The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Who Is an SF Writer?" (1974)

The delight which SF writers show when encountering one another personally, at conventions or on panels or during lectures, indicates some common element shared by them, novices and old pros alike. There always emerges a psychological rapport, even if the ideas and politics in their respective works clash head-on; it is as if absolutely opposite themes in their published work -- which might be expected to create a personal barrier when the writers meet face to face -- this barrier is never there, and a feeling when a group of SF writers gathers is always one of a family rejoined, lost friends refound or new friends made -- friends among whom there is a fundamental basis of outlook or at least of personality structure. Nearly always it is characterized by a mutual respect, and this respect on the part of each writer is for the others as persons, not merely a respect for their work. We are linked as if scattered members of a once tightly knit ethnic group which has been scattered, but then momentarily reunited. I have felt this with no other group of people: Something special is there in us, that not only is common but which binds us rather than separates us as one finds, say, in the social gatherings of the so-called "New York literary writers," in which chronic jealousy and envy and sour carping impede personal contact. To my knowledge, this camraderie and rapport is at least currently unique in the arts; and it means something; it tells something about us.

On meeting a new SF writer who has just gotten into print, we never feel crowded or insecure; we feel strangely happy, and tell him so and encourage him: We welcome him. And I think this is because we know that the very fact that he has chosen to write SF rather than other types of fiction -- or other careers in general -- tells us something about him already. I know one element that allows us to prejudge favorably any new pro SF writer to our midst: There just cannot be a profit motive as this person's working dynamism because there is no profit financially in writing SF; the average high school teacher, to name another underpaid group, makes almost twice what I make, and all my income comes from writing SF. So we know this to start with: Facing a new young pro SF writer I know first of all what he is not driven by; he is out of the hands of one of the great corrupting drives, that for great wealth -- and I might add great fame and prestige as well, because we don't get those either. I know, when I meet a new pro writer, that he must in some sense truly love to write SF, at all costs, or he would be in other, greener pastures.

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.

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.

Often SF readers and writers are accused of a sort of clinical syndrome, a reality-evading one such as is found in schizophrenics. One pictures the disturbed adolescent boy in his room avidly reading "Spicy Science Fiction Horror Tales" and escaping into lurid fantasy as a way out of solving his and society's problems. But a primary tendency in the schizophrenic is that he is unable to think abstractly to such an extent that his mentational processes become involuntarily tied to immediate stimuli, to what is called concrete thinking. The production of great tales of other societies in the future on other planets does not pander to the incipient schizophrenic, and anyhow if I am wrong about this I'm sure TV is doing a better job in this area anyhow, this pandering.

The authentic body of science fiction, by its truly reputable writers (and I believe most of us are), does not provide an alternative to facing reality because it deals, as I've said, with reality fundamentally and primarily, as opposed to the genre of fantasy, and the writers are not clinically disturbed either; I have met many, many of my colleagues over the years, and I find them genial, warm, friendly people who hate the isolation imposed on them by the tragically solitary act of having to go off and lock oneself into one's study for a year to do a novel, not allowing any interruptions... writing is a lonely profession, at least I have found it so, and this is what I hold against my work: not that it allows me to escape into the "fantasies" of my novels but that it cuts me off from wife, children, and friends. I resent that. We all do. I find that there is enough extroversion in SF writers to cause them to yearn, to strive -- and very successfully -- to relate to other people; they are not motivated by the wish to withdraw, but by the necessity of solitude involved in the mechanics of the work itself. They have, let me say, enough extroversion to seek out whenever possible their colleagues and fans, to lecture, to speak on the radio and TV, to be interviewed... but then they must go back into that lonely little office for a period of time that, not counting food breaks and sleep breaks, may run, for a good novel, two years.

They resent this; they would love to sit and chat forever, and must force themselves back into their office or studio. They do not flee; they are forced that way, whereas, I think, the true scientist may be more introverted and might greet with real relief his withdrawal from human contact to do his work. This brings up one more point, crucial, I think, in determining what sort of person becomes an SF writer: He has a warmer heart than the scientist, and would like to play and chat and be close to others, and he resents this aspect of his work; he is torn within, and when he can, emerges from his studio to fraternize with whomever he can buttonhole. Probably, as I do, most SF writers, like most fiction writers in general, solve this by creating characters in their stories to keep them company during the long, lonely, isolated chore of work. I have a strong feeling, having met so many of my colleagues over the years, that there is almost universally among them a love of human beings and a concern for them, a desire for closeness that, in itself, might explain why the SF writer chose that field rather than one of the pure sciences. SF writers are not loners. Caught halfway between going out to petition versus retiring into solitude -- caught between the political activist and the pure scientist -- they have or at least I have found SF a workable compromise: I can be with my characters when I write, I can love them and support their anguished hopes as I would my "actual" friends -- we do, in the final analysis, write about people, however idea-oriented our stories -- and yet I don't have to be manning the barricades, be out on the street waving a banner, where I really don't belong.

I have seen real love shown among SF writers who came together at one of the many conventions -- a great authentic fondness for their colleagues, not as writers, but as close friends. I'm sure this isn't unique to SF, and yet even other kinds of writers do not seem to exhibit this extended family quality that we have -- they seem more competitive, more pitted against one another, hoping the new novel by their colleague will fail, will not turn out good. SF writers have none of that. We are a body, a corporate group working, as in the Byzantine days, on some great mosaic, upon which finally no individual name will be stamped; we are friends and we admire one another in a warm and personal way. We ratify one another and sense our identity as humans as being intimately connected with this fraternal spirit. There are few if any cold schizoid SF writers; when you meet a Ray Bradbury or a Ted Sturgeon or a Norman Spinrad or an A. E. van Vogt you find a warm person longing to know you, too; you are part of a family that goes back decades and into which we perpetually welcome others: There are no sterile, aseptic white smocks, no cruel or detached interactions among us. Writing SF requires a humanization of the person, or, put another way, I doubt if that person would want to write SF unless he had in him these empathic needs and qualities. Too timid to demonstrate, too warm to retreat to a sterile lab and experiment on objects or animals, too excited and impatient to allow all knowledge to be confined to the limits of absolute certitude -- we live in a world of what a radio SF show once called "possible maybes," and this world attracts persons who are not loners but are lonely; and between those two distinctions there is a crucial difference.