The Shifting Realities of Philip K. DickSelected Literary and Philosophical Writings

by Philip K. Dick 
Edited and with an Introduction by Lawrence Sutin 
Copyright 1995 - First Vintage Books Edition 
ISBN 0-679-42644-2 
eVersion 4.0 / Important Formatting Notes at End - Please Read Before Converting 

START Back Cover 

Nonfiction/Science Fiction 

"A wide-ranging selection of free-wheeling philosophical essays and journal 
entries; humorous, thoughtful speeches; and plot scenarios. . . . For both casual and 
serious Dick fans, The Shifting Realities unearths some gems." -- Boston Phoenix 

Philip K. Dick was both our most brilliant science fiction writer and a visionary 
philosopher who chose to couch his speculations in fiction. For, as he wrote about 
androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also 
posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human? 
This unprecedented collection of Dick's literary and philosophical writings acquaints us 
with the astonishing range and eloquence of his lifelong inquiry. 

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick includes autobiography, critiques of 
science fiction, and dizzyingly provocative essays such as "The Android and the Human" 
and "It You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." Readers will 
also find two chapters of a proposed sequel to Dick's award-winning novel The Man in 
the High Castle and selections from the metaphysical Exegesis that inspired his classic 
VALIS. 

Witty, erudite, and exploding with intellectual shrapnel, this is the last testament of 
an American original. This collection confirms Dick's reputation as one of the foremost 
imaginative thinkers of the twentieth century. 

END Back Cover 

To Mab, for her ceaseless fascination and patience with Philip K. Dick, and to 
Henry, always the most attentive reader of the Exegesis. 

The editor would also like to thank Douglas A. Mackey for his kind assistance in 
tracing prior publication data for certain of the writings inluded herein. 

Contents 


Introduction 


Part One -Autobiographical Writings 
Two Fragments from the Mainstream Novel Gather Yourselves Together (1949) 
"Introducing the Author" (1953) 
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1968) 
"Self Portrait" (1968) 
"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968, 1972) 
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972) 
"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1973) 
"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" (1976) 
"The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976) 
"Strange Memories of Death" (1979, 1984) 
"Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview," Conducted by Frank C. Bertrand (1980, 
1988) 


Part Two - Writings on Science Fiction and Related Ideas 
"Pessimism in Science Fiction" (1955) 
"Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert 
Heinlein?" (1966) 
"The Double: Bill Symposium": Replies to "A Questionnaire for Professional SF Writers 
and Editors" (1969) 
"That Moon Plaque" (1969) 
"Who Is an SF Writer?" (1974) 
"Michelson-Morley Experiment Reappraised" (1979) 
"Introduction" to Dr. Bloodmoney (1979, 1985) 
"Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980) 
"Book Review" of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) 
"My Definition of Science Fiction" (1981) 
"Prediction" by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981) 
"Universe Makers. . . and Breakers" (1981) 
"Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1981) 


Part Three -Works Related to The Man in the High Castle and Its Proposed Sequel 
"Naziism and The High Castle" (1964) 
"Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974) 
The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle 
(1964) 


Part Four -Plot Proposals and Outlines 
"Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth" (1967) 
"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967) 
"TV Series Idea" (1967) 
"Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) 


Part Five -Essays and Speeches 
"Drugs, Hallucination, and the Quest for Reality" (1964) 



"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" (1965) 
"The Android and the Human" (1972) 
"Man, Android, and Machine" (1976) 
"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" (1977) 
"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978, 1985) 
"Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978) 
"The Tagore Letter" (1981) 


Part Six -Selections from the Exegesis 
From the Exegesis (c. 1975-80) 


Introduction 
BY LAWRENCE SUTIN 


This is a first-time collection, in book form, of significant nonfiction writings -essays, 
journals, plot scenarios, speeches, and interviews -- by Philip K. Dick from 
throughout his career. These writings establish, I believe, that Dick was not only a 
visionary creator of speculative fiction but also an illuminating and original thinker on 
issues ranging from the merging of quantum physics and metaphysics; to the potential 
scope of virtual reality and its unforeseen personal and political consequences; to the 
discomforting relation between schizophrenia (and other psychiatric diagnoses) and 
societal "joint hallucinations"; to, not least, the challenge to primary human values posed 
in an age of technological distance and spiritual despair. 

The bulk of these writings have either never before been published, or have 
appeared only in obscure and out-of-print publications. Dick saw himself first and 
foremost as a fiction writer, and there can be no question that it is in his stories and his 
novels -- both science fiction (SF) and mainstream -- that Dick's most permanent legacy 
resides. As for his nonfiction writings, those few essays and speeches that he published 
in his lifetime attracted scant attention. In certain cases, this was justified -- their style 
and quality were markedly uneven; indeed, the same may be said with respect to the 
contents of this volume, many of which -- the Exegesis entries -- Dick had no intention of 
publishing in his lifetime and hence no reason to revise and polish. (He may -- there is 
no direct evidence in his private writings to support the supposition -- have hoped that 
they be discovered and published after his death.) 

But the lack of attention paid to Dick's nonfictional works is due to factors that go 
beyond unevenness of quality. To this day one finds, in SF critical circles, sharp 
resistance to the notion that Dick's ideas -- divorced from the immediate entertainment 
context of his fiction -- could possibly be worthy of serious consideration. It is as if, for 
these critics, to declare that certain of Dick's ideas make serious sense is to diminish his 
importance as the ultimate "mad" SF genius -- a patronizing role assigned him by these 
selfsame critics. But it is nonsensical to maintain, in the face of the plain evidence of the 
fictional texts themselves, not to mention his own writings on SF in this volume, that 
Dick's ideas and his fictional realms are divisible dualities rather than the permeable 
whole of a life's work. Thankfully, this kind of critical parochialism is diminishing even 


within the SF world. And as for the world at large, Dick is, at long last, receiving his due 
as a writer of both imaginative depth and intellectual power. Indeed, the story of his 
emergence into sudden literary "respectability" is a revelatory parable as to the fierce 
cultural strictures that, in America, dominate the type and degree of attention paid to an 
author and his works. 

Philip K. Dick (1928-82), author of more than fifty volumes of novels and stories, 
has become, since his death, the focus of one of the most remarkable literary 
reappraisals of modern times. From his longtime status as a patronized "pulp" writer of 
"trashy" science fiction, Dick has now emerged -- in the minds of a broad range of critics 
and fellow artists -- as one of the most unique and visionary talents in the history of 
American literature. 

This astonishing turnabout in recognition of Dick is evidenced both by the 
intensity of the praise bestowed on him and the range of voices that concur in it. Art 
Spiegelman, author/illustrator of Maus, has written: "What Franz Kafka was to the first 
half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half." Ursula Le Guin, who 
has acknowledged Dick's strong influence on her own acclaimed SF novels, points to 
him as "our own homegrown Borges." Timothy Leary hails Dick as "a major twenty-firstcentury 
writer, a 'fictional philosopher' of the quantum age." Jean Baudrillard, a leader of 
the postmodernist critical movement in France, cites Dick as one of the greatest 
experimental writers of our era. New Age thinker Terrence McKenna writes of Dick the 
philosopher as "this incredible genius, this gentle, long-suffering, beauty-worshiping 
man." Dick appears on the cover of The New Republic while the critical essay within 
declares that "Dick's novels demand attention. . . . He is both lucid and strange, practical 
and paranoid." An electronic-music opera with a libretto based on the Dick novel Valis 
premieres to great acclaim in the Pompidou Center in Paris. The renowned Mabou 
Mines theater group performs a dramatic adaptation of the Dick novel Flow My Tears, 
the Policeman Said in Boston and New York. Punk and industrial rock bands take their 
names from Dick titles and pay homage to his books in their lyrics. Hollywood adapts a 
Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a story ("I Can Remember It for 
You Wholesale") into the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, while an acclaimed 
French film adaptation of yet another novel (Confessions of a Crap-Artist) was released 
in America in the summer of 1993 under the title Barjo. In the past two years, Dick has 
been the subject of laudatory front-page features in The New York Times Book Review 
and the L.A. Weekly --the opposite poles, one might say, of an overall mainstream 
acceptance. The headline for the L.A. Weekly feature sums up the thrust of the critical 
turnaround: "The Novelist of the '90s Has Been Dead Eight Years." 

What makes this posthumous triumph all the more wrenching is the knowledge 
that, during his lifetime, Dick could succeed in reaching a wide readership only within the 
"ghetto" of the (SF) genre -- a critically derided "ghetto" that effectively prevented 
serious consideration of his works from without. Dick wrote a number of mainstream 
literary novels (including the above-mentioned Confessions of a Crap-Artist), most of 
which have been published posthumously. But the greatest of his fictional works fall 
within the SF genre, which allowed Dick a conceptual and imaginative freedom that was 
severely crimped by the strictures of consensual reality favored by the mainstream. 
Even within the SF genre, Dick was considered something of an odd figure, with his 
penchant for plots that emphasized metaphysical speculations as opposed to "hard" 
science predictions. Still, the sheer vividness, dark humor, and textured detail with which 


Dick rendered his spiraling alternate universes and the oh so human characters who 
inhabited them won over a sizable number of SF readers. In a writing career that 
spanned three decades, Dick produced a number of stories and novels that are widely 
regarded as SF classics; these include Time out of Joint (1959), Martian Time-Slip 
(1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly 
(1977), and Valis (1981). 

In 1963, Dick was awarded the highest honor that SF has to bestow: the Hugo 
Award for The Man in the High Castle, a novel that exemplifies Dick's trademark 
blending of SF plot structure (as to which the number one rule is constantly to amaze the 
reader) and philosophical mazemaking (with a no-holds-barred skepticism that allowed 
for all possibilities). Dick was fervent in his view that SF was the genre par excellence for 
the exploration of new and challenging concepts. 

As Dick himself explained in an epistolatory interview (with critic Frank Bertrand) 
included herein: "Central to SF is the idea as dynamism. Events evolve out of an idea 
impacting on living creatures and their society. The idea must always be a novelty. . . . 
There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before 
everything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view 
and the invented world." 

High Castle contains a horde of stimulating ideas, beginning with the basic plot: a 
post-World War II world in which the Axis powers apparently have prevailed and the 
United States is a conquered land divided between Japan (the West) and Germany (the 
East). While the Japanese are relatively compassionate conquerors, the Nazis have 
extended their brutal methods throughout their dominions. Evil has become, under their 
reign, a palpable daily horror. One of the characters, a Swiss diplomat who is secretly 
working against the Nazis, sees them as the products of a collective psychic upheaval 
(described in terms that evidence Dick's indebtedness to C. G. Jung) that has obliterated 
the distinction between the human and the divine by reversing the sacrificial pattern of 
the Christian eucharist: 

They [the Nazis] want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power 
and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their 
egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It 
is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and 
that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man. 

But beneath this apparent, horrific reality there exists -- for those who can 
experience it -- an alternate world in which the Allies are victorious and life has retained 
its capacity for goodness. To reach this alternate world is no easy matter; pain and 
shock may be necessary to open one's eyes, or the enlightening aid of The 
Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the novel-within-the-novel in High Castle that reveals the true 
state of affairs for those who read with intelligence, heart, and an open mind. 

In 1974, perhaps the most tumultuous year -- for reasons shortly to be discussed 
-- in his signally tumultuous life, Dick contemplated writing a novelistic sequel to High 
Castle, but his inward repugnance at returning to an extended reimagining of the Nazi 
mentality prevented him from completing this project. The two chapters he did complete 
are published for the first time in this volume, as is the "Biographical Material on 
Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974). 


Dick himself would come to hope, in the final decade of his writing life, that his 
own novels and stories could fulfill a role analogous to that of Abendsen for his readers: 
to alert them that the consensual reality that grimly governed their daily lives (the "Black 
Iron Prison," as Dick would come to call it in his philosophical journal, the Exegesis) 
might not be as impregnable as it seemed. This is not to say that Dick saw himself as a 
prophet or as one possessing an undeniable Truth of life (though Dick could sound -temporarily 
-- convinced while exploring the possibilities of an idea that intrigued him.) 
On the contrary, Dick could be a relentless critic of his own theories and beliefs. He was 
also quite willing to satirize himself broadly (as the would-be mystic Horselover Fat) and 
his penchant for "wild" speculations in his autobiographical novel Valis (1981): "Fat must 
have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he 
developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked." In his 
philosophical writings, Dick would don, dwell within, and then discard one theory after 
another -- as so many imaginative masks or personae -- in his quest to unravel the 
mysteries of his two great themes: What is human? What is real? What makes Dick 
such a unique voice, both in his fiction and -- equally -- in the nonfiction writings 
collected in this book, was not the answers he reached (for he held to none), but rather 
the imaginative range and depth of his questioning, and the joy and brilliance and wild 
nerve with which he pursued it. 

Philosophical issues were always at the heart of Dick's subject matter as a writer. 
He sold his first SF story back in 1951, at age twenty-two. Even by then, his course was 
set: He would explore the basic mysteries of existence and of human character. In 
Michael in the 'Fifties, an unpublished novel by Kleo Mini (Dick's second wife, to whom 
he was married for most of the fifties decade), the psychological makeup of the title 
character is based loosely on Dick and displays the same intense scrutiny of existence 
that Mini remembers in her husband at the very start of his SF writing career. Here is a 
dialogue between Michael and wife Kate, based to some extent on Mini herself. Kate 
speaks first: 

"I think you [Michael] -- sometimes -- want to pull away from the world. Away from me, away from 
everything I think of as real. Away from your house and your car and your cat. Sometimes you're very far 
away from all of us. And sometimes I think I'm like a string that brings you back to earth, holds you down 
to the earth." 

She was right, he thought. She was real, as real as the crab grass and the kitchen table. 

"Where is it you go, Michael?" 

"I don't want to go anywhere, Kate. But I think there are different kinds of reality. And the car and 
the house and the cat are not all there is. Living like we do -- on the edge, in a way -- we're always so 
busy scraping along, trying to get by, that it keeps us, it keeps me from dealing with the other reality, the 
meaning of everything."* 

* I would like to thank Kleo Mini for permission to quote from Michael in the 
'Fifties, which offers a valuable portrait not only of Dick but also of theBerkeley milieu in which he came of age. 
In his interview with Bertrand, Dick offered a summary of his early philosophical 
influences: 

I first became interested in philosophy in high school when I realized one day that all space is the 
same size; it is only the material boundaries encompassing it that differ. After that there came to me the 


realization (which I found later in Hume) that causality is a perception in the observer and not a datum of 
external reality. In college I was given Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible 
existence of a metaphysical realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to understand that the 
human mind could conceive of a realm of which the empirical world was epiphenomenal. Finally I came to 
believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not as real as the archetypal 
realm beyond it. At this point I despaired of the veracity of sense-data. Hence in novel after novel that I 
write I question the reality of the world that the characters' percept-systems report. 

This condensed history of philosophical influences tells only part of the story of Dick's 
development as a writer. There are, to be sure, a good number of philosophical and 
spiritual perspectives that mattered greatly to Dick but are not listed above. But a more 
basic factor was the difficult childhood Dick endured, which included the early divorce of 
his parents, frequent Depression era cross-country moves with his financially strapped 
and emotionally distant mother, and bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia that interfered 
with Dick's schooling and friendships and caused his mother to have him examined by at 
least two psychiatrists. One of these psychiatrists speculated that Dick might be 
suffering from schizophrenia -- a diagnostic possibility that severely frightened the boy 
and would haunt the grown man all his life. 

Throughout Dick's speculations, there is the underlying sense of a dark pain and 
of shattering experiences that had left him grappling for his place in the shared world 
(koinos kosmos, in the Greek of Heraclitus, a thinker whom Dick greatly admired) and 
struggling to evade the madness of solitary delusion (idios kosmos, private world; from 
idios comes the English "idiot" -- one who is cut off from that which is happening around 
him). Though fear lurked strongly within him, Dick insisted on staring madness in the 
face and asking if it, too, could lay claim to a kind of knowledge. Thus, in "Drugs, 
Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," a 1964 essay included herein, Dick argued 
that what is called schizophrenic or psychotic "hallucination" may be, in many cases, the 
result of extremely broad and sensitive perceptions that most "sane" persons learn to 
screen out of their consciousness. The Kantian a priori categories of space and time are 
examples of such screens; Kant claimed that these were necessary for the mental 
ordering of phenomenal reality, which would otherwise remain a hopeless perceptual 
chaos to human minds. In his essay, Dick theorized that, to the extent that our mental 
and sensory awareness happens to extend beyond these socially ratified screens, any 
one of us may become subject to "hallucinations" -- which are, in essence, unshared 
realities. While it is possible that "mystical" insights may ensue, there is a greater 
likelihood -- and a fearfully tragic one it is -- that we may find ourselves in a hell realm of 
utter mental isolation: 

In the light of this, the idea of hallucinating takes on a very different character; hallucinations, whether 
induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be merely quantitatively different from what we 
see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the 
organism, over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity. . . . No-name entities or aspects begin to 
appear, and since the person does not know what they are -- that is, what they're called or what they 
mean -- he cannot communicate with other persons about them. This breakdown of verbal communication 
is the fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit 
into his own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons. 

There is an interesting parallel between Dick's emphasis here on a societally based 
definition of hallucinations -- as perceptions unshared by others -- and the insight offered 


by the eminent anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his Beyond Culture: "Perceptual 
aberrations are not restricted to psychoses but can also be situational in character, 
particularly in instances of great stress, excitation, or drug influences."* Instances, that 
is, in which, in Dick's words, "too much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of 
the organism." 

* Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976, 1981), p. 229. 
In his 1965 essay "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes" (also included), Dick 
sought to give the fearful and isolated perceptions of the schizophrenic an analytical 
coherence that might extend beyond the purely personal to a new viewpoint on human 
experience: 

What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy 
is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of 
film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not 
exist. Instead, the a-causal connective principle which [quantum physicist] Wolfgang Pauli called 
Syncronicity is operating in all situations -- not merely as one factor at work, as with us. Like a person 
under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun. 

Dick described himself, in this essay, as "schizoid effective" -- a "pre-schizophrenic 
personality." This fearful dancing on the high wire of self-diagnostics is a recurrent 
element in Dick's essays and journals. Two opposite possibilities set the boundaries: the 
fear that he might be insane ("psychotic" and "schizophrenic" were his most common 
terms), and the possibility that he might, through an encompassing intellectual 
understanding (anamnesis, the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato), 
win spiritual redemption -- freedom from his crippling fears, and a haven from the 
deluded and sorrowful world. 

There was, for Dick, a certain sense in which his own writings might alleviate 
some of the sorrow -- for his readers and for himself -- by at least openly acknowledging 
the doubts and questions that existence posed for those who had eyes to see. As he 
wrote in one Exegesis entry: 

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to 
formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can 
do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of 
sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom 
my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature 
of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an 
integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.* 

* Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed.
Lawrence Sutin (Novato, Calif./Lancaster, Pa.: Underwood-Miller, 1991), p.
161. 
One aspect of that "personal history" that has continued to intrigue his readers is the 
bizarre and powerful series of dreams, visions, and voices that flooded Dick's 
consciousness in February and March 1974 (or "2-3-74," Dick's shorthand for that 
period) and stood for him as the central -- and, ultimately, inexplicable -- event of his life. 
These inspired what has become known as the "Valis Trilogy" -- the final three novels of 


Dick's life that have earned both critical praise and a broad readership (through their 
recent simultaneous reissuance as Vintage trade editions): Valis (1981), The Divine 
Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). In all three novels, 
Dick explores the anguish and entropic emptiness of an earthly realm in which God (or 
whatever alternative name we give to the divine) remains unknown and perhaps 
unknowable. But also, in all of these works, Dick offers the hope that divine knowledge 
and redemption may yet be granted -- even to modern, scuffling souls who have trouble 
paying their rent and keeping their marriages together. There is a striking thematic 
resemblance between these novels and the speculations of the Gnostic thinkers of the 
early centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, in the definitive modern edition of Gnostic 
scriptures, The Nag Hammadi Library (1988), an "Afterword" singles out Dick (along with 
Jung, Hermann Hesse, and Harold Bloom) as a preeminent modern interpreter of 
Gnostic beliefs. 

As we have seen, even prior to the "Valis Trilogy," philosophical and spiritual 
questions had formed the underpinnings of Dick's SF "alternate" worlds and "alien" 
intelligences. But Dick had harbored a carefully limited view of himself, through the first 
two decades of his writing career, as one who fervently posed ultimate questions but 
lacked -- as a matter of personal experience -- any real encounter with a higher source 
of being. After 2-3-74, this changed to an extent. By his very nature, Dick was not a man 
to arrive at -- or even to wish to arrive at -- a simple conclusion about any life event, 
much less as complex and unsettling a series of events as 2-3-74. But through all of his 
wrangling, one fundamental fact emerges plainly: 2-3-74 served as a soul-shaking 
inspiration for Dick as a writer and thinker. The pratfalls and paradoxes of his SF plots 
had begun to seem to him -- after two decades of prolific exploration -- mere 
entertainments. Not that Dick did not wish to entertain. On the contrary, it was one of his 
paramount concerns as a writer: He loved the excitement of a good SF plot, as is amply 
testified to in his essays on SF included in this volume. But one of the strongest facets of 
his character -- and one that sets Dick aside from the abundance of writers who dabble 
in metaphysical puzzles out of sheer amusement -- was his conviction that answers 
could be attained by those who persisted in asking questions. Imagination, intelligence, 
and yearning insistence could prevail. Now, in his final years, there was a new passion: 
the driving necessity of getting to the truth of what had happened to him in those 
months. 

Was "2-3-74" a case of genuine mystical experiences, or a contact with "higher" 
(or simply "other") forms of intelligence, or a conscious manipulation of his mind by 
unknown persons, or a purely private outbreak of psychotic symptoms? Dick considered 
each of these possibilities, as well as others too numerous to summarize here, in his 
eight-thousand-page Exegesis (subtitled by Dick Apologia pro Mea Vita, to emphasize 
its central importance). The Exegesis was a journal -- handwritten, for the most part -- at 
which Dick labored night after night for eight years, until his death in 1982, in an attempt 
to explain 2-3-74 to his own satisfaction. He never succeeded. The Exegesis is, at times, 
a wild and wayward human record: Eight years' worth of impassioned journaling through 
the dead of the night (Dick's preferred time for creative effort), with no expressed 
intention of publication in his own lifetime, could not but result in highly uneven streaks 
of writing. But the Exegesis is also replete with passages that confirm Dick's standing as 
a subtle thinker and an astonishing guide to hidden possibilities of existence. A previous 
collection, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (Underwood/Miller, 1991), 


edited by the present writer, has won critical praise for Dick as a philosophical and 
spiritual thinker. Robert Anton Wilson (coauthor of the popular Illuminatus trilogy) wrote: 
"Dick explains 'mystic' states better than any visionary writer of the past." In Gnosis, 
reviewer John Shirley declared: "Deluded or spiritually liberated, Dick was a genius, and 
that genius shines through every page of this book." Further unpublished selections of 
the Exegesis appear in this volume -- including a full-length essay, titled (in the parodic 
pulp style that Dick employed with masterly effect in his fictional works) "The Ultra 
Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The Secret Meaning of the Great Systems of Theosophy of 
the World, Openly Revealed for the First Time." 

As is exemplified by this flamboyant title, there is something in the nature of 
Dick's raptly pell-mell style that may well put off those readers who think they know what 
"serious" writing must look and sound like. Of course, it was just such fixed canons of 
"serious" discourse that Dick devoted himself to dismantling -- or, in the more 
fashionable postmodern jargon that has come into prominence since his death, 
"deconstructing" -- in many of the essays included in this book. 

Dick is, as a matter both of style and of content, an uncategorizable thinker. One 
can dub him a "philosopher," and indeed he warrants the title in its original Greek 
meaning as one who loved wisdom and truly believed in the value of uninhibited 
questioning -- a rarity in this day and age, in which the word "metaphysical" has become 
a synonym for "pointless." But Dick has none of the systematic rigor and impersonality of 
tone that mark modern-day philosophical analysis for most readers. He adheres to no 
single philosophical school, though he feels free enough to wander through the 
hallways, so to speak, of each and every school of West and East down through the 
ages. He defends no propositions; rather, he samples them, explores them to their 
heights and the depths, then moves on. He proposes ultimate answers -- a goodly 
number of them, in fact -- and then confesses that he himself cannot choose among 
them. Especially in the Exegesis, Dick is sometimes moved to exclamations of 
unphilosophical joy; at other times the despair expressed on the page is a fearful thing. 
Dick clearly does not fit the modern mold of the "philosopher"; his true affinity is with the 
pre-Socratic thinkers, whose gnomic and evocative writings -- adamant, fragmented 
personal visions of the universe, its nature and purpose -- have resisted definitive textual 
analysis for more than two millennia. 

If one attempts to label Dick as a "mystic," similar difficulties arise. First, the term 
"mystic" seems to imply, by its standard usage in theological literature, that Dick 
definitely made contact with a divine reality or "saw God," as modern parlance goes. 
This conclusion is, of course, unwarranted. Dick himself never made up his mind as to 
whether it was God or "psychosis" or "something other" that he contacted in 2-3-74. 
Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of the Exegesis. The sheer strangeness of 
Dick's visions, coupled with his self-confessed "nervous breakdowns," have led some 
readers and critics to conclude that 2-3-74 can be seen only as the product of mental 
illness; the diagnoses offered are legion. To be sure, attempts at posthumous diagnosis 
of Dick are doomed to be highly speculative, particularly when psychiatrists and 
psychologists who treated him at various times of his life themselves disagreed widely 
over his mental state (most placed him as neurotic in some form, and at least one found 
him quite normal). Quite aside from the difficulties of such diagnosis, there is the further 
concern that diagnostics per se are useful when applied to a living patient under 
treatment but are singularly reductive when employed as a simplistic categorizing label 


for a substantial body of writings by a deceased author. There is, in truth, no psychiatric 
term yet devised that does justice to the vividness and cornplexity of his writings -- and 
their impact on the psyches of his readers. To read Dick with attention is to participate -startlingly 
-- in his unique vision, which frequently violates consensus assumptions about 
the nature of "reality," but retains nonetheless a brilliant coherence and emotional depth 
that signal anything but the workings of a madman, howsoever the facts of his life may 
be thrashed over and diagnosed by amateur analysts. Critic Alexander Star has aptly 
delineated the boundary between the man and the impact of his work: "Dick's sanity was 
open to question. But throughout his career he wrote with qualities that are rare in a 
science fiction writer, or in any writer at all. These included a sure feel for the detritus 
and debris, the obsolescent object-world, of postwar suburbia; a sharp historical wit; and 
a searching moral subtlety and concern."* 

* Alexander Star, "The God in the Trash," The New Republic (December 6, 1993),
p. 34. 
To focus on a rigid binary definition of sane or insane constitutes, in the case of 
Dick and his work, a puerile simplification. The further the combined bodies of 
knowledge of psychology, anthropology, and history of religions progress, the less clear 
it seems that bright-line divisions among "religious," "shamanic," and "psychotic" states 
is possible or even useful in the absence of a careful appreciation of the cultural and 
personal contexts of the experiencer. This is not to argue that Dick even remotely 
resembles an "enlightened" mystic; it is well to remember that Dick's forte was 
questions, not answers; those who would see his ideas as fodder for a "cult" merely 
reflect their own hunger for conditioned thought. Dick's experiences, as reflected in the 
writings in the present volume, reflect a root indeterminacy, a persistent puzzlement and 
skepticism that underlie even his wildest speculations. To follow Dick along his 
metaphysical quest will, however, provide its own unique rewards for the reader who is 
able to maintain an open mind. 

For example, one of the elements of his 2-3-74 experience was a series of 
"phosphene graphics" visions, which included, in one instance, a sighting of the Golden 
Rectangle of Greek aesthetics, which represented, in that culture, perfect architectural 
proportion as reflected in structures such as the Parthenon. Dick also became 
fascinated, during this period, with the Fibonacci logarithmic series, named after the 
thirteenth-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, who utilized it to 
demonstrate a frequent structural analogy among spiral forms in nature, as in certain 
seashells, leaves, and rock formations. Subsequent research has extended the analogy 
to the spin of hurricane winds and the DNA double helix, as well as to the underlying 
theorems of fractal mathematics and computer imaging. Dick believed that the Golden 
Triangle and the Fibonacci series were keys to interpreting the archetypal truths being 
revealed in the "phosphene graphics"; these speculations appear frequently in the 
Exegesis and are featured in Dick's novel Valis and in the speech "If You Find This 
World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," included in this volume. Nonetheless, 
the skeptical reader is likely to give them short shrift, consigning them as mere 
gibberish. 

But now consider the pervasive influence of phosphene graphics in shamanic 
visions and world religions, as summarized by anthropologist Michael Ripinsky-Naxon: 


Somewhere in the neural network of the brain and the retina is spurred a phenomenon 
[phosphenes] that actuates inner sight, or luminous visions, and which may constitute the basis for an 
objective, physical framework for the visions encountered among religious adepts such as shamans and 
mystics. . . . Carl G. Jung, observing the transcultural character of the neurally stimulated phosphene 
shapes, pioneered the idea that certain archetypal symbols might originate in the personal experience of 
such luminous designs. . . . The almost visionary, later paintings, executed in an asylum, by Vincent van 
Gogh, exhibit phosphene patterns, as do many unskilled crayon drawings of youngsters between the ages 
of two and four years. As can be also expected, a large number of designs encountered in ancient and 
aboriginal cultures display phosphene-like characters.* 

* Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism (Albany State University ofNew York Press, 1993), pp. 148-50. 
Ripinsky-Naxon goes on to consider the archetypal symbol of the spiral specifically: 

If we. . . recognize the spiral to be an archetypal pattern and its schematic representations as the 
labyrinth, then this conception may help elucidate our understanding of why this motif has been used to 
symbolize the unknown origin-point leading to the Hereafter, the cave, the tomb, and the womb of the 
Great Mother. The tomb, as has been noted, was constructed in resemblance of the body of the Great 
Mother, whose energy and procreative sexuality are conveyed through the element of the spiral.* 

* Ibid., p. 150. 
In this regard, note that Dick believed (see "If You Find This World Bad ...") that he 
sighted, through the vision of the Golden Rectangle, the goddess Aphrodite, or the 
sexual aspect of the Great Mother. As for the Importance of the Great Mother to Dick 
both philosophically and psychologically, the reader may consult his speech "The 
Android and the Human" in the present volume. 

Again, the point here is not to seek to argue on behalf of Dick as an inspired seer, 
or even -- necessarily -- as a "sane" human being. (There is no proof possible as to the 
sanity or insanity of Philip K. Dick.)* Rather, it is to challenge the reader to resist labels 
and to plunge into the ideas expressed in the texts themselves, and to wrest from them 
what seems useful and vital without regard to predisposing diagnostic labels. One might 
further urge that readers suspend their tendency to read Dick's metaphysical writings 
with belief or disbelief foremost in mind. For Dick, as the writings themselves reveal, had 
no pointedly persuasive intentions with respect to the reader. In turn, those readers who 
refuse to worry over whether Dick persuades them on any particular points may find that 
he illumines any number of prospective paths for further exploration. There is a beauty 
and a visionary intensity to the possibilities Dick offers, as in "Cosmogony and 
Cosmology," a 1978 essay in which Dick sought to distill key concepts of the Exegesis. 
The divine form discussed is that of a righteous Godhead (akin to the redeeming Logos 
of the Gnostics) who has lost the memory of himself as the true creator and has ceded 
control of the earthly realm to a blind and ignorant demiurge or "artifact." This "artifact" 
(akin to the Gnostic Archon) holds all humans in its delusional thrall, and even the 
Godhead must struggle against it.** 

* There is a considerable range of quality in the attempts to apply diagnosticmeasures to Dick's life and writings. Jay Kinney, for example, offers athoughtful and subtle comparison between schizophrenic and shamanic states in 

his "Wrestling with Angels: The Mystical Dilemma of Philip K. Dick" (publishedin In Pursuit of Valis). In the writings of Gregg Rickman, however, diagnosesof Dick abound and are relentlessly flogged despite the highly inconclusiveevidence. Paul Williams, the onetime literary executor of the Dick estate,
provides a sound assessment of Rickman's egregious mode of analysis in his To 
The High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life (1928-1962) (Long Beach, Calif.:
Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1989), of Dick as a potential victim ofchild abuse. See "The Rickmanization of PKD" in the "Philip K. Dick SocietyNewsletter," No. 24 (May 1990). 

** For those readers who would insist upon viewing Dick as a "mad" charlatantossing about ideas he could not comprehend as truly as might a "sane" andreasonable scholar, the following case study -- in miniature -- may proveilluminating.

The late Ioan P. Couliano, an acclaimed historian of religious thoughtwho taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School and worked as ascholarly collaborator with the eminent Mircea Eliade, had occasion to examineone novel of the "Valis Trilogy" --The Divine Invasion -- in his landmark 
survey of Gnostic thought The Tree of Gnosis (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
Couliano's judgment of the thematic influences in that novel was intended torebut those who, in Couliano's view, too carelessly cited Dick as an exampleof a "Gnostic" science fiction writer: 

"A closer look at the novel shows that, indeed, Dick took inspirationfrom Jewish and Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature (especially The Vision 
of Isaiah), yet his novel, which describes the descent of God to the earththrough the first heaven controlled by the troops of Belial the Opponent, andGod's encounter with his wisdom in a kindergarten, makes no use of gnosticmaterial." 

Now compare this with an analysis by Dick himself, written in 1979, inthe concluding pages of an unpublished outline of the novel in progress (thentitled Valis Regained) that would become The Divine Invasion. Note that Dick 
himself recognizes the absence of a fundamental Gnostic good-evil dualism inthis novel. He also makes reference to Isaiah (though his source is the Bible,
not the apocalyptic text cited by Couliano):

"In the first novel, Valis, the protagonist Horselover Fat was obsessed-- and for good reason: His girlfriend had killed herself -- by the problem ofevil. He finally came to the conclusion that two gods exist, which is to say abitheism, each contending against the other. Although Valis Regained draws 
heavily on the bitheism of the Qumran people, it basically presents anotherview, not syntonic to Horselover Fat: monotheism, with the notion that evilhas no true existence of its own but borrows its existence, or is lent itsexistence, from the one God. Valis Regained bases its theology on theextraordinary passage in Isaiah 45:6-7 [the capitalization is Dick's own]: 

". .. so that men from the rising and the setting sun
may know that there is none but I:
I am the LORD, there is no other;
I make the light, I create darkness,
author alike of prosperity and trouble.
I, the LORD, do all these things." 


Had Couliano taken the time to study the first novel in the trilogy --Valis 


-it is possible that his judgment as to the presence of Gnostic ideas inDick's work would have changed. Nonetheless, the comparison of these twoquotations is useful not only as a validation of Dick's knowing use ofreligious source material but also as a fair warning to all those who would 

paste a doctrinal label of any sort on Dick's work. Dick's viewpoints weremultifold, indeterminate, and changeable; he cannot rightly be described byany "ism." 

Observe how Dick, in tracing out the possibilities of this spiritual viewpoint, 
employs the narrative gifts of a fiction master to create a haunting parable of a fallen and 
amnesiac god who must wander for centuries through his own creations to win his own 
redemption: 

He [the Creator] no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. He 
has allowed himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced by it, finally killed by it. 
He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the 
servant. And the master either renounced voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else 
his memory was eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim. 

But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember -who 
he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master's lost memories 
and hence his true identity. 

One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to restore his 
memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It keeps him in ignorance. 

The artifact must be fought; i.e., disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a piece of the 
Godhead (Urgrund) which has somehow been captured by the artifact (the servant); it now holds that 
piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these fragments of its legitimate master! When will it 
change? 

When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then they must return. 

If all of this seems impossibly speculative to the reader, it may be still more unsettling to 
realize that there is a direct parallel between the ideas expressed by Dick above and the 
cosmological theories posed by highly respected quantum physicists such as David 
Bohm. In The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot offers a summary of Bohm's 
viewpoint on the "implicate" and "explicate" orders of the cosmos that is strikingly 
analogous to the Urgrund/artifact dichotomy posed by Dick: 

As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an 
illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and 
sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all 
things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep 
connectivity. [Fellow physicist F. David] Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the 
fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order 
underlying all of nature. . . . According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really 
experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout 
society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and 
matter into creativity itself."* 

* Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial,
1992), pp. 79-80. 
Dick was hardly an expert in quantum physics theories, though he did read in the field 
sporadically. As the essay "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" attests, he 
was especially interested in the concept of synchronicity posed by physicist Wolfgang 
Pauli (who worked in conjunction with C. G. Jung in formulating this theory). But the key 
parallels between Dick's writings -- both fiction and nonfiction -- and the current insights 
of quantum physics do not seem, based on the evidence of the Exegesis and other 


personal writings by Dick, to have been based on reading, but rather on an experiential 
grappling on Dick's part that proved synchronous, as it were, with the findings of the 
quantum physicists. For example, in his 1977 speech "If You Find This World Bad, You 
Should See Some of the Others," included herein -- a speech that predates any 
widespread public discussion of the quantum physics notion that the known structure of 
the cosmos may aptly be described by the metaphor of a hologram -- we find Dick 
asking, based on his experiences of 2-3-74, "Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser 
hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose 
artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown?" 

Nor is quantum physics the only field in which Dick's speculations find a 
revelatory context. Consider the concept of "fake fakes," which is put to use in so many 
of Dick's novels and stories and which is explored persistently in his nonfiction writings 
as well. Examples included in the present volume may be found in the outline for a 
proposed (but never completed) novel Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth, as 
well as in the proposal for a script (never written) for the television series Mission: 
Impossible and in the 1978 speech (likely never delivered) "How to Build a Universe 
That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In essence, a "fake fake" is -- despite its 
seeming status as a mere contradiction that equates into "genuine" -- a radically new 
ontological category that takes on significance precisely because it perplexingly mimics 
(and even threatens to supersede) our "ordinary" or consensual reality. Hence the "fake 
fake" is no mere SF plot prop -- although Dick certainly employed it to dazzling effect as 
just such a prop -- but is also a commentary on the inundation of our world by 
mechanical and computer-generated simulacra. 

In the field of art, Marcel Duchamp explored a similar range of ideas with his 
concept of the "readymade," a found object that Duchamp would ironically designate as 
a work of art, at times adding his own visual or linguistic touches (in which case the 
object became a "readymade aided"). In his 1961 essay "Apropos of 'Readymades,'" 
Duchamp broached paradoxes that serve to elucidate certain aesthetic possibilities of a 
world in which Dickian "fake fakes" proliferate. Wrote Duchamp: 

At another time wanting to expose the basic antimony between art and readymades I imagined a 
"reciprocal readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board! . . . 

Another aspect of the "readymade" is its lack of uniqueness . . . the replica of a "readymade" 
delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the "readymades" existing today is not an 
original in the conventional sense. 

A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse. Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured 
and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "readymades aided" and 
also works of assemblage.* 

* Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du 
Set) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 142. 
The "fake fake" of Dick and the "readymade" (and its permutations) of Duchamp are, at 
root, cognate ideas expressing the shimmering indeterminacy between originals and 
simulacra that is the hallmark of the virtual reality -- both as metaphor and as technology 
-- of postindustrial society. It was Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay "The Work 


of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," who first clearly delineated this tension. 
But it was Philip K. Dick, in numerous works including the pointedly titled The Simulacra 
(1964), who first created a body of fiction that brought the tension to life. The concept of 
the "simulacrum" has since become a staple of postmodernist criticism -- thus the praise 
offered by Baudrillard of Dick's works as "a total simulation without origin, past or future." 

A brief note on the principles of selection of writings included in the present 
volume: The primary goal was to set forth the best of Dick's nonfictional efforts. But 
there was also the secondary aim of offering a representative sampling of his different 
nonfictional modes -- autobiographical; informal free flights of ideas (in the cozy 
obscurity of SF fanzines); critical examinations of the SF genre and of his own works in 
particular; and extended philosophical and theological analyses. In writing of his own life, 
Dick could range from brutal honesty to blatant fabulistic enhancements. No effort has 
been made in this volume to sort out "truth" from "fiction" in his autobiographical 
accounts. (Readers interested in one effort to do so may consult my Divine Invasions: A 
Life of Philip K. Dick.) 

There are, in addition, selections herein from Dick's fiction: (1) two brief excerpts 
from an early unpublished Dick mainstream novel --Gather Yourselves Together 
(written in 1949) -- featuring autobiographical elements bearing on Dick's experience of 
reality; and (2) the two completed chapters of the proposed sequel to The Man in the 
High Castle --tentatively titled, at one point, as To Scare the Dead --which have long 
deserved publication, and, in addition, benefit from being read in conjunction with 
"Naziism and the High Castle" and "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen." 

For all selections, the year cited with the title is the year of first publication; or, if 
the piece is unpublished, the year in which it was written (in the case of the Exegesis, 
the year provided represents, in some cases, my best estimate based on internal textual 
clues); or if the piece was published significantly later than the writing thereof, the year it 
was written followed by the year of publication. 

At his best, as evidenced both by his fiction and by his finest metaphysical 
speculations, Dick joins the great creators of parable and paradox of this century -- a 
lineage that includes G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Rene Daumal, Jorge Luis Borges, 
Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Italo Calvino. 

Note to the Vintage edition: Two inadvertent errors in the dating of "The Two 
Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle" and the 
Exegesis entry on page 328 have been corrected in this paperback edition. 

Part One 
Autobiographical Writings 

The writings in this section have been grouped together by the fact that their 
content focuses exclusively or primarily on Dick's life. It will be obvious to the reader, 
however, that many of the writings included in other sections of this volume contain 
autobiographical elements as well. In his writings, Dick frequently drew upon events in 
his life to elucidate his ideas, and, in like manner, drew upon the ideas that most 


fascinated him at any given time to elucidate past events. 

The two selections from the mainstream novel Gather Yourselves Together 
(1949) vividly portray the psyche of the young and innocent protagonist Carl, who bears 
a close resemblance to the young Philip K. Dick. These are certainly not 
autobiographical passages, but they nonetheless offer insight into the modes of thought 
and feeling of the apprentice writer coming of age. This novel was published in a limited 
edition by WCS Books in 1994. 

"Introducing the Author" was first published (with an accompanying photograph of 
Dick) on the inside front cover of Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy (February 
1953). 

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1968) was apparently prepared for the 
use of one of Dick's publishers. It is published here for the first time. 

"Self Portrait" was first published, according to Paul Williams, "in mid- or late 1968 
for a Danish magazine or fanzine edited by Jannick Storm." It first appeared in English in 
the Philip K. Dick Society (PKDS) Newsletter (edited by Williams), No. 2, December 
1983. 

"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer," written in 1968, was first 
published in Eternity Science Fiction, Old Series, No. 1, July 1972. It was reprinted in the 
PKDS Newsletter, Nos. 22-23, December 1989. 

The two autobiographical sketches -- each titled "Biographical Material on Philip 

K. Dick" and written in 1972 and 1973, respectively -- are published here for the first 
time. 
"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" first appeared in The Real 
World, No. 5, February-March 1976. 
"The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" first appeared in Scintillation, 
Vol. 3, No. 3, June 1976. 
"Strange Memories of Death," written in 1979, first appeared in Interzone, 
Summer 1984, and was republished in the Dick essay-story collection I Hope I Shall 
Arrive Soon, edited by Mark Hurst and Paul Williams. 

The 1980 epistolatory exchange with critic Frank Bertrand -- titled (in Dick's typed 
transcript) "Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview" -- was first published in 
Niekas, No. 36, in 1988. The version published here comes from the typed transcript in 
the possession of the Dick Estate. 

Two Fragments from the Mainstream Novel Gather Yourselves Together 
(1949) 

This was what happened to all the things that came out of the wet earth, out of 
the filthy slime and mold. All things that lived, big and little. They appeared, struggling 
out of the sticky wetness. And then, after a time, they died. 

