The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Book Review" of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980)

This is MIT Press's first effort to cope with the reality of science fiction. Although less than 300 pages, it weighs almost a pound and a half, compared to Ballantine Books' edition of Ted Sturgeon's classic More Than Human, which weighs exactly a quarter pound. Therefore Warrick's book must be six times as important as Sturgeon's. Her study, Warrick tells us, "is based on 225 stories and novels written between 1930 and 1977." She states her conclusions up front in her introduction: "This study demonstrates that much of the (science) fiction written since World War II is reactionary in its attitude toward computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill informed about information theory and computer technology and lags behind present developments instead of anticipating the future." She then goes on to present a fully developed aesthetic approach by which to judge SF (here she does quite well). The three SF writers whom she deals with most fully are Asimov, Lem, and myself. I get the impression she considers the three of us important, and here lies my quarrel with her. As far as I am concerned the concept "important" is of no use in judging SF. I could quarrel with the vague style of the book (for instance, I cite "... a prison of false illusions" as being not only a double negative but also verbose, and "A shower of bizarre metaphors trails from Dick's imagination as it journeys through the patterns of possibilities in the evolving reciprocal relationship between man and his artificial constructs" and "He throws torches of possibility into his dark future, and their flashes of light reveal a survival," etc., as boring and sophomoric and a waste of the reader's time). But I would prefer to quarrel with the purpose of the book instead, and start out by saying that it has no purpose. It is a parasitic thing, and its very existence suggests that SF as a field is beginning to die, because only an entity waning and failing attracts such suckers as the academic sports of this sort. As Jesus says in Matthew 24:28: "Wherever the corpse is, there will the vultures gather."

The main complaint expressed repeatedly by Warrick in this book is SF's tendency to emit warnings about the dangers of technology -- dangers to individual humans and human society generally. Well, it is just too bad, but it is a fact: Science fiction writers worry about trends, worry about possible dystopias growing out of the present, and this is a cardinal value of the field. Admittedly, there was a time when science and progress were assumed to be identical. If we worry now we have cause to. This is not due to ignorance of the state of the world and the breakthroughs in science. Warrick devotes an entire chapter to my stories and novels that deal with robots, and she quotes me -- fairly -- as saying: "The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical." Am I not to be allowed to view this with alarm? Who will legislate what SF writers will be allowed to write and to worry about? This book praises me by terming my writing important but it arrogates to itself the role of arbiter of viewpoint and proper concern. Viewpoint and concern in SF are a transaction among author, editor, and reader, to which the critic is a spectator. If the reader enjoys what I write, there you have it. If he does not enjoy it, there you have nothing. "Important" is a rule from another game that I am not playing. I did not begin to read or write SF for reasons dealing with importance. When I sat in high school geometry class secretly reading a copy of Astounding hidden within a textbook I was not seeking importance. I was seeking, probably, intellectual excitement. Mental stimulation.

If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death, despite what Delany, Russ, Lem, and Le Guin may think; as with a single mind they woo academic approval as if it were some ultimate court. However, I look to my left and see a coverless, tattered copy of the July 1952 Planet Stories -- my first published story appeared in it, and I received a lot of kidding from serious-minded people for selling to such a market and for reading such a "trashy" magazine, to use Lem's favorite term of derision. Frankly I would prefer the derision to the new praise; SF is now palatable to the educated, the lofty, and I say, Let me out. Professor Warrick's pound-and-a-half book with its expensive binding, paper, and dust jacket staggers you with its physical impression, but it has no soul and it will take our soul in what really seems to me to be brutal greed. Let us alone, Dr. Warrick; let us read our paperback novels with their peeled eyeball covers. Don't dignify us. Our power to stimulate human imagination and to delight is intrinsic to us already. Quite frankly, we were doing fine before you came along.