Hour 25 A Talk With Philip K Dick

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Hour 25: A Talk With Philip K. Dick

Hosted by Mike Hodel

KPFK-FM, North Hollywood, California. June 26,
1976.

Transcribed and edited by Frank C. Bertrand

You can also listen to this interview by visiting

the multimedia page

or

here:

An interview with Philip K. Dick by Mike Hodel which aired

on the science fiction themed radio show Hour 25. It is

from 1977, just before A Scanner Darkly was released.

The interview is divided into 3 parts.

Part 1 (42 min.)

-Why science fiction? The paradox of

mainstream vs. sci-fi. On Deus Irae and researching a

novel. On the I Ching and The Man In The High Castle. On

A Scanner Darkly and character development. His

popularity in Europe. The poverty of the beginning sci-fi

writer with accounts of his own experiences.

Part 2 (20 min.)

– Phil reads an excerpt from A Scanner

Darkly (this is great!). Sci-fi as a

“silly putty” world. On

which authors he likes and dislikes in science fiction.

Part 3 (13 min.)

– On winning the Campbell and Hugo

awards. And much more

From Part 2: Listen to Phil reading an excerpt from A

Scanner Darkly (3:38 min.)

Mike Hodel: John Brunner calls him consistently the most brilliant

science fiction writer in the field. His name is Philip K. Dick. Why science

fiction out of all the forms of literature you could have chosen? Why SF?

Was it a conscious decision?

Philip K. Dick: Yes. There

’s more latitude in science fiction for the

expression of pure ideas than you find in other genres.

Mike: Let

’s get rid of a couple of cliches first. SF is a ghetto. People say,

yeah, it

’s a ghetto. Then on the other hand they say it’s a literature of

ideas. All literature is supposed to be a literature of ideas. Right? So why

is it that science fiction gets tagged with that and in the same breath is

tagged as a ghetto? And people can put it down and pay a lot less money

and get a lot less recognition and so forth.

Phil: Well, science fiction has changed a lot in the last few years. It

’s

coming out of the ghetto. But all that

’s done is make it worse. I mean, the

writing is worse, now that it is coming out of the ghetto. Instead of getting

better it

’s getting worse because it’s losing it’s identity, it’s losing it’s

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shape. It

’s becoming like silly putty. I mean, you can now call anything you

want science fiction or you can decide not to call it science fiction. I have

a book coming out. The hardcover edition of it will be called mainstream

and the paperback is going to be sold as science fiction. If you buy the

hardcover you

’re reading a mainstream novel. If you buy the Ballantine

paperback you

’re reading a science fiction novel. But the text is identical

in the two. And they were bought simultaneously by Doubleday and

Ballantine working in tandem. So if I were to talk to you about my novel, I

’d

have to ask you whether you

’d read the Doubleday edition or the

Ballantine paperback edition. Now, if you

’d read the Ballantine paperback

edition I

’d say, yes, that was a great science fiction novel. And if you’d

read the Doubleday edition I

’d say, well, that was a great mainstream

novel, wasn

’t it Mike? You’d be hard put to figure out how to respond

when it

’s strictly a way of packaging it. We’re not talking about packaging

and marketing. We

’re not talking about content at all. Like Sharon Jarvis

at Doubleday read its first eighty pages. She says, well, there

’s no rocket

ships in this book. It

’s not science fiction. I’m going to throw it down the

hall to the other editors, the trade editors and let them market it. And

Ballantine looked at the manuscript and said, hot dog, this is wonderful

science fiction. We

’re going to make millions. And then I said, you guys

better get together. So I really don

’t know. I mean, it came out of the

ghetto in the hardcover edition and it went right back into the ghetto in the

paperback edition.

Mike: Which do you hope sells more, the softcover with the SF tag or

Doubleday mainstream?

Phil: I hope, oh boy, now you

’ve really put me against the wall. That’s a

very evil question to ask.

Mike: That

’s right.

Phil: Because I can

’t answer without offending somebody. That is, I have

to sit on two stools at once. And I have to hype the science fiction one

and then I have to turn around and hype the mainstream one. I can

’t fault

either one without immediately becoming victim of my own trap.

Mike: Okay. Well, let

’s see if we can rephrase it so it may not offend

quite as many people.

Phil: I don

’t want to offend anybody. It’s an inoffensive novel. It will not

offend any reader anywhere. No bad words. Now that

’s another thing. It

could not be published as science fiction by Doubleday because it had

four letter words in it. And their science fiction list does not allow four

letter words in a book. There were too many of them to remove them. If

there only had been a few, like in Deus Irae, which they bought from me

and Roger Zelazny. There were only a few four letter words so they inked

them out and then marketed it as science fiction. And I had never known

this before. I didn

’t know the distinction between science fiction and

mainstream was the number of four letter words. But on this new one of

mine, Larry Ashmead, the editor-in-chief at Doubleday says, you can

’t

take them out. They

’re necessary to the book. Therefore we can’t market

it as science fiction. So we

’re down to basics now. If you want it marketed

as a mainstream novel you say bleep bleep all the way through the book.

And if you get enough bleep bleeps in the book they can

’t market it as

science fiction because they figure most of the science fiction market is

kids. This is their theory. This is not my theory. But their envisioning this

audience with the hick glasses and the acne, parting the hair in the

middle, and the overcoat the guy bought at the Salvation Army and the

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sign every copy of every Astounding that he

’s got. That’s their idea of the

science fiction market. That

’s theirs, that’s not my idea.

Mike: This is Doubleday, the premier hardcover

Phil: I

’m not saying I mean Doubleday. I just mean them.

Mike: Oh, them. Oh yeah, the well known

Phil: The well known them. The people who run things.

Mike: So that

’s the distinction. If it’s got enough four letter words it’s not

science fiction.

Phil: That

’s right. I was told this by an editor-in-chief who is not with

Doubleday. He went over to Simon and Schuster.

Mike: How does he explain it? Did you ask him about somebody like

Delany with Dhalgren, which is definitely SF and has got lots of four and

ten letter words?

Phil: Yeah, that

’s true. I’ve read part of that. Harlan Ellison and I agree

that

’s a terrible book. Even though it had a lot of four letter and ten letter

words it was still a terrible book. It should have been marketed as trash.

There

’s a category, you know, there’s trash. There’s trashy novels.

Mike: There

’s sci-fi and trashy novels. Okay, why? Why is it a bad book?

Is it just because

Phil: Oh, it

’s just a bad book. I don’t have to go into that. I mean, it’s not

necessary that I be a literary critic. I don

’t know anything about that. That’s

not my field. I can

’t criticize. I just started reading it and said this is the

worse trash I

’ve ever read. And I threw it away. And Harlan did the same

thing, sitting up there in Sherman Oaks where he lives on the pinnacle of

that steep hill. Harlan is not in it for profit. Harlan is in it for the ideology of

science fiction.

Mike: Well, Harlan is leaving the field of science fiction. He says, I write

what I write.

Phil: He is?

Mike: Yeah. I write Harlan Ellison stories. They

’re not science fiction.

They

’re –

Phil: That

’s a tautology. Harlan Ellison writes Harlan Ellison stories. The

predicate is implied by the subject. I

’ve listed the people for Publishers

Weekly who have left science fiction recently. I didn

’t even think to add

Harlan. I remember now, I did read Harlan

’s letter to F&SF, I believe,

where he said America, bleep it or bleep it regarding science fiction. Barry

Malzberg published the most marvelously crazy statement of the

universe. In all the history of science fiction nobody has ever bum-tripped

science fiction as much as Barry Malzberg did. And I think he

’s a great

writer but that

’s not the way. You don’t break up a marriage that way, you

don

’t leave science fiction that way by saying everybody in it is rotten. And

everything that

’s ever been written is rotten, except what I wrote; that

wasn

’t rotten, which is what Malzberg said, that he’s going onto bigger

and greater things. And then Vonnegut, this is what I said in Publishers

Weekly, Vonnegut has always never written science fiction. He

discovered when upon looking back over his career, he discovered he

’d

made a lot of money at some point, and at that point, retroactively, he, like

the Pope, everything I say is true, and I never was writing science fiction

even if you read Player Piano and you thought it was science fiction, you

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were wrong. And Cat

’s Cradle likewise. And they’re not science fiction,

because I say they

’re not science fiction. Come to me, I will tell you.

