Is that seriously what you thought I was saying?
I really liked the early novel that had only a slight sliver of sci-fi to it, The Broken Bubble? I also LOVE some of his short stories but I’ve never managed to make it through any of the rest of his longer fiction.
Hm. Fair enough. Where you would class Sheckley, H. Ellison, Tiptree, & Silverberg?
These are nothing more than personal preferences based on scattershot reading, but…
–I’m very fond of Tiptree (would maybe put her a notch below Zelazny).
–Have read almost no Sheckley.
–Ellison rubs me wrong, and apart from “Boy and His Dog” I usually think “style without substance.”
–Silverberg, also not a favorite, but he was prolific and produced a healthy quantity of good fiction. Generally when he’d try to be insightful it made my eyes roll.
And I’ll mention that I’m very out of touch with the field, so if someone someone has done something major in the last 10-15 years I probably don’t know about it.
Ellison and Tiptree are both up among the top writers of the century (and Tiptree did some pretty good novels, too). Silverberg has touches of greatness (Dying Inside and “Good News from the Vatican,” for instance), but I never really liked his work. Sheckley is funny, but lightweight.
Yes. Read what you wrote.
It’s the same old tripe. No humanist can be a true science fiction writer. Anybody who writes about real things that matter to people isn’t really in sf, even if they use robots and aliens. They must mean them ironically, because only inferior writers who don’t care about people can use sf tropes. They can’t write about empathy or humanity because they’re too busy writing about spaceships and solar wars. The human condition is only for real writers, not for sf writers.
That’s the only meaning that your words have for me. If you wanted to say something else, then why not say:
Dick was the heart and soul of what good sf writing is. Science fiction is always about the present, although it uses the future for effect. This gives sf writers an opportunity to say things that no other forms of fiction can achieve. Like the dozens of other good sf writers, Dick used aliens and robots to isolate and exaggerate pieces of humanity that require close examination, putting them under a magnifying glass of special situations. Time changes our external surroundings but not the human condition, so sf writers can uniquely achieve a special empathy with and by their characters that can only marginally be done by mainstream writers.
See the difference?
I remember watching that and chuckling, although I can’t remember if it was on Futurama, Simpsons, or something else. Ray can write like a sumbitch, but when someone has written that many short, short stories–often shooting for moody and evocative– over decades upon decades, it’s hard not to become a punchline.
Hi Mr. Borgia. It’s a time honored annoyance for sf fans when a reviewer claims that a popular author isn’t a sf writer… when the author would clearly be classified as sf if he was less popular or less skilled.
So when you wrote:
Dick is only marginally an SF writer. Like Vonnegut he used some SF Tropes, but was basically a humanist who used those tropes to meditate on the human condition.
You seemed to be saying that science-fiction writers can’t be humanists who meditate on the human condition. To me (and seemingly to Exapno Mapcase) that’s an absurd claim. Sort of a reverse No True Scotsman fallacy.
A decent argument could be made that Dick/Vonnegut/Lafferty/Ellison are fantasy writers rather than sf writers, and if that’s your point I won’t argue the matter.
(On editing I see Exapno got in here before I posted.)
Indeed, please see below. I just posted in a hurry. If it helps, imagine you’re held at gun point by a mad man demanding to know what’s so different about writing in the 20th century compared to what came before. He throws you a handful of books (Philip K Dick’s “Do Androids dream…” included) and asks you to explain. Hurry, he’s getting twitchy 
Ah, that would be because it’s my wording :o
The module is simply on 20th century literature. I can’t remember off the top of my head what the other authors and books were, PKD just sprang out as an unlikely author to be included on a university level reading list.
I mean, I read his stuff.
I suppose you could say that 20th Century literature as embodied by the likes of Dick attempted to tackle the implications of technology on the self and society. Science fiction did exist in the 19th century but arguably mostly as a plot device. It was during the 20th C that writers such as Dick dealt the effects of technology on what it is to be human?
(Yeah that all could be bullshit)
A whole bunch of his novels have just been issues as a Library of America edition, which makes him important by definition.
