This is a transcription of an interview with Philip K. Dick

Made on December 23, 1971
The interview is about 2 and ½ hours long.
James Holmes is the interviewer

Introduction

At the date of this interview Phillip K. Dick was 43 years old. He had only a little more than ten years to live. He would die on March 2, 1982 at the age of 53.

Though he had a substantial body of work he was not well known or appreciated in the US. Phillip K. Dick had no idea he would become a cult superstar.

The Interview

Philip K. Dick: Taping– I’m gonna stop– I’m gonna stop talking like that. Talk real talk, like real people do. Of course, see, I can’t– Are you taping?

James Holmes: No, I’m not taping. (I was in fact taping while setting the levels for recording)

Philip K. Dick: I knew it. I talked real talk for nothing.

James Holmes: What’s real talk?

Philip K. Dick: Good evening, ladies and gentleman! We are speaking from Sunny Santa Venetia, the garden spot of the intellectuals of Marin county. That’s real talk.

James Holmes: Test.

Philip K. Dick: Test. Good evening, ladies and gentleman. This is Del Courtney paralyzed from the neck down forever, but still active and friendly, friendly like

James Holmes: There are a few technical problems on my channel, but your channel is perfect.

Philip K. Dick: We’ll just hear the answers than. Oh, like, how about “no.”

James Holmes: Yeah, well. You’ll be happy to know that at the end of the interview, when I go down into my room, I edit the thing and I change all the questions–

Philip K. Dick: Certain questions you edit [laughter].

James Holmes: — so it makes you seem like a complete fool.

[ laughter ]

Philip K. Dick: Like, do you consider yourself an important writer? I certainly do. Changed to– Was Adolf Hitler a great man? I certainly do.

James Holmes: That is the sound of snuff inhaling by Mr. Philip Dick.

Philip K. Dick: K.

James Holmes: What?

Philip K. Dick: Middle initial K.

James Holmes: Philip–

Philip K. Dick: K. Dick.

James Holmes: K. Dick.

Philip K. Dick: Like Robert K. Heinlein.

James Holmes: Is it Robert–

Philip K. Dick: Isaac K.

James Holmes: Is that the way you prefer to be known to the world?

Philip K. Dick: Only legally and professionally.

James Holmes: Oh, only legally. How come you never used a pseudonym?

Philip K. Dick: Because I did once and they ferretted it out. I was Richard Phillipps.

James Holmes: It was Richard Phillipps?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, a brilliant inspiration by somebody else.

James Holmes: [laughter]

Philip K. Dick: Pressed for time, had a deadline– a long work day. [laughter] I thought of the name Ernest Hemingway as a pseudonym, but–

James Holmes: Somebody got it.

Philip K. Dick: No, I figured it wouldn’t sell too well. People would think I had a beard and they wouldn’t buy my books.

James Holmes: I’m a little curious about your writing career. For instance, when did you first start writing?

Philip K. Dick: When I was in the first grade.

James Holmes: And, that was– you know, they immediately grabbed up your work and started publishing you?

Philip K. Dick: Only the teacher.

James Holmes: Oh. When did you first get to– get to the stage to where you felt your work was good enough to be published?

Philip K. Dick: I’ve never felt that, and I mean that sincerely.

James Holmes: Really?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah.

James Holmes: But it gets published anyway, not over your dead body.

Philip K. Dick: No, but I’m pretty passive in general.

James Holmes: [laughter] What was the first book that you ever published?

Philip K. Dick: Solar Lottery.

James Holmes: Solar Lottery and you never published short stories before that, or you–

Philip K. Dick: Oh, sure, yeah. I’ve published all kinds of short stories; hundreds of them.

James Holmes: Hundreds?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, a hundred and twenty two.

James Holmes: A hundred and twenty two, to be exact?

Philip K. Dick: Well, approximately.

James Holmes: Ah.

Philip K. Dick: That’s approximately a hundred and twenty two.

James Holmes: When was–

Philip K. Dick: Could be 4 years or two hundred and fifty.

James Holmes: When was your first work published?

Philip K. Dick: In– Should I lay it on you? Aunt Flo’s column in the Berkeley Gazette in 1942.

James Holmes: In 1942?

Philip K. Dick: Yes

James Holmes: How old were you then?

Philip K. Dick: Well, I’d have to calculate. Let’s see, 20 to 30 – age 10. I was approximately 11.

James Holmes: Eleven years old?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah. Could have been 10 or 13.

James Holmes: Were you paid for that?

Philip K. Dick: Well, in a sense. We got what were called credits, literary credits. Like four literary credits for–

James Holmes: Is that like master points in bridge.

Philip K. Dick: Well, we could trade these in at the end of the year on a funky dictionary, which I never bothered to do. I just pedaled the credits, the literary credits, to my friends–

James Holmes: Who bought–?

Philip K. Dick: — for more literary credits.

James Holmes: Solar Lottery was published when?

Philip K. Dick: I think it was 1955.

James Holmes: 1955?

Philip K. Dick: Approximately.

James Holmes: Did you feel that was your big break?

Philip K. Dick: As far as publishing a first novel, yes.

James Holmes: Yes.

Philip K. Dick: What do you mean my big break? I was already famous. I was famous in 1953. I published 27 short stories, 27 magazine-like stories in 1953.

James Holmes: In 1953? Is that a record?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, it was at the time, yeah. I had stories in seven magazines in one month in June 1953. I went down to the newsstands, and I couldn’t afford to buy the magazines that had the stories in them.

James Holmes: [laughter] Jesus.

Philip K. Dick: But, I got to look at the covers.

James Holmes: Well, since you’ve written so many short stories, I guess we should probably just–

Philip K. Dick: A hundred and twenty two.

James Holmes: — concentrate more on the novels. Could you give us a brief resume of the novels that you’ve written?

Philip K. Dick: What does that mean?

James Holmes: Well, could you just tell us which ones, you know—which ones you’ve published of the novels.

Philip K. Dick: There are 28 of them. I can’t remember all that.

James Holmes: Wow! There are 28 novels?

Philip K. Dick: Or it is 27?

James Holmes: Starting in 1955, going to the present.

Philip K. Dick: Solar Lottery. Yeah, going right on through to A Maze of Death.

James Holmes: Which of those did you like best?

Philip K. Dick: There were several that I liked best.

James Holmes: Which?

Philip K. Dick: How much time do I have?

James Holmes: You have probably two hours.

Philip K. Dick: Well, there were 28 of them that I like best.

[ laughter ]

Philip K. Dick: No, that’s not true. Some of them were terrible. Let me list the ones that were terrible first, they stick in my mind – The World Jones Made, that was the worst; Clans of the Alphane Moon, that was next to worst; The Man Who Japed, that was next; so on and so forth and so forth. There were about three good ones.

James Holmes: Which are the good ones in your opinion?

Philip K. Dick: I’m glad you inserted that clause. The Man in the High Castle, Dr. Bloodmoney, Martian Time-Slip. We have two hours and that’s about it right there.

James Holmes: Which of those– Well, which of all of the novels that you published sold best?

Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle, as far as I know.

James Holmes: And, that’s the one that you received the Nebula Award for?

Philip K. Dick: Hugo Award.

James Holmes: The Hugo Award for, excuse me.

Philip K. Dick: Yes. By the way, that’s been in print for 10 years, which is unusual for paperback.

James Holmes: How many printings has it gone through?

Philip K. Dick: One printing.

James Holmes: One printing?

Philip K. Dick: That’s all one printing. Same cover, same number, same price. One printing. They just keep running it off.

James Holmes: Wow, that’s amazing!

Philip K. Dick: They pay royalties, though.

James Holmes: Do you think that The Man in the High Castle was your best book, the book that you’d like to be remembered by?

Philip K. Dick: Yes.

James Holmes: What were you trying to say in that book?

Philip K. Dick: Exactly what I said.

James Holmes: Which was?

Philip K. Dick: That things could be a lot worse than they are, and even if they were– That is in the book, it’s an alternate present in which Germany and Japan won World War II and sit on the west coast of California here with Japanese occupying this area, that even if were worse, that worse, it would still be livable, there would still be good people and good things would happen. It would still be viable.

James Holmes: Have you ever written for TV?

Philip K. Dick: Not scripts directly. I’ve had adaptations made.

James Holmes: Adaptations made? Do you get paid for adaptations?

Philip K. Dick: You bet your bippy!

James Holmes: Do you get paid well?

Philip K. Dick: No, usual.

James Holmes: The usual. What do you think of the adaptations that TV has made of your works?

Philip K. Dick: I never saw them.

James Holmes: Oh, you never saw them?

Philip K. Dick: I did do some radio script writing for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which I enjoyed very much, and I would have gone right on doing it except they cancelled not only that program, but all dramatic programs on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Just wiped them all out and put on funky music instead– Preparation H commercials, too. I really loved that. I really loved script writing. You write down– The way you do it, you write the name, you say George, and then after that in parentheses it says “loudly” or “softly” or “excruciatingly loudly” or something like that, or “subtly,” and then follows a line of corny dialogue like, “Don’t point that thing at me, you fool,” and that’s the way it looks on paper, and that’s the way a book comes out, but then when they read it over the radio, they put stuff in it. I mean, they put elan in it and verve, you know and stuff in it, and it’s really great. It’s fantastic! I mean, those guys, even the routine, you know– like these were mostly ex soap opera actor and actress types, you know, where the soap operas that support them, and they did a beautiful job on the stuff I wrote. I’ve played the tapes back many times. It’s amazing what they could do, and they were just technical technicians really, you know, functionaries of the station, probably getting paid about the same scale I was, and they did a beautiful job.

James Holmes: I don’t see a TV here in your room. Do you–

Philip K. Dick: That’s right.

James Holmes: Is that a statement of some kind on your part?

Philip K. Dick: No, that’s a statement on the part of other people who like TV sets better than I did. Well, no I won’t say they liked them better. They just liked mine better than I did. I wouldn’t even say that. They just got mine; that’s all.

James Holmes: They just took it?

Philip K. Dick: Well, it’s gone, anyway. (Note: About a month before, his house had been broken into. The thieves ransacked the house taking some of PK Dick’s papers and the television set, He thought they were meth freaks thinking he must have something of value.)

James Holmes: You say you liked writing for radio a lot. Do you think radio is better than the current TV, let’s say?

Philip K. Dick: I don’t know because I don’t have a current TV.

[ laughter ]

Philip K. Dick: I would have written for TV, too, if I could have figured out which camera was camera 3 and camera 3. Camera 3, I believe, it projects downward from overheard, and if you write camera 3 and it’s really camera 2 that projects down, and camera 2 is over there, then the whole thing is shot from the standpoint of the bald head of the main actor and it’s all screwed up, so I could never get it right.

James Holmes: Ah.

Philip K. Dick: I went back to, “Don’t point that thing at me, you fool!”

James Holmes: Over the years, how has your attitude towards your work changed?

Philip K. Dick: It hasn’t changed at all.

James Holmes: Well, has your confidence in your writing changed?

Philip K. Dick: I never had any.

James Holmes: You never had?

Philip K. Dick: Just tenacity. Inability to know when to give up, and a constant rejoicing that I didn’t have to give up as quickly as I thought I would have to. By not knowing how to give up, I was able to keep on going when any sane person would have knuckled under. This was especially true in the beginning. Like before I sold my first story, people said, “You can’t sell a story. Only professionals can sell stories.” Then, after I sold my first one, they said, “That was terrible. You’ll never sell another.” Then, after I sold a whole bunch, they said, “You prolific hack writers just write the same story over and over again,” and so forth, you know, and they were always right, but I just, you know, never paid attention, and I went right on writing.

James Holmes: From what I’ve been able to read, people have been amazed at your versatility. You seem to write– You have your stories in practically every kind of magazine and the stories seem to fit the magazine. Do you do that intentionally?

Philip K. Dick: No. I don’t write for any market at all. Well, I don’t write stories really any much anymore, I write novels now, but, that has always been true that my stuff seems to– When it comes out in a magazine, it looks like it was written for the magazine. I mean, it seems to be that kind of story, but I mean, I used to write them, you know, and I’d send them off. It was sort of a kind of an idiot savant thing on my part. Like, I would write– When I was writing a lot of stories, like I wrote a story every other week for three years, and I would write a really crummy, rotten, lousy story, and I would look at it and I’d say, “That’s perfection, man,” and I’d send it off and it would be snapped up by Planet Stories or Thrilling Stories or Startling Stories, or something like that, and when it would come out, it would look just like it was written for them. Then, the next week I’d write another thing that was what they call a quality story, and I’d say, “Man, that’s perfection,” and I’d send it off and it would get picked up by Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had fairly high literary standards, and it would come out and it would look like I wrote it for them, and I never could tell the difference when I wrote it. When I wrote something, I couldn’t tell if it was any good or not. I’d make it as good as I could and it would vary from really awful to fairly good. The shorter it was, the better it was. I noticed later that the longer the story, the worse– and I wrote some awful stuff in good faith. I mean, I never sent off anything that I knowingly, you know, that was knowingly bad. I mean, I never said– Like I’ve had colleagues say, “Well, this is no good, but I’m gonna send it off anyway,” or “It could be better, but I don’t have the time,” or “they don’t pay enough so it’s not worth improving.” I’d sit there and improve the God damn thing and really work it over until it was, and I’d work all night and on and on and on, and then I’d say, “This is perfection, man,” and it could be very good or it could be very bad, and I never knew the difference until later. Other people knew the difference right away, but there was always a market. That was the creepy thing. Every story that I wrote, I sold, and every science fiction novel that I’ve written, I’ve sold. There has always been a market for it. It’s like I have written with markets in mind, a variegated selection, you know quite a range of markets, and I haven’t at all. It’s really weird, really freaky. The only thing where that screwed up was I started writing stories when the magazines went out of business; like, there were 16 science fiction magazines at one point, and then the next week there were two, and I didn’t know the difference. I kept right on, you know, a story every other week, and then somebody pointed out there were no longer any magazines down at the newsstand, you know, so I wrote my agent. I said, “You know, how come there are no magazines on the newsstands anymore?” It’s because they all went out of business, Chester. Didn’t you notice?” And, also the word rate dropped from seven cents a word to a half a cent a word. You now get $400 for a whole novel, which was exactly true, $400 for, you know–

James Holmes: When was that? Is that now?

Philip K. Dick: No, thank God. That was back in the old days.

James Holmes: Right. When

Philip K. Dick: That was back about 1957; 57 to 59, at which point, I stopped writing magazine-like stuff entirely because the word rate having gone down to half a cent a word, you literally couldn’t make a living no matter how much you wrote at a half cent a word. You couldn’t write enough words to make a living.

James Holmes: And, that’s when you started heavy into novels?

Philip K. Dick: Well, I had already started writing novels because I foresaw something of that kind, that is, I calculated how much you made from the average novel. See, stories, when you sell a story to a magazine, you are paid on a per word basis. Like, they have a fixed rate, like two cents a word, three cents a word, and you know when you send off the story exactly how much you’re gonna get if it sells to a particular magazine. Well, I calculated the length of an average novel, which is 55,000 to 60,000 words, and the average per word rate at that– came out to much higher than the magazine average per word rate, so–

James Holmes: At that time?

Philip K. Dick: So, I shifted over. Yeah, it came out to about five to six cents a word compared to about two to three cents, so I started writing novels as a kind of insurance policy against the future, you know, that is that ultimately I figured it would pay off better to write a novel. The only thing was, that was like, you know, as I said, about 1954 and 1955 that I started writing novels, and you probably don’t remember back in those days. That was before automobiles were invented and they still used shells, you know, and brightstones for money, but there were no good novels being published. Maybe there were three or four good novels in almost a decade.
James Holmes: Science fiction novels?

Philip K. Dick: Science fiction, yeah. Sturgeon– Well, like More Than Human, a couple of Bradbury, Pohl and Kornbluth book collaborations, and that was about all; just a few over that long period of time, and most of the writers in the field were very good in story writing, like Robert Sheckley was a good example; he had tried to make the transition to novel writing and hadn’t been able to do it. Even Bradbury, to some extent, was having a great deal of difficulty making the transition, and I’m not sure that he ever really did make a successful transition. Just about everybody, and there were a lot of very good story writers out, Sheckley was a prime example, simply could not make that transition, and in trying to make it, just faded out of the field, just simply disappeared and never came back, and I decided that before I switched over to novel writing, I would make sure that I could do it– that is, you know, I would not send off a bunch of inept novels and fail as a novel writer, because if I fail as a novel writer, there was no place to go in fiction as I construed it, because, to me, the novel was the ultimate form of fiction, and if I screwed that up– I mean, I could screw up short story writing and go to the novel as a natural evolution anyway, you know, but what would I do if I couldn’t do a novel? This is really what has ruined a couple of very fine writers who did make the transition, but not successfully; lost their ability really as a writer and continued to write novels anyway, and so disappeared. So, when I sent off Solar Lottery, I had already written eleven novels that I never sent off. That was my twelfth novel that I sent off, and that had been worked over and studied and was based on a very complicated novel form. I made tremendous study of the novel. I had never made any formal study of the story. I mean, I had never taken any courses in creative writing except one from Tony Boucher, but I really studied the novel. I studied the French realistic novel, the Russian novel. I studied especially the products of the French Department of Tokyo University after the war. The Japanese students, they were writing very interesting novels. I read all of those that I could; they were more contemporary, and they updated the French realistic novel, and when I sent it off, it was based on a very sturdy complex structured form, which I have continued to use, a very intricate form, which, you know– have you read any of my novels?