Harlan says, come to me, I will tell you.

Mike: Silverberg is also leaving the field.

Phil: I know, I know.

Mike: Tom Disch

Phil: He

’s rich. Silverberg is rich. I don’t know how, he is. I can’t figure it

out,

’cause none of the rest of us are. I’ve always asked him that same

question over and over again. He just smiles with that sort of superior

enigmatic smile of his which means that I know something you don

’t

know and that

’s why I’m rich and you’re not. He didn’t make it off science

fiction. I don

’t believe he made if off selling science fiction. If he did he

sure does know something I don

’t know. I think he reinvested his royalties

in a pizza plant or something.

Mike: I don

’t know why. But there’s something about your style of writing,

and your style as I discovered it from The Rolling Stone piece, the Paul

Williams article, that puts me in mind of Kilgore Trout.

Phil: That

’s Philip Jose Farmer.

Mike: Yeah, right, I know. I don

’t mean you are –

Phil: I don

’t understand just what you mean about Kilgore Trout.

Mike: Alright. You do writing which is excellent. And it is labeled science

fiction and therefore it don

’t sell nothing. It winds up –

Phil: Wrong. Wrong. Doubleday gets to market it through their el cheapo

book club. Oh boy, will they love to hear this. But that

’s true. They get to

sell it for a dollar. And the author makes a penny, then, or something

trivial like that. His royalties of the entire, Robert Heinlein explained this to

me one time. He said, you sell a book to a hardcover publisher and the

Doubleday Book Club snatches it right up and markets it for a dollar, no

matter how many pages it

’s got. I mean, we’re speaking in hyperbole

here, but never the less, then your royalties immediately descend down to

the miniscule level again. The more copies it sells the less money you

make. Heinlein says that he was financially ruined when they picked up

like Stranger In A Strange Land, I believe it was, one of his recent ones,

because they immediately market a giant thing for a dollar and his

royalties, he says, it destroyed the trade edition. He says, the worst thing

that could happen to you. I always thought it was good when I had a book

picked up by the Doubleday Book Club, but I found out I make no money. I

looked at my royalty sheets. I made no money. That

’s where the money

is, though, is marketing it through like a book club thing. And the publisher

makes the money but the author doesn

’t. He makes his ten percent of the

flat price on the trade edition only. And what they do is this. They print up

about two thousand copies of the trade edition. They sell five hundred of

them and they pulp the rest the next day. I didn

’t know that. That is almost

enough to make me leave the field of writing entirely. An editor, two

editors told me that this is actually what happens. A hardcover publisher

puts out a science fiction novel and pulps his trade edition immediately

and turns it over to the book club. So the author looks at his royalty sheet,

he says, that

’s really strange, he says, no matter how good my novel is, it

will only sell two thousand copies. It always stops at two thousand

copies. Because that

’s at the point that the publisher decided to pulp the

edition. I was told this and one of my recent hardcover novels, I won

’t

name the publisher, because this is secondary data, I

’ve just this editor’s

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word for it. After they sold five hundred copies, they pulped the entire

edition. For no reason at all. Except it made it available immediately for

subsidiary rights.

Mike: What about paperback?

Phil: Well, that

’s a subsidiary. You mean selling directly to the

paperback?

Mike: Yeah, right.

Phil: Well, somebody told me that

’s where the fat money is, is selling

directly to the paperbacks. That was a paperback publisher told me that.

And then they offered me all the money you ever saw in your life to do a

novel for them. But when they actually talked specifically, rather than just

say we

’ll give you all the money you ever wanted, it turned out to be less

than if I sold it to a hardcover house. And there was a Doubleday Book

Club edition and then a paperback, seeing that a paperback under those

conditions, you split the royalties fifty-fifty with the hardcover publisher. It

still turned out to be less, Mike. Because like in Ubik, I got ten thousand

dollars for the paperback, of which I got five thousand. Doubleday got the

other five. Well, I

’ve recently, DAW offered me six thousand dollars to do

an original novel for them. And for DAW six thousand dollars is like, for

them, selling you all the office furniture they

’ve got including all their

computers and things. That

’s about all the money DAW has is six

thousand dollars. If you were to project six thousand for DAW, say, what

will Bantam they pay, or Dell. Like Bantam has seventeen thousand five

hundred outlets in the United States. They own seventeen thousand five

hundred racks. Isn

’t that incredible. That’s the largest number of racks

that any publisher owns in this country. And DAW doesn

’t own any racks

that I know of. I

’ve never seen a DAW rack. And they’re up to six

thousand.

Mike: Are you going to do it? Are you going to write the book for them?

Phil: Oh, yes. I

’m going to have a ball doing it too. It’s going to be a lot of

fun. That

’s Don Wollheim and he gave me my start.

Mike: That

’s a good cue to pick up, some biographical stuff. You started

when?

Phil: In fifty-one.

Mike: Fifty-one. When you sold your first story. How long had you been

writing before you sold your first story?

Phil: Ever since I could operate a typewriter, which was when I taught

myself to type when I was twelve. And I wrote my first novel when I was

fourteen. It was called Return To Lilliput. It was really a bomb. It was

terrible. It was the worst novel. I

’ll sell it some day. I’ll find a market for it. It

had

– it was really neat. They rediscovered Lilliput in the modern world.

Like rediscovering Atlantis. These guys report they

’ve discovered Lilliput.

But it

’s only accessible by submarine because it’s sunk under the water.

You

’d think a fourteen year old kid would have a more original idea than

that. And I can even tell you the numbers on the submarines. I had, A-

101, B-202, C-303 were the numbers and designations of the

submarines.

Mike: Makes it a finite number of submarines, then.

Phil: Yeah, well, I realized that when I got halfway through. I wasn

’t

thinking ahead.

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Mike: You sold your first story, then, to Don Wollheim?

Phil: No. To Tony Boucher at F&SF.

Mike: That

’s hell of a way to begin. That’s pretty good. F&SF in fifty-one

was

Phil: Oh, yes. It was the highest class magazine in existence at that time.

And what I did was I sent out thirteen or fourteen stories. And they all

came back including the one I sent to F&SF. Only, Tony Boucher said, if

you rewrite along these lines you will have a worthwhile piece of fiction.

Because he

’s the greatest editor. I mean, he was a great writer, great

anthologizer, great editor, great person. And like I had sent him 8 or 9

thousand words, and I cut it down to about two thousand words. That

was a story called

“Roog.” And it’s still in print. It’s still in print now. It’s in

print in a text for High School students.

Mike: It

’s in paperback, in one of your paperback collections of short

stories, the only collection of your short stories I

’ve ever seen by you.

Phil: It

’s in The Preserving Machine?

Mike: I think it is.

Phil: Yeah. It

’s also – Silverberg picked it up. In other words, it’s still in

print, all these years later, 25, 26 years later. And I

’m still getting money

off the darn thing. It

’s really weird. I’m still making money off stuff I wrote

when I was just starting. They

’re still in print, those early stories of mine.

But then I hit a bad part of my career. About 1954 when I started writing

the worst trashy stuff you ever

– none of that stuff’s in print. It started out

very good. I was a very good writer under Tony Boucher

’s direction. And

in

’53 I sold 27 stories that year. And 26 and 27 were rotten, worthless

pieces of fiction. And my agent had to tell me, you know, his best friends

won

’t tell him. My agent said, Phil, write fewer, better stories. The fewest

the best. Maybe one a year. But they were really terrible. But they were all

being purchased.

Mike: What about the first novel you sold?

Phil: That was to Don Wollheim. That was Solar Lottery. And that

’s still in

print. It

’s been in print off and on for about twenty years. And I’ve made

about fifteen hundred dollars off it.

Mike: That is what I mean about Kilgore Trout.

Phil: Oh, is that what you mean about Kilgore Trout.

Mike: That is what I mean. A man who is virtually unparalleled in the field.

Nobody knows you. You could, if you

’ll pardon the hyperbole, be starving

to death in the field. You

’re damn good. You’re still going to make fifteen

hundred buck and

Phil: Yeah, I got a thousand dollars advance on the book. And then, when

they reprinted it ten years later they gave me five hundred. And that

’s the

last I ever saw of any money off that book. And it

’s still in print. I could

walk over there and pull a copy out of the bookcase, and it still bears the

original publishing date. There

’s no, like, second, third printing and the

further dates. It still says copyright Ace Books 1954 or whatever it is.

