Part 14 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview

James Holmes:  Who do you think are the leading science fiction writers now?

Philip K Dick:  In terms of their potential or their present ability or their past ability.

James Holmes: For whatever.

Philip K Dick:  Well the one things that really matters is present material and the possible future stuff.  Roger Zelazny will outlast me first of all, as far as what he is doing and what he will be doing, without any doubt.  After that it’s all who won the other prize, the dictionary, the pirated one, made on Formosa. Outside of Roger, well Norman Spinrad is very good, and Ron Goulart will be better and better.  Calvin Demmon is really strange like he writes really short stuff, like half a page, but it’s very good, now he’s going to write a novel, be a page.  He has a lot of potential. 

James Holmes: What do you think about the old….

Philip K Dick:  There’s another one I forget.

James Holmes: Like Heinlein is considered the dean of science fiction.

Philip K Dick:  That’s because he tried to fossilize it back at the time of the American Civil War, when it was a fight between the people with the right colored skins, brains, hair and general organs and those that either didn’t have them or have them in the wrong places.  Things have changed since then. He was a mess.  Did you read Panshin’s articles on him?

James Holmes: I don’t know.

Philip K Dick: Remember how Panshin ended those articles, he said it is unfortunate that the superman of tomorrow must stand with his back against a solid wall for fear of certain things happening to him.  I thought you know, I never even had that problem in high school his superman of tomorrow shouldn’t really worry about those things. I though Panshin really summed it up in that. He said a lot more but that one last sentence really seemed. 

James Holmes: My impression was Panshin was being rather pro Heinlein like.

Philip K Dick:  I know, I talked to Panshin a couple years ago, and I quoted that and he looked at me real funny and he asked me I put that in there, and I said yes, Alex you did.  So he said I’m going to mail an unpublished chapter of my future book of criticism about your writing and mail it right back after you read it. I received it, read it and never mailed it back, it listed two books of mine as being good, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and I think The Man In the High Castle, or something like that, and he said that they were really important books and his description of why would make me think that he really did not approve of them but that in his long essays, he felt, now I don’t know if this is true, this is my subjective feeling.  He never said this, but that he could not really come out and say what the thought was wrong with Heinlein. I only say this because I’ve talked with Alex about it, I’ve corresponded with him and I’ve read unpublished stuff that he’s written, not about Heinlein, but about my stuff.  I’ve felt that he felt the thing was too formidable to openly denounce and connection with that have you read some of the European responses on it, like in Austria.  There’s a tremendous uneasiness in Europe about Heinlein’s stuff, Heinlein wrote later in his life for adolescents deliberately as a propaganda thing, he stated that he wanted to influence the youth of tomorrow.  Starship Trooper, did you read that?

James Holmes: Yes.

Philip K Dick: What did you think of that?

James Holmes: Overall reaction, was a well written book but I’ll disagree with Panshin.

Phil: Well I’ll tell you, I’ve read Heinlein from the time he first started appearing in print which was about the time of van Vogt, and he wrote some marvelous things, he was definitely at one time, not only the finest science fiction writer writing, but really in some ways created modern American science fiction.

James Holmes: His short stories are the best. 

Philip K Dick: Yea, some of the longer one, like Up By His Boot Straps, some of the fantasies he wrote, did you know that he wrote some marvelous fantasies and unknown world book length fantasies. Some really marvelous things, and then something really strange began to happen, 1943 he wrote a novel called Gulf and out of nowhere there was a different Heinlein, I don’t know what happened, I’ve studied that god damn thing over and over again, fortunately it disappeared into obscurity, but it was something else. Remember the first thing he wrote that struck me as odd was his analysis of The Future Compliment of a Spaceship, remember he said the Negros will carry because that’s all they really do, and they do it very well, I mean this is a favorable and they do a marvelous job at carrying the traits, the Japanese will cook because they do a marvelous job at cooking, and this went on through all the races and in the cabin, holding the telescope will be the white man because he is very good at guiding, steering, controlling the ship and telling everybody else what to do, and all these people are good people and all their place. I thought you know this is stated in a positive way but maybe some of the Negros could cook the food for awhile and sort of play around with that and then Gulf came up, and Gulf was the study of what he called The Monkey Men versus the real men and there were a lot of monkey men and there were only a few real men. This droned on for 65 to 70 thousand words and it was just an abomination, and from then on he was writing really strange stuff, really creepy stuff. 

James Holmes:  What about Stranger in a Strange Land and his politics.

Philip K Dick:  Stranger in a Strange Land I thought was the worst book I have ever read in my life.  It was, the worst thing I can say about it was dull and when Heinlein gets dull, like you said about his politics, I disagree with his politics too, that would not be enough to stop me from reading his stuff because I disagree with most people’s politics, but now Heinlein is dull, and the title was cribbed out of the I Ching, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, in the Wanderer, a stranger in a strange land must not be gruff or overbearing, he must have humility I felt when I read Heinlein’s title, this is what Heinlein does not have, he should have read the rest of the sentence. God that was a terrible book, what was that about anyway, I read it and it’s something about a guy comes back from Mars and has gills or something.

James Holmes:  It’s about Jesus Christ 

Philip K Dick:  I figured, he had gills too and somebody said that Jesus Christ was a mushroom, and that’s much better than anything Heinlein ever said in Stranger in a Strange Land, don’t you think?

James Holmes: I agree with you.

Philip K Dick:  The guy who said that, now he’s who we should read. 

James Holmes: Right, of course if he has written it.

Philip K Dick: Well if he wrote that or said that, that’s enough. 

James Holmes:  What do you think of the ten, you know just list off what you would suggest other people to read which you might consider to be the ten best science fiction books?

Continued in:

Part 15 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview