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Philip K. Dick
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 Philip K. Dick, to the astonishment of many traditional science fiction readers, emerged in the 1970s
as perhaps the most important living sf writer in the eyes of literary critics and a preponderance of readers
worldwide outside the United States. His most famous novels include
Solar Lottery (1955), Time Out of
Joint (1959), The Man in the High
Castle (1962), Martian Time-Slip (1964),
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965),
Ubik (1969), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
(1974), Valis (1981). Dick was fascinated by
the surfaces and images of technology, and was more taken with philosophical ideas and the nature of reality
than with science and its rigorous methodology. He was also a humorist. His closest relations among
science fiction writers when he began to write in the 1950s were A. E. Van Vogt (for his huge, ambitious,
metaphysical ideas in endless profusion and combination) and Henry Kuttner (for his stylish play with the tropes and
cliches of science fiction -- a future world filled with talking appliances and strange shifts in reality, more
Carrollian than Campbellian). By the 1960s, the influence of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. -- especially of
The Sirens of Titan (1959) -- became prominent, both in the sentiment and politics of, for example,
The Man in the High Castle, and Dr.
Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the
Bomb (1965), and in the structure and constant shifting of
point-of-view characters, then quite unusual in sf novels. Of all American science fiction writers of the 50s
through the early 80s, Dick's work is most amenable to the reading protocols of postmodern critics, and his
reputation has only increased since his death in 1982, the year of the classic sf film Bladerunner, based on Dick's
novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968).
We include "The Indefatigable Frog," an early story, because it shows Dick playing with a
mathematical and philosophical idea (like Richard Grant three decades later), using it to parody the character of his
scientists. Dick's fiction was often in opposition to the rest of the genre, especially to the attitudes of most
hard science fiction. This is in fact one of the rare occasions in his work when science is at the center of the story.
It is also in the tradition of Breuer's "The Hungry Guinea Pig" and might, as well, be in reaction to the rash
of low-budget science fiction creature movies of the early 1950s which often used small animals as sf creatures
(made huge or alien by special effects -- see Bryant's "giANTS"). At heart, though, it is a funny story
about Zeno's paradox, part of the subgenre of mathematical and scientific play stories like Rucker's "Ms. Found in
a Copy of Flatland" or Sladek's "Stop Evolution in Its Tracks!", that subvert the idea that experimental
science can be useful in settling theoretical or philosophical questions.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.