James Holmes: Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: Would you say that the structure is pretty complicated?

James Holmes: For Solar Lottery, fairly, yeah.

Philip K. Dick: I beg your pardon.

James Holmes: What?

Philip K. Dick: For Solar Lottery?

James Holmes: Yeah, some of them, yeah.

Philip K. Dick: Well, Solar Lottery, for a first novel, is a pretty, you know, elaborate– you compare that to say to one of Ron Goulart’s novels. I mean, now he’s a guy– I went in to Tony Boucher’s writing class in 1951 with Ron Goulart. Now, Ron Goulart is making the transition to the novel after all this time, and I’m not gonna single him out– Let’s say that, you know, I think I have been successful as a novel writer not because I’m a better writer than some of these other people, but because before I began to send off novels, I had, you know, thoroughly studied the novel form and had a novel structure.

James Holmes: You do this all on your own? Did you go to college?

Philip K. Dick: I went to the University of California for a while, yeah, but not at that point; before that, and I didn’t stay really long.

James Holmes: Yeah, and that wasn’t in English or creative writing?
Philip K. Dick: Heck no.

James Holmes: What was that in, just out of curiosity?

Philip K. Dick: Philosophy, the trashy stuff, of no use whatsoever. I got interested in Yeats and Euripides, though, while wandering around waiting for my philosophy books to be available at the library, so it wasn’t all a waste.

James Holmes: There’s a strong similarity between World of Null-A and Solar Lottery. I was wondering if you knew. Have you ever read World of Null-A?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, I have.

James Holmes: Yours is much better, I might add.

Philip K. Dick: That’s not my opinion.

James Holmes: I didn’t– That’s not–

Philip K. Dick: I hope that’s not Van Vogt’s opinion either.
James Holmes: Really?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah, because I think– No, now, like, you know, I sort of glossed over that. I read World of Null-A when it came out as a magazine serial in Astounding in the 40’s, and I thought that was a terrific novel, and when it came out in book form by Simon and Schuster later on, I bought that and it was different, by the way, than the magazine version.

James Holmes: Oh, it was?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, and I studied the changes that he had made, and I thought that was– first of all, I thought Van Vogt was a really great writer, I still do.

James Holmes: Really?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, a really great writer, and he was really my ideal. When I grew up in the 30’s, that’s when Van Vogt started publishing about 1939, I think his first story came out, and I started reading science fiction in 41, so he was publishing just about the time I started reading it, and he was my ideal as a writer. I mean, when I read– I couldn’t even figure out a recruiting station and some of that, I mean, he just lost me, but I say he’s really great because they were really great.

James Holmes: [laughter] Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: And, they were great then, remember though. They were– I won’t put him put him down now, but let’s say at that time in 1941 and 2 and 3, because he wrote through the war– he was still writing during the war then, World of Null-A in 45, which I thought was great. So, anyway, I met Van Vogt in 1954, yeah, at the convention in San Francisco, and I didn’t anymore expect to meet Van Vogt than I expected, you know, to meet Chaucer. You know, I would have been just as surprised if Chaucer had come through the room, and I would have spoken to him, too, and I said, “Mr. Van Vogt, sir, your majesty,” and he said, “Are you the guy that’s got my pants, or is that somebody else?” I says, “No, I’m an ardent fan of yours,” and I told him who I was. I had already published so much of stories, and he says, “Gosh,” and he was really great. I mean, he looked at me like I really existed, and I said, “Mr. Van Vogt, I have read all of your stuff,” which was true, and “I think it’s really great, but I cannot fathom how your plots develop. I cannot understand the linkage that connects the progressions within your plot. Could you explain it to me?” He says, “Well, Phil, what happens is, I start with one plot, then it all peters out and goes nowhere and is no good, and then I think of an entirely new plot and work on that, and that peters out too, and then I try another one, and then I finally give up when I get the word rate right,” and I says, “Is that how it’s done,” and he says, “Well, that’s how I do it, and there’s the guy that’s got my pants,” and then he went off, and I thought, no, you know, he didn’t have to cop out to that. I mean, he could have put on a big pretentious response, you know, in line with my sincere but pretentious question, you know, and pontificated at great length, and you know, shuck me back and fulfilled himself, you know, as a mystic idol giving me what I wanted, you know? Instead, he told me what he believed to be the literal truth. It was not a put down on himself. It was not cynical. It was what a writer would tell another writer. It was candid. It was– I mean, I see that now. At the time, all I thought was, you know, the thing for me to do is just study his stuff and work out a theme or plot that does not break down partly, you know, through the thing, or take a number of themes as he does and join them together so they do function as an integrated whole and not have it break, because then I went back to World of Null-A and I can see where it did break down, and he did start really from the start again, you know, as if the first part hadn’t been there, so I thought if we could link these separate plot strands into one, I wouldn’t say successful Van Vogt novel; I would say we could enlarge it and make stronger, you know, what Van Vogt has been doing, and that’s what I tried to do in Solar Lottery was do what he had done, but make the different plot elements as he thought of them, something that I worked out in advance, that I didn’t start one and then drop it, but I had them all in my mind and deliberately construct them in sequence and integrate them. That’s what I tried to do with Solar Lottery, and this is something that I think I did actually.

James Holmes: I thought you did fairly well.

Philip K. Dick: Sold 298,000 copies, too.

James Holmes: Is it still in print? I mean, is it still being–

Philip K. Dick: Yes, it is.

James Holmes: So, you’re probably gonna sell more.

Philip K. Dick: I saw it down at Mill Valley at the Greyhound Bus Station the other day.

James Holmes: You seem to have abandoned, though–

Philip K. Dick: I didn’t have enough money to buy them.

James Holmes: Van Vogt has a very sweeping kind of, you know, trying to encompass all of space; well not, you know, as much a space as he can handle with all these vast vistas, but after Solar Lottery, at least of the ones that I’ve read, you’ve kind of brought it back to earth and contented yourself mostly with, you know, with people and, you know, more social situations that are almost satires on current political, you know, or social situations that we’re in.

Philip K. Dick: Well, that’s not really true anymore, I mean, about my stuff. I don’t know how candid I should be. If I’m as candid as he was, I might not get the enthusiastic response which he got from me because, like the fact of the matter is, I did the social satire stuff, which is not really social satire so much as anti-utopian type of thing, you know, where we got tired of the utopian novel, well they got tired before I came along, but like Darkness at Noon of Koestler and things like Huxley in a Brave New World, not to mention 1984, or anti-utopian novels which are reactions against the utopian novels, which I guess preceded them, but I was influenced by Pohl and Kornbluth’s stuff, which is very anti-utopian, and as far as satire, I can’t tell the difference. I mean, I have such a feeble grip on reality that satire, which presumably distorts and exaggerates and burlesques, you know, and somehow makes humorous by exaggeration of things, you know, which are not humorous in themselves, you know like Norman Spinrad’s story, what is that, the Carcinoma Angels or something, a funny cancer story, you know. Like, I don’t know the difference. I mean, when I write this stuff, or wrote that stuff then, anti-utopian stuff, I wasn’t parroting or burlesquing reality. That’s the way I thought reality was. I mean, this is the way I experienced it. I mean, I find sinister large institutions funny, you know, because I have no choice. If I start facing reality, you know, I freak out. I mean, especially that was true then, you know, because that was during the McCarthy period, and you guys are lucky man, because if you think it’s bad now, it was really bad then. I mean, people were killing themselves literally out of fear, you know, of the kind of thing that could be done to them in public during the McCarthy period. Not– Well, I was gonna say not the smallest fish like me, but this could be done to small fish, too. This was done to an awful lot of people. There was a tremendous amount of fear in the country. I mean, it was really a terror and a legitimate terror. I was too dumb to know the difference. I went right on writing the kind of left wing stuff, you know, the radical stuff that I believed in when I had gone to school. You know, I was really left wing, and I went right on writing that kind of stuff right into the McCarthy period, right on through, and right on out, and it just was the way I experienced these large sinister institutions as being sort of funny; I mean, funny in the sense that– The Kafka is not funny. I mean, it would be like the trial, you know, where they say “you’ve been arrested,” you know, and you say “what for,” and they say “well, we don’t know because the other guy’s got that document,” you know, that says what you’re being arrested for. In my story, they would have the wrong guy. You see, in other words, they would arrest the wrong guy for the crime, you know, as in they wouldn’t tell him what he did; they would have the wrong guy who hadn’t done what he didn’t do or did do, and it would get all screwed up. The sinister forces of the court would let a document expire before they served it on him, you know, and it would all– everything would break down, and people would say you’re satirizing Kafka, you know, you’re satirizing the star chamber, the inquisition, or Cromwell or something like that, and I would say, “Gosh, no.” You know, this is the way when I went to the concentration camp, you know, to be gassed to death, they accidentally sent me to the showers instead, you know, instead of the other way around. You know, saying here’s the shower, when you go in your gassed, you know. I went in and say, “I’m ready to be gassed,” and I was given a free shower. I mean, this is the way I would write it because this is the way I would experience it. That was the social satire period, so called, that I went through. That would be like The Man Who Japed where the guy goes into the automat and there’s a human head behind one of the little glass windows, and he decides to order that but he doesn’t have the right amount of money, and when he does get the right amount of money, it isn’t a human head at all, it’s made out of plaster and he feels gypped, but he takes it home anyway, that kind of– Then I got out of that and started writing a psychological thing, which began really with Eye in the Sky. Did you read Eye in the Sky?

James Holmes: No, I didn’t.

Philip K. Dick: You got 75 cents?

James Holmes: I can read it now.

Philip K. Dick: That was the beginning of my psychological world. The sound of snuff; the check I wrote for the snuff bounced snuff guy here on mic.

James Holmes: What kind of snuff is that called, just out of curiosity.

Philip K. Dick: I’m glad you asked, because I get a commission on this. This is Dean Swift Snuff, the finest English snuff there is. This is a blend called Specific Number One. It’s really great stuff. It really spaces you out after a while, but it’s good, and it’s legal, but I digress. Eye in the Sky was really the beginning of my whole preoccupation with what is real and what is not real, because up to that point I thought I knew what was real and I just wrote it down and sent it off and some guy marketed it, some guy bought it, and some guy published it, and some guy read it, and the guy that read it, or the critic that read it, came around to me and explained, you know, that it was all in my mind, and about the time I wrote Eye in the Sky, I was beginning to become aware of the fact that what I thought was going on in the world around me was really going on in my own mind, and rather than give up, you know, and with solipsistic, you know, cop out, you know and say, “I can’t write about reality because I haven’t contacted it yet,” I said, “Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way,” as you know Polonius says to Hamlet. I’ll write about the fact that I don’t know what’s going on. I’ll write books in which people are in their own heads, and this was not in my eyes a great discovery; this was simply making the best of a bad situation. If I didn’t know what was objectively real, as had been pointed out to me, and I agree, at least I could write about what was subjectively real, and I decided that maybe every individual had his own subjective reality, and I didn’t invent that idea– I read that in a book somewhere. But, it just hit me, to write a book about six or eight people and for dramatic purposes have their subjective realities be different enough so that when you went from one to the next, the reader was aware of a tremendous jump, as much of a jump as I could think of, you know, like I deliberately posited a group of people with extremely different world views, so different that they weren’t philosophically different, they were structurally fundamentally different, and for those purposes, I had to create exaggerated world’s caricatures of normal world view differences, and, wow, I wrote it in two weeks, and I really enjoyed writing it, and to write a novel in two weeks from a physical standpoint is just almost impossible. I mean, you know, writing day and night and really being carried away and saying, “You know, gosh, wow,” and the dialogue just wrote itself. I mean, it’s really, really funny dialogue though, because it came out in England earlier this year and I read it over because I didn’t have anything else to read. It was sitting around in a box. I said, “What’s this,” and I says I’ll read it over, and oh, gosh, if I could write dialogue like that now– You know, like, the people said the kind of things, you know, that I wish I could think of to say, you know, in social situations. You know, like the guy’s wife says, “Well, I see you admiring that girl. I suppose you think she’s got a lot–” Well, see, I can’t do it. I’d have to get the book out. Damn it! And it went on like that for pages and pages, and I said all these wonderful brilliant things that I can’t think of, not one can I think of, and in two weeks I was finished and I sent it off, and I got a little tiny amount of money for it as usual, you know, which that’s the breaks. A thousand dollars is what I got for it, and–

Philip K. Dick: All I have ever made on it, was $1750 bucks. In all its printings, which is Mickey Mouse money really. John Christopher wrote a novel at the same time as mine and he got a hundred thousand bucks for his and mine was listed as one of the fifty best novels of the decade. But still, I only got $1750 bucks.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: It was a very fine book. I don’t care how much money I made because I am still alive. You know, I got enough to eat and everything like that. When I read it over I said to myself, “Now this is really a good book.” This was the first thing I wrote that was… Maybe the only thing I wrote that really inspiring. You know, to write it in two weeks, to have it be a very original let us just say and especially from my historical stand point at that time. A really revolutionary thing in the field. For instance, was it a fantasy or science fiction? At that point, nobody could decide.

James Holmes: It is fantasy.

Philip K. Dick: A science fiction. It was neither one. It was something new, you know. It was reality so it wasn’t fantasy. With science but it wasn’t what set in the present now. It was set in 1954, I believe or 56 and that was not set in the future. It was set in Belmont. Not set you know on, Jupiter. Everybody drank at this particular bar if you remember, you know. I mean, it was a really a trick novel. It was really a… Oh man, I really love that book. Wish I could write like that now. That started me on an interior point of view thing. That got stronger and stronger. The subjectivity got greater. In trying to establish the only reality that I know which was a subjective reality I pushed further and further into more extraordinary subjective states and subjective worldly views. Now the introduction of pathological or psychotic world views in my stuff which really dates from Eye in the Sky. If you remember Miss Reiss, Miss Reiss’s part… She was nuts. That was one of my deliberate selections. I selected a fundamentalist religious…. Did you read?
I had selected a fundamentalist religious type, a communist. I forget. A bourgeoisie woman who would could not believe sex had to be around and various of other, you know. Extravagant forms. I deliberately selected a psychotic world view for one of the episodes. I didn’t enjoy writing that part. I didn’t enjoy being in a psychotic world and writing from a psychotic standpoint. But later on, I realized that this was perhaps the most extreme world view that there was. In a way, that was the definition of psychosis. It is the extraordinary drop away from shared reality and conventional experiences in such a way that communication breaks down. For the kind of exploration that I was making, the kind of point that I was making that was to push further and further into what is real. I would have to go more and more into psychosis because psychosis by definition was a more extreme kind of divergence from the ordinary or shared world of view.

James Holmes: Uh-hmm.

Philip K. Dick: I was not really…

James Holmes: [coughs]

Philip K. Dick: …I think, involuntarily expressing my own psychological problems. Because when I would write one of these things with the one exception of the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I was not caught up at all in any of the psychological processes involved in the world. Like for instance, The Game Players of Titan.

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: Did you read that?

