Gregor Samsa may have become a cockroach in Kafka's brilliant allegory The Metamorphosis, but for a Philip K. Dick character, that's just the stuff of a Sunday afternoon. Lots of writers pretend to be dangerous. For every truly dangerous popular writer, most are only a danger to the English language. Not Philip K. Dick.He was the man, the Jim Morrison of science-fiction, the brilliant light that burned at both ends and in the middle too. That the hero of 1960s and '70s science fiction was a rather gentle, shmoo-shaped fellow is just the luck of the draw.
In this collection, an overview of a huge career is attempted. And even if you want to complain about specifics, it isn't like these stories are necessarily available. And even if they are, this context and Jonathan Lethem's insightful introduction give us other ways to look at this writer.
Philip Jose Farmer and Harlan Ellison were all looking for the big score that Arthur C. Clarke got from 2001. Dick got it. His story Minority Report is designed a little more satirically than Spielberg's recent film, theoretically based on the material. His award-winning Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? was virtually ignored by the makers of the film Blade Runner. And Total Recall has about as much to do with its source story as a 5-year-old's story about how the lamp got broken does with reality.
Selected Stories features a wide enough range of Dick's work, from the early 1950s, when he was writing fairly run-of-the-mill stories. And then he became popular with the new wave, the British science-fiction movement. Just as Algis Budrys and Alfred Bester are claimed by the cyberpunks as precursors, so is Dick by the new wave.
Like Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, Dick sees big things written in small packages, almost silly packages. And the fact that the evil he writes about can (as in his brilliant novel The Man in The High Castle) be moved to tears by music gives us all a modicum of hope, for all Dick's love of downer endings. We can be reached. We can learn. Always. This is the faith of Philip K. Dick.
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2003.