methods that would serve for thirty-odd years. In “Adjustment Team” and “Autofac” we begin to meet the Dick of the great sixties novels, his characters defined by how they endure more than by any triumph over circumstance.“Upon the Dull Earth” presents an eerie path-not-taken into Gothic fantasy, one that reads like a Shirley Jackson outtake. Then there is the Martian-farmer-émigré mode, which always showed Dick at his best: “Precious Artifact” and “A Game of Unchance.” Later, in “Faith of Our Fathers,” we encounter the Dick of his late masterpiece A Scanner Darkly, working with the I Ching at one elbow and the Physicians' Desk Reference at the other. “Faith of Our Fathers,” together with “The Electric Ant” and “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts,” offers among the most distilled and perfect statements of Dick's career: black-humor politics melting away to Gnostic theology, theology to dire solipsism, solipsism to despair, then love. And back again.
If Dick thrived on the materials of SF, he was less than thrilled with the fate of being only an SF writer. Whether or not he was ready for the world, or the world ready for him, he longed for a respectable recognition, and sought it variously and unsuccessfully throughout his life. In fact, he wrote eight novels in a somber realist mode during the 1950s and early 1960s, a shadow career known mainly to the agents who failed to place the books with various New York publishers. It's stirring to wonder what Dick might have done with a wider professional opportunity, but there's little doubt that his SF grew more interesting for being fed by the frustrated energies of his “mainstream” ambition. Possibly, too, a restless streak in Dick's personality better suited him for the outsider-artist status he tasted during his lifetime. Dick was obsessed with stigma, with mutation and exile, and with the recurrent image of a spark of life or love arising from unlikely or ruined places: robot pets, discarded appliances, autistic children. SF was Dick's ruined site. Keenly engaged with his own outcast identity, he worked brilliantly from the margins (in this regard, it may be possible to consider the story “The King of the Elves” as an allegory of Dick's career). “Sci-Fi Writer” became a kind of identity politics for Dick, as did “Drug Burnout” and “Religious Mystic”—these during the period when identity politics weren't otherwise the province of white American males. Here, from an introduction written for Golden Man, a collection of stories assembled in 1980, Dick reminisces:
In reading the stories in this volume you should bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley—or especially in Berkeley—people would say, “But are you writing anything serious?” To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most writers, let alone most other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: “To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.” I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity.…So in my head I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at an official city function [Dick had just received an arts medal in France], and the ordeal of the Fifties when Kleo and I lived on ninety dollars a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book, and when we were literally living on dog food. But I think you should know this—specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot
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