Philip K Dick, or, Finally, Sci-Fi Comes up Short

I am about to wade into some kind of bramble.

I have never cared for science fiction.  My best attempt at this volume of Philip K. Dick from Library of America did not change my mind.  In fact, reading these novels helped me, finally, articulate what I think is the biggest, most essential, and ultimately fatal shortcoming of the genre.

Dick is one of America’s important writers, and Americans are rightly proud of his contributions to an international field that has become one of the most visible and admired in literature.  Even if I am not a fan of his genre, no one can diminish his stature in it.  

I have now cleared my throat.  

Having read around the Library of America collection for some time, I decided to pick up this volume for the express purpose of trying out one of the most famous practitioners of science fiction.  Ever since I was a kid, I just never loved sci fi or fantasy, no matter how many times I tried.  Apart from some Primo Levi and Umberto Eco, if you consider those a fit, it has probably been decades since I have read any fiction in either category.  I had just given up on it.  Recently, I concluded it was perhaps the moment to try again, now that enough time has passed.

Lemme tell you: I really, really wanted to like Philip K. Dick.  I know he is a hero to so many.  I know many readers consider him a visionary.  I know his literary and cinematic offspring are widely regarded as brilliant.  (How many people have you met who think Blade Runner is fatuous bunk?  I know.  I haven’t met many, either.  But my dad and I are two of ‘em.) 

And I am glad I decided to pick up this volume.  It contains two of his most famous books,  The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  This, I decided, was a perfect way for me to challenge, assess, and review my old opinion of science fiction.  To be clear, in case you gotta ask, I am not glad that I bought the volume so I could be justified in some kind of contrarian opinion.  On the contrarian contrary, I discovered what so many people have known for a long time: man, oh man, Philip K. Dick (why is it always written and uttered w the “K”?) was a good writer.  No serious reader can fault a single page.  His sentences and paragraphs, the swing of his scenes, and the intelligence of his character and subplot introduction are all first class.

In fact, his excellence was so excellent that it compelled and enabled me to articulate, better than I had ever before, why I don't care for sci-fi.  I found I liked his writing so much that I wished he were inviting his readers elsewhere.  This volume helped me tease out what it is about the genre itself that I don’t love.  For completeness, for the astute follower or for the heckler in the cheap seats, I can add that, though Alternate History (like Man in the High Castle) is neither properly sci-fi nor fantasy, it shares essential qualities with both that inform my opinion heavily.  Here goes . . . . 

The problem with sci-fi is that it is not radical enough.  That’s it in a sentence.  Though its central promise is a fantastical future or parallelity, it is so, well, unambitious.  In the end, sci-fi, like its cousin fantasy, proposes differences from reality that are expressed mostly in terms of costume, climate, and technology. 

The value systems in these supposedly very different worlds are always the same as ours.  This does not mean that the particular values embraced by the Evil Faction are the same as ours.  But the writer never asks readers to challenge their contemporary beliefs of the way things oughta be.  In other words, the writer expects and accepts that the reader will interpret the Evil Faction’s evil through exactly the same lens through which the reader would perceive the Nazis (perhaps literally) or Pol Pot or Jeffrey Dahmer.  The tacit agreement between author and audience is that all Background Understanding of the World remains the same, but the setting has changed.  It’s all so . . . ordinary.  More accurately, maybe, it’s a head fake.  This is supposed to be a radically different world, but somehow everyone in it is adjudged by 20th-21st century western values.  

Then there’s the plot.  You know the old saw that there are only seven plots under the sun (or three or twenty or thirty-six — it’s an easy Google).  Well, in sci-fi, even though we’re in a Different and Only Imaginable Spacetime, the story is never that much of a departure from the one you’d find in the book sitting just a little further down the shelf.  He always gets the girl or doesn’t for undifferentiated reasons.  He changes and grows due to his bravery.  The bad guy gets his comeuppance or doesn’t (but we know he should have).

Take Man in the High Castle.  There is so much to like and admire.  The use of the I Ching as a device within the book.  The book-within-the-book that doubly plays with the concept of alternate history.  (In Man in the High Castle, the major shift is that the Axis won the Second World War.  In the book-within-the-book, they lost.)  The brilliant internal monologue of Americans defeated by the Japanese who now think in a kind of translated, accented patois.  But the problem is, to use a suitcase word, structural.  In sci-fi and fantasy, at least half the text must be exposition.  The writer has to set up the new world.  The machines, temperatures, prior macro histories, the various food flavors, the factions, the different form of government: they all need to be explained to the reader.  The writer’s vivid imaginary world must be laid out. 

I think a lot of people mistake this for creativity.

It quickly becomes dull and overbearing.  The essence of what makes writing like this alternate history, science fiction, or fantasy is exactly what gets in the way of its being radical or moving.  There is just too much freight for the author to transfer and for the reader to receive.  All the exposition gets in the way of the story, and depicting in great detail the changes in costume gives the mirage of courage.  Once you figure that out, I think, finally, you don't need it.