When he set himself up at the age of twenty-four to write science fiction, Philip Dick did not imagine it was something he would do his whole life. SF was a temporary solution to a temporary predicament. Yet once it was clear that a career in academia was out of the question, there were few professions that his various phobias and anxieties would allow him to pursue. All those psychological tests he had undergone over the years had established that, if nothing else. Sure, he could play the game during a job interview and appear as serious and earnest as the next guy, but he also knew he could never pull off the charade day after day, week after week, stuck behind a desk. He liked power, but not the kind you get from being a middle manager or even a senior executive. As for the white-collar existence that the American advertising industry was touting to a country swept up in the postwar boom, no self-respecting Berkeleyite could look at suburban America and see anything other than a grotesque nightmare: grinning robots in suits and ties filling their commuter trains every morning with the reek of aftershave and, in the evening, after a day of meaningless activity, returning to their ranch houses and smiling blond wives, who hand them a martini and ask them the same question in the same tone of voice—day after day, week after week, year after year: “So, honey, how was your day?” Better to cultivate one’s own peculiarity—in Dick’s case, an adolescent affinity for science fiction. To a young writer whose “literary” works no one would touch, the genre at least offered a chance to earn a living from writing—a meager living, but enough to cover expenses while he wrote other things. Of course, writing science fiction also meant playing the game—working fast and cheap and putting up with editorial interference, inane titles, and garish illustrations of little green men with bulbous eyes. Terry Carr, the Ace paperback editor, used to joke that if the Bible had been published as science fiction, it would have had to be cut down to two volumes of twenty thousand words each; the Old Testament would have been retitled “Master of Chaos,” and the New Testament “The Thing with Three Souls.” Phil hoped that things would change, that it wouldn’t be long before people would be reading his stories in the New Yorker; that his real books would be published by real publishers and receive real reviews; that someday he would be mentioned in the same breath as Norman Mailer and Nelson Algren; indeed, that the whole period of his science fiction writing would merely add an appealingly common touch to the biography of one of America’s greatest living novelists.
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The strangest thing about Dick’s literary dreams may be that they never materialized. His “serious”—or, as publishers like to say, “mainstream”—works may not have been all that good, but far worse ones were getting published all the time. In a world in which remainder shelves overflow with yesterday’s brilliant discoveries, Dick ought to have had a shot at making it among mainstream readers. But something held him back, something that seemed to him at first an inexplicable piece of bad luck, then (though much later) a sign that a far higher calling awaited him.
In the 1950s, in addition to the eighty or so short stories and seven science fiction novels he turned out, Dick managed to write no fewer than eight non–genre novels; each was rejected. Kleo, who subscribed wholeheartedly to the myth of the misunderstood artist, took the rejections in stride: the true artist had to be rejected by the bourgeoisie, at least in the beginning. She saved his rejection letters (one day he received seventeen) and pinned them to the wall—silent testimony both to the obtuseness of the zombies in suits who ran the publishing houses and to her husband’s originality, which the world would soon be forced to recognize. Newspapers were starting to talk about the Beat Generation, and its laid-back rebels offered a plausible model for someone like Phil, at least sartorially: he had been wearing jeans, checked shirts, and old army boots for years. Kleo’s dream was for her husband to become as famous as Kerouac, and on their rare excursions across the bay and into San Francisco she tried to drag him into the smoky little cafes of North Beach where the Beat poets listened to jazz and read their works until all hours of the morning.
Unfortunately, Phil didn’t like crossing the bay, and he didn’t like smoky cafes, jazz, or writers’ gatherings either. He was petrified of the moment when some obscure but published poet would ask him what he wrote and then look on with a superior smile as Phil mumbled, “Science fiction.” Less confident than Kleo and lacking her sense of righteous indignation, Phil wasn’t so sure that failure was the mark of genius, and without daring to ask her to take down the rejection letters she so prized—“What!” Kleo would have screamed. “Don’t tell me you’re ashamed of them!”—he merely scowled and turned away from the accusing wall. He preferred, when he was alone, to take out his wallet and contemplate a file card autographed by a novelist named Herb Gold, whom he barely knew, on which the anodyne inscription read: “To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.”
If Phil found it mortifying to find himself in the company of those he would have loved to regard as his peers, he soon came to feel that way around so-called normal people, people who weren’t writers, who had careers, lived in nice houses, and took home a weekly paycheck. Of course, he could always follow Kleo’s example and despise these people for their success, except that he knew that the sword cut both ways and that they looked down on him for his failures. The pride and pleasure he took in not having to answer to a boss meant little next to the nagging daily realities of being poor. Not far from where they lived was a pet-supply store, the Lucky Dog Pet Store, where Phil sometimes went to buy horse meat, supposedly for his dog. One day as he was making his purchase, the salesclerk looked at him and said, “You’re not going to eat this stuff yourself, are you?” When he recounted the incident to Kleo, she laughed and tried to console him by reminding him that his first name meant “lover of horses” in Greek. He replied by asking whether his being a horse lover meant that he should eat their flesh or be repulsed by the very idea of it. Hindus didn’t eat cows, which they considered sacred; Jews didn’t touch the flesh of the pig, an animal they regarded as unclean. Kleo and Phil couldn’t decide what to make of this paradox, except to conclude the two strictures were probably equally valid. Whatever the case, they ate horse meat, and in California in the mid-1950s this was the food of pariahs.