Which almost borders on the illegal, for them to copyright it rather than

giving me the copyright. It means I can

’t get reversion on them, where I

would get title again, because I never had title. They took copyright on

their name. And they just recycle that book, and they recycle it all over the

world. People find it in Hong Kong. And the royalty sheets show no copies

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have been sold since 1954, or something like that.

Mike: They print a lot and they just hope. Of all the novels you have

written, I guess my own particular favorite

’s A Man In The High Castle, of

course, Ubik [ooh-bik].

Phil: Ubik. [u-bik]

Mike: Ubik? [u-bik]

Phil: Ubik. The French call it Ubik [ooh-bik]. Dick

’s Ubik.

Mike: And

Phil: It

’s called Ubik neo senora in Italian. I guess that means “Ubik my

dear sir,

” or something like that. Well, it does because I looked it up.

Mike: Okay. I shan

’t argue with you. What about your own working

habits? How do you work? Or do you, or do you have a pattern indeed?

Phil: Well, I use to just write all the time. I use to just get up at noon and

sit down at the typewriter and write until 2 AM. Just write from noon in the

morning until 2 AM. You

’ve got to do that when you start out. Or you’re

going to die on the vine. I mean you

’ve got to just – you’re going to live on

two thousand dollars a year. You

’re going to eat rocks and dirt and weeds

from the back yard for the first ten years. And then after the first ten

years, you get to eat instant breakfast. You work up till you

’re rich enough

to get a phone put in. And you get to buy an old automobile. And you get

to drive around in an old automobile, which you crank-start every

morning. And then after 25 years, you manage to get a used Dodge. It

costs you $795.00, but, the radio doesn

’t work in it. And there’s people

that

’re standing behind grocery counters are making more money. One

time I was in Trader-Jones, a grocery store, and I was talking with the

clerk and he made more money than I did. And I was really sore. I really

took it bad. Because they had just hired him. He didn

’t even have seniority

as a grocery clerk. At least he could have been a senior clerk. I said, how

much do you make? And he says, such and such. And I said, jeepers,

that

’s a lot of money.

Mike: You do that enough you get to the point of what the hell, why am I

beating my brains out for two grand a year, or four grand, or even ten.

Phil: Well, then, I answer I love to write. And I

’d write it if they didn’t pay

me anything.

Mike: He

’s only kidding, he’s only kidding Bantam. He’s only kidding.

Phil: Oh, yeah, that ain

’t too cool to say. Well, I say that a lot. But you try

to get

– I’ve got an agent who doesn’t agree with me. See, I don’t market

my own stuff. I market it through the toughest, meanest dude in the world,

Scott Meredith. And you can

’t gyp him. It’s impossible to gyp Scott

Meredith, because if you do, don

’t start your car up the next morning –

Mike: At least not without checking

Phil: Pulling the hood open and looking for extra wires.

Mike: So, you do like to write. You said, you use to work non-stop?

Phil: Yes.

Mike: Have you changed that pattern?

Phil: Yes. Now I, here

’s what happened to me. This novel that I spoke

about earlier, Deus Irae, that Roger Zelazny and I wrote, it took us 12

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years to write it. That

’s really true. We figured it out. I signed a contract

with Doubleday in 1964. This is 1976, right? Well, that

’s how long it took

the two of us. I couldn

’t even write it alone. I mean, I got like a third of it

done and I discovered I didn

’t know anything about the subject matter,

which is Christianity. I could sing a few hymns and I could cross myself

and that was about all. And I had embarked on a theological novel without

knowing anything about theology. So I ran across Zelazny in 1968. I had

been working four years on the novel. And I said, Zelazny, do you know

anything about theology? He says, you better believe it Jack. I said, how

’d

you like to collaborate with me? I

’ve got one third of this thing done. It’s all

about Christianity. So he took it. And then like 8 years later

– and I didn’t

hear from Roger. I got a postcard one time from the East Coast. I said,

Roger

’s over his head. He’s just like me, he’s doing research. Now I’ve

learned. So at the end of 12 years we were able to complete it finally. We

each got $400.00 a piece, or something like that. In other words, it was

like the greatest disaster of our joint careers, was that novel. We

’ll never

be able to earn back what we put into it in the way of research and work.

Now I spend my time doing research before I do the book. I

’m not going to

get burned like that again. I

’m working on another theological novel called

To Scare The Dead, but I

’ve done 2 years of research. When I sit down to

the typewriter I

’m going to know what I’m talking about. Man In The High

Castle, I did 7 years of research for Man In The High Castle. Seven years

of research. I did other stuff too during that 7 years. But it took me 7 years

to amass the material on the Nazis and the Japanese, especially on the

Nazis, before I could sit down and write. That

’s part of the reason why it’s

a better novel than most of my novels, that I knew what I was talking

about. There wasn

’t anything I didn’t know. I had prime source material at

the Berkeley Cal Library from the Gestapo that they had seized after WW

II. It was marked, for the eyes of the higher police only. The higher police

is their term for

– I was forced to read Gestapo diaries, the Gestapo men

in Warsaw, Gestapo agents. I had to read that stuff. I had to sit there

because you couldn

’t take it out of the library. You had to read it in the

stacks. I had to read what those guys wrote in their private journals to

write Man In The High Castle. And that

’s why I’ve never written a sequel to

it. Because it

’s too horrible. It’s too awful. I started several times to write a

sequel to it and I would had to go back and read about Nazis again. And

I

’d just like to off every one of them, it’s what I’d like to do. And so I could

never do a sequel to it. Somebody would have to come in and help me do

a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach for the stamina to think

along those lines, to get into the head; if you

’re going to start writing about

Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you

imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich

’s face? Now, Condon, Richard

Condon, is that his name, he wrote a thing called An Infinity Of Mirrors

about Reichfuhrer Himmler. Condon has the guts to do that. I could not

do that again. That

’s why the book, my book The Man In The High Castle

is set in the Japanese part, you see, because then I could deal with

people. But I have little glimpses of the Nazi part like when Mr. Tagomi

hears this printout on personality traits of the Nazi contenders for

Reichsfuhrer, Reichs Chancelor, I

’m sorry. And he runs out and gets sick

and falls down.

Mike: That was you.

Phil: That was me. That was me. Horrible, he said, horrible. Evil is like

cement. Evil is a pun, concrete, cement, you see. What he

’s thinking, his

thoughts are all jumbled up.

Mike: Did you know it was going to be that torturous when you began?

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Phil: The writing wasn

’t torturous. Writing was a catharsis for me. It was

the research that was so tough. I thought I hated those guys before I did

the research. After I did the research then I had created for myself an

enemy that I would hate the rest of my life. Fascism. Wherever it

appears. Whether it

’s in Germany, the United States, Soviet Union or

anywhere. Fascism, wherever it appears, it is the enemy.

Mike: And yet, at least one of the Germans in that book, you, at least I

came away from almost respecting in a way.

Phil: Who

’s that? I’ll get him. Where is he?

Mike: The consular in San Francisco, the German -

Phil: Oh, Reiss?

Mike: Yeah.

Phil: Oh, he just sat around and smoked fancy cigarettes. I had to have

somebody that I could talk to in that book on the German side. Fascism

and Germany are not that intimately linked. Fascism is a world wide

phenomena. It can hit a bunch of baboons swinging in the trees in

Polynesia. They can all suddenly put on iron helmets and march around.

Fascism is very much with us today, boys and girls. And it

’s still an

enemy. I wrote The Man In The High Castle with the I Ching.

Mike: You did?

Phil: Yeah, and I

’ve been sorry ever since because when it came time to

resolve the novel at the end, the I Ching didn

’t know what to do. It got me

through most of the book. Everytime they cast a hexagram I actually cast

four of them and got something and assigned it to them and they

proceeded on the basis of the advice given. Like when Juliana Frink

decides to tell Abendsen that he

’s about to be offed by an agent. I threw

the coins and she got warning make known the truth to the court of the

King great danger and so on. Someone comes up behind him and hits

him with a club. That

’s what she got. And so she did go warn Abendsen

and if she

’d got another hexagram I would not have had her go speak to

Abendsen. But then when it came time to close down the novel the I

Ching had no more to say. And so there

’s no real ending on it. I like to

regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime.

