In reading the stories in this volume you should bear in mind that most were written when [science fiction] was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley — or especially in Berkeley — people would say, ‘But are you writing anything serious?’ To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most _writers_, let alone most other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, who I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: ‘To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.’ I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful for this charity… So in my head I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at an official city function, and the ordeal of the Fifties when Kleo and I lived on ninety dollars a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book, and when we were literally living on dog food.
But I think you should know this — specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is a justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered… Kabir, the sixteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, ‘If you have not lived through something, it is not true.’ So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.
—
Philip K. Dick, 1980
I know, a little over the top and I’m certainly not empathizing, but this fear colors and enhances a lot of Dick’s best work, or at least what I’ve read so far. “Often it is a justified fear” rings sad in a distant way; again, like a lot of his best work. Jonathan Lethem, writing about this, points out “the self-mocking humility” of Dick’s anecdote regarding Gold’s “charity,” but it doesn’t seem that way to me.