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: Well now, a lot of critical material written on that studied in detail the paranoid aspects of it. The conviction you know, that was expressed over and over again in the book that the people who are wandering around in the book were not really human but were alien monsters assuming human form. Well, you know like…

James Holmes: [coughs]

Philip K. Dick: …I did this deliberately. This was not something that I really suspected was true in reality. You know, that anybody around me was an alien monster. I never, for a moment was in any way personally preoccupied with this, believed in it in any kind of theoretical way or experienced it in any kind of psychological way. This was a device that I deliberately adopted. I actually copied it out of another story. I mean, I plagiarized the idea. I had read it, I forget who wrote it. I was intrigued by it and I saw it as a way of achieving that kind of point I was trying to achieve. The sole exception was the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch which was not that kind of story in any way. It was a study of absolute evil and not a paranoid thing at all. But the thing that I was preoccupied with was reality versus illusion. The device that I used was the simulacrum which is what…

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: …I like to call it. That is what appears to be a human being but when we get closer to it or we see it long enough or if something happens, we discovered it is not a human being but is either an artificial construct or something from outer space. You see, the fact that I don’t even care whether it is something from outer space, that it’s organic and alive or a laboratory product which is sold as an analgesic shows that this is not a psychological preoccupation. If it was, the distinction between those two would be of great importance to me. All that’s important to me is the fact that it appears to be conventional. This is the element that is constant in this artifice. It is simply… It appears conventionally. It could be a chair. I mean, I could have simplified it and they all said, “Well, look at all the human beings, they all look like chairs.” Gosh! So this is my chair let us buy it. A chair that easily displays wings and flies it off, you know. I could have done that but how many books can you write. How many things can chairs say, you know and do. I have never met a human being that I thought was a simulacrum or I have never met a simulacrum that I thought was a human being.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: This was never a symbol of anything. This was never a philosophical preoccupation and stuff. It was only a technique, a dramatic technique for handling what was the preoccupation. Reality versus illusion. A very simple idea in there. The illusion is the human appearance. The reality is questionable. What lies behind it. That was a question. I was not giving an answer. I was as happy to say that a machine lay behind it as to say an extraterrestrial life form. Now, in one story that I wrote called Human Is, which is the title of a short story collection I have for Valentine. That I’m involved with. I had a human being, a scientist type. I don’t like the scientist types because they are cold, schizoid, like matter of fact. Drives us unrealistic. He was some kind of an archaeologist freak. He goes bopping off to an asteroid to, you know, go through the ruins. He was a really cruel guy. Mean to his wife. Kicks the dog, kicks the child, kicks the wife. You know, telling his wife: you would make a good laboratory specimen if you were in a bottle. it would be a better environment for you than oxygen. You know, you would look better if your veins were full of, you know… And then he goes off chuckling at his mordant wit. While he was on this asteroid. Something was living there on the asteroid. You know, in a kind of a suspended animation form. Something from the asteroid seized his brain and takes it over and kicks him out. Kicks him into the little urn that’s sitting there on the shelf in the ruins and comes back in his body. Well now, he goes away, cold-cruel and anal-retentive. So this, he comes back. He comes in the door… I have not read the damn thing since I wrote it. But you know, like if I don’t read it, it is probably funny, you know. Because maybe I didn’t do it as good as it looks. He comes on the door and he says, “Hi Marley.” Let me look at what I wrote down when I went through his memory bags. He says, “Hi Cynthia! God you’re pretty.” Have I got that right? Yeah, well that is probably right. You know, pretty beautiful, lovely and attractive. So you are attractive and Cynthia enabled whatever it was, the woman was proud and able. And this early life form has been living in this urn for ten million years and it really is sincere. I mean, it is happy to be alive. Happy to walk around. Happy to do what the child, the dog, you know… Happy to see every object, every person and it just screws it all up, you know. It gets the names wrong and it starts using terms that have been out of use on earth for 200 years like it says things like, “I see you saucy baggage “. May I surprise you in some manners such as diddling you. And he said, “Wait a minute, that has not been said since 1720.” Let me get a look at this. She finally grasped the fact that it was an alien life form. Just about that time, the FBI shows up and says, “Madam, this is not your husband. This is an alien life form and we are going to zap it. All we need is you sign this document to corroborate from your experience with your husband that this is an alien life form.” And she says, “Gosh, no! My husband has been nice, kind, beautiful and wonderful like this all the time I have known him.” And that was too bad, they can’t do a thing. The alien life form later says, “Thank you Mayflor.” Or Cynthia or whoever you are having because I will get it yet.

[laughing]

James Holmes: [laughing]

Philip K. Dick: She says, “Okay Chester, Charlie, Arthur or Glen or whatever your name is. I like you fine and I will always have liked you fine ever since I met you twenty-two years ago.” She’s not an alien, I don’t want to make it sound like that. But it doesn’t matter because what is alien is the thing that went off chuckling mordantly to itself and what came back is human. So this still carry’s the same thing. Reality versus illusion.

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: But it shows that the preoccupation is not in one direction. This life form has a ball. It is walking around. It is going across the street to pick up the newspaper or whatever. It didn’t get better at it. It picks up the newspaper from the lawn across the street.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: But it enjoyed everything it does because if you have been sitting in a little urn for ten thousand years, you would enjoy anything. Even picking up the San Mateo Merchandiser and reading about you know, cane bottom chairs being sold. You would enjoy that too. It is really enthusiastic. It can’t even figure out how to kick the dog because it thinks that the dog is the wife and the wife is the dog.

James Holmes: [laughs] Where did you go from there?

Philip K. Dick: Downhill.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: Where can you go from there? I got $35 for that story. It was published in Startling Quarterly. It attracted the same attention as the preparation H ad and the Hernia belt on the back page attracted. Oh, and I think they made more money with the Hernia Belt. I could not think of a way to go on with that because I was sort of, “What else can you say after you said that.” That again was a variation though at that time in my mind on the basic theme, which was reality versus illusion. I did not see that as an end in itself. I thought of that merely as another way of exploring the subject. That what I did there was important intrinsically. It did not occur to me until I was putting the short story collection together. I was going over a list of every short story I ever wrote which is not all that long. I came across that and I thought, “Nobody has anthologized that.” And I got to thinking about it and I thought, “You know, that is a little different way of handling a human being possessed by an alien mentality.” You know like, do you remember Robert Heinlein’s, The Puppet Masters?

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: Well, The Puppet Masters preceded that story. For the benefit of the Tijuana radio network or whatever we are taping this for. It was a classic example of what I call… If you are going to talk about a paranoid view of aliens versus human beings, it was a great novel dramatically. I mean, The Puppet Masters… The guy sitting around his name is Chester Knoll, and he’s your brother in law. Normally, he reads the Sporting Green in the morning. One morning, he picks up this Sporting Green and a strange look appears on his face. I forgot what he said but he said something like, “We got you now. We are only pretending to read this Sporting Green. Actually, we are burning out your cerebral cortex by our electronic rays that we are emitting through the front page.” And you discover that a little parasite has got into the gangly of his spinal column. It was actually sitting on the back of his neck, is that correct? Or little…

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: …horrible lump or thing, you know. And that’s the master and he is the puppet. People talk really funny when they become a puppet. They suddenly… I don’t know, they just do something. They really get awful. I mean, they get really horrible.

James Holmes: [coughs]

Philip K. Dick: And then these little blobs take it over by… It was a great novel. I read it and I said, “Oh my God, this is a terrible thought, you know.”

James Holmes: [breathing sound]

Philip K. Dick: The illustrations in the magazine they were really good. It showed Colonel Conway before and after you know, before he is smiling and holding out his hand. Then after, when the blob has got him, he is giving you a shot with the whoopie electric joy buzzer in his palm and his hands attached to…

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: …a million volt battery in his pocket. It ain’t no American legion shock. It is curtains. The whole thing really freaks me and I said, “Gosh, they had gone out west and there were little pockets of resistance that you have seen on these.” That did that pretty well, you know. The human being reduced to a puppet. Because I think at the end, they went to pry the little creatures off or something like that.

James Holmes: I see.

Philip K. Dick: Then I got to thinking and then, “Wait a minute now, that was pretty frightening.” But I remember when that was first used. It was used on the Buck Rogers Radio Serial for kids in 1937. Those days, it was called the psychic restriction ray and went like this, “Wilma, what is going on down there in the basement?” Well, come on down and let us sit here and huddle together. And then there was a strange sound and that was the psychic restriction ray emitted by Killer Ken’s agents. And also she said, “Come down here Buck and look in to the front end of my blast pistol and let’s see if it is still working.” And he says, “Gosh, she doesn’t usually talk like that.” I am like, “Gosh, I heard all that in 1937.” It didn’t faze me then, I was only a little kid, you now and it is the same idea. The end of it was the same idea. They got the psychic restriction ray turned off. I don’t see why it should freak me now as an adult when it didn’t freak me as a kid. I never really worried that much after that. I think Robert Heinlein still worries about that kind of thing.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: I was going to write that, the Puppet Masters. Let us say like, Robert Heinlein said it to me but he will not probably ever say. I feel like I can’t quite make this novel come off. Could you write the final draft?

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: So I say, “Sure Bob.” Which I probably wouldn’t say. I will be happy too. Let me look it over. So I look it over and I will say, “First of all, the blobs of protoplasm they are all identical.” And that is stupid because how can you write a dialogue for them if they are all identical? So I will have then named. Bill, George, Chester, Charlie, Gloria and so on. And they would all speak idiomatically. One blob with protoplasm will say to the next one, “You got your puppet under control Bill?” Bill would say, “Yeah, Fred but I am having a little trouble working the legs you know. Could you hand me the manual?”

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: Well that thing is page 33. It shows that pedal extremity, you know, structure has something to do with the tendon linkage. And finally, my novel, my version of his novel will all break down with the little master’s fighting, arguing, saying, “He screwed up his puppet didn’t he? You know, he always would. I knew he would be a failure. His mother said he would be a failure.” Pretty soon they would be talking and acting like people and then I will give it back to Robert Heinlein and he would go back to Colorado and lock himself up in the gorge that he lives in, with the barbed wire everything and brood even more. Heinlein has been solo, he always has been.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: But I would enjoy writing a dialogue if they were different from one another. Whereas, the way they all were all puppets when they opened their mouths. Do they not all talk somewhat alike?

James Holmes: Uh-huh.

Philip K. Dick: That was pretty much the nitty gritty of it, yeah.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: And there is not much fun in writing dialogue under those circumstances. “Hey Bill, how did you do? Fine Bill, I did fine. How about you Bill? Yeah Bill, I did good too. Let’s ask how has Bill did. Yeah, I did good too Bill.”

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: “Bill did you do good? Yes, I did good.”

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: How many pages can you fill with talk like that? If all the creatures are named Bill, it is good for a one story. But, as a matter of fact, that might make a pretty good story.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: Would you edit this last out of the tape so nobody can plagiarize it?

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: I may be able to do a satire on The Puppet Masters like that. Hey Bill, let us invade earth. Okay Bill, which one is earth? They’re all like earth. That’s earth over there. It’s the green one over there. They all look like earth.

[both laughing]

Philip K. Dick: Yes. That is yours over there, it is the green one. No, it is the green one over there named earth and so on. All the human beings look alike. They are named Fred, George, Charlie and Gloria.

James Holmes: [laughs] Well, The Man In the High Castle seems to deviate from that you know subjective reality type quite a bit. Was that sort of the next place that you went or was that the natural conclusion … that doesn’t make sense but…

Philip K. Dick: No. The Man in the High Castle was an anomaly. What happened was, I had to quit writing. I had given up writing for a variety of reasons and one of them being, I didn’t have anymore to say. I went into the jewelry business and I had a pretty good time. I had a good time in writing. I made more money. It worked out pretty good. Found out I didn’t have any ability. At least that’s what my wife said, “You don’t have any ability Bill. You are going to be a failure, I know you would.” So I said to my psychiatrist, “How do I get out of this jewelry business?” He says, “pretend you are writing another novel.” I said, “You know I am all washed up as a writer.” He said, “I know, but no body else does.” They won’t know that until you are finished. I mean, you have a year you know. You can sit there and write. See Jane run you know, pretend you are writing a first grade poem. Let me sit there and write, you know and say I am writing a novel. Your wife didn’t know the difference in you. As long as you work hard, get up early in the morning. You know, look emaciated. Have a martini and do that sort of stuff, you know, she will think you are writing a novel. So I went and I did. I never really know what I was writing. I said, “Let us see what do I say this is about.” And I thought, well when I was really little, I always wondered about what will it be like if the Nazi’s and Japanese had won. Because I lived during that war and I used to think that at that time.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: When it wasn’t quite so clear what the outcome would be. You know, like I say, “Gosh, it is going to be interesting saying Guten Morgen Frank!” Every morning to the guy next door instead of whatever you say now. So I thought about it then and then we won the war and then I forgot about it. So I said I will write about that. So I thought, what do I need in a way of not spelling the name of a Japanese character in the middle of the west coast. Because that is where I lived. I don’t want to have to make up streets in New York because I don’t know what New York is like. So I said, I will call him Mr. Summer. Then I thought up his name and this is where I wrote about five things down and I start typing. I said to my wife that evening, “Gosh, my novel is coming on pretty good.” And she said, “Better because we need such and such amount of money for orthodontist working on and the taxes are going up. I got it all finished and showed it to her. She said, “You make about $700 a year, you are a failure. I always knew you would be.” So I sent it off. It was an anomaly. And it won the Hugo Award and made my wife rich.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: I knew you would be a failure, she said. You only won a Hugo award with it. Why not win a Nebula. Then I had to write whole bunch of stuff after that.

James Holmes: Why? Because you won the award?

Philip K. Dick: No, because I had proved to my wife, I can still write a novel and sell it.

James Holmes: But you continued writing after that. Is that because of all those great things happened, you decided to continue writing?

Philip K. Dick: Like what?

James Holmes: Like making your wife rich? Happy? You know, or you are getting that Hugo Award. I mean, you obviously continued writing so it wasn’t—

Philip K. Dick: That seems to be true. It is nice to have something we can agree on. I mean I am not going to disagree with you but I did go on writing after that. The point was that, what choice did I have? I already screwed up in the jewelry business. I couldn’t even cut a Santa Claus, you know. A pin that fell off and dropped on the floor and I stepped on it. I burnt myself with solder, that is true. Then I have cut too far with the shears on the silver. “Phil, don’t you know a silver cost $53 a cubic centimeter? You just ruined 20 million dollars worth of silver, now you are going to have to go to your room and count to a hundred backwards somewhere which maybe. So I couldn’t go on in the jewelry business and I proved that I could still write and sell something which looked like a good idea at that time, you know. I wrote six novels in four months. At one point in six weeks, I wrote twelve hundred pages. Typed twelve hundred pages in six weeks. I did two novels simultaneously under contract. I had to write two versions of each one. I had taken one page out of the typewriter that said the end and I put it in another page that said page one. I said, “Oh my God, you know. I mean Jesus…”

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: The funny thing is my wife spends it fast… I mean you know… It makes no sense. Then I got out of that marriage. I didn’t write for a while and then there was no alternative and I went back to writing. Because for me, writing is not a business. It is not craftsmanship. It is something that… Well like for instance, have you ever had a desk or a table or something with one leg that didn’t quite reach the ground you know and you continually put match book covers to try to make it not rock around. And you can’t stop yourself from going over and trying to make it so it doesn’t go bumpity-bump-bump. Well this is the way I was with writing. If I don’t write for a while, finally, I get real… You know, like I got to go tinker with the typewriter. First, you know, I would say maybe I could sell it. And then I said, maybe if I clean the keys I can get more money for it or something like that. In person I said, “Maybe I will type something like you know, see the rich red fox jump over the lazy brown dog or whatever expressions.” And then I said, “Maybe I will write a letter to my agent to borrow some money.” And then I say, “Maybe as long as I am writing a letter to my agent to borrow some money off, pretend I am writing a story and I will give them a short synopsis of it. Then I got to think of a short synopsis. So I make up one. Then while I am making up a short synopsis I said to myself, maybe if I write a few pages I can actually get a contract from a publisher. Maybe if I pretend it is a book I can get a bigger contract. And I do. Then I got to write the thing. Then I find that I am writing something anyway. You know, letters to the IRS explaining why I didn’t pay my taxes. I am already writing. I have to write, defensively. If I don’t write, I don’t know what else to do. I mean, it is natural. I always have written. Ever since I was in the first grade. I told myself from my…

[phone ringing]

Philip K. Dick: …typing manual.

James Holmes: This microphone is plugged in and we are being bugged by a tape recorder. So I made a beep every fifteen minutes.

Philip K. Dick: How do you make a beep?

James Holmes: Burp…

Philip K. Dick: How am I there for a level.

James Holmes: Sounds pretty good.

Philip K. Dick: Okay. Because I tend to mumble sometimes especially when I burp. Are we on? Ladies and gentlemen, this is Robert Heinlein speaking from his cozy sanctuary in the deep part of the Rocky Mountains surrounded by barb wire and don’t play that.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: Shit! Okay that… Thanks for that.

James Holmes: You are on the air.

Philip K. Dick: Not after that, you don’t have to use that. Now what were we discussing Mr. Frost?

James Holmes: Well, to tell you the truth I can’t even remember. Do you want to… We can start off on a whole different thing and try to get back to where we were.

Philip K. Dick: Okay. How do we know when we get back to where we were?

James Holmes: Uh…. [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: We will feel it. We will feel it here.

James Holmes: When we are there, we will fill in the vacuum.

Philip K. Dick: Why don’t you query me.

James Holmes: Okay. I would be really interested to know what a typical day for you was when you are working. Like what time do you get up, how many hours do you work, you know. Do you work regularly, sporadically, do you—

Philip K. Dick: I only work—

James Holmes: You know, how many—

Philip K. Dick: Under two circumstances. One, when I absolutely have to by dire necessity and even then I hardly do it. And when I am inspired which is once in a while. Then I work all the time, night and day until I finish whatever I am working on.

James Holmes: How many drafts of the work do you do?

Philip K. Dick: The last book I did, I did nine complete drafts from start to finish.

James Holmes: Nine complete?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah.

James Holmes: The ninth one was the one you sent to the publisher and that was what he published?