Carl looked up at the day again, at the sunlight and the hills. It did not look the 
same, now, as it had looked a few moments before. Perhaps he saw it more clearly than 
he had a moment ago. The sky, blue and pure, stretched out as far as the eye could 
see. But blood and feathers came from the sky. The sky was beautiful when he stood a 
long way off from it. But when he saw too closely, it was not pretty. It was ugly and bitter. 


The sky was held together with tacks and gum and sticky tape. It cracked and 
was mended, cracked and was mended again. It crumbled and sagged, rotted and 
swayed in the wind, and like the sky in the children's story, part of it fell to earth. 

Carl walked on slowly. He stepped off the road and climbed a narrow dirt ridge. 
Soon he was going up the side of a grassy slope, breathing deeply and taking big steps. 
He stopped for a moment, turning to look back. 

Already the Company and its property had become small, down below him. 
Shrunk, dwindling away. Carl sat down on a rock. The world was quiet and still around 
him. Nothing stirred. His world. His silent, personal world. 

But he did not understand it. So how could it be his world? He had come out to 
smile at the flowers and grass. But he had found something more, something that he 
could not smile at. Something that was not pleasant at all. Something that he did not like 
nor understand nor want. 

So it was not his world. If it were his world he would have made it differently. It 
had been put together wrong. Very much wrong. Put together in ways that he could not 
approve of. 

The silent bird, lying in the road. It reminded him of something. His thoughts 
wandered. What did it remind him of? A strange feeling drifted through him. This had 
happened before. This very thing. He had gone out and found something terrible. 
Something that did not make sense. Something he could not explain or understand. 

After a while he remembered. The cat. The dying old cat, with its broken ears, 
one eye gone, its body thin and dry with patches of loose hair. The cat and the bird. 
Other things. Flies buzzing around. Streams of ants. Things dying, disappearing silently, 
drifting away. With no one to watch or care. 

He had never understood it, this thing that he found, in the great warm world. It 
had no meaning. No sense. Was there some purpose? Some reason? 

When he understood the cat was dead he had gone back inside the house, 
walking slowly, deep in thought. Back inside, to his room, his things. His microscope. His 
stamps and maps and drawings and books. They had meaning. Purpose. Their 
existence had reason to it. He could look at them and understand them. 

Carl sat on the hillside, thinking about his childhood. It was not so long ago. Not 
so very many years in the past. He could feel the memories rising up around him, 
seeping up on all sides of him. Sights, smells. Tastes. His past was very much with him. 
It was close, just below the surface. Waiting to come up. His room. His microscope. The 
drawings he had made. 

He sat and remembered about them. 

* * * * 

Her breasts amazed him. They did not jut out and up. They did not swell, pressing 
forward as the drawings had shown them. They hung down, and when she bent over 
they fell away from her. They bounced and swung when she picked up her clothes, 
bending over and reaching down to dress. They were not hard cups at all, but flesh like 
the rest of her, soft pale flesh. Like wineskins hanging on tent walls in Middle East 
villages. Sacks, wobbling flesh sacks that much [sic; must] have got in her way every 
now and then. 

She buttoned her short red pants and fastened her gray blouse around her. She 


sat down to tie her sandals. Now she looked the same as she always had, not white, 
bare, chunky. Her breasts were again curves under her blouse, not bulging wineskins 
hanging down. In the close-fitting pants and blouse she looked taller and slimmer. 

She finished dressing and went off, across the lawn. He lost sight of her. She had 
disappeared. It was finished. He relaxed. His blood subsided. His heart began to return 
to normal, the color draining out of his cheeks and ears. He sighed, letting out his 
breath. 

Had it really happened? He felt dazed. In a way he was disappointed. She had 
been white and short, bulging here and there. With legs for walking and feet for 
standing. Her body was like all bodies, a physical creation, an instrument, a machine. It 
had come into the world the same way as other things, from the dust and wet slime. 
After a while it would wither and sag and crack and bend, and the tape and glue and 
tacks would give way to let it sink back down into the ground again, from which it had 
come. 

It would break and wear out. It would fade and pass away, like the grass and the 
flowers, the great fir trees above him, like the hills and the earth itself. It was a part of the 
ordinary world, a material thing like other material things. Subject to the same laws. 
Acting in the same way. 

He thought suddenly of his drawings, the pinups he had copied, all the notions 
and images that had crowded into his mind as he sat in his stuffy room with the sunlight 
shining through the drapes. He smiled. Well, at least he had gained a new 
understanding. He had lost all the cherished images and illusions, but he understood 
something now that had eluded him before. Bodies, his body, her body, all were about 
the same. All were part of the same world. There was nothing outside the world, no 
great realm of the phantom soul, the region of the sublime. There was only this -- what 
he saw with his eyes. The trees and sun and water. He, Barbara, everyone and 
everything, were parts of this. There was nothing else. 

And it was not as if his secret inner world, the spirit world that he had nourished 
so long, had suddenly come crashing down around him. There were no ruins and sad 
remains to pick over. Rather, all the dreams and notions he had held so long had 
abruptly winked out of existence. Vanished silently, like a soap bubble. Gone forever. As 
if they had never existed. 

"Introducing the Author" (1953) 

Once, when I was very young, I came across a magazine directly below the 
comic books called Stirring Science Stories. I bought it, finally, and carried it home, 
reading it along the way. Here were ideas, vital and imaginative. Men moving across the 
universe, down into subatomic particles, into time; there was no limit. One society, one 
given environment was transcended. Stf [abbreviation for "scientifiction," an early 
alternate term for "science fiction"] was Faustian; it carried a person up and beyond. 

I was twelve years old, then. But I saw in stf the same thing I see now: a medium 
in which the full play of human imagination can operate, ordered, of course, by reason 
and consistent development. Over the years stf has grown, matured toward greater 
social awareness and responsibility. 


I became interested in writing stf when I saw it emerge from the ray gun stage 
into studies of man in various types and complexities of society. 

I enjoy writing stf; it is essentially communication between myself and others as 
interested as I in knowing where present forces are taking us. My wife and my cat, 
Magnificat, are a little worried about my preoccupation with stf. Like most stf readers I 
have files and stacks of magazines, boxes of notes and data, parts of unfinished stories, 
a huge desk full of related material in various stages. The neighbors say I seem to "read 
and write a lot." But I think we will see our devotion pay off. We may yet live to be 
present when the public libraries begin to carry the stf magazines, and someday, 
perhaps even the school libraries.

 --PHILIP K. DICK 

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1968) 

Philip K. Dick attended the University of California, operated a record store, was 
an advertising copywriter, had a classical music program on station KSMO, lives now in 
San Rafael, and is interested in hallucinogens and snuff. Born Chicago, December 16, 
1928. Although bearded, aging and portly, is a fanatical girl-watcher; does everything but 
carry a measuring tape. Sold his first story November 1951 and has had no occupation 
except that of science fiction writer since. Has to his credit twenty-seven books, of which 
twenty-six are novels. First novel: 1954. In June 1953 had stories in seven magazines 
simultaneously. Won the Hugo for best novel 1962, Man in the High Castle. Married, has 
two daughters and young, pretty, nervous wife, Nancy, who is afraid of the telephone. In 
two years (1963, '64) wrote and sold twelve novels, plus many magazine-length stories. 
Loves ducks and sheep; lives on a slough where wild ducks pause in their migrations. 
Lost his seventeen sheep in his most recent divorce action. Has owned a strange variety 
of cats, including one -- Horace -- who all his life asked an invisible question which no 
one could answer. Spends most of his time listening to first Scarlatti and then the 
Jefferson Airplane, then Gotterdammerung, in an attempt to fit them all together. Has 
many phobias and seldom goes anywhere, but loves to have people come over to his 
small, nice place on the water. Owes creditors a fortune, which he does not have. 
Warning: don't lend him any money. In addition he will steal your pills. Considers his 
best work to be the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? recently published by 
Doubleday, because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society in 
which a person's dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than his 
house or car. 

"Self Portrait" (1968) 

Chicago: I was born there, on December 16, 1928. It was a frigid city, and the 
home of gangsters; it was also a real city and I appreciated that. Fortunately, however, 
my mother and father moved us to the Bay Area in California, and I learned that weather 


could be good, could be friendly rather than harsh. So, like most people in California, I 
was not born here but drifted here (I was about a year old at the time). 

What, in those days, could be collected as evidence that I would someday be a 
writer? My mother (who is still living) wrote with the hope of having a literary success. 
She failed. But she taught me to admire writing . . . whereas my father viewed football 
games as transcending everything else. The marriage between them did not last, and 
when I was five they separated, my father moving to Reno, Nevada, my mother and I -and 
my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt -- remaining in Berkeley in a huge old blue 
house. 

Cowboy songs were my main love then. Music, in fact, has played a major role 
throughout my life. But in those days -- when I was six -- I wore a cowboy suit and 
listened to cowboy music on the radio. That and the funny papers were my whole world. 

It is odd to think that a child could grow up during the Depression and not know it. 
I never heard the word. Of course I knew that my mother was broke most of the time, but 
I never managed to extrapolate from this. It seemed to me that the dull quality of the 
society around me -- the city streets and their houses -- came from the fact that all 
motorcars were black. Traffic progressed like a great and never-ending funeral. 

But we had our amusements. In the winter of 1934 my mother moved the two of 
us to Washington, D.C. This gave me the sudden opportunity to find out what really 
awful weather was like . . . and yet we enjoyed it. We had our sleds in winter and our 
Flexies (sleds with wheels) in summer. In Washington, summer is a horror beyond the 
telling of it. I think it warped my mind -- warped that in a fine conjunction of the fact that 
my mother and I had nowhere to live. We stayed with friends. Year in, year out. I did not 
do well (what seven-year-old child would?) and so I was sent to a school specializing in 
"disturbed" children. I was disturbed in regard to the fact that I was afraid of eating. The 
boarding school could not handle me because I weighed less each month, and was 
never seen to eat a string bean. My literary career, however, began to emerge, in the 
form of poetry. I wrote my first poem thus: 

I saw a little birdy 

Sitting in the tree 

I saw a little birdy 

looking out at me. 

Then the kitty saw the birdy and there wasn't none to see, 

For the cat ate him up in the morning. 

This poem was enthusiastically received on Parents' Day, and my future was assured 
(although, of course, no one knew it; not then, anyhow). There then followed a long 
period in which I did nothing in particular except go to school -- which I loathed -- and 
fiddle with my stamp collection (which I still have), plus other boywise activities such as 
marbles, flipcards, bolobats, and the newly evented comic books, such as Tip Top 
Comics, King Comics, and Popular Comics. My ten-cent allowance each week went first 
to candy (Necco wafers, chocolate bar, and jujubes), and, after that, Tip Top Comics. 
Comic books were scorned by adults, who assumed and hoped they, as a literary 
medium, would soon disappear. They did not. And then there was the lurid section of the 
Hearst newspapers, which on Sunday told of mummies still alive in caves, and lost 
Atlantis, and the Sargasso Sea. The American Weekly, this quasi-magazine was called. 


Today we would dismiss it as "pseudo-science," but in those days, the midthirties, it was 
quite convincing. I dreamed of finding the Sargasso Sea and all the ships tangled up 
there, their corpses dangling over the rails and their coffers filled with pirate gold. I 
realize now that I was doomed to failure by the very fact that the Sargasso Sea did not 
exist -- or anyhow it did not capture many Spanish gold-bearing ships-of-the-line. So 
much for childhood dreams. 

About 1939 my mother took me back to Berkeley and we began to have cats. We 
lived in the Berkeley hills, which in those days were mostly vacant lots. Mice rustled 
about, and so did cats. I began to think of cats as a necessary part of the household -- a 
view I hold even more strongly today (at present my wife and I have two, but the male, 
Willis, is worth at least five regular cats [I will return to this subject later]). 

And, at about the same time, I discovered the Oz books. It seemed like a small 
matter, my utter avidity to read each and every Oz book. Librarians haughtily told me 
that they "did not stock such fantastic material," their reasoning being that books of 
fantasy led a child into a dreamworld and made it difficult for him to adjust properly to the 
"real" world. But my interest in the Oz books was, in point of fact, the beginning of my 
love for fantasy, and, by extension, science fiction. 

I was twelve when I read my first SF magazine. . . it was called Stirring Science 
Stories and ran, I think, four issues. The editor was Don Wollheim, who later on (1954) 
bought my first novel. . . and many since. I came across the magazine quite by accident; 
I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? 
At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books -this 
magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science, and set in the future, 
where, as we all know, science will play more and more of a role in our lives. Such has 
come about, but I am not too happy about that. In any case my view became magic 
equals science. . . and science (of the future) equals magic. I have still not lost that view, 
and our idea then (I was twelve, remember) that science would prove to play a greater 
part in our lives -- well, we were right, for better or worse. I, for one, bet on science as 
helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb 
lurking about. Science has given more lives than it has taken; we must remember that. 

In high school I held a little job in a record and radio store, sweeping and 
cleaning, but never, oh never, talking to the customers. Now here my longtime love of 
music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of 
music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera, identify any 
classical tune hummed or whistled at me. And, through this, I was promoted to Record 
Clerk, First Class. Music -- and phonograph records -- became my life; I planned to 
make it my whole future. I would advance up the ladder, step by step, and eventually I 
would manage a record store and then at last I would own one. I forgot about SF; in fact, 
I no longer even read it. Like the radio serial Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy! SF 
fell into place as an interest of childhood. But I still liked to write, so I wrote little literary 
bits which I hoped to sell to The New Yorker (I never did). Meanwhile I gorged myself on 
modern classics of literature: Proust and Pound, Kafka and Dos Passos, Pascal -- but 
now we're getting into the older literature, and my list could go on forever. Let us say 
simply that I gained a working knowledge of literature from The Anabasis to Ulysses. I 
was not educated on SF but on well-recognized serious writing by authors all over the 
world. 

I came back to SF -- and ultimately SF writing -- in an odd way. Anthony Boucher, 


the most dearly loved and equally important person in SF, had a program of vocal music 
on a local radio station, and due to my interest in classical music I listened to the 
program. I got to meet him --he came to the record store in which I worked -- and we 
had a long talk. I discovered that a person could be not only mature, but mature and 
educated, and still enjoy SF. Tony Boucher had entered my life, and by doing so, had 
determined its whole basic direction. 

Tony had a weekly class on writing, which he conducted in his home. I decided 
to go, and Tony dutifully read my painful first efforts. The literary ones he did not 
respond to, but to my surprise he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy, which I had 
done; he seemed to be weighing it in almost terms of economic worth. This caused me 
to begin writing more and more fantasy stories, and then SF. In October of 1951, when I 
was twenty-one years old [Dick is mistaken here; he was twenty-two], I sold my first 
story: a tiny fantasy to F&SF, the magazine that Tony Boucher edited. I began to mail off 
stories to other SF magazines, and lo and behold, Planet Stories bought a short story of 
mine. In a blaze of Faust-like fire I abruptly quit my job at the record shop, forgot my 
career in records, and began to write all the time (how I did it I don't yet know; I worked 
until four each morning). Within the month after quitting my job I made a sale to 
Astounding (now called Analog) and Galaxy. They paid very well, and I knew then that I 
would never give up trying to build my life around a science fiction career. 

In 1953 I sold stories to fifteen different magazines; in one month, June, I had 
stories in seven magazines on the stands at once. I turned out story after story, and they 
were all bought. And yet -


With only a few exceptions, my magazine-length stories were second-rate. 
Standards were low in the early '50s. I did not know many technical skills in writing that 
are essential. . . the viewpoint problem, for example. Yet, I was selling; I was making a 
good living, and at the 1954 Science Fiction World Convention, I was very readily 
recognized and singled out. . . I recall someone taking a photograph of A. E. Van Vogt 
and me and someone saying, "The old and the new." But what a miserable excuse for 
"the new"! And how much the field was losing by Van Vogt's leaving it! 

I knew that I was in serious trouble. For example, Van Vogt, in such works as The 
World of Null A, wrote novels; I did not. Maybe that was it; maybe I should try an SF 
novel. 

For months I prepared carefully. I assembled characters and plots, several plots 
all woven together, and then wrote everything into the book that I could think up. It was 
bought by Don Wollheim at Ace Books and titled Solar Lottery. Tony Boucher reviewed it 
well in the New York Herald Tribune; the review in Analog was favorable, and in Infinity, 
Damon Knight devoted his entire column to it -- and all in praise. 

Standing there at that point I did some deep thinking. It seemed to me that 
magazine-length writing was going downhill -- and not paying very much. You might get 
$20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I 
wrote The World Jones Made, and later on, The Man Who Japed. And then a novel that 
seemed to be a genuine breakthrough for me: Eye in the Sky. Tony gave it the Best 
Novel of the Year rating, and in another magazine, Venture, Ted Sturgeon called it "the 
kind of small trickle of good sf which justifies reading all the worthless stuff." Well, I had 
been right. I was a better novel writer than a short-story writer. Money had nothing to do 
with it; I liked writing novels and they went over well. 

But then, at that point, my private life began to become violent and mixed up. My 


marriage of eight years broke up; I moved out into the country, met an artistically 
inclined woman who had just lost her husband. We met in October and the next April we 
had gotten married in Ensenada, Mexico. I had her and three girls to take care of, and 
for two years I was unable to produce anything except hack work. At last I gave up and 
went to work for my wife, in her jewelry business. I was miserable. As a child the misery 
had come from outside in the form of no money, no heat, no place to live; with Anne I 
could not fulfill myself because her own creative drive was so strong that she often 
declared that my creative work "got in her way." Even in the jewelry making I merely 
polished pieces that she designed. My sense of self-worth began to flag, so I hitched 
myself to the priest of our times, the psychologist-psychiatrist, and asked his advice. "Go 
home," he said, "and forget the jewelry business. Forget that you have a five-bedroom, 
three-bathroom house, with three girls to raise -- and a fourth coming. Go home, sit 
down at your typewriter; forget income taxes, even How to Make Money. And simply 
write a good book, a book you really believe in. You can stop fixing breakfast for the kids 
and assisting your wife in her welding. Write a book." 

I did so, without preamble; I simply sat down and wrote. And what I wrote was 
The Man in the High Castle. It sold right away, received a number of reviews suggesting 
that it should win the Hugo, and then, one day, I got a letter from my agent 
congratulating me for winning the Hugo. Another point had been passed in my career -and, 
as before, I didn't realize it. All I knew was that I wanted to write more and more 
books; the books got better and the publishers were more interested in them. 

Now, most readers do not know how little SF writers were paid. I had been 
earning about $6,000 a year. In the year following the Hugo award, I earned $12,000, 
and close to that in the subsequent years (1965-68). And I wrote at a fantastic speed; I 
produced twelve novels in two years. . . which must be a record of some sort. I could 
never do this again -- the physical stress was enormous. . . but the Hugo was there to 
tell me that what I wanted to write was what a good number of readers wanted to read. 
Amazing as it seems! 

Recently I have sat back, reflecting on my twenty-eight novels, which I have sold 
between 1954 and 1968, wondering which are good. What have I accomplished? Here I 
am, thirty-nine years old, rather moth-eaten and shaggy, taking snuff, listening to 
Schubert songs on the phonograph . . . "although bearded, elderly, and portly," someone 
said about me, "he is still a confirmed girl-watcher." This is true. And cat-watcher. They 
are the great joy for me, and I wish I could squeeze Willis, my huge orange and white 
tom, into a novel, or if they make a movie of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 
Willis could play a walk-on part (no lines), and we would both be happy. Four years ago I 
divorced my jewelry-welding wife and married a very sweet girl who paints. We now 
have a baby and we must find a larger house (we did find one, and, as I'm writing this, 
we are preparing to move into it: four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a level 
backyard, fenced, where Isa can play safely). So that is my nonliterary life: I have a very 
young wife whom I love, and a baby whom I almost love (she's a terrible pest), and a 
tomcat whom I cherish and adore. What about the books? How do I feel about them? 

I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for 
example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky [1956]. 
Then The Man in the High Castle [1962]. Martian Time-Slip [1964] (published by 
Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney [1965] (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun [1967] and 
The Penultimate Truth [1964], both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another 


Ace book, The Simulacra [1964]. 

But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer 
Eldritch [1965]. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a 
great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as 
personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't 
correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true. 

Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: 
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968] and another as yet untitled [Ubik (1969)]. 
Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has 
in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It 
deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real 
sheep is Somebody. . . and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, 
my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his 
long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really 
that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been 
warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is 
write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell. 

"Notes Made Late at Night by a Weary SF Writer" (1968, 1972) 

Here I am, almost forty years old. Seventeen years ago I sold my first story, a 
great and wonderful moment in my life that will never come again. By 1954 I was known 
as a short story writer; in June 1953 I had seven stories on the stands, including one in 
Analog, Galaxy, and F&SF, and so on down. Ah, 1954. I wrote my first novel, Solar 
Lottery; it sold 150,000 copies of itself and then vanished, only to reappear again a few 
years ago. It was reviewed well, except in Galaxy. Tony Boucher liked it; so did Damon 
Knight. But I wonder why I wrote it -- it and the twenty-four novels since. Out of love, I 
suppose; I love science fiction, both to read it and to write it. We who write it do not get 
paid very much. This is the harsh and overwhelming truth: Writing SF does not pay, and 
so writer after writer either dies trying to earn a living or leaves the field. . . to go into 
another, unrelated field, as for example Frank Herbert, who works for a newspaper and 
writes Hugo-winning SF in his spare time. I wish I could do that: hold an unrelated job 
and write SF after dinner each night, or early in the dawn. Then the pressure would be 
off. Let me tell you about that pressure. The average SF novel obtains between $1,500 
and $2,000. Hence an SF writer who can write two novels a year -- and sell them -gets 
back between $3,000 and $4,000 a year. . . which he can't live on. He can try, 
instead, to write three novels a year, plus a number of stories. With luck, and unending 
effort, he can raise his income to about $6,000 a year. At best, I have managed to earn 
$12,000 in one year; usually it runs less, and the effort of trying to bring in more money 
collapses me for as much as two years on end. During these two-year dry periods the 
only money coming in is for what are called "residuals." These include foreign sales, 
reprint in paperback, magazine serialization, TV and radio purchases, etc. It is awful, 
these dry periods, when you exist on the uncertain drip-drop of residuals. For example, 
an air mail letter arrives from one's agent. It contains royalty payments in the sum of 


$1.67. And the next week an air mail letter comes with a check for $4.50. And yet we 
who write SF go on, to some extent. As I say, it's love for the field. 

What is there about SF that draws us? What is SF anyhow? It grips fans; it grips 
editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in 
my mind Henry Kuttner's Fairy Chessmen with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that 
winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see -- outside my mind, right beside 
my desk -- a complete file of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, plus Astounding back to 
October 1933. . . these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, 
separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. 
Hence separate from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file, which protects these 
magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I 
own -- or hope to own. 

The magic that grips us is in there, in the file. I have captured it, whatever it is. 

As to my own writing. Reading it does not mean anything to me, all 
considerations as to how good it is or isn't, what I do well and what I do badly (such as 
putting in the kitchen sink, as Ted Sturgeon phrased it, in regard to The Three Stigmata). 
What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I 
am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, 
completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that 
world forever -- that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no 
longer move. I'm alone, without much money, and, as I said before, nearly forty. Where 
is Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist in Man in the High Castle? He has left me; we are cut off 
from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again 
where I can hear him talk. Once written, the novel speaks generally to everyone, not 
specifically to me. When a novel of mine comes out I have no more relationship to it than 
has anyone who reads it -- far less, in fact, because I have the memory of Mr. Tagomi 
and all the others. . . Gino Molinari, for example, in Now Wait for Last Year, or Leo 
Bulero in Three Stigmata. My friends are dead, and as much as I love my wife, daughter, 
cat -- none of these nor all of these is enough. The vacuum is terrible. Don't write for a 
living; sell shoelaces. Don't let it happen to you. 

I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine 
people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this. . . and, secretly and 
cautiously, I begin another book. 

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972) 

In 1969 Paul Williams said of Philip K. Dick, "I must tell you this. . . Philip K. Dick 
will have more impact on the consciousness of this century than William Faulkner, 
Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Author of thirty-one novels and almost two 
hundred stories published from 1951 on, he won the Hugo Award in 1963 for the Best 
Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Man in the High Castle [1962]. His reputation, 
especially in intellectual circles, is worldwide; in France, for example, he has more 
novels in print than has any other science fiction author. The first U.S. science fiction 
novel to appear in Poland will be his recent Doubleday novel, Ubik [1969], acclaimed by 


Patrice Duvic of Editions OPTA, Paris (winner of the award for publisher of the year at 
the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in L.A.) as "one of the most important books 
ever published." In February 1972 he spoke as Guest of Honor at the Second 
Vancouver Science Fiction Convention and lectured at the University of British 
Columbia. His most notable novels include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 
[1968], Maze of Death [1970], We Can Build You [1972], Martian Time-Slip [1964], Dr. 
Bloodmoney [1964], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965], Ubik [1969], and 
[The] Man in the High Castle [1962], Some of his best stories have been published in the 
paperback collection The Preserving Machine [1969]. Born in Chicago in 1928, Philip K. 
Dick has spent most of his life in the Bay Area, having attended the University of 
California at Berkeley. During the late fifties he lived in Point Reyes Station, Marin 
County, and in the early sixties in San Rafael. Now he resides in the Los Angeles area, 
where he lectures and writes. His early novels dealt with future societies of an anti-
utopian nature; in later novels he pioneered an "inner space" multiple-reality universe 
presented as hallucinations drug trauma [sic]. His story "Faith of Our Fathers" in Harlan 
Ellison's mind-shattering anthology Dangerous Visions [1967] received a Hugo 
nomination and is considered one of the most "dangerous visions" in that superb 
collection. Recently he completed a massive new novel for Doubleday titled Flow My 
Tears, the Policeman Said [later published in 1974] and is currently working on a 
science fiction novel of a different sort: a study of one girl's mind projected onto the 
universe, in which her qualities, lifestyle, and values form not merely a sociological 
enclave but the entire world of reality. Its working title is Kathy-Jamis-Linda and 
threatens to occupy him for what remains of his life. In it he contrasts the authentic 
human versus what he calls the "android," the reflex machine posing as a living being. 

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1973) 

Professional science fiction writer since 1951, with almost two hundred stories 
and thirty-five novels sold. In 1963 Man in the High Castle [1962] won the Hugo Award 
for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Phil Dick was born on December 16, 1928 in 
Chicago but has lived most of his life in California. He attended the University of 
California at Berkeley but dropped out because of his antiwar convictions. His great 
passion is music: German Lieder, Wagner. He majored in German and greatly loves the 
works of Schiller, Heine, Goethe, Junger, Brecht. At one time he ran a classical music 
radio program and operated a record store. He is married, has three children, and a cat 
named Fred, and because of his experiences in Canada in the rehabilitation of drug 
addicts, is at work now on a major novel dealing with the tragedy of lives ruined by 
involvement with drugs. He identifies strongly with the protests and the angers of the 
younger generations versus the older establishment, and has lectured both in the U.S.A. 
and in Canada at universities and on the radio and in articles published throughout the 
world in favor of the rebellion of youth against age. His radicalism goes deeper than 
politics; it has become a worldview expressed growingly in his writing. Most of all he tries 
to express in his novels the fight against oppression of the free human spirit, of whatever 
kind: any tyranny, such as drug addiction or a police state or manipulative psychological 


techniques. The ordinary citizen, without political or economic power, is the hero of all 
his novels, and is his hero, too, his hope for the future. 

"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" (1976) 

Hark! Each tree its silence breaks.

 --NICHOLAS BRADY (1692) 

When I first met Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote More Than Human, this good 
man said to me right off, "What sort of universe is it that causes a man like Tony 
Boucher to die of cancer?" I had been wondering the same thing ever since Tony 
Boucher died [in 1968]. So had Ted Sturgeon, although he didn't expect me to give an 
answer. He just wanted to show me what he -- Ted Sturgeon -- was like. I've found I can 
do that, too: let people know about me by asking that. It shows that I cared a lot about 
one of the warmest men who ever lived. Tony was warm and at the same time when he 
stood in the midst of a group of people, sweat came out on his forehead from fear. 
Nobody ever wrote that about him but it's true. He was terrified all the time. He told me 
so once, in so many words. He loved people, but one time I encountered him on the 
electric train going to the opera and he was scared. He was a music critic and he did 
reviewing for The New York Times and edited a magazine and wrote novels and stories. 
But he was scared to take a drive across town. 

Tony loved the universe and the universe frightened him, and I think I know 
where his head was at. A lot of people who are timid are that way because they love too 
much. They're afraid it'll all fall through. Naturally, it did with Tony. He died in middle 
age. Now, I ask you, what good did it do him to be scared? He used to carry his rare old 
78 records to radio station KPFA every week for his program "Golden Voices," wrapping 
them in a towel so they wouldn't get broken. One time I decided to give Tony all my rare 
opera and vocal records, just plain give them to him as a gift of my loving him. I phoned 
him up. "I got Tiana Lemnitz and Gerhard Husch," I told him. Tony replied shyly, "They 
are my idols." He was a Roman Catholic, the only one we knew, so that was a strong 
statement. Before I could get the records to him he was dead. "I feel tired half the day," 
he had said. "I can't work as much as I used to. I think I'm ill." I explained I had the same 
thing. That was eight or so years ago. The doctor told him he had a bruised rib and 
taped it up. Someday I will meet that doctor on the street. Tony got bad advice from 
everyone who could talk. 

We used to play poker. Tony loved opera and poker and science fiction and 
mystery stories. He had a little writing class. This was after he was famous and edited 
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine and he charged one dollar a night when you 
showed up. He read your whole manuscript. He told you how rotten it was, and you went 
away and wrote something good. I never figured out how he accomplished that. 
Criticism like that is supposed to crush you. "Maybe it's because when Tony reads your 
story it's like he's reading it in Latin," Ron Goulart, a fellow student, said. Tony taught me 
to write, and my first sale was to him. I still can remember that nobody understood the 
story but he, even after it was printed. It's still in print, twenty-two years later, in a 


college-level sf course manual put out by Ginn and Company. There're only about fifteen 
hundred words to the story, about as short as this. After the printing of the story, Ginn 
and Company prints an impromptu discussion I had with a high school class about the 
story. All the kids understand the story. It's about a dog and how he sees garbagemen 
coming to steal the precious food that the family stores up every day until the heavily 
constructed metal urn is full and then these Roogs come and steal the harvest just when 
it's ripe and perfect. The dog tries to warn the family, but it's always early in the morning 
and his barking just annoys them. The story ends when the family decides they have to 
get rid of the dog, due to his barking, at which point one of the Roogs or garbagemen 
says to the dog, "We'll be back to get the people pretty soon." I never could understand 
why no one but Tony Boucher could understand the story (I sent it to him in 1951). I 
guess in those days my view of garbagemen was not shared universally, and now by 
1971 when the high school class discussed it with me, I guess it is. "But garbagemen 
don't eat people," a lady anthologizer [SF editor Judith Merril] pointed out to me in 1952. 
I had trouble answering that. Something comes and carries off and devours people who 
are sleeping in tranquillity. Like Tony. . . something got to him. I think the dog who cried 
"ROOG! ROOG!" was trying to warn me and Tony. I got the warning and escaped -well, 
we'll see about that; time will tell -- but Tony stayed at his post. You see, when 
you're so scared of the universe (or Roogs, if you will), to stay at your post takes 
courage of the kind they can't write about, because (1) they don't know how and (2) they 
don't notice in the first place, except maybe Ted Sturgeon, with all his own love, and his 
total lack of fear. He must have known how scared Tony was, and to be that scared and 
for the Roogs to get you. . . it's so goddam symmetrical, isn't it? 

However, Tony is still alive, I discovered last year [1974]. My cat had begun to 
behave in an odd way, keeping watch over me in a quiet fashion, and I saw that he had 
changed. This was after he ran away and returned, wild and dirty, crapping on the rug in 
fear; we took him to the vet and the vet calmed him down and healed him. After that, 
Pinky had what I call a spiritual quality, except that he wouldn't eat meat. He would 
tremble whenever we tried to feed it to him. For five months he'd been lost, living in the 
gutter, seeing God knows what; I wish I knew. Anyhow, after he was changed -- in the 
twinkling of an eye; that is, while at the vet's -- he wouldn't ever do anything cruel. Yet I 
knew Pinky was afraid, because once I almost shut the refrigerator door on him and he 
did a three-cushion bank shot of himself off the walls to escape, and clocked a velocity 
unique for a pink sheeplike thing that usually just sat and gazed ahead. Pinky had 
trouble breathing because of his heavy fur and what they call hairballs. Tony had asthma 
terribly and needed it cold. Pinky would sit by the door to get the cold air from under the 
crack, and struggle to breathe. I will not write a teaser article here; Pinky died of cancer 
suddenly; he was three years old, very young for a cat. It was totally unexpected. The 
vet diagnosed it as something else, which could be cured. 

I hadn't realized Pinky was Tony Boucher, out of love served up by the universe 
again, until I had this dream about Tony the Tiger, the cereal box character who offers 
you Sugar Frosted Flakes. In my dream I stood at one end of a light-struck glade, and at 
the other a great tiger came out slowly, with delight, and I knew we were together again. 
Tony the Tiger and me. My joy was unbounded. When I woke up I tried to think who I 
knew named Tony. I had other strange experiences after Pinky died. I dreamed about a 
"Mrs. Donlevy," who was incredibly tall -- I could see only her feet and ankles -- and she 
was serving me a plate of milk on the back porch and there was a vacant lot where I 


could roam at will, forever. It was the Elysian Vacant Lot, which the Greeks believed in, 
just my size. Also, the day Pinky died, at the vet's, that evening as I stood in the 
bathroom I felt my wife put her hand on my shoulder, firmly, to console me. Turning, I 
saw no one. I also dreamed this dream: I had the album notes for Don Pasquale and at 
the end the conductor had added a note: five strings of catgut like a cat's cradle, like a 
musical stave. It was a final hello from Pinky, who was Tony Boucher; in the dream the 
album was an old 78 one, a rare classic, a favorite of Tony's. 

Tony or Pinky, I guess names don't count, was a lousy hunter all his life. One 
time he caught a gopher and ran up our apartment stairs with it. He placed it in his dish, 
where he was fed, because that was orderly, and of course the gopher got up at once 
and ran off. Tony felt that things belonged in their places, being an obsessively tidy 
person, his enormous collection of books and records was arranged the same way -each 
object in its proper place, and a proper place for each object. He should have 
tolerated more chaos in the universe. However, he recaught the gopher and ate it, all 
except the teeth. 

Tony, or Pinky, was my guide; he taught me to write, and he stayed with me when 
I was sick back in 1972 and 1973, lying beside me day after day. That's why my wife, 
Tessa, brought him over, because I had pneumonia and needed help and we had no 
money for a doctor. (I think now in that regard I lucked out; he would have told me I had 
a bruised rib.) When the pain was really bad, Pinky used to lie on my body until I 
realized that he was trying to figure out which part of me was sick. He knew it was just 
one part, around the middle of my body. He did his best and I recovered but he did not. 
That was my friend. 

Most cats fear the clattering arrival of the garbagemen each week, but Pinky 
detested them. Under our bed fixed, set eyes, but no Pinky was visible. Just the eyes, 
waiting for the bastards to go. 

Four nights before Pinky unexpectedly died, before we knew he had cancer -- I 
started to say, before he had been diagnosed as having a bruised rib -- he and Tessa 
and I, as was our custom, were lying on the big bed, and I saw a uniform pale white light 
slowly fill the room. I thought the angel of death had come for me and I began praying in 
Latin: "Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo," and so forth. Tessa gritted her teeth, but 
Pinky sat there, front feet tucked under him, impassive. I knew there was no place to 
hide, like under the bed. Every child knows that. And it looks bad. 

It never occurred to me that death was arriving for anyone but me, which shows 
my attitude. I saw us all as painted ducks, on a painted sea, and thought of the 
thirteenth-century Arabic poem about "Once he will miss, twice he will miss. All the 
world's one level plain for him on which he hunts for flowers." We were as conspicuous 
as -- well, anyhow, finally I gave up praying, but I remember in particular I kept crying 
out, "Mors stupebit et natura," which I thought meant that death stood stupefied, as if in 
surprise (as in, "I was stupefied to learn that my car had been towed away." It means 
just standing there impotently. That maybe is not what Merriam-Webster 3 says, but it is 
what I say). 

Pinky never noticed the pale white light; as was his custom he seemed awake, 
but dozing. I think he was humming to himself. Later when I slept, toward morning, I 
dreamed a disturbing dream: The report of a gun fired close to my ear: a dreadful 
shotgun blast, and when I looked I saw a woman lying dying. I went for aid, but got on to 
one of those electric trolley buses by mistake, along with three Gestapo agents (I dream 


that a lot). We rode around forever while I tried vainly to short-circuit the power cables of 
the bus or trolley car, whatever it was -- no luck. The Gestapo agents remained 
confident in that smug way they have and read newspapers and smoked. They knew 
they had me. 

"The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976) 

I would like to speak to my friends, here, to let them know that (1) all the dreadful 
things they have heard have befallen me have indeed befallen me, and (2) I am fine 
anyhow. In February I had a heart attack. The paramedics came -- I was alone in the 
house at the time -- and it was just like a scene in the TV program Emergency. They 
arrived two minutes after I phoned them, and pretty soon they were monitoring my vital 
life signs, and then it was to the county hospital to the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit. I 
hovered between life and death, telling jokes and falling in love with one nurse named 
Beth, who always wore pink. 

But I write this to say that I recovered completely, until I saw the bill for $2,000 
anyhow, which brings up the point that it was to the county hospital that I was taken; I 
didn't have any money, and none of the other Orange County hospitals would accept 
me. My view here is, Thank God for a hospital that will take you if you're broke, asking 
no questions, just saving your life and billing you later. But. . . 

When I was sprung eleven days later I had forty cents, no more. Some food at 
home in the freezer. My total income for that month was nine dollars. March was no 
better, and by mid-April they were going to shut off the utilities. Every phone call was 
someone wanting money. My agent, God bless him, loaned me money, and here is 
where I want to say something that at the time didn't affect my head, but that when I told 
it later to a dude, he got really funny and said, "That sums up the situation of the artist 
better than I've ever heard it summed up before." There was a French royalty check on 
its way by mail from Paris to my agent, and I phoned, desperately, to see if it had arrived 
yet, since much of it was to go to me. The check arrived, the previous day. My agent 
could hear the fear in my voice, the shaking; I was three months overdue in my child 
support payments -- and he said, in an oddly soft voice, "You know, Phil, you are one of 
the most respected writers in the world." I barely listened; all I knew was that I wouldn't 
be spending thirty days in Orange County jail for nonsupport, as Jim Croce says in one 
of his songs. 

What I want to stress is not that I am either one of the most respected writers in 
the world or that my agent thinks so or said so but that here I am, after twenty-five years 
of professional SF writing, getting notices that they are going to turn off the water and 
gas and electricity if I don't pay in three days, and I say, What has it all been for? Well, 
recently I read an article by Barry Malzberg in F&SF [Fantasy and Science Fiction, a 
prominent SF magazine] in which he says he's leaving SF forever because -- well, read 
it yourself; it is the greatest bunch of whining I ever heard in my life. I don't propose to 
whine, although probably what I've said so far seems to be whining. Really, though, I am 
more asking a question than making a statement, whining or otherwise. What have 
twenty-five years of work done to make me financially secure? I have a new novel 


coming out next January [1977] by Doubleday (A Scanner Darkly), which I honestly 
believe to be the best work I've ever done. I have the collaboration with Roger Zelazny 
coming out this year, the novel Deus Irae [1976] -- there was that long article on me in 
Rolling Stone ["The Worlds of Philip K. Dick," November 6, 1975, by Paul Williams], 
which gave me a lot of publicity, and (and here it comes; get ready) I am just about to 
make it big. The key words: just about to. It is another case of waiting for Godot; the little 
boy says, "Mr. Godot isn't coming today, but surely he'll come tomorrow." But I say, If it 
does come for me, will it matter? Will it make up for twenty-five years of shivering with 
fear as to whether, when I get up in the morning, the electricity will still be turned on? 

One time in early 1972 I came home and the utility company had shut off the 
electricity, and put a padlock on my circuit-breaker box. I got my tool kit, got out tools, 
and cut through the padlock and turned the power back on again. Technically, that's a 
crime, but the utility people were so surprised that they let me get away with it. I paid 
them the next day, but if you cut that padlock, you go into the slammer. I cite this to 
show that my fears are not merely neurotic. And the house that I was in then -- it was 
repossessed by the finance company that held the mortgage. So these are real and 
valid fears. After I moved down here to Southern California I had to start out from the 
bottom all over again; no car, no furniture, no house. And one day down here I got up 
and the electricity had been turned off. In early 1973 down here I was in bed with 
pneumonia, with no phone, no money to go to a doctor, to buy medication -- I remember 
that very well, because while I was lying there propped up in bed (so I could breathe), 
Mr. Death walked into my bedroom. Really. I saw him as clear as I see you now, my 
friends. He wore a sharp, modern, polyester suit and carried a briefcase, which he 
opened to reveal some simple puzzles, the sort you give grammar school children. I 
failed to pass, and Mr. Death said, "Then you can come with me." And I saw (I'm not 
kidding you) a vision of a long winding road up a hillside, with many trees, to a sort of 
lovely large safe-looking old building, which was a sanitarium of some kind. "I'm taking 
you there," he said. "These tests prove that your brain is totally burned out, so now you 
can rest. You can rest up there at the top of the hill forever." And I was flooded with a 
sense of total joy and relief. However, at that moment my chick came into the bedroom, 
on impulse, to see how I was. And I realized who I'd been talking to. After that I began to 
mend. 

You will say, now, that this piece I am writing rambles, and it is supposed to, 
having no topic but the head of the author writing it, which is well known to be a rambling 
head that produces rambling writing -- with even a bit of chaos thrown in. What is my 
point? My point is that (1) twenty-five years of devoted writing haven't in any way given 
me financial security; (2) the fact that I am sure my new novel, A Scanner Darkly, is my 
best novel doesn't stop the fear; (3) I am not quitting. It's going to take more than all this 
to make me give up science fiction writing, for one simple reason. I love to write it. I am 
working on a thing now, called, To Scare the Dead, and already I've done two hundred 
thousand words of notes. It won't produce any financial security. The big break, just 
around the corner, will never come. One of these days I'll be back in the hospital, sick as 
hell, but I'll no doubt get out. . . and receive another $2,000 bill I have to pay off or go to 
jail. There are, in human beings, irrational drives. "Why don't you get a real job?" people 
say to me, mostly in fun, but not always in fun, and sometimes I say it to myself. They 
[sic; the big break] will always be on its way but not quite here yet; my agent will always 
help me (I should mention that he is Scott Meredith, and I've been with him about 


twenty-four years, and in 1973 when my son Christopher was born, Scott sent him the 
most beautiful silver rattle you ever saw) --I guess there are eternal verities in the 
universe, all right, and the one that appeals to me is that man will keep on striving no 
matter how many times he is pushed down, which was what Faulkner said so thrillingly 
in his Nobel Prize speech. Man will be planning and scheming amid the ruins; the sound 
of his voice will still be heard. 

So that is what's happened to me recently: three times in the hospital in a couple 
of years (plus the pneumonia), months of really being poor. . . one day I had to box up 
and mail off my collection of Unknown and Unknown Worlds, which was complete and 
which I had held on to through thick and thin, just to pay the landlord, BUT: 

In this business of being an SF writer I have met either face-to-face, or talked with 
on the phone, or gotten letters from, some of the best goddamn human beings in the 
world. Schoolkids, for instance. Last week a black chick in Oakland. Today a guy from 
West Germany. Yesterday I wrote to a Swedish guy who came to this country mainly to 
meet me (sorry if that sounds egoish, but the point is, that was back in 1971, and we're 
still writing back and forth: Goran Bengtson; you may have seen letters of his printed in 
fanzines). I'm looking now in the stack, very huge and sloppy, beside my typewriter. A 
chick who did her master's thesis on me. 

Oh yes. I find another letter, too. The return address: 

OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY. 

So you can see what I mean, as my heart skips a beat and thuds itself with the 
old, old fear. 

