selection process to struggle against trash and promote real value, the works of Dick are sometimes compared with those of A. E. van Vogt.
The novels of both authors share the common characteristics that (1) they are composed of trashy parts and (2) they are full of contradictory elements. The contradictions include those of an external nature (as when the world depicted in a book runs counter to empirical scientific knowledge) and of an internal nature (as when during the course of a novel the action becomes self-denying — i.e., contradicts itself).
Such a diagnosis does not automatically invoke a subsequent condemnation. It is true that literary judgment is undemocratic, but nevertheless in the course of each critical trial it is also just. Yet it must be ascertained why the case under scrutiny allows a sacrifice of values. These works contain local nonsense and a local destruction of values (sense is always to be preferred to nonsense), but this local inroad might aid the construction of a higher sense of the totality. This point is connected with the general relativity of all values: even a murder may be justified in a civilization where it is considered a link in a chain of connections in which, according to prevailing belief, the lesser value, a man’s life, is sacrificed to the greater, the godhead.
Judged prima facie, there are no relevant differences between the two cases under review. Both authors disregard empirical knowledge, logic, and causality, categories upon which our knowledge is founded. They seem to sacrifice these basic values to the momentary stage effect; therefore, they destroy the greater values in order to create a lesser one — something always culturally taboo.
However, our authors are writers of quite different ranks, when read thoughtfully. As Knight and Blish have proved, the phantasmagoric acrobatics of van Vogt do not add up to a meaningful whole. He does not solve the riddles posed, he does not draw conclusions from the things depicted early in his books, and he sketches only ephemeral ideas, piling them chaotically on one another. With all that, he does not hypnotize the wary reader, but only lulls him to sleep; this sleep comes from increasing boredom, not fascinating magnetism. The only problem posed by van Vogt’s prose is its financial success, at the same time irritating and annoying an intelligent reader like Knight. Why is it possible that work the stupidity of which was amply and unequivocally demonstrated by Knight still enjoys such great popularity?
But no deep secret awaits discovery. The van Vogt fans do not care a jot about the Knight line of deduction. Most probably they do not know of it and do not want to, either. From van Vogt they get the whole cosmos, with its inhabitants, wars, and empires, excellently served up, because the plot can be seen without thinking at all, and they close their eyes to the knowledge that they are being fed with stupid lies. We will say no more on this topic.
Philip K. Dick seems to write in a vein similar to van Vogt’s, although he does not, like van Vogt, violate grammar and syntax as well as physics. Dick, too, works with trash. Yet his novels are structured with more logic. He is accustomed to let action issue from a clearly and precisely built situation, and only later in the course of a novel does decay, perplexing the reader, begin to undermine initial order so that the end of the novel becomes a single knot of fantasies. Dreaming and waking are mixed, reality becomes indistinguishable from hallucination, and the intangible center of Dick’s world dissolves into a series of quivering, mocking monstrosities so that in the end each novel of Dick’s mainstream (for Dick has also written second-rate, insignificant works) destroys the order of things that he erected at the beginning. Even if Dick’s worlds owe their explosion to a technology or a disease (or madness) of the space-time manifold, in ever-increasing speed they multiply their “pseudo-realities” so that (as in
Trash is present everywhere in Dick’s books; from time to time, though, in some of his novels, he succeeds in executing a master stroke. I am convinced that he made this discovery unconsciously and unintentionally. He has invented an extremely refined tactic: he uses elements of trash (that is, those degenerate molecules that once had a sacramental, metaphysical value) so that he leads to a gradual
On the contrary, it is easy to say that this catharsis justifies the sacrifice of values that shocks the reader at the beginning. I cannot devote this essay to the Dick Transubstantiation Method; therefore, I will make only a few remarks on his
The promise of “almightiness” is implicit in science fiction. This omnipotence has a bipolar nature — the omnipotence of the bad (as in the dystopia) and of the good (the Utopia). In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole — that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallization, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the pleasant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. I believe it is a very sad phenomenon to witness the indifferent workmanship with which such novels are produced. There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns. A space occupied by trash is a vacuum in which lead and feathers fall at the same speed. It is indeed a great venture to coerce the resurrection of dead metaphysical values from such a novel.
* This point of view may prompt some fans to ask the question why science-fiction writers should not be allowed to make an intellectual game out of the topic of mankind’s doom, and why the science-fiction field should be forbidden that which is done with complete justification in the field of the crime novel? My answer is: Surely nothing in heaven or on earth prohibits us from doing so; in the same way as there are no “absolute” prohibitions to hinder us from playing with corpses or the genitalia of our fathers or from concentrating our whole love life on the goal of sleeping as fast as possible with as many women as possible in order to establish a record. We could do all these things as a matter of course, but surely nobody praises such programs as something to further social values: neither can we deny that these actions promise certain new liberties only annulling forever taboos that have stayed intact until today. As the English put it: you cannot have it both ways; you cannot respect a life, a topic, a feeling, and prostitute it at the same time. At the utmost you can falsify the real appearance and real meaning of a situation brought about by your own actions deliberately or unconsciously; but hiding one’s head in the sand is fraught with well-known dangers. According to the whole historical tradition of our culture, truth has inherent value, whether pleasant or depressing. If crime novels follow their own schemata to falsify reality, it does not matter, since nobody looks into these novels for the highest revelations and initiations into the abysses of human nature. If science fiction adapts itself to the crime novel, it must stop claiming to be considered as something better than the crime novel. Its peculiar state of continual oscillation between the Upper and the Lower Realms of literature is a symptom of its repetitive attempts to have it both ways. But this is impossible without self-deception.
It cannot be maintained that Dick has evaded all the traps set for him: he has more defeats than victories in his work, but the latter determine his rank as an author. His successes are due to his intuition. Average science- fiction authors form their hells of existence, their flaming grounds to head for, in social institutions, especially police-tyrannies-plus-brainwashing, as from Orwell’s school, but Dick makes his out of ontological categories. The primary ontological elements — space and time — are Dick’s instruments of torture, which he uses with great versatility. In his novels he constructs hypotheses that are
But in the first world even the “precogs” prove to be powerless to evade their own cruel end, which they foresaw themselves. Their wonderful gift only makes their torture harder to bear. In the second world time becomes a Laocoon’s snake that strangles its inhabitants. The third world embodies the saving of Chiang Tsi, who,