Philip K. Dick: I never sent it off. After doing nine complete drafts, that is like nine novels, I was just too tired to start typing up the final draft. You know, what they call the top copy craft and I couldn’t do it. I was just too tired. I had read the dialogue over and over again like day and night. I lie in bed at night and I think of a couple of sentences of the dialogue and I knew which page and which paragraph to insert them in from memory. I memorized the whole book so I never typed it up and I never sent it off.

James Holmes: So—

Philip K. Dick: It has never been sent off.

James Holmes: It hasn’t been published?

Philip K. Dick: No.

James Holmes: Was that… Does that describe adequately… You want to put that up a little close? Just a little bit.

Philip K. Dick: It’s little getting put.

James Holmes: Well, was that a good book? I mean, was it a memorable book?

Philip K. Dick: Yes. It is a very fine book and if it had not been really good to start with, I wouldn’t have gone go on and on. I don’t know what I would have done. I mean, maybe it was not as good as I thought. I just kept thinking that it was worth refining and refining. The thing is, we were talking about it before… Or I was talking about my obsessive preoccupation with reality versus illusion.

James Holmes: Uh-hmm.

Philip K. Dick: And then I was really asking the question what is real rather than stating anything as to what was real. This was an attempt to state what I thought was real. I wanted to get it right because to me, it is fairly mild as a responsibility to ask a question like what is real and tremendous responsibility to state what is real. In a way, I didn’t want ever to state it but finally I said, maybe I should. After rewriting it again and again, I still was tired but I could have had somebody else to type it up. It was all ready to be typed up. I never really had anybody else to type it up because in a way, how can you state what is real? I mean, the book could go on and be revised forever.

James Holmes: Uh-hmm.

Philip K. Dick: That as my idea what is real, changes. I could take the manuscript back, I don’t know have the manuscript here and I could rewrite it again. Then when I got it finished, I could rewrite it again. In a way, it can never be finished.

James Holmes: Well…

Philip K. Dick: Maybe it never should be.

James Holmes: Well if it is reality it could be a good mirror wouldn’t ever get done.

Philip K. Dick: Yeah, I thought even of having somebody else go over it and maybe do a final draft one. Maybe it should be a group thing.

James Holmes: Do you think it will ever get published?

Philip K. Dick: Yes. Definitely. Because if I were to croak right now, it will be published as it is.

James Holmes: Uh-hmm.

Philip K. Dick: It would cease at the moment I ceased which is the best I could offer.

James Holmes: Do you think that is the way it will be published?

Philip K. Dick: No. I am going to work on it again.

James Holmes: Oh.

Philip K. Dick: I am going to get it right.

James Holmes: Well, do you have any books in the works or any ideas or where are you heading? You know, where is your head at now? I mean, what is… What are your feelings about, you know…

Philip K. Dick: Stating what I think is real. Going on with what I did in that book which is called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Which is a combination of a song by John Dowland from his sixth, 1599 lute book plus a modern type Harlan Ellison thing. I am going on with it. I will try to say what I think it was real. Only now, instead of working on that book over, I am trying to do a further work. Subsequent work. Like a children’s story that I just finished.

James Holmes: Yeah, could you tell us about it?

Philip K. Dick: The children’s story?

James Holmes: You don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Philip K. Dick: Oh, well I’m uh… Oddly enough, I have the manuscript here in my pocket. No, in a way I couldn’t. Later on, I might read you a couple of sentences from it. But even that is not finished. Even that should be revised for the same reason as the novel. You can’t… Like if I ask the question what is real? For approximately 20 years in my writing, I sure should answer the question over a long period of time. Because if I can state it in one book, first of all, what am I going to do next week?

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: As opposed to, what is real revisited? Or son of what is real? What is real meets the wolf man. I mean I would be finished as a person, as a writer. And it couldn’t be done anyway. Because let us say next week… Furthermore, not only with that completely real and the complete description of reality but these things are real too and a further version, and so forth. Which would be proper.

James Holmes: This is your own reality that you are talking about? Or are you talking about the reality that everyone generally conceives as real? Is this a subjective reality or—

Philip K. Dick: No. I think this is objective.

James Holmes: The objective reality?

Philip K. Dick: Something that I said could not be done for years. Perception of an objective reality right. And not just a subjective world which differs from person to person. I mean, this was my whole basis, my whole viewpoint. Is that there are only individual subjective realities? A multitude of individual truths that is verities for only one individual. One truth, one person. Now I feel there is something that transcends that. Some objective reality. The koinos kosmos of Heraclitus. Shared reality. I think it exists. I think I have contacted it. I think I have got it on paper to a certain extent. I think I can get it down better and that is what I am trying to do.

James Holmes: Hmm… How do you just you know, what is it like? Could you describe it?

Philip K. Dick: Yes, you get billed for it at the end of the month.

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: And if you don’t pay the bill, something happens. That’s it right there. That’s not all of it, that is part of it. I mean, in a way you can reduce it to a couple of aphorisms and that way you can talk about it forever. I mean it is like some of the things in the new testament like the first should be the last, he that loses his life shall save it. You can reduce it to that and that is about all you can do. Or you can go on and on like Ecclesiastes. You never stop. I am doing both. The aphorisms and then the endless titanic world novel. Neither one would probably sell… although the novel is under contract to Doubleday, have already been sold.

James Holmes: Oh?

Philip K. Dick: My letters to Doubleday describing it caused them to sign the contract without seeing it.

James Holmes: [laughs] Is that…

James Holmes: That’s good for a novelist.

Philip K. Dick: Yes, it’s good, good business. For all I know, it doesn’t exist. Now, this is something that occurred to me one time, because it’s been a year since I signed the contract and they’ve never seen a page of the novel. For all I know, I was shucking them, there is no novel, and yet they’ve paid several payments on them. That’s really strange. So, I should get out a copy, my carbon of those letters and see what I said.
James Holmes: Oh, you don’t know and you don’t remember what you said?

Philip K. Dick: I remember I started to describe it and then all of a sudden I said oh and hear a four-letter word. I can’t describe in a letter. If I could, I wouldn’t have had to write the novel, and they said that’s when they made the contract, when I couldn’t describe it in the letter. That’s very Zen. That represents a failure on my part to be able to write a synopsis of the novel or even a description, convinces them that it was good. See, normally, they will sign a contract only on the basis of a synopsis and a few sample chapters.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: I couldn’t do it. They said it’s a perfect novel; the only perfect novel ever written.
James Holmes: [chuckles] You’ll go down in history.

Philip K. Dick: That’s what I said, too, except that part did not sell. That’s when I used that four-letter word.

James Holmes: If you have— Oh you—

Philip K. Dick: Just thinking of Beethoven trying to describe the 9th symphony to his publisher, which I guess was Diabelli; Dear Mr. Diabelli, Well, I finished the 9th Symphony, and man it sure is– and the word was the same four-letter word. How much will you give me for it?

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: Diabelli, “The same as usual.”

James Holmes: [laughs]

Philip K. Dick: “Not as much as you want, Mr. Beethoven.” I don’t know. I really should get a carbon of that out, because when I wrote the letter, I just finished the 9th version, the 9th draft, and at that point, I thought it was finished. I really did. I thought I did it, I got it down. Perfect reality, you know? This has never been done, but somehow I got it down. Clickety, click, click. “Dear Mr. Publisher, Guess what I just did,” and he sends back, all these funky-looking– a cigar coupons, civil war money and neoprene checks, but I convinced him. I wonder what’s he gonna say 10 years from now, and he still hasn’t seen it. Incidentally, I called him about four months ago and cashed some more money on the same novel, and I said, “By the way, I am typing it up now, sir.” He said, “I don’t care. I don’t care when we get it. It’s just, as long as it’s what you said it was, even if it takes 10 more years.” That appealed to me because I wasn’t typing it up. I said, “Okay, I will slow down the job of typing it up.”

James Holmes: [laughing] If you had a chance, and let’s say that you’ve got the chance now, to talk to, let’s say, 5 to 10,000 people over a radio, what would you say to them?

Philip K. Dick: Radio is obsolete. You all should be watching TV. You are living in the past. That wouldn’t have any effect. If they are already listening to the radio, they are not gonna turn it off. That television set they wouldn’t be watching. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say anything. I would present a dramatic thing. I’d do a script. I’d do it dramatically.

James Holmes: Sort of like Buck Rogers?

Philip K. Dick: No. I was thinking more of Goethe’s Faust.

James Holmes: [laughing]

Philip K. Dick: I would present it that way. I’d present it as a dramatic thing. No, seriously, I was thinking of the Orson Welles script of The War of the Worlds. Do you– do you remember–

James Holmes: Uh-hmm.

Philip K. Dick: –about that? Yeah, I missed that. I was at the kiddies matinee at the Oak’s Theatre– got in for a dime. I got home and my grandmother was hiding behind the couch, you know, with a shotgun and my mother was in the kitchen with a frying pan. I said, “What happened?” She said, “The Martians landed.” I said, “How do you know?” She said, “Franklin Roosevelt just said so over the radio.” I said, “Gosh, it’s worse here than at the kiddies matinee.” I said, “You guys are out of your gourds. It’s ridiculous. They would’ve announced it at the kiddies matinee if that had happen. Everybody knows that. They announce everything at the kiddies matinee.” So, I calmed them down, but they really believed the Martians had landed. They heard it on the radio. They heard his voice, and when I heard the playback years later, it did sound like him. It was really real. I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, a script in the usual sense. They interrupted themselves, they turned off their own theme music, you know, they cut in, they made mistakes, they mis-cued, they pre-empted themselves; it was unbelievable. It was reality. That really got me thinking. That, I think, is what set me in the direction of leaning toward drama in writing rather than discursive, you know, like Nabokov in style, you know, like Virginia Wolf was drama, even if it was melodrama.

James Holmes: You mean a lot of dialogue and interaction? Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: Well, whatever– it depends on what you mean by drama. What I mean by drama is a reenactment of an event in such a way that you forget that it’s a reenactment or a ritual or a replica or, you know, somehow synthetic or contrived. It seems like you’re actually there; it’s actually happening. I mean, like this script The War of the Worlds. The people listening really believed it was actual and I think all successful drama causes you to suspend the realization, you know, that it is a shuck. It is not a shuck at certain point; it is real in some sense. I mean this is truly a great novel. As such, and I mean, I tried to do that in my novels and make them dramatic, but what appeals to me is the true dramatic form; the play form, the spoken form, you know? That’s why I rely so much on dialogue. I think everything can be done through dialogue. If it couldn’t, Euripides would not have been the greatest, to me, the greatest writer that I’ve ever read.

James Holmes: Well, what about all the people that panicked in New Jersey and all of those places that, you know– I mean, in other words, he caused a lot of trouble by doing it. Do you think that was good?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah, in a way. I mean, drama always causes a lot of trouble. I mean, that’s incidental. That merely proves the effect that drama can have. It proves that the question, again, of reality versus illusion is a very subtle question, like “how do you test if it’s real?” Now, if that caused all those people to fly to the woods, grab guns, do this, do that; then, it was real in a sense because it caused real reactions and set real events into motion. The War of the Worlds script was real. The Martians hadn’t landed in a kind of metaphysical sense. There were no Martians, but for those people, the Martians were real, and what they did was real. And, if they had overthrown the government, you know, out of the belief that it was immanent in the face of the invasion and set up a tyrannical government, you know, an emergency government with extraordinary powers that would’ve been as real as any dictatorship ever was. So, drama is real, and the fact that it causes trouble is just proof of it reality.

James Holmes: Do you think you could ever get an effect like that out of one of your books?

Philip K. Dick: You mean, scare people in New Jersey and—

James Holmes: Into reacting in a way that there was a reaction to The War of the Worlds.

Philip K. Dick: Well, in a broad sense, yes. You can set things into motion that are literally a part of the set of the tangible world, you know, in which like we’re sitting here in a living room; part of that world. The drama is on the pages of a book or it’s in a script, but the consequences occur in this set, you know, in this world, this reality–
James Holmes: Uh hmm.

Philip K. Dick: — and it makes the translation occur through the mind of the person responding to the printed page or, you know, going to a theater. Yeah, I think that in a way I’ve done that to a certain– I mean, all drama does that to a certain extent. It alters the people. I mean, you don’t watch a drama or listen to it or read it; you experience it and it changes you. I mean, I feel like I’m different from having experienced some of the dramas that I’ve read like, for instance, the Wallenstein Trilogy with Schiller, which, to me is a very successful drama. I mean, that made me a different person. I mean, this goes back to Aristotle’s concept of the effect of tragedy, you know, the catharsis. It has an ameliorative effect on man’s passions, that it somehow relates to the drama that he’s a better person. In a way that’s not true and in a way it is. Something happens to him, something real; he does change, but I don’t think that it’s a catharsis, because I don’t think the passions are bad. I think that they’re transformed by being released, but not expelled or excreted, you know, harmlessly by watching. They are somehow molded into a coherent shape so they’re given a direction, and the direction is more towards changing the people intrinsically, than setting them off, you know, running to the hills and grabbing guns. I mean, I would not conceive of the effect of a book of mine that way, of making people go and do a particular thing like going and buying a Cadillac, you know, like that. That is to manipulate people into performing certain acts; even good acts like giving to charity or donating blood, but having an effect in changing them as people, not their values in theoretical senses, like believing, you know, that you should or should not sterilize the blacks, but making them different so their worlds, their subjective worlds are different; their value systems are different. They’re different people. Buy more books, too.

James Holmes: [chuckle]

Philip K. Dick: This is, like– This is about mass culture versus the formal elite culture, the old dialectic– You know, in Auerbach’s Mimesis, which is a study of popular culture versus formal culture, he shows that there really is no distinction. That it’s kind of a funky hoax that culture belongs to an elite group and is passed down, you know, as a kind of esoteric thing, and that mass culture is always an inferior thing, merely to pacify the masses, you know, so they don’t revolt, you know bread, circuses. This is not true. The great art has always been a kind of mass art, like Chaucer’s stories. I remember when I first read them; they were in the American Weekly section of the Hearst Newspaper with lurid illustrations, and I was about 11, and we read these and said, “Man, this is really terrible. Look at those dirty words. Oh, my God. How can they print this stuff?” And, somebody said, “You know they teach this in the colleges, and we said, “That’s scandalous. That’s wrong! The stuff is dirty newspaper tabloid, Sunday supplement stuff,” and it was when presented that way, but I mean this is the way it’s always been presented in a sense. I mean, Shakespeare’s plays were shown to much like the audience that sees a drive-in movie now; they really were. You can walk into the Globe Theater right off the street, you know, and throw out a Schilling and sit through Hamlet or [inaudible] and it was for whoever came by. That was true of Chaucer. It was true of all the myths; certainly true of the epics except maybe, possibly the Aeneid which was written maybe for more of an elite audience, but generally speaking, the great art has been sort of a mass art in a way, at least potentially. It is comprehensive. Like, when I read– I tend not to use all polysyllabic euphemisms, sobriquets, and prolix material of that kind, not just in my dialogue, but in general descriptions. Like, I don’t say the effete ineffable prolix response generated within his autonomic system by the stimuli emanating from her gonads– I mean, man, you know, like first of all, as Orwell pointed out, these are all Latin-type words, which are written words to start with–

James Holmes: Uh hmm.

Philip K. Dick: — and our language is basically a spoken language. English is a spoken language, and what we write should be based on what we say, like “Man, she was stacked.” Of course, he wouldn’t say that, but he would say, put it this way, “Her breasts were like mounds of whipped cream topped with maraschino cherries,” and so help me God, I saw that in a story once, and the undulated, at which point I sat up with the maraschino cherries souring as a result of the undulation with the cream churning the butter. He says, “You’ll never be a success as a writer if you take that cynical attitude.”

James Holmes: [chuckle]

Philip K. Dick: The other one was, “Her gown was fastened at the waist by a single broach.” I read that for years before I figured out what that meant. He meant the rest was not fastened.

James Holmes: [laughing]

Philip K. Dick: But, in a way, I mean, you know– This is what pulp, or popular writing, is supposed to consist of – repetitions of stereotyped expressions. Well, those stereotyped expressions go back to the Homeric myths. The Odyssey and Iliad both contained fixed descriptive passages before every subsection. They were always there. There was always rosy-fingered Dawn; it had to be there to work out the meter. There was always far-darting, which I never can say right, far-darting are tenuously or some freaked out goddess. It always had to be the far-darter; it could never be anything else. These were stereotyped as “her breasts were like mounds of whipped cream topped with maraschino cherries,” or “topped with a kosher pickle,” like that, and those stayed in the pulps and provided to the press, but that’s not the whole story about popular writing– much more. There’s a great deal of flexibility possible. I found that out the hard way. I tried those breasts topped with maraschino cherries too late. Auerbach said it’s been done.
James Holmes: Do you think there are gonna be any science fiction pulp magazines in the future? Do you think they are declining?