Mike: When you find somebody with the stomach to write one.

Phil: Yeah, or if the I Ching ever gets off its ass.

Mike: Do you go back from time to time and throw it to see if there is an

ending to it or

Phil: No, I don

’t use the I Ching anymore. I’ll tell ya, the I Ching told me

more lies than anybody else I

’ve ever known. The I Ching has a

personality and it

’s very devious and very treacherous. And it feeds ya

just what you want to hear. And it

’s really spaced out and burned out

more people than I would care to name. Like a friend is somebody who

doesn

’t tell you what you want to hear. A friend tells you what’s true. A

toady is the old word for somebody who told you what you wanted to

hear. The Kings all had their toadies around them who told them what

they wanted to hear. The King said, am I the greatest King in the world?

Yeah, you

’re the greatest King in the world, yeah. Well, this is what the I

Ching does. It tells you what you want to hear and it

’s not a true friend.

One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes.

And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a

complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. In other words I set it up.

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I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with

forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn

’t mean to say

that. But it had already -

Mike: Then you get a paradox.

Phil: Oh, I watched a girl do this to it once.

Mike: That

’s the paradox. It’s lying when it says it’s lying.

Phil: It

’s just full of, it’s a crock is what it is. Sladek, John Sladek said this

in his debunking book. He covers everything from Scientology to the

Mafia. He says none of them exist. And he says the I Ching

– you know

Sladek did a parody of my writing. It

’s as much better than anything I’ve

ever done. Have you read Sladek

’s parody of my writing?

Mike: Oh, yes.

Phil: It

’s so much better than anything that I can do. And I walked around

and I was really off the ground. Walking on cloud nine, after I read the

parody. And I wrote Ed Ferman, who is the editor of F&SF. This appeared

originally in F&SF. And I said, I have talent, Sladek has genius. And Ed

Ferman wrote back and said, fine, I

’m going to buy a lot of stuff from

Sladek. And he did. He commissioned eight more parodies. And they

’re

all marvelous; a parody of Asimov. Sladek said I was the hardest person

to parody. I have his book in front of me. In England it

’s called The Steam-

Driven Boy and other Strangers. Sladek says the I Ching is a hoax. And

Sladek is right. His parody of me is called

“Solar Shoe Salesman.” And in

it somebody consults the tiles and it gives him many small greatnesses

deny. It does not further to discover several gifts only. The wise King

avoids fried foods. And I says, ah, Sladek, you finished it off man. I can

never consult the I Ching again. And all started laughing. I

’m looking at

this parody and I

’m saying if I could write as well as Sladek. That’s

another thing that brought me back into writing science fiction when I

started to talk about being a mainstream writer. We

’re using science

fiction as a crash pad, rather than a legitimate dwelling. And I won

’t do

that. If science fiction is going to go down the tubes, I

’ll go down the tubes

with it, rather than abandon it. I think it

’s unfair, if you start thinking you’re

any good, you leave it. It

’s unfair to the field. And also it’s so, like, Hubris.

I

’m a great writer, therefore, I am not a science fiction writer. Well, what

about your first proposition. Maybe you

’re not such a great writer after all.

Maybe you

’re wrong right there, before you’ve gotten to the second part of

the proposition.

Mike: Maybe a month ago I was talking

– we had Richard Lupoff on the

show. Richard Lupoff. Good writer. Good competent writer. Probably best

known for what he did for Again Dangerous Visions, with the

“Bentfin

Boomer Boys on Little old New Alabama;

” marvelous story.

Phil: His wife

’s very pretty too. Pat Lupoff. Tried to pick her up in a bar.

Didn

’t know it was his wife. Most amazing thing happened. Found myself

out in the parking lot stretched out flat. Lupoff sure has a short fuse.

Mike: He does have a short fuse. That

’s one of the reasons he’s getting

out of the field. He says, look, he said -

Phil: Wait a minute.

Mike: He says he

’s been in it ten years. He’s written novels –

Phil: He had? I didn

’t know that.

Mike: Short stories, the whole thing. And he

’s made maybe four, five, ten

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grand. He said -

Phil: That

’s nothing. What’s that?

Mike: He said that.

Phil: Is this Lupoff you

’re talking about?

Mike: Dick Lupoff, yeah.

Phil: The guys leave the field before they even get into it.

Mike: Because he was offered big money. He would not say how much,

but I gathered it was better than fifteen grand, a personal hypothesis, to

write a novel about New York City, I believe, or something on the East

Coast.

Phil: De gustibus non est disputandum. Other people can have bad taste

and I don

’t care. That’s how you translate that.

Mike: He got

– when his agent said he got that kind of money for writing

the mainstream thing.

Phil: Makes me really sore. Because we

’re in a double-bind. If we stay in

the field they pay us pennies. Well, nobody

’s offered me fifteen thousand

dollars to leave, yet.

Mike: The agent had to apologize because it was so little because, he

said, this is a first book. You haven

’t written anything -

Phil: Oh, that

’s a lot of hype.

Mike: And Lupoff says, what is this. I

’ve been working in the field for ten

years. I

’m a competent, good, established writer. He says, that’s science

fiction. That

’s not literature, his agent says.

Phil: How do you know? Who told you?

Mike: Lupoff.

Phil: Don

’t believe anything a writer tells you. I’m a writer, I would know.

Mike: I promise.

Phil: Always, always check on your facts when any writer tells you

anything, any fiction writer tells you anything. A fiction writer speak with

forked tongue. Talk big money. I want to see Lupoff

’s contract before I’ll

believe it. I

’d like to see it.

Mike: Spend a evening ransacking his agent

’s files.

Phil: If somebody offered me fifteen, well, DAW offered six thousand

dollars to write a science fiction novel. And to me that

’s a lot of money.

Mike: That it is, a lot of money.

Phil: I thought it was.

Mike: Considering it

’s Wollheim, considering the fact he’s only been

doing the firm what? Two years? Three years? Something like that.

Phil: Well, he bought a thing from me in

’71, so, he just started out then. It

was really funny. He bought the leftovers from the Ballantine collection

that

’s coming out of my stories. He says, I’ll take what Betty Ballantine

doesn

’t want. And that’s exactly what he got. And he was madder than a

wet hen, as we say, to use a ten letter word. He says, I got Betty

Ballantine

’s rejects. I says, that’s what you contracted for, that’s what you

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got. He says, that ain

’t right. I says, neither is the price. We were still

talking in terms of the same advance that I got when I started out, really.

That with inflation we are getting less advance now, when you factor in

the inflation factor, we

’re getting less money per novel than we did in

1950, I mean, what we could buy with what we got then. We could buy

more than what we get now. Doubleday went up to 3,000 dollars advance

for me on my new book, I forget the title

– A Scanner Darkly. They offered

me 3,000 dollars. They says that was the most they could go for a

science fiction novel. And after they had acquired it for 3,000 dollars, they

turned it over to the trade department, which has no limit on what it can

offer. And then they told me that the real limit was 4,000 dollars, that

and I thought at the time, well, ya know, it takes one to know one. They

acquired it for 3,000 dollars, this new novel of mine, which is just chicken

feed, Mike, let

’s face it, it’s just chicken feed. Three thousand bucks. And

it took me like three years to write the book. That

’s a thousand dollars a

year. Anybody that wants to write science fiction and then they

’re going to

market it as a mainstream novel. They get to sit on both stools. They can

eat the porridge out of one pot and they eat the porridge out of the other

pot. And I

’ve got no porridge at all. And they’re going to make a bundle on

it. And Ballantine is going to make a bundle on it. And Ballantine deserves

to make a bundle on it because Judy-Lyn Del Rey at Ballantine went over

the manuscript page by page with me, that

’s A Scanner Darkly, and told

me what it needed to make it into a really competent book. She

’s able to

show me point for point. This is the first time any editor has ever done

that with me since The Man In The High Castle, the editor Pete Israel was

the editor for Putnam then. And he went over The Man In The High Castle

page by page and showed me how it should be changed. And then, now,

Judy-Lyn has done that with A Scanner Darkly. And so I

’ve got two good

novels under my belt because I had a good editor. The rest of them, they

let me flounder around and write whatever came into my head. So, it was

all uneven, the good parts and the bad parts wouldn

’t add up. Judy-Lyn

del Rey, I

’ve never had an editor like her before. She is probably the

greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins. She showed me how to create a

character and I

’ve been selling novels for 22 years. And she showed me

how to develop a character. Now that really

– my first reaction was dear

Judy-Lyn how would you like to take a one way walk off the Long Beach

pier? But then I started looking at what she was saying there. And as

soon as my fuse had burned out, being very short, it didn

’t take long, I

realized that she was teaching me how to write. And it

’s too bad nobody

did that 25 years ago because then maybe my books would make more

sense. But look for A Scanner Darkly because that

’s – there’s a master

craftsman came into that book, Judy-Lyn del Rey. Now I know what to do

when I write a book. You don

’t just write whatever comes into your head

when you sit there in front of the typewriter. Like when I wrote Ubik, I got

about 12 pages done then I didn

’t have anything I could think of so I just

wrote whatever came into my mind. And I wrote it from my unconscious

is what I did. I turned it over to my right hemisphere of my brain which did

all the thinking from then on. And I was as surprised as anybody as what

came out. And in France, it

’s considered a great novel because it doesn’t

really make any sense. It

’s an absurdist thing, a pate de zique in France.

