Sometime in the early ‘80s, when “My Sharona” sounded fresh and “big hair” meant a beehive hairdo from the ‘50s, I wrote my practice AP English paper on the topic of false perceptions in Philip K Dick’s novel “A Scanner Darkly
.” I’ll never forget the look on Mr. Collar’s face as he handed back the paper, admitting it was well-written, but not the kind of essay that would get me a good score on the actual test. The people grading the exams were looking for more literary topics and science fiction just wasn’t literature.At the time I had discovered PKD only a year earlier with “Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along after the Bomb
,” and nearly every other book I read for the next twelve months was by Dick. I’d devoured “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” and the Starlog articles about “Blade Runner,” which was still in pre-production, had me jabbering with excitement. Dick himself was still alive, although he’d die of a stroke a few months before the first movie ever based on his work was released. There was a certain sad irony to his death because the early 80s were both his best and worst times, his star was simultaneously rising and falling. The back of his short story collection “The Golden Man
” proclaims it as “The first major science fiction book of the 1980’s!” (It was published February, 1980). “Philip K. Dick may well be the next SF writer to follow Bradbury and Vonnegut in being ‘discovered’ by the mass audience!” Along with the movie “Blade Runner,” plans were in the works for movies based on “We can remember it for you wholesale” and “The Second Variety” (you may know them as “Total Recall” and “Screamers”). Yet, according to interviews he had a distrust of many people who admired him, and in the midst of all this still had money problems. According to the introduction of “Golden Man” in one month in 1977 he made only nine dollars.Yet, the troubles of the author himself barely registered to me. I only knew that I had found someone who could take the world, turn it inside out, make me feel for the characters, and then invert everything again, all the while telling a dang good story. Given that, how could the works of PKD fail to be literature? I had read other science fiction in school: “Brave New World,” “1984”, “Animal Farm”, short stories like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Shirley Jackson’s stories “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” and “The Lottery.” As we were taught in class these stories had themes, symbolism, and strong characters, and they were worthy of study. As far as my high school intellect could discern, Dick’s works were on par with these stories. They also had another draw: the suggestion of a shifting reality, a realm where the world could suddenly change our viewpoint, where one illusion was torn away like a wet Kleenex to be replaced with a new illusion of reality.
Dick liked to refer to the I Ching, the Book of Changes, quite a bit in his stories. Perhaps by looking at how the world has changed, and how change came to the work of Philip K Dick we can determine whether it can now be considered literary.
Continue reading with "A Minority Report Report."
I enjoyed your recall of your first PKD novel - Dr. Bloodmoney. Mine was Eye In The Sky back in 1984. Then... on to the rest of PKD's stories.
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