Philip K. Dick: I think that the written word in many ways is declining as such, thank God, because the written word is artificial compared to the spoken word. Going back to television in a way is not going back to passivity and mere passive acceptance of what is thrown at you. It’s going back more to the spoken thing.

James Holmes: Uh hmm.

Philip K. Dick: And, that’s not bad. I mean, script writing is basically dialogue writing. If you look at a TV– Well, like I said before, I can hardly fathom the camera stuff, but a TV script is very much like a radio script in that it relies primarily on dialogue, which means spoken language, and that, I think, is an improvement. To me, not only can everything be done in dialogue, everything should be done in dialogue, if it can be. It’s not proper. I mean, it’s not essential. It’s not the essence of the thing. Look at, for instance, Ibsen’s Ghost or Ibsen’s Doll’s House or the Master Builder. There isn’t anything that he can’t do as far as I can make out, and in Peer Gynt, he shows at the end of his life that he can even transcend the realism of the bourgeois frame of reference. He can go into a very mystical metaphoric religious-type thing, still within the framework of dialogue. “Hey man, here comes the button molder, what’s he got to offer?” And then Beckett picks it up like in Godot All That Fall; very transcendent, very mystical things, but done in dialogue. All That Fall is remarkable. Are you familiar with that?

James Holmes: No.

Philip K. Dick: That was written for the BBC Radio. It was written to be given strictly as a radio drama. There is no drama cast production. There is no visual All That Fall. It’s only available on the pages of the Evergreen Press book. There is no other All That Fall except the tape of the production over the BBC, which I have. It’s marvelous, but it’s strictly spoken, strictly oral. The greatest dramatic moment is when he says to her when she has this apotheosis, “You are quivering like a blancmange,” and it conveys everything. Like, resurrection, death, something about a chicken lying in the road taking a dust bath; a car comes along, one squawk, one fuss of feathers and it’s all over, and this is, you know, all there is, but everything on the theme of death and rebirth is contained in it. If I could recall it, it would be as good as Beckett. It’s there in the script. It’s a beautiful play. Unfortunately, my tape ran out before it ended, so I don’t know if there was rebirth or not. I just got to the “fall” part.

James Holmes: [laughing]

Philip K. Dick: I think there was rebirth. That comes on the next reel. I was changing tapes when it finished.

James Holmes: What kind of criticism has been leveled against the books that you’ve written, off-hand?

Philip K. Dick: That–

[laughter]

Philip K. Dick: How much time do we have now?

James Holmes: Oh, you’ve got hours.

Philip K. Dick: That’s what I was afraid of. Well, let’s see. We will take it in order of descending importance – that they’re morbid, that they deal with delusional psychotic states, that they are not transferable to other peoples’ mentalities; I mean, they’re, you know, so subjective that they’re relevant only for me, that nobody can understand them, and they don’t like them either. Not only did they not understand them, they don’t like them and they don’t approve of them, and it’s been done before, and not only has it been done before, it’s been done better, that it is more incomprehensible and more psychotic, I guess; and third, it’s dirty or it isn’t dirty. I don’t really know. See, the criticism of my stuff is usually too complicated for me to understand both pro and con. I mean, I start reading it and he starts talking about the meaning that I have in my books, the message, and when I get to that, I literally can’t figure out what he’s saying, and I start skipping paragraphs and I start skipping pages, and then finally– Like, there was one article in an Australian magazine that ran 25 pages – that was just one section – there were three sections, and I skipped the whole middle section. Then, I read the third section, and I couldn’t figure out what it was talking about, and he’d quote passages, and I’d read the passages from my books and I couldn’t figure the passages out. He said, “Now you see, here he talks about the identity between all men…all men are really one man,” and then he’d quote some dialogue. I’d say, “My God, I can’t figure out what that dialogue means,” and then I’d stop reading it entirely, and that’s true of both positive and negative criticism. If it’s profound criticism, I can’t figure it out. I just say, “Gosh, I must be really good. This guy spent 25 pages attacking me as the enemy of civilization.” This other guy says I’m the hope of civilization. I mean, I’m gonna mail the reviews to each other, and you know, slip away, and all the criticism has been, as far as I can make out where I could distinguish the meaning, irrelevant and not germane to me to what I was doing, with one exception; one or two sentences and one mimeograph thing like I did seem to relate to what I was doing, did sum up what I was trying to do.

James Holmes: What was that?

Philip K. Dick: I don’t know. It’s in the desk somewhere.

James Holmes: [laughing] Oh.

Philip K. Dick: If I tried to find it, I probably couldn’t. Something about– Well– Why don’t you turn that off for a second. This is a thing called Sunshine 24, and it’s mimeographed, and it’s so badly mimeographed that half of it you can’t read, and I don’t know who puts it out, somebody called the Latrell Family and I get these strange things all the time. It turns out it has to do with a science fiction class somewhere where they teach– Their booklets is what they call the ten best science fiction novels ever written. There are mentions of me here somewhere; this one thing. The author, speaking of me, is mainly interested in examining the small but noble gestures of belief, faith and trust, which is all that man can do to cope with the universe of chaos, and that seemed like, you know, that made some sense. Like, it doesn’t really matter whether people like what I write– or don’t like what I write, because that has to do, like, with response in a sense, you know, of approval or disapproval; that determines the sales, that determines the prestige. It’s whether they are getting out of it something– not even necessarily what I intend for them to get out, but something that– to go back to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy– It ameliorates their condition or their ability to deal with their condition in some way, which I wouldn’t call positive. You know, like, it makes them better people. I wouldn’t say that, but– It’s always disturbed me that people have talked of my stuff as being a thin film of reality over a seething chaos of psychotic horror that breaks through from time to time and drenches and overwhelms the individual. This sort of thing has worried me because this is not really what I’m talking about. I’ll buy this chaos thing. Like, you know, I don’t understand the universe at all, and it doesn’t understand me, you know, which is okay, but like, to me, I never thought of it this way– the small gestures of trust, faith and belief, but if somebody sees that in my writing, at least that offsets the possibility that I’m only conveying a view that the universe is basically a seething mass of hideous frightening evil with a thin skin of common place, things over the top. That is not what I mean to convey. If I thought that, I would just get a large can of insecticide and spray the universe with it. I wouldn’t write books. You know, I’d direct my attack on the universe. My writing is directed at people, because, you know, like, I believe in people. I mean, these people are gonna buy the books. When the universe gets some money, then I will direct my books at the universe. It makes me mad when I think about the seething cauldron of psychotic horror that the universe is supposed to be. I just pose it as a kind of chaos, and I don’t understand it, but who can understand chaos? It’s like in Kafka. I mean, he can’t figure out what’s going on, and the people that are coming to get him can’t figure out what’s going on. Like, in the Castle– He’s been hired to do a job. He arrives, can’t get in the castle, can’t get them on the phone; when he does get them, they can’t figure out who he is. They don’t know who he is either. They said, “Did we hire you?” He said, “Yes. I wonder what for?” They are as puzzled as he is. Now, if they had a sinister conspiracy going, they would say, “Ah ha, we’ve got you in the inn. Try your door. It won’t open. Now your whole room is gonna self-destruct.” That’s not what happens. They can’t figure out why he’s there, “Why did you come here?” “Well, you hired me.” “Well, we’ll send you a check.” I mean, the universe is gonna have to mail him a check every month on the assumption that he’s working for them. It could be that way, too. It’s not necessarily a seething cauldron. Why is this microphone trying to grasp me by the throat and strangle me?

James Holmes: Is there–

Philip K. Dick: I did write stuff like that for a while where microphones did that. I didn’t get interviewed. The people didn’t bring their microphones around.

James Holmes: Is there any good criticism?

Philip K. Dick: What do you mean?

James Holmes: Well, you know–

Philip K. Dick: Helpful to the writer?

James Holmes: Yeah, helpful to you, or–

Philip K. Dick: Yep.

James Holmes: You know, stuff that you could learn from.

Philip K. Dick: Even irrelevant criticism, and that is where they can’t figure out what you’re doing, is valuable because it’s feedback. I mean, like, if you read 20 different critical articles from different parts of the world, and they all can’t understand what you’re doing, and they all misunderstand it the same way, you begin to get the idea that there’s not much point in what you’re doing. Like, the London Times, the focus should be about your– you know, Isvestia you know, and the Alleghany Free Press all say you’re writing such and such, you start thinking, “I guess I’m not getting my point across,” and then some guy sends you a postcard from Pinole. You know, he uses a pencil because, you know, he can’t afford a ballpoint pen. It says, “Dear Mr. Sir, I read your book,” and he gets the title wrong, “and it was really good because it prevented me from killing myself yesterday afternoon when I blew the block on my car because it snowed all night and I didn’t put antifreeze in the motor,” and I say to myself now, you know, I didn’t write the book to keep this guy from committing suicide because his 1937 flathead Plymouth 6 motor burst, but, you know, maybe that’s good. I mean, the results are not necessarily what you intended, and you can’t control them, I mean, the consequences. But, in a way, you’re responsible for the general direction of the response. If you deprive your reader of the ability to cope with reality– I mean, if you lessen his stamina, lessen his integrity, lessen his joie de vivre or some other funky thing like that, something vital—I mean, I’m not preaching, you know, like we should write stuff that encourages people to believe that everything is wonderful, because it’s not, and if we encourage them to believe that, then that contributes to wiping out their ability to cope. I mean, this is the difference between positive inspirational writing, like it’s pedaled, you know, by the book clubs. Basically, what they tell you– They are comedies. They say things can be dealt with easily, and here is the formula: Get up early in the morning (that’s always something I don’t like to do – that’s where I stop reading those books), pay your bills, go to the dentist, get a haircut, you know, all kinds of unpleasant things, and when you do that, and then here’s what you get, and this is even worse: You get rich, you get popular, you get respected; you get things that are as bad as universal consequences as the techniques for acquiring them are repellent. I mean, I don’t want to get up early and I don’t want to be rich, and they tell you really basically the universe can be manipulated, and other people especially can be manipulated. They are manipulative technique books. They preach optimism as a philosophy, but they preach techniques for manipulating other people, which is cynical, and I don’t think that’s optimistic. My kind of optimism would be to write a book how to be unable to win friends, how to be completely inept at coping in the sense of influencing people, because you should never influence people in that sense. You know, “Hi Bill! By the way, my house is for sale. If you don’t buy it, I’m gonna send the police a photostat of that picture of you and my wife.” You know, that’s– How about, you know, a book like that– How to extort money, blackmail people and get them busted if they don’t cooperate. No, that wouldn’t be too optimistic. That would strike people as cynical. Now, positive books like psycho-cybernetics are really destructive in that they reduce descriptive science and pure science, like psychology, the science of the human mind, into a series of formulas for getting control not of yourself, but of the people around you, getting control of yourself is a valid thing in line with the Apollo motto: Know Thyself. Getting control of other people is something else to other people in that sense is like bugging their phone and listening into their conversations through your open window through their open window, which, in itself is not bad– it’s sort of interesting, but it’s the use that you put it to that is probably bad. I just write down dialogue before I would change the names. That’s as far as it’ll go. I don’t mail them a copy. I very carefully do not mail them a copy.
James Holmes: Have you ever written anything besides science fiction? Have you thought of doing, you know, mainstream or whatever they call it, you know, regular fiction?

Philip K. Dick: Well, I did some fantasies back around 1951 and 52, which were pretty good, but the market went away, and my ability to write them went away when the market went away, and I have done some avant-garde stuff and it was no good; it was lousy; it was crummy because I read it over recently, and it was just awful. It didn’t sell because it was no good. I said at the time it didn’t sell because nobody understood it; it was too advanced for them. That was not true. It was junk. I did sell one experimental novel that was marketed as science fiction, but it appeared in a magazine as a serial and will be marketed again in a paperback. How that’ll be presented, I don’t know, but that is not a science fiction, that it’s experimental. It’s a really strange book.

James Holmes: What is it?

Philip K. Dick: Hmm?

James Holmes: What’s the name of it?

Philip K. Dick: Well, the magazine version was A. Lincoln, Simulacrum. It’s about a Lincoln robot. This is before Disney– Disney built one about the time the serial came out, and his did just about what mine did in the book, only mine in the book it was carried into areas where I hope Disney did not carry his– I hope. I haven’t been down there to see Disney’s, but it was really a strange book; had the first Jewish robot. That’s something I didn’t notice until a critical article called it to my attention. And a pretty, pretty girl, too, but this will be coming out in paperback. I translated it directly from {inaudible}, “Her breasts were like mounds,” and then my Latin got too bad I couldn’t finish the quotation.

James Holmes: [chuckle]

Philip K. Dick: But, it’s an interesting book. It’s really strange. I don’t want to have it brought around, though. I wrote that when I was very pessimistic. Like, in the book, people’s eyes are below their noses and their mouths are above their– at the top of their face because of, you know, war time– you know, they’re war time mutants. You know, this is strange, but it’s accepted. You know, “Remember your brother, Chester? You know Chester. The one that has the eyes below his nose.” Unfortunately, I can’t get it straight. They can get it straight. That was a very strange book, since such a robot was built just about the time the book came out.

James Holmes: How is your outlook now?

Philip K. Dick: Optimistic.

James Holmes: For, you know.

Philip K. Dick: I think–

James Holmes: For your writing? For the world?

Philip K. Dick: No, I think robots will have a better future than I thought they would. No, I mean, my writing has always sold well. I mean, you know– I don’t make any money off it because if I do get some money, I can’t figure out what to do with it and I lose it, and if I figure out what to do with it, somebody else figures out better what to do with it, either done on a professional level by the income tax people or on a private level by mutual friends. Somebody can always figure out what to do with it if I can’t, and the sales are pretty good

Philip K. Dick: Well, I had a thing in the Soviet Union that sold a million and a half copies. That’s good, I guess. So that’s not an important factor. I think I can sell whatever I write, because most of what I write is pretty good for what that’s worth. That doesn’t really benefit me and I don’t know if it benefits humanity. As far as my view about what’s going on, I’m much more optimistic, I think things are not nearly as bad as I thought. Well I thought they would drop the cobalt bomb in 1912 and they haven’t dropped it yet, not as far as I know. The thing that really cheered me up was Faulkner’s Nobel speech, prize speech. Did you read that?

James Holmes: No I didn’t.

Philip K. Dick: Well he wrote that into his book she something I don’t know, it came out in a huge book that he wrote, but it was the Nobel prize speech that he had.

Philip K. Dick: Now how can I quote the Faulkner Nobel prize speech. Anyway, I always quote these things wrong, you know in style. But I translate them into my own language and they’re usually improved somewhat, but not in this case. So anyway, the hydrogen war and the world is in ruins which is what we science fiction writers wrote about all the time, and our books come out of the ruins with 8 legs carrying weapons that they’ve made out of copies of the bible that they’ve refrigerated until they’re firm enough to cut into scimitars and other shit. Anyway, here’s the way he saw the ruins after the war. And then there’s this noise from way down in the ruins and it’s man or men or something, and they’re scheming, arguing, plotting, planning, figuring out what to do, getting it wrong, correcting each other, arguing, but constantly arguing and bickering about it. They’re so busy arguing and bickering about what they’re going to do, they’re oblivious to the big picture, the fact that the world is in ruins. They’re just down there, they probably got an old envelope, probably something from the phone company saying they’re going to cut off the phone, and on the back of it they’re writing down what they’re going to do I guess. I mean this is the way I envision it, They can’t agree on what they’re going to, but they’re so busy planning they simply don’t notice the magnitude of the job and by the very intensity of their interaction, you sense they have a better chance, well, our stories didn’t have any chance at all because how can you rebuild the entire world. If he were here to read it, he would probably read the whole thing and be more effective. That was the impression I got, that they would come out of the ruins, that was the impression he wanted to give and do something, but it was the idiomatic quality of their gabble and I heard him read this over the radio, and I just turned it on and I heard what I thought was a Baptist minister, you know pontificating and ranting, and this went on for a long time. I’m very un-selective in what I turn off. And then he got on to this section, and I said you know that Baptist minister could make a name for himself, at least in the Southern states, if he could get rid of that accent, then they said it was William Faulkner reading the Nobel prize speech. So I liked it before I heard who it was, I like to think you know. I thought Jesus Christ, those rednecks have got something to say after all, they’re dumb and they use little, short words and they’re repetitious, but at least it’s soul time and that’s something. At least it isn’t all limited now to you all come back now, you hear, like we had heard about the south. That I suggested to an opulent friend, a materialistically inclined and very good at it, that when they were looking for inspirational literature having already consumed the bible in 8 days in a speed reading contest with the people across the street, that they try that and see if they like that. They didn’t buy it because it was too expensive and they couldn’t get a 10% discount by ordering more than 50, so instead they got something by James Mitchner, about how the races are inherently unequal and they read that instead because it was cheaper and it was more recently published so they figured it was more topical. I rest my case. This junkie too, they loaned it to me afterward, the dog ate it.

James Holmes: If you could be anyone…

Philip K. Dick: Dogs going to be in court pretty soon paying for it too. Full price. Yes sir.