One common theme in his universe is people on the outside wishing to be part of a normal world. The android animals can be seen as that. A lot of his novels involve Perky Pat, a Barbie like doll whom adults, even on alien worlds, play with as if she and her friends were real. Some of the books involve companies making accessories. You should be able to find something in there.
To join the Larry Borgia stomp, lots of sf talks about the human condition and uses the sf tropes to focus in on a particular aspect, and during the '50s to discuss stuff too racy or controversial to put in the modern world.
BTW, early Delany was very readable.
Man, science fiction fans sure are defensive. I alsmost wish I’d written “Sci-fi” instead of SF in my post. But I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any rage-induced aneurysms.
I wouldn’t write “If it’s good it can’t be SF” because that would be a stupid thing to say. No one would say anything like that. For the record, I’ve read probably a couple of thousand SF novels and stories, and I’ll cheerfully concur, if it’s really necessary, that there are plenty of good SF writers. Christ, I’m even writing a space opera, though I doubt it will ever see completion, let alone publication.
What I wrote is that PKD is outside the mainstream of SF and is only marginally an SF writer. I stand by that assertion. Hell, most SF fans don’t like him, as evidenced by this very thread. Most of the PKD fans I know don’t read a lot of SF, except maybe Neal Stephenson. PKD is really outside of any genre, and I don’t see how he or anyone else benefits by forcing him alongside authors he has nothing in common with. He’s got a lot more in common with Borges and Calvino than he does with Eric Flint or Timothy Zahn.
Dick has always been a favorite of science fiction fans. I’ve been in the field for 40 years. It never occurred to me at any time that sf fans didn’t like him. As a group they worship and adore Dick. That’s as close to a fact as observation can manage.
OTOH, Saying whether Dick is or is not “outside the mainstream of SF and is only marginally an SF writer” is a matter of opinion and can’t be definitively refuted. My personal opinion - and I realize you can’t know this, but I have an almost equally long history of critical writing about sf, a field that as a writer, reviewer, and critic I’ve looked at closely and thought a lot about - is that he is certainly within the mainstream. He is certainly a core sf writer in every possible way. He is not even the fantasy writer that Baal Houtham suggested. I understand why he made that point, but if you go that route hardly any writers would be left with the sf tag and that includes Asimov and Heinlein. Your putting him outside the mainstream demeans the many other writers who were striking their own paths in the 1950s. Consider Theodore Sturgeon or Alfred Bester, as examples. Dick has more in common with them than with any of the other names you mention. They all came out of a common writing and publishing community, so that shouldn’t be surprising.
My beef with Dick is that I would rather celebrate many of his contemporaries over him, as better writers who wrote better books. Paranoia doesn’t interest me as an emotion or as a worldview so that admittedly prejudices me against Dick. I rail against conspiracy theories and theorists here on the Dope all the time so a writer convinced that every action is a cabal of higher forces is not going to be my hero. Allowing for that doesn’t make his prose any better.
I should emphasize I’m talking about the sf he wrote and published as sf. I have not read the mainstream works that started coming out shortly before his death and continued in a stream afterward. (Or maybe I started one and couldn’t finish it.) I’m talking solely about Dick the sf writer.
All critics have certain authors that make them shake their heads and wonder what their contemporaries are smoking. Dick is one of mine.
But he’s sf through and through.
I guess fans dislike him so much they gave him a Hugo Award.
when I started I heard plenty of people belittle the New Wave, but I never heard anyone say Dick was not an sf writer - and this was long before he became accepted by the mainstream. Maybe I missed it, but I also never heard him say he wasn’t really an sf writer, which was pretty popular back then. We could see that Borges and Calvino were not sf writers per se because they came from and published well outside the field - but they were both well liked. Lots of people who didn’t do standard Poul Anderson space opera (not that there is anything wrong with that) were accepted. Besides Lafferty, there was Cordwainer Smith, for example. I’d say Dick was a lot closer to traditional sf than Ellison was.
Perhaps the reason the people you see as PKD fans don’t read sf is that sf fans have read PKD 30 - 40 years ago. And I rather bet Don Wollheim wasn’t thinking he was being daring by publishing outside the field when he bought Dick’s novels.