Dear Carl [editor of Scintillation, in which this piece appeared], 

You should have received by now the five-page piece I wrote for you, yesterday. Well, I decided to 
send the carbon off to Germany, to Uwe Anton, who has asked me for something and to whom I'd already 
sent some fragments of Deus Irae, the new novel coming out by me and Roger Zelazny (Anton is putting 
together a PKD issue, you see). Today I added three more pages to go with the five, to be printed in 
Germany only, and then I thought, Shit. Why not send you the carbons on these pages and see if you 
want to add them, perhaps explaining that Phil had originally intended them for the German printing only. . 
. although I sort of say that in the pages themselves. It's up to you. In any case, here are three additional 
pages to the untitled piece I mailed you on May first, and you are welcome to print them or not. Okay? But 
on second thought it seemed sort of chicken-shit for me to say stuff abroad and not here in the U.S. You'll 
see what I mean when you read the enclosed. 

This ends the part written to be published in the United States, but for my German 
friends I would like to add a little more. [The subsequent language did appear in the U.S. 
publication.] 

During 1974 we who opposed the Nixon tyranny here exhausted ourselves in 
forcing that tyranny out of office, only to discover, the next year, that underneath it lay an 
even greater abuse of power and threat to freedom: a secret police apparatus that had 
worked since the forties, completely invisible in terms of its lawless acts against 
Americans. In fact, something much like the police state that I depicted in Flow My 
Tears, the Policeman Said has come to light, and really to the astonishment of us all. I 
recall that back in the fifties, about 1953, two FBI agents came to visit me and asked me 
to spy on my wife, who at that time was attending the University of California at Berkeley 
and knew people -- students --who were politically active. From then on, the secret 


political police apparatus grew. 

And yet it was a thrilling year in 1974 when we began to dislodge what we 
thought was the tyranny. . . but then found the greater one, the intelligence community 
one, which really we cannot dislodge. The American people have lost the will to combat 
this tyranny; it has lasted too long, and we are tired. I am tired. As the disclosures came 
about the CIA and FBI, I could not believe them. What could I do? What could anyone 
do? It was not a question of one particular evil president, but all the presidents starting 
with Franklin Roosevelt: even our heroic ones, such as Kennedy. Freedom won only a 
limited victory in August 1974 when Nixon was forced out of office; the political police 
apparatus remains and will remain, and we cannot vote on this issue. I myself have 
given up, as our newspapers say most Americans have, with a sense that we are 
helpless. True, under the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the CIA to admit 
that they had indeed opened my mail to the Soviet Union and photographed it, and also 
I obtained my file from the FBI, or anyhow portions of it; I would have to go to court to 
get the rest. At that point, perhaps only a coincidence, I suffered my heart attack, as if 
my body had given up. As if my body was saying, "No more. It is futile." Now the thirty-
day time limit is past; I can't go to court. And perhaps it's just as well. Perhaps my days 
of being a fighter for freedom are over, due to age, due to worry, but due mostly to the 
discovery -- and existence -- of the enormity of the secret political police apparatus that 
has so long existed in this country, and the dreadful things they have done (e.g., to Dr. 
King, for instance, who was a hero to me). 

Personally, back in March 1974, I had the overwhelming conviction that God 
Himself had decided to depose Nixon. Few of my friends believe in God, much less that 
He would or was actually intervening. I mentioned it to Marcel Thaon of Robert Laffont 
publishers, France, and he wrote in an article accompanying their printing of my novel 
Eye in the Sky: 

On sait combien l'affaire Watergate a frappe qui a ete en butte par ailleurs a de nombreuses agressions 
voilees de I'administration Nixon. Comme le disait Klein a I'epoque, Dick propose que le decrochage 
systematique de I'ordre etabli -- par la desobtissance civique par exemple -- pent seul faire tehee au 
pouvoir. II pense par ailleurs que c'est Dieu qui un jour en a eu assez de Nixon et s'en est debarrasse -melangeant 
une fois de plus politique et religion. 

[One knows how much the Watergate affair affected those who were exposed, in addition, to the other 
hidden aggressions of the Nixon administration. As Klein said at the time, Dick proposes that the blowing 
up of the established order -- by civil disobedience, for example -- could only check their power. He thinks, 
in addition, that God had had enough of Nixon and got rid of him -- blending politics and religion one more 
time.] 

I write this to my German friends and not to my American friends because my American 
friends, like myself, have become too weary to fight or care anymore. We fought a 
wonderful battle to dislodge Nixon, but our energy was gone, then. Perhaps, as I truly 
believe, that energy came directly from God, Who inspired and animated us, Who hurled 
us into battle. But what now? Months of depression have fallen over us here, we who 
were the activists. On TV, Senator Frank Church (God bless him) said that the U.S. 
intelligence organizations had become as bad as the KGB. Ach Weh! 

So my novel in progress [ultimately crystallized as Valis (1981)] has nothing to do 
with politics; it has to do with the mystery religions of the first century B.C. and what they 


had discovered about restoring the faculties that man possessed before the Fall (Calvin 
spoke of man once having "supernatural faculties which were stripped away," and this 
fascinates me as the basis for a novel). But I am no longer politically active, and this will 
show up in my writing. This is sad, but I grow old; I grow old. I have not made my peace 
with the "straight" society, but at the same time I am too weak, too worn out by illness 
and fear, to do anything but try to make financial ends meet; I mean, to pay the water bill 
and gas bill and electricity bill. Perhaps it will not be the political secret police who will 
get me in the end but the district attorney for failure to pay back child support, an entirely 
unpolitical crime! 

And yet. . . God may return, and inspire us again, to fight when the time is right. In 
my heart I wait for that day. Will it be long in coming? "Wenn kommst du mein Heil. . . 
Ich komme dein Teil." (When comes my salvation. . . I come as your portion.) And 
meanwhile I say to myself, "Hab' Mut!" (Have courage!) 

[The following letter, to the editor of the fanzine Scintillation, in which this essay 
was first published, was attached as an epilogue.] 

Just within the last two days I've read two separate articles, one in Rolling Stone, the other the 
editorial in the May 17, 1976, New Yorker, which so horribly bear out my fears expressed in the last three 
pages I sent you that I want to call them to your attention. Hopefully, you can call them to your readers' 
attention. The RS piece is titled: "The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA 
from WWII to Watergate," by Howard Kohn. Look for it. Anyhow, the article suggests, incredibly, that 
Nixon may have been set up by the CIA, since "Deep Throat," who provided all the leaked secrets to Bob 
Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post, turns out to be Robert Bennett, a CIA front man. . 
. which Woodward and Bernstein never realized. There seem to have been crucial segments of the puzzle 
that Woodward and Bernstein never got on to. 

Carl, I think we were sold another crock; the exposure of the cover-up was itself a cover-up! What 
the RS piece points to is truly dreadful, far beyond what Woodward and Bernstein found. Would you 
believe that "Watergate," as they found it, was a CIA red herring? Incredible. 

"Strange Memories of Death" (1979, 1984) 

I woke up this morning and felt the chill of October [1979] in the apartment, as if 
the seasons understood the calendar. What had I dreamed? Vain thoughts of a woman I 
had loved. Something depressed me. I took a mental audit. Everything was in fact fine; 
this would be a good month. But I felt the chill. 

Oh, Christ, I thought. Today is the day they evict the Lysol Lady. 

Nobody likes the Lysol lady. She is insane. No one has ever heard her say a 
word and she won't look at you. Sometimes when you are descending the stairs she is 
coming up and she turns wordlessly around and retreats and uses the elevator instead. 
Everybody can smell the Lysol she uses. Magical horrors contaminate her apartment, 
apparently, so she uses Lysol. God damn! As I fix coffee I think, maybe the owners have 
already evicted her, at dawn, while I still slept. While I was having vain dreams about a 
woman I loved who dumped me. Of course, I was dreaming about the hateful Lysol Lady 
and the authorities coming to her door at 5:00 A.M. The new owners are a huge firm of 
real estate developers. They'd do it at dawn. 

The Lysol Lady hides in her apartment and knows that October is here, October 


first is here, and they are going to bust in and throw her and her stuff out in the street. 
Now is she going to speak? I imagine her pressed against the wall in silence. However, 
it is not as simple as that. Al Newcum, the sales representative of South Orange 
Investments, has told me that the Lysol Lady wants Legal Aid. This is bad news because 
it screws up our doing anything for her. She is crazy but not crazy enough. If it could be 
proved that she did not understand the situation a team from Orange County Mental 
Health could come in as her advocates and explain to South Orange Investments that 
you cannot legally evict a person with diminished capacity. Why the hell did she get it 
together to go to Legal Aid? 

The time is 9:00 A.M. I can go downstairs to the sales office and ask Al Newcum 
if they've evicted the Lysol Lady yet, or if she is in her apartment, hiding in silence, 
waiting. They are evicting her because the building, made up of fifty-six units, has been 
converted to condominiums. Virtually everyone has moved, since we were all legally 
notified four months ago. You have one hundred and twenty days to leave or buy your 
apartment and South Orange Investments will pay $200 of your moving costs. This is 
the law. You also have first refusal on your rental unit. I am buying mine. I am staying. 
For $52,000 I get to be around when they evict the Lysol Lady who is crazy and doesn't 
have $52,000. Now I wish I had moved. 

Going downstairs to the newspaper vending machine I buy today's Los Angeles 
Times. A girl who shot up a schoolyard of children "because she didn't like Mondays" is 
pleading guilty. She will soon get probation. She took a gun and shot schoolchildren 
because, in effect, she had nothing else to do. Well, today is Monday; she is in court on 
a Monday, the day she hates. Is there no limit to madness? I wonder about myself. First 
of all, I doubt if my apartment is worth $52,000. I am staying because I am both afraid to 
move -- afraid of something new, of change -- and because I am lazy. No, that isn't it. I 
like this building and I live near friends and near stores that mean something to me. I've 
been here three and a half years. It is a good, solid building with security gates and 
deadbolt locks. I have two cats and they like the closed patio; they can go outside and 
be safe from dogs. Probably I am thought of as the Cat Man. So everyone has moved 
out, but the Lysol Lady and the Cat Man stay on. 

What bothers me is that I know that the only thing separating me from the Lysol 
Lady, who is crazy, is the money in my savings account. Money is the official seal of 
sanity. The Lysol Lady, perhaps, is afraid to move. She is like me. She just wants to stay 
where she has stayed for several years, doing what she's been doing. She uses the 
laundry machines a lot, washing and spin-drying her clothes again and again. This is 
where I encounter her: I am coming into the laundry room and she is there at the 
machines to be sure no one steals her laundry. Why won't she look at you? Keeping her 
face turned away. . . what purpose is served? I sense hate. She hates every other 
human being. But now consider her situation: Those she hates are going to close in on 
her. What fear she must feel! She gazes about in her apartment waiting for the knock on 
the door; she watches the clock and understands! 

To the north of us, in Los Angeles, the conversion of rental units to condominiums 
has been effectively blocked by the city council. Those who rent won out. This is a great 
victory but it does not help the Lysol Lady. This is Orange County. Money rules. The 
very poor live to the east of me: the Mexicans in their barrio. Sometimes when our 
security gates open to admit cars the Chicano women run in with baskets of dirty 
laundry; they want to use our machines, having none of their own. The people who lived 


here in the building resented this. When you have even a little money -- money enough 
to live in a modern, full-security, all-electric building -- you resent a great deal. 

Well, I have to find out if the Lysol Lady has been evicted yet. There is no way to 
tell by looking at her window; the drapes are always shut. So I go downstairs to the sales 
office to see Al. However, Al is not there; the office is locked. Then I remember that Al 
flew to Sacramento on the weekend to get some crucial legal papers that the state lost. 
He hasn't returned. If the Lysol Lady wasn't crazy I could knock on her door and talk to 
her; I could find out that way. But this is precisely the focus of the tragedy; any knock will 
frighten her. This is her condition. This is the illness itself. So I stand by the fountain that 
the developers have constructed, and I admire the planter boxes of flowers that they 
have had brought in ... they have really made the building look good. It formerly looked 
like a prison. Now it has become a garden. The developers put a great deal of money 
into painting and landscaping and in fact rebuilding the whole entrance. Water and 
flowers and French doors . . . and the Lysol Lady silent in her apartment waiting for the 
knock. 

Perhaps I could tape a note to the Lysol Lady's door. It could read: 

MADAM, I AM SYMPATHETIC TO YOUR POSITION AND 
WOULD LIKE TO ASSIST YOU. IF YOU WISH ME TO 
ASSIST YOU, I LIVE UPSTAIRS IN APARTMENT C-1. 


How would I sign it? Fellow loony, maybe. Fellow loony with $52,000 who is legally here 
whereas you are, in the eyes of the law, a squatter. As of midnight last night. Although 
the day before it was as much your apartment as mine is mine. 

I go back upstairs to my apartment with the idea of writing a letter to the woman I 
once loved and last night dreamed about. All sorts of phrases pass through my mind. I 
will re-create the vanished relationship with one letter. Such is the power of my words. 

What crap. She is gone forever. I don't even have her current address. 
Laboriously, I could track her down through mutual friends, and then say what? 

MY DARLING, I HAVE FINALLY COME TO MY SENSES. 
I REALIZE THE FULL EXTENT OF MY INDEBTEDNESS 
TO YOU. CONSIDERING THE SHORT TIME WE WERE 
TOGETHER YOU DID MORE FOR ME THAN ANYONE ELSE 
IN MY LIFE. IT IS EVIDENT TO ME THAT I HAVE 
MADE A DISASTROUS ERROR. COULD WE HAVE DINNER 
TOGETHER? 


As I repeat this hyperbole in my mind the thought comes to me that it would be horrible 
but funny if I wrote that letter and then by mistake or design taped it to the Lysol Lady's 
door. How would she react? Jesus Christ! It would kill her or cure her! Meanwhile I could 
write my departed loved one, die feme Geliebte, as follows: 

MADAM, YOU ARE TOTALLY NUTS. EVERYONE WITHIN 
MILES IS AWARE OF IT. YOUR PROBLEM IS OF YOUR 
OWN MAKING. SHIP UP, SHAPE UP, GET YOUR ACT 
TOGETHER, BORROW SOME MONEY, HIRE A BETTER 
LAWYER, BUY A GUN, SHOOT UP A SCHOOLYARD. IF 
I CAN ASSIST YOU, I LIVE IN APARTMENT C-1. 



Maybe the plight of the Lysol Lady is funny and I am too depressed by the coming of 
autumn to realize it. Maybe there will be some good mail today; after all, yesterday was 
a mail holiday. I will get two days of mail today. That will cheer me up. What in fact is 
going on is that I am feeling sorry for myself; today is Monday and, like the girl in court 
pleading guilty, I hate Mondays. 

Brenda Spenser pleaded guilty to the charge of shooting eleven people, two of 
whom died. She is seventeen years old, small and very pretty, like one of those she 
shot. The thought enters my mind that perhaps the Lysol Lady has a gun in her 
apartment, a thought that should have come to me a long time ago. Perhaps South 
Orange Investments thought of it. Perhaps this is why Al Newcum's office is locked up 
today; he is not in Sacramento but in hiding. Although, of course, he could be hiding in 
Sacramento, accomplishing two things at once. 

An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of 
criminal psychotic acting-out there was an easier alternative that the disturbed person 
overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket 
and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them 
children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his 
way uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks that he 
does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic 
inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity 
and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw. 

Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the 
inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady had contrived to put herself in the most 
difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was 
transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends, when the 
impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest 
of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the 
psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen -- well, it is an amazing sight. 
The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the 
person is in motion -- the pistons are going up and down frantically -- and then it's an 
inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably 
got on to years before. It is kinetic death. "Place there is none," St. Augustine wrote. 
"We go backward and forward, and there is no place." And then the cessation comes 
and there is only place. 

The spot where the Lysol Lady had trapped herself was her own apartment, but it 
was no longer her own apartment. She had found a place at which to psychologically die 
and then South Orange Investments had taken it away from her. They had robbed her of 
her own grave. 

What I can't get out of my mind is the notion that my fate is tied to that of the 
Lysol Lady. A fiscal entry in the computer at Mutual Savings divides us and it is a 
mythical division: It is real only so long as people such as South Orange Investments -specifically 
South Orange Investments -- are willing to agree that it is real. It seems to 
me to be nothing more than a social convention, such as wearing matching socks. In 
another way, it's like the value of gold. The value of gold is what people agree on, which 
is like a game played by children. "Let's agree that that tree is third base." Suppose my 
television set worked because my friends and I agreed that it worked. We could sit 


before a blank screen forever that way. In that case it could be said that the Lysol Lady's 
failure lay in not having entered into a compact with the rest of us, a consensus. 
Underlying everything else there is this unwritten contract to which the Lysol Lady is not 
a party. But I am amazed to think that the failure to enter into an agreement palpably 
childish and irrational leads inevitably to kinetic death, to total stoppage of the organism. 

Argued this way, one could say that the Lysol Lady had failed to be a child. The 
element that had taken over her life was the element of the grim. She never smiled. No 
one had ever seen her do anything but glower in a vague, undirected way. 

Perhaps, then, she played a grimmer game rather than no game; perhaps her 
game was one of combat, in which case she now had what she wanted, even though 
she was losing. It was at least a situation she understood. South Orange Investments 
had entered the Lysol Lady's world. Perhaps being a squatter rather than a tenant was 
satisfying to her. Maybe we all secretly will everything that happens to us. In that case 
does the psychotic person will his own ultimate kinetic death, his own dead-end path? 
Does he play to lose? 

I didn't see Al Newcum that day but I did see him the next day; he had returned 
from Sacramento and opened up his office. 

"Is the woman in B-15 still there?" I asked him. "Or did you evict her?" 

"Mrs. Archer?" Newcum said. "Oh, the other morning she moved out; she's gone. 
The Santa Ana Housing Authority found her a place over on Bristol." He leaned back in 
his swivel chair and crossed his legs; his slacks, as always, were sharply creased. "She 
went to them a couple of weeks ago." 

"An apartment she can afford?" I asked. 

"They picked up the bill. They're paying her rent; she talked them into it. She's a 
hardship case." 

"Christ," I said. "I wish someone would pay my rent." 

"You're not paying rent," Newcum said. "You're buying your apartment." 

"Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Interview," Conducted by Frank C. 
Bertrand (1980, 1988) 

INTRODUCTION [BY BERTRAND]: The following interview was conducted by mail in 
January 1980. Intended to be but the beginning of a long, in-depth discussion and 
exploration of P. K. Dick's interest in philosophy and the manifestation of that interest in 
his stories and novels, it was cut short by a disagreement over how best to continue, by 
letter or by phone. Nonetheless, what P. K. Dick has to say is a brief but informative 
overview of his interest in philosophy. 

FB: I would like to start by asking a cliche question phrased a bit differently. How do you 
define science fiction? In asking this, though, I do not seek a "dictionary"-type definition, 
but rather what is it about a work of fiction that when you read it causes you to say this is 
science fiction? 

PKD: SF presents in fictional form an eccentric view of the normal or a normal view of 


the world that is not our world. Not all stories set in the future or on other planets are SF 
(some are space adventures), and some SF is set in the past or present (time travel or 
alternate world stories). It is not mimetic of the real world. Central to SF is the idea as 
dynamism. Events evolve out of an idea impacting on living creatures and their society. 
The idea must always be a novelty. This is the core issue of SF, even bad SF. That 
events accord with known scientific truths distinguishes SF from fantasy. Good SF tells a 
reader something he does not know about a possible world. Thus both the news (novel 
idea) and possible world (setting) are inventions by the author and not descriptions. 
Finally, SF makes what would otherwise be an intellectual abstraction concrete; it does 
this by locating the idea in a specific time and place, which requires the inventing of that 
time and place. Characters need not differ from characters in non-SF; it is what they 
encounter and must deal with that differ[s]. 

FB: Why is there science fiction? That is, why is it written, why is it read? Would 
literature be better or worse off if it had never come into existence? Just what function 
does SF fulfill in literature and for those who choose to read it, or write it? 

PKD: There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation 
before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric 
view, and the invented world. It is written because the human mind naturally creates, 
and in creating the world of an SF story the ultimate in human imagination is brought into 
use; thus SF is an ultimate product of and for the human mind. The function of SF 
psychologically is to cut the reader loose from the actual world that he inhabits; it 
deconstructs time, space, reality. Those who read it probably have difficulty adjusting to 
their world, for whatever reason; they may be ahead of it in terms of their perceptions 
and concepts or they may simply be neurotic, or they may have an abundance of 
imagination. Basically, they enjoy abstract thought. Also, they have a sense of the magic 
of science: science viewed not as utilitarian but as explorative. The writer of SF has in 
his possession ideas not yet committed to print; his mind is an extension of the corpus of 
already written SF. He is SF's probe into the future, its vanguard. There is not a vast 
difference between reading SF and writing it. In both cases there is a joy in the novel -


i.e. new -- idea. 
FB: Would you please recount just when it was that you first became interested in 
philosophy? Was it a particular course or book or idea that initially generated your 
interest? Or a particular teacher? In high school, before, after? 

PKD: I first became interested in philosophy in high school when I realized one day that 
all space is the same size; it is only the material boundaries encompassing it that differ. 
After that there came to me the realization (which I found later in Hume) that causality is 
a perception in the observer and not a datum of external reality. In college I was given 
Plato to read and thereupon became aware of the possible existence of a metaphysical 
realm beyond or above the sensory world. I came to understand that the human mind 
could conceive of a realm of which the empirical world was epiphenomenal. Finally I 
came to believe that in a certain sense the empirical world was not truly real, at least not 
as real as the archetypal realm beyond it. At this point I despaired of the veracity of 
sense data. Hence in novel after novel that I write I question the reality of the world that 


the characters' percept-systems report. Ultimately I became an acosmic panentheist, led 
to this point by decades of skepticism. 

FB: Once your interest in philosophy was sparked, how did you then pursue this 
interest? What books did you at first read? What courses if any did you take in 
philosophy? 

PKD: I dropped out of college very early and began to write, pursuing my interest in 
philosophy on my own. My main sources were poets, not philosophers: Yeats and 
Wordsworth and the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets, Goethe, and then 
overt philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibnitz and Plotinus -- the last influencing me 
greatly. Early on I read Alfred North Whitehead and Bergson and became well grounded 
in process philosophy. I did take a basic survey course in philosophy at the University of 
California at Berkeley, but was asked to leave when I inquired as to the pragmatic value 
of Platonism. The Pre-Socratics always fascinated me, in particular Pythagoras, 
Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. I still view God as Xenophanes viewed him. 
Gradually my interest in philosophy passed over into an interest in theology. Like the 
early Greeks I am a believer in parapsychism. Of all the metaphysical systems in 
philosophy I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum "Deus sive 
substantia sive natura"; to me this sums up everything (viz., God i.e. reality i.e. nature). 
After flirting with bitheism for years I have settled down to monotheism; I regard even 
Christianity and later Judaism as basically dualistic and hence unacceptable. To me the 
truth was first uttered (insofar as we know) when Xenophanes of Colophon, an Ionian, 
stated, "One god there is. . . in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the 
thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him 
hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move 
about now this way, now that. But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his 
mind." My interest in Pythagoras came from reading Wordsworth's "Ode," and from 
there I passed on to Neo-Platonism and to the Pre-Socratics. The German Aufklarung 
influenced me, especially Schiller and his ideas of freedom; I read his "Wars of the 
Dutch Lowlands" and the "Wallenstein" trilogy. Spinoza's views regarding the worth of 
democracy also influenced me. Especially I studied the Thirty Years' War and the issues 
involved, and am sympathetic to the Protestant side, in particular the valorous Dutch. 
When I was twenty-one I wrote a piece on the superiority of the American governmental 
system of checks and balances, praising it above all other systems of government either 
in modern times or in antiquity; I got a copy to the then governor of California, Earl 
Warren, to which he replied, "It is a gratifying experience to receive such an expression 
of appreciation of the government for which all of us work and serve. And although it 
may be that others have the same depth of feeling you express, few are so articulate. 
Certainly your letter is unique in my experience, and I have received many through my 
years in public office." That was in the year 1952, when my first stories were published. 
It coincides, therefore, with my appearance as an author in the world of SF. 

Part Two 


Writings on Science Fiction and Related Ideas 

The essays in this section concern themselves primarily with the nature of the SF 
genre, the role of the SF writer, and speculation on future scientific possibilities. 

"Pessimism in Science Fiction" (1955) was first published in Oblique, No. 6, 
December 1955, a fanzine edited by Clifford Gould. 

"Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of Robert 
Heinlein?" was first published in the fanzine Lighthouse, No. 14, October 1966, edited by 
Terry Carr. The style represents Dick at his most informal, employing the open and 
uninhibited fanzine forum to orate, opine, and vent at will. It is not Dick's most 
impressive work, although it has its moments of humor and of dark insight, as in its brief 
remarks on the difficult relationship between Dick and his mother. There was a tempest 
in a teapot when, in the subsequent issue of Lighthouse (No. 15, August 1967), an SF 
fan wrote a letter attacking Dick for the callousness of his remarks both as to Heinlein 
and as to Dick's mother, and implying that Dick had suffered permanent brain damage 
from his use of LSD. In point of fact, Dick did not suffer from brain damage and was 
rather prone, during the sixties, to exaggerate his LSD usage greatly (he used the drug 
on only a handful of occasions, finding it far too frightening for his liking). Dick replied to 
this attack in the following issue with blustering outrage, implying that he might bring a 
suit for libel; the letter-writer apologized and the matter was dropped, to the evident relief 
of both parties. Dick never relented in his animus toward his mother; with regard to 
Heinlein, however, Dick's attitude changed considerably. See Dick's "Introduction" to 
The Golden Man story collection in this same section. 

"The Double: Bill Symposium" replies by Dick were included in the pamphlet 
volume The Double: Bill Symposium, published by D:B Press (1969), which included the 
responses of ninety-four SF writers. The two editors were Bill Mallardi and Bill Bowers. 
The questionnaire was prepared by Lloyd Biggie, Jr. 

"That Moon Plaque" first appeared in Men on the Moon (1969), an Ace anthology 
edited by Donald A. Wollheim, an important figure in Dick's publishing career. 

"Who Is an SF Writer?" was first published, in truncated form, in Science Fiction: 
The Academic Awakening (1974), a College English Association (Shreveport, Louisiana) 
chapbook. The editor was Willis E. McNelly, an English professor at the University of 
California at Fullerton with whom Dick enjoyed friendly relations. The essay appears 
here for the first time in its full typescript length, which is roughly one-third longer than 
the original published version. 

"Michelson-Morley Experiment Reappraised" first appeared under the title 
(supplied by an editor) as "Scientists Claim: We Are Center of the Universe" in New 
Worlds, No. 216, September 1979. 

"Introduction" to Dr. Bloodmoney, written in 1979, was first published in the 1985 
Bluejay Books edition of that novel. 

"Introduction" to The Golden Man first appeared under the title (supplied by an 
editor) "The Lucky Dog Pet Store" in Foundation, No. 17, September 1979. It was 
republished, with minor changes, as the "Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980) story 
collection edited by Mark Hurst. The story notes that concluded this essay were 
republished in the five-volume Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (1987). The opening 
essay on his SF writing, not included in the Collected Stories, is presented here. 


The "Book Review" (1980) of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction, by 
Patricia Warrick, has never before been published. It is unclear if Dick ever submitted it 
to any publication. It is important to note that this review may well have been written in a 
moment of temporary pique; Dick and Warrick carried on -- both before and after this 
review was written -- a voluminous correspondence on philosophical and spiritual 
matters, and Dick frequently praised and thanked Warrick, in this correspondence, for 
her insights and support. Nonetheless, the review is worth publishing because it does 
accurately reflect the high degree of suspicion, even animosity, that Dick felt toward 
"mainstream" academicians who sought to adopt SF, as it were, and make it respectable 
or "important." At the same time, as Dick confesses in his "Introduction" to The Golden 
Man, the lack of mainstream attention for his work was a source of pain for him. 

"My Definition of Science Fiction" was first published in Just: SF, Vol. 1, No. 1 
(1981), edited by John Betancourt. 

"Predictions" was first included in The Book of Predictions (New York: Morrow, 
1981) by David Wallechinsky. 

"Universe Makers. . . and Breakers" (1981) first appeared in SelecTV Guide, 
February 15-March 28, 1981. This guide was issued by Dick's cable company, and his 
payment for writing the piece was a free year of cable service. See my prefatory 
comments to "Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968), in a subsequent 
section, for further information on Dick's views on the film Blade Runner (1982). 
"Universe Makers.. ." was reprinted in Radio Free PKD (the successor to PKDS 
Newsletter, edited by Gregory Lee), No. 1, February 1993. 

"Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub," written in 1980, first appeared in 
accompaniment with the reprinted story in First Voyages (New York: Avon, 1981), an SF 
anthology edited by Damon Knight, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. It was 
reprinted in PKDS Newsletter, No. 24, May 1990, and in Radio Free PKD, No. 3, 
October 1993. This headnote was not reprinted in the available Collected Stories 
volumes; hence its inclusion here. 

"Pessimism in Science Fiction" (1955) 

Since science fiction concerns the future of human society, the worldwide loss of 
faith in science and in scientific progress is bound to cause convulsions in the SF field. 
This loss of faith in the idea of progress, in a "brighter tomorrow," extends over our 
whole cultural milieu; the dour tone of recent science fiction is an effect, not a cause. If a 
modern science fiction writer mirrors this sense of doom, he is only doing what any 
responsible writer does: If a writer feels that present-day saber-rattling and drum-beating 
are leading the world to war, he has no choice but to reproduce his feelings in his 
writings -- unless he is writing purely for profit, in which case he never reproduces his 
feelings, only those sentiments that he feels will be commercially acceptable. 

All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, 
because doom is in the wind; but science fiction writers more so, since science fiction 
has always been a protest medium. In science fiction, a writer is not merely inclined to 
act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to -- unless, of course, he honestly 


thinks he will wake up some morning and find that the high-minded Martians have 
sneaked off with all our bombs and armaments, for our own good. 

Of course, doom stories become monotonous, since there are infinite bright, 
successful, nondoom futures, but only one doom; that is war. Once the war-doom story 
has been written, there is not much to say; and Ray Bradbury has written that story at 
least once. So the responsible science fiction writer repeats himself, since although 
there are many things he might write about, there is only one horrible future he really 
believes in: The rest are exercises in logic, imagination, and writing skill. If the writer 
honestly believes we are moving toward racial suicide, then skillful, cheerful stories 
become -- although interesting -- mere fiddle-scraping. But a natural hope, taking the 
place of legitimate optimism, crowds us into preferring these pleasant substitutes. Well, 
they are a lot of fun, just as detective novels were a lot of fun in the thirties. And the 
question is not: Which makes more enjoyable reading? Because nobody would seriously 
debate that one. After all, pleasant exercises in imagination and logic are supposed to 
be pleasant; and the doom stories are merely intended to call attention to reality. The 
latter activity has never been popular. 

In a sense, the job of the science fiction writer in continuing to write 
pessimistically if he feels pessimistic, is a worsening of the spot every one of us is in; the 
SF writer will be cooked no deader than anybody else. But the SF writer has all day to 
brood; brooding, or at least thinking, is his job. If the SF writer is requested not to think 
about doom, if it's immoral to write about an approaching war, then it certainly is an evil 
thing to worry about it. 

The only really legitimate complaint that can be raised against doom stories 
(outside of the complaint that they are all the same and hence only one really adequate 
doom story is required) is that there have always been war and danger, and that the 
sense of doom may be misplaced. This is a good argument, and I am beginning to 
believe it. A doom story never offers a solution to the problem: It merely utters the 
problem over and over again. Well, assuming we accept the existence of the problem 
(the approaching war), perhaps a more realistic or at least more valuable function would 
be to seek, in our science fiction stories, partial solutions to the menace. How are we 
going to survive? What will our world be like after a few (or a lot) of us have survived? 

Rather than writing stories about doom, perhaps we should take the doom for 
granted and go on from there. Make the ruined world of ash a premise: State it in 
paragraph one, and get it over with, rather than winding up with it at the very end. And 
make the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve the 
problem of postwar survival. 

At worst, we can suppose that nobody will survive. But this is like taking pictures 
of coal bins at midnight: It can be done, but if there is nothing there, then what the hell. It 
is quite possible that a few dozen and even a very large number of people may survive 
the war, in which case a story dealing with various attempts at setting up societies can 
be developed. Of course, we want to avoid the English doom novel: the struggling 
primitive colony of the postmachine type, the "back to nature" thing. Let's bypass that, 
and presume basic technology; maybe not atomic-powered rocket ships, but at least 
gasoline combustion engines and telephones. 

However, I can't seriously believe that much of our cultural pattern or physical 
assets will survive the next fifty years. Our present social continuum is disintegrating 
rapidly; if war doesn't burst it apart, it obviously will corrode away. At the very best, at 


the most optimistic, there won't be any death and destruction. I'll assume the brighter 
side, the possibility of a limited war and only partial retrogression -- Bradbury is perhaps 
too pessimistic -- but to avoid the topic of war and cultural retrogression, as some 
schools of science fiction writers and editors have done, is unrealistic and downright 
irresponsible. 

Such pollyanna noises are designed to increase circulation. They shouldn't fool 
anybody who reads newspapers. 

"Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected, and If So, What Becomes of 
Robert Heinlein?" (1966) 

Recently I took yet another dose of LSD-25, and as a result certain dull but persistent 
thoughts have come creeping into my head. I will herein retail [sic; retell] a few of them, 
in chaotic form. If you find them all false, good for you. If you find them all true, good for 
you likewise. 

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in 
fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not SF because 
they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much SF if they went by 
rubber band. 

Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately. Those such as Waldo are freaks and prove 
nothing. 

Because of a present-day rocket travel to Mars et al., the general public is at last willing 
to accept SF as reasonable. They have stopped laughing, but they have not started 
reading. They probably never will, because reading is too hard for them. But now we 
know that we were right. (Of course, we knew that all along. But it's nice to see it 
proved.) 

No one makes any real money off good -- I repeat, good --SF. This probably indicates 
that it has artistic worth. If Lorenzo de Medici were alive he would pick up the tab for A. 

E. van Vogt, not for John Updike. 
The best SF novel I have read is Vonnegut's Player Piano, because it actually deals with 
men-women relationships (Paul Proteus and his bitch of a wife). In this matter the book 
is unique in the field. Brave New World only seems to do this; 1984 in this regard is 
awful. 

If I were to dredge up one SF novel that, more than any others, would cause me to 
abandon SF entirely, it is Robert Heinlein's Gulf. It strikes me as fascism pure and 
simple, and -- what is worse -- put forth unattractively. Bleh. 

Heinlein has done more to harm SF than has any other writer, I think -- with the possible 


exception of George O. Smith. The dialogue in Stranger in a Strange Land has to be 
read to be believed. "Give the little lady a box of cigars!" a character cries, meaning that 
the girl has said something that is correct. One wonders what the rejoinder would be if a 
truly inspired remark had to be answered, rather than a routine statement; it would 
probably burst the book's gizzard. 

Once I read a terrific short story in If by an unknown writer named Robert Gilbert. It was 
poetry, beauty, love, perfection, and I wrote him and told him so. He wrote back and said 
he'd written the story while listening to Harry James records. 

I started reading SF in 1941. I'm old. 

There is one accurate way -- and only one -- by which you can tell you are growing old. 
It is when the SF magazines that you bought new on the stand at the time they came out 
have begun to turn the same yellow color as the ones you picked up as collectors' items 
from specialty dealers . . . i.e., already ancient. 

Is it possible that Lovecraft saw the truth? That realms and wickedness such as he 
describes, for example in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, actually exist? 
Imagine taking a dose of LSD and finding yourself in Salem. You would go mad. 

Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint, as in 
Gather, Darkness [a novel by Fritz Leiber]. God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF 
story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else's. Therefore I deplore my 
Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I 
don't. I wish I had never written it; there are too many horrid forces loose in it. When I 
wrote it I had been taking certain chemicals and I could see the awful landscape that I 
depicted. But not now. Thank God. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God 
who lifts the sins of the world]. 

Avram Davidson [an SF writer] fascinates me -- as a person, I mean. He is a mixture of 
a little boy and a very wise old man, and his eyes always twinkle as if he were a 
defrocked Santa Claus. With beard dyed black. 

I'll give anyone fifteen cents who can imagine [SF editor] Tony Boucher as a small boy. 
Obviously, Tony was always as he is now. But even more difficult to imagine is the 
strange truth that once there was no Tony Boucher at all. This is clearly impossible. I 
think there must always have been a Tony Boucher; if not the one we know, then some 
other, very much like him. 

I have written and sold twenty-three novels, and all are terrible except one. But I am not 
sure which one. 

If Beethoven had lived just one additional year he would have entered a fourth period of 
his evolving talent. We can imagine this by listening to his last composition, the alternate 
ending for the thirteenth quartet. What we cannot imagine is -- what about later, in his 
old age? Suppose he, like Verdi, like Haydn, had lived to compose in his eighties. Under 


LSD I have a vision of a seventh or eighth period of Beethoven: string quartets with 
chorus and four soloists. 

Out of all the SF that I have read, one story still means more to me than any others: It is 
Harry Bates's Alas, All Thinking. It is the beginning and the end of literate science fiction. 
Alas. 

For fifteen years, the entire period in which I have written SF, I have never seen my 
agent or even talked to him on the phone. I wonder what sort of person he is, assuming 
he exists at all. When I call his number his receptionist says, "Mr. Meredith isn't here 
right now. Will you talk to Mr. Rib Frimble?" Or some such unlikely name. On the basis 
of that, in my next call I ask not for Mr. Meredith but for Mr. Frimble. Then the 
receptionist says, "Mr. Frimble is out, sir; will you talk to Mr. Dead?" And so it goes. 

If I knew what a hallucination was I would know what reality was. I have examined the 
topic thoroughly, and I assert that it is impossible to have a hallucination; it goes against 
reason and common sense. Those who claim to have had them are probably lying. (I 
have had a few myself.) 

Once in a while somebody in the neighborhood who is rich enough to own a hedge, and 
is always busily clipping it, asks me why I write SF. I never have an answer. There are 
several other questions that get asked but that obtain no response at all from me. They 
are: 

1. Where do you get your plots? 
2. Do you put people you know into your stories? 
3. Why aren't you selling to Playboy? Everyone else is. I hear it pays a hell of a lot. 
4. Isn't science fiction mainly for kids? 
Let me illustrate what I mean when I say I have no answer to these; I will do herein what 
I generally do. : 

Answer to 1: Oh, well, plots; well, you can find them almost anywhere. I mean, there're a lot of 
plots. Say, talking to you gives me an idea for a plot. There's this humanoid superior mutant, see, who has 
to hide himself because the mass man has no understanding of him or his superior, evolved aims -- etc. 

Answer to 2: No. 

Answer to 3: I don't know. I guess I'm a failure. What other possibility can there be? And it was 
lousy of you to ask. 

Answer to 4: No, SF is not for kids. Or maybe it is; I don't know who reads it. There're roughly 
150,000 people who comprise the readership, and that's not a great number. And even if it does appeal to 
kids -- so what? 

You can see how weak these answers are. And I've had fifteen years in which to think 
up better answers. Obviously I never will. 

The TV news announcer says tonight that a ninety-one-year-old man has married a 
ninety-two-year-old woman. It is enough to bring tears to your eyes. What do they have 
in store for them? What chance is there, every time they close their eyes, that they will 
ever open them again? The small and unimportant silent creatures are far finer and 


worth a great deal more than Robert Heinlein will ever know. 

Loneliness is the great curse that hangs over a writer. A while ago I wrote twelve novels 
in a row, plus fourteen magazine pieces. I did it out of loneliness. It constituted 
communication for me. At last the loneliness grew too great and I stopped writing; I left 
my then-wife and then-children and took a great journey. The great journey ended up in 
Bay Area fandom, and for a short while I ceased to be lonely. Then it came back, late 
one night. Now I know it will never go away. This is my payment for twenty-three novels 
and one hundred magazine pieces. It's no one's fault. That's just the way it is. 

My mother shows her love for me by clipping out certain magazine and newspaper 
articles, which she gives me. These articles prove that the tranquilizers that I take do 
permanent brain damage. It's nice, a mother's love. 

Under LSD I saw radiant colors, especially the pinks and reds; they shone like God 
Himself. Is that what God is? Color? But at least this time I didn't have to die, go to hell, 
be tormented, and then raised up by means of Christ's death on the cross into eternal 
salvation. As I said to J. G. Newkom [a friend of Dick at this time] when I was free of the 
drug, "I don't mind going through the Day of Judgment again, after I die, but I just hope it 
won't last so long." Under LSD you can spend 1.96 eternities, if not 2.08. 

In fifteen years of professional writing I haven't gotten a jot or a tittle better. My first 
story, Roog, is as good as -- if not better than -- the five I did last month. This seems 
very strange to me, because certainly through all those years I've learned a good deal 
about writing. . . and in addition my general store of worldly wisdom has increased. 
Maybe there are only a given number of original ideas in each person; he uses them up 
and that is that. Like an old baseball player, he no longer has anything to offer. I will say 
one thing in favor of my writing, however, which I hope is true: I am original (except 
where I copy my own previous work). I no longer write "like Cyril Kornbluth" or "like A. E. 
van Vogt." But in that case I can no longer blame them for my faults. 

A publisher in England asked me to write a blurb for a collection of my short stories. In 
this country someone else writes them, usually someone who has not read the book. I 
would like to have started the blurb by saying, "These dull and uninteresting stories . . ." 
etc. But I suppose I had better not. 

Thus endeth my thoughts. 

"The Double: Bill Symposium": Replies to "A Questionnaire for Professional 
SF Writers and Editors" (1969) 

Question 1: For what reason or reasons do you write science fiction in preference to 
other classes of literature? 


Its audience is not hamstrung by middle-class prejudices and will listen to genuinely new 
ideas. There is less of an emphasis on mere style and more on content -- as should be. 
It is a man's field, and hence a happy ending is not required -- as in all the fiction fields 
dominated by women. It is one of the few branches of serious fiction in which humor 
plays a major role (thereby making SF more complete, as was Shakespeare's work). 
Being one of the oldest modes of fiction known to the Western world, it embodies some 
of the most subtle, ancient, and far-reaching dreams, ideas, and aspirations of which 
thinking man is capable. In essence, it's the broadest field of fiction, permitting the most 
far-ranging and advanced concepts of every possible type; no variety of idea can be 
excluded from SF; everything is its property. 

Question 2: What do you consider the raison d'etre, the chief value of science fiction? 

To present in fiction form new ideas too difficult or too vague as yet to be presented as 
scientific fact (e.g., Psionics). And ideas that are not scientific fact, never will be, but that 
are fascinating conjectures -- in other words, possible or alternate science systems. 
World views that we can't "believe" in but that interest us (as, for example, we find 
interesting the medieval worldview but simply cannot any longer accept it as "true"). So 
SF presents to us, in addition to the worldview, which we actually adopt, a great range of 
"as if" views: The possession of these have the effect of making our minds flexible: We 
are capable of seeing alternate viewpoints as coequal with our own. 

Question 3: What is your appraisal of the relationship of science fiction to the 
"mainstream" of literature? 

SF fails to explore the depths of interpersonal human relationships, and this is its lack; 
however, on a purely intellectual level it possesses more conceptual ideas as such, and 
hence in this respect is superior to mainstream or quality fiction. And (supra) it does not 
need to dwell on mere style as such but can range farther in terms of its content. But SF 
(excepting Bradbury) is for younger, more optimistic people, who haven't yet truly 
suffered at the hands of life; quality fiction tends -- and rightly so -- to deal with the 
defeated, those who have lost the first bloom. . . hence quality fiction is more mature 
than SF -- alas. 

Question 4: Do you believe that participating in fandom, fanzines, and conventions 
would be a benefit or a hindrance to would-be writers? 