James Holmes: If you could be anyone in history, who would you be?

Philip K. Dick: As little as possible, I’d like to go in and out of history in such a way that I did not get noticed, because that is what the Nazi’s called de stille imlande and that was the people that objected but they could never pin them down because they couldn’t find them and that’s what it means translated. The people who are silent throughout the country and this was the only way you could object in a state like the National Socialist state. With the death penalty, if you lined your garbage pail with something that turned out to maybe have a picture of Hitler on it, and they all did, so that was it, and yet there was this stille imlande and they could never get them all because the people made no sound, showed no characteristics, and somehow they undermined the regime in some subtle way. How could you draw up a document, an arrest document, you had no name, no address, nothing on them, and they were ready to arrest them all, and they never could find them and this is the way I think you should enter history and get out, invisible. They’re still looking for them, they went to Argentina and changed their names, they’re now hokeying up all those funky cars they’re building in Argentina. Sabotage is what it’s called, which means literally throwing your wooden shoes into the assembly line. What was it called in French, [sabot-wooden shoes made from a single block of wood], the wooden things, once they fell into the machinery, you couldn’t get the machinery turning for days, it slowed down to a crawl, things came off the assembly line, but it took longer. You could never pin down who did it because everybody’s shoes were identical. The mass man,

James Holmes: What do you think of when you read science fiction.

Philip K. Dick: I don’t know, when I read it, it’s in translation and it loses something I guess, because it never strikes me as very good, just full of all kinds of poetic imagery which to me is out of place in prose. Like, can you tell me about it, maybe you could enlighten me about the new wave stuff.

James Holmes: I know I can’t.

Philip K. Dick: Have you read any of it?

James Holmes: Well I don’t know, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is.

Philip K. Dick: Is that Ted Carnells stuff?

James Holmes: I think it’s gonna be people like J G Ballard.

Philip K. Dick: Oh yea, the drown world subject.

James Holmes: Yeah.

Philip K. Dick: Did you read any of his stuff? Was it any good?

James Holmes: Yea, it was enjoyable, he has some good ideas.

Philip K. Dick: What did you like it for you, for instance.

James Holmes: For instance, oh purely crystalline worlds, you know.

Philip K. Dick: What goes on in them?

James Holmes: Not much.

Philip K. Dick: A dull Saturday night. Reminds me of a Hal Clement called Mission of Gravity, it was a serial in Astounding, in the second installment, the preamble, or synopsis, began this way. For the first time in the history of man it became possible to measure a three gravitational field. I thought what a dramatic premise for a human life, man. What pathos, what tragedy, three gravities. So I asked somebody what the book was like because I couldn’t read it, he says they built this little airplane and they could only fly 5 feet, and I said why, because of the three gravities, and then he went on about the 3 gravities, pulled out a slide rule, measured me to see how far I’d fly. That’s the way Ballard struck me, because I’ve got all of Ballard kicking around here and I tried to read it, and it was sort of poetic, it was sort of poetic sterile stuff, sort of vivid, very vivid impotent stuff. Very, very vivid dull stuff.

James Holmes: Some of Norman Spinrad’s stuff, like Bug Jack Barron, used to called new wave, sort of, I think Damon Knight called it second handedly trendy.

Philip K. Dick: Norman said it was the dirtiest book ever written by him, he was going to get the most money he’d ever got in his life. Did he by the way?

James Holmes: I think he did.

Philip K. Dick: I think he did too.

James Holmes: From what he said, his collection of short stories outsold it because it was sold by Doubleday science fiction.
Philip K. Dick: Was it dirtier?

James Holmes: No it wasn’t dirtier.

Philip K. Dick: I didn’t think Norman wrote dirty stuff, I’ve never been able to read a book, but don’t quote me about that because like I haven’t told Norman I couldn’t read Bug Jack Baron, but I had it around and I opened it, and it says this is the dirtiest book I’ve ever read, I’m going to buy all the copies that I can, mail them to people as Christmas presents. My check didn’t clear and I never got the presents. I don’t think that’s new wave, I think that’s an experimental model of the Henry Moore type, of the sort of, says an article by Judith Merrill one time in Fantasy and Science Fiction about new wave, which is about all I know about it. It was a contrast between the new wave stuff and what she called the old pulp pros and the old pulp pros were like Van Vogt, people like that, Stanley Weinbaum, the new wave stuff was whoever those guys are over there. She mentioned me, I read paragraph after paragraph before finding about me, she said then there’s Phil Dick, I got ranked, she said now he stands between the two, he’s a lousy pulp writer like the old pros, he writes all kinds of unintelligible stuff like the new wave people, in addition his dialogue is all from the comic books. It goes like this, pow, zowy, gretta, it’s sure great in bed isn’t it, zam, wham, I said gosh that’s terrible. That’s the worst news I’ve ever heard. Then I read on, she said, therefore he’s the finest figure in the field, and gave reasons that made no sense. I got to thinking about this and I thought now here’s the quintessence of idiocy, my dialog is not like that, the new way stuff is probably beautiful, but like remembrance of things past has no future, is style and imagery without content, the old pros, like Van Vogt, Weinbaum, John W Campbell under the name Don A Stuart, were really very fine writers, nothing she says makes sense because it goes back to the whole thing between popular culture and the elite culture, the new wave is a kind of attempt to make into an elite thing the field that has always been a kind of popular or pulp thing, to give it prestige without quality, class without dignity, and readers who are more affluent and who like elegance, like her breast were like Florentine China man, 60% bone and glazed with the most beautiful lead glaze possible, melted down from byzantine mosaics. Tipped with gold, rose stained glass windows from Notre Dame. That would sell in England, I’ve got a low opinion of English science fiction.

James Holmes: I understand you’re more popular over in England and Europe than you are here.

Philip K. Dick: You have a knack for words son. No they don’t like my stuff over there. That’s true.

James Holmes: But don’t you sell better over there?

Philip K. Dick: No

James Holmes: Aren’t you more popular over there?

Philip K. Dick: I don’t know, I’ve never been over there. I get letters from some writers over there, John Brunner for instance who I know very well comes to see me about every 18 months, which is when he renews his prescription for earth and novid [?] for his girlfriend, his wife, says that he likes my stuff. He did a big article of my stuff in France, which I can’t read which says I’m very good he says. Outside of John Brunner I don’t think I am liked at all over there. Ted Carnell doesn’t like my stuff at all.

James Holmes: There are fan people over there, but they don’t buy all your books.

Philip K. Dick: Nobody buys my books over there.

James Holmes: Really?

Philip K. Dick: No, they did for awhile.

James Holmes: What happened?

Philip K. Dick: I don’t know some terrible calamity must have set in. I was published by the largest publisher over there, and my agent said that’s your publisher Phil and then all of a sudden they went and bought back every copy of one of my books that had been distributed, and then a great silence fell over England and they never bought anything again.

James Holmes: Which book did they buy back.

Philip K. Dick: I’m not going to say.

James Holmes: come on.

Philip K. Dick: They bought the title back and they erased my memory banks. No they’d used a different title, anyway I was never really popular after that point. What did I say in that book do you suppose that would turn off a whole country?

James Holmes: Well, maybe I can read it.

Philip K. Dick: A Penultimate Truth

James Holmes: You didn’t say anything.

Philip K. Dick: Maybe that’s what happened, that’s all that money and understanding. I sort of liked that book though.

James Holmes: I read it.

Philip K. Dick: Do you remember anything about it?

James Holmes: Yea, I remember the title because I didn’t know what Penultimate meant.

Philip K. Dick: I didn’t use that title, the publisher put that on and when I received the book I said what does penultimate mean. Turns out it means the next last right?

James Holmes: Right.

Philip K. Dick: I don’t see how that refers to the book. I thought that was the ultimate truth I was putting down. That was my one attempt to tell what I thought was the ultimate truth, and it backfired, I ceased to be popular in England. I think I said that the Torreys were all homosexuals or something, I don’t know. I know I said something really bad because the German edition was translated into Braille and for those whose mothers had suffered from Rubella during their pregnancy. and distributed to the experimental labs so it must have been really awful.

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.

Philip K. Dick: Well I’ve spent the last two months drawing up a list, I’ve studied every novel that’s been published in the field and here’s my list, would you like to hear it.

James Holmes: I’d love to hear it.

Philip K. Dick: #1 – Dune by Frank Herbert, second A Canticle for Liebowitz that was a marvelous novel, the first really great American science fiction novel, Cats Cradle Kurt Vonnegut, I would, myself in later thought would substitute Player Piano, but Cats Cradle is very good. Childhoods End by Arthur Clark, Ubick by Richard Phillipps, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, a really great book, it really deserved the Hugo, Starmaker by Olaf Stapleton an old book in English but good, Circus of Doctor Lau by Jack Finney who lives down here in Canfield and won’t talk to anybody, that was a very fine book. Babel 17 by Chip Delaney and one that I can’t remember now what it was about but I must have liked it, Hole in the Zero by Joseph, I’m sure that’s a shuck, but those are 10 very fine novels in the field. Hole in the Zero was a horror book but I understand Damon Knight liked it, a horror book none the less, I must have put it on the list for a reason. I don’t really have, that’s somebody else’s list, that’s from Sunshine Number 24, What do you think of that list, Seriously.

James Holmes: I like it, I think most of it, I’ll agree with Babel 17, I’d like to see I think Stand on Zanzibar.

Philip K. Dick: Do you really?

James Holmes: Yea, I do.

Philip K. Dick: I was with John off and on while he was writing at least when he was over here, he was telling me about it, and we corresponded and he sent me a copy as soon as it was out, and damn that was a long book wasn’t it? But it was worth reading, I mean I don’t usually read books that long, they usually circulate by a book of the month club and cost a lot of money, but he sent one free. Had it mailed to the United States, sent the dedication on a piece of paper which he had me glue into the front page to save money, but that was a very fine book. I don’t think it was as good though as The Jagged Orbit.

James Holmes: Jagged Orbit was more coherent, in terms of plot development and things like that.

Philip K. Dick: That’s what I said in the back jacket, yea, I wrote part of the blurb. That was kind of a reciprocal thing he wrote a blurb for me, and we both said each other’s book was the best one published that year.

James Holmes: Didn’t you think Dune was also pretty long, did you ever read Dune?

Philip K. Dick: Yea, Dune is a very good book, Stand on Zanzibar was an effort on his part to do what Dos Passos did in USA, to capture everything in terms of all the raw data and like he got it down but I know John wouldn’t mind if I said this because I said it in a letter. That like in Jagged Orbit, he digested, refined, excreted the stuff that was not relevant and shaped it more which I think is more the job of the writer. In Stand on Zanzibar, he just kind of pasted in everything that happened in his head, but it was a marvelous book, it really was great. Especially if you got it for free.

James Holmes: Did you read Einstein Intersection?

Philip K. Dick: No.

James Holmes: Delaney did somewhat the similar thing, he wrote it when he was driving around Europe and singing songs for pennies, and he would throw in parts of his diary, and before every chapter you could kind of see the, some kind of relationship between where he was in Europe and what was happening.

Philip K. Dick: Well you know like the last, I think it was in the Stand on Zanzibar, wasn’t it, the last chapter of this novel was typed on a Corona portable with a silk ribbon, 842 inches long, and you know I thought to myself, when you pay on the word basis how you, I don’t know, when he was out here, you know Phil, I’m in the Guinness Book of World Records I wrote the shortest chapter ever written. I said OK, lay it on me John, what was the chapter. He said I is the word, the letter I, that was all. So I thought the other day, I’m going to beat that, get that out of the Guinness Book of World Records, I’m going to write a chapter with nothing, just 1, chapter 1, and nothing on there. Already did that but it was rejected by the editor. But I’m going to get him out of the Guinness Book of World Records. Anyway he was prouder of that than anything else in that book. In a way I don’t blame him because in a way we all want immortality. Maybe I could write the longest chapter ever written.

James Holmes: Also on missing on that list, now that I think about it is Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, or Men in the Jungle, Bug Jack Barron is a bit more palatable.

Philip K. Dick: Well I can think of some older books that at the time seemed good to me. For instance, Gravy Planet, and the Pohl and Kornbluth collaboration: Space Merchants.

James Holmes: Space Merchants.

Philip K. Dick: That was awfully good, Sturgeons More Than Human had some good parts, especially in the 3rd section. That was originally the middle part was the novel at end Galaxy and he fanned out in both directions. There was Player Piano of Vonnegut, I believe it was his first novel wasn’t it. That I thought was marvelous. That I have re read many times. As a Freudian slip, I found it the other day among my collection of my own novels, I don’t know who put it there, but there it was, and that was great because of the dialog. That was really as fine dialog as you’ll find, especially between the guy and his wife. In fact I read that and said you know that guy has got more marital problems than I have. Those were good, Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes was I guess was a fantasy, when the balloon witch floated over head and they punctured it, I said that is really marvelous and then there’s been a few others.

James Holmes: How about in the fantasy realm, a fan, I mean divorced from science fiction. The Man Who Was Thursday.
Philip K. Dick: That was, oh Christ, if I could paste my name over somebody else’s name it would have been on that. The Man Who Was Thursday, the dream, what was the subtitle, A Nightmare, that and L Ron Hubbard’s Fear, did you read that?

James Holmes: No, I didn’t

Philip K. Dick: That was to me, the most frightening thing I have ever read, that was the beginning of the kind of thing, that like I’ve done, a psychological novel, he marketed it as fantasy but like when the guy would walk down the street he would look back real quick and the people passing, walking the other way were lying down. When he looked back, they got up slowly and stood up again and I remember that once it was a study of a disintegrating mind, a trip into schizophrenia and he got it all down, it was all there. Perfect, it could never be improved on. That I would say began and ended the whole psychological or true psychotic novel, I mean that is another reason why just thinking about it now, I’ve never really tried to write a psychotic novel because he really did that in Fear. I know what he was trying to do, and he did it, and when he finished, he never touched it again. never touched anything like that again, didn’t have to.

James Holmes: How about it, have you read any Borges, Jorge Luis Borges

Philip K. Dick: What nationality is that?

James Holmes: Argentina.

Philip K. Dick: This guy who came over from Sweden, from Swedish tv, sent me a copy of some of his stuff, said he was very good, I didn’t really get too much out of it but.

James Holmes: You’re right, it’s mostly short stories, they’re all really amazing.

Philip K. Dick: Well this guy from Sweden, I forget his name, is a foreigner of some sort, thought this Argentina fellow, another foreigner would really be one of the greatest people in the field, that may be true, but I’m interested more in the novel anyway, I would not tend to respond to short stories. If I were going to talk in terms like that though, that is really literary type stuff this Argentina fellow. I would get out of the field entirely, I would talk about Ionesco for instance and Beckett, I wouldn’t even restrict myself at all in the field. In a way it depends on where you limit, the definition of the field, how far are you going to extend the genre term, what are you going to include, like the Naked Lunch, include Burroughs. I would not include Burroughs. In England he’s included. I would just simply go right into stuff, which bore no, I would just say this is science fiction, I would list Ionesco, people would say why, and I’d say why not, and they would never be able wrangle me out of. I would go into things like Watt for instance, Samuel Beckett’s stuff especially, Malone Dies, all those things of his. Really strange things, people are treated as if they were planets in the solar system, rotating around one another with nothing but the most meager and indirect evidence of each others existence and finally of their own existence. Where human life is reduced to what he finds progressively to be the sole essential constituents, and each piece he writes he finds fewer essential constituents, people wind up living in garbage cans, End Game That’s horrible, End Game is horrible. There it’s reduced to a point where there is really degradation, there’s no humor, there’s nothing but degradation, I mean who wants to live in that garbage can when you can live in Santa Venetia. Before he got to the end where he was reduced to that extent, it was pretty good stuff, there was still humor, and still a perspective and people were not yet planets in the sense of being inanimate. As you do get in the final stuff, you know like, Craps Last Tape, have you read that or seen that? Did you like that?

James Holmes: [um-hm]

Philip K. Dick: I liked that a lot, because of just one thing, where he says, he’s sitting there eating a banana, he turns the tape on and recorded 20 to 30 years earlier in his life, when Tape starts out he hears his own voice say I’m going to get rid of the habit of eating bananas today, or something like that. And he’s still eating bananas 20 years later. Now without that kind of touch, that stuff is drear, and he excluded that kind of element I think finally, but like in that you still have that element and that transforms something like Craps Last Tape. Which otherwise is a kind of entropic thing you know, continual downhill thing as you get throughout most of Beckett, toward an equal distribution of heat`into an utterly impotent purposeless, as the New Merriam Webster says toward ultimate silence, stillness and death. Silence, coldness and death. There aren’t a dictionary page, he still had humor like the banana thing, and therefore is alive even though, I mean if they were living in a garbage can and they said my garbage can is better than yours or something like that, then I could carry it even farther in my own mind.

some good parts, especially in the 3rd section. That was originally the middle part was the novel at end Galaxy and he fanned out in both directions. There was Player Piano of Vonnegut, I believe it was his first novel wasn’t it. That I thought was marvelous. That I have re read many times. As a Freudian slip, I found it the other day among my collection of my own novels, I don’t know who put it there, but there it was, and that was great because of the dialog. That was really as fine dialog as you’ll find, especially between the guy and his wife. In fact I read that and said you know that guy has got more marital problems than I have. Those were good, Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes was I guess was a fantasy, when the balloon witch floated over head and they punctured it, I said that is really marvelous and then there’s been a few others.