Ever since Jeury hit town in Paris they

’ve loved stuff that didn’t make any

sense. Maybe it makes sense when you translate it into French. Like Poe,

was it Baudelaire who translated Poe and made him a great writer in

France? Maybe I

’m a great writer in France because I’ve got good

translators.

Mike: You are better known I think sometimes in France -

Phil: In France -

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Mike: Than you are here.

Phil: In Germany, France, in England too. I

’m not translated though, see. I

mean we speak the same, you understand -

Mike: Two nations separated by -

Phil: They spell curb with a

“k” there.

Mike: Yeah.

Phil: That

’s the only difference.

Mike: What do they think of The Man In The High Castle in Germany?

Phil: Oh, that

’s heavy, heavy. They didn’t know I could read German.

They bought it, a publisher bought it in Germany and began to translate it.

And I learned of it, the fact that they bought it. Oh no, you

’re not going to

print that in Germany without letting me see the German translation of

this. You get that in the contract Scott, you insist. And Scott is Jewish.

And I said, listen Scott, we

’re not going to let them publish that book

unless I read the galleys. It

’s got to be a sequitur quo non, it’s got to be a

condition. And he said, I agree with you completely. And they phoned

Germany. And they asked for it immediately, the galleys. Well, they didn

’t

have galleys. They still just had the typescript, the manuscript. And they

had to send it to us. We made it a condition in the contract. And I got a

chance to read it, because I can read German, and I started reading that

thing and they had destroyed that book. They left whole scenes out,

whole basic scenes just

– the action, they had just turned it into a

travesty. And I wrote them a letter. They went out of business after they

published it too. Like I was really, I actually burst into tears when I finished

reading it. I actually cried at what they

– see, there was my best novel,

right? And they said we didn

’t know you could read German. They actually

said that in their letter. At least they gave me five days to read it. That

’s

how they thought, they had five days. They said he wasn

’t German, he

can

’t be fluent enough so he can read the whole darn thing in five days.

But my German got very fluent at that point. I just stayed up night and day

with my Cassell

’s German-English dictionary and I read every single word

and I compared it line by line with the english. And I marked the parts they

had cut out, the parts they had changed. They hadn

’t changed any of the

political parts. All the anti-Nazi stuff was still there. They had just

cheapened it into a cheap adventure novel. Fast action. Fast paced

adventure novel. I remember, at one part it says

“unter Gomi nanntest

seine scheisstergewehr wie Wyat Urp.

” And I never mentioned Wyat Urp

in my book anywhere. In Germany Mr. Tagomi he is like Wyat Urp. Isn

’t

that dreadful? The whole thing was that way.

Mike: What about Japan?

Phil: There is a Japanese edition. I can

’t read it. I can read the titles of my

english novels in the bio section in the back. And they have

– I’m not

putting you on. I don

’t mean this as a slur against the Japanese. But they

said the english title

’s Gullible Man instead of Variable Man. That’s their

problem. But I can

’t read the Japanese edition. Oh, I got – I wrote the

translator. Somebody suggested I write the translator, Japanese

translator, and ask him specific questions about the book. And I could tell

something about the Japanese edition that way. And he wrote back. And

he was really

– I thought the Japanese were suppose to be very polite

because I was really wrong. In his first letter he said your book wasn

’t any

good to start with. And he says secondly you confuse Chinese culture

and Japanese culture. Chinese are inferior people and the I Ching is

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Chinese and not Japanese. No Japanese would ever use such Confucian

classics. Only foreigners use those. And he went on like that. I was really

amazed how up front he was in his contempt for the book. But the book is

still in print in Japan. It sold very well. I made almost $30 dollars, $35

dollars off it over a ten year period. I once got a check for 40 cents and

Scott had taken 2 cents out. There were 42 cents. It was a book that sold

in Tanganyika or someplace like that, really. No kidding. One copy. And

my royalty is 42 cents and Scott took out 2 cents and sent me a check for

40 cents. And do you know that I was so broke I cashed it. I wrote dirty

words on the back of it for a long time, you know, I wasn

’t going to

caXXXXX. Finally I went up to the 7-11 and bought a man handler meat

pie or something, hand over a 40 cent check, royalty check. I

’m tell ya -

Mike: And they took it?

Phil: Oh, they kind of laughed at me. But they always laughed at me at

the 7-11 anyways because my checks always bounced. At least this

check didn

’t bounce, being how it was Scott’s check. One time four guys

from the 7-11 showed up at the front door with $285 dollars worth of bad

checks that I

’d written to the 7-11. They said, you’ve got until 5 o’clock to

make them good or you

’re going to the D.A.’s office. They said, you’re

going to get in the car now and we

’re going to ride around till 5 o’clock.

And we did. And I borrowed it from my insurance agent; State Farm

insurance agent loaned me the money to pay them. That

’s the life of the

writer. Does that give you an insight

– I’m laughing now. I wasn’t laughing

that day.

Mike: And the next book you

’ve got coming out Phil is A Scanner Darkly?

Phil: Yeah.

Mike: Anything like the Cordwainer Smith

’s scanners or -

Phil: I didn

’t know anybody used that in a title. What does that mean?

Mike:

“Scanners live in vain,” one of Cordwainer Smith’s first SF stories.

Phil: Suffering succotash. Does that mean I

’ve got to change my title?

Mike: I don

’t think so. He’s dead.

Phil: No, that isn

’t the issue at hand. Well, I know he’s dead. That wasn’t

even his name. No, A Scanner Darkly is from Paul

’s sees through a glass

darkly.

Mike: Ah.

Phil: It

’s the story about a guy who becomes a narcotics agent and then

begins to narc on himself. He rigs up a scanner, an infra-red scanner, in

his own home. And while he

’s in the home he feels he’s being watched.

And then when he goes to the safe house he watches reels and reels of

tape, video hologram tape

– it’s set in the future – of what he was doing in

the house and he

’s so spaced out by the dope he’s been taking as an

undercover agent that he doesn

’t know he’s narcing on himself. He thinks

he

’s two different guys. And when his superiors point out to him that he’s

really the same guy that he

’s been reporting on, he just slides into a

terrible rage and they fire him. And then he

’s got to come off the dope

because he can

’t afford to buy it anymore because he didn’t have any

more money. And his brain is all burned out. And Judy-Lyn del Rey helped

me put this book back together so that it made more sense. And one of

the things that I wrote was this funny suicide scene. I really think there

should be more funny suicide things. I think that it

’s a topic of great

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humor. And this is it. It

’s very short and it’s in the book and it’s self

explanatory, I hope. I hope the whole book makes sense. Judy says it

makes sense now. So we

’ll have the first Phil Dick novel that makes

sense. The scene goes as follows:

“Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more

depressed by what was happening to everybody he knew,

decided finally to off himself. There was no problem, in the

circles where he hung out, in putting an end to yourself:

you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them

with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the

hook so no one would interrupt you.

The planning part had to do with the artifacts you wanted

found on you by later archeologists. So they

’d know from

which stratum you came. And also could piece together where

your head had been at at the time you did it.