A benefit, but not a very great one. It would be a benefit if the fans allowed the writer to 
do the talking, instead of trying to instruct him. It is the job of the writer to do the telling; 
he should not be turned into a listener. But the concepts in SF writing are not derived 
from fandom, from within the field, anyhow; they are -- or at least should be -- derived 
from the wide world itself, its far shores in particular. From everywhere but SF fandom. 

Question 5: What source or sources would you recommend to beginning writers as 
having been, in your experience, the most productive of ideas for science fiction stories? 

Journals that deal in the most advanced research of clinical psychology, especially the 


work of the European existential analysis school. C. G. Jung. Oriental writings such as 
those on Zen Buddhism, Taoism, etc. Really authoritative -- as compared with 
popularizations -- historical works (e.g., The Brutal Friendship). Medieval works, 
especially those dealing with crafts, such as glass blowing -- and science, alchemy, 
religion, etc. Greek philosophy, Roman literature of every sort. Persian religious texts. 
Renaissance studies on the theory of art. German dramatic writings of the Romantic 
period. 

Question 6: Do you feel that a beginning science fiction writer should concentrate on 
short stories as opposed to novels -- or vice versa? Why? 

Short stories first, to master this easier form. Then, very slowly, work toward longer 
pieces, say up to twenty-five thousand words. Then at last try a full-size (i.e., sixty-
thousand-word) novel, based on the structure of some writer who is admired. I, for 
instance, based my first novels on the structure used by A. E. van Vogt. Later, when I 
was more sure of myself, I departed from this. Be sure, however, that you select a writer 
who is skilled in the novel form (for instance, don't select Ray Bradbury). 

Question 7: What suggestions can you offer to the beginning writer concerning the 
development of "realistic" characters and writing effective dialogue? 

Read modern "quality" writing, especially the short pieces of Algren, Styron, Herb Gold, 
the so-called New School writers. And the fine left-wing writers of the thirties, such as 
Dos Passes, Richard Wright, and go back as far as Dreiser and Hawthorne --try to 
stick to American writers (including, of course, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein) because 
it is among the American writers that realistic dialogue has developed. Try the French 
realistics, such as Flaubert, for plot and characterization. Avoid Proust and other 
subjective-type writers. And by all means intently study James Joyce; everything from 
his early short stories to The Wake. 

Question 8: Do you believe that an effective novel requires a message or moral? Please 
comment. 

Absolutely not! The notion that a novel needs a moral or message is a bourgeois 
concept. In the days of the aristocracy it was recognized that art did not need to instruct 
or elevate; it could be a success by merely entertaining. One should never look down on 
entertainment; Mozart string quartets do not instruct -- show me a moral or message in, 
say, the late Beethoven. Music is pure; literature can be, too; it becomes more pure as it 
drops its intention of improving and instructing the audience. The writer is not a bit 
superior in morals than his audience anyway -- and frequently he's inferior to them. 
What moral can he really teach them? What he has to offer is his ideas. 

Question 9: To what extent do you think it possible to detect a writer's viewpoints as to 
politics, religion, or moral problems through examination of his stories? 

If the writer is a good one, it's impossible. Only a bad writer details his personal 
viewpoints in his fiction. However, it is always possible that some good writing may be 


found in an "instructive" work. But at the moment I can't think of any (e.g., Ray Bradbury. 
There is no way, in reading his work, to tell really what his personal views are; the writer 
in this case disappears entirely, and his story reveals itself on its own. This is the way it 
ought to be.). It is one of the cardinal errors of literary criticism to believe that the 
author's own views can be inferred from his writing; Freud, for instance, makes this 
really ugly error again and again. A successful writer can adopt any viewpoint that his 
characters must needs possess in order to function; this is the measure of his craft, this 
ability to free his work of his own prejudices. 

Question 10: During your formative writings, what one author influenced you the most? 
What other factors such as background, education, etc., were important influences? 

Van Vogt influenced me the most. Also Tony Boucher (i.e., his critical views, not his 
fiction). Also my interest in the Japanese novelists in the French Department of Tokyo 
University, who wrote after World War Two. And my interest in Depth Psychology and 
drugs. And in "stream of consciousness" writing, as with James Joyce. And -- but I 
wouldn't recommend this for the would-be writer -- my own "nervous breakdown," which 
I experienced at nineteen and then again at twenty-four and at thirty-three. Suffering of 
this sort educates your viewpoint, but at the expense of your creature-comfort principle; 
it may make you a better writer but the cost is far too great. 

Question 11: What do you consider the greatest weakness of science fiction today? 

Its inability to explore the subtle, intricate relationships that exist between the sexes. 
Men, in their relationship with women, get themselves into the most goddamn difficult 
circumstances, and SF ignores -- or is unable to deal with -- this fundamental aspect of 
adult life. Therefore SF remains preadult, and therefore appeals -- more or less -- to 
preadults. If SF explored the man-woman aspect of life it would not lose its readers as 
those readers reach maturity. SF simply must learn to do this or it will always be 
retarded -- as it is now. The novel Player Piano is an exception to this, and I suggest that 
every SF fan and especially every would-be writer study again and again the details of 
this superb novel, which deal specifically with the relationship of the protagonist and his 
wife. 

"That Moon Plaque" (1969) 

In no way should problems here on Earth detract from the glory of the Apollo 11 
moon flight. Similar problems led to the colonization of the New World back in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: poverty, lack of opportunity, even starvation. 
Sometimes the presence of grave social problems is a stimulus to exploration; man 
searches relentlessly for a way out of his problems, and in doing so he presses at every 
door, hoping to find one that will lead him somewhere that is new and different. And it 
must be recognized that the moon flight has acted and will continue to act as a flare 
lighting up the powerful abilities of man, his capacity to do what has never been done 


before. It is an indication of what can be done, and should make, by its existence, a new 
awareness grow in us as to what we can do. We should, because of it, be more 
optimistic as to what we can do here on Earth; it is proof of our strength and tenacity, not 
an indication that we are forgetting domestic goals. And, in addition, it was essential that 
we send a man to the moon; exploration is natural to man; it is virtually an instinct. It is, 
at least, a force in man so powerful that it cannot be denied. The moon flight was 
inevitable and is a new measure of ourselves. 

"Who Is an SF Writer?" (1974) 

The delight which SF writers show when encountering one another personally, at 
conventions or on panels or during lectures, indicates some common element shared by 
them, novices and old pros alike. There always emerges a psychological rapport, even if 
the ideas and politics in their respective works clash head-on; it is as if absolutely 
opposite themes in their published work -- which might be expected to create a personal 
barrier when the writers meet face to face -- this barrier is never there, and a feeling 
when a group of SF writers gathers is always one of a family rejoined, lost friends 
refound or new friends made -- friends among whom there is a fundamental basis of 
outlook or at least of personality structure. Nearly always it is characterized by a mutual 
respect, and this respect on the part of each writer is for the others as persons, not 
merely a respect for their work. We are linked as if scattered members of a once tightly 
knit ethnic group which has been scattered, but then momentarily reunited. I have felt 
this with no other group of people: Something special is there in us, that not only is 
common but which binds us rather than separates us as one finds, say, in the social 
gatherings of the so-called "New York literary writers," in which chronic jealousy and 
envy and sour carping impede personal contact. To my knowledge, this camraderie and 
rapport is at least currently unique in the arts; and it means something; it tells something 
about us. 

On meeting a new SF writer who has just gotten into print, we never feel crowded 
or insecure; we feel strangely happy, and tell him so and encourage him: We welcome 
him. And I think this is because we know that the very fact that he has chosen to write 
SF rather than other types of fiction -- or other careers in general -- tells us something 
about him already. I know one element that allows us to prejudge favorably any new pro 
SF writer to our midst: There just cannot be a profit motive as this person's working 
dynamism because there is no profit financially in writing SF; the average high school 
teacher, to name another underpaid group, makes almost twice what I make, and all my 
income comes from writing SF. So we know this to start with: Facing a new young pro 
SF writer I know first of all what he is not driven by; he is out of the hands of one of the 
great corrupting drives, that for great wealth -- and I might add great fame and prestige 
as well, because we don't get those either. I know, when I meet a new pro writer, that he 
must in some sense truly love to write SF, at all costs, or he would be in other, greener 
pastures. 

But what is the positive motivation and personality that I feel, say, that Geo. 
Effinger, a new SF writer whom I met in August of last year, can be assumed to have? "I 


know where your head is," is what I think when I meet a man or woman who has just 
published his first SF piece. I know you don't want fame, power, the big best seller, 
fortune -- and therefore I know that you must want to or even need to write SF. One SF 
writer said to me one day, "I'd write it even if they paid nothing." Vanity to see your name 
in print? No, just an awareness that this is a chosen field, and chosen by him; he is not 
being forced to live out the ambitions of his thwarted parents and their aspirations that 
their son "amount to something," as, for example, by becoming a doctor or a lawyer -- all 
those good, classy, well-paying professions. His drive must be intrinsic; it is impossible 
to imagine one's mother saying, "I hope my son will grow up to be an SF writer." What is 
there in the SF writer, old pro like myself (twenty-two years of selling) or a new one after 
his initial sale, is a belief in the value of science fiction. Not necessarily a belief in his 
own ability to write the Great American SF Novel and be remembered forever -- novice 
pros are very shy and unpushy and humble -- but his belief in the significant meaning of 
his field. And he would not see this specific field as a high-value field unless he had read 
SF by other authors, previous authors, and had some sense of the nature of what SF is, 
can do, will be. 

If anything, assuming he is going to write and sell, he will be looked down on; 
people will say, "But are you doing any serious writing?," meaning, of course, that they 
do not share this mystique, this understanding and conviction of what SF is. He actually 
risks losing status rather than gaining it. Not, of course, by his colleagues, but by those 
people who think SF consists of George Pal budget films about the Anchovie That Ate 
New York, such as one sees on TV late at night; he knows that this is not what SF is, 
really. Even if he can't come through with massive talent, the attitude is still there: SF is 
an accretional field, built up layer by layer, year by year with constant reference to all 
that has come before. Unlike the Western story writer, you do not sell the same story 
twice, with new character names and a new title; each time you must produce something 
genuinely new. The SF reader -- all exceptions granted -- insists on one thing before all 
else: The new stories and novels must not duplicate those that came before, and woe 
unto the novice writer who does not know all the SF classics back to 1930; he must -and 
almost certainly did -- absorb them before he began writing himself. What he did, 
what I did back in 1951 when I sold my first story, was to go on to the next step in 
structure of fictionalized thought that is the growing public property of all SF readers and 
writers. In this sense SF must be avant-garde. And so it is. And the motivation I think 
that underlies many of us -- certainly it did me -- was to add one more bit of stone to a 
mosaic whose pattern, whose final gestalt, has not been explicated or frozen yet on the 
printed page. It is as if an SF writer is created when he reads a story by a previous writer 
and then says, "Next it could be that. . ." meaning this book, this story, this underlying 
theme should be carried on. Heinlein has written what he calls "future history," and much 
of SF is. And much of the motivation that drives the SF writer is the motivation to "make" 
history -- contribute what he sees, his perception of ". . . and then what happened?" to 
what all the rest of us have already done. It is a great colloquy among all of us, writers 
and fans and editors alike. Somewhere back in the past (I would say about 1900) this 
colloquy began, and voice after voice has joined in, little frogs and big in little puddles 
and big, but all croaking their sublime song. . . because they sense a continuity and the 
possibility, the opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing 
"future history." 

I've watched high school kids grow from an avid reading appreciation of SF to 


their first hesitant submission, their first sale -- they may disappear soon, or become only 
one of many, or become like Ted Sturgeon a unique and powerfully lovely contributor. . . 
in any case there is a tremendous motivation to make the statement, the written 
submission. "Nobody has thought yet of this," the SF writer says when an idea comes to 
him, but it is not merely an outre idea that he senses germinating in his head; it is an 
addition and a contribution to a vast, extant body. In the sciences proper, when 
experimental work reveals some law or principle previously unknown, the researcher 
knows he must publish his results; why determine that such-and-such is a universal 
scientific principle and then say nothing about it? This shows the affinity between the SF 
writer and the true scientist; having discovered something new, it is incumbent on him -morally 
incumbent -- to publish a little piece in print about it, whether that publishing will 
make him immortal or rich -- the ethic is the same. In fact it would be purposeless, for 
example, to determine in scrupulous laboratory conditions that mice fed on nothing but 
canned mackerel live twice as long as the control group and then, the experiment having 
been conducted and the results obtained, never mention it to anybody. So, I think, we in 
our field have that grand great drive of the true research scientist, to acquaint people 
with something heretofore overlooked. All other factors -- the need to earn a living, to 
impress people, to be "immortal" --those are secondary; spin-offs, so to speak, if they 
do occur. 

Probably what we see in an SF writer (I will use myself as an example) is a boy 
growing up and originally wanting to be a scientist (I wanted to be a paleontologist, for 
example). But science does not leave room for a factor vital to us: speculation. For 
example, an anthropologist finds a humanoid skull in Africa almost 3 million years old. 
He looks at it, subjects it to tests, and then in his article in Nature or Scientific American 
tells us what he actually found. But I can see myself there with Leakey finding those 
incredibly ancient humanoid skulls with an 800 cc brain skull, back at the 2.8-million-year 
striation, and as I see it, wild speculations that I cannot prove would come to my mind. If 
X, then Y. If true, humans lived that long ago -- and I would imagine a whole culture, and 
speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person's world might have been like. I do 
not mean his diet or how fast he could run or if he walked upright; this is legitimate for 
the hard sciences to deal with. What I see is what I suppose I would have to call a 
"fictional" environment that that skull tells me of. A story that that skull might wish to say. 
"Might" is the crucial word, because we don't know, we don't have the artifacts, and yet I 
see more than I hold in my hand. Each object is a clue, a key, to an entire world unlike 
our own -- past, present, or future, it is not this immediate world, and this skull tells me of 
this other world, and this I must dream up myself. I have passed out of the domain of 
true science. If I wish to write about that ("What if these ancient humanoids had 
developed a method of controlling their environment by" -- etc.) then I must write what 
we call science fiction. It is first of all the true scientific curiosity, in fact, true wondering, 
dreaming curiosity in general, that motivates us, plus a desire to fill in the missing pieces 
in the most startling or unusual way. To add to what is actually there, the concrete reality 
that can only say so much and no more, my own "glimpse" of another world. A world I 
will never see fully or even to a great extent, but toward which this one object has 
pointed. 

It is not, however, that the SF writer is a thwarted scientist who couldn't make it 
legitimately and so turned to fantasy fiction, to dreams; it is more that this person is 
impatient to see all the rest not visible in the actual skull, and inventive enough to spin 


such a myth, a tale about "that other world" that touches ours only here and there. We 
as SF writers see many objects again and again as clues to other universes, other 
societies. We sense the rest, and this sensing can't be separated from literary, artistic 
imagination. "This rock," the phrase goes, "could tell many stories, of battles fought 
here, of deeds done and now forgotten; if only it could talk." The SF writer senses that 
story, or many stories from the clues of tangible reality around him, and does the rest; he 
talks for the objects, the clues. He is driven to. He knows there is more, and he knows 
that he will not live long enough to see all the scientific data actually brought forth. . . 
they may never be. The writer, then, begins to sing about those battles and those deeds. 
He places them in the future only for convenience; it is the placing of the story mostly in 
an imaginary world, but bound by small actual clues to this world, that drives him into 
expression. It might be said that where Homer sang about Troy after those events, the 
SF writer wishes to sing about events ahead because he feels that this is really the only 
reasonable place where those events could occur. It is as if Homer wrote the Iliad before 
those events, and had he done so it would be authentic speculative or science fiction. 

This shows, I think, the affinity between the SF writer and the scientist as such: 
But his impatience, his inventiveness, his discovery that the pieces and bits around him 
(and they can be in our present actual world or in other SF) tell stories not yet told and 
that without him might never get told -- this is one facet characteristic of the SF writer's 
mind and shows why the term "science fiction" still lingers to describe what we do, even 
if we write about a purely religious society set not even in the future but in a parallel 
Earth. It is not that the stories are about science; it is that the writer is motivated along 
parallel lines motivating research scientists. But he is not content. He is stuck with a 
discontent; he must improve or change what he sees, not by going out and politically 
agitating but by looking deep into other possibilities and alternatives manufactured within 
his own head. He does not say, "We should pass laws regarding air pollution" and hence 
join ecology groups; his wish is the same -- he detests righteously what he sees of 
decay and corruption in our society as much as anyone -- but his manner of approaching 
the problem is acutely different. 

He will create, on the basis of the known data or plausible data, how it could all 
be better, or how it could all be worse. His story or novel is in a sense a protest, but not 
a political one; it is a protest against concrete reality in an unusual way. He wishes to 
sing, rather than chant and carry signs. He will sing to us of hells far worse than what we 
actually endure, or better worlds, or just worlds in which these elements are simply not 
present: worlds based on other premises. I would say, he is an introverted activist, not 
an extroverted one. It does not occur to him, if he sees the freeways becoming death 
traps, to petition the city council for changes in speed laws and so on -- he sees the 
dangers but, being an introvert, the idea of social action, of acting out publicly and 
politically, is not his natural response. He would look funny out there marching and 
chanting. He is self-conscious and shy. He will instead write down rather than act out. 

So I would say, the SF writer shares a little of the political mentality just as he 
does the scientific. Scientists improve things by staying in their labs; activists go out and 
petition. The SF writer glimpses totalities, some good, some bad, some merely bizarre, 
and he wants to bring these glimpses to our attention. Hence he is also a literary figure 
as well as a little of the politician and the scientist; he is all three and probably something 
more. But to speak of his work as escapist -- no view of SF, at least nowdays, could be 
less true. He is writing about reality with as much fervor and conviction as anyone could 


muster to get a bad zoning ordinance changed. This is his way, because he is none of 
the three types listed above but a fusion of all. Somewhere along the line he got the idea 
that words are things; they can exert force and accomplish desired ends. This he 
shares, with all writers, I suppose; but if you join this latter to his quasi-scientific basis 
and his quasi-political basis of personality structure, you can readily see that what he 
wishes to capture on paper, and his motivation, in toto are different from writers in other 
fields. They may wish to capture the lovely, the quaint -- freeze one block of a Bronx 
slum circa 1930 and the life of it for all future generations to read -- but the SF writer is 
not oriented toward freezing any one milieu except a vision -- one vision after another -that 
he prepared in his own head. There is no actual boyhood world, once extant but 
now only a memory, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of 
worlds, with no proclivity for the freezing of any one alone; for example, his own 
boyhood in a small town where there were nickel Cokes and so forth. . . he wishes to get 
down on paper all possibilities that seem important enough to him to be recorded and 
then at once communicate to others. 

"Flexibility" is the key word here; it is the creating of multiverses, rather than a 
universe, that fascinates and drives him. "What if. . ." is always his starting premise. Part 
scientist, part political activist, but with the conviction of the magic power of the written 
word, and his restlessness, his impatience -- he will spin one new world for you after the 
other, given a set of facts or even one sole datum to take off from. He wants to see 
possibilities, not actualities. But as I say, his possibilities are not escapist (although, 
again, much hack SF is escapist, particularly when tending toward power fantasies) 
because the source of them lies firmly rooted in reality. He is a dreamer with one eye 
open, always coldly appraising what is actually going on. And yet he thinks, "It doesn't 
have to be this way. Because what if we woke up one day and found that all the men 
were sterile except for. . ." and the scientist in him will bond him to possibilities that have 
validity for us, in contrast to stories about Hobbits and looking glasses. He is, as 
Santayana once said, "dreaming under the control of the object," which was 
Santayana's definition of our waking life: "dreaming under the control of the object," yes, 
but for the science fiction writer there is a capacity -- and this is to me the thrilling part -however 
powerful that immediate object is, he is able to speculate us out of its total grip; 
it still holds us, but not absolutely. The SF writer is able to dissolve the normal absolute 
quality that the objects (our actual environment, our daily routine) have; he has cut us 
loose enough to put us in a third space, neither the concrete nor the abstract, but 
something unique, something connected to both and hence relevent. So we do cut 
loose, but with enough ties still remaining never to forget that we do live in one specific 
society at one specific time, and no legitimate SF writer would want us to forget that, 
want us to drift away inside our heads and ignore the actual problems around us. It is 
just that he is saying, "Hey, you know it occurs to me that if by chance such-and-such 
were to happen, then. . ." and it is the then that is fictional because this particular event 
(Washington, D.C., washed away by a mysterious tidal wave, etc., or whatever premise 
you wish), this event has not happened, probably will not, and we are not being asked to 
believe either that it has or that it will. It is just that the daily tyranny of our immediate 
world, which we generally succumb to, becoming passive in the hands of and accepting 
as immutable, this is broken, this tyranny of concrete reality. 

Often SF readers and writers are accused of a sort of clinical syndrome, a reality-
evading one such as is found in schizophrenics. One pictures the disturbed adolescent 


boy in his room avidly reading "Spicy Science Fiction Horror Tales" and escaping into 
lurid fantasy as a way out of solving his and society's problems. But a primary tendency 
in the schizophrenic is that he is unable to think abstractly to such an extent that his 
mentational processes become involuntarily tied to immediate stimuli, to what is called 
concrete thinking. The production of great tales of other societies in the future on other 
planets does not pander to the incipient schizophrenic, and anyhow if I am wrong about 
this I'm sure TV is doing a better job in this area anyhow, this pandering. 

The authentic body of science fiction, by its truly reputable writers (and I believe 
most of us are), does not provide an alternative to facing reality because it deals, as I've 
said, with reality fundamentally and primarily, as opposed to the genre of fantasy, and 
the writers are not clinically disturbed either; I have met many, many of my colleagues 
over the years, and I find them genial, warm, friendly people who hate the isolation 
imposed on them by the tragically solitary act of having to go off and lock oneself into 
one's study for a year to do a novel, not allowing any interruptions. . . writing is a lonely 
profession, at least I have found it so, and this is what I hold against my work: not that it 
allows me to escape into the "fantasies" of my novels but that it cuts me off from wife, 
children, and friends. I resent that. We all do. I find that there is enough extroversion in 
SF writers to cause them to yearn, to strive -- and very successfully -- to relate to other 
people; they are not motivated by the wish to withdraw, but by the necessity of solitude 
involved in the mechanics of the work itself. They have, let me say, enough extroversion 
to seek out whenever possible their colleagues and fans, to lecture, to speak on the 
radio and TV, to be interviewed. . . but then they must go back into that lonely little office 
for a period of time that, not counting food breaks and sleep breaks, may run, for a good 
novel, two years. 

They resent this; they would love to sit and chat forever, and must force 
themselves back into their office or studio. They do not flee; they are forced that way, 
whereas, I think, the true scientist may be more introverted and might greet with real 
relief his withdrawal from human contact to do his work. This brings up one more point, 
crucial, I think, in determining what sort of person becomes an SF writer: He has a 
warmer heart than the scientist, and would like to play and chat and be close to others, 
and he resents this aspect of his work; he is torn within, and when he can, emerges from 
his studio to fraternize with whomever he can buttonhole. Probably, as I do, most SF 
writers, like most fiction writers in general, solve this by creating characters in their 
stories to keep them company during the long, lonely, isolated chore of work. I have a 
strong feeling, having met so many of my colleagues over the years, that there is almost 
universally among them a love of human beings and a concern for them, a desire for 
closeness that, in itself, might explain why the SF writer chose that field rather than one 
of the pure sciences. SF writers are not loners. Caught halfway between going out to 
petition versus retiring into solitude -- caught between the political activist and the pure 
scientist --they have or at least I have found SF a workable compromise: I can be with 
my characters when I write, I can love them and support their anguished hopes as I 
would my "actual" friends -- we do, in the final analysis, write about people, however 
idea-oriented our stories -- and yet I don't have to be manning the barricades, be out on 
the street waving a banner, where I really don't belong. 

I have seen real love shown among SF writers who came together at one of the 
many conventions -- a great authentic fondness for their colleagues, not as writers, but 
as close friends. I'm sure this isn't unique to SF, and yet even other kinds of writers do 


not seem to exhibit this extended family quality that we have -- they seem more 
competitive, more pitted against one another, hoping the new novel by their colleague 
will fail, will not turn out good. SF writers have none of that. We are a body, a corporate 
group working, as in the Byzantine days, on some great mosaic, upon which finally no 
individual name will be stamped; we are friends and we admire one another in a warm 
and personal way. We ratify one another and sense our identity as humans as being 
intimately connected with this fraternal spirit. There are few if any cold schizoid SF 
writers; when you meet a Ray Bradbury or a Ted Sturgeon or a Norman Spinrad or an A. 

E. van Vogt you find a warm person longing to know you, too; you are part of a family 
that goes back decades and into which we perpetually welcome others: There are no 
sterile, aseptic white smocks, no cruel or detached interactions among us. Writing SF 
requires a humanization of the person, or, put another way, I doubt if that person would 
want to write SF unless he had in him these empathic needs and qualities. Too timid to 
demonstrate, too warm to retreat to a sterile lab and experiment on objects or animals, 
too excited and impatient to allow all knowledge to be confined to the limits of absolute 
certitude -- we live in a world of what a radio SF show once called "possible maybes," 
and this world attracts persons who are not loners but are lonely; and between those two 
distinctions there is a crucial difference. 
"Michelson-Morley Experiment Reappraised" (1979) 

The failure of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in 1881, in which the 
absolute velocity of the Earth moving through luminiferous ether proved to be zero, gave 
rise to Einstein's Relativity Theory, which holds that the concept "absolute velocity" is 
meaningless. However, scientists at UCLA, using more sophisticated laser techniques, 
have suggested a more probable significance of the null result: that in fact the Earth 
does not move and that Copernicus was a crypto-Pythagorean determined to vindicate 
an ancient and discredited heliocentric solar system model. In a meeting of Southern 
California astronomers and astrophysicists it was proposed that (1) the geocentric solar 
system be restored as the proper model, and (2) that Copernicus be dug up and 
admonished. As a side issue, Einstein will be regarded with mild disfavor and some 
amusement, but scientists attending the meeting could not agree on the amount of 
amusement to be formally proposed. 

"Introduction" to Dr. Bloodmoney (1979, 1985) 

Well, I predicted wrong when I wrote Dr. Bloodmoney back in 1964. Events that I 
foresaw never came about, and as you read this novel you will see what I mean. But it is 
not the job, really, of science fiction to predict. Science fiction only seems to predict. It's 
like the aliens on Star Trek, all of whom speak English. A literary convention is involved, 
here. Nothing more. 

I am amused, however, to see what specifically I got wrong. Worst of all, I totally 


misread the future of the manned space program. But this only shows how rapidly 
history unfolds. In Dr. Bloodmoney I have one American circling the world forever. This 
is obvious nonsense; either there would be many Americans -- and many Russians, for 
that matter --or none at all. 

Of course, the major item that I got wrong is the End of the World. Back in 1964 I 
was expecting it anytime; I kept checking my watch. Horace Gold, who edited Galaxy 
magazine, once chided me for anticipating global wipe-out within the next week. That 
was back around 1954; I anticipated it by 1964. Well, such were the fears of the times. 
Right now we have other worries. Our problem seems to be paying our debts with 
incredibly inflated dollars, finding gas for our cars -- much more mundane worries. Less 
cosmic. 

Oddly, these are the sort of worries that assail the characters in Dr. Bloodmoney 
in their post-World War Three world. There are horses pulling cars. Eyeglasses are rare 
and treasured. A man who manufactures cigarettes is honored wherever he goes. Of 
supreme value is someone who can fix things. Society has reverted, but not to the brutal 
level that we might expect. Rather, it has become rural in nature. The vast cities are 
gone, and, in their place, a sort of countryside exists that is not awful at all. I must add, 
however, that in no sense does it resemble any world that we actually have. 

But then, of course, we haven't had World War Three. 

In my opinion, this is an extremely hopeful novel. It does not posit the end of 
human civilization as a result of the next war. People are still around and they are still 
coping. Those who survive, anyhow, are fairly lucky in their new lives. What is 
interesting is the subtle change in the relative power status of the survivors. Take Hoppy 
Harrington, who has no arms or legs. Before the bomb hits, Hoppy is marginal in terms 
of power. He is fortunate if he can get any kind of job at all. But in the postwar world this 
is not the case. Hoppy is elevated by stealthy increments until, at last, he is a menace to 
a man not even on the planet's surface; Hoppy has become a demigod, and a complex 
one at that. He is not really evil, in the usual sense. . . but here is an instance of the 
abuse of power: evil emanating from power per se. It is not so much that Hoppy is evil 
but that his power is evil. 

In the satellite, Walt Dangerfield is transformed from a man assisting the 
fragmented postwar society, giving it unity and strength, raising its morale, to a man 
desperate for help from it, a man who is becoming weaker day by day. He signifies 
isolation, which is the horror of the many down below: isolation and a loss of the objects 
and values that comprised their original world. As time passes, Walt Dangerfield must 
gain strength from those on the planet's surface, rather than giving strength to them. 
And into the vacuum created comes Hoppy Harrington, who epitomizes the monster in 
us: the person who is hungry. Not hungry for food but hungry for coercive control over 
others. This drive in Hoppy stems from a physical deprivation. It is compensation for 
what he lacked from birth. Hoppy is incomplete, and he will complete himself at the 
expense of the entire world; he will psychologically devour it. 

You will note in Dr. Bloodmoney an account of a test conducted in 1972 that turned out 
to be a catastrophe, and, of course, there was in fact no such test and no such 
catastrophe. But then, there was no such person as Dr. Bluthgeld. This is a work of 
fiction. And yet at a certain level it is not. The West Marin County area where much of 


the novel is set is an area that I knew well. When I wrote the novel I lived in that area. 
Many of the features that I describe are real. So a great deal of the veridical is blended 
in with the fiction. As do some of the characters, I searched for wild mushrooms in West 
Marin, and I found the varieties they find (and avoided the varieties they avoid). It is one 
of the most beautiful areas in the United States, and is called by the Sierra Club "The 
Island in Time." When I lived there in the late fifties and early sixties it was set apart from 
the rest of California and therefore seemed to me a natural locus for a postwar 
microcosm of society. Already, in fact, West Marin was a little world. When I read over 
Dr. Bloodmoney I discover, to my pleasure, that I have captured in words much of that 
little world that I so loved -- a little world from which I am now separated by time and 
distance. 

My favorite character in the novel is the TV salesman Stuart McConchie, who 
happens to be black. In 1964, when I wrote Dr. Bloodmoney, it was daring to have a 
major character be a black man. My God, how much change has taken place in these 
recent years! But what an excellent change, one we can be proud of. In my first novel, 
Solar Lottery, I had a black man as captain of a spaceship -- daring, indeed, for a novel 
published in 1955. Stuart is in my opinion the focus of the novel, and he appears first. It 
is through his eyes that we initially see Dr. Bluthgeld, which is to say, Dr. Bloodmoney. 
Stuart's reaction is simple; he is seeing a lunatic, and that is that. Bonny Keller, 
however, knowing Dr. Bluthgeld more intimately, holds a more complex view of the man. 
Frankly, I tend to see Bluthgeld as Stuart McConchie sees him. I am, so to speak, Stuart 
McConchie, and at one time I was a TV salesman at a store on Shattuck Avenue in 
Berkeley. Like Stuart, I used to sweep the sidewalk in front of the store in the early 
morning, noticing the cute girls on their way to work. So I do have to confess to an overly 
simple view of Doctor Bluthgeld: I hate him and I hate everything he stands for. He is the 
alien and the enemy. I cannot fathom his mind; I cannot understand his hates. It is not 
the Russians I fear; it is the Dr. Bluthgelds, the Dr. Bloodmoneys, in our own society that 
terrify me. I am sure that to the extent that they know me, or would know me, they hate 
me back and would do exactly to me what I would do to them. 

"And, sure enough as Stuart watched, leaning on his broom, the furtive first nut of 
the day sidled guiltily toward the psychiatrist's office." 

This is our initial glimpse of Dr. Bloodmoney: through the eyes of a man pushing 
a broom. I am with the man pushing the broom, here at the beginning of the novel and 
all the way to the end. Stuart McConchie is an astute man, and in seeing Dr. 
Bloodmoney he has experienced a moment of instant insight that Bonny Keller in her 
years of personal, intimate knowledge lacks. I admit to prejudice, here. I think the first 
response by the man pushing the broom can be trusted. Doctor Bloodmoney is sick, and 
sick in a way that is dangerous to the rest of us. And much of the evil in our world now 
emanates from such men, because such men do exist. 

So in writing Dr. Bloodmoney in 1964 I may have erred in many of my predictions, 
but upon rereading the novel recently I sensed a basic accuracy in it -- an accuracy 
about human beings and their power to survive. Not survive as beasts, either, but as 
genuine humans doing genuinely human things. There are no supermen in this novel. 
There are no heroic deeds. There are some very poor predictions on my part, I must 
admit; but about the people themselves and their strength and tenacity and vitality. . . 
there I think I foresaw accurately. Because, of course, I was not predicting; I was only 
describing what I saw around me, the men and women and children and animals, the life 


of this planet that has been, is, and will be, no matter what happens. 

I am proud of the people in this novel. And, as I say, I would like to number myself 
as one of them. I once pushed a broom on the sidewalk of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley 
and I felt the joy and sense of busy activity and industry that Stuart feels, the excitement, 
the sense of the future. 

And, as the novel depicts, despite the war -- the war that did not in fact happen -it 
is a good future. I would have enjoyed being there with them in their microcosm, their 
postwar West Marin world. 

"Introduction" to The Golden Man (1980) 

When I see these stories of mine, written over three decades, I think of the Lucky 
Dog Pet Store. There's a good reason for that. It has to do with an aspect of not just my 
life but with the lives of most freelance writers. It's called poverty. 

I laugh about it now, and even feel a little nostalgia, because in many ways those 
were the happiest goddamn days of my life, especially back in the early fifties, when my 
writing career began. But we were poor; in fact, we -- my wife, Kleo, and I -- were poor 
poor. We didn't enjoy it a bit. Poverty does not build character. That is a myth. But it 
does make you into a good bookkeeper; you count accurately and you count money, 
little money, again and again. Before you leave the house to grocery shop you know 
exactly what you can spend, and you know exactly what you are going to buy, because 
if you screw up you will not eat the next day and maybe not the day after that. 

So anyhow there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, in 
Berkeley, California, in the fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat. The reasons 
why I'm a freelance writer and living in poverty is (and I'm admitting this for the first time) 
that I am terrified of Authority Figures like bosses and cops and teachers; I want to be a 
freelance writer so I can be my own boss. It makes sense. I had quit my job managing a 
record department at a music store; all night every night I was writing short stories, both 
SF and mainstream. . . and selling the SF. I don't really enjoy the taste or texture of 
horsemeat; it's too sweet. . . but I also do enjoy not having to be behind a counter at 
exactly 9:00 A.M., wearing a suit and tie and saying, "Yes, ma'am, can I help you?" and 
so forth. . . . I enjoyed being thrown out of the University of California at Berkeley 
because I wouldn't take ROTC. . . boy, an Authority Figure in a uniform is the Authority 
Figure! -- and all of a sudden, as I hand over the thirty-five cents to the Lucky Dog Pet 
Store man, I find myself once more facing my personal nemesis. Out of the blue, I am 
once again confronted by an Authority Figure. There is no escape from your nemesis; I 
had forgotten that. 

The man says, "You're buying this horsemeat and you are eating it yourselves." 

He now stands nine feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds. He is glaring 
down at me. I am, in my mind, five years old again, and I have spilled glue on the floor in 
kindergarten. 

"Yes, sir," I admit. I want to tell him, Look: I stay up all night writing SF stories and 
I'm real poor but I know things will get better, and I have a wife I love, and a cat named 
Magnificat, and a little old house I'm buying at the rate of $25-a-month payments, which 


is all I can afford. But this man is interested in only one aspect of my desperate (but 
hopeful) life. I know what he is going to tell me. I have always known. The horsemeat 
they sell at the Lucky Dog Pet Store is only for animal consumption. But Kleo and I are 
eating it ourselves, and now we are before the judge; the Great Assize has come; I am 
caught in another Wrong Act. 

I half expect the man to say, "You have a bad attitude." 

That was my problem then and it's my problem now; I have a bad attitude. In a 
nutshell, I fear authority but at the same time I resent it -- the authority and my own fear 


- so I rebel. And writing SF is a way to rebel. I rebelled against ROTC at U.C. Berkeley 
and got expelled; in fact, told never to come back. I walked off my job at the record store 
one day and never came back. Later on I was to oppose the Vietnam War and get my 
files blown open and my papers gone through and stolen, as was written about in Rolling 
Stone. Everything I do is generated by my bad attitude, from riding the bus to fighting for 
my country. I even have a bad attitude toward publishers; I am always behind in meeting 
deadlines (I'm behind in this one, for instance). 
Yet -- SF is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers and bad 
attitudes -- an attitude of "Why?" or "How come?" or "Who says?" This gets sublimated 
into such themes as appear in my writing as "Is the universe real?" "Are we all really 
human, or are some of us just reflex machines?" I have a lot of anger in me. I always 
have had. Last week my doctor told me that my blood pressure is elevated again and 
there now seems to be a cardiac complication. I got mad. Death makes me mad. Human 
and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I 
mean it; I feel fury at him. I'd like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him 
that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn't sin and fall but was pushed -- which 
is bad enough -- but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is 
not. 

I have known all kinds of people (I turned fifty a while ago and I'm angry about 
that; I've lived a long time), and those were by and large good people. I model the 
characters in my novels and stories on them. Now and again one of these people dies, 
and that makes me mad -- really mad, as mad as I can get. "You took my cat," I want to 
say to God, "and then you took my girlfriend. What are you doing? Listen to me; listen! 
It's wrong what you're doing." 

Basically, I am not serene. I grew up in Berkeley and inherited from it the social 
consciousness that spread out over this country in the sixties and got rid of Nixon and 
ended the Vietnam War, plus a lot of other good things, the whole civil rights movement. 
Everyone in Berkeley gets mad at the drop of a hat. I used to get mad at the FBI agents 
who dropped by to visit with me week after week (Mr. George Smith and Mr. George 
Scruggs of the Red Squad), and I got mad at friends of mine who were members of the 
Communist Party; I got thrown out of the only meeting of the CP-USA I ever attended 
because I leaped to my feet and vigorously (i.e., angrily) argued against what they were 
saying. 

That was in the early fifties, and now here we are in the very late seventies and I 
am still mad. Right now I am furious because of my best friend, a girl named Doris, 
twenty-four years old. She has cancer. I am in love with someone who could die 
anytime, and it makes fury against God and the world race through me, elevating my 
blood pressure and stepping up my heartbeat. And so I write. I want to write about 
people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world 


we actually have because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. 
Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have 
never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read 
Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream best-selling writers. 
But you are reading SF and I am writing it for you. I want to show you, in my writing, 
what I love (my friends) and what I savagely hate (what happens to them). 

I have watched Doris suffer unspeakably, undergo torment in her fight against 
cancer to a degree that I cannot believe. One time I ran out of the apartment and up to a 
friend's place, literally ran. My doctor had told me that Doris wouldn't live much longer 
and I should say good-bye to her and tell her it was because she was dying. I tried to 
and couldn't and then I panicked and ran. At my friend's house we sat around and 
listened to weird records (I'm into weird music in general, both in classical and in rock; 
it's a comfort). He is a writer, too, a young SF writer named K. W. Jeter -- a good one. 
We just sat there and then I said aloud, really just pondering aloud, "The worst part of it 
is I'm beginning to lose my sense of humor about cancer." Then I realized what I'd said, 
and he realized, and we both collapsed into laughter. 

So I do get to laugh. Our situation, the human situation, is, in the final analysis, 
neither grim nor meaningful but funny. What else can you call it? The wisest people are 
the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I 
would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would 
not talk. Remember, Harpo could talk. He just wouldn't. Maybe there was nothing to say; 
everything has been said. Or maybe, had he spoken, he would have pointed out 
something too terrible, something we should not be aware of. I don't know. Maybe you 
can tell me. 

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and 
work. For instance, I have had the same agent for twenty-seven years and I've never 
met him because he is in New York and I'm in California. (I saw him once on TV, on the 
Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show, and my agent is one mean dude. He really plays hardball, 
which is what an agent is supposed to do.) I've met many other SF writers and become 
close friends with a number of them. For instance, I've known Harlan Ellison since 1954. 
Harlan hates my guts. When we were at the Metz Second Annual SF Festival last year, 
in France, see, Harlan tore into me; we were in the bar at the hotel, and all kinds of 
people, mostly French, were standing around. Harlan shredded me. It was fine; I loved 
it. It was sort of like a bad acid trip; you just have to kick back and enjoy; there is no 
alternative. 

But I love that little bastard. He is a person who really exists. Likewise Van Vogt 
and Ted Sturgeon and Roger Zelazny and, most of all, Norman Spinrad and Tom Disch, 
my two main men in all the world. The loneliness of the writing per se is offset by the 
fraternity of writers. Last year a dream of mine of almost forty years was realized: I met 
Robert Heinlein. It was his writing, and A. E. Van Vogt's, that got me interested in SF, 
and I consider Heinlein my spiritual father, even though our political ideologies are totally 
at variance. Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he 
could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was 
doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him -- one of the few true 
gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that 
is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't 
raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I 


dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very 
impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to 
the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when 
we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love. 

My friend Doris who has cancer used to be Norman Spinrad's girlfriend. Norman 
and I have been close for years; we've done a lot of insane things together. Norman and 
I both get hysterical and start raving. Norman has the worst temper of any living mortal. 
He knows it. Beethoven was the same way. I now have no temper at all, which is 
probably why my blood pressure is so high; I can't get any of my anger out of my 
system. I don't really know -- in the final analysis -- who I'm mad at. I really envy Norman 
his ability to get it out of his system. He is an excellent writer and an excellent friend. 
This is what I get from being an SF writer: not fame and fortune, but good friends. That's 
what makes it worth it to me. Wives come and go; girlfriends come and go; we SF 
writers stay together until we literally die. . . which I may do at any time (probably to my 
own secret relief). Meanwhile I am writing this "Introduction" to The Golden Man, 
rereading stories that span a thirty-year period of writing, thinking back, remembering 
the Lucky Dog Pet Store, my days in Berkeley, my political involvement and how The 
Man got on my ass because of it. . . . I still have a residual fear in me, but I do believe 
that the reign of police intrigue and terror is over in this country (for a time, anyhow). I 
now sleep okay. But there was a time when I sat up all night in fear, waiting for the 
knock on the door. I was finally asked to "come downtown," as they call it, and for hours 
the police interrogated me. I was even called in by OSI (Air Force Intelligence) and 
questioned by them; it had to do with terrorist activities in Marin County -- not terrorist 
activities by the authorities this time, but by black ex-cons from San Quentin. It turned 
out that the house behind mine was owned by a group of them. The police thought we 
were in league; they kept showing me photos of black guys and asking did I know them. 
At that point I wouldn't have been able to answer. That was a really scary day for little 
Phil. 

So if you thought writers live a bookish, cloistered life you are wrong, at least in 
my case. I was even in the street for a couple of years; the dope scene. Parts of that 
scene were funny and wonderful and other parts were hideous. I wrote about it in A 
Scanner Darkly, so I won't write about it here. The one good thing about my being in the 
street was that the people didn't know I was a well-known SF writer, or if they did, they 
didn't care. They just wanted to know what I had that they could rip off and sell. At the 
end of the two years everything I owned was gone -- literally, including my house. I flew 
to Canada as guest of honor at the Vancouver SF Convention, lectured at the University 
of B.C., and decided to stay there. The hell with the dope scene. I had temporarily 
stopped writing; it was a bad time for me. I had fallen in love with several unscrupulous 
street girls. . . . I drove an old Pontiac convertible modified with a four-barrel carb and 
wide tires, and no brakes, and we were always in trouble, always facing problems we 
couldn't handle. It wasn't until I left Canada and flew down here to Orange County that I 
got my head together and back to writing. I met a very straight girl and married her, and 
we had a little baby we call Christopher. He is now five. They left me a couple of years 
ago. Well, as Vonnegut says, so it goes. What else can you say? It's like the whole of 
reality: You either laugh or -- I guess fold and die. 

