"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968, 1972)
Here I am, almost forty years old. Seventeen years ago I sold my first story, a great and wonderful moment in my life that will never come again. By 1954 I was known as a short story writer; in June 1953 I had seven stories on the stands, including one in Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF, and so on down. Ah, 1954. I wrote my first novel, Solar Lottery; it sold 150,000 copies of itself and then vanished, only to reappear again a few years ago. It was reviewed well, except in Galaxy. Tony Boucher liked it; so did Damon Knight. But I wonder why I wrote it -- it and the twenty-four novels since. Out of love, I suppose; I love science fiction, both to read it and to write it. We who write it do not get paid very much. This is the harsh and overwhelming truth: Writing SF does not pay, and so writer after writer either dies trying to earn a living or leaves the field... to go into another, unrelated field, as for example Frank Herbert, who works for a newspaper and writes Hugo-winning SF in his spare time. I wish I could do that: hold an unrelated job and write SF after dinner each night, or early in the dawn. Then the pressure would be off. Let me tell you about that pressure. The average SF novel obtains between $1,500 and $2,000. Hence an SF writer who can write two novels a year -- and sell them -- gets back between $3,000 and $4,000 a year... which he can't live on. He can try, instead, to write three novels a year, plus a number of stories. With luck, and unending effort, he can raise his income to about $6,000 a year. At best, I have managed to earn $12,000 in one year; usually it runs less, and the effort of trying to bring in more money collapses me for as much as two years on end. During these two-year dry periods the only money coming in is for what are called "residuals." These include foreign sales, reprint in paperback, magazine serialization, TV and radio purchases, etc. It is awful, these dry periods, when you exist on the uncertain drip-drop of residuals. For example, an air mail letter arrives from one's agent. It contains royalty payments in the sum of $1.67. And the next week an air mail letter comes with a check for $4.50. And yet we who write SF go on, to some extent. As I say, it's love for the field.
What is there about SF that draws us? What is SF anyhow? It grips fans; it grips editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in my mind Henry Kuttner's Fairy Chessmen with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see -- outside my mind, right beside my desk -- a complete file of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, plus Astounding back to October 1933... these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. Hence separate from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file, which protects these magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I own -- or hope to own.
The magic that grips us is in there, in the file. I have captured it, whatever it is.
As to my own writing. Reading it does not mean anything to me, all considerations as to how good it is or isn't, what I do well and what I do badly (such as putting in the kitchen sink, as Ted Sturgeon phrased it, in regard to The Three Stigmata). What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever -- that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no longer move. I'm alone, without much money, and, as I said before, nearly forty. Where is Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist in Man in the High Castle? He has left me; we are cut off from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again where I can hear him talk. Once written, the novel speaks generally to everyone, not specifically to me. When a novel of mine comes out I have no more relationship to it than has anyone who reads it -- far less, in fact, because I have the memory of Mr. Tagomi and all the others... Gino Molinari, for example, in Now Wait for Last Year, or Leo Bulero in Three Stigmata. My friends are dead, and as much as I love my wife, daughter, cat -- none of these nor all of these is enough. The vacuum is terrible. Don't write for a living; sell shoelaces. Don't let it happen to you.
I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this... and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972)
In 1969 Paul Williams said of Philip K. Dick, "I must tell you this... Philip K. Dick will have more impact on the consciousness of this century than William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Author of thirty-one novels and almost two hundred stories published from 1951 on, he won the Hugo Award in 1963 for the Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Man in the High Castle [1962]. His reputation, especially in intellectual circles, is worldwide; in France, for example, he has more novels in print than has any other science fiction author. The first U.S. science fiction novel to appear in Poland will be his recent Doubleday novel, Ubik [1969], acclaimed by Patrice Duvic of Editions OPTA, Paris (winner of the award for publisher of the year at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in L.A.) as "one of the most important books ever published." In February 1972 he spoke as Guest of Honor at the Second Vancouver Science Fiction Convention and lectured at the University of British Columbia. His most notable novels include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968], Maze of Death [1970], We Can Build You [1972], Martian Time-Slip [1964], Dr. Bloodmoney [1964], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965], Ubik [1969], and [The] Man in the High Castle [1962], Some of his best stories have been published in the paperback collection The Preserving Machine [1969]. Born in Chicago in 1928, Philip K. Dick has spent most of his life in the Bay Area, having attended the University of California at Berkeley. During the late fifties he lived in Point Reyes Station, Marin County, and in the early sixties in San Rafael. Now he resides in the Los Angeles area, where he lectures and writes. His early novels dealt with future societies of an anti-utopian nature; in later novels he pioneered an "inner space" multiple-reality universe presented as hallucinations drug trauma [sic]. His story "Faith of Our Fathers" in Harlan Ellison's mind-shattering anthology Dangerous Visions [1967] received a Hugo nomination and is considered one of the most "dangerous visions" in that superb collection. Recently he completed a massive new novel for Doubleday titled Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said [later published in 1974] and is currently working on a science fiction novel of a different sort: a study of one girl's mind projected onto the universe, in which her qualities, lifestyle, and values form not merely a sociological enclave but the entire world of reality. Its working title is Kathy-Jamis-Linda and threatens to occupy him for what remains of his life. In it he contrasts the authentic human versus what he calls the "android," the reflex machine posing as a living being.