two novels. If we could reproduce his thoughts as they correspond to his behavior as a library borrower, we must conclude that he has an extremely short memory; at the utmost he can remember what is printed on one page. Or he does not think at all; an alternative that scares me so much, however, that I’d prefer to drop it.
The problem remains that all science-fiction books are similar to one another -not according to their content, but according to the way they are received. Innumerable imitations of each original work appear, so that the originals are buried beneath mountains of trash, like cathedral towers around which garbage has been dumped for so long that only the spires project out of the rubbish that reaches toward heaven. In this context the question arises as to how many gifted beginners have insufficient power to preserve their individuality as writers — unless by way of compromise, like Dick — in spite of the equalizing trends of science fiction.
Probably the pressure of trivial literature has crushed many highly talented writers with the result that today they deliver the products that keep highbrow readers away from science fiction. This process brings about a negative selection of authors and readers: for even those writers who can write good things produce banalities wholesale: the banality repels intelligent readers away from science fiction; as they form a small majority in fandom the “silent majority” dominates the market, and the evolution into higher spheres cannot occur. Therefore, in science fiction, a vicious circle of cause and effect coupled together keeps the existing state of science fiction intact and going. The most intelligent and most demanding readers, who form a small minority, still long for “better” science fiction and feel ill at ease when reading its current production, showing their uneasiness in their letters of comment and essays in fanzines. The “normal” reader — i.e., the silent majority and their representatives in fanzines — gains the impression somehow that the others are tense, scurrilous, and even malicious creatures just like — I wrote something like this once in a private letter — missionaries in a whorehouse — i.e., people who feel that they are doing their duty but at the same time are conscious that their efforts at conversion are powerless and that they seem out of place. The missionaries, ready to make the greatest sacrifices, can just as little change a whorehouse into a temple as “genial” readers can change science fiction into a fully qualified citizen of the Upper Realm of Literature.
I’ll close this essay with one last remark: the disfigurement of Dick’s work is the price that he had to pay for his “science-fiction citizenship.” Dick owes his exuberant growth, as well as his own peculiar downfalls, to this circle of life, which, like a dull teacher, cannot distinguish its brightest pupils from the plodding grinds. This circle of life, like such a teacher, strives to treat all its subordinates in the same way, a way improper in schools, and disastrous in literature.
APPENDIX
Ubik as Science Fiction
In Science Fiction Commentary 17, George Turner wrote: “In Ubik we are given the living and the half-living; the half-living are actually dead but exist in another version of reality until their vestigial remainders of consciousness finally drain away. Their “reality” is subject to manipulation by a strong personality among the half-living, which piles complexity on complexity, until inconsistencies begin to stand out like protest posters. The plotting is neat, but cannot override the paradoxes. The metaphor fails because it cannot stand against the weight of reality as we know it.”
Now I am ready to prove that there is a rational viewpoint from which Ubik can be seen as a novel based on scientifically sensible notions. Here is the line of proof.
In Ubik dying people are put into a state of “half-life” if medicine does not know how to heal them. The critically ill are placed in “cold packs” in which their bodies are intensively cooled down. At a very low temperature, their life functions decelerate so that death cannot occur. This is not fantasy. We know today that at temperatures close to 0° Kelvin for all practical purposes the growth of cancer cells stops, and even deadly poisons no longer destroy cells. Therefore an analogue of the process mentioned in Ubik can be realized today, except that it would be regarded as senseless to carry it out. Although cooling (better known as hibernation) will delay death and stop agony, one cannot speak of saving the patient: he is unconscious, he cannot be allowed to be warmed up to consciousness again, because then the death that has been delayed will occur. People speak of freezing a man and preserving him in this state of cryogenics until medicine discovers a method of healing this special case after years or centuries. We do not know yet whether reversible cold death, the idea of which lies at the base of this opinion, can be realized, because until the present day, experiments performed on mammals have shown no positive results; freezing and later defreezing wreaks irreversible damage on all tissues. Ubik presupposes that reversible cold death cannot be realized — something considered by specialists to be plausible or even highly probable. Thus hibernation can be regarded as useless, and freezing at low temperatures as unobtainable. But there is one escape route, viz., one could keep the body of the patient in a state of continuous hibernation and supply his brain with warm blood with a suitable apparatus (artificial heart and lungs), so that the patient will regain consciousness.
The patient would find himself in the same position as a paralytic, or maybe we should call it a situation much worse than that. His sense organs do not function, for only his brain can be supplied with blood; however, even if someone were ready to face such a cruel risk as near-death, even then he could not be helped. For we know that the idea of keeping intact the paraphysiological functions of an isolated brain is Utopian. When the normal flux of sense data to the brain ceases, and a state of sensory deprivation sets in, an ever-increasing decay of all, especially the higher, brain functions sets in. An isolated brain cannot function normally; therefore we meet a barrier even in this escape route.
But all is not yet lost: if we succeed in creating a synthetic environment for the patient’s brain, he will continue to live, although not in our normal reality — he will live in a substitute reality. This pseudoreality is the common good (or bad, as you like) of all people in cold storage. The key question to answer is whether we can create a substitute world for those lying in cold storage, and if so, how? Now we cannot put into effect such an achievement at the moment, but the chances of doing so are quite good. Often during surgical operations on the brain the cerebral cortex has been irritated electrically and, circumstances permitting (with which I do not wish to deal here), this irritation may produce a series of hallucinations that the patient lives through as reality. The subject hears the voice of a dead acquaintance, sees him, witnesses whole scenes from his past, and so on. Please bear in mind that these are primitive experiments to which very little time was devoted, because the main purpose of the operation was to heal the patient, and one is not allowed to attempt tests that carry with them the slightest shadow of danger. Perhaps we will gain more knowledge, which will allow us to perfect this method. There must be machines, which we can call simulators or environment-producers, to which people lying in cold storage could be connected. The simulator becomes a source of information used necessarily to create a fictitious environment in the patient’s brain; it works according to a program attuned to the needs of each case and becomes a fountain of new facts and impressions previously unknown to the patient. (Even today we can bring about by irritation of the cerebral cortex not only sensory hallucinations, but also feelings, including, for example, erotic experiences.)
In principle, the technical problem in the real world is soluble, and so we come to the next, untechnological, question: how much knowledge can the patient have about his true situation? Ubik makes the assumption that sane people in cold storage, such as Runciter’s wife, have been conscious of their situation for years, but also some people, such as Joe Chip, who was put on ice after an accident, and those placed there because of incurable disease, do not know about their situation. Somebody — and this happens to Joe Chip — meets with catastrophe, loses consciousness, regains it after a period of time and finds himself returned to his well-known environment without knowing that it is part of a pseudoreality to which he is condemned “for life” because this is the only way to save him.
Morally it is quite questionable whether the false belief of these people that they are still living normal lives should be maintained — but this problem is irrelevant because a much more important one displaces it: i.e., his next-of-kin prefers the situation in which the patient lives to his death; though at the same time nobody could call it an agreeable situation. People are not content to keep the patient alive, because, from the point of view of people in the normal world, he is leading only a half-life isolated from the real world. They want to reach him, to talk to him, listen to him, etc. This is technically possible, but only under the most extraordinary conditions. Pseudoreality