One thing I've found that I can do that I really enjoy is rereading my own writing, 
earlier stories and novels especially. It induces mental time travel, the same way certain 


songs you hear on the radio do (for instance, when I hear Don McLean sing "Vincent" I 
at once see a girl named Linda wearing a miniskirt and driving her yellow Camaro; we're 
on our way to an expensive restaurant and I am worrying if I'll be able to pay the bill and 
Linda is talking about how she is in love with an older SF writer and I imagine -- oh, vain 
folly! -- that she means me, but it turns out she means Norman Spinrad, whom I 
introduced her to); the whole thing returns, an eerie feeling that I'm sure you've 
experienced. People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, 
psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from 
the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true. So when I 
read my writing, like these stories in this collection, I take a trip through my own head 
and life, only it is my earlier head and my earlier life. I abreact, as the psychiatrists say. 
There's the dope theme. There's the philosophical theme, especially the vast 
epistemological doubts that began when I was briefly attending U.C. Berkeley. Friends 
who are dead are in my stories and novels. Names of streets! I even put my agent's 
address in one, as a character's address. (Harlan once put his own phone number in a 
story, which he was to regret later.) And of course, in my writing, there is the constant 
theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making 
my life into a coherency. 

You see, had I not become a writer I'd be somewhere in the music industry now, 
almost certainly the record industry. I remember back in the midsixties when I first heard 
Linda Ronstadt; she was a guest on Glen Campbell's TV show, and no one had ever 
heard of her. I went nuts listening to her and looking at her. I had been a buyer in retail 
records and it had been my job to spot new talent that was hot property, and, seeing and 
hearing Ronstadt, I knew I was hearing one of the great people in the business; I could 
see down the pipe of time into the future. Later, when she'd recorded a few records, 
none of them hits, all of which I faithfully bought, I calculated to the exact month when 
she'd make it big. I even wrote Capitol Records and told them; I said, the next record 
Ronstadt cuts will be the beginning of a career unparalleled in the record industry. Her 
next record was "Heart Like a Wheel." Capitol didn't answer my letter, but what the hell; I 
was right, and happy to be right. But, see, that's what I'd be into now, had I not gone into 
writing SF. My fantasy number that I run in my head is, I discover Linda Ronstadt, and 
am remembered as the scout for Capitol who signed her. I would have wanted that on 
my gravestone: 

HE DISCOVERED LINDA RONSTADT 
AND SIGNED HER UP! 


My friends are caustically and disdainfully amused by my fantasy life about discovering 
Ronstadt and Grace Slick and Streisand and so forth. I have a good stereo system (at 
least my cartridge and speakers are good) and I own a huge record collection, and every 
night from 11:00 P.M. to 5:00 A.M. I write while wearing my Stax electrostatic top-of-line 
headphones. It's my job and my vice mixed together. You can't hope for better than that: 
having your job and your sin commingled. There I am, writing away, and into my ears is 
pouring Bonnie Koloc and no one can hear it but me. The joker is, though, that there's 
no one but me here anyhow, all the wives and girlfriends having long since left. That's 
another of the ills of writing; because it is such a solitary occupation, and requires such 
long-term concentrated attention, it tends to drive your wife or girlfriend away, anyhow, 


whoever you're living with. It's probably the most painful price the writer pays. All I have 
to keep me company are two cats. Like my doper friends (ex-doper friends, since most 
of them are dead now) my cats don't know I'm a well-known writer, and, as with my 
doper friends, I prefer it that way. 

When I was in France, I had the interesting experience of being famous. I am the 
best-liked SF writer there, best of all in the entire whole complete world (I tell you that for 
what it's worth). I was Guest of Honor at the Metz Festival, which I mentioned, and I 
delivered a speech that, typically, made no sense whatever. Even the French couldn't 
understand it, despite a translation. Something goes haywire in my brain when I write 
speeches; I think I imagine I'm a reincarnation of Zoroaster bringing news of God. So I 
try to make as few speeches as possible. Call me up, offer me a lot of money to deliver 
a speech, and I'll give a tacky pretext to get out of doing it; I'll say anything, palpably a 
lie. But it was fantastic (in the sense of not real) to be in France and see all my books in 
expensive beautiful editions instead of little paperbacks with what Spinrad calls "peeled 
eyeball" covers. Owners of bookstores came to shake my hand. The Metz City Council 
had a dinner and a reception for us writers. Harlan was there, as I mentioned; so was 
Roger Zelazny and John Brunner and Harry Harrison and Robert Sheckley. I had never 
met Sheckley before; he is a gentle man. Brunner, like me, has gotten stout. We all had 
endless meals together; Brunner made sure everyone knew he spoke French. Harry 
Harrison sang the Fascist national anthem in Italian in a loud voice, which showed what 
he thought of prestige (Harry is the iconoclast of the known universe). Editors and 
publishers skulked everywhere, as well as the media. I got interviewed from eight in the 
morning until three-thirty the next morning, and, as always, I said things that will come 
back to haunt me. It was the best week of my life. I think that there at Metz I was really 
happy for the first time -- not because I was famous but because there was so much 
excitement in those people. The French get wildly excited about ordering from a menu; 
it's like the old political discussions we used to have back in Berkeley, only it's simply 
food involved. Which street to walk up involves ten French people gesticulating and 
yelling, and then running off in different directions. The French, like me and Spinrad, see 
the most improbable possibility in every situation, which is certainly why I am popular 
there. Take a number of possibilities, and the French and I will select the wildest. So I 
had come home at last. I could get hysterical among people acculturated to hysteria, 
people never able to make decisions or execute actions because of the drama in the 
very process of choosing. That's me: paralyzed by imagination. For me a flat tire on my 
car is (a) The End of the World; and (b) An Indication of Monsters (although I forget 
why). 

This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just 
possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if. . ." It's "My God; what if. . ." In 
frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming. Mr. Spock is the only one calm. 
This is why Spock has become a cult god to us; he calms our normal hysteria. He 
balances the proclivity of SF people to imagine the impossible. 

KIRK (frantically): Spock, the Enterprise is about to blow up! 

SPOCK (calmly): Negative, Captain; it's merely a faulty fuse. 

Spock is always right, even when he's wrong. It's the tone of voice, the supernatural 


reasonability; this is not a man like us; this is a god. God talks this way; every one of us 
senses it instinctively. That's why they have Leonard Nimoy narrating pseudo-science 
TV programs. Nimoy can make anything sound plausible. They can be in search of a 
lost button or the elephants' graveyard, and Nimoy will calm our doubts and fears. I 
would like him as a psychotherapist; I would rush in frantically, filled with my usual 
hysterical fears, and he would banish them. , 

PHIL (hysterically): Leonard, the sky is falling! 

NIMOY (calmly): Negative, Phil; it's merely a faulty fuse. 

And I'd feel okay and my blood pressure would drop and I could resume work on the 
novel I'm three years behind on vis-a-vis my deadline. 

In reading the stories included in this volume, you should bear in mind that most 
were written when SF 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?" We made no money; few publishers published SF 
(Ace Books was the only regular book publisher of SF); and really cruel abuse was 
inflicted on us. To select SF writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, 
most writers, let alone other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. 
The only non-SF writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, whom 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 to him for this charity. (Yes, that was what it was, then, to treat an SF writer with 
courtesy.) To get hold of a copy of my first published novel, Solar Lottery, I had to 
special-order it from the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, which specialized in the 
outre. 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 $90 a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library 
book, and when I wanted to read a magazine I had to go to the library because I could 
not afford to buy it, 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. My financial ordeal did not end in the fifties; as late as the 
midseventies I still could not pay my rent, nor afford to take Christopher to the doctor, 
nor own a car, nor have a phone. In the month that Christopher and his mother left me I 
earned $9, and that was just three years ago. Only the kindness of my agent, Scott 
Meredith, in loaning me money when I was broke got me through. In 1971, I actually had 
to beg friends for food. Now, look; I don't want sympathy; what I am trying to do is tell 
you that your crisis, your ordeal, assuming you have one, is not something that is going 
to be endless, and I want you to know that you will probably survive it through your 
courage and wits and sheer drive to live. I have seen uneducated street girls survive 
horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains had been 
burned out by drugs, men who still could think enough to be able to realize what had 
happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempts to weather that which cannot be 


weathered. As in Heine's poem "Atlas," this line: "I carry that which can't be carried." 
And the next line is, "And in my body my heart would like to break!" But this is not the 
sole constituent of life, and it is not the sole theme in fiction, mine or anyone else's, 
except perhaps for the nihilist French existentialists. Kabir, the fifteenth-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. 

If I had to come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies inside me, which 
expresses itself in so many subliminations, I would guess that probably what arouses my 
indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the force of entropy -there 
is no redemptive value of something that can't be understood, as far as I am 
concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything 
I've seen and done, and fashion it into a work that makes sense. I'm not sure I've been 
successful. First, I cannot falsify what I have seen. I see disorder and sorrow, and so I 
have to write about it; but I've seen bravery and humor, and so I put that in, too. But 
what does it all add up to? What is the vast overview that is going to impart sense into 
the entirety? 

What helps for me -- if help comes at all -- is to find the mustard seed of the funny 
at the core of the horrible and futile. I've been researching ponderous and solemn 
theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the 
Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be 
processed and secreted in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in 
the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I 
started on the article on Indian philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an eight-
volume learned reference set that I esteem. The time was 4:00 A.M.; I was exhausted -I 
have been working endlessly like this on this novel, doing this kind of research. And 
there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this: 

"The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not 
yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient. . . . The external world 
supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different 
only because there are different sorts of experiences 'of' them. Yet if the experiences are 
thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external 
objects. . . ." 

In other words, by applying Ockham's razor to the basic Epistemological question 
of "What is reality?" the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external 
world is a "superfluous hypothesis"; that is, it violates the Principle of Parsimony -- which 
is the principle underlying all Western science. Thus the external world is abolished, and 
we can go about more important business -- whatever that might be. 

That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push 
philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate 
of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that 
the self doesn't exist, either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as 
ultimately funny. Kabir, whom I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; 
and he wrote about the sound of "the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks." I would 
like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could my anger and fear, and my high blood 
pressure, would go away. 


"Book Review" of The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) 

This is MIT Press's first effort to cope with the reality of science fiction. Although 
less than 300 pages, it weighs almost a pound and a half, compared to Ballantine 
Books' edition of Ted Sturgeon's classic More Than Human, which weighs exactly a 
quarter pound. Therefore Warrick's book must be six times as important as Sturgeon's. 
Her study, Warrick tells us, "is based on 225 stories and novels written between 1930 
and 1977." She states her conclusions up front in her introduction: "This study 
demonstrates that much of the (science) fiction written since World War II is reactionary 
in its attitude toward computers and artificial intelligence. It is often ill informed about 
information theory and computer technology and lags behind present developments 
instead of anticipating the future." She then goes on to present a fully developed 
aesthetic approach by which to judge SF (here she does quite well). The three SF 
writers whom she deals with most fully are Asimov, Lem, and myself. I get the 
impression she considers the three of us important, and here lies my quarrel with her. As 
far as I am concerned the concept "important" is of no use in judging SF. I could quarrel 
with the vague style of the book (for instance, I cite "... a prison of false illusions" as 
being not only a double negative but also verbose, and "A shower of bizarre metaphors 
trails from Dick's imagination as it journeys through the patterns of possibilities in the 
evolving reciprocal relationship between man and his artificial constructs" and "He 
throws torches of possibility into his dark future, and their flashes of light reveal a 
survival," etc., as boring and sophomoric and a waste of the reader's time). But I would 
prefer to quarrel with the purpose of the book instead, and start out by saying that it has 
no purpose. It is a parasitic thing, and its very existence suggests that SF as a field is 
beginning to die, because only an entity waning and failing attracts such suckers as the 
academic sports of this sort. As Jesus says in Matthew 24:28: "Wherever the corpse is, 
there will the vultures gather." 

The main complaint expressed repeatedly by Warrick in this book is SF's 
tendency to emit warnings about the dangers of technology -- dangers to individual 
humans and human society generally. Well, it is just too bad, but it is a fact: Science 
fiction writers worry about trends, worry about possible dystopias growing out of the 
present, and this is a cardinal value of the field. Admittedly, there was a time when 
science and progress were assumed to be identical. If we worry now we have cause to. 
This is not due to ignorance of the state of the world and the breakthroughs in science. 
Warrick devotes an entire chapter to my stories and novels that deal with robots, and 
she quotes me -- fairly -- as saying: "The greatest change growing across our world 
these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reification, and at the same 
time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical." Am I not to be allowed to view 
this with alarm? Who will legislate what SF writers will be allowed to write and to worry 
about? This book praises me by terming my writing important but it arrogates to itself the 
role of arbiter of viewpoint and proper concern. Viewpoint and concern in SF are a 
transaction among author, editor, and reader, to which the critic is a spectator. If the 
reader enjoys what I write, there you have it. If he does not enjoy it, there you have 
nothing. "Important" is a rule from another game that I am not playing. I did not begin to 
read or write SF for reasons dealing with importance. When I sat in high school 


geometry class secretly reading a copy of Astounding hidden within a textbook I was not 
seeking importance. I was seeking, probably, intellectual excitement. Mental stimulation. 

If SF becomes annexed to the academic world it will buy into its own death, 
despite what Delany, Russ, Lem, and Le Guin may think; as with a single mind they woo 
academic approval as if it were some ultimate court. However, I look to my left and see a 
coverless, tattered copy of the July 1952 Planet Stories -- my first published story 
appeared in it, and I received a lot of kidding from serious-minded people for selling to 
such a market and for reading such a "trashy" magazine, to use Lem's favorite term of 
derision. Frankly I would prefer the derision to the new praise; SF is now palatable to the 
educated, the lofty, and I say, Let me out. Professor Warrick's pound-and-a-half book 
with its expensive binding, paper, and dust jacket staggers you with its physical 
impression, but it has no soul and it will take our soul in what really seems to me to be 
brutal greed. Let us alone, Dr. Warrick; let us read our paperback novels with their 
peeled eyeball covers. Don't dignify us. Our power to stimulate human imagination and 
to delight is intrinsic to us already. Quite frankly, we were doing fine before you came 
along. 

"My Definition of Science Fiction" (1981) 

I will define science fiction, first, by saying what SF is not. It cannot be defined as 
"a story (or novel or play) set in the future," since there exists such a thing as space 
adventure, which is set in the future but is not SF. It is just that: adventure, fights, and 
wars in the future in space involving superadvanced technology. Why, then, is it not 
science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. 
However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. 
Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate-world story or novel. 
So if we separate SF from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what 
then do we have that can be called SF? We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: 
It is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society -- that is, 
our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own 
in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate-world story or novel. It is our 
world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world 
transformed into that which it is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at 
least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not 
occur in our society -- or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent 
idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not 
merely a trivial or a bizarre one -- this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual 
dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the 
author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in 
the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world 
that he is reading about. 

Now, to separate science fiction from fantasy. This is impossible to do, and a 
moment's thought will show why. Take Psionics; take mutants such as we find in Ted 
Sturgeon's wonderful More Than Human. If the reader believes that such mutants could 


exist, then he will view Sturgeon's novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that 
such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then 
he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as 
impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under 
the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and 
what is not [cannot be] objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of 
the reader. 

Now to define good science fiction. The conceptual dislocation -- the new idea, in 
other words -- must be truly new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be 
intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his mind and wake it up to the 
possibility of something he had not up to then thought of. Thus "good science fiction" is a 
value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, 
objectively, as good science fiction. 

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best 
when he said that the true protagonist of an SF story or novel is an idea and not a 
person. If it is good SF the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of 
all, it sets off a chain reaction of ramification ideas in the mind of the reader; it so to 
speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create. 
Thus SF is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by and large does 
not do. We who read SF (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because 
we love to experience this chain reaction of ideas being set off in our mind by something 
we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately 
winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create -- and 
enjoy doing it: Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of 
discovery of newness. 

"Predictions" by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981) 

1983 
*The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile 
attack against that country impossible. At the same time the USSR will deploy this 
weapon as a satellite killer. The United States will turn, then, to nerve gas. 


1984 
*The United States will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, 
will serve as a fuel source, eliminating the need for oil. 


1985 
*By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the USSR or in 
the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants. 


1986 
*Such satellites as HEA0-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high-energy phenomena in 
the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when 



it has reached its expansion limit. 


1989 
*The United States and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as 
a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to 
the huge amount of information coming into existence. 


1993 
*An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the USSR, thus reducing our 
interest in locating life forms on other planets. 


1995 
*Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public 
from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing 
experts. 


1997 
*The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and on Mars. 
Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under 
non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments. 


1998 
'The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of 
light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American 
ship. 


2000 


* An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of 
Earth but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact. 
2010 
*Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will 
attempt to alter the past with scientific information. 

"Universe Makers. . . and Breakers" (1981) 

[The opening biographical note 
was written by Dick himself.] 

Philip K. Dick is the author of 48 books and 150 stories, with four movies currently 
in the works. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the 
Graouilly d'Or Award of France, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Playboy 
Award for Best New Contributor of Fiction for 1980 [for the story "Frozen Journey," later 
retitled "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon"]. This February, Bantam Books releases his new 


novel Valis, and in April Simon & Schuster its sequel The Divine Invasion. The London 
Times wrote of him, "One of the most original practitioners now writing any kind of 
fiction, Philip K. Dick makes most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a 
cul-de-sac." He lives in Santa Ana, Orange County, California, and has been a SelecTV 
subscriber for over two years. 

Science fiction films have put one over on us. Like the veil of maya, your special 
effects department down there in Hollywood can now simulate anything the mind can 
imagine. . . and you thought it was all real. No, they really don't blow up planets. It's true; 
they make it up. And a great deal of skillful imagining is going on these days. Not 
content with destroying whole planets, inventive scriptwriters and directors will soon be 
bringing you peculiar new universes with inhabitants to match. Watch for it. What you 
thought an alien looked like. . . well, it is going to look a lot worse. What burst through 
Kane's shirt in Alien is not the end of the line of monsters but more the beginning. 

It takes megabucks to match the imaginations behind sci-fi films, and that money 
exists because the profits are there. Not for the story line of the film; that isn't what 
Hollywood goes for, now that Hitchcock has left us. Why do you need a story line if your 
special effects department can simulate anything? Graphic, visual impact has replaced 
story. Authors of science-fiction novels know this and grumble; what they wrote is not 
what you get when the film is finished. But this is as it should be. We are seeing a story, 
not being told it. 

Ridley Scott, who directed Alien and who now intends to bring into existence a 
$15 million film based on my novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, confessed to 
an interviewer from Omni magazine that he "found the novel too difficult to read," despite 
the fact that the novel appeared as a mass-circulation paperback. On the other hand I 
was able rather easily to read the screenplay (it will be called Blade Runner). It was 
terrific. It bore no relation to the book. Oddly, in some ways it was better. (I had a hell of 
a time getting my hands on the screenplay. No one involved in the Blade Runner project 
has ever spoken to me. But that's okay; I haven't spoken to them.) What my story will 
become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, 
general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch. Makes my book seem dull by 
comparison. 

Still, you wouldn't want to see my novel on the screen because it is full of people 
conversing, plus the personal problems of the protagonist. These matters don't translate 
to the screen. And why translate them, since a novel is a story in words, whereas a 
movie is an event that moves? They're not called movies for nothing. I have no 
complaints. 

Sometimes we sci-fi writers tell ourselves that the recent mass excitement over 
our wares is due to the successes in the actual space program, all those manned and 
unmanned probes, all those pictures sent back of moons no one knew existed, not to 
mention rings that are braided together in an affront to known laws of physics. But this 
isn't the case. The real reason for the wild financial successes of recent sci-fi films is: 
Human imagination takes a quantum-leap breakthrough by the special effects people; 
films such as Close Encounters and Alien and 2001 would be just terrific, just as awe-
inspiring and wonderful if we were still driving Model A Fords -- perhaps even more so. 

The fact is, spaceships no longer dangle on strings, no longer fizz, hesitate, or 
wobble past you, as in the old Flash Gordon serials. The monsters are no longer inflated 


rubber toys haltingly mimicking what the average ten-year-old could dream up. There is 
great sophistication at the dream factory these days. If I as an author can think it up, 
they can build it in such a way as to scare or amaze you, and in all cases convince you. 
And this is why, really, sci-fi films work now, in contrast to the old days, when kids at 
Saturday afternoon matinees hooted and giggled at Lon Chaney, Jr., emerging from a 
fake swamp to inflict the mummy's curse on yet another idiotic lady. 

As a writer, though, I'd sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just special 
effects of my ideas, used. For all its dazzling graphic impact, Alien (to take one example) 
had nothing new to bring us in the way of concepts that awaken the mind rather than the 
senses. A monster is a monster, and a spaceship is a spaceship. Star Trek, years ago, 
delved more into provocative ideas than most big-budget sci-fi films today, and some of 
the finest authors in the science-fiction field wrote those hour TV episodes. I'm getting a 
little tired of people turning out to be robots, harmless-looking life forms evolving into 
stupendous but predictable space squids, and, most of all, World War Two's Battle of 
Midway refought in outer space. But I must admit that the eerie, mystical, almost 
religious subtheme in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back enchanted me. Now and 
then the sense of wonder is there. Okay, if they would just stop blowing up the orbiting 
space station at the end -- but it looks so nice, that acid-trip color-burst display. This is 
the great written rule: Sci-fi films end not with a whimper but a bang. And maybe that's 
as it should be, in the best of all visual galaxies. 

"Headnote" for "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1981) 

The idea I wanted to get down on paper had to do with the definition of "human." 
The dramatic way I trapped the idea was to present ourselves, the literal humans, and 
then an alien life form that exhibits the deeper traits that I associate with humanity: not a 
biped with an enlarged cortex -- a forked radish that thinks, to paraphrase the old saying 
-- but an organism that is human in terms of its soul. 

I'm sorry if the word "soul" offends you, but I can think of no other term. Certainly, 
when I wrote the story "Beyond Lies the Wub" back in my youth in politically active 
Berkeley, I myself would never have thought of the crucial ingredient in the wub being a 
soul; I was a fireball radical and atheist, and religion was totally foreign to me. However, 
even in those days (I was about twenty-two years old) I was casting about in an effort to 
contrast the truly human from what I was later to call the "android or reflex machine" that 
looks human but is not -- the subject of the speech I gave in Vancouver in 1972 ["The 
Android and the Human," included herein] -- twenty years after "Beyond Lies the Wub" 
was published. The germ of the idea behind the speech lies in this, my first published 
story. It has to do with empathy, or, as it was called in earlier times, caritas or agape. 

In this story, empathy (on the part of the wub, who looks like a big pig and has the 
feelings of a man) becomes an actual weapon for survival. Empathy is defined as the 
ability to put yourself in someone else's place. The wub does this even better than we 
ordinarily suppose could be done: Its spiritual capacity is its literal salvation. The wub 
was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now. On the other hand, Captain 
Franco (the name is deliberately based on General Franco of Spain, which is my 


concession in the story to political considerations) looks on other creatures in terms of 
sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for this total failure of 
empathy. So I show empathy possessing a survival value; in terms of interspecies 
competition, empathy gives you the edge. Not a bad idea for a very early story by a very 
young person! 

I liked the blurbs that Planet Stories printed for "Beyond Lies the Wub." On the 
title page of the magazine they wrote: 

Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools, proclaimed the slovenly wub, after death. 

And ahead of the story proper they wrote: 

The slovenly wub might well have said: Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools. 

Reader reaction to the story was excellent, and Jack O'Sullivan, editor of Planet, wrote 
to tell me that in his opinion it was a very fine little story -- whereupon he paid me 
something like $15. It was my introduction to pulp payment rates. 

Just a week ago while going through my closet I came across an ancient pulp 
magazine with ragged edges, its cover missing, its pages yellow. . . . Wondering what it 
was, I picked it up -- and found that this ancient remnant, this artifact from another 
epoch, was indeed the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories with my first published story in 
it. Profound emotions touched me as I gazed down at the illustration for "Wub"; it is a 
superb little illo [illustration], done by Vestal, and under it is written, " 'The Wub, sir,' 
Peterson said. 'It spoke!' " Well, here we are in the eighties, twenty-eight years later, and 
the gentle wub still speaks. May he always speak. . . and may other humans always 
listen. 

Part Three 
Works Related to The Man in the High Castle and Its Proposed 
Sequel 

Readers should consult the "Introduction" to this volume for a discussion of the 
Dick novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award for Best 
Science-Fiction Novel the following year. 

"Naziism and the High Castle" was first published in the science-fiction fanzine 
Niekas in September 1964. It was written in response to a politically charged review of 
High Castle in an earlier issue of Niekas by fellow SF writer (and friend) Poul Anderson. 
It was reprinted in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, No. 14 (June 1987). As the 
essay raises a number of unusually important factual issues, it is essential to note that 
the assertion by Dick that "many" Jewish refugees who lived, during World War Two, 
under Japanese rule in the Far East "set up Hitler organizations" and performed the Nazi 
salute is utterly unsubstantiated by the numerous scholarly studies that I have consulted. 
Dick's own source for this assertion is unknown. 

Both the "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974) and the two 


chapters (1964) of the proposed sequel to High Castle are published here for the first 
time. The quality of the two chapters is remarkable; see the "Introduction" for a 
discussion of the factors that led Dick to abandon this project. One historical clarification 
is in order: In the first chapter, reference is made to the suicide of Field Marshal Rommel 
by shooting. In fact, he poisoned himself. It should also be noted that an audiotape 
cassette released as PKDS Newsletter, Nos. 9-10 (January 1986) includes, as one of its 
sides, notes dictated by Dick (whose arm was in a splint due to a shoulder injury, which 
precluded him from his usual typing) on this proposed novel. The tape describes one 
scene in which Hawthorne Abendsen is brutally interrogated by the Nazis as to the truth 
of the Nebenwelt (or alternate universe) in which the Allies, not the Nazis, were 
triumphant. But Abendsen cannot provide them with the truth -- he does not know. The 
secret is ever elusive. 

"Naziism and The High Castle" (1964) 

Many moon have passed since white man (i.e., Poul Anderson) review my book 
Man in the High Castle, and fen [sic; perhaps "fan" intended] (e.g., too many to note, 
with, however, one exception, a certain John Boardman) have commented, not on the 
book nor review per se, but on Naziism -- which is right and proper, because that is the 
true topic, far more so than any novel or any review, and only proves that I am right: We 
are still very much afraid, still rightly so very much disturbed, and, as Harry Warner so 
correctly said, ". . . we might identify with the war guilt of the Germans because they're 
so similar to us. . . ." 

However, although these comments, etc., took place back in March, I have just 
now seen them, and would also like to comment. 

John Boardman calls Dr. Friedrich Foerster "the greatest modern critic of 
Germany." There is no one "greatest modern critic," etc., of anything; this is just a way of 
saying that you believe your source, and it is right that you should believe your source; 
however, I will dispute his uniqueness, or any claim to his Platonic Ideal-type perfection 
as a sole and utter source. Even though, as a matter of fact, I agree with the quoted 
passage from him (v. John Boardman's comments March '64 Niekas). In fact it is just 
this sort of thinking that worries me (however, it is early in the morning, I have not had 
breakfast yet, so everything worries me; let it go). Anyhow, we just cannot say for sure if 
there are "two Germanics" in the sense of two traditions of thought, or that Naziism is 
the absolute culmination, the logical fulfillment, of all that is German; we don't know; 
please, let's admit our ignorance. We know what they did, we know what their stated 
ideologies were. . . but we do not actually know why, in the deepest sense, they -- i.e., 
the Nazis -- did it. Truly. I have talked to some of them. All they knew was that they were 
afraid -- afraid as we are, but not afraid of the same things: They were afraid of us, of the 
U.K., of Russia (which we are, too, now), and -- most of all, of the Jews, which we are 
not, and which we cannot comprehend; i.e., this fear. To us, a Jew is, for example, a 
nice tall guy with a glass in his hand next to us at a party. To them -- well, there the 
curtain falls. But a Nazi friend of mine, living in the United States after the war, started to 
enter an apartment with me, and I said, "By the way, this fellow who lives here is named 


Bob Goldstein," and my Nazi friend actually paled and blanched (i.e., drew back); he 
was literally afraid to go into the apartment -- and, in addition, he felt somatic, horrible 
aversion. Why? Ask Hannah Arendt, whom I regard as the "greatest modern critic of 
Germany," a Jew herself. I feel even she, raised among them, does not know. It is 
subrational; it is psychological, not logical. Why do some people fear cats or streetcars 
or redheaded goats? They themselves do not know. Phobia is phobia; it springs, as 
Freud and Jung and H. S. Sullivan showed, from depths of the self unknown to the self. 

Ipse dixit. 

Please forgive me if I ramble, but you see: I feel that simple, clear "answers" to 
this question ("Why the Nazis did what they did, and will we do it, and are we also 
guilty?") defy us; they cannot be had. Are we guilty of what the mad, subrational 
"planners" in Washington, D.C., are doing right now? I don't know. Was some old village 
German lady in 1939 "guilty" of a decision at Eichmann's bureau in Berlin? There are a 
few established facts, however, that we should remember. (1) When Himmler asked for 
and got the chance to witness an execution of innocent, harmless Jewish people (by 
firing squad), he had a convulsion of horror; he fainted, fell to the floor, rolled in a spasm 
of anguish; his aides had to drag him to his feet; and, there and then, Himmler decreed 
that no more Jews "were to be shot, but that some merciful method, painless and 
instant" had to be found. Remember, mark, this. So even this unman, this thing, reified 
into the top ranks of Nazi officialdom, had "feelings." (Hitler would neither have cared to 
watch, and if he had, he would not have had any emotional, ethical reaction; mark that, 
too.) Also, the Wermark Soldaten (the average German soldier) hated the Schwarzers, 
the SS. . . knew them as murderers. Mark that. German citizens poked bread into the 
sealed cattle cars carrying Jews to their death through the Reich; read that and ponder. 
Remarque records a German playing the theme from Beethoven's Fidelio that depicts 
the prisoners -- unjustly held by a tyranny -- as they are at last, for a moment, let up to 
see the light -- playing this as a team of Jewish concentration camp victims are led down 
the street past his house. Even German whores came to the walls of the death camps, 
hoping "to do something for" those within. In other words, good (and I will not put quotes 
around that word) impulses broke out constantly among average Germans as and when 
they became aware of what was being done to the Jews; many, admittedly, spat on, 
kicked, jeered at, Jews being hauled off. . . but not all. "Die Stille im Lande" [the quiet in 
the land] the Nazis called these Germans who did not approve of the racial policies; 
these Germans knew that if they showed themselves they, too, would be killed. Mark 
this: The first inhabitants of the concentration camps were non-Jewish Germans. And it 
did mean death, during the war, for a German citizen to show any dissent from official 
policy; a German woman, for example, was imprisoned because the newspaper with 
which she lined her garbage pail had on it a photo of Hitler; this was decreed by the 
court (the so-called Reichs Gericht) a "crime against the state." They made it stick! 

Yet, the German people, or a good part of them, better than half, voted, legally 
voted, Hitler into power, and knowing his racial views. Read Goebbels' early diaries; the 
Partei had the support of the working class --not the bourgeoisie. Mark that, too: The 
working class swung from supporting the Communists and the moderate socialists to the 
Nazis. Why? Well, I can hazard a guess. The Nazis, like the big city political bosses who 
used to run Chicago and New York and Boston, were always "open," always there and 
ready to listen, to help, to dole out food and support. . . and the Germans were starving, 
dying, being evicted, being deprived; it was the Depression, remember, and the people, 


as our people, were desperate. One of our favorite folk singers of today in those days 
(late 30s) not only sang against our support of the U.K. and defense plant activity but 
drawlingly spoke of being listed as a "Japanese spy"; in other words, this "now liberal, 
one of us" great folk singer -- his initials are P.S. -- was for Nazi Germany -- because of 
the German-Russian Pact. World Communism and Naziism were cooperating, for a 
time; the Nazis were not "rightists"; they were coleftists -- at least until the Nazi tanks 
entered the Russian-controlled half of ex-Poland. 

In his comments in Niekas George H. Wells speaks of "Jewish nationalists," and 
that they "were overlooked." This is a point, too; at the time of the rise of anti-Jewish 
ideology among non-Jewish-Germans, the Jewish-Germans were beginning, in great 
part, to think -- as not Germans or even Europeans, but as nationalists of the soon-tobe-
reborn national state of Israel. (Moses Mendelssohn pleaded with the people not to 
accept this, but to "come out and be part of the European community"; generally, he 
failed.) So: We saw Jews, in Germany, arrive at the same idea as the pre-Nazi "racists," 
such as Wagner, and it always seems that Richard Wagner is the goat in this; he 
invented the idea that Jews were aliens, hostile to Germany. Catcrap. A thorough study 
of Wagner's ideas shows that he broke with Nietzsche in the end, saw a redemption of 
Germany (i.e., of man per se) in Christian love, not in military bombast (vide Parsifal). So 
even among the famous pre-Nazi theoreticians we don't find the uniformity of outlook; 
what we do find, however, is the Englishmen Stuart House Chamberlain, and Carl 
Rhodes. . . and of course Nietzsche; but we find English madmen-thinkers right at the 
"heart of darkness," so to speak. Teaching the idea, as Hannah Arendt says, of a small, 
worldwide elite of Nordics who will run things: a top caste who will tell the "darkies," i.e., 
the rest of us, where to go. . . and "where to go" may be into the false shower baths that 
are really cyanide gas chambers. Yes, Harry Warner, writing in Niekas, is right: We 
squirm and we remember because it is not "them" but "us" who thought those awful 
thoughts, and hence instigated those awful deeds; and the "us" includes the Jewish 
nationalist fanatics, some of whom live today in Israel, who invade schools, break up 
grammar school class meetings with their quasi-military (I think the form is paramilitary) 
thugs. . . because the teacher of the class is not racially "correct." In this case, however, 
not sufficiently Jewish, rather than sufficiently German. 

The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs, supported -i.
e., kept from starving -- by the Quakers, are the greatest single lot of displaced persons 
on earth today. And don't let anyone tell you that those Arabs (i.e., non-Jews and hence 
aliens, although their people had lived there for two thousand years) wanted to leave. 
They were terrorized into leaving, and they cannot return. So the victims of World War 
Two have become the arrogant nationalists, ready to go to war (vide the Suez crisis) 
with their neighbors as soon as assured of adequate military support (and again it is 
Britain who gives it, Britain and France). 

This is all dreadful. In the Jewish refugee settlements in the Far East under the 
Japanese during World War Two, many Jews set up Hitler organizations, including the 
Nazi (or Roman, if you prefer) salute. 

We like to think of the victims of tyranny and cruelty as innocent (e.g., 
Chessman). But often the victim is blood-stained, too; i.e., he has participated actively in 
the situation that has at last claimed his life. Many Jews today won't ride in a VW, and 
some won't even listen to the music of Beethoven; is this not as neurotic and "sick" as 
was the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by both 


Germans and Jewish-Germans? Personally, I enjoy telling fanatical nationalistic, blood-
oriented Jewish friends a fact they generally don't know: Many of the medieval German 
knight-poets, the minnesingers, were -- Jewish. 

So, Dr. Friedrich Foerster, "the greatest modern critic of Germany" to the 
contrary, there are now, have always been, at least two, and probably three, seven, nine 
Germanics; i.e., worldviews held by Germans. J. S. Bach considered himself a Pole (his 
monarch was under fief to a Polish king.) But we call Bach a German because he spoke 
German. Tony Boucher speaks German, and perfectly; is he, therefore, a German, 
hence a Nazi? The German Jews spoke German. . . and remember, a Jewish violinist's 
hand was broken by a Zionist fanatic swinging a lead pipe because that violinist dared to 
play a Richard Strauss piece in concert in Israel. . . . Is this not the Brown Shirts of the 
thirties once more, or is it not? 

When a Jewish fanatic friend of mine calls me a "gentile" I simply say, "Call me a 
goy and let it go at that." Because, if I am a "gentile," then two thousand years of 
evolution in human thought has been abandoned. 

And if he won't ride in my VW -- which was probably made in New York, not 
Germany, and was certainly, for sure, sold me by a Jewish person, Leon Felton of San 
Rafael -- then I will not allow him to eat a bagel in my presence. (I am, of course, joking; 
I am trying to show this: That we can no more hold a people responsible than we can 
hold any other mythical, semantic, nonactual entity responsible; German1 is not 
German2 and German2 is not German3, and so forth. Just as, in this country, you and I 
did not bomb those little Negro schoolchildren in that church Sunday school. . . you 
know goddamn well we did not, and if we, you and I, could catch the white bastards -- or 
rather just plain bastards -- who did it, we would work just as much and quick vengeance 
on them as any Negro mob would or could.) 

I am not a "white man." My German friends are not "Germans," nor my Jewish 
friends "Jews." I am a nominalist. To me, there are only individual entities, not group 
entities such as race, blood, people, etc. For example, I am an Anglo-Catholic; yet my 
views differ from those of my vicar, and his do -- enormously -- from the bishop of the 
diocese -- whose views I happen to agree with, Bishop Pike. And so forth. 

I will not walk out of a room when a German enters any more than I would have 
walked out of a room when a Jew entered. Nor will I allow myself to be a "gentile" -- i.e., 
a member of a race -- to my Jewish friends. If they don't like me, let them hit me, as an 
individual, one right in the eye; let's see them hit a race -- as the Nazis tried to do -- one 
right in the eye. It won't work; the Nazis failed: Israel exists, and Jews exist. And -- let us 
face it: Germany exists. Let's live in the present and for the future, not dwelling 
neurotically on the outrages of the past. Ludwig von Beethoven did not light the fires at 
Dachau. Leonard Bernstein did not hit that Jewish violinist on the hand with a piece of 
lead pipe. Okay? And salve, as the Romans used to say. Or, as we Anglo-Catholics say, 
may the peace and love of God be with you. Germans included. And, please, Jews, too. 

"Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974) 

I am, of course, one of Mr. Abendsen's admirers; my own works, such as they 


are, have been influenced strongly by his, in particular my novel Man in the High Castle 
(Berkley Books, U.S.A., 1974 [a reprint paperback edition]). 

It goes without saying that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (its German title, Schwer 
Liegt die Heuschrecke [Miinchen: Konig Verlag, 1974] is perhaps more familiar to us) 
has become Hawthorne Abendsen's most renowned book, although "underground" both 
in printing and distribution, due to its political and religious nature. Although 
Grasshopper offended the Authorities, they themselves studied it with keen professional 
intent, for it outlines major historic "possibilities" of an "alternate world," of a sort familiar 
to SF readers, in which the Axis is not favorably described, thus causing Mr. Abendsen 
and his family to seek an uneasy and certainly temporary sanctuary in the Rocky 
Mountain states between the two more militant zones of the United States, partitioned 
off by treaty after the defeat of the Communist-Plutocrat Alliance. 

Further writing by Mr. Abendsen, who lives as modest and conventional a family 
life as possible, in view of his vulnerability to police reprisal for his famous underground 
novel in which the Axis lost the war, is meager; most appear in the form of hasty letters 
printed in nonprofit "fanzines," as they are called, outside the United States -- for 
obvious reasons. 

The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the 
High Castle (1964) 

ONE 

On the morning of August fifth, 1956, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goring flew north 
from the big Luftwaffe base located at Miami, Florida. He had not wakened in a good 
mood; on his mind, like an iron press, rested the recent memory of the Little Doktor's 
appointment as chancellor of Germany and all German-occupied territory. And when 
one ponders, Goring thought, it was after all my bombers that defeated England and 
won for us the war; the Ministry of Propaganda did nothing more than whip up and 
excoriate the people to a useless but fashionable enthusiasm. 

Below him the Gau of Virginia passed; his R-15 Messerschmitt rocket flew low 
enough for him to glimpse black specks: slaves working the fields in the God-ordained 
manner, both timeless and circular. It appealed to reason and to good sense. But 
nothing could please him today. 

He had not properly anticipated the death of the old chancellor, Bormann. Others 
had, as, for example, Goebbels himself -- not to mention the eager eggheads in the 
higher SS. Keeping politically alert, however, had not benefited the Reichsfuhrer SS, 
Reinhardt Heydrich, who chafed, fumed, and wrote many memos at his permanent 
headquarters on Prinz-Albrechstrasse, home in Berlin. I wonder what he intends? the 
Reichsmarshal mused. Supposedly a concentration of Waffen-SS troops and armor, 
specifically the Leibstandarte Division, commanded by old, dependable Sepp Dietrich, 
had gathered in order to protect Heydrich from removal -- Dr. Goebbels had certainly by 
now considered that -- and in addition to threaten the party, should it fish for a loyalty 
oath to the new chancellor by the generals, something Bormann had been unable to do. 


And then, meditating, he wondered once again if he had been wise to leave the Miami 
Luftwaffe base, his center of protection throughout the current crisis. After all, Baldur von 
Scherach, the head of the Hitler Youth, had been arrested on Goebbels' order. But 
Goebbels had been jealous of von Scherach since the success of Project Farmland: the 
draining of the Mediterranean. The project -- Scherach's one achievement -- had been 
popular with the masses whom Goebbels appealed to, so there lay a conflict of interests. 
. . resolved a few days ago by von Sherach's arrest. 

Of course, in a showdown the Wehrmacht had an advantage: possession, solely 
and exclusively, of the hydrogen bomb. For years the SS had sent its agents skulking 
about army installations, trying to learn enough to build a nuclear reactor of their own. 
Evidently they had failed. But any government, representing either the party or the SS -or 
a third force, perhaps a coalition -- would need the generals, in particular the support 
of the supreme wartime field marshal, General Rommel, living now in retirement, but still 
vigorous. And still hating the party and the SS for his removal as Military Governor of 
German-occupied America a few years after Capitulation Day -- a day that he believed 
in his arrogant ignorance he had personally brought about at Cairo. Whereas the 
knocking out of the English radar network by the Luftwaffe had achieved the victory, as 
every German schoolboy knew. 

The autopilot of the R-15 bleeped, indicating that he had reached his destination, 
Albany, New York. 

I hope, he thought, that Fritz Sacher has come up with proof of his contention. If 
so, I will reward him. The reward, carefully wrapped in cloth, lay in the rear compartment 
of the ship: a great bottle containing a uniquely deformed fetus, the product of medical 
experiments carried out by Dr. Seyss-Inquart. The father had been a Slav, the mother a 
Negress. The fetus, worked on by Seyss-Inquart's staff during its development in the 
womb, had a foot where its head should have been and eyes at the end of its feet. Only 
this one existed, and it had been part of the Reichsmarshal's collection of more than a 
hundred genetic sports. It was in fact the best. But pleasing Fritz Sacher came before 
the pride of collecting, at least if the research scientist's claims could be believed. 

An armed patrol with dogs kept watch along the perimeter of Sacher's New York 
estate, but it was through secrecy that the operation protected itself. Luftwaffe funds 
supported it; hence his knowledge. The Abwehr, Naval Counterintelligence, supplied 
men and so Admiral Canaris knew, too. He was not therefore surprised when, upon 
climbing from the R-15, he found both Sacher and Canaris waiting for him. 

Puffing with the exertion of descending the rungs of his ship, Goring said, "I 
brought you a Wunderkind, Herr Sacher." He eyed Admiral Canaris, whom he did not 
like. "Nothing for you." 

"Der Dicke [the Fat One] emulates the Japanese," Canaris said to no one in 
particular. "The giving of gifts. Ceremony." He examined his watch. "I'd like to get 
started." He started from the field, into the building that had once been a governor's 
mansion in the prewar days when America had governed itself. 

"Try and guess the deformity of this," Goring said, reaching up to grasp the bulky, 
cloth-wrapped bottle. 

"Who knows you're here, Reichsmarshal?" Sacher asked. "Anyone in the SS? 
We're especially concerned about the SS." 

"Only my own people," Goring answered as he lifted down the bottle and held it 
out to the young scientist Sacher. "This one is novel; it will give you quite a lift." 


