Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Read Free

Dick.
He loved to tell the story of how he discovered SF:
I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine . . . it was called STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES and ran, I think, four issues. The editor was Don Wollheim, who later on (1954) bought my first novel ... and many since. I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for POPULAR SCIENCE. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz booksthis magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science.... In any case my view became magic equals science ... and science (of the future) equals magic.
Phil read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake several times in his early twenties. Throughout his life the range of his reading was virtually limitless, from technical papers on physics to Binswanger's daseinanalyse to Jung, Kant, William Burroughs, the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bhagavad Gita. Influences on his work? Phil would frequently cite-before getting around to any SF authors-Stendhal, Flaubert, and especially Maupassant, whose tales, along with those of James T. Farrell, taught him how to structure the stories he sold for his livelihood in the early fifties: over seventy in three years, before the novels took precedence.
What I mean to say is that Phil was smart as a whip and fully capable of appreciating the finer literary things of life. So what did he need with the Lower Realm?
It was the SF genre, with its hospitable tenet of astonishment above all, that set Phil the writer free.
From what? The art of biography consists in tackling impossible questions about your subject that you couldn't answer about yourself, and I'll do my best to do that by book's end. But for now, just imagine yourself as a young writer able to type at an amazing 120 words per minute-and you can barely keep up with yourself when you're hot. Now consider the possibilities of a genre in which any psychological, political, sexual, or evolutionary premise is allowable so long as readers keep laying down cold cash for the lure of unknown worlds.
Phil wanted badly into the mainstream. As the years went on he knew damn well he was writing brilliant books that no one else could about his two obsessions: "What is Real?" and its frightening corollary, "What is Human?" But he also knew that the mainstream rules didn't much allow for the kinds of possibilities that tended to come to his mind. Knowing those things could make him feel outcast, angry, and blessed all at once:

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers. [... I This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if-" It's "My God; what if-" In frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.
But only in the pulps ("trashy pulps," as they are usually called). In April 1911, Hugo Gernsback wrote and serialized a novella, Ralph 124C41 +: Novel of the Year 1966, in his own magazine, Modem Electrics. The futuristic adventure tinctured by wild "What If?" extrapolations went over surprisingly well in a magazine previously devoted exclusively to practical fact. But it took until April 1926 for Hugo Gernsback to seize the idea of founding the first all-SF pulp in the English language: Amazing Stories. And it was Gernsback who, starting with the term scientifiction, at last anointed SF with the name that stuck.
Amazing was an enormous success until the Depression hit and Gernsback found himself in receivership. He lost control of Amazingothers