He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer

than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the

same time required to get that many reds. He would be found

lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand

’s The

Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood

superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered

by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the

cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict

the system and achieve something by his death, over and

above what the death itself achieved. Actually, he was not

as sure in his mind what the death achieved as what the two

artifacts achieved; but anyhow it all added up, and he began to

make ready, like an animal sensing its time has come and

acting out its instinctive programming, laid down by nature,

when its inevitable end was near.

At the last moment (as end-time closed in on him) he

changed his mind on a decisive Issue and decided to drink

the reds down with a connoisseur wine instead of Ripple or

Thunderbird, so he set off on one last drive, over to Trader

Joe

’s, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of

1971 Modavi Cabernet Sauvignon, which set him back almost

thirty dollars

— all he had.

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe,

drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating

his favorite page of The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex, which

showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside

his bed, lay down with the Any Rand book and unfinished protest

letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not,

although he kept remembering the girl being on top, and then, with

a glass of the Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once.

After that, the deed being one, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book

And the letter on his chest, and waited.

However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates,

as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type

he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the

market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to

hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life.

Always ripped off. He had to face the fact

– considering how many of

the capsules he had swallowed

– that he was in for some trip.

The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was

standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.

The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking

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clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an

enormous scroll.

“You’re going to read me my sins,” Charles Freck said.

The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.

Freck said, lying helpless on his bed,

“and it’s going to take a

hundred thousand hours.

Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from

between dimensions said,

“We are no longer in the mundane

universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as

‘space’ and ‘time’ no longer apply to you. You have been elevated

to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly,

in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.

Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could

take back the last half-hour of his life.

A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with

the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening

to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade,

when he was six years old.

Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.

The year he had discovered masturbation.

He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high

being with its endless scroll reading on and on.

“And next –” it was saying. Charles Freck thought, at least I

got a good wine.

Mike: Oh, that

’s marvelous.

Phil: So, I just stuck that in. She didn

’t ask for that. This thing that I read,

a guy told me that happened to him.

Mike: Really?

Phil: Yeah. That he had bought barbituates, what he thought were

barbituates and everything there is exactly what happened to the guy,

except the particular artifacts that he had. I forgot what he had, a can

opener or something. He was going to do it for the archeologists, you

know. He expected them to find him thousands

– I don’t know what made

him think that. Well, I guess I do, because it was 800 pounds of

psychedelics that he took. He still didn

’t know where he was. But that’s

what happened to him, he hallucinated. The cops found him under a

bush. He was very fortunate. He was outdoors. And a police car drove by.

And he

’s lying under a bush, with a hundred pounds of psychedelics in

his tum-tum and his bloodstream, seeing creatures from between the

dimensions. And the police car saw him and they leaped right out and

grabbed him and took him to the hospital, just drove him right to the

hospital. So, if like he had done it inside, like my character did

– this

character is never seen again in the book, I just realized. We assume

he

’s still going to be there hallucinating. This guy told me if he’d done it in

his bedroom instead of under a bush

– that was the one thing that saved

him was the cops came. I mean like I

’m anti-cop all the time but I think to

myself there is an example of where you really could use a cop car

coming by. The guy couldn

’t get up or talk or anything. He couldn’t tell

them what he had taken or anything. The worst aspect to suicide is

where you get into it and you can

’t get back out and you change your

mind. Like people who do it with automobile exhausts, they turn into a

vegetable. Somebody drags them out of the car and saves them but

they

’ve burned out all their brain cells from the carbon monoxide.

Mike: Didn

’t you tell me when you were on the show before, didn’t you tell

me you had worked in counseling in a situation like that where you were

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dealing with drug cases, OD

’s and so forth for a long time?

Phil: Yeah.

Mike: That has really got to be one of the grimmest parts of dealing with

humanity. When you see them in that condition, in that state -

Phil: Well, A Scanner Darkly is about this, Mike. It

’s, you know, I tried to

find the ultimate ironies in the drug world. And the ultimate irony would be,

like I remember in the old days when you were underage in a bar with a

fake I.D. drinking, being real grown up, that a guy would come in the bar

and he

’d order milk and he’d be a cop because he couldn’t drink on duty.

Even if he

’s a plain clothes cop, he was not allowed to order whiskey. So

all the underaged people get up and leave the bar right away as soon as

somebody came in and ordered ginger-ale. They just

– we all leave the

bar. But undercover narcotics agents, they have to take dope to be

undercover narcotics agents, I guess. I mean, I figured that if they blow

their cover they

’re going to get offed, you see. So I presumed that, like if

everybody lights up a joint and there

’s a narc sitting there he’s going to

have to light up a joint. He can

’t say, no, I’m only allowed to drink ginger-

ale. Because in those circles they

’re going to run over, back over him with

their car. So, that

’s an ultimate irony and then the dope that the guy takes

burns his brain out and I just tried to pile

– see how far you could push the

terrible tragedies of the dope world. And it would be where this guy is

reporting on himself and he

’s too burned out to know the difference any

more. And even when they tell him, I mean, I saw

– I remember one thing

I saw when I use to hang around with dopers. This guy took me to meet

this dude who had a lot of money. And there was this dude all he could do

was juggle three balls in the air, you know, toss it up and catch them. And

I thought, gee, what a hebephrenic type. The guy

’s about 30 years old and

all he can do is stand around all day juggling these three balls and kind of

smile a lot. And I thought, I guess, I mean that

’s really too bad, probably

moron level. And then I pulled a book off of, out of the bookshelf and it

was Spinoza. And the guy had his bookplate thing on the colophon page

and he had underlined parts. At one time in other words he

’d had a

brilliant mind. And I could look at the guy standing juggling three balls. I

said. this guy burned his brain on dope, right. And my friend says, yes he

did. He use to be

– in fact he’s got 3 million dollars. He’s got everything in

the world. And there

’s nothing left of him, nothing left. You can’t even ask

him what he took. He doesn

’t even know what he took. He couldn’t even

tell you what he took. And if you held up the book of Spinoza to him he

wouldn

’t even recognize it. It’s worse than Flowers For Algernon, you

know, in a way. I couldn

’t, I just, I said, I want to get out of here man. I

want to get out of here. I don

’t want to see this. Like, look at the Spinoza.

It was very difficult to read Spinoza. That

’s probably – Spinoza is the

hardest philosopher to read, really. And the guy had underlined parts that

meant a lot to him. And there he is juggling his three balls. He can

’t even

do that. And I says, holy goodness and a lot of other things I said when it

began to come to my attention. And I talked to Avram Davidson

’s ex-wife,

Grania Davidson, about that. She did a short story about that and beat me

to it in a short story. I hope we don

’t overlap too much. But her husband,

Steve Davis, is a doctor. And he came up with this idea, which I was

toying around with, that would be lead poisoning in the air from car

exhausts. That a whole city of people could burn out their brains on the

lead toxins in the atmosphere and nobody would know it. Like even the

doctors wouldn

’t know it because they were inhaling the stuff. And he said

this really could happen. He said, like it would start out with the doctor

finds a hypodermic, you never leave it around. And he would think to

himself there

’s something wrong. And Steve Davis wasn’t a writer and

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Grania wrote a short story which I never read. But she and I talked over

this idea and I was in the hospital after that. Forget what I had. Oh, a

girlfriend of mine was in the hospital and I went to visit her and by god

there was a hypodermic lying on the television set beside her. And I

thought, you know this is exactly what Steve Davis was talking about. I

mean, maybe everybody, this is in Marin County

– maybe everybody in

Marin County from the car exhaust and dope has now got to the point

where they

’re all walking around sideways and nobody knows the

difference. And in Scanner they

’re all turning on. They’re all, nobody

knows anything anymore. And it

’s a terrible thing. Like Tom Disch wrote

Camp Concentration which I think we discussed when we were on the air

before which I

’ve always felt was one of the greatest science fiction

novels ever written where everybody gets very brilliant from getting

syphilis. I always meant to ask Tom Disch where he got the idea to get

syphilis made you brilliant although he told me peripherally that Thomas

Mann had syphilis, in fact tertiary syphilis, and that the more his brain

burned out the more brilliant he got. And I was going to say the next time I

saw Tom Disch, well you

’re wrong about that, you know, because Camp

Concentration posits that syphilis will speed up your mentational process.