Larry Borgia writes:
> Dick is only marginally an SF writer. Like Vonnegut he used some SF Tropes, but
> was basically a humanist who used those tropes to meditate on the human
> condition. Dick found our humanity in our ability to feel empathy. He used robots
> and aliens to flesh out this idea.
Larry Borgia, search on “Ansible” and “David Langford.” Ansible is a newsletter put out by Langford for several decades now. Look through the issues that are online for a regular column called “As Others See Us.” Langford has collected hundreds of different quotations in which someone will praise some science fiction writer that they like. (Yes, easily hundreds of them. And as I was writing this post, I was opening my mail and found the new issue of Ansible. There’s another example in there.) They will defend this writer by saying that what they write is not really science fiction because science fiction obviously isn’t any good. So if we seem sensitive about this, you should understand. Whatever you meant, it’s easy to misinterpret it.
In any case, it’s simply not true that science fiction fans don’t usually like Dick. I’ve spent most of my adult life hanging out with science fiction fans. They most certainly do like Dick as a general rule.
Nah, I wasn’t implying that I consider him a fantasy writer. I don’t. Sometimes I phrase things carefully, and sometimes I don’t, but when I wrote:
*A decent argument could be made that Dick/Vonnegut/Lafferty/Ellison are fantasy writers rather than sf writers, and if that’s your point I won’t argue the matter. *
…that’s pretty much what I meant.
If someone wants to argue that science fiction isn’t science fiction unless the writer makes an attempt to present the events as remotely possible, I wouldn’t care enough to argue against them.
And again, the notion that Dick was less a science-fiction writer than, say, Fritz Leiber is silly. People fight over the definition of science-fiction, but if pretty much every book someone writes is loaded with aliens, space travel, telepathy, alternate universes and futuristic technology I’m going consider them a sf writer… barring special dispensation from the ghost of Stanley Weinbaum.
OK, then I understand why you understand why someone would make that point.
When I was a kid SF was pretty much ghettoised,very much a minority culture.
I was addicted to the genre and read everything that I could get my hands on as Sf wasn’t very available generally.
My local library had a copy of Do Androids Dream…but I,inspite of my addiction didn’t bother to read it partly because of the off the wall title and partly because of the totally crap bookcover.
Eventually out of desperation I read the book as there wasn’t any other SF that was available to me to read.
I was hooked,the man was a genius,a great writer with incredibly innovative ideas.
Yes he was an amphetamine abuser and as a result of that became a paranoid scizophrenic but that doesn’t diminish his genius one iota.
A Scanner has got to be one of his finest.
My goodness, look at the straw men!
- Dick was considered a major voice in the field by SF fans, who gave him a Hugo Award. They also established the Philip K. Dick Award in his honor, given to the best original paperback novel, in recognition that most of Dick’s books never came out in hardcover in his lifetime (the award was established immediately after his death).
- Dick was considered a major SF writer by professional SF writers. He won the juried John W. Campbell Award, and was nominated for more Nebulas than Hugos. In addition, Dick was so respected in the field that he was used as an example and justification for revoking Stanislaw Lem’s honorary SFWA membership.*
- Eric Flint and Timothy Zahn do not define science fiction. Dick has things in common with writers like Ellison, Lafferty, Silverberg, Sheckley, etc. He also has things in common with writers like Murray Leinster.
But, ultimately, Dick wrote science fiction. You could certainly say that his science fiction dealt with themes that other mainstream literary writers wrote about. But it is utter clueless arrogance to argue – as you do – that he is outside the mainstream of science fiction because he dealt with these themes.
And where were these literary critics who put Dick in the SF ghetto and didn’t see what you purport to see? If he was such a mainstream writer, where was the appreciation from mainstream critics when he was alive? It wasn’t there. Evidently, these themes magically appeared in his work after his death.
- Dick, who wasn’t making enough money to pay the rent from his fiction, still paid his SFWA dues, while Lem did not. (Though the real reason Lem had his membership revoked was that giving it to him was against the bylaws; Lem was always welcome to join as a regular memember).