly of his drawings, the pinups he had copied, all the notions and images that had crowded into his mind as he sat in his stuffy room with the sunlight shining through the drapes. He smiled. Well, at least he had gained a new understanding. He had lost all the cherished images and illusions, but he understood something now that had eluded him before. Bodies, his body, her body, all were about the same. All were part of the same world. There was nothing outside the world, no great realm of the phantom soul, the region of the sublime. There was only this -- what he saw with his eyes. The trees and sun and water. He, Barbara, everyone and everything, were parts of this. There was nothing else.

And it was not as if his secret inner world, the spirit world that he had nourished so long, had suddenly come crashing down around him. There were no ruins and sad remains to pick over. Rather, all the dreams and notions he had held so long had abruptly winked out of existence. Vanished silently, like a soap bubble. Gone forever. As if they had never existed.

Once, when I was very young, I came across a magazine directly below the comic books called Stirring Science Stories . I bought it, finally, and carried it home, reading it along the way. Here were ideas, vital and imaginative. Men moving across the universe, down into subatomic particles, into time; there was no limit. One society, one given environment was transcended. Stf [abbreviation for "scientifiction," an early alternate term for "science fiction"] was Faustian; it carried a person up and beyond.

I was twelve years old, then. But I saw in stf the same thing I see now: a medium in which the full play of human imagination can operate, ordered, of course, by reason and consistent development. Over the years stf has grown, matured toward greater social awareness and responsibility.

I became interested in writing stf when I saw it emerge from the ray gun stage into studies of man in various types and complexities of society.

I enjoy writing stf; it is essentially communication between myself and others as interested as I in knowing where present forces are taking us. My wife and my cat, Magnificat, are a little worried about my preoccupation with stf. Like most stf readers I have files and stacks of magazines, boxes of notes and data, parts of unfinished stories, a huge desk full of related material in various stages. The neighbors say I seem to "read and write a lot." But I think we will see our devotion pay off. We may yet live to be present when the public libraries begin to carry the stf magazines, and someday, perhaps even the school libraries.

-- PHILIP K. DICK

Philip K. Dick attended the University of California, operated a record store, was an advertising copywriter, had a classical music program on station KSMO, lives now in San Rafael, and is interested in hallucinogens and snuff. Born Chicago, December 16, 1928. Although bearded, aging and portly, is a fanatical girl-watcher; does everything but carry a measuring tape. Sold his first story November 1951 and has had no occupation except that of science fiction writer since. Has to his credit twenty-seven books, of which twenty-six are novels. First novel: 1954. In June 1953 had stories in seven magazines simultaneously. Won the Hugo for best novel 1962, Man in the High Castle . Married, has two daughters and young, pretty, nervous wife, Nancy, who is afraid of the telephone. In two years (1963, '64) wrote and sold twelve novels, plus many magazine-length stories. Loves ducks and sheep; lives on a slough where wild ducks pause in their migrations. Lost his seventeen sheep in his most recent divorce action. Has owned a strange variety of cats, including one -- Horace -- who all his life asked an invisible question which no one could answer. Spends most of his time listening to first Scarlatti and then the Jefferson Airplane, then Gotterdammerung , in an attempt to fit them all together. Has many phobias and seldom goes anywhere, but loves to have people come over to his small, nice place on the water. Owes creditors a fortune, which he does not have. Warning: don't lend him any money. In addition he will steal your pills. Considers his best work to be the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? recently published by Doubleday, because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society in which a person's dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than his house or car.

Chicago: I was born there, on December 16, 1928. It was a frigid city, and the home of gangsters; it was also a real city and I appreciated that. Fortunately, however, my mother and father moved us to the Bay Area in California, and I learned that weather could be good, could be friendly rather than harsh. So, like most people in California, I was not born here but drifted here (I was about a year old at the time).

What, in those days, could be collected as evidence that I would someday be a writer? My mother (who is still living) wrote with the hope of having a literary success. She failed. But she taught me to admire writing... whereas my father viewed football games as transcending everything else. The marriage between them did not last, and when I was five they separated, my father moving to Reno, Nevada, my mother and I -- and my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt -- remaining in Berkeley in a huge old blue house.

Cowboy songs were my main love then. Music, in fact, has played a major role throughout my life. But in those days -- when I was six -- I wore a cowboy suit and listened to cowboy music on the radio. That and the funny papers were my whole world.

It is odd to think that a child could grow up during the Depression and not know it. I never heard the word. Of course I knew that my mother was broke most of the time, but I never managed to extrapolate from this. It seemed to me that the dull quality of the society around me -- the city streets and their houses -- came from the fact that all motorcars were black. Traffic progressed like a great and never-ending funeral.

But we had our amusements. In the winter of 1934 my mother moved the two of us to Washington, D.C. This gave me the sudden opportunity to find out what really awful weather was like... and yet we enjoyed it. We had our sleds in winter and our Flexies (sleds with wheels) in summer. In Washington, summer is a horror beyond the telling of it. I think it warped my mind -- warped that in a fine conjunction of the fact that my mother and I had nowhere to live. We stayed with friends. Year in, year out. I did not do well (what seven-year-old child would?) and so I was sent to a school specializing in "disturbed" children. I was disturbed in regard to the fact that I was afraid of eating. The boarding school could not handle me because I weighed less each month, and was never seen to eat a string bean. My literary career, however, began to emerge, in the form of poetry. I wrote my first poem thus: