By
CHARLES McGRATH
ALL his life
the science fiction writer Philip K. *** yearned for what he called the
mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose
audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.” But Mr. ***, who
popped as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week, was also more than a little
paranoid. In the early ’70s, when he had finally achieved some standing among
academic critics and literary theorists — most notably the Polish writer
Stanislaw Lem — he narced on them all, writing a letter to the F.B.I. in which he claimed they were K.G.B. agents
trying to take over American science fiction.
So it’s hard to
know what Mr. ***, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the
fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability.
Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik”
— are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame
format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He
might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t
so honored. And what about the “Exegesis,” an 8,000-page journal that derived a
sort of Gnostic theology from a series of religious visions he experienced
during a couple of months in 1974? A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that
the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply
subversive writer into another canonical brand name.
Another thing
that would probably amuse and annoy Mr. *** in about equal measure are the
exceptional number of movies that have been made from his work, starting with
“Blade Runner” (adapted from “Do Androids Dream”), 25 years old this year and
available in the fall on a special “final cut” DVD. The newest, “Next,” taken
from a short story, “The Golden Man,” starring Nicolas Cage as a magician able to
see into the future and Julianne Moore as an F.B.I. agent
eager to enlist his help, opened just last month. In the works is a biopic
starring Paul Giamatti, who bears more than a
passing physical resemblance to the author, who by the end of his life had the
doughy look of a guy who didn’t spend a lot of time in the daylight.
Mr. *** died
while “Blade Runner” was still in production, already unhappy about the shape
the script was taking, though not the kind of money he hoped to realize. “Blade
Runner” is probably the best of the *** movies, if not the most faithful.
(That honor probably belongs to “A Scanner Darkly,” released last year, in
which Richard Linklater’s semi-animated
technique suggests some of the feel of a graphic novel.)
There’s no
reason to think Mr. *** would have approved any more of the others, especially
“Total Recall,” in which Quail, the nerdish hero of Mr. ***’s story “We Can
Remember It for You Wholesale,” turns into Quaid, a buffed-up Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Meanwhile, as several critics have
noted, movies like the “Matrix” series, “The Truman Show” and “Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind,” though not based on *** material, still seem to contain
his spark, and dramatize more vividly than some of the official *** projects
his essential notion that reality is just a construct or, as he liked to say, a
forgery. It’s as if his imaginative DNA had spread like a virus.
Part of why Mr.
***’s work appeals so much to moviemakers is his pulpish sensibility. He grew
up in California reading magazines like Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder
Stories and Fantastic Universe, and then, after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, began writing for them,
often in manic 20-hour sessions fueled by booze and speed. He could type 120
words a minute, and told his third wife (third of five, and there were
countless girlfriends: Mr. *** loved women but was hell to live with), “The
words come out of my hands, not my brain, I write with my hands.”
His early
novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace
paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the
Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be
cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master
of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’ ”
So for the most
part you don’t read Mr. *** for his prose. (The main exception is “The Man in
the High Castle,” his most sustained and most assured attempt at mainstream
respectability, and it’s barely a sci-fi book at all but, rather, what we would
now call a “counterfactual”; its premise is that the Allies lost World War II
and the United States is ruled by the Japanese in the west and the *** in the
east.) Nor do you read him for the science, the way you do, say, Isaac Asimov
or Robert Heinlein.
Mr. *** was
relatively uninterested in the futuristic, predictive side of science fiction
and embraced the genre simply because it gave him liberty to turn his
imagination loose. Except for the odd hovercar or rocket ship, there aren’t
many gizmos in his fiction, and many of his details are satiric, like the
household appliances in “Ubik” that demand to be fed with coins all the time, or
put-ons, like the bizarre clownwear that is apparently standard office garb in
the same book (which is set in 1992, by the way; so much for *** the prophet):
“natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top, and
train engineer’s tall hat.”
To a
considerable extent Mr. ***’s future is a lot like our present, except a
little grungier. Everything is always running down or turning into what one of
the characters in “Do Androids Dream” calls “kipple”: junk like match folders
and gum wrappers that doubles itself overnight and fills abandoned apartments.
This sense of entropy and decline is what Ridley Scott evokes so well in
“Blade Runner,” with its seedy, rainy streetscapes, and what Steven Spielberg misses in his slightly schizoid “Minority Report,” in
which Tom Cruise waves his hands at that
glass console, as if it were a room-size Wii system.
The theme of
“Minority Report” — pre-cognition, or the idea that certain people, “precogs,”
can foresee the future, with not always happy results — was an idea that Mr.
*** began exploring in the mid-’50s, along with themes of altered or repressed
memory, which became the subject of “Total Recall,” “Impostor” and, more
recently, John Woo’s “Paycheck.” Most of
the ***-inspired movies come from short stories of this period — several of
them, including “The Golden Man,” written in the space of just a few months.
In
the ’60s Mr. *** turned his energies to novel writing, and with the exception
of “Do Androids Dream” (considerably dumbed down in “Blade Runner”) and “A
Scanner Darkly” (published in 1977 and, incidentally, the first book *** wrote
without the assistance of drugs) the novels don’t lend themselves so readily to
the Hollywood imagination.