Excessive Candour
The Bone Song of Philip K. Dick

In 2007, it might be best to remain tomb quiet and read the book and feel the song in the bones.

But there are things to be said, up here, looking backward into a time when the bone song of Philip K. Dick first ate us from within. The editor of this almost entirely excellent collection—he is now rimming the apogee of a career far more eminent than Philip K. Dick ever achieved in a lifetime of chorea highs and downers worse than Icarus'—was born two years after the earliest story included in Four Novels of the 1960s first appeared. It is a collection assembled by a neonate, and we shall see if it shows.

The first title chosen, The Man in the High Castle (1962), is perhaps the one Dick book whose canonization in the Library of America could not rationally be avoided. High Castle is famous and should be; it won a Hugo, and should have; it was the first entirely Dickian novel to reach publication; it is just about the best Hitler Wins novel yet written; and by using the I Ching as a kind of magic-dice narration cage to control the moves of the tale, it steps alluringly sideways every time you think you've got it pinned. Nothing of interest about Lethem shows here, because the choice is inevitable.

Lethem's other three selections are The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (dated 1965 but 1964), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ubik (1969), and they too seem pretty hard to reject. But now we are entering deeper waters. We know that of the 19 novels Dick published in the 1960s—each one of them being a theoretical winner in this particular stakes—there were several clunkers, books written when the ground was too close for Icarus, or simply typed down too fast with the money already spent, or maybe somebody woke him before he had a chance to memorize the dream. But there are others.

Most of Dick's nearly innumerable critics and interpreters would probably instance Martian Time-Slip (1963) and Dr. Bloodmoney; Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) as two of the three or four best novels of the 1960s, as would I; A Maze of Death (written 1968), the last of the great paradigm Dick texts of the 1960s, was not published until 1970, and belongs therefore in some successor volume. We are still left with two books Lethem did not choose (though I suspect he would have included them had the Library of America given him as much space as they accord, per volume, to the journalism of Henry James).

The secret courts of science fiction

If I had had Lethem's task, I might well have ended up with the same choice; but in fact I think probably not, for reasons which may have something to do more with our respective ages than with the quality of the choices available. When I began to read Philip K. Dick, in 1953, I was assailed by a reading experience that, not very far into my teens, I had no words for: an incestuous deadpan interflow between transgressiveness and the Sense of Wonder, a pressure of tone that rightly hinted at anguishes beyond my ken, but also hummed with awe (which is to say Recollection Reborn, which is to say that the Sense of Wonder feels like deja vu). For me, in that year, Dick had the secret of SF. He told old tales as though they had just happened tomorrow. He told them to me. It was our secret.

That secret, which thousands shared with me in the vast solitude I shared with thousands, was not of course conveyed by words alone. My generation— the generation of readers 10 or 20 years younger than Dick—was the first to gain admission to the secret courts of SF by reading not only magazines but also paperback originals, and the king of the paperback original (for many of us) was Philip K. Dick. The content of his early Ace Doubles, like Solar Lottery or The Man Who Japed, seemed intrinsicate with their covers: messages of danger and allure: Look, you can survive the falseness of things. You can come through. The future's yours. But you've got to stay below the radar. Like me.

It is that nostalgia—that memory of wake-up calls conveyed to children in Betty Crocker suburbs— that, had I had the chance, would have probably inspired me to honor the register of Dick's inherent dangerousness by including at least one paperback original—either Martian Time-Slip or Dr. Bloodmoney would have done fine— as a marker, an irony, an awakener. (I was an early judge in the annual Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback original, and I remember that we tried to honor books not only because their authors had suffered, but because they shone through their register and by virtue of it.)

But of course there is in fact no intrinsic "paperback-original-ness" in either text Lethem left out; both could as easily have appeared in Doubleday's hardback list (all but High Castle were Doubleday releases) as any of the books Lethem did select. Certainly he is highly unlikely to have made any critical distinction between paperback and hardback originals, maybe because he was too young to notice. And maybe we are confusing extrinsic and intrinsic issues here. So be it.

The absolute certainty of placement

The novels themselves have been analyzed to death and beyond by now. Here are a few fragmented impressions after 40 years.

The Man in the High Castle: First thing to notice, the absolute certainty of placement. Each character, in his or her particular niche within an environment that paralyzes almost any initiative, is somehow ideally placed to inch sideways in that niche, and therefore see the world. Note how violently and healthily Dick despises victorious Germany. Note the observed rule-bound, wonderland intricacies of the behavior of his Japanese. Note Dick's unrelenting spelling out of the inherent hoax of the world: not only fake manners, fake antiquities (was Dick the first to notate the transformation of 20th-century America into a collectible?), fake thought, but also of course the fact that the world itself is ontologically vitiated by the existence of Hawthorne Abendsen's alternate history, in which the Nazis lost (though note that Abendsen does not describe our own world at all: we're not real either). Note how subtly the texture of the tale changes from light comedy (with black overtones) to vastation: to a sense (deeper in the next novels) of the underlying malice of the world.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: "He is a freak. His teeth are steel and deform his jaw. Palmer Eldritch is the heart of Dick's world. Because Palmer Eldritch is also God." Simple enough—certainly simple enough for me to have said it (as per quote) back in 1965, in the first SF review I ever wrote—but a place to start, though perhaps not here and now. What was hoax upon hoax in the previous book darkens here into infinite recursions of digestion: you cannot tell what is real because the stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which are the likeness of God, may be devouring the accidents of the real, for the taste. Note the Dick trio, which appears here clearly: the functionary given just enough glimpse of the gears of things to make the story go; the astonishingly beautiful woman who seduces and betrays and talks rings around her prey (and who never has a nudity taboo); the boss figure, the only character in any Dick novel with anything like a wide range of affect, excepting surprise. No one seems to be genuinely surprised in a Philip K. Dick novel: What is felt at moments of reversal or epiphany is more the shock of resignation. Note the global warming. Note the palsy of all official governance: that it is the automata in Dick's novels who do the grunt work of low-grade intimidation.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Note how much sadder and more savage the book is than the big noisy athletic sentimental movie. Note that World War Three is long over; that there is no future on the Ruined Earth; that any awareness conveyed of the end of the world in this book and in any Dick book is conveyed in a tone of disinteredness that burns the eye: just as in the works of J.G. Ballard, his contemporary in many ways. Note that the whole complicated quasi-thriller action of the tale takes place within 24 hours, note the professional skill of Dick's use of this narrative device. Note that the electric pets and the androids convey a tacit pathos, because they will not last much longer than we will. Note also (in radical contrast to Blade Runner) how subtly Dick depicts the androids' fatal flaw: that though they scatter affect over the page, they cannot viscerally adhere to their own lifelines, there is no song in the bone about continuing the gene. Unlike us Dick humans, they are not resigned to continue regardless. Note that we learn how deeply Dick loves those characters he depicts experiencing a fragile small glow of resignation. Note how love makes radiant even the electric toad.

Ubik: Note how love makes radiant the electric toad.