The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1981)

The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of "human." The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an enlarged cortex -- a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying -- but an organism that is human in terms of its soul.

I'm sorry if the word "soul" offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, when I wrote the story "Beyond Lies the Wub" back in my youth in politically active Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the "android or reflex machine" that looks human but is not -- the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 ["The Android and the Human," included herein] -- twenty years after "Beyond Lies the Wub" was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape.

In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else's place. The wub does this even better than we ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very young person!

I liked the blurbs that Planet Stories printed for "Beyond Lies the Wub." On the title page of the magazine they wrote:

Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools, proclaimed the slovenly wub, after death.

And ahead of the story proper they wrote:

The slovenly wub might well have said: Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.

Reader reaction to the story was excellent, and Jack O'Sullivan, editor of Planet, wrote to tell me that in his opinion it was a very fine little story -- whereupon he paid me something like $15. It was my introduction to pulp payment rates.

Just a week ago while going through my closet I came across an ancient pulp magazine with ragged edges, its cover missing, its pages yellow... . Wondering what it was, I picked it up -- and found that this ancient remnant, this artifact from another epoch, was indeed the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories with my first published story in it. Profound emotions touched me as I gazed down at the illustration for "Wub"; it is a superb little illo [illustration], done by Vestal, and under it is written, " 'The Wub, sir,' Peterson said. 'It spoke!' " Well, here we are in the eighties, twenty-eight years later, and the gentle wub still speaks. May he always speak... and may other humans always listen.