Accepting the bottle, Sacher said, "Many thanks, Reichsmarshal. Your collection 
of enormities is well known. I remember as a schoolchild touring your villa near Brenner 
and seeing. . ." He had by now unwrapped the bottle. "A cephalopedalis. Well. How 
nice." He stared fixedly at the fetus floating gradually to the bottom of the bottle. "Must 
be worth at least a thousand Reichsmarks at home; even more here. I have as yet 
created no real collection myself; only a few -- " 

"Can we get started?" Admiral Canaris called sharply. 

They entered the building. Goring and Canaris followed the white-robed research 
scientist down a hallway and into a large room that, the Reichsmarshal guessed, had 
once been a dining room. The two men sat at a table with papers and objects before 
them, neither of them particularly distinguished-looking; they both seemed ill-at-ease, 
and when they made out the Reichsmarshal they rose awkwardly in respect. 

"These are the surviving members of the twelve-man Kommando group originally 
sent through our nexus," Sacher said. "That is now eighteen months ago that we first 
became aware of the parallel universe, which we then called die Nebenwelt, because it 
borders this, and is beside it constantly, plus being available by means of a weak spot, 
such as exists here. Such we have known the entire eighteen months. Now we can 
present accurate specifics relating to this Nebenwelt, and it is for this presentation, Herr 
Reichsmarshal, that Admiral Canaris and yourself have been asked to meet with me 
here. I introduce Herr Kohler and Herr Seligsohn to you; they will speak briefly on their 
encounter." 

"I am Kohler," the shorter of the two men explained. Beside him his companion 
self-consciously reseated himself. In a squeaky, untrained voice Kohler continued, "We 
with others of our Kommando unit who survived the crossing from here to that world but 
who did not also survive the crossing back, as we did, lived ordinary lives in the 
Nebenwelt for virtually a year and a half, speaking the English language with facility, it 
being the language of this geographical area in that universe. We found it to be a 
reasonably satisfactory milieu, but overrun with Jews. We inquired, via the public library 
and through accidental contacts, as to why that would be, and also why English and not 
German dominates as the spoken and written language. As we had anticipated before 
our crossing -- as Herr Sacher originally theorized -- the Nebenwelt constitutes an 
alternate Earth to ours in which the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis mishandled the war and 
allowed the Allied Nations of Communism and Plutocracy a victory by default. Because 
of this, America remains a number one Jew State, and the Bolsheviks control half the 
world, the other half; they have divided the world between them, as Dr. Goebbels 
predicted in event of an Axis defeat." 

There was silence, then. No one spoke as the Reichsmarshal and Admiral 
Canaris pondered. 

"Did you manage," Canaris asked presently, "to make out specifically why their 
war miscarried?" 

Irritably, Goring said, "What does that matter? Technical details; for academic 
scholars." To Sacher he said, "Your Nebenwelt is a hallucination, a phantasm. It isn't 
real, not like this." He rapped his knuckles noisily against a nearby case filled with 
scientific texts. 

Kohler said, "We brought back artifactual documentation." 

"Faked," Goring said bitingly. 

"It is up to me to determine that," Admiral Canaris pointed out. He walked to the 


table, bent to scrutinize the assembled papers and objects. "Why do you reject this idea 
ad hoc, Reichsmarshal?" He glanced inquiringly at Goring. "Is it that you can't conceive 
of this? As Herr Kohler says, we've known of it -- at least theoretically -- for a year and a 
half. You've had a long time to digest the idea, and now we have material brought back 
by men who've been living there. I find it intriguing." He picked up a massive book from 
the desk, thumbed through it intently. "But, of course, disturbing." He eyed Kohler, who 
remained doggedly on his feet, unwilling to back down. "We have here something called 
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer." Glancing at Kohler, he said, "I 
gather this will answer as to the 'technical details.' " His voice was withering. 

"The period up to 1945," Kohler agreed, nodding. "I have read it several times; it 
is complete, absolutely the best I could find there. At several bookstores in New York I 
asked and was told this volume is totally comprehensive; it is certainly not one I selected 
at random." His voice rang with conviction. "And it certainly is not faked." 

Sacher said, "While waiting for you, Admiral, and you, Reichsmarshal, to arrive 
here" -- he took the book from Canaris, opened to a marked place -- "I personally 
examined this. Let me read you." 

"Just tell us," Canaris said. 

"Their history," Sacher said, "apparently diverged from ours in the early thirties. 
President Roosevelt was not successfully assassinated and was in office in 1941 when 
America entered the war against the Axis." 

"Bricker never became president?" Canaris said alertly. 

"No, Herr Admiral." Sacher shook his head. 

"In prosecuting the war," Kohler said, "Field Marshal Rommel failed to take Cairo 
and therefore never managed to link up with the German army coming down from 
Russia. Nor did the German army break the Russian lines; at a town called Stalingrad 
on the Volga the Communist hordes counterattacked and destroyed our entire Sixth 
Army corps." 

Beside him Herr Seligsohn murmured, "And" -- he did not look directly at Goring 


- "the Luftwaffe concentrated on bombing civilian population centers in Britain and did 
not put out of action their radar network. So, consequently, no invasion of the British 
Isles took place." 
"Toward the end of the war," Kohler said, "the Anglo-Saxon powers developed 
the atomic bomb. The Jew Einstein suggested it in a letter to Roosevelt, although 
himself born in Germany; he betrayed his homeland." 

Goring said, "Germany is not a homeland for any Jew." 

Drily, Canaris said, "Herr Einstein seems to have agreed." 

"They brought back material," Sacher said, "on the condition of Germany as it is 
now. It has been divided between the Anglo-Saxon powers and Communist Russia. Split 
in half, no longer a nation." He added, "Japan is as of this date a satellite of the United 
States. And communism has spread throughout the Orient; specifically into China." His 
voice was stony, impersonal, a mere recitation of facts without emotion. "It becomes 
evident how vital the assassination of Roosevelt was in shaping our world. If any one 
single event could be said to have -- " 

"I would be interested in knowing," Goring broke in, "how our great wartime Field 
Marshal Erwin Rommel, who lead us to victory in '47, fared in this so-called Nebenwelt. I 
cannot imagine him in defeat." 

"After the loss of North Africa," Kohler said, "the field marshal was transferred to 


France to take command of the forces awaiting invasion from England. While en route 
by car he was spotted by a British Spitfire and machine-gunned, hence hospitalized. He 
did not command during the invasion of Festung Europa at its West Wall." He paused. 
And then in a low voice said, "There is more." 

"Well?" Goring demanded. 

"Field Marshal Rommel joined a group of traitors conspiring against the life of 
Adolf Hitler." 

"That could never be," Goring said. 

"Wait," Canaris said, gesturing tensely. "Let him finish." 

"The plot failed," Kohler said. "The conspirators were strangled and hung from 
meathooks, which is appropriate. Erwin Rommel, being a soldier and former patriot, was 
allowed to shoot himself. He so did." 

Again there was silence, long and strained. 

"I think," Goring said at last, "that these so-called 'artifactual documentations' are 
forgeries put together by the Abwehr." He studied Admiral Canaris, trying to penetrate 
the slightly ironic mask that had, at his words, slid in place. "The motivation, however, is 
unclear to me. Obviously in part it is to slander the field marshal. The rest I do not 
understand." He made his voice harsh and affirmative, but inwardly he felt doubt, 
confusion. He needed time to digest all of this. Certainly this trumped-up "disclosure" 
related to the current political crisis in the Reich's politics; that much was clear. Intuitively 
he sensed that Admiral Canaris and his counterintelligence organization had engineered 
the venture; after all, Kohler and Seligsohn were Abwehr agents, as had been the entire 
Kommando squad. 

And yet -- it appeared true that an alternate universe did exist, as Sacher had, for 
a year and a half, declared. That much we did not dispute. If only he could send some of 
his own Luftwaffe people, loyal to him. . . 

"I hasten to add, Herr Reichsmarshal," Kohler said, "that the decision to bomb 
English cities and not the radar network was not yours but the Fuhrer's." He peered 
hopefully at Goring. 

Pacing about, his arms folded, Admiral Canaris said, half to himself, "For several 
minutes now I have been thinking of something odd. In Japanese-controlled regions, 
specifically the Rocky Mountain states and the PSA, a book has been circulating; it is 
banned here, but my office has routinely examined it. They say it's very popular among 
the Japanese, for reasons I do not understand. It is a work of fiction, pure fiction, or at 
least so we have up to now supposed." 

"The Grasshopper Lies Heavy," Goring said. He had read it; the ban on reading 
Hawthorne Abendsen's book did, of course, not apply to him. "A narrative of the world as 
it would be today if the Allied powers had won the war." 

Canaris said, "And also an analysis of how the Allied Powers could have won. 
They could have won, this Abendsen alleges, if the Soviet Union had stopped General 
von Paulus at Stalingrad. Abendsen bases his fictional world specifically on that." 
Turning to Sacher he said, "This is a historical condition reported by these two 
Kommandos; this occurred in Nebenwelt, so it would appear to me that Abendsen's 
book is an account of Nebenwelt." 

"Not quite," Kohler said. "Both Seligsohn and myself are familiar with Abendsen's 
book; there is a vague resemblance between the world he describes and the 
environment studied by us over the past eighteen months. But many details vary. The 


relationship fails to be precise. By example, in the book Rexford Tugwell is president at 
the time America enters the war; in Nebenwelt, Roosevelt still -- " 

"But Abendsen," Canaris persisted, "seems to have had at least a diffuse 
awareness of the Nebenwelt. Even if details differ, the resemblance is basic; to ignore it 
would be politically unwise." 

"Why unwise?" Goring said. 

Canaris gestured. "It means that Sacher has no monopoly as to access to 
Nebenwelt. If one man, Hawthorne Abendsen, is aware of it, then others can be -- have 
already been, perhaps. We don't have the undivided control over egress that we need." 

"Need for what?" Goring said. He had never been able to fathom the admiral's 
convoluted thinking, typical as it was of intelligence reasoning. 

A veiled expression appeared on the admiral's face. Obviously choosing his 
words with care, he said, "Any military operation planned by the army would now of 
necessity be shelved -- in view of this." 

"Why?" Goring said, still not following. "What military undertaking is planned?" He 
thought at once of the space program, the colonization of Venus and Mars. So far, the 
Wehrmacht had stayed aloof; emigration had been handled solely by the SS. He 
wondered if at last the army intended to participate. Certainly it would help; so far the SS 
had signally failed to round up sufficient numbers of genetically adequate human 
specimens. 

Canaris, however, switched to another area of the topic; slippery and deft, he 
eluded even a direct question. "A point-by-point comparison between Abendsen's 
imaginary alternate world and the Nebenwelt should be developed. I would like to know 
exactly how they compare and differ." He gestured. "It may be what the Japanese call 
synchronicity, a meaningless coincidence. Or rather what our own physicist Wolfgang 
Pauli calls synchronicity; I forget that the acausal connective concept is of German 
origin." He scowled. "It is their use of that damn oracle that confuses me, that I Ching 
they employ in the making of every decision. Fortunately the party has rejected it as 
degenerate oriental mysticism." 

"The oracle," Kohler said, "exists in the Nebenwelt; we encountered it several 
times, although there is -- we found -- no widespread use. It does not appear at all in 
Abendsen's book, in the world he depicts." 

"Another difference," Canaris said thoughtfully. He seemed for a time to chew on 
this point. "If we were to believe in the oracle," he said at last, "then we would suppose it 
to know of the existence of the Nebenwelt, inasmuch [as] it can be found there. 
Abendsen, I have read, makes use of the oracle; I understand, in fact, he plotted his 
book by means of the hexagrams. That might account for the resemblance of his 
fictional world to the Nebenwelt. But consider the hazard involved -- the hazard to 
Germany. The oracle is attempting to inform those who rely on it that. . ." He broke off, 
again scowling. "I'm talking about it as if it were alive." 

Goring said, "We did well to ban it in German-occupied territory. I remember how 
emphatic Dr. Goebbels was on that issue; he foamed at the mouth when that modern 
composer -- what was his name? -- declared in print that he used it to develop chord 
progressions." 

"The Little Doktor foams at the mouth about everything he fails to understand," 
Canaris said. 

"Who understands the oracle?" Goring asked. "Not even those who rely on it. 


Except for Pauli's theory of synchronicity there is no hypothesis for its operation at all. 
Except the ancient Chinese idea that invisible spirits determine which hexagram turns 
up." The subject bored him and he returned to the matter that had brought him here to 
Albany. "Sacher," he said briskly, "it is vital to Germany's internal and external security 
that the availability of the Nebenwelt be kept confidential. We can't throttle speculation 
because Abendsen's book has already raised the issue publicly; even in Germany most 
intellectuals are aware of its general outline, without, of course, having read it. 
Unfortunately it is not necessary to have read it; to know of its existence is enough. You 
understand what I mean." For the masses to speculate on another way of life, an 
existence minus German hegemony -- that breached the unconditional identification with 
the Gemeinschaft, the folk community created back in '32 by the party and now half a 
world wide. The writer Hawthorne Abendsen had, by his book, done great harm, and all 
the machinery of the secret police, the Sicherheitsdienst, had not managed to keep 
bootlegged copies of The Grasshopper from showing up in such central Gaus as Berlin 
itself. In Hamburg especially, knowledge of -- and possession of -- the book defied the 
state security apparatus, vigilant as it continued to be. 

We should have Abendsen picked up, Goring pondered. Seized by an SD Einsatz 
Gruppe and brought in for expert interrogation. I will call Heydrich about that, he 
decided, as soon as I'm out of here. Surprising that the Reichsfuhrer SS has done 
nothing in that direction already. 

Kohler said, "Shall I continue my description of the Nebenwelt, as well as 
explaining these artifactual documents?" He indicated the heap of items on his and 
Seligsohn's table. 

"Do so," Goring said, and bent an ear to listen to the elaborate circumstantial 
report of another world, a mystifying universe in which the Axis had lost -- unbelievably -the 
Second World War. 

TWO 

In the mirror-polished Daimler phaeton sedan the SS men who had met Captain 
Rudolf Wegener at Tempelhof Airfield chatted amiably as the car neared SS GHQ on 
Prinz-Albrechstrasse, where the crack Black Shirt division, Sepp Dietrich's 
Leibstandarte, had bivouacked itself with the expectation of successfully waiting out the 
great current crisis in domestic German affairs. Now Wegener could perceive the huge 
Tiger tanks of the division deployed strategically here and there, their 88mm cannons 
covering each intersection and building. 

The show of military strength did not impress him. One tactical hydrogen bomb, 
lobbed by a Wehrmacht mortar, would erase the division of SS men and Heydrich 
himself. The Hangman, however, probably felt psychologically secure: The SS mentality 
thrived on the ostentatious display of finely executed, parade-style maneuvers such as 
these cordons of gleaming tanks. 

When he had been escorted into Heydrich's big office he found the Reichsfuhrer 
SS on the telephone. 

"We already sent someone to do that," Heydrich was saying in his harsh, 
monotonous voice as he stared blankly through Wegener. "He wound up killed in a hotel 
room in Denver. His throat. Yes, someone slashed it. Yes, he was very close to reaching 
the Jew Abendsen." A pause. "No, he wasn't going to bring him here; why do that? 


What's he got to say besides what he said in his book?" Another pause, longer this time. 
"If you want him brought here," Heydrich said finally, "you'll have to tell me why. We're 
not an adjunct to the Luftwaffe. Okay, send someone yourself. Bomb him. Good-bye." 
Heydrich hung up, jotted a note on a pad of paper, then inclined his head to indicate a 
leather-covered chair placed before his desk. "The Reichsmarshal," he explained to 
Wegener, "all four hundred kilos of him. Sit down. You're the Abwehr man who's been in 
the Pacific States of America." He spread out fanwise a collection of folios, rummaged, 
and at last selected one, which he opened. "I've been reading about you. Did you enjoy 
the way the Japs run things? Slipshod, wouldn't you say? Of course, things aren't much 
better here, what with that nasty little crippled gutter rat Goebbels sneaking in as 
chancellor -- temporarily. He'd kill us all in our beds while we slept. That's why I had you 
met at the airport." 

"I appreciated it," Wegener said woodenly. 

"In our opinion," Heydrich rattled away, "Bormann was murdered. So in no regard 
is Goebbels legal chancellor. Several SS lawyers have drawn up briefs for me to that 
effect. An election will have to be held, with all party members voting. The new leader of 
Germany must come from the party ranks, as Hitler originally intended. Goebbels, even 
if legally appointed, is too old -- as are all the Altparteigenosse. I, of course, do not fit in 
that category." 

"Not in the slightest," Wegener agreed. 

"Did you make much headway as to informing the Japs about Operation 
Dandelion? Was General Tedeki interested?" 

"I -- know nothing about it," Wegener said. 

"But you went there to inform the Japanese that we are on the verge of attacking 
them." Irritably, Heydrich said in a sharp voice, as if speaking to a foreigner, "Operation 
Dandelion -- the attack on Japan. Your mission; you posed as a Swedish businessman." 
He leafed through the dossier. "You left Tempelhofer Field in one of those new 
Lufthanse 9-E rockets, under the name of Baynes. An SD agent talked with you en 
route; he gave the name Alex Lotze and pretended to be a painter; you pretended to be 
in plastics and polyesters. At the San Francisco airport you were met by a delegate from 
the ranking Jap Trade Mission, a Mr. Nobusuke Tagomi. A day later at his office in the 
Nippon Times Building the retired Chief of Staff of the Japanese Imperial Army, General 
Tedeki, met with the two of you and you informed him of the imminent attack on the 
home islands by the Wehrmacht -- a surprise attack that the Japanese secret police, the 
Tokkoka, had no knowledge of." 

Wegener said, "This is all new to me, this information." 

"Balls," Heydrich said impatiently. "In fact, during your conference with General 
Tedeki and Mr. Tagomi, a squad of SD men attempted to force their way in and kill the 
three of you." He added, "They failed." 

After a pause Wegener said huskily, "Mr. Tagomi is a good shot. He collects 
pistols of the U.S. Civil War and practices firing them." 

"We wondered what happened. Bruno Kreuz von Meere, who is the San 
Francisco head of the SD, theorized that it had been Kempeitai marksmen -- the 
Japanese civil police -- who had waited either outside or within Tagomi's office. Hmm; so 
Tagomi took care of Kreuz von Meere's men himself." He nodded, apparently glad to 
see the mystery cleared up. "So you betrayed your country. Is the entire Abwehr 
involved, or was it only you? What about Admiral Canaris himself?" 


"He knows nothing about my trip," Wegener said, wondering if Heydrich had in his 
possession information to the contrary. The Reichsfuhrer SS seemed to know everything 
else; why not this? 

Heydrich, however, dropped the point; he turned to another topic. "In the Pacific 
States, did you encounter that Jew book in which our war effort fails? That Grasshopper 
book?" 

"It's available there," Wegener said abstractly. 

"You heard me talking to the Reichsmarshal; they want me to snatch Abendsen 
and bring him here, for reasons they won't divulge." Heydrich eyed Wegener intently. 
"We understand that a joint project exists in Albany, New York, in which your 
organization and the Luftwaffe are involved. Do you personally know anything about 
that?" 

"No," he said, truthfully. 

"As far as we can determine," Heydrich said, "this project is operating under the 
assumption that paralled worlds exist, of which we are one and Abendsen's world, 
written about as if imaginary fiction, is another. What success Sacher -- he heads the 
project -- has obtained we don't know. Perhaps none. The premise may be false. Or" --
Heydrich gestured --"enough success to prove the premise, but not enough to open 
actually a doorway to another parallel world." He ticked the possibilities off methodically, 
using his fingers. "Or they have found a passageway through, but the other world -- the 
Nebenwelt, I understand they call it -- is not that which the Jew Abendsen depicts in his 
pseudo-fictional book. There are other possibilities." He reflected. "At most they have 
been able to reach several other worlds, of which Abendsen's is one." 

"Hmm," Wegener said. 

"What interests is that all at once the Reichsmarshal is interested in having 
Abendsen -- not killed -- but abducted and brought here; brought, specifically, to the 
Reichsmarshal's pro tern headquarters at the Luftwaffe base in Miami." Heydrich studied 
his extended fingers, then selected one. "This suggests that they wish to interrogate 
Abendsen regarding his Grasshopper world. . . which further suggests to me that they 
have had some luck." He raised his eyes, regarded Wegener acutely. "Are you sure you 
know nothing about this? You're an Abwehr agent, and the Abwehr, we hear, is 
supplying the agents that Sacher means to -- or has already, perhaps -- " 

"All my recent time," Wegener broke in, "has been spent in preparation for my 
visit to the PSA, now completed. There's no use talking to me; I can't help you. Up to 
now I haven't even heard of this project, presuming, as you say, it exists." It sounded 
doubtful to him: more like an imaginative fabrication by the brilliant, deranged minds of 
the higher SS, Heydrich included. 

"Consider this, then," Heydrich said, folding his hands and tilting his chair back 
until he rested against the wall behind his desk. "You are legally a traitor to Germany; 
you deliberately and systematically carried top-secret military information to our enemy, 
directly to the Japanese general staff. Without a convocation of the Reichsgericht I could 
have you garroted and hung from a meathook. I could have your testicles crushed first, 
by means of pliers. I could have a solution of lye forced up your -- " 

"Your agency," Wegener said, managing to keep his voice reasonably steady, 
"can do nothing to an agent of Naval Counterintelligence. If I have to stand trial it will be 
a military court-martial, presided over by my superiors in the Abwehr." 

"You want to bet?" 


Wegener said, "I know for a certainty that your agency, in fact the entire SS, 
opposes Operation Dandelion. By your own statement you had me followed; you knew 
what I came for before I managed to meet with General Tedeki; you could have stopped 
me." 

"We attempted to," Heydrich said smoothly. "At the Nippon Times Building." 

"What's your point?" 

Heydrich said, "You are, at this moment, at the dead center of the Waffen-SS 
division Leibstandarte. There is no way anyone, from the Abwehr or the Wehrmacht or 
the party or all three, could get you out of here. So if you transact any business it must 
be with me, and I am hard to do business with, which you may have heard. In this 
dossier on you" -- he indicated the papers spread out on his desk -- "details and 
documentation of your treason are laid out. Right now it is a very much open file, but I 
have the authority, despite all it contains, to make it perpetually inactive. No SD men will 
show up at 5:00 A.M. and cart you off to a final solution camp; no Nacht und Nebel 
[Night and Fog] action will ever take place in your direction -- I guarantee it. In fact, I will 
make you an honorary colonel in the Waffen-SS; General Dietrich himself will bestow 
the citation on you." Heydrich picked up a phone receiver from his desk and said, "Get 
me Sepp Dietrich." 

"I'm familiar with the mechanism," Wegener said. "I'm not interested." As soon as 
he became an honorary colonel in the SS he would be automatically under SS 
jurisdiction, taking his orders from Heydrich or even someone lower down in Heydrich's 
apparatus. Over the years innumerable Wehrmacht officers had received such 
commissions, without being aware of the consequences. Instant SS men, he thought 
grimly. Created by a stroke of Heydrich's pen. 

Shrugging, Heydrich said, hanging up the phone, "It's up to you if you want to 
remain a captain in an organization that probably won't exist one year from now. Admiral 
Canaris has been skating over thin ice for years; it's only a question of time before he 
falls through. . . dragging the rest of you down with him." 

"What is it you want me to do?" Wegener asked. "In exchange for letting me out 
of here?" 

"Not merely 'letting you out.' In addition, as I explained, we'll guarantee your 
continual safety -- from reprisals, for example, by your organization. To be protected by 
the SD is to be virtually beyond reach; you'll find yourself sleeping at night again, 
peacefully, and in these times of unpredictable political conflict that will be anomalous. I 
want you to do this: You will report back to your superiors in the Abwehr and give a 
report of your mission to San Francisco without mentioning your side trip here. You 
landed at Tempelhofer; you took a cab to Abwehr GHQ. All uneventful." 

"And from then on," Wegener said, "I'm to report regularly to you or one of your 
subordinates about Sacher's project." 

Heydrich eyed him. 

"I may never get near Sacher's project," Wegener said. 

"You'll hear talk. We have heard talk, and we have yet to penetrate Canaris' 
organization. . . until perhaps now. I'm not in a hurry; I agree that it will take time. Just so 
long as the information comes to us eventually. Verstehst du?" 

"I understand you," Wegener said. He pondered, then decided to take a 
calculated risk. "You won't kill me," he said, "because it's to your advantage that I 
informed General Tedeki about Operation Dandelion. You'll make use of this as 


ammunition to persuade the party not to back the Wehrmacht; a surprise attack is now 
out of the question, and we all know that even though the Japanese lack the hydrogen 
bomb, they do have enormous intercept hardware. Even if the home islands are 
destroyed, their Chinese regions, their Manchukuo colony, the Philippines, the Pacific 
States of America, their holdings in Latin America -- " 

"I am familiar with the geography of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," 
Heydrich said drily. 

"Plus the fact," Wegener said, "that the guidance systems of our missiles are 
imperfect -- notoriously so. For example, we are familiar with our missile performance in 
Africa. Several years -- " 

"The guidance systems have been improved since then." 

Wegener said, "You'll require my continued existence because I'm the only 
German national who knows from direct contact that the Japanese general staff is aware 
of Operation Dandelion. Without me, all that exists is your dossier on me, which could be 
faked. Or so the Wehrmacht generals will argue. In particular, Rommel." 

"The field marshal is in retirement." Heydrich added, "And old." 

"It is planned to restore him into service." The Abwehr had learned this several 
months ago. "He will, in fact, be made the highest military commander in the operation; 
as is well known, his unique strategic sense has not since been equaled. And his 
presence will make the campaign considerably more popular with the people, who 
regard him an Ubermensch. The only hero of modern times; one would have to go back 
to Hindenburg." 

"Or Adolf Hitler." 

"Hitler's legendary reputation as a strategist has dimmed. The Wehrmacht knew 
his failings at the time; most of the German people know them now. As I'm sure you 
realize. You do keep tabs on such matters." 

"It was the peresis of the brain," Heydrich said hotly. "If the UrFuhrer had not 
contracted that disease during his youthful days in Vienna, that Jew town -- " 

Rising to his feet, Wegener said, "This discussion, as far as I am concerned, is 
over. I am required to report back to my superiors as to my accomplishments. Guten 
Tag." 

Also standing, the Reichsfuhrer SS started to speak. But then the intercom 
system on his desk buzzed. "Yes?" he said, depressing a key. 

"General Skorzany to see you, sir," the intercom said. 

"All right. Send him in." Heydrich folded his arms, rocked back and forth on his 
heels, reflecting. 

A burly, gray-haired man, reasonably good-looking, with wary, intelligent eyes, 
wearing the uniform of a Waffen-SS general, entered Heydrich's office. He glanced at 
Wegener, sizing him up, then turned inquiringly to the Reichsfiihrer SS. 

To Wegener, Heydrich said, "Turn my suggestions over in your mind. For a time I 
will suspend any action vis-a-vis your activities recently in the Pacific States. I'll be in 
touch with you before the end of the week and I hope a favorable decision will occur to 
you. Keep it in mind that your position is not good." 


Part Four 
Plot Proposals and Outlines 

This section contains examples of Dick at work sketching out his ideas -- lucidly, 
and with a penchant both for dramatic possibilities and cognitive paradoxes -- for the 
consideration of agents, editors, and potential television and film producers. All four of 
the selections date from the late 1960s, the only period in his life in which Dick seriously 
attempted to break into writing for television. (One of his finest early short stories, 
"Colony," had been adapted, in 1956, for the X Minus One radio program, devoted to SF 
dramatizations.) There is no evidence that he gained even the interested attention of 
anyone in that industry. The lure to attempt to do so may have stemmed from the 
success of certain of his SF peers, such as Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, in 
placing scripts with the original Star Trek series. 

The novel outline "Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth" (1967) was first 
published posthumously in New Worlds #2, edited by David Garnett (Gollancz, London, 
1992). 

"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967) and "TV Series Idea" (1967) have 
never before been published. 

"Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) was first published 
posthumously in PKDS Newsletter, No. 18 (August 1988). The notes were written for the 
benefit of Bertram Berman, a filmmaker who had, in that year, obtained a first option on 
the just released Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). This novel 
was ultimately adapted (with no involvement by Berman) into the acclaimed film Blade 
Runner (1982). Dick was able to see some of the early rushes of that film before his 
death in 1982, and was decidedly enthusiastic. In an earlier stage of the production of 
Blade Runner, however, Dick was displeased with the then quality of the script 
(subsequently rewritten, to Dick's liking, by David Peoples) and vented his displeasure in 
"Universe Makers. . . and Breakers" (1981), included earlier in this volume. It is 
interesting to compare Dick's notes here with the film version of the novel -- Blade 
Runner -- that ultimately emerged. 

"Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth" (1967) 

Theme: A revolution which has brought forth conditions less favorable than the 
dictator planned. He is asked to resign in favor of an aspirant who says he can do better. 
But a group opposed to the aspirant takes the dictator into an alternate Earth where the 
aspirant, not the dictator, has ruled. Conditions are much worse. In fact, all the alternate 
worlds are worse. The aspirant ponders; he knows about this group and what they are 
doing. Solution: Aspirant has a team cross into alternate world and create fake fakes 
here and there, very subtle in character, which, when dictator finds them, will convince 
him that this whole alternate world is faked. So far, so good. But aspirant now goes too 
far: He plans out entire faked world (alternate Earth), where he rules superlatively. 
Aspirant knows that the dictator will be suspicious, will look for flaws, but aspirant is sure 
he can bring it off. Next step: What would group loyal to the dictator (the group who took 


him to real alternate worlds) do? They don't need to plant fake fakes in the "good 
alternative" because it's already wholly faked! 

Plot: Joe Protagoras has a puny job -- but in the overpopulated and economically 
malfunctioning socialist world of 2007 he is lucky to have any job at all. However, he has 
been saving up a sum of money by which to consult Mr. Job. This peculiar entity, with 
tens of thousands of outlets throughout Earth and its planetary colonies, is virtually alive, 
although artificial, and is important in the lives of Earth's hordes of jobless and near-
jobless citizens. Mr. Job can tell Protagoras, after an analysis of his aptitudes and 
experience, where he can find a genuinely adequate career appointment; Mr. Job, 
through its network of multiple extensors, keeps computer-style tabs on all job openings 
everywhere. But consulting Mr. Job is expensive. Protagoras hasn't much "real" money 
saved up (i.e., metal coins, in contrast with the nearly worthless inflationary scrip floated 
by the government), but he can't wait any longer (among other things, his girlfriend is 
putting pressure on him). He accordingly enters one of Mr. Job's many booths (like a 
telephone booth), dials his facts in, drops his precious coins into the slot. He gets back a 
cryptic sentence-and-a-half: "Your twenty words are up," Mr. Job tells him, and then 
clicks off. Joe Protagoras leaves the booth, trying to decipher the oraclelike message, 
and at this point the novel shifts to its other main character. 

Simon Herrlich, the ancient, tottering despot, has kept himself alive by means of 
artificial organs for far too many years -- and has kept himself in Earth's top office at the 
same time. He is ill-liked by his heir, an ambitious aspirant named Arthur Self. For years, 
Self has been trying to persuade the Old Man to bow out voluntarily and hence turn 
everything over to him, i.e., to the younger, more virile Art Self. It is Self's contention that 
if he had been ruling all this time, Earth would be in better shape economically, 
politically, and socially -- if not spiritually (i.e., ideologically, this being a totalitarian 
state). 

From Self's viewpoint we learn about Project Almost, the breaking through to and 
investigation of alternate Earths. We learn about the scientist in charge of operating the 
inter-Earth project: Nick Edel, a close associate and good friend of Simon Herrlich -- a 
man whom Self hates because it is Nick Edel who is, by means of his project, keeping 
Herrlich in office. . . inasmuch as all alternate Earths visited are worse than their own. 

This section of the novel ends with Self conceiving the idea of sending his own 
teams across into one of the worst alternate worlds and planting "simulated forgeries" -in 
other words, fake fakes -- with the idea of discrediting Edel's whole project by giving 
the alternate Earths the appearance of being phony. We see him visiting the REM 
Corporation, a huge industrial concern owned by the government (which, of course, 
owns every economic enterprise on Earth, this being a Communist-type society). We 
now meet Cynthia Stonemerchant, the director of REM Corporation, the elderly widow 
who manages this vast industrial cartel. She is quite hostile toward the old dictator; she 
is, in fact, in favor of a non-Communist government, with industries privately owned, as 
in a capitalist society. Therefore she is glad to have her factories produce the fake fakes 
that Self wants. Then, together, they hatch out the extraordinary idea of creating an 
entire fake alternate world, a world that Mrs. Stonemerchant and her technical staff will 
plan. 

Unknown to Self, Mrs. Stonemerchant plans to construct a capitalist fake 
alternate world that is better than their own. She is not merely hostile toward Simon 
Herrlich; she is hostile toward Art Self as well. She is in fact hostile to their whole 


totalitarian society, and is doing this job for her own purposes. 

We return to Joe Protagoras, who has managed -- with the help of his girlfriend -to 
decipher the sentence-and-a-half that Mr. Job gave him. It is telling him to go to REM 
Corporation's Los Angeles branch and apply for the job technically listed as 20583-AR. . 
. a designation that means absolutely nothing to him; he has no idea what the job for 
which he will be applying consists of. But Mr. Job is never wrong, so Joe Protagoras 
quits the meager job he has, gathers his few possessions together (he has only a rented 
room, adequate housing being years away, due to the faulty economics of the 
government). Going by second-class surface bus, he sets off for Los Angeles. 

When he reaches REM Corporation's Los Angeles branch and applies for job 
20583-AR he discovers what it is. Designing rides for what is called an "amusement 
park," something that he has never even heard of. The personnel manager of REM, 
however, assures him that he is the man for the job (Joe Protagoras has given the 
personnel manager the same resume he gave Mr. Job). "You'll do just fine," Mr. Bean 
assures him, and leads him to his bright, modern, high-class office. He is to begin work 
right away. Historical texts and technical manuals dealing with amusement parks are 
already in the office; Joe Protagoras begins to read, and we leave him. But before we 
return to the schemes of Art Self, we see Protagoras making an interesting inquiry. What 
is REM Corporation's product? What is his job for? He gets no answer from his new 
superiors; they know but won't tell him. "Just design good, scary, fun rides," he is told. 
"Pay special attention to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride from the twentieth-century amusement 
park called Disneyland; that is your prototype. Update it and you'll be on your way." 

We of course know what REM Corporation is producing: the fake alternate world 
supposedly for Self's benefit, but actually for Mrs. Stonemerchant's personal purposes. 
In any case, Protagoras, the "little" protagonist, is now linked to Art Self, the "big" 
protagonist, as well as Mrs. Stonemerchant, the third force at work on the world stage, 
or rather inter-worlds stage. 

At this point all the characters will have been introduced. These are: 

Elderly despot: Simon Herrlich 

Aspirant: Arthur Self 

Director of REM Corporation: Mrs. Cynthia Stonemerchant 

Craftsman little protagonist: Joe Protagoras 

Girlfriend of Protagoras: Abby Vercelli 

Girl, party zealot for Simon Herrlich: Marleen Poole 

Hatchetman thug for Herrlich: Patrick O'Connell 

Tough goon for REM Corp: Mike Fox 

Group of top officials loyal to Herrlich: Calvin Gold, Dan Hastings, lan Kain 

Spy and informer for Art Self: Demeter Troll 

Wife (young) of Herrlich: Aulikki Mildmay 

The plot continues as follows. Briefly, it's this: While REM Corporation is building the 
fake capitalist alternate world, Nick Edel's research workers stumble onto a genuine 
capitalist alternate world. This pleases no one; that is, neither Art Self nor the old despot 
(it would please Mrs. Stonemerchant, of course, but both Herrlich and Self keep this 
startling information top-secret). It is a better world than any other alternative -- including 
their own. This is one possibility that neither Self nor Herrlich anticipated; wrapped up in 
their Communist ideology, they were absolutely certain that if a capitalist alternate world 


showed up (which in itself is considered by both of them unlikely), it would, of course, be 
awful. 

Art Self crosses over to it, spends time there skulking about incognito, then 
returns to his own world. And, back in it, encounters almost at once a fake fake object! 

What does this discovery mean? Two hypotheses are possible. (1) It -- his own 
world -- is real and someone has planted fake fakes there, as he himself has done in the 
alternate worlds; for instance, Mrs. Stonemerchant, who may have learned about the 
real alternate capitalistic world. Or (2) his own world is entirely fake, and he has a false 
memory grafted into his brain by someone unknown to him but who is obviously out to 
destroy him. This someone could be either Herrlich's supporters in the party apparatus 
or Mrs. Stonemerchant's technicians. Hard to tell. 

The maximum host of perplexities is now at its peak; from hereon the plot will 
unravel. 

A. Protagoras is doing a strange sort of task for a purpose he does not know and 
for a corporation whose product is kept secret from him. 
B. Mrs. Stonemerchant may or may not know about the discovery of an authentic 
capitalistic Earth. If she does find out, what will she do? 
C. Art Self has found what appear to be fake fakes in his own world. What does 
this mean? Who put them there and why? Or is everything fake? 
D. The old man, Simon Herrlich, has seen his hopes and dreams shattered, here 
at the end of his life, by the discovery that a capitalistic world would have been -- is, in 
fact -- far better than anything he and his world-revolution takeover can come up with. 
What should he do now? Renounce his own totalitarian society and attempt to bring 
capitalism back -- with Mrs. Stonemerchant's help and that of other industrial directors 
who share her attitude? 
The novel is resolved in this way. A team working for REM Corporation is 
discovered, by Self's personal police, planting fake fakes in his own world. That answers 
that. His world is real, and Mrs. Stonemerchant has tried to do to him what he did to 
Herrlich. Self therefore has his thugs kill Mrs. Stonemerchant (after a heavy pitched 
battle with her company goons), since he knows for a certainty that she is, in totalitarian 
jargon, plotting against him, obviously with the idea of undermining their socialist state. 
However, Mrs. Stonemerchant has made certain arrangements; the instant she dies, an 
automatic instrument goes into action; it drops into a mail slot many, many copies of a 
full statement of REM Corporation's activities, its creating of fake fakes at Self's 
command. This letter is addressed to every powerful official loyal to old Simon Herrlich, 
and within twenty-four hours the elderly despot learns what Self has been up to. 

Self becomes, at once, a hunted criminal in a society where escape from the 
government police is impossible. He knows he can't escape Herrlich's agent, but at least 
he can take revenge vis-a-vis REM Corporation -- which, he reasons, has brought about 
his downfall and certain death. He therefore, with all the resources he can muster, 
attacks REM Corporation's various branches, and, in a matter of hours, reduces most of 
them to rubble. . . killing the majority of the corporation's employees. Or so he thinks. 
Actually, Mrs. Stonemerchant had anticipated exactly this; upon her death, REM 
Corporation's employees began passing across to the alternate capitalist world via a 
pirated duplicate of Nick Edel's mechanism. 

Again the novel focuses on Protagoras, who believes himself safe in this capitalist 
alternate world. However, he very soon makes a hideous discovery. This is not the 


authentic alternate capitalist world at all. Something -- at least in his case -- went wrong. 
This is the mere partly completed fake that REM Corporation was building for Self up to 
the time that Mrs. Stonemerchant learned of the existence of the real one. Here he finds, 
for example, the not yet functioning "rides" that he himself designed: a ghostly, lonely, 
echoing "amusement park," of which he is the sole patron; he is alone in this ersatz 
world, with no way to get back out. 

The ending is not downbeat, however. REM Corporation has not removed its 
machinery, the autonomic building rigs by means of which they were constructing this 
"world." At the end of the book we find Joe Protagoras starting the great elaborate 
autonomic machines once more into action; if he can't leave this ersatz world, at least he 
can complete it -- make it pleasant and habitable, including the building of ersatz 
"people" to keep him company. He is emperor of an entire landscape, and he is happy. 
Of all the major characters, Joe Protagoras came out the best -- which the reader will 
agree is as it should be. 

In this ending, the questions What is real? What is illusion? are answered (or 
anyhow the attempt will be made within the context of the novel). Joe Protagoras has 
gone from a "real" but unsatisfying world into an "unreal" but satisfying alternate. The 
test will be purely pragmatic. If this half-completed ersatz world is capable of answering 
Joe Protagoras' needs, then it is real -- in the sense that it provides the material out of 
which he can fashion a reasonably tolerable life. In fact, the issue of "real" versus 
"unreal" is itself false; the authentic issue is: What will sustain life? What will permit a 
living organism to function? In answer to this, the ersatz, half-completed world is 
advantageous, because, among other things, it gives Joe Protagoras a field in which to 
work creatively (i.e., as he personally completes it). Instead of a bureaucrat he is now an 
artist, and this ersatz world is the lump of clay out of which he will fashion his own, 
idiosyncratic reality. Which, we realize, is the finest reality of all. 

"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967) 

The mission is to take place in a Latin American country that is an analog for 
present-day Cuba. Formerly a hedonistic, self-serving dictator ruled, but a year or so 
ago he was overthrown and killed by a young, idealistic revolutionary. However, this left-
wing revolutionary has allied himself with "the other side" -- i.e., the Communist states of 
Eastern Europe and Asia. The United States would, of course, like to see him deposed, 
but assassination is out of the question; the revolutionary's followers would know that 
the CIA had done it, and would become even more fanatical and anti-West. So the 
mission is this: to find a way by which the revolutionary leader can be induced to come 
voluntarily to the United States -- which will not only remove him from power in his own 
country but also will undermine the Marxist-oriented followers and demileaders backing 
him. But how can this be done? 

The scheme worked out by the Mission: Impossible team is as follows. The 
revolutionary leader (from hereon referred to as R) is at present at a swank resort within 
the borders of his country -- a pleasure palace left over from the previous dictator's 
reign. At this fashionable spot the R is conferring with heads of clandestine fighters 


operating in the mountains of other Latin American countries. R is therefore out of public 
circulation for a time. Using cinnamon as bait, the team captures and drugs the R and 
makes off with him -- meanwhile making use of word cuts from audiotapes that the R 
made in the past: These individual word cuts are assembled so as to form an oral 
statement to the others gathered at the mansion to explain why the R has "temporarily 
departed." (I don't believe Mission: Impossible has used word cuts from audiotapes 
before, as was done in the movie The Great Man.) The team takes the R off to a building 
that they have taken over. They have made the interior of the building appear to be that 
of a mental sanitarium. When the R comes to, he is told by the chief "psychiatrist" 
(probably, of the team, Jim Phelps) that he has been in a complete catatonic 
schizophrenic state for well over a year. The time is the present, but the R has not ruled; 
he went mad in the hills, believing himself ruler of the entire country. It was a delusion 
that the previous dictator (from hereon referred to as D) was kicked out of office and 
then executed; the D is very much alive and still in power. 

Here the magic fakery of the fertile minds of the team begins to operate. The D 
appears on TV, and this is not an old film or videotape; it is live, and in various ways 
alludes to the time -- to the now. The D might even scathingly refer to the R as being 
hopelessly mad and in a sanitarium. Then there are faked newspapers. The R makes 
phone calls to his demileaders, and Barney cuts into the circuit, at which point Rollin tells 
the R that first one demileader and then another is either in the D's prisons or dead. The 
movement failed; it collapsed after the R became psychotic and could no longer keep 
things running. (The appearance of the D on the TV screen is done by Rollin, using his 
handy rubber-face apparatus.) But the most overwhelming fakery is yet to come. 

When he took office, after deposing and killing the D, the R made an important 
speech; he remembers it well. It stated to the nation the aims and intentions that he 
intended to carry out; in this speech the R unmasked himself and informed his 
conquered country that he intended to lead it into "progressive anticapitalism," etc. The 
team therefore produces the following. They take the audio portion of the tape (or movie 
film) of that speech. Rollin, this time wearing a rubber face, etc., which makes him look 
like the R (repeat: like the R), only it is not the R speaking from the balcony of his new 
capitol building to huge masses of people: The video portion of the tape or film shows 
the R in a mental hospital -- the very same one he is in now -- wearing the standard 
clothes of a patient and delivering his speech to other patients and members of the 
hospital staff (the team accomplishes this via lip-sync plus Rollin's impersonation). 