James Holmes: How about in the fantasy realm, a fan, I mean divorced from science fiction. The Man Who Was Thursday.

Philip K. Dick: That was, oh Christ, if I could paste my name over somebody else’s name it would have been on that. The Man Who Was Thursday, the dream, what was the subtitle, A Nightmare, that and L Ron Hubbard’s Fear, did you read that?

James Holmes: No, I didn’t

Philip K. Dick: That was to me, the most frightening thing I have ever read, that was the beginning of the kind of thing, that like I’ve done, a psychological novel, he marketed it as fantasy but like when the guy would walk down the street he would look back real quick and the people passing, walking the other way were lying down. When he looked back, they got up slowly and stood up again and I remember that once it was a study of a disintegrating mind, a trip into schizophrenia and he got it all down, it was all there. Perfect, it could never be improved on. That I would say began and ended the whole psychological or true psychotic novel, I mean that is another reason why just thinking about it now, I’ve never really tried to write a psychotic novel because he really did that in Fear. I know what he was trying to do, and he did it, and when he finished, he never touched it again. never touched anything like that again, didn’t have to.

James Holmes: How about it, have you read any Borges, Jorge Luis Borges

Philip K. Dick: What nationality is that?

James Holmes: Argentina.

Philip K. Dick: This guy who came over from Sweden, from Swedish tv, sent me a copy of some of his stuff, said he was very good, I didn’t really get too much out of it but.

James Holmes: You’re right, it’s mostly short stories, they’re all really amazing.

Philip K. Dick: Well this guy from Sweden, I forget his name, is a foreigner of some sort, thought this Argentina fellow, another foreigner would really be one of the greatest people in the field, that may be true, but I’m interested more in the novel anyway, I would not tend to respond to short stories. If I were going to talk in terms like that though, that is really literary type stuff this Argentina fellow. I would get out of the field entirely, I would talk about Ionesco for instance and Beckett, I wouldn’t even restrict myself at all in the field. In a way it depends on where you limit, the definition of the field, how far are you going to extend the genre term, what are you going to include, like the Naked Lunch, include Burroughs. I would not include Burroughs. In England he’s included. I would just simply go right into stuff, which bore no, I would just say this is science fiction, I would list Ionesco, people would say why, and I’d say why not, and they would never be able wrangle me out of. I would go into things like Watt for instance, Samuel Beckett’s stuff especially, Malone Dies, all those things of his. Really strange things, people are treated as if they were planets in the solar system, rotating around one another with nothing but the most meager and indirect evidence of each others existence and finally of their own existence. Where human life is reduced to what he finds progressively to be the sole essential constituents, and each piece he writes he finds fewer essential constituents, people wind up living in garbage cans, End Game That’s horrible, End Game is horrible. There it’s reduced to a point where there is really degradation, there’s no humor, there’s nothing but degradation, I mean who wants to live in that garbage can when you can live in Santa Venetia. Before he got to the end where he was reduced to that extent, it was pretty good stuff, there was still humor, and still a perspective and people were not yet planets in the sense of being inanimate. As you do get in the final stuff, you know like, Craps Last Tape, have you read that or seen that? Did you like that?

James Holmes: [um-hm]

Philip K. Dick: I liked that a lot, because of just one thing, where he says, he’s sitting there eating a banana, he turns the tape on and recorded 20 to 30 years earlier in his life, when Tape starts out he hears his own voice say I’m going to get rid of the habit of eating bananas today, or something like that. And he’s still eating bananas 20 years later. Now without that kind of touch, that stuff is drear, and he excluded that kind of element I think finally, but like in that you still have that element and that transforms something like Craps Last Tape. Which otherwise is a kind of entropic thing you know, continual downhill thing as you get throughout most of Beckett, toward an equal distribution of heat`into an utterly impotent purposeless, as the New Merriam Webster says toward ultimate silence, stillness and death. Silence, coldness and death. There aren’t a dictionary page, he still had humor like the banana thing, and therefore is alive even though, I mean if they were living in a garbage can and they said my garbage can is better than yours or something like that, then I could carry it even farther in my own mind.

James Holmes: They don’t have to talk all then , they just sit.
Philip K. Dick: That’s really man, now Ionesco I don’t think ever got to that kind of thing, he was still great. All his characters in one play were named the same name, I don’t know how they staged that, really funny things like talking about Aristotle. A guy says he was a wog, another argument, very profound, he said I’m going to bite your nose, and stuff like that, to me it was, it’s really absurd, It’s the Theatre of the Absurd.
Philip K. Dick: … But to me it makes sense. I mean, I can’t tell the difference anyway whether things make sense or not. I just enjoy them and I really enjoy Ionesco. Did you see Zero Mostel in Rhinoceros?

James Holmes: No I didn’t.

Philip K. Dick: I didn’t either. They say that was unbelievably good because he did on the stage what, ya know, happens in the script; he did turn himself right on the stage into a rhinoceros like, ya know, the way Barrymore did it in the silent film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with no make up he just turned himself into Mr. Hyde. Darndest thing I ever saw. I wish I could do that. But to me Ionesco, for instance is writing the kind of stuff that I conceive of myself as writing. I mean it’s not set in the future and it’s not… nobody, I think, has ever called, Ionesco science fiction. But it is the zeitgeist that compels my attention. A mixture of chaos, ya know the absurd. You go back to Kafka where the universe doesn’t make any sense and you carry it one step further where it doesn’t make any sense and it’s also funny. Now, cause like if God is conspiring to destroy and God screws it all up and can’t find you when the day comes, ya know. When judgment day comes and God’s got the records all mixed up and he condemns somebody else in line by mistake. To me, this kind of relief from the inexorable conspiratorial view of the universe is the thing about the modern world, or the really modern world, that I like. For instance Goethe mentions this like in Egmont; this is the thing that even the conspiracies of God are screwed up by the chance commingling of people and events. Nobody, even God, can predict what is going to happen. Look what happened at the Garden of Eden. God had it all worked out, it screwed up somehow, which is good probably. And this introduces not merely chaos and the unfathomable and mysterious but chance and randomness enhance humor, because humor is based on a response to the unexpected, to something other than cause and effect you know, which is inexorable. Something happens, in other words, you mix five eggs, some flour and all that other stuff and you get, for instance, the Bible, you know; you open the oven and there’s the Bible sitting in the pan. This is always funny; the unexpected is always funny unless it’s horrible. And if you can shut out the sense of the horrible, then it’s funny. And sometimes you can do this even when you are being executed. Like “you fellas couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn door” and the next second that guy is blown to bits. If he can still keep that mood, I would like to see how he does it, you know. Then there’s some hope. Not for him maybe, but maybe one of those soldiers goes home and says “You know, he’s right, I missed him entirely. I’ll have to go practice some more and do better next week.” I don’t really know, there’s a Jewish joke, where it’s during the Crimean war and they’re firing back and forth in the lines and this Jewish soldier has been dragooned into one of these sides. So he leaps up and says, “Why are you shooting at me, ‘here steyt ein mensch’ ” which is Yiddish for ‘here stands a man’. It makes no sense at all because who else are there on both sides except men. But the fact that the guy can’t figure out how they can be shooting at him if he’s a man in a way it makes no sense and in a way it makes complete sense. The thing that’s missing though is his realization. Everybody else on both sides, every other individual could also say that if they thought about it. Jewish humor is that way, it’s not funny and it is funny just like Chaplin you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I would prefer to laugh. I cry and they arrest me for being a homosexual or something like that.

James Holmes: What do you think of Kafka. You mentioned him…

Phillip K. Dick: Laugh myself sick. Especially reading Metamorphosis

James Holmes: But, Kafka laughed.

Phillip K. Dick: You’re putting me on.

James Holmes: No. He laughed all the way through. What if he’d, like, read them to his friends.

Phillip K. Dick: He laughed?

James Holmes: Yeah he had friends read them and he just laughed himself silly.

Phillip K. Dick: You must be putting me on. Even like “In The Penal Colony”?

James Holmes: Yes. Even “The Penal Colony”. He just, from what I’ve read, of people, not in his diaries or anything like that but people writing about his life and he..

Phillip K. Dick: Jesus Christ.

James Holmes: He would just laugh the whole way through it.

Phillip K. Dick: So like my idea of

James. Holmes: “The Castle” is just the one. You know there’s a section of “The Castle” where he had his friends read them over again and again.

Phillip K. Dick: It’s like the Adolf Hitler joke book, it’s a fine idea but what do you put in as the first joke, besides Adolf Hitler’s birth? And that, you can’t start laughing there. I don’t know what to think; if Kafka thought those things were funny, like one day Joseph K. woke up one day and found out he was a giant cockroach, you know, I wouldn’t find that funny at all. I’ll have to go back and look at my article that I wrote on Kafka. I did not mention that Kafka thought those things were funny. That’s bad news. That’s like, the Soviet Union published an article once that Hamlet was really written as a comedy and it was the end scene where everybody is dead on the stage and you’re supposed to die laughing and the proof of this is that Hamlet is described as being fat and everybody knows that fat men are funny or at least they were so thought of then. And this immediately inspired me to all kinds of thoughts. Like a humorous musical on Ecclesiastes, something like Oklahoma and all kinds of awful things like the Nuremberg trial documents set to music like, oh Jesus Christ don’t get me started on that.

James Holmes: Have you seen any movies lately?

Phillip K. Dick: Yeah.

James Holmes: Any that you’d like to remember?

Phillip K. Dick: Yeah. The Planet of the Apes and Under The Planet of the Apes. Beneath? I always get it wrong. Those were really marvelous. Those were like to me The Schiller trilogy, the Wallenstein trilogy. It was worth the $2.00 it cost for all nine of us to get in. They were really wonderful. And as I drove away, I thought next time we’d go back and see it again we’ll offer them a banana instead of $2.00 and see what happens. That this was really like pop art, mass culture, man that is really something because the span of attention alone required in sitting there in your cold car watching those three films and that’s about as long as a Wagnerian opera and a hell of a lot better. Now I thought when that was over, I don’t really have to say anything because the guys that made this, they did it really damn good. That was really wonderful. And I would recommend seeing that. I saw another movie that I would not, well I recommend seeing it as a scientific curiosity of the way things should never be and that was something called ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and after this girl and I got out, we went to the movies because we were feeling depressed, we got out of that and we drove around and tried to buy a cup of coffee and they wouldn’t serve us because we had such strange looks on our faces. That I would recommend only as I would recommend reading the Nuremberg trial documents and the contrast between the two is the contrast between life and death.

James Holmes: Are they searching back?

Phillip K. Dick: Yeah searching back, I always think of “All Quiet On The Western Front” the old Lew Ayres film which I finally saw on TV. like I saw “Children of Paradise” on daytime TV. To me that, “All Quiet On The Western Front”, that was the greatest dramatic moment in my life that is you know sitting before any kind of dramatic production. I never recovered from that, I was never the same person. I’ve seen a lot of really fine movies since then, “Ballad Of A Soldier”, that Soviet film, or whatever it was called, it was the about the soldier on leave during World War II. It was simply a slave looking for this girl; it had no politics or anything. That was a great film. I thought “Ben Hur” was a great film, believe it or not, I got really strange taste. I thought that “Potemkin” was a great film. I thought the “Circus of Dr. Lao” was a great movie, nothing though was like “All Quiet On The Western Front” to me.

James Holmes: Your all time favorite movie?

Phillip K. Dick: Absolutely. That and the first “Dracula” film.

James Holmes: Ha ha, with Bela Lugosi?

Phillip K. Dick: Yeah well that one. There was a silent German “Dracula” which I saw. Did you ever see that?

James Holmes: No, I don’t think so.

Phillip K. Dick: That was pretty scary too. But I was thinking of the first Bela Lugosi one. With the people coming, the women all three coming forward from their coffins; to me was like out of Jung; it was a great archetypal moment. There are a lot of other, there are really many, many fine movies, there’s so many fine movies that you can’t really sit, like you can, list them. You can draw up a list of the 10 best science fiction novels cause at most there are 10 but there are so many great movies. I also can name some of the worst movies I ever saw too. But there are many of those too.

James Holmes: What’s the absolute worst?

Phillip K. Dick: What was that thing about where Rhett Butler at the end says “Frankly, I don’t give a damn” whatever that was that was it. What was that?

James Holmes: “Gone With The Wind”?

Phillip K. Dick: “Gone With The Wind”. Yeah, the worst movie ever made. All time worst movie.

James Holmes: That’s also the all time biggest money grossing movie ever made.

Phillip K. Dick: I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole. That’s cause it had a dirty word at the end of it. The word “damn”. You know it’s really tragic when you think about, well I can never see that thing and I get dragooned into seeing it. Without thinking of what happened to Vivian Leigh at the end of her life in comparison to what happened to her as the character in there. To me, the contrast between the two, if I was teaching a course on the relationship between wish fulfillment, fake, lousy, what they call plastic culture stuff and life I would contrast that movie with what happened to her in real life. Which to me, was an authentic tragedy. In which, if I were to write, I would write that kind of thing into my writing. That was really terrible. If you don’t know what happened to her I ain’t gonna tell you cause I’m not gonna lay that number on you. In a way you could do that a lot of times. Do you remember a German film called “The Blue Angel”?

James Holmes: I think I’ve seen it.

Phillip K. Dick: In the 40s when I was going to Cal or whatever it was, that was considered to have been the finest movie around in the old days and that was Marlene Dietrich and I forget the guy, it was the guy, it wasn’t Harry Bauer it was somebody else but anyway, the ending, it was study of how a human being can be degraded systematically step by step until at the end this guy who had been a professor in this school is breaking eggs over his head in a circus and going cock a doodle do and he goes back finally, as he’s dying, to his classroom and after sitting there for awhile he gets out an egg and breaks it over his head and says cock a doodle do or something and by that point I had freaked out too much, that was a great movie. And that is the kind of thing that I would write about but I would not end it there because if it ends there like that then it opens the door to the deluge like we were talking; about that was a Weimar Republic thing it said there was no hope man cannot survive he will become a thing that breaks eggs over his head in a circus and that opened the door to the national socialist period the mystique of blood and so forth and so on, so it isn’t even a practical idea to end. I mean, you can express that stuff but that is life unredeemed through art; that is you know, like, you pick up the Chronicle and it says “Embalmed baby sits in living room holding Shirley Temple drink in hand for 22 years”, or something really unbelievable or “Drunken father eats own baby”, and I used to stick these things into my novels and these awful headlines would take like 10 words and then it would take me 55,000 words to rationalize a way that that one headline like “Drunken father eats own baby” or “Man drowns in giant vat of slowly hardening chocolate found by his brother in law”. I would be obsessed by those things and I would write books to excoriate the image created by those actual fragments of reality. I’ve got a whole drawer full of them. I could blow anybody’s mind with three of them, at random. “Pittsburg Pirate Batboy toe taps $330,000.00 to buy Pittsburg Pirates”, figured out he had to toe tap $25,000 a day for all his life, that kind of thing, it can’t happen, all kinds of stuff like that appears in the newspapers. And art consists of explaining away one article in the Chronicle to me, Ernest Faust has written his finest in one Chronicle article. I’ve got to stop taking the Chronicle it’s getting to me again. My periods of elation/depression madness always coincide with subscribing to the Chronicle. “Drunken father dies in huge vat of slowly hardening chocolate while trying to eat drunken baby”; that would not serve to help at all. It does take 55,000 words. Trouble with reality is it contains elements which cannot be reconciled with anybody’s philosophy and this is also its virtue, fortunately. It can’t be. Because if it could be, I think things would be worse. Like it could turn out that articles like that were made up by somebody at the newspaper for want of something else to do and there never was a guy that drowned in the bottom of vat of slowly hardening chocolate, that would be worse even. Like I wrote in a letter the other day, you find out the lies people are telling you, telling about you behind your back they just made up. Actually all the lies they are telling behind your back are true and they’re all favorable. It’s like the adultery Bible which was always my favorite version and the Commandments, it was printed about 1522, thou shalt commit adultery and all the copies were printed that way and of course that guy was burned at the stake. But that is what has come down to be known as the adultery Bible, thou shalt commit adultery. That’s the saving typographical error that unhinges 952 pages by leaving out a couple of letters, completely destroys the rest of the thing.
James Holmes: Well, what would you, as an epitaph to your life, what would you…

Phillip K. Dick: Wait a minute, no sir. Somebody else will have to do that, I’m not going to do that. Some guy, this is what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to actually write your obit and submit it in advance, presumably at birth to your agent so that they won’t have to fuss around and I’m not going to do that. I refuse to. They’ll have to, I can’t do everything man. They have to do part of it. I could write ‘He died without having written anything’ and disappeared without his name even being known and that seems like the show I’m on, how are they going to print that ‘Unknown nonexistent writer fails to succumb to a merely hysterical illness. Now we used to kid around with this girl that was going to get an abortion that if her pregnancy was hysterical then she could pay for the abortion with nonexistent money that is hysterical money and so forth and so forth. No I’m not going to write my own epitaph. I can’t spell it right, I get it mixed up with epithet. You can put on my gravestone ‘He ran out of things to say’ in Latin. No, I’m not going to do that.