It doesn

’t at all. You can check the opening of Breakfast Of Champions

where Vonnegut describes seeing peritics walking around and the guy

can

’t even step off the curb. He doesn’t even know when they get to the

curb. Their foot comes up and they fall down. That

’s really what tertiary

syphilis

– I don’t know where Disch got, I mean where Mann/Disch got

that idea. But I think my book is sadder than Camp Concentration, in a

way.

Mike: Do you find yourself doing a consistent universe from book to

book? I mean, not like Man In The High Castle, obviously, but where you

do have a book set in 1981 or 2011. Are they essentially the same

universe or does it -

Phil: Well, I didn

’t think they were but somebody said that they are all

essentially the same universe, that my basic postulates are always the

same.

Mike: Which comes first for you, situations, characters or do they, are

they sort of interleaved and you can

’t tell?

Phil: Well, the first thing is the idea, which is a pure idea. And the next

thing is the characters who will be confronted by an environment based

on the idea. That is, you create an environment which is a kind of a

special effects mock-up of an idea. You translate it from an idea into a

world. And then, but then you have to have the people who must live in

that world. And if my books all have a consistency it

’s because my ideas

interlace and interact with each other. And I always try to find somebody

who

’s the victim of the idea and somebody who is the master of the idea.

So you have a bifurcated society always with the loser, you know, and the

winner. Somebody

’s going to make it off the idea and somebody’s going

to be victimized by the idea. Suppose we use pretzels for money, as an

example. And all the people who own bakeries would probably

– instead

of a president we

’d have the chief baker. See what I mean, and then

there

’s another guy who has a dietary deficiency. He’s got to eat pretzels

or he

’ll die. And so whenever he’s paid off at the end of the month he has

to eat the pretzels instead of using them to buy things with. So they give

him his months pay and it

’s in a papersack, a little white paper bag, like

you get pretzels in. And he eats the pretzels on the way home and then

he realizes that now he can

’t pay any of his bills. But his system requires

the salt in the pretzels or something like that. That

’s -

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Mike: Copyright 1976, Philip K. Dick.

Phil: I don

’t know, man, science fiction’s become very much like a silly

putty world, in trying to define it. Publishers Weekly in their questionnaire

that they sent, the first question is what do you mean when you use the

term science fiction? And I thought, well, I could spend the rest of my life

answering that one question.

Mike: Who was it that defined it by saying science fiction is what I mean

when I point at something -

Phil: Oh, well that

’s Wittgenstein originally and his idea of definitions by

families of connectives, like if you look up the word

“door” in the Meriam

and Websters three, the big new Meriam and Websters. Look up

something simple like

“door”. A door is a thing standing in a horizontal

position as distinguished, or like a chair from a shelf. The hardest thing in

the world to define is the simplest objects. Like that, what is a door -

Mike: Define a spiral staircase without using your hands.

Phil: It

’s a helical spiral, no, that’s a tautology. They asked, how do you

define science fiction? I finally decided I would answer. It took me ten

pages to answer such, in all. Ten pages to answer how do you define

science fiction; what is the present state of science fiction, and what is its

future? It took me ten pages, and then some little questions like who do

you think is any good? But the basic questions what is it, where does it

stand now, and where is it going to took me ten pages to answer.

Mike: Who do you think is any good?

Phil: In the field? Well, most of the people I think are good are apparently

dropping out of the field, so if I say they are good, then they would deny

that they were science fiction writers. Tom Disch, Barry Malzberg, Phil

Farmer -

Mike: Silverberg?

Phil: I don

’t like Bob’s stuff at all. I’ve never read anything by Silverberg

that I liked. I don

’t like his stuff. I don’t like Harlan Ellison’s stuff. I like

Spinrad

’s stuff a lot. Katherine Kurtz, I like her stuff. She writes fantasy, I

guess. She

’s also very pretty. Hi Kathy. I sure like your books. What are

they about? She writes fantasy for Ballantine.

Mike: LeGuin?

Phil: Well, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, you said it, not me, Gesagts in

Luther

’s translation, Beis du der juder Konig. And then Jesus answers,

Sie sagts, you said it, not me. If that

’s what you say Pontius that’s up to

you. You

’re the emperata.

Mike: I

’ve got to go wash my hands, excuse me.

Phil: That was, you know, he didn

’t get off the hook by answering that

way. Pilate got off the hook by

– I can not answer about Ursula’s stuff. I

really don

’t understand it. Her whole body of writing seems to me to be

like a sermonette. The television station use to sign off with a sermonette,

a kind of political sermonette, all hopped up in gussy dove with a kind of

literary style. But it

’s all from the Poli Sci department of the University of

California in Berkeley as far as I can make out when you strip the style

away.

Mike: You beat out Ursula LeGuin for the Campbell Award in 1975. Flow

My Tears, The Policeman Said won the award losing to The

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Dispossessed which that year won the Hugo and the Nebula. The whole

awards thing, is that essentially a game that the field plays or does it

really have meaning?

Phil: Well -

Mike: I say this to a man who has at least one Hugo.

Phil: Yeah, well, when I learned I

’d won the John W. Campbell Award my

first reaction was to refuse the award because I was present when the

first, when the award was given out in Fullerton. And it was a shambles

and a mockery and a disgrace.

Mike: Yeah, I was there too.

Phil: You were there too? I was so upset I went up and made a formal

complaint to the university about the whole ceremonies. In fact I have

never gone anywhere and spoken anywhere since that thing. I was so

ashamed of every single person up there on that panel. Ashamed for

those students who came there to hear us answer their relevant

questions with our relevant answers. And they asked relevant questions

and all we did was make fools of ourselves. And I never have ever spoken

in public since then. I have become a complete recluse. I

’ve turned down

every speaking engagement that

’s ever been offered me since. Then the

next year I won the John W. Campbell award and immediately I was

going to refuse it. And I was all set to

– I got very sick with the flu just

thinking about having won. I was

– my whole barfed up feeling came back

that I

’d had the year before when it was in Fullerton. But then Harry

Harrison called me up and he described the awards ceremony in

England. It was given at St. John

’s College at Oxford. And he said it isn’t

like it was when it was given in Fullerton. He said it was not a shambles

and a mockery and a disgrace. And he said

– and so I finally decided that

it was an honor. But I was very reluctant to accept it. And I refused to

pose for publicity pictures at the University of California at Fullerton with

my award. I refused to do it. I refused to pick up the award, in fact. I

wouldn

’t even pick it up. I made them bring it over to me and I wouldn’t be

photographed with the award or with Dr. McNelly. I wouldn

’t have anything

to do with any of the PR hype. I told them I was sick. Told them I had

kidney trouble. But so, anyway, they brought the award over and then

Time Magazine interviewed me and they photographed me and I was

looking through the thing, it

’s a moebius strip. Have you ever seen it?

Mike: No.

Phil: Well, it

’s a moebius strip. It looks like something you’d use to prop

up the axle of your car with if you

’re changing a tire and couldn’t find a

regular bumper jack. And, I don

’t know Mike what to think about these

awards. Like I

’m ambivalent. It’s nice that I won because it means that

Flow My Tears is going to be reissued again because it got the award. It

means the book will go back into print next November with a new cover

and the fact that I got the award. So like I just split right down the middle.

My left hand votes yes, my right hand votes no on the value of the

awards. It

’s like aw shucks fellows, gee whiz, you shouldn’t have done it,

but don

’t take it back. I was very happy when I got my original Hugo

Award. They never told me I got it. I didn

’t find out until my agent wrote to

congratulate me. And I was very excited and I considered it a great honor.

But I think now the awards have become

– what is it they give in Canada?

They give, there

’s something, the Elron, or something. It’s a lemon or

something like that. It

’s for the worst science fiction novel of the year and

– how do you accept an award like that. What do you say when they give

it?

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Mike: Harvard does the same thing with the Lampoon award.

Phil: Yes, yes.

Mike: Is the field

– well, look, a couple of times you have compared the

field to silly putty. Is Gresham

’s Law in operation? Is the bad SF or sci-fi

driving out the good? Is there less good stuff being printed? Is Sturgeon

’s

Law still in force?