However, there has been a minor, technical error in the film. A pile of magazines 
is shown, and the R has noticed this same pile in the now --and the film is supposed to 
be at least a year old. The R now employs a bit of electronic gadget knowledge on his 
own; he manages to get a single frame of the film enlarged enough so that he can read 
the date on the top magazine. The magazine is current, not a year old. So the R realizes 
that this is all an illusion (the Mission: Impossible team does not know, however, that he 
has discovered this). But even though he knows this, he is still physically in their hands. 
How can he make contact with the outside world -- i.e. his followers? After all, Barney 
has all the phones tied up, and Willy is skulking about outdoors with a Skoda rapid-fire 
hand weapon. 

But the R is inventive and imaginative; after all, he did come down out of the hills 
and take over his country. The Mission: Impossible team, this time, is up against a 
person who is not only as resourceful as they are, but is so along some of the same 


lines -- for example, electronic gadgetry, Barney's specialty. (I don't recall a Mission: 
Impossible episode in which the team faced someone expert in their own sort of 
electronic delusion sleight-of-hand before.) 

There are two possible things that the R can do. (1) He can try to get hold of one 
of the team's walkie-talkies and rewire it so that it broadcasts over a much greater area, 
thus -- hopefully -- reaching a nearby outpost of the R's militia. Or (2) he might be able to 
splice into an underground phone cable that runs nearby (he now knows where he is 
geographically). But he can't be precisely sure where the phone cable is, and anyhow 
it's down deep, and he has no shovel or other tool by which to dig. Hence he decides to 
steal a walkie-talkie and rewire it. 

Cinnamon is currently posing as a fellow patient. The R manages to steal the 
miniaturized walkie-talkie from her purse; he sneaks off to an unnoticed spot where he 
can work on it. Where else than the basement? He is able to pick the lock on the 
basement door, and starts down into the darkness of his hiding place -- and then, when 
he turns the lights on, finds himself facing Barney's electronics center. Everything he 
needs is here. What a windfall! 

First, to take care of Barney should he come back, the R rapidly lays a hot cable 
across the wooden basement steps -- then he begins to work feverishly to alter the 
walkie-talkie, using Barney's tools and other equipment. Barney does come back, yanks 
out a pistol with a silencer on it, rushes down the stairs. . . and steps on the hot cable. 
He at once topples over, letting the gun bounce down the stairs to the floor, where the R 
waits. Alertly, the R snatches up the gun; now he doesn't need to rewire anything: He 
can fight his way out. 

Leaving the building, he scampers across the lawn of the building, whereupon he 
encounters Willy. He shoots Willy, and Willy falls down, obviously dead. The R continues 
to scuttle away from the "mental hospital," entering a wooded area; he is soon 
successfully gone from the team's custody. 

Segue to the R tramping wearily through the woods. Then, to his immense relief, 
he stumbles onto a paved road. Traffic will surely be coming soon; meanwhile he 
trudges along the road, still putting as much distance between himself and the MI team 
as possible. 

(The viewer, at this point, thinks that not only has the R gotten away and the 
mission has failed, but also that Barney and Willy are dead.) 

The R reaches a military picket shack, where several of his khaki-clad militiamen 
are lounging about. The R stumbles toward them. At the sight of him, the militiamen 
raise their rifles alarmingly. "It's me," the R pants. "Ernesto. Your leader, Ernest Guardia. 
Don't you recognize me?" Their faces remain hostile and cold, and then one of them 
fires. The R drops into safety behind a rock, and, with his silencer-equipped pistol, kills 
the several militiamen. All at once there is silence. The R alone remains alive. 

Getting to his feet, he gaspingly staggers toward the picket shack, numbed by the 
impossible: his own militiamen firing at him. Inside the shack he discovers current 
newspapers and a radio receiver (but not a transmitter). After examining the newspapers 
and listening to the radio, he discovers that, during his absence, two of his demileaders 
have tried to seize power; the country is now split into two warring camps, and what is 
worse, the two adversaries have released hitherto secret papers that incriminate the R -this 
along the lines of the de-Stalinization in the USSR after Stalin's death. 

What can he do? Even though the MI team failed, he has been deposed anyhow, 


during his absence. The incriminating papers that were released tell how, while in the 
hills, the R worked with CIA agents, inasmuch as that at that time the R had not come 
out for a "people's democracy" along Marxist, pro-China lines. 

Obligingly, a small but high-speed plane lands in the rustic field behind the picket 
shack; the pilot gets out of his craft and saunters toward the shack, carrying various 
objects of a military nature. The R shoots him; the pilot obligingly falls to the ground, 
whereupon the R scuttles across the field and into the plane. In a moment he is airborne 
-- and heading for the United States. Then the camera returns to the field, where the 
"dead" pilot lies; he is now getting leisurely to his feet to watch the plane depart, as are 
the "dead" militiamen. They grin. What does all this mean? 

All this means that the R fell for a fraud within a fraud. The newspapers that he 
found in the picket shack were fakes. So was the radio broadcast that he heard: Barney 
did that, and Barney is very much alive. The team intended that the R "escape," that he 
"shoot" Willy and "electrocute" Barney, then flee the scene and make his way to the fake 
picket shack. The R did not in actuality leave the fake world and reenter the real world; 
no one seized power during his absence; there is no civil war; no incriminating 
documents were released; the "militiamen" and the pilot were spurious, and they did not 
die any more than Willy died; the gun, with its effective silencer, fired no bullets -- no 
wonder the silencer was so effective! And now he is on his way to the United States; the 
MI team did its job: It only appeared to have lost control of the situation for a time . . . 
when in actuality everything went exactly as planned. The whole unmasking of the 
"mental hospital" and the fake newsreel of the R delivering his important speech -- from 
the very beginning the team intended the R to discover the truth. . . right down to Rollin's 
rubber face and the lip-sync. The R was too smart to be fooled by the fakery, and the 
team knew this from the start. For the mission to work they had to include the R's 
discovering "everything" and go on from there. 

Of course, when he reaches Florida, the R will fairly soon discover the truth -discover 
that there has been no seizure of power back home. But by this time the 
American authorities will have audio- and videotaped the R's formal statement that he is 
applying for formal sanctuary in the United States, and this will be sufficient to keep him 
from returning to his own country, for obvious reasons. 

"TV Series Idea" (1967) 

Location: The gray, foggy landscape of Heaven. "We Are Watching You, Inc.," a 
small guardian angel organization consisting of Anastasia Kelp, the owner, a Paul 
Douglas type; Miss Theola Feather, the phone operator, receptionist, and secretary; 
Morris Nimbleman, the research director; the protagonist, Herb DeWinter, in charge of 
field operations; Ludlow Orlawsky, sales manager; Fred Engstrom, repairman for the 
field equipment that Herb uses on his trips back and forth between Earth and Heaven. 
"We Are Watching You, Inc.," is a small outfit among several giants, but its record of 
bailing Earthlings out of jams is virtually 100 percent; it's a small but proud, fine old 
"handcrafted" firm, beset with worries -- namely, that the Government will cancel its 
franchise due to its smallness (the other guardian angel firms have thousands of field 


operators, whereas WAWY, Inc., has only DeWinter, who is a slender, good-looking, 
young, slightly baffled type who seems to fumble things up until the last moment, 
whereat he miraculously comes through). Additional character: Mr. Vane, the expert 
from the Government who is ghostly --his voice booming through an echo chamber -and 
somehow always on hand, checking up on them. He has the power to close them 
for good, and his "audit" is much feared, although admittedly it would be just. Anastasia 
Kelp is realistic, aware that his small outfit is an anachronism and probably ought to give 
up, but he can't quite bring himself to resign and fold up tents. Everything at WAWY, 
Inc., is old-fashioned, even the telephones and wooden counters; it reeks of the early 
twentieth century, without chrome or gadgets -- except the "magical" advanced 
electronic superscience gimmicks that the repairman Fred Engstrom provides Herb with 
at the start of each trip to Earth. Each time the gimmicks differ, according to the 
assignment. The gimmicks are really spectacular, so that Herb becomes a parody on 
James Bond with his magic attache case, and when he is operating in the field and the 
locale is Earth, this is the dominant mood of the drama: a sort of supernatural James 
Bond type, except well-intentioned and unsophisticated and a bit bungling. When in 
Heaven, however, at WAWY, Inc., the locale is like an old-fashioned small store, with 
much personal relatedness between the employees so that they form a bickering, loving 
small family, with Anastasia Kelp, of course, as the father. 

Each episode consists of a different field trip by Herb DeWinter. In each episode 
a client has come to WAWY, Inc., for help. A relative or loved one still on Earth is in 
trouble, and the client wants to hire the services of a professional Guardian Angel to bail 
that person out. Inasmuch as WAWY, Inc., is a small, marginal -- but reputable -- firm, it 
is bound to get a good many oddballs as clients. . . and this it does. The loved one or 
relative on Earth, too, is often wild or kookie, with a wild, kookie mess ensnaring him. 

When he has left Heaven and the offices of WAWY, Inc., and has journeyed 
down to Earth, Herb routinely approaches the beleaguered loved one in this manner: He 
shows him or her his business card --he is, of course, wearing a natty New York-style 
suit of the latest cut -- and says something like, "Mr. Peterson. My name is Herb 
DeWinter, from We Are Watching You, Incorporated. Your grandmother Hatte has hired 
me to look into your situation with an eye toward effectively bringing about a positive 
solution," etc. In other words, he lays it on the line; the beleaguered loved one knows 
who is assisting him and why. Double takes are as brief as possible; then the two of 
them get down to brass tacks, and the beleaguered loved one accepts Herb from then 
as he would accept any expert help proffered him in his dilemma. The shortness of the 
double takes can be explained by the urgent peril surrounding the beleaguered loved 
one; he can't afford to be skeptical, not at a time like this. 

The drama of each episode consists of Herb DeWinter's efforts to collaborate with 
the beleaguered loved one in getting him out of his jam. He always does, but generally 
he makes it a lot worse before he extricates the victim, and often the victim is faster and 
brighter than he. Extra humor is supplied by the occasional tough Chicago syndicate-
type enemies of the victim who also unhesitatingly accept Herb for what he is; for 
instance, he is sapped, knocked out, and his wallet examined by gunsels of the mobster. 
Mr. Big, the head of the mob, as did the victim, does very little double taking; he, too, 
accepts Herb at face value, but of course doubts cynically if Herb will be of much use. In 
addition, Mr. Big compares his electronic gimmicks with the supernatural magic ones 
that Herb is equipped with, and often Mr. Big's are more advanced (recall that WAWY, 


Inc., is quite obsolete: and not merely behind the times in Heaven but occasionally -although 
not inevitably -- on Earth). Countering this is the occasional appearance of 
some gimmick rigged up at WAWY by Fred Engstrom, which is so potent as to be 
miraculous. So it can go either way, depending on the episode. The pendulum swings 
from miracle to complete bust of Herb's arsenal of wild supernatural gimmicks -- the fact 
that any gimmick may work spectacularly or be a total dud -- would help keep audience 
interest, in that the effect of these broad pendulum swings of electronic effectiveness on 
his part make him almost a superman in some episodes, an idiot in others. In fact, within 
the same episode there is no telling what the results will be the next time Herb dips into 
his ever-present attache case; a good deal of suspense can be built up here. 

The drama of struggle between the victim and those opposing him is always 
fought out beyond the pale of the law. If it were a situation in which actual, recognized 
legal bodies could cope with, Mr. DeWinter wouldn't be needed. In every case, the 
beleaguered loved one is isolated in his struggle, and this is what has caused the client 
up in Heaven to come to WAWY, Inc., for help. 

Sometimes, in extremely sticky situations, the owner of the firm, Anastasia Kelp, 
appears to confer with Herb -- appears without being called, in that Herb is always 
humiliated, not relieved, to see his shrewd, heavy-set, rough-talking employer. Kelp 
never really helps Herb solve the problem; he generally merely bickers with him in an 
effort to goad him into better work. The relationship between the two of them is highly 
turbulent, they being so different from each other. 

In addition, Herb occasionally -- but not usually more than once in an episode -"
phones" Heaven to confer either with the repairmen Engstrom or the delightfully sexy 
receptionist or, less frequently, Kelp himself. Engstrom, a nervous, twitchy electronics 
genius type, is a good friend of Herb, and can often give him suggestions as to how to 
put the gear in the attache case to work (almost always the gimmicks that Fred 
Engstrom has come up with are new to Herb). And, of course, everyone at WAWY, Inc., 
is watching Herb's progress on their Terrascreen. As is the apprehensive client -- who 
occasionally manages to get hold of Herb when he calls up to Heaven and berates him 
old-ladywise. (This is a video intercom system, by the way; a mixture of science fiction 
and the supernatural: science fiction in the idea of a visual phone, but supernatural in 
that almost any object can be used as a Terrascreen, such as the mirror of the medicine 
cabinet in the bathroom; Herb is shaving, suddenly sees his lathered features dim, and 
in their place appears Anastasia Kelp's grumpy, irritated visage.) 

And also Mr. Vane, the Government man -- it is never made clear what this 
"government" is like, but obviously, by process of logical reasoning, he must either be 
God or represent God -- tends to hang around the locale of the action on Earth, studying 
Herb's activities, pursuant to his -- Vale's -- job of auditing the firm to see if it "fills a 
genuine need." He never participates in the victim rescue, except insofar as he's 
inadvertently brought in by such extravagant moments as the total collapse of the 
building, etc. 

Hence, in his job, Herb is under great pressure every episode; pressure from his 
boss Mr. Kelp, pressure from Mr. Vane, pressure from the victim's foes, and, of course, 
from the victim himself, who always expects absolutely spectacular, unlimited help from 
a representative from Heaven who has been hired as his professional guardian angel. 
He is, of course, disappointed each time, as is Kelp -- and Vane appears always on the 
verge of writing finis to the firm -- but then, as the final moments run out, Herb, with the 


help of Fred Engstrom and Miss Feather, manages to snatch final victory, and everyone 
can relax until next time. Reluctantly, with grudging admiration, Mr. Vane grants a 
temporary reprieve to the firm. The episode ends with Herb back in Heaven in the front 
office of the firm, and an identifying coda note closes each half hour: the entrance to the 
firm's office, with the shadow of a new client falling across it as the client prepares to 
enter. 

Hence each episode begins and ends with a shadow -- a different shadow -darkening 
the threshold of the firm's office, and all employees, plus Mr. Kelp, glancing 
up in unison with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation. 

Sex enters mildly in Heaven a la Miss Feather, and more carnally in the form of 
certain female victims whom Herb has shown up to save. In this vein the drama a bit 
resembles the Topper novels. Herb, who is rather a small-town hick, although good-
looking and certainly not regional, seems quite frequently to draw swanky, wealthy 
penthouse-type mistresses and wives as his victim-to-be-saved; he is naive, and so the 
sequel theme doesn't ever get very far -- keeping the series fit for children. And, of 
course, being from Heaven, he can't very well have a deep interest in such goings-on. 
But now and then he is tempted. 

Since Herb can appear anywhere on Earth, in any country, the locale of the Earth 
scenes is enormous. One episode can be with the Volpo in East Berlin, the next in 
Cambodia or Pocatello, Idaho. This permits the same international flavor as in 
U.N.C.L.E.-type series. 

In periods of extreme danger for Herb, when he is unable to get some gimmick to 
work, Fred Engstrom occasionally actually comes to Earth in person; together, they 
tinker with the gadget, trying to figure out why it doesn't work. Engstrom, an electronic -but 
erratic -- genius, often gets it to work -- and sometimes work too well. Both men have 
the advantage, however, of being immortal; the building can disappear in a cloud of 
atomic particles, but, of course, neither is harmed. Here again is the superman theme, 
with humorous, even satiric overtones. 

Much greater depth can be given the series if there is a particular evil "human" 
who shows up in various guises from time to time, while Herb is at work on Earth. This 
sinister man's name changes, and so does the modus operandi of his activities, but he is 
always pitted against Herb. . . this gives Herb's rescue activities the faint hint of being a 
perpetual crusade in the name of God and Good against Evil, as personified by the 
recurring evil figure who seems to haunt Earth. Of course, since this is basically an 
action-comedy series, philosophical undertones such as this will be played down, yet will 
be there for anyone who wants to pick them up. 

The currency that WAWY, Inc., receives for its successful rescue efforts on Earth 
is the reprieve from extinction that Mr. Vane extends at the end of each episode. So over 
and above the fight in each episode to save the beleaguered victim on Earth, there is a 
perpetual fight on the part of Herb DeWinter, Anastasia Kelp, and others in the 
organization, which transcends the episodes: the fight to keep their identity; i.e. the fight 
to survive. 

"Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) 


The initial question: Who is the viewpoint character? It must be either the bounty 
hunter Rick Deckard or Jack Isidore. Since Isidore is younger, were he to be the 
viewpoint character we would perhaps have something on the order of The Graduate, in 
which everyone over thirty is corrupt and an instrument of the Establishment, and young, 
free, innocent love wins out -- an oddly corny theme for such a supposedly adult movie. 
In the novel, Isidore has a naive love directed toward the androids; Rick Deckard's view 
is that the androids are vicious machines that must be destroyed. These two different 
(and mutually exclusive) views, running parallel to each other in a twin-plot scheme, 
merge toward the end of the work, when Isidore is confronted by the cruelty of the 
androids as they cut the legs off the spider. Rick Deckard's view has won out, and the 
proof of this is that Isidore tells the bounty hunter where the androids are within the 
decayed apartment building. Since Deckard's view proves to be correct, perhaps he 
should be the viewpoint protagonist. We cannot come up with "love and innocence and 
faith conquer all," as was done -- and I think wrongly -- in the movie The Graduate. 

But if Rick Deckard is the protagonist, then we are faced with a difficult problem 
(or perhaps I should say a problem that must be solved): the love that the bounty hunter 
feels toward animals, in contrast to his heartless murders of the androids. To love an 
animal more than a person is a deranged or cynical view -- or so it might seem. We must 
learn very soon why Rick holds this view, which means an early proof for his view 
contrasted with Isidore's. Or is not this the major theme, this struggle between the two 
views -- with proof only at the end that Rick Deckard's view was correct. In the novel we 
are told that androids lack human feeling, warmth, and empathic sensitivity, but we are 
not shown this in action until the meeting of Isidore and Deckard. But perhaps this is a 
good way to handle it; the contrast between Isidore and his views, in contrast to Deckard 
and his views, in some ways is the primary story. Notice I say "story" and not theme. 
The theme of the book tends to cluster around the religion of Mercerism and its 
emphasis on shared pain and mutual compassion, a rebirth of the primordial Christian 
view. Or is the basic theme the broad background, the total world in which they live, with 
their collective and general worship of animals, the decaying huge apartment buildings, 
and the "specials," like Jack Isidore -- plus the running thread of their mutual empathy? 

Casting is a vital question. Rick Deckard could, for example, be played by 
Gregory Peck (which makes him powerful and sensitive and wise), in contrast to Richard 
Widmark (which makes him a psychotic killer), with several lesser possibilities, such as 
Martin Balsam (which makes him virtually into an archetypal father figure), or someone 
like Ben Gazzara (which makes him bold, and a man of action). As to Isidore. He could 
be played, for example, by Dean Stockwell (which makes him sensitive and an introvert, 
living in a lonely world of his own making), or possibly Wally Cox, which makes him into 
Wally Cox. My theory (supra) calls for Deckard to be the protagonist, with views that the 
audience may not quite at first share but that at the end win out morally, psychologically, 
dramatically, and in all other ways. Hence I would favor someone like Gregory Peck to 
play Rick Deckard, and then Dean Stockwell to play Isidore. It seems to me that with 
each casting change -- or decision -- you have a whole new ball of wax. Think, for 
example, of the strong factor introduced if Rachael were played by a vibrant, hard girl 
such as Grace Slick (a bit of casting I would really plug for). 

Of course, there is also the question of the tone of the picture; is this a touching 
story (Isidore protecting the androids and then, at the end, seeing what they are really 


like -- his soap bubble world suddenly collapsing), or Isidore as funny (via Wally Cox, 
etc.), or gunplay action, as Deckard shoots one android after another, or as a broad 
general picture of a whole and entire world that is ethnic fundamentally, with many 
quaint and odd customs practiced with great solemnity by the natives, customs that 
include murder on a legal basis: "people" (i.e. the androids) without any legal rights of 
any sort. Also, the film could be procop or anticop, which reverts as a question to the 
deeper, earlier question of what age group is the protagonist going to be? 

I personally feel that the bizarre, the odd, the eerie should be played up, the 
pataphysical quiddities of this world in which they live. One finds this, for example, of the 
whole element about fake live animals, and the new animal dealers who have replaced 
the new car dealers of our own time. The strange, the dreamlike (as in the time-lapse 
and space-lapse camerawork in The Graduate). It is a sort of pretend world. . . up to a 
point. And then the murders of the androids begin, and suddenly it is all real, all for 
keeps, and very much grim and unfunny. 

One additional oddity: the fact that there are two Rachaels, the one whom Rick 
meets, and then the one Isidore meets. These are the same android, and some kind of 
imaginative camerawork -- superimpositions or few-frame blinks back and forth between 
the two androids -- is much needed, and could be a major attraction of the film. What 
must be made clear to the audience, however, [is] that these two Rachaels, each with its 
human colleague, are functioning at the same time; these are not a flashback but a 
simultaneous double life. For example, the android talking to Rick Deckard could say a 
phrase, and then when we pick the other Rachael up with Isidore, she could repeat the 
exact words -- an audiotrack superimposition, with the voice echoing itself as in a sort of 
electronic echo chamber, much improved on our own. I think that (1) it is going to be 
hard to get across the desired effect, but (2) it will be worth the effort. The small plot-
element of the Other Police Station could be eliminated entirely. 

I am not sure that the Mood Organ material should, as in the novel, begin the 
piece. Perhaps instead we could have Jack Isidore driving his electric-animal-repair 
truck setting out at dawn. Technically, I think there should be a weapon, used in 
particular by the bounty hunters, that isn't merely another laser tube, such as one sees 
in Star Trek and The Invaders. Here again, something of imagination rather than cliche 
is needed. This includes the sound made by the weapon; it must be new and unusual, 
too. A sound, for example, that a champagne bottle makes when it pops its cork. 

It seems to me that one strong point of the novel is the fact that it provides space 
for many moods and tones: There is the dramatic search and destruction of the 
androids, the tenderness felt toward live animals, the weird, deserted apartment building 
in which Jack Isidore lives -- opportunities for humor, the peculiar, the very frightening, 
and, of course, the awe felt when Mercer is encountered. We can have a many-sided 
film. . . or, I would think, some of the moods (and plot, etc.) can be eliminated entirely, 
however important they are to the novel. . . and then remaining elements, such as 
Isidore and the Mercer theme, can be retained and built up more. But I do think that both 
the search and destroy androids theme must be retained (because of its connection -contrast 
-- to Isidore's view), and because it all throughout the novel adds the quality of 
violence, of the chase. . . although, in regarding this, I wonder if the empathy test that 
Deckard gives prospective androids is adequate in the visual medium. Perhaps an 
entirely new type of test should be made up for this, or perhaps no test that is a 
question-and-answer test, but perhaps a measuring of brain-wave rhythms. This, too, is 


a vital area to be there with imagination, as with the kind of weapons used. 

There could be room for more sex. E.g. Rick Deckard making love to Rachael 
and then dissolve to Isidore, trying same on his Rachael android, and fouling it all up, a 
la Peter Sellers. The possibilities here are enormous. . . to cite one reason, there is the 
exact duplication of sentences uttered by the two identical androids. Sentences to which 
Rick Deckard gives one kind of reply. Jack Isidore another. The Isidore romance could 
be a chilling travesty of the successful Rick Deckard makeout with the girl. 

And this brings up the whole underlying subject: sexual relations between 
humans and androids. What is it like? What does it mean? Is it, for instance, like going 
to bed with a real woman? Or is it an awful, nighmarish, bad trip, where what is dead 
and inert seems alive and warm and capable of the most acute intimacy known to living 
creatures? Isn't this, this sexual union between Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen -- isn't 
it the summa of falsity and mechanical motions carried out minus any real feeling, as we 
understand the word? Feeling on each of their parts. Does in fact her mental -- and 
physical -- coldness numb the male, the human man, into an echo of it? 

In the novel it is treated on page 165 [of the 1968 Doubleday first edition] in its 
most acute form, when, as Rachael and Rick prepare to go to bed, Rachael says to him, 
"Androids can't bear children. . . is that a loss? I really don't know; I have no way to tell. 
How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not 
born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. 
Ants again; that's what we are. . . chitinous reflex machines who aren't really alive. I'm 
not really alive! You're not going to bed with a woman. 

And then a bit later Rachael says, 

"I understand -- they tell me -- it's convincing if you don't think too much about it. 
But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you're doing -- then you can't go on. For, 
ahem, physiological reasons." 

Rick then bends and kisses her bare shoulder. 

Now, this is about the extent of this subject as handled in the novel, but there are 
more possibilities, which might come out vividly in a film version. For example (to name 
the first that comes to my mind): Is this a way he can cheat vis-a-vis his wife Iran -- in 
other words, is it all right to sleep with an android? It doesn't count, etc. In any case, the 
key question comes up on page 168, where Rachael asks, "Would you ever go to bed 
with an android again?" His answer to this is gracious, very politic, and yet somehow 
evasive. "If it was a girl," Rick says. "If she resembled you." But Rachael has already 
made the point that she is not a person; she is a type, a subform of androids in general. 
His relationship, by having intercourse with her, has melded him to -- not an individual, 
human or android -- but to a whole type or model, of which, theoretically, there could be 
tens of thousands. To whom, then, has he really given his erotic libido to? An army of 
rachael rosens, a horde of them, all identical? This undermines the meaning of love -- at 
least sexual, erotic love -- because the basic parity is undermined, one man for one 
woman (or at least one at a time). But he has, in effect, made love to them all! 

Here, I think, the crucial questions of What is reality? and What is illusion? come 
up strongly. The whole sexual scene with Rachael (and, if used, the one between Isidore 
and Pris) could be dreamlike, but not in the usual sense, not the wishful, daydreaming 
contemplations of infinite women, infinite prowess, and so forth. This could be -- not a 
vague dream -- but a horrifyingly mechanical episode of half dream, half reality, with 
Rachael melting superficially -- but by doing so, exposing a steel-and-solid-state 


electronic gear beneath. The more Rick strives to force her to become a woman -- or, 
more accurately, to play the role of a woman -- the more he encounters the core of unlife 
within her. In subtle ways (certainly not in gross ways) it should be shown that his 
attempt to make love to her as a woman for him is defeated by the tireless core of her 
electronic being. I don't mean that he opens a door in her chest, thus swinging her right 
breast away and exposing a maze of sensationally advanced selenoids and servo-
assists and transistors. This is not the discovery he -- and the audience -- is making; 
this is already known. What is shown is just how far both the android woman and the 
human male can manage to force back the artificial and mechanical and smother it in 
their mutual yearnings. They are both pretending. . . but a good deal of ordinary, today 
and now sex is handled this way; during sex the faculty of judgment in many ways is 
suspended, by both partners. The question here is: How far can this go? Will that which 
both of them desire be successfully maintained, or will it, because of her makeup, 
recede farther and farther the deeper he goes -- much to the bitter disappointment of 
both of them? 

It seems to me that after the soothing, endearing words, a very hateful conclusion 
-- or aftermath -- could spring up between them; their mutually arranged act has made 
each worse off than before, and this could be well expressed by the mutual hatred and 
disappointment each now feels for the other. 

With this miserable outcome, perhaps the segue to Isidore and Pris, from time to 
time, could reveal a more optimistic scene than would be expected. Ironically, it might be 
Isidore who succeeds -- due to his worldly ignorance. And this would provide an 
augmented basis for his grief when the three andys die. 

The failure of the sexual act between Rick and Rachael could, in the end, amount 
to a complete collapse of understanding between them, a theme on the order of A 
Passage to India [the E. M. Forster novel]. And if this deep and final estrangement aids 
Rick in his search-and-destroy mission against Pris Stratton -- makes it possible, in fact, 
for him to kill her -- then the sex theme will have served a vital purpose in terms of the 
book's plot (which up to now it really hasn't done; it was, in the printed form, sort of an 
interlude only). Yes, it could well be that Rick's recoiling from being close to Rachael -or 
trying his damn best to be close -- may be vital in his determination -- and success -in 
destroying the last three andys. 

I will stop speculating at this point, and hopefully wait for a response, however slight it 
may well be, to what I've added here in the way of further analysis of the novel. 

Part Five 
Essays and Speeches 

This section contains the principal published essays by Dick on matters other 
than science fiction. 

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" was first published in 
Lighthouse (edited by Terry Carr), No. 11, November 1964. 

"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" was first published in Niekas, No. 11, 


March 1965. It was reprinted in the PKDS Newsletter, No. 14, June 1987. 

"The Android and the Human," delivered as a speech by Dick at the University of 
British Columbia, Vancouver, in February 1972, was first published in SF Commentary, 
No. 31, December 1972. It was most recently reprinted in the eclectic Dick anthology 
The Dark-Haired Girl (1988), published by Mark V. Ziesing. This essay is Dick's most 
extended nonfictional foray into social ethics. The rape-related humor has aged very 
badly, and the celebration of random ripoffs as the means of warding off centralized 
oppression may not convince readers who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. But the 
central distinction between the android and the human remains a suggestive one. 

"Man, Android, and Machine" first appeared in the British anthology Science 
Fiction at Large (Gollancz, 1976), edited by Peter Nicholls, and was reprinted in The 
Dark-Haired Girl. 

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" was delivered 
as a speech by Dick at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz, 
France, in September 1977. It was first published in French translation in L'Annee 197778 
de la S.-F. et du Fantastique (Juilliard, 1978), edited by Jacques Goimard. Its first 
English publication came in the PKDS Newsletter, No. 27, August 1991. 

"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" was written as 
a speech but was likely never delivered. It was first published in I Hope I Shall Arrive 
Soon (1985). 

"Cosmogony and Cosmology," dated January 23, 1978, was expressly intended 
by Dick as a summary of the key insights expressed in the Exegesis as of that time. It is 
included here as an essay because it was sent out in typed form by Dick to his agent, 
Russell Galen, although with no overt publishing intentions in mind. In this sense, it 
differs from the remainder of the Exegesis, which Dick kept to himself, but for occasional 
limited disclosures to friends. It was first published in a limited edition by Kerosina Books 
in 1987. 

"The Tagore Letter" was first published in Niekas, No. 28, November 1981. 

"Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" (1964) 

One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an 
undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever 
from my garden-of-eden slumber. "The psychotic does not merely think he sees four 
blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An 
hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the 
brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient acts in response to this to-him-veryreal 
perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to 
suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of 
psychosis." 

Well, I have pondered this over the dreary years, while meantime the drug 
industry, psychiatrists, and certain naughty persons of dubious repute have done much 
to validate -- and further explore -- this topic, so that now we are faced with a psychiatric 
establishment little related to the simple good old days (circa 1900) when mental 


patients fell into one of two rigid classes: the insane, which meant simply that they were 
too ill to function in society, to wash and wax their car, pay their utility bills, drink one 
martini and still utter pleasant conversation, and hence had to be institutionalized. . . and 
the neurotic, which included all those wise enough to seek out psychiatric help, and for 
merely "hysterical" complaints, such as feeling a compulsion to untie everybody's shoes 
or count the number of small boys on tricycles passing their houses or offices, or for 
"neurotic" disorders that boiled down to anxiety felt out of proportion to the "reality 
situation," in particular specialized phobias such as a morbid, senseless dread that an 
unmanned space missile supposed to land in the Atlantic would instead strike dead-
center in the patio on Sunday afternoon while the person in question was fixing 
charcoal-broiled hamburgers. No real relationship was seen between the "insane" who 
were -- or should have been -- in institutions and "neurotics" or "hysterical" individuals 
showing up for one hour of free-association a week; in fact, the belief that the insane (or 
as we would say now, the psychotic) had an ailment of a physical, rather than 
psychogenic, origin and the neurotic felt unnatural fears because of a traumatic event in 
his early childhood was so established that Freud's initial discovery had to do with 
creating a diagnostic basis upon which the doctor could decide into which group the ill 
person fell. If he proved psychotic, then depth psychology, psychoanalysis, was not for 
him -- if neurotic, all that was needed was to bring the long-forgotten repressed 
traumatic sexual material out of the subconscious and into the light of day. . . whereupon 
the phobias and compulsions would vanish. 

This looked to be a good thing, until Jung showed up and proved: 

1. That hospitalized, full psychotics responded to psychotherapy as rapidly as 
neurotics, once the psychotic's private language had been comprehended, 
communication thereby being established. And 
2. Many "neurotics," who were ambulatory, who held jobs, raised families, 
brushed their teeth regularly, were not what he had designated as "introverted neurotics" 
but in fact psychotics -- specifically schizophrenics -- in an early stage of a lifelong 
illness career. And they responded less well to psychoanalysis than anyone else. 
This meant something. (A) Perhaps all mental illness, no matter how severe, 
might be psychogenic in origin. (B) A neurosis might not be an illness at all or even an 
illness symptom, but a construct of the brain to achieve stasis and avoid a far more 
serious breakdown; hence it might well be risky to tinker with someone's neurosis 
because under it might lie a full-blown psychosis -- which would emerge at the point 
where the happy psychiatrist sits back and says, "See? You're no longer afraid of 
buses." Whereupon the patient then discovers that he is now afraid of everything, 
including life itself. And can no longer function at all. 

So out went the whole great scheme of things, the subconscious, the repressed 
childhood sexual trauma -- like a medieval flat-world map it referred to nothing, and was, 
possibly, even harmful to what are now designated as "borderline psychotics," which is a 
way of saying, "Those who can't function in society but do. I guess." How cloudy can an 
issue become? All theories, one by one, broke down; there were "rational" psychotics, 
whom we in our amusing way call paranoids, and there were -- but enough. Because 
now we are at what I regard the crucial issue: that of the presence in the psychotic of not 
only delusions ("They're conspiring against me," etc.) but of hallucinations, which 
neurotics do not have. So perhaps in this regard we have a diagnostic basis, if not of the 
nature of the illness then at least of its severity. But one item crops up, here, that is 


rather unnerving. There is such a thing as negative hallucination -- that is, instead of 
seeing what is not there, the patient cannot see what is. (Jung gives, I think, the most 
extraordinary example of this: a patient who saw people minus their heads -- he saw 
them up to the neck only, and then nothing.) But what is even more scary is that this 
patient was not psychotic; he was absolutely for sure merely hysterical -- as any stage 
hypnotist can testify, since such malperception can be induced in distinctly nonill people. 
. . as well as a good deal more, including that which when it occurs without the influence 
of the hypnotist is considered the sine qua non of psychosis, the positive hallucination. 

We are now getting somewhere, and it is a frightening where. Because we have 
entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian 
Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced in virtually any person, 
but the added horror of "posthypnotic suggestion" gets thrown in for good measure. . . 
and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think 
I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a 
form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all 
modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable 
to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -grows 
from the observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and 
perceptions and motivations implanted by "suggestion" during the hypnotic state. 
Suggestion? How weak a word; how little it conveys, compared to the experience itself. 
(I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that ever 
happened to me.) What the body of "suggestions" add up to for the hypnotized subject is 
nothing less than a new worldview superimposed on the subject's customary one; there 
is no limit to the extent of this induced new view or gestalt of data perceptions and 
organizing ideas within the mentational processes of the brain -- no limit to its extent, its 
duration, or its departure not only from what we quaintly call "reality." And -- this simply 
can't be, logically, but it is so -- the subject can be altered physically, in terms of what he 
is able to do; he can lie rigid between two chairs and be stood on, so even the somatic 
portion of him is new. . . sometimes even to the point of contradicting what we know to 
be anatomically possible, as relating to the circulatory system, etc. (e.g., holding his arm 
extended for a considerable time); the time limit is imposed by purely physiological 
factors, and there simply can be no psychogenic explanation as to such a phenomenon, 
unless we wish to posit yoga or Psionic or -- let's face it -- magical powers. But powers 
of this sort by whom? The patient? The hypnotist? It makes no sense either way, unless 
we restore the seventeenth-century notion of wizards and those who are victims of 
wizardly spells. . . and where does this take us? I doubt if even John W. Campbell, Jr. 
[influential SF editor of Astounding magazine, whose rigid approach to SF plotting was 
disapproved of by Dick] would want to venture along this path. 

However, perhaps we can construct something comprehensible out of this by 
recalling that there now appears some validation of extrasensory perceptions -- and 
abilities. There is a relationship; as far back as 1900 Freud himself noted palpable 
evidence, during free association by his patients, of telepathic ability. (I really hate to 
have learned this, having jeered at ESP for years; but Freud's documentation alone -and 
he was an incredibly scrupulous observer -- tends to strengthen the case for ESP.) 
And, recently, in absolutely reputable psychiatric journals, trained M.D. psychiatrists 
have given us the news that telepathic perceptions by their patients occur so frequently 
as to be beyond dispute. Ehrenwald, published by W. W. Norton, which is reputable, 


with a foreword by Gardner Murphy, goes so far as to construct an entire theory of 
mental illness based on firsthand observation of his severely disturbed patients that they 
are experiencing involuntary telepathic linkage; the paranoids, for example, receive as 
sense data the marginal, repressed, unspoken hostile thoughts and feelings of those 
around them; he declares that again and again, while passing through hospital wards, 
paranoid patients quoted to him word for word hostile thoughts that he was entertaining 
toward them -- and, of course, concealing such thoughts, as we all do, in order to keep 
our interpersonal relationships functioning. So now, in my prolix, rambling way, I have 
gotten to my Big Scoop. Taking Ehrenwald's utterances at face value (that is, accepting 
them as true and using them as a postulate), we are faced with the clear and evident 
possibility that at least in the case of paranoids -- or, anyhow, some paranoids -- the 
"delusions" are not delusions at all, but are, on the contrary, accurate perceptions of an 
area of reality that the rest of us cannot (thank the Lord) reach. All right; now let's return 
to and reexamine the entire topic of mental illness, hallucinations both negative and 
positive, the hypnotic experience, pseudoschizophrenic sensory distortions brought 
about by chemicals such as LSD and organic toxins such as are found in some 
mushrooms, etc., and, to be absolutely certain that I make a fool of myself, I'll add 
mysticism, the mystical event called "conversion," such as happened to St. Paul. 
Ready? Okay. 

Can a person be psychotic without hallucinating? Yes. The paranoids merely 
have "delusional ideas"; they see the same reality that we do, but interpret it differently, 
work it into their system. 

Can a person hallucinate without being psychotic? Yes, as for example during the 
hypnotic state, under drugs, when ill with a high fever, poisoned -- for many reasons. 

What is the relationship between hallucination and worldview? The German 
psychological notion (more accurately Swiss) is that each individual has a structured, 
idiosyncratic, and in some regards unique way of picturing or experiencing -- or 
whatever it is one does with -- reality. It now is universally accepted that reality "in itself," 
as Kant put it, is really unknown to any sentient organism; the categories of organization, 
time, and space are mechanisms by which the living percept-systems, including the 
portions of the brain that receive the "raw" sense data, require the imposition of a 
subjective framework in order to turn what would otherwise be chaotic into an 
environment that is relatively constant, with enough abiding aspects so that the 
organism can imagine, on the basis of memory (the past) and observing (the present), 
what the future probably will be. Continuity is essential; one must be able to recognize a 
good deal of the external world in order to function (this, of course, is why the name 
problem is real and not a figment of medieval imagination; the logos, the word, turns 
chaos into separate and different objects). 

A good deal of this organization is done within the percept system itself; that is, 
by less-than-conscious portions of the neurological apparatus, so by the time the "self" 
receives the sense data it has so to speak been automatically structured into the 
idiosyncratic worldview. The self (or ego or some damn fool thing) is therefore presented 
with material a good deal of which originated within its own being, at one level or 
another. In the light of this, the idea of hallucinating takes on a very different character; 
hallucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis, drugs, toxins, etc., may be 
merely quantitatively different from what we see, not qualitatively so. In other words, too 
much is emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism, over and beyond 


the structural, organizing necessity. The percept system in a sense is overperceiving, is 
presenting the self portion of the brain too much. The cognitive processes, then, in 
particular the judging, reflecting frontal lobe, cannot encompass what it has been given, 
and for it -- for the person -- the world begins to become mysterious. No-name entities or 
aspects begin to appear, and, since the person does not know what they are -- that is, 
what they're called or what they mean -- he cannot communicate with other persons 
about them. This breakdown of verbal communication is the fatal index that somewhere 
along the line the person is experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his or her 
own prior worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other persons. 

But the crucial question as to where, at what stage, these perplexing aspects, 
augmentations, or warpages away from the commonly shared view begin, is not 
answered by any of this. We are aware today that a good deal of what we call "external 
reality" consists of a subjective framework by the percept system itself, and that there 
are probably as many different worldviews as individuals. . . but how do unwanted, even 
frightening, and certainly not commonly shared "hallucinations" creep in? Up until the 
last three or four years it would have been generally agreed that these invasions of the 
orderly continuity of world experience beyond doubt originate in the person, at some 
level of the neurological structure, but now, for the first time, really, the body of evidence 
has begun to swing the other way. Entirely new terms such as "expanded 
consciousness" are heard, terms indicating that research, especially with hallucinatory 
drugs, points to the probability, whether we like it or not, that, as in the case of Jan 
Ehrenwald's paranoids, the percept system of the organism is overperceiving, all right, 
and undoubtedly presenting the judging centers of the frontal lobe with data they can't 
handle, and this is bad because there can be no judgment under such circumstances, 
and no interpersonal life, due to the breakdown of the shared language -- but the 
overperception emanates from outside the organism; the percept system of the 
organism is perceiving what is actually there, and it should not be doing so, because to 
do so is to make the cognitive process impossible, however real the entities perceived 
are. The problem actually seems to be that rather than "seeing what isn't there" the 
organism is seeing what is there -- but no one else does, hence no semantic sign exists 
to depict the entity and therefore the organism cannot continue an empathic relationship 
with the members of his society. And this breakdown of empathy is double; they can't 
empathize his "world," and he can't theirs. 

Hallucination, mental illness, drug experiences of "expanded consciousness" are 
menacing to the organism because of the social results. It is obvious, then, what role 
language plays in human life: It is the cardinal instrument by which the individual 
worldviews are linked so that a shared, for all intents and purposes common reality is 
constructed. What is actually subjective becomes objective -- agreed on. So, viewed this 
way, sociologically and anthropologically, it does not matter where the hallucinations 
originate or even whether they are accurate -- but unique and hence unshared -perceptions 
of "higher levels of reality unglimpsed ordinarily," even by the person 
himself. 

Real or unreal, originating within the percept system or received validly by the 
percept system because, say, of some chemical agent not normally present and active 
in the brain's metabolism, the unshared world that we call "hallucinatory" is destructive: 
Alienation, isolation, a sense of everything being strange, of things altering and bending 
-- all this is the logical result, until the individual, formerly a part of human culture, 


becomes an organic "windowless monad" [a description utilized by Leibnitz]. It does not 
matter that his reasoning faculties are unimpaired; it does not matter whether or not he 
feels "adequate emotion," those being the two classic criteria by which schizophrenia 
was diagnosed. Actually it seems to be that neither is impaired; faced with the sense 
data presented him, the individual does as well with it as we do with ours, and the same 
goes for his emotional life -- he may display moods and feelings that to us can't be 
accounted for. But we are not perceiving what he is; the emotions are almost certainly 
appropriate in relation to what he perceives, i.e. experiences. 

