In 1963, Dick was awarded the highest honor that SF has to bestow: the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that exemplifies Dick's trademark blending of SF plot structure (as to which the number one rule is constantly to amaze the reader) and philosophical mazemaking (with a no-holds-barred skepticism that allowed for all possibilities). Dick was fervent in his view that SF was the genre par excellence for the exploration of new and challenging concepts.
As Dick himself explained in an epistolatory interview (with critic Frank Bertrand) included herein: "Central to SF is the idea as dynamism. Events evolve out of an idea impacting on living creatures and their society. The idea must always be a novelty... . There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before everything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world."
High Castle contains a horde of stimulating ideas, beginning with the basic plot: a post-World War II world in which the Axis powers apparently have prevailed and the United States is a conquered land divided between Japan (the West) and Germany (the East). While the Japanese are relatively compassionate conquerors, the Nazis have extended their brutal methods throughout their dominions. Evil has become, under their reign, a palpable daily horror. One of the characters, a Swiss diplomat who is secretly working against the Nazis, sees them as the products of a collective psychic upheaval (described in terms that evidence Dick's indebtedness to C. G. Jung) that has obliterated the distinction between the human and the divine by reversing the sacrificial pattern of the Christian eucharist:
They [the Nazis] want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
But beneath this apparent, horrific reality there exists -- for those who can experience it -- an alternate world in which the Allies are victorious and life has retained its capacity for goodness. To reach this alternate world is no easy matter; pain and shock may be necessary to open one's eyes, or the enlightening aid of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the novel-within-the-novel in High Castle that reveals the true state of affairs for those who read with intelligence, heart, and an open mind.
In 1974, perhaps the most tumultuous year -- for reasons shortly to be discussed -- in his signally tumultuous life, Dick contemplated writing a novelistic sequel to High Castle, but his inward repugnance at returning to an extended reimagining of the Nazi mentality prevented him from completing this project. The two chapters he did complete are published for the first time in this volume, as is the "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974).
Dick himself would come to hope, in the final decade of his writing life, that his own novels and stories could fulfill a role analogous to that of Abendsen for his readers: to alert them that the consensual reality that grimly governed their daily lives (the "Black Iron Prison," as Dick would come to call it in his philosophical journal, the Exegesis) might not be as impregnable as it seemed. This is not to say that Dick saw himself as a prophet or as one possessing an undeniable Truth of life (though Dick could sound -- temporarily -- convinced while exploring the possibilities of an idea that intrigued him.) On the contrary, Dick could be a relentless critic of his own theories and beliefs. He was also quite willing to satirize himself broadly (as the would-be mystic Horselover Fat) and his penchant for "wild" speculations in his autobiographical novel Valis (1981): "Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked." In his philosophical writings, Dick would don, dwell within, and then discard one theory after another -- as so many imaginative masks or personae -- in his quest to unravel the mysteries of his two great themes: What is human? What is real? What makes Dick such a unique voice, both in his fiction and -- equally -- in the nonfiction writings collected in this book, was not the answers he reached (for he held to none), but rather the imaginative range and depth of his questioning, and the joy and brilliance and wild nerve with which he pursued it.
Philosophical issues were always at the heart of Dick's subject matter as a writer. He sold his first SF story back in 1951, at age twenty-two. Even by then, his course was set: He would explore the basic mysteries of existence and of human character. In Michael in the 'Fifties, an unpublished novel by Kleo Mini (Dick's second wife, to whom he was married for most of the fifties decade), the psychological makeup of the title character is based loosely on Dick and displays the same intense scrutiny of existence that Mini remembers in her husband at the very start of his SF writing career. Here is a dialogue between Michael and wife Kate, based to some extent on Mini herself. Kate speaks first:
"I think you [Michael] -- sometimes -- want to pull away from the world. Away from me, away from everything I think of as real. Away from your house and your car and your cat. Sometimes you're very far away from all of us. And sometimes I think I'm like a string that brings you back to earth, holds you down to the earth."
She was right, he thought. She was real, as real as the crab grass and the kitchen table.
"Where is it you go, Michael?"
"I don't want to go anywhere, Kate. But I think there are different kinds of reality. And the car and the house and the cat are not all there is. Living like we do -- on the edge, in a way -- we're always so busy scraping along, trying to get by, that it keeps us, it keeps me from dealing with the other reality, the meaning of everything."*
* I would like to thank Kleo Mini for permission to quote from Michael in the 'Fifties, which offers a valuable portrait not only of Dick but also of the Berkeley milieu in which he came of age.
In his interview with Bertrand, Dick offered a summary of his early philosophical influences:
I first became interested in philosophy in high school when I realized one day that all space is the same size; it is only the material boundaries encompassing it that differ. After that there came to me the realization (which I found later in Hume) that causality is a perception in the observer and not a datum of external reality. In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible existence of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to understand that the human mind could conceive of a realm of which the empirical world was epiphenomenal. Finally I came to believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal realm beyond it. At this point I despaired of the veracity of sense-data. Hence in novel after novel that I write I question the reality of the world that the characters' percept-systems report.