* * *
Phil wrote at night, keeping to the habit he had got into while working at the record store. In the morning he would stroll around his neighborhood, in ever-smaller circles, coming home to scan his collection of secondhand records or sit out in his overgrown backyard and read. What he didn’t do was attend to home repair, to the sorts of little jobs his next-door neighbor would surely have done if he could have spent his days at home as Phil did. Leaving for work every morning, the neighbor would eye Phil suspiciously, and once he was gone, Phil would turn a sly, longing gaze over the fence and stare at the man’s wife, who invariably would be starting her housecleaning just as he was thinking of going to bed. They must have flirted with each other, but nothing came of his flirtations with his female neighbors until later.
Phil read widely—Dostoevsky, Lucretius, the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, German poetry and philosophy, and science fiction; he also read psychoanalysis, mostly Jung, buying each new volume of the Bollingen Press edition as it came out. This was how he discovered Seven Sermons to the Dead, which Jung had published in 1916 under the pseudonym Basilides—after a twelfth-century Gnostic from Alexandria. In pseudoarchaic prose, Jung recounted a mystical experience filled with weird sounds and lights and with revelations from such figures as the prophet Elijah, Simon Magus, and Philemon, whom Jung recognized as an embodiment of his own spirit, only wiser and more knowledgeable. Phil became obsessed with this strange work and toyed with the idea of using it as the basis for a novel about a struggling writer, along the lines of Thomas Mann’s newly published Doctor Faustus, which he had read with enormous admiration. Then he dropped the idea.
Generally speaking, the mainstream novels Dick was writing during this period reveal few traces of what he was reading. Their protagonists are aging television repairmen, disgruntled record salesmen who dream of becoming disk jockeys, and unhappily married couples. Instead of unfolding in any dramatic way, the lives of these lost souls seem predetermined, as they trudge with weary resignation along a path toward even greater despair. Sloppily written, turgid, full of inanely portentous dialogue, these works reflect the deep melancholy of their author, who would have given anything to be called another Thomas Mann. Stories about little green men and flying saucers, on the other hand, were what he was paid to write, and the most they offered in terms of literary recognition was comparison to someone like A. E. Van Vogt, a writer with whom Phil had once been photographed at a science fiction convention. The photo appeared in a fanzine above the caption “The Old and the New.” Three years of hard work had raised him to the level of “promising young writer” in the science fiction community.
* * *
Van Vogt’s specialty—like that of certain other writers, such as Lafayette Ron Hubbard, the future founder of the Church of Scientology—was galactic foundation myths known as “space operas.” Featuring valiant earthlings doing battle against invading mutant hordes, they served up a standard fare of initiation rites, awesome displays of supernatural powers, the clash of titans. But alongside this naive if demanding genre, which some critics saw as merely offering compensatory fantasies to an unsophisticated readership, there existed a slightly more adult school of science fiction that emphasized the “science” rather than the “fiction,” attempting to extrapolate the shape of things to come from existing or plausible technologies. Readers of the future, an author could only hope, would marvel at his prescient depiction of their world.
Phil had little affinity for either of these schools of science fiction, but he catered to the market and churned out Van Vogtian space operas while keeping up his subscriptions to various popular science magazines to stay abreast of developments in science and technology. Reading an article about a recent Soviet discovery that supposedly disproved Einstein’s special theory of relativity, he immediately dashed a letter off to one of the researchers, a Professor Alexander Topchev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Phil hoped he might get some firsthand physics information, a scoop that would provide material for a new story, but no one ever wrote back. In any case, SF publishers were beginning to realize that good science made for dull reading, and the writers soon got the message and started to let their imaginations run wild again with stories of time travel, journeys to the fourth dimension, and space taxis that took pleasure seekers out to the rings of Saturn for an evening of adventure.
In the mid-1950s, however, another style was starting to take shape, one in which Dick felt much more at home. Writers like Robert Scheckley, Fredric Brown, and Richard Matheson were publishing dark, terse narratives in which the ordinary somehow turns into the nightmarish. Often involving a loss of innocence, their stories were crafted with an eye toward a denouement that reversed the normal order of things and left the reader with a feeling of disorientation. Lying somewhere between traditional fantasy literature and conventional science fiction, this school is peculiarly American, as I discovered when I published a novel called The Mustache. Although it was deeply influenced by Matheson, not a single review in my native France mentioned him, whereas Kafka’s name came up repeatedly. The style was popularized by television and the movies, its spirit infusing such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and The Invaders, for which Scheckley, Brown, and Matheson all wrote teleplays, and Don Siegel’s remarkable film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
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Phil didn’t see the film when it came out in 1956. Ever since the panic attack he had had as a child while watching a wartime newsreel, movie theaters made him uncomfortable and he rarely saw movies until they were shown on TV. Friends who had seen the film, however, told him about it, and as he listened to them recount the story of the residents of a small town being taken over, body and soul, by extraterrestrial pods, he was convinced that someone had stolen the idea from him. It seems that two years earlier he had published a short story on the same theme, told from the point of view of a young boy who believes that a monster has taken possession of his father’s body. The more the person standing before him actually looks like the father he has always known, the more the boy is convinced the man is not his father at all but an alien imposter. And while the boy is in the garage looking in the incinerator for his father’s remains, the monster sits in the living room complaining to the boy’s mother about their son’s wild imagination and how someday it will get him into trouble.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, however, was based on a short story by Jack Finney that had come out several months before his own. Phil eventually decided that the general idea must have been in the air at the time.