James Holmes: You’re a great man as well.

Phillip K. Dick: To look up Latin words in.

James Holmes: Right. But you don’t know what you are seeking?

Phillip K. Dick: Well no, I don’t say a few words in Latin and look them up. I just don’t know Latin except when I take certain medicinal elements that increase my brain, my metabolism. Then I speak and write in Latin, otherwise I don’t. But once in a while when reading a book, you know the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, I find footnotes saying what they really did was as follows and then it’s in Latin so I’ve got to look it up. Takes a long time but it’s very interesting. That is a very fine book. Want me to look up a word for you? There’s one they don’t give me a definition for.

James Holmes: There’s one where they print the definition in Greek?

Philip K. Dick: No they’ve just given the word; there’s no definition at all. It’s published in English these days but it couldn’t be in there. Should I lay the word on you?

James Holmes: Yeah

Philip K. Dick: Ah, I’m not gonna.

James Holmes: Turn right at Banff and I’ll show it to the teddy bear.

Philip K. Dick: OK, there it is. I’ll read it off.

James Holmes: OK. Got it?

Philip K. Dick: Mm hmm. Think we should say it aloud?

James. Holmes: I don’t know..

Philip K. Dick: Better not, man.

James Holmes: Yeah

Philip K. Dick: I’ll say it in Latin. No we’ll say it in English. You know it mystified me why they would include it, you know, if they didn’t define it. I’m going to write in my own definition.

James Holmes: Is there anything to say?

Philip K. Dick: Mm hmm. It’s even, the declension or whatever they give is there too for it. It’s a feminine declension. Consists of a prefix…nah. It’s like, you know, answers before the question. I think it was L. Sprague deCamp who did a whole novel with dialogue that people didn’t say. And then there’s a bunch of, you know, lines he didn’t say angrily. And that was the dialogue. You know, like answers before the question. Like I’ll say “No”…we were talking about that…I’ll say “No” and then you propound the question after that. Like, well, “Will Jesus Christ be remembered after his lifespan?”. I put that in that children’s’ story that I just finished. Where this guy’s given up trying to figure out what questions to ask Him, states and answer with no question and then waits for somebody to propound the question. Like why did you give that answer? It’s better on paper but I can’t find it; it’s in there with all those other things I was going to quote.

James Holmes: Do you use tranks?

Philip K. Dick: Only when prescribed by a physician who’s in his right mind and is in good standing with the AMA. And only from a pharmacy that pays its bills on time and buys its materials from ethical houses, and I get to carry the packages between the ethical house and the pharmacy. I don’t accept free samples even from doctors. The doctor might die of a stroke before I got home, have a hell of a time explaining why I have 8,000 stelazine tablets that say “for professional use only”. Mine is amateurish. No, and I don’t take anything now really. I used to take a lot of tranquilizers, you know like I had…at one time prescriptions for 10 different tranquilizers and I took them all. It cost me $150.00/month and all it did was dim my acuity to the point where I continued to refill the prescriptions. Finally, I ran out of money, couldn’t pay my bill, they wouldn’t refill them and I woke up and realized I was being shucked out of $150.00/month. Now I don’t take anything unless somebody lays it on me and it’s sterile water or inert salts. And even then I want it certified by the, whoever it is that pure food and drug people. The less of that stuff you take, the better.

James Holmes: What do you think of waterbeds?

Philip K. Dick: Depends on who’s in them. What do you think of waterbeds?

James Holmes: I like them.

Philip K. Dick: You turned on by waterbeds?

James Holmes: No

Philip K. Dick: Hey well what is the advantage? In winter do they freeze, do you put an…..somebody said like slime grows on them, you know green…is that true?

James Holmes: I’ve heard it.

Philip K. Dick: Well who’d want something like that around the house? You’d have to chlorinate your waterbed, like oxygenate the water, heat……

James Holmes: Putting fish in there..

Philip K. Dick: putting in antifreeze. I don’t understand it. What is the turn-on part, you know because like I sat down the other day over at a chick’s house on something that had a paisley shawl over it and it quaked and undulated sexually and she says “Don’t run in fear, that’s a waterbed”. I says “Whatever it is, you know, I don’t like it. It’s animate but it isn’t. I kind of looked at her and she just sank.

James Holmes: She didn’t do anything to help you change your mind?

Philip K. Dick: No. No fucking room on it.

James Holmes: Too bad

Philip K. Dick: Babe’s still sitting there right now I guess. In fact I know a chick who’s got a waterbed put aside for her in her hope chest along with 800 Pepsi Cola bottle tops and the empty Pepsi….no she turned those in for the deposit. There’s no water in it, I guess she’s going to fill it up later on. Paid $40.00 for it….I don’t know what the purpose of it is. It’s just one of those metaphysical realities that Kafka wrote about that is beyond my ability to comprehend.

James Holmes: Do you have any problem with science fiction groupies?

Philip K. Dick: You mean a fen?

James Holmes: Feminine fans at science fiction conventions.

Philip K. Dick: Yes

James Holmes: Do you have any…Is it usual or

Philip K. Dick: Yep, the usual.

James Holmes: Are you the father of any illegitimate science fiction writers?

Philip K. Dick: As many as I know about. And as far as I know, I don’t know of any…Well how old would they be, my friend? Let’s see now. Ron Goulart was the same age as me and he was very young….Lay it on me, is there something I don’t know because, like, I was 19….no I don’t see how I could be. Turn off the technology because…. would you repeat that question; don’t rephrase it, just repeat it.

James Holmes: I don’t know whether I can repeat it.

Philip K. Dick: Well you said it once, I’m sure you can say it again.

James Holmes: Well, I can say it again but I might rephrase it.

Philip K. Dick: Well I’ll rephrase it then the way it was said? “Are you the father of any illegitimate science fiction writers?”

James Holmes: Yeah

Philip K. Dick: Who’s good in the field now that’s very young?

James Holmes: Uh, Chip Delany.

Philip K. Dick: And what color is he?

James Holmes: Oh he’s black.

Philip K. Dick: I’m his father.

James Holmes: Well, you should be very proud.

Philip K. Dick: I am. He’s a very fine writer. In fact his name is attached to one of these novels that I really enjoyed through my publication Sunshine 24. Yes, Babel 17.

James Holmes: Unfortunately that seems to be listed at Number 9, very low..

Philip K. Dick: We’ll change that. Well, you know you can put them wherever you want. They all get read during the year. Yeah, Chip Delany is a very fine writer. I didn’t realize he was black. I’ve talked to him. Is he black all the time or just, you know, during…

James Holmes: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Philip K. Dick: Oh, he’s a good writer, and very handsome too you know – striking profile. Large cranium…worry lines, you know. I’m going to have to reread everything he’s written now. He is really very fine. Who else is young and very good?
James Holmes: Ummm

Philip K. Dick: And who are their mothers, that would ….

James Holmes: I was just wondering if you and Judith Merrill.

Philip K. Dick: OH ! If you ask Judith Merrill the answer was “No” five times and “Yes” on the sixth time. If you ask me the answer was “No” 4,000 times, and there were no further questions. No, Judith Merrill – she’s 1922 now…no, that would have been really past menopause, it would have been impossible. See, I was 19 too, no I was past menopause even then. So biologically it could not have happened.

James Holmes: What do you think about modern music? Anything?

Philip K. Dick: What do you mean by “modern music”?

James Holmes: Oh, rock, rock and roll.

Philip K. Dick: I think it is a barbaric Communist assault designed to weaken the integrity of American youth. And next time I see Grace Slick I’m going to tell her that and pray on the name of the Holy Bible she stop singing those songs and sing hymns. And I know what Grace Slick will say when I say that, too. Same thing she said last time I told her that.

James Holmes: What did she say?

Philip K. Dick: Well you know how she talks? She’s reading a book of mine with the idea of playing a role in the book when it’s made into a film.

James Holmes: Oh, are you going to have one made into a film?

Philip K. Dick: No, that’s somebody else’s, some producer’s.

James Holmes: Which one?

Philip K. Dick: A small experimental outfit that spun off of CBS TV. They tied up the property while they were with CBS and now they’ve tied it up independently.

James Holmes: Which book are they going to make into a movie?

Philip K. Dick: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and she’s reading the book, or was reading it with the idea of playing the role of Priscilla the Android.

James Holmes: Are you going to write the screenplay?

Philip K. Dick. I hope so. I asked for her in the role as she was interested, so a mutual friend turned the book over to her and asked her to read it. Last I heard she was walking off with the book. She would be ideal for that. She is marvelous. I really admire her. I don’t admire the book very much, actually, but I really….she would do something for that book, she would make that character into something really great, really human.

James Holmes: Have you ever thought you were God?

Philip K. Dick: Only on the way to the funny farm. On the way back I realized that I wasn’t and I was very disappointed and wanted my money back. They said “God doesn’t need money anyway and he shouldn’t want it back”. Well, how do you tell if you’re God because that seemed a simple matter when I thought I was but now I wonder, how does one know?

James Holmes: I expect your father tells you.

Philip K. Dick: Who’s God’s father?

James Holmes: God.

Philip K. Dick: Well that’s …..

James Holmes: No, you know, I don’t know…

Philip K. Dick: Well and, no no, that’s the other way around. He’s the Son. I don’t really know. If I was God I probably wouldn’t know the difference. I would be treated the same by my neighbors here which is to ignore me, and treated by my friends the same, which is fine with me because that’s the way God should be treated. That’s exactly what He deserves. I don’t think anybody would know.

James Holmes: Do you think anybody will know?

Philip K. Dick: Why? When it happens?

James Holmes: Yeah

Philip K. Dick: Well they will if it’s written up in the Chronicle with a proper headline. “Santa Venicia self-destructs on discovery the most hated inmate there, Victor Moore, reveals himself during a cathedral service underground after the war as God. Causes little if any response outside of the community”. I don’t really know. I haven’t believed in God for a long time. Except when nobody is listening.

James Holmes: How come?
PKD has a cat named Pinky who comes into the living room and sits on PKD’s lap and starts purring.

Philip K. Dick: Because I don’t think there is a God. I think there are many gods and they have different names – George, Frank, Bob, Glenda, Lucille, Leonard. Don’t purr into the microphone; don’t oscillate into the microphone; don’t sink into oblivion, either. I mean there are people, that’s all I know. And the only God-like qualities I’ve seen have been qualities that individual people exhibited at the most surprising moments. And that’s good enough for me.

James Holmes: What do you think of women?

Philip K. Dick: I think that the pretty ones are wonderful and the other ones might as well go away. And there’s more than that but my agent asked me to submit that in writing and let him market it because he can get a lot of money for it. Cause the mark of a good writer, as you know, is how well he can write about women, as Joyce proved in Ulysses. And if I’ve got anything to say about women that matters I’m going to put it in a novel.

James Holmes: Hopefully you’ll try it out first

Philip K. Dick: You mean on the waterbed or just….

James Holmes: Well, I…..

Philip K. Dick: Reading it aloud. Reading the rough draft aloud? If reading the rough draft aloud is my idea of trying it out I probably pass it out to my agent. No, let’s say that I’m in the process of trying it out. My public will find out how it worked if my agent thinks it’s going to benefit anybody. How to lose a mistress…there’s some book that just came out isn’t there – “How To Acquire a Mistress” or something?

James Holmes: I know this book that sells for $7.95 on how to pick up girls. mainly under 24. Hotcha chicks.

Philip K. Dick: Who gets the $7.95 – the girls or the guy who wrote the book? We’ve got a name for him He’s been making $7.95 for a long time. You know, there’s a book that came out, written by some very, very respectable and important Bay area physician. Herb Cain wrote an article about this. The book came out under, you know, a nom de plume. Herb Cain ferreted out the guy’s actual name and now they’re ferreting out who the different mistresses are, because in the book they are all actual prominent Bay area women. Anyway, I guess that’s been done, that kind of book “How To Pick Up Girls”. You know if you have to buy a book and pay $7.95 or even 29 cents to find out how to do whatever you said, you got, the prognosis is bad. Better to spend the $7.95 on the girl. Yeah, if I took $7.95 and spent it on a book like that instead of on the girl, I deserve to spend $7.95 or anything like that on a book – Jesus Christ – what a way to make money.

James Holmes: Well, we’re almost at the end – what would you like to add? Could you sum up your cosmology?

Philip K. Dick: Yeah.

James Holmes: Would you?

Philip K. Dick: I just did. Do you think that purring is going to get on the tape.

James Holmes: Oh, it might.

Philip K. Dick: I hope so. Drowned out at the end by loud purring by my anonymous friend, plus silence by other fine anonymous friend. Plus 60 cycle hum by ubiquitous PG&E.

James Holmes: That gets filtered out.

Philip K. Dick: So does um…but that got it filtered out. Yes I would say, and here the filter goes right in so we’ll never know. It’s like Pinky after the rip-off on the 17th. When I got home the place was in ruins and Pinky was staring straight ahead like always. I said “Pinky, what happened?” and he said “I don’t know. I didn’t notice a thing, same as always”. He’s going to survive us all. Like when he eats the praying mantises – “or same thing. What did happen, Phil?” “Oh were you gone”. “Yes Pinky I was gone”. “I didn’t notice”. Uri says Pinky’s pregnant. Pinky is gonna win.

End of interview

APPENDIX

I completed three interviews: science fiction authors Norman Spinrad on Dec 16, 1971 and Philip K. Dick on Dec 23, 1971 and the host of the TV show Creature Features Bob Wilkins.
This is a transcription of the tape recording of the interview with Phillip K. Dick I made on my Tandberg reel to reel tape recorder in December 1971. The interview was recorded on two 7 inch reels using 2400 foot long 0.5 mil thick ¼ inch wide audio magnetic recording tape.
The technology which was top of the line in 1971 is now obsolete. In order to be able to use and even listen to them I had to get the recordings transferred to mp3 audio. Then I had the audio mp3 files transcribed to Microsoft Word, which is contained in the previous 68 pages.
The mp3 audio files are quite large: the 2 and ½ hour Phillip K. Dick interview is 151.7 MB; the 1 and ½ hour Norman Spinrad interview is 90.4 MB.

The recordings were 45 years old when I had them transcribed in 2016. Surprisingly the recordings had survived the 45 years quite well despite my concerns about magnetic print through on the thin (0.5 mil thick) recording tape.

The motivation behind the interviews was I wanted to do a show on the student radio station KZSU. I imagined my show would include: science fiction topics, reviews of new books, discussions of my favorite novels and short stories and interviews with SF authors and others involved in SF or fantasy whether in publishing, television, movies or radio.

The PKD and Spinrad interviews were the first in a series of science fiction authors , including Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Phillip Jose Farmer, R.A. Lafferty, Roger Zelazny and Robert Silverberg. I had addresses and some telephone numbers for all of them. Others I wanted to interview but didn’t have addresses for included Theodore Sturgeon, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederick Pohl, Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and Bob Shaw.

My intended show was rather different from the typical show on the student station which was mostly rock music and some talk about the music. What happened at KZSU and why I only did the two interviews and only one trial show is for another time. So it goes.

Sometime in 1972 I took all the reel to reel tapes I had recorded (some 18 reels) and wrapped them in plastic bags and put them in a metal foot locker that I then stored in the basement of my parent’s house. There they remained for over 40 years until after both my parents had died. Whereupon I retrieved the foot locker and unpacked the tapes and put them in a storage closet in my house where they sat for another 5 years.

I won’t go into the details of transferring the recordings to audio mp3 files and then using the audio files to transcribe the interviews. Suffice it to say I found excellent companies to resurrect the recordings so the interviews and other recordings can be experienced and enjoyed by interested parties.
As you will see in the interviews, both Phillip K. Dick and Norman Spinrad are very articulate and coherent in their answers so much so that after the Spinrad interview I wondered how many times he had answered the very same questions I asked. I made a mental note to not be quite so predictable when I interviewed Philip K. Dick. However the problem is that many of those predictable questions are ones some readers would like have the author answer. After all if you’re totally familiar with an author and his work why bother to read or listen to another interview.

Unless you are a fanatic.

Enjoy

To purchase both interviews + extras on USB click the button below

James Holmes
November 24, 2018
Carmel-by-the-Sea
California, USA

Philip K. Dick’s house in San Rafael, CA