Philip K. Dick's "Roog"

Cafe Society
1

I just got a collection of Philip K. Dick stories today, and I have NO idea what the story “Roog” is supposed to be about. There’s this dog who can see these creatures called “Roogs” who steal garbage from the dog’s owner. I’m afraid I just don’t understand this story at all. Can anyone else do better?

As a side note: Why didn’t they keep the Penfield mood organ in Blade Runner? This device allows you to dial a number that causes you to feel a certain emotional state. If you dial 3, it makes you want to dial again. You can also dial for such wonderful things as “desire to watch TV no matter what’s on.” If I had one of these things, I could actually motivate myself to exercise and lose weight!

And don’t forget, “I’m the King of the Elves!”

2

I read that story not too long ago.

I believe that the creatures who steal the garbage are actually just the garbage collectors. In my collection of short stories there is a section of notes and comments by PKD on the various stories and he states that the Roogs are the garbage men.

I don´t have the book with me here at work but I´ll post a summary of what PKD says about this story when I get home tonight.

3

PKD is fascinated by the dog’s world view, which, though alien to him, is fully consistent with the evidence he has.

Here’s a link; scan for “Snooper”.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/1923/counterc.html

4

I’m not familiar with that one (and I’ve read a lot of Dick). Which anthology is it in?

5

Here’s a list of places where you can find the story “Roog”:

http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/pwork.cgi?83278d

This isn’t necessarily complete. sfsite has a lot of references but isn’t really complete.

The Penfield mood organ was one of many things that was dropped from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for the movie Bladerunner. I think that it was a good idea that many of the plot points from the novel were dropped. Like a lot of the novels that Dick wrote in the early to mid-'60’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written too hastily and not well edited, neither by Dick himself nor by his publisher. It’s full of interesting but poorly developed ideas. It sounds, in my opinion, like a book written by a brilliant writer on speed.

Dick later admitted that he was doing a lot of speed back then to keep himself going at night to do his writing. He had a wife and four daughters (or step-daughters) to support and, even with his fast writing and his wife’s jewelry business, they were barely scraping by. His then wife Anne (the third of his five wives) now says that they could have been doing O.K. if they hadn’t been as free about spending money.

6

A great little story.

I just spent about a quarter of an hour thumbing through my copy of The Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings of Philip K. Dick – I dimly recall that he offers some illumination about Roog, (in response to an editor’s “Huh?”, I think.)

Let me just say that Lawrence Sutin is in line for a kick in the nuts from me. Who publishes a collection of essays without a frigging index? You suck, Larry!

I couldn’t find it and my coffee is getting cold. Sorry.

7

Dick suffered from a lot of problems when he was alive. His editors were crap, and often changed his titles to

8

Whoa! Sorry about that! Didn’t mean to post that. What I was going to say was that Dick’s editor’s gave his works lamer titles than Dick had proposed. Also, in one of the ironies of life, one of Dick’s doctors told him that because of his metabolism, his body simply “ignored” all the speed he took and that any effects he felt from it were purely placebo. Kind of funny, considering he once dedicated a book to his pancreas.

9

Case-in-point: Project Ploughshares became The Zap Gun.

Oh, brother. I can picture Dick’s editor shambling toward the manuscript, muttering “Gubble, Gubble!”

10

Tuckerfan writes:

> Also, in one of the ironies of life, one of Dick’s doctors told him
> that because of his metabolism, his body simply “ignored” all
> the speed he took and that any effects he felt from it were
> purely placebo.

I remember reading something like this in one of the biographies or some essay about Dick. However, I believe that this was one of the absurd rationalizations that Dick made up himself and later told other people to justify his use of speed. Unfortunately, Dick’s stories about his own life are not really trustworthy.

11

I have this book on my nightstand at home although I haven’t actually read much of it yet. Found the point about the Roogs in about 10 seconds by sheer dumb luck.

In the book they talk about the Roogs as an intro of a discussion about a really nice guy named Tony (forgot the last name, I’m not at home right now) and how he dies but comes back as PKD’s cat, Pinky. (I think that Dick more or less believed this, if not in an actual sense then at least in a karmic sense). Both Tony and Pinky both die of cancer.

Anyway, the “Roogs” are just garbagemen from a dog’s perspective. This is the first story that Dick ever sold, BTW. The dog’s see the “Roogs” as people who come and steal the stuff in the cans from the humans they live with. “Roog” is Dicksian onomatopoeia for the sound that dogs make when the garbagemen come.

There seem to be two themes to the story: First, just to look at the world from the very different perspective that dogs would have. Second, that eventually the “Roogs” get us all. Meaning, perhaps, that our corporeal existence is impermanent.

12

Get “The Best of Philip K. Dick” and read Dick’s comments on “Roog” in the afterword. Basically, the dog is the only one who sees the world as it really is (i.e., the garbagemen are scary aliens/beasts who eat garbage), but no one will believe him.