Phil: I really don

’t know, Mike. I really don’t know. I have a great anxiety

about the future of science fiction. And when I wrote to Publishers Weekly

I took a very negative view of the future of science fiction. I contrasted the

hopes and dreams that we

’d had for it with now people writing about

sword fights and little fellows with fuzzy turned-up feet. What is it, Draino

and Fredo and other -

Mike: Dildo -

Phil: Yeah. You can

’t parody science fiction anymore because it’s

becoming a parody of itself. You know people think science fiction

consists of guys putting on funny looking old fashioned costumes and

whacking each other over the head with swords. And that

’s not science

fiction. Science fiction is stuff like 1984, to me, dystopias.

Mike: Like Man In The High Castle, dystopias?

Phil: Yeah. The novel of ideas is still the cardinal thing in science fiction.

All we

’ve got now is tedious sermonettes masquerading as literature,

Adventure, Space Opera. I had a strange experience. I played over a X-1

cassette that somebody sent me for one of my X-1 shows that NBC did

in 1954. 1954. And it was indistinguishable from the latest science fiction

like Space 1999, is that what it

’s called? And Star Trek. Mine was as

modern in 1954 as what they

’re doing now.

Mike: What one was yours?

Phil: Well, the one I played over was

“Colony.” Remember, we listened to

that tape? And we marveled that in 1954, I didn

’t do – I don’t take credit for

the radio treatment of it. Somebody else did it. But what he was doing in

’54, treating my story, was as modern as what they’re doing now.

Mike: Well -

Phil: You wouldn

’t know it was done in ’54. There was nothing to give it

away.

Mike: We

’re going to find out. Because, if we have that tape of X-1 called

“Colony” we’re going to run it tonight.

Phil: Well, I

’ll give you my cassette.

Mike: We may have it. There

’s a fellow named Bob Borgan who’s given

Hour 25 like, oh god, I must have 50 radio shows Dimension X, X-1, etc. If

that one is in there, I think it is, we

’ll run it.

Phil: Yeah, I have

– there were two of mine, “Colony” and “The

Defenders.

” And it was just scary to listen to it and look on the date, you

know,

’54, and realize here we are in 1976 and we’ve made no steps

forward. You know we

’re still, it’s still as follows – Captain, there’s

something hideous on the viewscreen. Captain says, turn on the

laserbeams. And then a voice comes out of no where, all looking under

the seat cushions to see where the voice comes from and it

’s talking

through an echo chamber and it says, I can read your thoughts. I need

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your assistance. And they say, it

’s a ruse. Get the eagles going. Zzzt zzzt

zzzt. The eagles take off. We know this is a ruse. This is the Captain

talking from the control room. We know it

’s all a ruse. You don’t need our

help. You

’re going to zap us as soon as we take off to zap you first. And,

you know, nothing has progressed. I am a superior being. I am a kindly

old fellow. You can believe everything I

’m telling you because I’m really a

computer and would a computer lie. And I thought, oh my god I just saw

that on the air Saturday night and I says that

’s HAL talking again. That’s ol’ 

HAL, you know, shining everybody on. My name is HAL. Would I lie?

Would a computer lie? Herb Jaffe, he has an option on Do Androids

Dream Of Electric Sheep? And I don

’t dare bad mouth his silly movies. If

you

’re listening Herb Jaffe I love your money. But you sure write lousy

scripts, I

’ll tell ya, man. You’re back, you’re a Neanderthal man is what

you are. You

’re back in the Stone Age. You’re back with George Pal.

You

’re, I don’t want you to make a movie out of my book. I read the

screenplay that they wrote for Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

And it was a combination of Steve Reeves and Maxwell Smart. And I said,

the producer, Robert Jaffe, Herb Jaffe

’s son, flew down to Fullerton to talk

with me about it, because I didn

’t think it was a final shooting script. I

thought it was the rough draft. And I, he, I says I

’m going to beat you up

right here in the airport, I says you

’re going to drag me down with you

guys and ruin my career if you make a movie out of my book. He says,

you mean it

’s that bad? And I said, yeah, and we went on. Finally he says,

you mean you wrote that book seriously? He says, you science fiction

writers take your writing seriously? I says, seriously enough to throw you

right out of my car. I said, that

’s how serious we take it. I said, I’m going to

buy it back from you. I

’m going to give you the $2,000 dollar option money

back. And he says, you

’re serious aren’t you? And we had about a four-

hour rap session which was very productive. They didn

’t make the movie

unless they write a decent script. It was really terrible. It was the worst

script. It was

– how bad was it? I’ll tell you how bad it was. You could

have stopped the first person on the street and asked him to write a script

and he could have done a better job, really. And there

’s a guy I know

who

’s into screenplays says it would also cost about six million dollars to

make it which is another thing.

Mike: You wrote a screenplay of one of your own things.

Phil: Yeah, I wrote a good screenplay. I wrote a really good one of Ubik.

And it seems to be the fate that the better the screenplay

– boy, there’s

Gresham

’s Law. I don’t know how it applies to science fiction writing in

general but it sure applies to screenplays, you know, that the bad

screenplays force the good out. If given a choice they will make a movie

out of a bad screenplay and they

’ll throw the good screenplay back at the

author.

Mike: If I remember, The Rolling Stone piece, that screenplay you did of

Ubik is currently bouncing around Europe trying to get finances. Is that

still the case or is that -

Phil: Yeah, it

’s still optioned and they’re still trying to get financing for it.

It

’s not the director’s fault. He spent all the money he had, Jean-Pierre

Gorin, and he couldn

’t get the financial backing. He couldn’t get the

millions of dollars that it would cost. And he got really sick. He got sick

with liver trouble and he had to give up being a director and go teach

down in San Diego. He just about died trying to get a movie made out of

that. But I wrote a really great

– I must say, I wish you’d – I’d like to read it

over the air sometime. There

’s the funniest scenes in that screenplay that

aren

’t in the book that I added that I went back to the old silent film days

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where these

– you know, it’s a tragedy. That’s the one thing I am bitter

about. If I had written a novel with that stuff in it I wouldn

’t have any trouble

selling it. But I can

’t sell that screenplay. It’s too bad.

Mike: We are close to running out of time. Let me ask you if there

’s

anything in particular that we have not covered that you do want to get on,

that you want to talk about?

Phil: Well, let me just make one statement. And that is that I hope people

will come into the science fiction field and write science fiction and not

listen to people like Silverberg and Malzberg and Harlan Ellison and

anybody else you want to name, Vonnegut, who say either they don

’t

write science fiction or they never did write science fiction or they will not

write it in the future. I mean science fiction is a lot of fun to write. And it

’s

worth all the bad financial breaks to do it. I mean I don

’t regret for one –

well, that

’s not true. I regret it when they turn off my electricity. I go

through periods where

– when I sent off the manuscript of Flow My Tears,

for instance, to my agent, I didn

’t have enough money to send it first

class. I had to send it by parcel post, I mean third class mail. I didn

’t have

money for first class postage. That

’s how poor I was. And that’s just —

city when you get to the point when you can

’t pay the postage to mail a

manuscript off after it

’s already been bought. Doubleday had already

bought it on the basis of the outline. So, I mean, it

’s the artist in the garret

again. You know, he

’s going to starve his ass off if he writes science

fiction. Nobody will give him any, they

’ll flip him off every time. He will

never get any recognition. He will never get any money. But he will have a

hell of a lot of fun. And he ought to know what he

’s in for. If he wants to go

in it for the money, let him go elsewhere but if he loves to write science

fiction let him be prepared for what

’s going to happen to him. He’s going

to get no money and he

’s going to get no recognition. And he’s going to

die in the gutter. But he might die happier and at more peace with himself

than somebody who

’s going to make fifteen thou doing something he may

not want to do. I mean, do what you want to do. I mean, these people are

stupid if they think they

’re in it for money. Why did they get in it in the first

place? Who ever promised them a lot of money? Where was Ellison

promised a lot of money? Where was Malzberg promised a lot of money?

Where did it say when Malzberg was born that he was promised fame

and money? You know, it

’s like his birthright, you know, his patrimony.

Nonsense. We

’re lucky that they publish us at all, in a way, you know.

They could actually abolish the field of science fiction. And then we really

would have to write something else. We

’re lucky that category still exists.

I mean, let

’s hear it for the science fiction writers who are coming along

I mean, let

’s hear it for the science fiction writers who are coming along

and still write science fiction and flip the bird to the people who want

money.

Mike: The words of Philip K. Dick. This is Mike Hodel for Hour 25.

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