bought him out and carried it on-and Gernsback never again set the course for SF. He has, however, been duly immortalized through the Hugo Awards, the highest SF literary honor, awarded by fan vote at annual Worldcons.
Phil Dick won the Hugo in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that was published by Putnam with a dust jacket that betrayed no SF content within. It posits a post-World War II world in which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United States is roughly divided between them; Japan governs the western half, which includes the nominally futuristic San Francisco in which the novel is set. Phil devised the plot by consulting the I Ching, and several of the novel's characters-Japanese and conquered, culturally cowed Americans alike-consult that divinatory text, marking its debut in American fiction.
Phil thought, after over a decade of writing effort that had produced eleven mainstream novels (none published at that point) and seven SF novels (all but one published in pulpy-looking paperback by bottom-ofthe-line Ace Books), that at last, with The Man in the High Castle, he had merged the best of the Lower and Higher Realms by telling a very serious, beautifully written story about the nature of fascism and the Tao and (as SF allowed) reality going quietly haywire. But the Higher Realm turned its head away-there was no mainstream recognition for High Castle-even as the Lower Realm bestowed its Hugo honors.
Categories ... Phil never fit well into any of them, nor could he fit what he thought might be Real into them. This is not to say that Phil was impractical or otherworldly. The novels and stories testify to his detailed, sympathetic understanding of everyday work and marital woes and the value of craft in the former, of love despite all in the latter. And Phil managed, mark you, to make a living for thirty years writing books he wanted to write. He was a consummate professional.
But you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs, and you can't write of Mr. Tagomi seeing through a glass darkly in The Man in the High Castle-or of Barney Mayerson pleading with Mr. Smile the suitcase psychiatrist in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or of Joe Chip warding off retrograde time with a handy spray can in Ubik, or of Fred/Robert Arctor the brain-damaged undercover narc informing on himself in A Scanner Darkly, or of Horselover Fat in Valis explaining to character Phil Dick (both know that they are really one and the same person) just how he encountered a vast One Mind that might be God or something else (". . . Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked")-you can't write of any of these souls without first confronting the terror and shaky hilarity of a world that cannot cohere. In 1981, looking back on his efforts, Phil wrote:
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.
Unsurprisingly, then, strict categories worked against Phil. Take novels like A Scanner Darkly and Valis. They were marketed as SF, but if, say, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, respectively, had written them, they would have been mainstream. Why? Categories. Borges's frequently anthologized story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (about an imaginary
Phil Dick won the Hugo in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that was published by Putnam with a dust jacket that betrayed no SF content within. It posits a post-World War II world in which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United States is roughly divided between them; Japan governs the western half, which includes the nominally futuristic San Francisco in which the novel is set. Phil devised the plot by consulting the I Ching, and several of the novel's characters-Japanese and conquered, culturally cowed Americans alike-consult that divinatory text, marking its debut in American fiction.
Phil thought, after over a decade of writing effort that had produced eleven mainstream novels (none published at that point) and seven SF novels (all but one published in pulpy-looking paperback by bottom-ofthe-line Ace Books), that at last, with The Man in the High Castle, he had merged the best of the Lower and Higher Realms by telling a very serious, beautifully written story about the nature of fascism and the Tao and (as SF allowed) reality going quietly haywire. But the Higher Realm turned its head away-there was no mainstream recognition for High Castle-even as the Lower Realm bestowed its Hugo honors.
Categories ... Phil never fit well into any of them, nor could he fit what he thought might be Real into them. This is not to say that Phil was impractical or otherworldly. The novels and stories testify to his detailed, sympathetic understanding of everyday work and marital woes and the value of craft in the former, of love despite all in the latter. And Phil managed, mark you, to make a living for thirty years writing books he wanted to write. He was a consummate professional.
But you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs, and you can't write of Mr. Tagomi seeing through a glass darkly in The Man in the High Castle-or of Barney Mayerson pleading with Mr. Smile the suitcase psychiatrist in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or of Joe Chip warding off retrograde time with a handy spray can in Ubik, or of Fred/Robert Arctor the brain-damaged undercover narc informing on himself in A Scanner Darkly, or of Horselover Fat in Valis explaining to character Phil Dick (both know that they are really one and the same person) just how he encountered a vast One Mind that might be God or something else (". . . Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked")-you can't write of any of these souls without first confronting the terror and shaky hilarity of a world that cannot cohere. In 1981, looking back on his efforts, Phil wrote:
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.
Unsurprisingly, then, strict categories worked against Phil. Take novels like A Scanner Darkly and Valis. They were marketed as SF, but if, say, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, respectively, had written them, they would have been mainstream. Why? Categories. Borges's frequently anthologized story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (about an imaginary
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