In a sense I am joking, of course, but in a sense I am not.
I don’t feel I was “picked” by a Future Force, as its instrument, etc., bidden to make manifest its word, etc., any more than when you are watching a TV program the transmitter has picked you. It is broadcast; it just radiates out in all directions and some people tune in, some do not; some like what they see and hear, some reject it. All I did was to transduce, as all creatures do. I just gave what I received a local habitation and a name, as Shakespeare put it.
P.P.S. One aspect of regarding this as an information transmission and reception-transduction system (like a teletype) might at last throw some light on the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of glossolalia when seized by the “Holy Spirit.” In my reception of tachyon bombardment (assuming this is what it is, of course) I frequently either fail to transduce properly (error at the receiving end) or else there is a lapse of accurate transmission (as if the teletype operator has his fingers on the wrong line of keys, etc.). When that happens, instead of seeing, in my dreams, the perfectly articulated English prose passages which would be the result of all components functioning correctly, I get gibberish like this: meaningless “names” and “words” and sequences of numbers which have no significance. Unless one is very, very careful to factor out, to use a scrupulous reject circuit of some kind (I suppose this would come with practice) one is confronted with the task of making sense out of random or inaccurate integers. I give these actual examples:
832
835
5412960
Eleanor
Mr. Arensky
Mrs. Aramcheck
Sadasa Ulna
17
Command—Odd
G-12
5242681
P-13
Considering the distance over which these packets of information travel, and their velocity, much contamination, signal-loss and other fa miliar invasion of the material contained must take place—cross-talk from other fields, so that when the tachyons at last impinge on us even if our transduction is superb (as in the case of “mystics” and “saints”) there would be something quite less than a perfect meaningful construct. I suppose that out of these etoin shrdlu type of ramblings (or whatever you get on a linotype when your fingers go from left to right) the various “Names of God” are constructed; they supply the spurious and dogmatic Holy Writ such as the Mormons treasure as their inspiration.
If you recall the weird word found on deserted Roanoke Island in 1591, which was CTOSYOAN, carved on a tree and everyone mysteriously gone,—well, look I did it just then; I had my fingers one key to the right on my keyboard: the word is CROATOAN; I was copying it from my text book and had my eyes away from my hands. Thus marvelously proving my point. But for centuries scholars have been trying to figure out what “Croatoan” means. Probably it means nothing; the terrified colonists of the island, faced by one or more hostile forces (famine, Indians, plague, etc.), had an inspiration and left the island for some other sanctuary, believing that those letters spelled out something meaningful. Perhaps the Cosmic Teletype Operator turned his head for a moment, as I did, and erred.
In my novel Galactic Pot-Healer there’s a girl character named Mali Yojez. Not being able to think of another name, I hit keys at random, and used what I got. Years later a burned-out freak who had read the book looked at me with secret insinuating accusation and said, pointing to these letters-used-as-a-name, “That’s me you’re writing about there in your book.” I pointed out that Mali Yojez was in no way his name. “It’s a code you used,” he explained, “to cover over my name so I wouldn’t know. But I do know.” I then pointed out that I had written and published the book years before I ever met him; at that his all-knowing paranoid glee increased. “That just proves how clever you are,” he said. “You even knew about me in advance.” You see what I mean, Peter.
I’ve reinserted this into the typewriter because just as I was about to mail this, it occurred to me that according to my tachyon theory, I could well have anticipated meeting the above-mentioned burned-out freak. This brings to my mind my strange and eerie feeling that my novels are gradually coming true. At first I laughed about this, as if it was only a sort of small matter; but over the years—my God, I’ve been selling stories for 23 years—it seems to me that by subtle but real degrees the world has come to resemble a PKD novel; or, put another way, subjectively I sense my actual world as resembling the kind of typical universe which I used to merely create as fiction, and which I left, often happily, when I was done writing.
Other people have mentioned this, too, the feeling that more and more they are living in a PKD novel. And several freaks have even accused me of bringing on the modern world by my novels.
Well, a case could be made here for my above tachyon theory, I guess, although I hadn’t thought of it until now. Let us say that I am inspired by a creative entity outside my conscious personality to write what I write. (I had imagined it to be my subconscious, but this only begs the question, What is the subconscious?) There is no doubt that quite frankly I do not in any real sense write my novels; they do come from some non-I part of me. Often they contain dreams I’ve had (this was true of Lovecraft, I’ve heard). If tachyon bombardment was inspiring my novels, then it would stand to reason that the world—it is really all the same world which my books depict, as has been pointed out in critical essays many times—it would stand to reason that, as the years pass, my books would, so to speak, come true. They are about the future in two ways: they describe it fictionally, like S-F tends to do, and, they being inspired by tachyon information about the actual future (or possible several alternate futures) depict on-coming reality. Isn’t our world now somewhat like the world in Solar Lottery, my first novel? And other, later novels of mine even more so? I do not wish to be in one of my own novels, by the way. So this isn’t wish-fulfillment. Anyhow, I’m not the only person who’s noticed that the world seems to be getting like my novels; it was pointed out to me recently that if I had waited another year to bring out Flow My Tears it would have been out of date (actually it was by-and-large finished in 1970).
Several times I’ve had the uncanny experience of meeting people who resemble persons, characters, I’d previously made up for my novels. In Flow My Tears there’s a 19 year old girl named Kathy, as you recall, whom Jason meets; she is a girl of the gutter, so to speak, living a quasi-illegal existence. The next year, 1971, I in fact did meet a girl, the same age, living a life so similar to that of the girl in the novel as to frighten me—frighten me that if she reads the book ever she may sue. Her name—Kathy.
I am not the true and actual source of my own fiction, and I’ve always wondered what the source was. John Denver, the current folk singer, says he doesn’t compose his many songs; “They’re out there in the air somewhere,” he says, “and I just fish them in.” Well, my novels aren’t out there in the air; they’re in my unconscious—or are they? Maybe Denver is right; it’s coming at us from a standpoint physically outside our brains, not down deep below the surface. In point of fact, S-F is often thought of as “future history,” and this notion is one I’ve combated, with great irritation, over the years. And yet I’m faced with the fact that time and history have caught up with me, which is perhaps one reason why you and others were disap pointed with Flow My Tears; I waited too long to bring it out. Put another way, the gap between my vision and the actual world has gotten smaller and smaller over the years; when I wrote Solar Lottery it was a vision that no one else had, but how can I claim my vision in Flow My Tears to be unique in the same way? I could do as well by getting my information from newspapers, perhaps. How strange. How frightening, to me, anyhow.