The collected stories of Philip K. Dick Book

This, or the later, slightly rearranged, editions by Gollancz & Citadel Twilight are must-haves for Philip K. Dick fans. The stories are quite various in quality, Dick having been a working author usually supported at so many cents per word paid by various science fiction magazine publishers.

I'd read many of these shorter pieces before in other collections or in their original magazine appearances. Those which were entirely familiar, I skipped.

The extraordinary interest in Dick following upon his death in 1982 and reflected in academic studies, republications and cinematic adaptations is not because he was a great writer. He wasn't. Rather, I think, it was because of the terrible earnestness behind some of his admittedly hack works. Dick was a tortured person, a failure academically, in marriage and professionally. The rest of us, most of us, have, I suspect, similar feelings about ourselves--at least after it dawns on us that we are no longer youths with great prospects ahead. Unlike many others, Dick had neither a stable family nor a stable career to hide within. He didn't subscribe to a normative set of religious beliefs or belong to a faith community--religious, political or otherwise. He was essentially alone.

It's not that Dick was a loner, however. He regularly sought out companionship, often lived with others--sometimes a diverse lot, increasingly with persons considerably younger than himself. He was connected, yet not connected--again, a common condition.

Unlike many others who suffer silently, Dick was a reader and a writer. His personal anxieties weren't saleable, not in his lifetime, but the common, public aspects of them were (the fear of nuclear war, of creeping totalitarianism, of commodification, of environmental destruction, of attitude manipulation by governments and corporations). Now, of course, with his death, with the posthumous publication of uncompleted and/or unsaleable works and the creation of a Dick industry, the more personal side of his angst is receiving attention.

Beyond this, beyond Dick being representatively symptomatic, there is also the passionate yearning, reflected in much of his work, for a stable ground and a path to attain to such felicity. Thus, with his ageing, the increasingly religious character of his product.

Dick never found redemption. His work reflects a tension between despair and hope, between falsity and truth which may indeed be resolved in the context of a story or a novel, especially the earlier ones, but which was patently left unresolved in his life.

Unlike most(?) others, however, Dick had a series of visions--real, literal visions--which seemed to proffer a solution to his all-too-common dilemmas. His very last works represent a grappling with this ultimately ungraspable revelation and intrigue readers like myself with their promise. These last works, the VALIS books, are quite unsatisfactory as novels, but also, despite their flaws, quite alluring.

Thus, Dick endures.