PHIL (hysterically): Leonard, the sky is falling!
NIMOY (calmly): Negative, Phil; it's merely a faulty fuse.
And I'd feel okay and my blood pressure would drop and I could resume work on the novel I'm three years behind on vis-a-vis my deadline.
In reading the stories included in this volume, you should bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley -- or especially in Berkeley -- people would say, "But are you writing anything serious?" We made no money; few publishers published SF (Ace Books was the only regular book publisher of SF); and really cruel abuse was inflicted on us. To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most writers, let alone other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, whom I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: "To a colleague, Philip K. Dick." I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for this charity. (Yes, that was what it was, then, to treat an SF writer with courtesy.) To get hold of a copy of my first published novel, Solar Lottery, I had to special-order it from the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, which specialized in the outre. So in my head I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at an official city function, and the ordeal of the fifties when Kleo and I lived on $90 a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book, and when I wanted to read a magazine I had to go to the library because I could not afford to buy it, when we were literally living on dog food. But I think you should know this -- specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. My financial ordeal did not end in the fifties; as late as the midseventies I still could not pay my rent, nor afford to take Christopher to the doctor, nor own a car, nor have a phone. In the month that Christopher and his mother left me I earned $9, and that was just three years ago. Only the kindness of my agent, Scott Meredith, in loaning me money when I was broke got me through. In 1971, I actually had to beg friends for food. Now, look; I don't want sympathy; what I am trying to do is tell you that your crisis, your ordeal, assuming you have one, is not something that is going to be endless, and I want you to know that you will probably survive it through your courage and wits and sheer drive to live. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains had been burned out by drugs, men who still could think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempts to weather that which cannot be weathered. As in Heine's poem "Atlas," this line: "I carry that which can't be carried." And the next line is, "And in my body my heart would like to break!" But this is not the sole constituent of life, and it is not the sole theme in fiction, mine or anyone else's, except perhaps for the nihilist French existentialists. Kabir, the fifteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, "If you have not lived through something, it is not true." So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.
If I had to come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies inside me, which expresses itself in so many subliminations, I would guess that probably what arouses my indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the force of entropy -- there is no redemptive value of something that can't be understood, as far as I am concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I've seen and done, and fashion it into a work that makes sense. I'm not sure I've been successful. First, I cannot falsify what I have seen. I see disorder and sorrow, and so I have to write about it; but I've seen bravery and humor, and so I put that in, too. But what does it all add up to? What is the vast overview that is going to impart sense into the entirety?
What helps for me -- if help comes at all -- is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I've been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article on Indian philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an eight-volume learned reference set that I esteem. The time was 4:00 A.M.; I was exhausted -- I have been working endlessly like this on this novel, doing this kind of research. And there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this:
"The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient... . The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences 'of' them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects... ."
In other words, by applying Ockham's razor to the basic Epistemological question of "What is reality?" the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external world is a "superfluous hypothesis"; that is, it violates the Principle of Parsimony -- which is the principle underlying all Western science. Thus the external world is abolished, and we can go about more important business -- whatever that might be.
That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that the self doesn't exist, either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, whom I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of "the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks." I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.
"Book Review" of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980)
This is MIT Press's first effort to cope with the reality of science fiction. Although less than 300 pages, it weighs almost a pound and a half, compared to Ballantine Books' edition of Ted Sturgeon's classic More Than Human, which weighs exactly a quarter pound. Therefore Warrick's book must be six times as important as Sturgeon's. Her study, Warrick tells us, "is based on 225 stories and novels written between 1930 and 1977." She states her conclusions up front in her introduction: "This study demonstrates that much of the (science) fiction written since World War II is reactionary in its attitude toward computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill informed about information theory and computer technology and lags behind present developments instead of anticipating the future." She then goes on to present a fully developed aesthetic approach by which to judge SF (here she does quite well). The three SF writers whom she deals with most fully are Asimov, Lem, and myself. I get the impression she considers the three of us important, and here lies my quarrel with her. As far as I am concerned the concept "important" is of no use in judging SF. I could quarrel with the vague style of the book (for instance, I cite "... a prison of false illusions" as being not only a double negative but also verbose, and "A shower of bizarre metaphors trails from Dick's imagination as it journeys through the patterns of possibilities in the evolving reciprocal relationship between man and his artificial constructs" and "He throws torches of possibility into his dark future, and their flashes of light reveal a survival," etc., as boring and sophomoric and a waste of the reader's time). But I would prefer to quarrel with the purpose of the book instead, and start out by saying that it has no purpose. It is a parasitic thing, and its very existence suggests that SF as a field is beginning to die, because only an entity waning and failing attracts such suckers as the academic sports of this sort. As Jesus says in Matthew 24:28: "Wherever the corpse is, there will the vultures gather."