My own feeling, especially in view of the very recent laboratory findings that some 
connection exists between schizophrenia and subsecretions of the adrenal gland, is this: 
"The sane man does not know that everything is possible." In other words, the mentally 
ill person at one time or another knew too much. And, as a result, so to speak, his head 
shut down. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but gadzooks -- what about too 
much knowledge? Death, as a factor of reality, perhaps should not be known about at 
all, or, if that's impossible, then as little as one can manage. James Stephens, in his 
poem "The Whisperer" (from Insurrections, Dublin, 1912), informs us of something I 
distinctly am not glad to know, but now I know it, and I guess one finds it out sooner or 
later. Ironically, it is that God Himself feels this: 

I fashion you, 

and then for weal or woe, 

By business through, 

I care not how ye go, 

Or struggle, win or lose, nor do 

I want to know. 

One doesn't have to depend on hallucinations; one can unhinge oneself by many other 
roads. 

"Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes" (1965) 

In many species of life forms, such as the grazing animals, a newborn individual 
is more or less thrust out into the koinos kosmos (the shared world) immediately. For a 
lamb or a pony, the idios kosmos (the personal world) ceases when the first light hits his 
eyes -- but a human child, at birth, still has years of a kind of semireal existence ahead 
of him: semireal in the sense that until he is fifteen or sixteen years old he is able to 
some degree to remain not thoroughly born, not entirely on his own; fragments of the 
idios kosmos remain, and not all or even very much of the koinos kosmos has been 
forced onto him as yet. The full burden of the koinos kosmos does not weigh until what 
is delightfully referred to as "psychosexual maturity" strikes, which means those lovely 
days during high school epitomized by asking that cute girl in the row ahead of you if 
she'd like to go get a soda after school, and she saying "NO." That's it. The koinos 
kosmos has set in. Prepare, young man, for a long winter. Much more -- and worse -- lie 
ahead. 

The preschizophrenic personality is generally called "schizoid effective" [sic; likely 


"affective" intended], which means that as an adolescent he still hopes that he won't 
have to ask the cute chick (or boy) in the next row for a date. Speaking in terms of my 
own schizoid-effective experience, one gazes at her for a year or so, mentally detailing 
all possible outcomes; the good ones go under the rubric "daydreams," the bad ones 
under "phobia." This bipolar internal war goes on endlessly; meanwhile the actual girl 
has no idea you're alive (and guess why: You're not). If the phobias win out (suppose I 
ask her and she says, "With you?" etc.), then the schizoid-effective kid physically bolts 
from the classroom with agoraphobia, which gradually widens into true schizophrenic 
avoidance of all human contact, or withdraws into phantasy, becomes, so to speak, his 
own Abe Merritt [a popular SF writer of the 1920s and 1930s] -- or, if things go further 
wrong, his own H. P. Lovecraft. In any case, the girl is forgotten and the leap to 
psychosexual maturity never takes place, which wouldn't be bad in itself because really 
there are other things in life besides pretty girls (or so I'm told, anyhow). But it's the 
implication that's so ominous. What has happened will repeat itself again and again, 
wherever the kid runs head on into the koinos kosmos. And these are the years (fifteen 
years old to twenty-two) when he can no longer keep from running into it on almost 
every occasion. (Phone the dentist, Charley, and make an appointment to get that cavity 
patched," etc.) The idios kosmos is leaking away; he is gradually being thrust out of the 
postwomb womb. Biological aging is taking place, and he can't hold it back. His efforts to 
do so, if they continue, will later be called "an attempt to retreat from adult responsibility 
and reality," and if he is later diagnosed as schizophrenic, it will be said that he has 
"escaped from the real world into a phantasy one." This, while almost true, is just not 
quite correct. Because reality has an attribute that, if you'll ponder on it, you'll realize is 
the attribute that causes us to so designate it as reality: It can't be escaped. As a matter 
of fact, during his preschizophrenic life, during the schizoid-effective period, he has been 
somewhat doing this; he is now no longer able to. The deadly appearance, around 
nineteen, of schizophrenia, is not a retreat from reality, but on the contrary: the breaking 
out of reality all around him; its presence, not its absence from his vicinity. The lifelong 
fight to avoid it has ended in failure; he is engulfed in it. Gak! 

What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to 
imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether 
he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it 
progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the acausal 
connective principle that Wolfgang Pauli called synchronicity is operating in all situations 
-- not merely as only one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the 
schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun. 

At this point the I Ching (The Book of Changes) enters, since it works on the 
basis of synchronicity -- and is a device by which synchronicity can be handled. Maybe 
you prefer the word "coincidence" to Pauli's word. Anyhow, both terms refer to acausal 
connectives, or rather events linked in that manner, events occurring outside of time. Not 
a chain passing from yesterday to today to tomorrow but all taking place now. All 
chiming away now, like Leibnitz's preset clocks. And yet none having any causal 
connection with any of the others. 

That events can take place outside of time is a discovery that strikes me as 
dismal. My first reaction was, "Good God, I was right; when you're at the dentist it does 
last forever." I'll let the mystics dilate on, more favorable possibilities, such as eternal 
bliss. Anyhow, LSD has made this discovery available to everyone, and hence subject to 


consensual validation, hence within the realm of knowledge, hence a scientific fact (or 
just plain fact, if you prefer). Anybody can get into this state now, not just the 
schizophrenic. Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg of LSD -and 
enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in -- but enough. Because after two thousand 
years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgment, one probably will be rather 
apathetic to asking for one's five dollars back. 

But at least one has now learned what life is like during the catatonic 
schizophrenic state, and one does return from LSD within a short time period as 
computed within the koinos kosmos (roughly ten hours), however much longer it is in the 
idios kosmos (to rather understate the matter). For the catatonic schizophrenic the 
duration of this state is not only forever idios kosmoswise but also, unless lucky, koinos 
kosmoswise. To put it in zen terms, under LSD you experience eternity for only a short 
period (or, as Planet Stories used to phrase it, "Such-and-such," he screamed under his 
breath). So, within a nontime interval, all manner of elaborate and peculiar events can 
take place; whole epics can unfold in the fashion of the recent movie Ben Hur. (If you'd 
prefer to undergo the experience of LSD without taking it, imagine sitting through Ben 
Hur twenty times without the midpoint intermission. Got it? Keep it.) 

This unfolding is not in any sense a causal progression; it is the vertical opening 
forth of synchronicity rather than the horizontal cause-and-effect sequence that we 
experience by clock time, and since it is timeless, it is unlimited in extent; it has no built-
in end. So the universe of the schizophrenic is, again to understate it, somewhat large. 
Much too large. Ours, like the twice-daily measured squirt of toothpaste, is controlled 
and finite; we rub up against only as much reality as we can handle -- or think we can 
handle, to be more accurate. Anyhow, we seem to manage to control its rate, just as, for 
example, we decide not to go on the freeway during rush-hour traffic but take that good 
old back road that nobody (sic) knows about except us. Well, it goes without saying that 
we eventually err; we take a wrong turn, generally when we're about sixty-five years of 
age; we drop dead from cardiac arrest, and despite years of experience in managing the 
flow of reality, we're just as dead as the psychotic stuck in the eternal now. 

But, to repeat, this merely lies ahead of us, in the future; we haven't failed to get 
that annual medical checkup yet, or if we have, it wouldn't have revealed anything this 
time, except the usual ulcer. Our partial knowledge of reality is sufficient to get us by -for 
a while longer. Cause and effect bumble on, and we go with them; like good middle-
class Americans we keep paying on our insurance policies, hoping to outbet the actuary 
tables. What will destroy us in the end is synchronicity; eventually we will arrive in a blind 
intersection at 4:00 A.M. the same time another idiot does, also tanked up with beer; 
both of us will then depart for the next life, with probably the same outcome there, too. 
Synchronicity, you see, can't be anticipated; that's one of its aspects. 

Or can it? If it could. . . imagine being able to plot in advance, in systematic 
fashion, the approach of all meaningful coincidences. Is that a priori, by the very 
meaning of the word, not a contradiction? After all, a coincidence, or as Pauli called it, a 
manifestation of synchronicity, is by its very nature not dependent on the past; hence 
nothing exists as a harbinger of it (cf. David Hume on the topic; in particular the train 
whistle versus the train). This state, not knowing what is going to happen next and 
therefore having no way of controlling it, is the sine qua non of the unhappy world of the 
schizophrenic; he is helpless, passive, and instead of doing things, he is done to. Reality 
happens to him -- a sort of perpetual auto accident, going on and on without relief. 


Schizophrenics don't write and mail letters, don't go anywhere, don't make phone 
calls: They are written to by angry creditors and authority figures such as the San 
Francisco Police Department; they are phoned up by hostile relatives; every so often 
they are forcibly hauled off to the barber shop or dentist or funny farm. If, by some 
miracle, they hoist themselves into an active state, call HI 4-1234 and ask for a cab so 
they can visit their good friend the pope, a garbage truck will run into the taxi, and if, 
after getting out of the hospital (vide Horace Gold's experience a few years ago), 
another taxi is called and they try one more time, another garbage truck will appear and 
ram them again. They know this. They've had it happen. Synchronicity has been going 
on all the time; it's only news to us that such coincidences can happen. 

Okay; so what can be done? For a schizophrenic, any method by which 
synchronicity can be coped with means possible survival; for us, it would be a great 
assist in the job of temporarily surviving. . . we both could use such a beat-the-house 
system. 

This is what the I Ching, for three thousand years, has been and still is. It works 
(roughly 80 percent of the time, according to those such as Pauli who have analyzed it 
on a statistical basis). John Cage, the composer, uses it to derive chord progressions. 
Several physicists use it to plot the behavior of subatomic particles -- thus getting around 
Heisenberg's unfortunate principle. I've used it to develop the direction of a novel 
(please reserve your comments for Yandro, if you will). Jung used it with patients to get 
around their psychological blind spots. Leibnitz based his binary system on it, the open-
and-shut-gate idea, if not his entire philosophy of monadology. . . for what that's worth. 

You, too, can use it: for betting on heavyweight bouts or getting your girl to 
acquiesce, for anything, in fact, that you want -- except for foretelling the future. That, it 
can't do; it is not a fortunetelling device, despite what's been believed about it for 
centuries both in China and by Richard Wilhelm, who did the German translation now 
available in the Pantheon Press edition in an English version. (Helmut, Richard's son, 
who is also a Sinologist, has demonstrated this in articles in the Eranos Jahrbucher and 
in lectures; also available in English from Pantheon. And Legge, in the first English 
version circa 1900, demonstrated that, then.) True, the book seems to deal with the 
future; it lays before your eyes, for your scrutiny, a gestalt of the forces in operation that 
will determine the future. But these forces are at work now; they exist, so to speak, 
outside of time, as does the ablative absolute case in Latin. The book is analytical and 
diagnostic, not predictive. But so is a multiphasic physical exam; it tells you what is 
going on now in your body -- and out of a knowledge of that, a competent doctor may 
possibly be able, to some extent, to predict what may happen in the future. ("Get that 
artery replaced, Mr. McNit, or next week or maybe even on the way home this afternoon 
you'll probably drop dead.") 

By means of the I Ching the total configuration of the koinos kosmos can be 
scrutinized -- which is why King Wen, in prison in 1100 B.C., composed it; he wasn't 
interested in the future: He wanted to know what was happening outside his cell that 
moment, what was becoming of his kingdom at the instant he cast the yarrow stalks and 
derived a hexagram. Knowledge of this sort is obviously of vast value to anyone, since, 
by means of it, a fairly good guess (repeat: guess) can be made about the future, and so 
one can decide what one ought to do (stay home all day, go outside briefly, go visit the 
pope, etc.). 

However, if one is schizophrenic to any extent, and it is now resignedly realized 


by the psychiatric profession that a hell of a lot of us are, many more than was once 
realized, knowledge of this type, this absolute, total presentation of a pattern 
representing the entire koinos kosmos at this Augenblick [moment], consists of total 
knowledge period, in view of the fact that for the schizophrenic there is no future 
anyhow. So in proportion to the degree of schizophrenic involvement in time that we're 
stuck with -- or in -- we can gain yield from the I Ching. For a person who is completely 
schizophrenic (which is impossible, but let's imagine it, for purposes here), the derived 
hexagram is everything; when he has studied it plus all texts appended to it, he knows -literally 
-- all there is to know. He can relax if the hexagram is favorable; if not, then he 
can feel worse: His fears were justified. Things are unendurable, as well as hopeless, as 
well as beyond his control. He may, for example, with complete justification ask the 
book, "Am I dead?" and the book will answer. We would ask, "Am I going to get killed in 
the near future?," and in reading our hexagram get some kind of insight -- if we read the 
judgment, "Misfortune. Nothing that would further," we might decide not to shoot out into 
commuter traffic that evening on the way to North Beach -- and we might thereby keep 
alive a few years longer, which certainly has utility value to anyone, schizophrenic or not. 

But we can't live by the damn book, because to try to would be to surrender 
ourselves to static time -- as King Wen was forced to do by losing his throne and being 
imprisoned for the rest of his life, and as present-day schizophrenics must, along with 
those of us nutty enough to belt down a draft of LSD. But we can make partial use of it; 
partial, as its ability to "forecast coming events" is highly partial -- if not in the strict 
sense, as I just now said, nonexistent. Sure, we can tinker around and fix matters up so 
that it does depict the future precisely. But that would be to become schizophrenic, or 
anyhow more schizophrenic. It would be a greater loss than gain; we would have 
induced our future into being consumed by the present: To understand the future totally 
would be to have it now. Try that, and see how it feels. Because once the future is gone, 
the possibility of free, effective action of any kind is abolished. This, of course, is a 
theme that appears in SF constantly; if no other instance crosses your mind, recall my 
own novel The World Jones Made. By being a precog, Jones ultimately lost the power to 
act entirely; instead of being freed by his talent, he was paralyzed by it. You catchum? 

It occurs to me to sum up this observation by saying this. If you're totally 
schizophrenic now, by all means use the I Ching for everything, including telling you 
when to take a bath and when to open a can of cat tuna for your cat Rover. If you're 
partially schizophrenic (no names, please), then use it for some situations -- but 
sparingly; don't rely on it inordinately: save it for Big Questions, such as, "Should I marry 
her or merely keep on living with her in sin?" etc. If you're not schizophrenic at all (those 
in this class step to the foot of the room, or however the expression, made up by you 
nonschizophrenics, goes), kindly use the book a very, measured little -- in controlled 
doses, along the lines of your wise, middle-class use of Gleam, or whatever that damn 
toothpaste calls itself. Use the book as a sort of (ugh) fun thing. Ask it the opposite sort 
of questions from what we partial schizophrenics do; don't ask it, "How can I extricate 
myself from the dreadful circumstances of complete decay into which I've for the fiftieth 
time fallen, due to my own stupidity?," etc., but on this line instead, "What happened to 
lost Atlantis?" or, "Where did I mislay the sporting green this morning?" Ask it questions 
the outcome of which can have no genuine bearing on your life, or even on your 
immediate conduct; in other words, don't "act out" on the basis of what the book hands 
you -- comport yourself strictly as you should under LSD: Observe and enjoy what you 


see (or, if it's the hell world, observe and suffer through in silence and immobility), but let 
that be all, white man; you begin to act out in real life on basis of what you see and we 
put you in Shanghai People's Democratic Funny Farm doing stoop labor at harvest time. 

I speak from experience. The Oracle -- the I Ching -- told me to write this piece. 
(True, this is a zen way out, being told by the I Ching to write a piece explaining why not 
to do what the I Ching advises. But for me it's too late; the book hooked me years ago. 
Got any suggestions as to how I can extricate myself from my morbid dependence on 
the book? Maybe I ought to ask it that. Hmmm. Excuse me; I'll be back at the typewriter 
sometime next year. If not later.) (I never could make out the future too well.) 

"The Android and the Human" (1972) 

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. 
Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these 
anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, 
bring back into our own heads -- the living quality that we, in ignorance, cast out onto the 
inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the 
individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such 
as one finds in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with 
a purpose, a life, that is actually within himself; once these childish projections are 
withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead and that life resides solely within himself. 
When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane. Or 
scientific. But one wonders: Has he not also, in this process, reified -- that is, made into 
a thing -- other people? Stones and rocks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but 
what about his friends? Has he now made them into stones, too? 

This is, really, a psychological problem. And its solution, I think, is of less 
importance in any case than one might think, because, within the past decade, we have 
seen a trend not anticipated by our earnest psychologists -- or by anyone else -- that 
dwarfs that issue; our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, 
artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components 
-- all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest 
psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense 
our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and 
fundamentally analogous to ourselves. Cybernetics, a valuable recent scientific 
discipline, articulated by the late Norbert Wiener, saw valid comparisons between the 
behavior of machines and humans -- with the view that a study of machines would yield 
valuable insights into the nature of our own behavior. By studying what goes wrong with 
a machine -- for example, when two mutually exclusive tropisms function simultaneously 
in one of Grey Walter's synthetic turtles, producing fascinatingly intricate behavior in the 
befuddled turtles -- one learns, perhaps, a new, more fruitful insight into what [in] 
humans was previously called "neurotic" behavior. But suppose the use of this analogy 
is turned the other way. Suppose -- and I don't believe Wiener anticipated this -suppose 
a study of ourselves, our own nature, enables us to gain insight into the now 
extraordinary complex functioning and malfunctioning of mechanical and electronic 


constructs? In other words -- and this is what I wish to stress in what I am saying here -it 
is now possible that we can learn about the artificial external environment around us, 
how it behaves, why, what it is up to, by analogizing from what we know about 
ourselves. 

Machines are becoming more human, so to speak -- at least in the sense that, as 
Wiener indicated, some meaningful comparison exists between human and mechanical 
behavior. But is it ourselves that we know first and foremost? Rather than learning about 
ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to 
comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to. 

Perhaps, really, what we are seeing is a gradual merging of the general nature of 
human activity and function into the activity and function of what we humans have built 
and surround[ed] ourselves with. A hundred years ago such a thought would have been 
absurd, rather than merely anthropomorphic. What could a man living in 1750 have 
learned about himself by observing the behavior of a donkey steam engine? Could he 
have watched it huffing and puffing and then extrapolated from its labor an insight into 
why he himself continually fell in love with one certain type of pretty young girl? This 
would not have been primitive thinking on his part; it would have been pathological. But 
now we find ourselves immersed in a world of our own making so intricate, so 
mysterious, that as Stanislaw Lem the eminent Polish science fiction writer theorizes, 
the time may come when, for example, a man may have to be restrained from 
attempting to rape a sewing machine. Let us hope, if that time comes, that it is a female 
sewing machine he fastens his intentions on. And one over the age of seventeen -hopefully, 
a very old treddle-operated Singer, although possibly, regrettably, past 
menopause. 

I have, in some of my stories and novels, written about androids or robots or 
simulacra -- the name doesn't matter; what is meant is artificial constructs masquerading 
as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind. I suppose I took it for granted that if 
such a construct, a robot, for example, had a benign or anyhow decent purpose in mind, 
it would not need to so disguise itself. Now, to me, that then seems obsolete. The 
constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already. 
They are not trying to fool us, for a purpose of any sort; they merely follow lines we 
follow, in order that they, too, may overcome such common problems as the breakdown 
of vital parts, loss of power source, attack by such foes as storms, short-circuits -- and 
I'm sure any one of us here can testify that a short-circuit, especially in our power 
supply, can ruin our entire day and make us utterly unable to get to our daily job, or, 
once at the office, useless as far as doing the work set forth on our desk. 

What would occur to me now as a recasting of the robot-appearing-as-human 
theme would be a gleaming robot with a telescan lens and a helium-battery power pack, 
who, when jostled, bleeds. Underneath the metal hull is a heart such as we ourselves 
have. Perhaps I will write that. Or, as in stories already in print, a computer, when asked 
some ultimate question such as "Why is there water?" prints out 1 Corinthians. One 
story I wrote, which I'm afraid I failed to take seriously enough, dealt with a computer 
that, when able to answer a question put to it, ate the questioner. Presumably -- I failed 
to go into this -- had the computer been unable to answer a question, the human 
questioner would have eaten it. Anyhow, inadvertently I blended the human and the 
construct and didn't notice that such a blend might, in time, actually begin to become 
part of our reality. Like Lem, I think this will be so, more and more. But to project past 


Lem's idea: A time may come when, if a man tries to rape a sewing machine, the sewing 
machine will have him arrested and testify, perhaps even a little hysterically, against him 
in court. This leads to all sorts of spin-off ideas: false testimony by suborned sewing 
machines who accuse innocent men unfairly; paternity tests; and, of course, abortions 
for sewing machines that have become pregnant against their will. And would there be 
birth control pills for sewing machines? Probably, like one of my previous wives, certain 
sewing machines would complain that the pills made them overweight -- or rather, in 
their case, that it made them sew irregular stitches. And there would be unreliable 
sewing machines that would forget to take their birth control pills. And, last but not least, 
there would have to be Planned Parenthood clinics at which sewing machines just off 
the assembly lines would be counseled as to the dangers of promiscuity, with severe 
warnings of venereal diseases visited on such immoral machines by an outraged God -Himself, 
no doubt, able to sew buttonholes and fancy needlework at a rate that would 
dazzle the credulous merely metal and plastic sewing machines, always ready, like 
ourselves, to kowtow before divine miracles. 

I am being facetious about this, I suppose, but -- the point is not merely a 
humorous one. Our electronic constructs are becoming so complex that to comprehend 
them we must now reverse the analogizing of cybernetics and try to reason from our 
own mentation and behavior to theirs -- although I suppose to assign motive or purpose 
to them would be to enter the realm of paranoia; what machines do may resemble what 
we do, but certainly they do not have intent in the sense that we have; they have 
tropisms, they have purpose in the sense that we build them to accomplish certain ends 
and to react to certain stimuli. A pistol, for example, is built with the purpose of firing a 
metal slug that will damage, incapacitate, or kill someone, but this does not mean that 
the pistol wants to do this. And yet there we are entering the philosophical realm of 
Spinoza when he saw, and I think with great profundity, that if a falling stone could 
reason, it would think, "I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second." 
Free will for us -- that is, when we feel desire, when we are conscious of wanting to do 
what we do -- may be even for us an illusion; and depth psychology seems to 
substantiate this: Many of our drives in life originate from an unconscious that is beyond 
our control. We are as driven as are insects, although the term "instinct" is perhaps not 
applicable for us. Whatever the term, much of our behavior that we feel is the result of 
our will, may control us to the extent that for all practical purposes we are falling stones, 
doomed to drop at a rate prescribed by nature, as rigid and predictable as the force that 
creates a crystal. Each of us may feel himself unique, with an intrinsic destiny never 
before seen in the universe. . . and yet to God we may be millions of crystals, identical in 
the eyes of the Cosmic Scientist. 

And -- here is a thought not too pleasing -- as the external world becomes more 
animate, we may find that we -- the so-called humans -- are becoming, and may to a 
great extent always have been, inanimate in the sense that we are led, directed by built-
in tropisms, rather than leading. So we and our elaborately evolving computers may 
meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may 
shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-Other, which has come out of a General 
Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may 
shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump 
that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of 
truth for both of them. 


I would like, then, to ask this: What is it, in our behavior, that we can call 
specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least 
up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect 
behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include in this the kind of pseudohuman 
behavior exhibited by what were once living men -- creatures who have, in ways I wish 
to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me 
analogues of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life 
continues, metabolism goes on, the soul -- for lack of a better term -- is no longer there 
or is at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world -- it always did, but the 
production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and 
suchlike agencies now. The reduction of humans to mere use -- men made into 
machines, serving a purpose that although "good" in the abstract sense has, for its 
accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on 
what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into 
foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, 
to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal -- however puny -- destiny. As if, so 
to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in -- and 
trained in -- the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically 
oriented themselves, in such a way that the use of these devices strikes them as a 
necessary, or at least desirable, method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal. 

I think, at this point, of Tom Paine's comment about one or another party of the 
Europe of his time, "They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird." And it is the 
"dying bird" that I am concerned with. The dying -- and yet, I think, beginning once again 
to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity -- the dying bird 
of authentic humanness. 

That is what I wish to say to you here, today. I wish to disclose my hope, my faith, 
in the kids who are emerging now. Their world, their values. And, simultaneously, their 
imperviousness to the false values, the false idols, the false hates of the previous 
generations. The fact that they, these fine, good kids, cannot be reached or moved or 
even touched by the "gravity" -- to refer back to my previous metaphor -- that has made 
us older persons fall, against our knowledge or will, at thirty-two feet per second 
throughout our lives. . . while believing that we desired it. 

It is as if these kids, or at least many of them, some of them, are falling at a 
different rate, or, really, not falling at all. Walt Whitman's "Marching to the sound of other 
drummers" [this phrase, inexactly quoted, in fact belongs to Henry David Thoreau] might 
be rephrased this way: falling, not in response to unexamined, unchallenged, alleged 
"verities," but in response to a new and inner -- and genuinely authentic -- human desire. 

Youth, of course, has always tended toward this; in fact, this is really a definition 
of youth. But right now it is so urgent, if, as I think, we are merging by degrees into 
homogeneity with our mechanical constructs, step by step, month by month, until a time 
will perhaps come when a writer, for example, will not stop writing because someone 
unplugged his electric typewriter but because someone unplugged him. But there are 
kids now who cannot be unplugged because no electric cord links them to any external 
power sources. Their hearts beat with an interior, private meaning. Their energy doesn't 
come from a pacemaker; it comes from a stubborn, almost absurdly perverse refusal to 
be "shucked"; that is, to be taken in by the slogans, the ideology -- in fact, by any and all 
ideology itself, of whatever sort -- that would reduce them to instruments of abstract 


causes, however "good." Back in California, where I came from, I have been living with 
such kids, participating, to the extent I can, in their emerging world. I would like to tell 
you about their world because -- if we are lucky -- something of that world, those values, 
that way of life, will shape the future of our total society, our utopia or anti-utopia of the 
future. As a science fiction writer, I must, of course, look continually ahead, always at the 
future. It is my hope -- and I'd like to communicate it to you in the tremendous spirit of 
optimism that I feel so urgently and strongly -- that our collective tomorrow exists in 
embryonic form in the heads, or rather in the hearts, of these kids who right now, at their 
young ages, are politically and sociologically powerless, unable even, by our California 
laws, to buy a bottle of beer or cigarette, to vote, to in any way shape, be consulted 
about, or bring into existence the official laws that govern them and our society. I think, 
really, I am saying this: If you are interested in the world of tomorrow you may learn 
something about it, or at least read about possibilities that may emerge to fashion it, in 
the pages of Analog and F&SF and Amazing, but actually, to find it in its authentic form, 
you will discover it as you observe a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid as he goes 
about his natural peregrinations, his normal day. Or, as we say in the San Francisco Bay 
Area, as you observe him "cruising around town to check out the action." This is what I 
have found. These kids that I have known, lived with, still know, in California, are my 
science fiction stories of tomorrow, my summation, at this point of my life as a person 
and a writer; they are what I look ahead to -- and so keenly desire to see prevail. What, 
more than anything else I have ever encountered, I believe in. And would give my life 
for. My full measure of devotion, in this war we are fighting, to maintain, and augment, 
what is human about us, what is the core of ourselves and the source of our destiny. Our 
flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings. Because it is 
not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make 
our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra -- but per hominum. 
[To the stars -- but as men.] And we must never lose sight of that. 

It would, after all, be rather dismaying, if the first two-legged entity to emerge on 
the surface of Mars from a Terran spacecraft were to declare, "Thanks be to God for 
letting me, letting me, click, letting, click, click. . . this is a recording." And then catch fire 
and explode as a couple of wires got crossed somewhere within its plastic chest. And 
probably even more dismaying to this construct would be the discovery when it returned 
to Earth that its "children" had been recycled along with the aluminum beer cans and 
Coca-Cola bottles as fragments of the urban pollution problem. And, finally, when this 
astronaut made of plastic and wiring and relays went down to the City Hall officials to 
complain, it would discover that its three-year guarantee had run out, and, since parts 
were no longer available to keep it functioning, its birth certificate had been canceled. 

Of course, literally, we should not take this seriously. But as a metaphor -- in 
some broad sense maybe we should scrutinize more closely the two-legged entities we 
plan to send up, for example, to man the orbiting space station. We do not want to learn 
three years from now that the alleged human crew had all married portions of the space 
station and had settled down to whirr happily forever after in connubial bliss. As in Ray 
Bradbury's superb story in which a fear-haunted citizen of Los Angeles discovers that 
the police car trailing him has no driver, that it is tailing him on its own, we should be 
sure that one of us sits in the driver's seat: In Mr. Bradbury's story the real horror, at 
least to me, is not that the police car has its own tropism as it hounds the protagonist but 
that, within the car, there is a vacuum. A place unfilled. The absence of something vital 



-that is the horrific part, the apocalyptic vision of a nightmare future. But I, myself, 
foresee something more optimistic: Had I written that story I would have had a teenager 
behind the wheel of the police car -- he has stolen it while the policeman is in a coffee 
shop on his lunch break, and the kid is going to resell it by tearing it down into parts. 
This may sound a little cynical on my part, but wouldn't this be preferable? As we say in 
California, where I live, when the police come to investigate a burglary of your house, 
they find, when they are leaving, that someone has stripped the tires and motor and 
transmission from their car, and the officers must hitchhike back to headquarters. This 
thought may strike fear in the hearts of the establishment people, but frankly it makes 
me feel cheerful. Even the most base schemes of human beings are preferable to the 
most exalted tropisms of machines. I think this, right here, is one of the valid insights 
possessed by some of the new youth: Cars, even police cars, are expendable; can be 
replaced. They are really all alike. It is the person inside who, when gone, cannot be 
duplicated at any price. Even if we do not like him we cannot do without him. And once 
gone, he will never come back. 
And then, too, if he is made into an android, he will never come back, never be 
again human. Or anyhow most likely will not. 

As the children of our world fight to develop their new individuality, their almost 
surly disrespect for the verities we worship, they become for us -- and by "us" I mean the 
establishment -- a source of trouble. I do not necessarily mean politically active youth, 
those who organize into distinct societies with banners and slogans -- to me that is a 
reduction into the past, however revolutionary these slogans may be. I refer to the 
intrinsic entities, the kids each of whom is on his own, doing what we call "his thing." He 
may, for example, not break the law by seating himself on the tracks before troop trains; 
his flouting of the law may consist of taking his car to a drive-in movie with four kids in 
the trunk to avoid having to pay. Still, a law is being broken. The first transgression has 
political, theoretical overtones; the second, a mere lack of agreement that one must 
always do what one is ordered to do -- especially when the order comes from a posted, 
printed sign. In both cases there is disobedience. We might applaud the first as 
meaningful. The second, merely irresponsible. And yet it is in the second that I see a 
happier future. After all, there has always been in history movements of people 
organized in opposition to the governing powers. This is merely one group using force 
against another, the outs versus the ins. It has failed to produce a Utopia so far. And I 
think always will. 

Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means, as I said, to 
allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a 
means without one's knowledge or consent -- the results are the same. But you cannot 
turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. 
Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a 
given person's response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy 
that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form. What good 
is a flashlight if the bulb lights up only now and then when you press the button? Any 
machine must always work to be reliable. The android, like any other machine, must 
perform on cue. But our youth cannot be counted on to do this; it is unreliable. Either 
through laziness, short attention span, perversity, criminal tendencies -- whatever label 
you wish to pin on the kid to explain his unreliability is fine. Each merely means: We can 
tell him and tell him what to do, but when the time comes for him to perform, all the 


subliminal instruction, all the ideological briefing, all the tranquilizing drugs, all the 
psychotherapy are a waste. He just plain will not jump when the whip is cracked. 

And so he is of no use to us, the calcified, entrenched powers. He will not see to it 
that he acts as an instrument by which we both keep and augment those powers and the 
rewards -- for ourselves -- that go with them. 

What has happened is that there has been too much persuasion. The television 
set, the newspapers -- all the so-called mass media -- have overdone it. Words have 
ceased to mean much to these kids; they have had to listen to too many. They cannot 
be taught because there has been too great an eagerness, too conspicuous a motive, to 
make them learn. The anti-utopia science fiction writers of fifteen years ago, and I was 
one of them, foresaw the mass communications propaganda machinery grinding 
everyone down into mediocrity and uniformity. But it is not coming out this way. While 
the car radio dins out the official view on the war in Vietnam, the young boy is 
disconnecting the speaker so that he can replace it with a tweeter and a woofer; in the 
middle of the government's harangue the speaker is unattached. And, as he expertly 
hooks up better audio components in his car, the boy fails even to notice that the voice 
on the radio is trying to tell him something. This skilled craftsman of a kid listens only to 
see whether there is any distortion, interference, or a frequency curve that isn't fully 
compensated. His head is turned toward immediate realities -- the speaker itself -- not 
the flatuus voci dinning from it. 

The totalitarian society envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 should have arrived 
by now. The electronic gadgets are here. The government is here, ready to do what 
Orwell anticipated. So the power exists, the motive, and the electronic hardware. But 
these mean nothing, because, progressively more and more so, no one is listening. The 
new youth that I see is too stupid to read, too restless and bored to watch, too 
preoccupied to remember. The collective voice of the authorities is wasted on him; he 
rebels. But rebels not out of theoretical, ideological considerations, but only out of what 
might be called pure selfishness. Plus a careless lack of regard for the dread 
consequences that the authorities promise him if he fails to obey. He cannot be bribed 
because what he wants he can build, steal, or in some curious, intricate way acquire 
himself. He cannot be intimidated because on the streets and in his home he has seen 
and participated in so much violence that it fails to cow him. He merely gets out of its 
way when it threatens, or, if he can't escape, he fights back. When the locked police van 
comes to carry him off to the concentration camp, the guards will discover that while 
loading the van they have failed to note that another equally hopeless juvenile has 
slashed the tires. The van is out of commission. And while the tires are being replaced, 
some other youth siphons out all the gas from the gas tank for his souped-up Chevrolet 
and has sped off long ago. 

The absolutely horrible technological society -- that was our dream, our vision of 
the future. We could foresee nothing equipped with enough power, guile, or whatever to 
impede the coming of that dreadful, nightmare society. It never occurred to us that the 
delinquent kids might abort it out of the sheer perverse malice of their little individual 
souls, God bless them. Here, as in [sic] case in point, are two excerpts from the media; 
the first, quoted in that epitome of the nauseating, Time, is -- so help me -- what Time 
calls the "ultimate dream in telephone service once described by Harold S. Osborne, 
former chief engineer at AT&T: Whenever a baby is born anywhere in the world, he is 
given at birth a telephone number for life. As soon as he can talk, he is given a watchlike 


device with ten little buttons on one side and screen on the other. When he wishes to 
talk with anyone in the world, he will pull out the device and punch on the keys the 
number. Then, turning the device over, he will hear the voice of his friend and see his 
face on the screen, in color and in three dimensions. If he does not see him and hear 
him, he will know that his friend is dead." 

I don't know; I really don't find this funny. It is really sad. It is heartbreaking. 
Anyhow, it is not going to happen. The kids have already seen to that. "Phone freaks," 
they are called, these particular kids. This is what the L.A. Times says, in an article 
dated earlier this year: 

They (the phone freaks) all arrived carrying customized MFers -- multifrequency tone signals -the 
phone-freak term for a blue box. The homemade MFers varied in size and design. One was a 
sophisticated pocket transistor built by a Ph.D. in engineering, another was the size of a cigar box with an 
acoustical coupler attaching to the phone receiver. So far, these phone freaks had devised twenty-two 
ways to make a free call without using credit cards. In case of a slip-up, the phone freaks also know how 
to detect "supervision," phone-company jargon for a nearly inaudible tone that comes on the line before 
anyone answers to register calling charges. As soon as phone freaks detect the dreaded "supervision," 
they hang up fast. 

Captain Crunch was still in the phone booth pulling the red switches on his fancy computerized 
box. He got his name from the whistle found in the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal box. Crunch discovered 
that the whistle has a frequency of 2,600 cycles per second, the exact frequency the telephone company 
uses to indicate that a line is idle, and, of course, the first frequency phone freaks learn how to whistle to 
get "disconnect," which allows them to pass from one circuit to another. Crunch, intent, hunched over his 
box to read a list of country code numbers. He impersonated a phone man, gave precise technical 
information to the overseas operator and called Italy. In less than a minute he reached a professor of 
classical Greek writings at the University of Florence. 

This is how the future has actually come out. None of us science fiction writers 
foresaw phone freaks. Fortunately, neither did the phone company, which otherwise 
would have taken over by now. But this is the difference between dire myth and war, 
merry reality. And it is the kids, unique, wonderful, unhampered by scruples in any 
traditional sense, that have made the difference. 

Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state 
ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the 
United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have 
you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights 
taken away, all your property -- everything." And the boy will reply, 'Yeah, so could my 
father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." 
End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that 
one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it 
from him while the reporter was babbling on. 

If, as it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in 
which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the 
true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge 
documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets 
used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at 
night when you're permitted to turn it off -- rewire it in such a way that the police flunky 
monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you 
sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's 


infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber cheks 
or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell 
the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's 
birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all 
else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make 
unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to 
blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge -- you saw 
him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a 
fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker 
that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the 
sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay 
phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as 
to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently 
left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its 
entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to 
destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state 
of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with 
a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, 
so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister 
insurrection. 

I wonder if you recall the "brain mapping" developed by Penfield recently; he was 
able to locate the exact centers of the brain from which each sensation, emotion, and 
response came. By stimulating one minute area with an electrode, a laboratory rat was 
transfigured into a state of perpetual bliss. "They'll be doing that to all of us, too, soon," a 
pessimistic friend said to me regarding that. "Once the electrodes have been implanted, 
they can get us to feel, think, do anything they want." Well, to do this, the government 
would have to let out a contract for the manufacture of a billion sets of electrodes, and in 
their customary way, they would award the contract to the lowest bidder, who would 
build substandard electrodes out of secondhand parts. 

The technicians implanting the electrodes in the brains of millions upon millions of 
people would become bored and careless, and, when the switch would be pressed for 
the total population to feel profound grief at the death of some government official -probably 
the minister of the interior, in charge of the slave-labor rehabilitation camps -- it 
would all get folded up, and the population, like that laboratory rat, would go into 
collective seizures of merriment. Or the substandard wiring connecting the brains of the 
population with the Washington, D.C., thought control center would overload, and a 
surge of electricity would roll backward over the lines and set fire to the White House. 

Or is this just wishful thinking on my part? A little fantasy about a future society 
we should really feel apprehensive about? 

The continued elaboration of state tyranny such as we in science fiction circles 
anticipate in the world of tomorrow -- our whole preoccupation with what we call the 
"anti-utopian" society -- this growth of state invasion into the privacy of the individual, its 
knowing too much about him, and then, when it knows, or thinks it knows, something it 
frowns on, its power and capacity to squash the individual -- as we thoroughly 
comprehend, this evil process utilizes technology as its instrument. The inventions of 
applied science, such as the almost miraculously sophisticated sensor devices right now 
traveling back from war use in Vietnam for adaptation to civilian use here -- these 


passive infrared scanners, sniperscopes, these chrome boxes with dials and gauges 
that can penetrate brick and stone, can tell the user what is being said and done a mile 
away within a tightly sealed building, be it concrete bunker or apartment building, can, 
like the weapons before them, fall into what the authorities would call "the wrong hands" 
-- that is, into the hands of the very people being monitored. Like all machines, these 
universal transmitters, recording devices, heat-pattern discriminators, don't in 
themselves care who they're used by or against. The predatory law-and-order vehicle 
speeding to the scene of a street fracas where, for example, some juvenile has dropped 
a water-filled balloon into the sports car of a wealthy taxpayer -- this vehicle, however 
fast, however well-armed and animated by the spirit of righteous vengeance, can be 
spotted by the same lens by which its superiors became aware of the disturbance in the 
first place. . . and notification of its impending arrival on the scene can be flashed by the 
same walkie-talkie Army surplus gadget by which crowd control is maintained when 
blacks gather to protest for their just rights. Before the absolute power of the absolute 
state of tomorrow can achieve its victory it may find such things as this: When the police 
show up at your door to arrest you for thinking unapproved thoughts, a scanning sensor 
that you've bought and built into your door discriminates the intruders from customary 
friends and alerts you to your peril. 

Let me give you an example. At the enormous civic center building in my county, 
a fantastic Buck Rogers type of plastic and chrome backdrop to a bad science fiction 
film, each visitor must pass through an electronic field that sets off an alarm if he has on 
him too much metal, be it keys, a watch, a pair of scissors, bomb, or .308 Winchester 
rifle. When the hoop pings -- and it always pings for me -- a uniformed policeman 
immediately fully searches the visitor. A sign warns that if any weapon is discovered on 
a visitor, it's all over for him -- and the sign also warns that if any illegal drugs are found 
on a visitor during this weapons search, he's done for, too. Now, I think even you people 
up here in Canada are aware of the reason for this methodical weapons search of each 
visitor to the Marin County Civic Center -- it has to do with the tragic shootout a year or 
so ago. But, and they officially posted notice of this, the visitor will be inspected for 
narcotics possession, too, and this has nothing to do with either the shootout or with any 
danger to the building itself or the persons within it. An electronic checkpoint legitimately 
set up to abort a situation in which explosives or weapons are brought into the Civic 
Center, has been assigned an added police function connected with the authentic issue 
only by the common thread of Penal Code violation. To visit the county library, which is 
in that building, you are subject to search -- must, in fact, yield absolutely and 
unconditionally -- for possession without the juridical protection, built into the very basis 
of our American civil rights system, that some clear and evident indication exist that you 
may be carrying narcotics before a search can be carried out against you. During the 
search I've even had the uniformed officer at the entrance examine the books and 
papers I was carrying, to see if they were acceptable. The next step, in the months to 
come, would be to have such mandatory check-points at busy intersections and at all 
public buildings -- including banks and so forth. Once it has been established that the 
authorities can search you for illegal drugs because you're returning a book to the 
library, I think you can see just how far the tyranny of the state can go. Once it has 
provided itself with an electronic hoop that registers the presence of something we all 
carry on us: keys, a pair of fingernail clippers, coins. The blip, rather a quaint little sound, 
which you set off, opens a door not leading to the county library but to possible 


imprisonment. It is that blip that ushers in all the rest. And how many other blips are we 
setting off, or our children will be setting off, in contexts that we know nothing about yet? 
But my optimistic point: The kids of today, having been born into this all-pervasive 
society, are fully aware of and take for granted the activity of such devices. One 
afternoon when I was parking my car on the lot before a grocery store, I started, as 
usual, to lock all the car doors to keep the parcels in the backseat from being stolen. 
"Oh, you don't have to lock up the car," the girl with me said. "This parking lot is under 
constant closed-circuit TV scan. Every car here and everyone is being watched all the 
time; nothing can happen." So we went inside the store, leaving the car unlocked. And, 
of course, she was right; born into this society, she has learned to know such things. 
And -- I now have a passive infrared scanning system in my own home in Santa Venetia, 
connected with what is called a "digital transmitting box," which, when triggered off by 
the scanner, transmits a coded signal by direct line to the nearest law-enforcement 
agency, notifying them that intruders have entered my house. This totally self-operated 
electronic detection system functions whether I am home or not. It is able to discriminate 
between the presence of a human being and an animal. It has its own power supply. If 
the line leading from it is cut, grounded, or even tampered with, the signal is immediately 
released, or if any other part of the system is worked on. And Westinghouse will reinstall 
it wherever I live: I own the components for life. Eventually, Westinghouse Security 
hopes, all homes and businesses will be protected this way. The company has built and 
maintains a communications center near each community in this country. If there is no 
police agency willing or able to accept the signal, then their own communications center 
responds and guarantees to dispatch law enforcement personnel within four minutes -that 
is, the good guys with the good guns will be at your door within that time. It does not 
matter if the intruder enters with a passkey or blows in the whole side of the house, or as 
they tell me it's being done now, bores down through the roof -- however he gets in, for 
whatever reason, the mechanism responds and transmits its signal. Only I can turn the 
system off. And if I forget to, then -- I suppose, anyhow -- it's all over for me. 

Someone suggested, by the way, that perhaps this passive infrared scanner 
sweeping out the interior of my house constantly "might be watching me and reporting 
back to the authorities whatever I do right there in my living room." Well, what I am doing 
is sitting at my desk with pen and paper trying to figure out how to pay Westinghouse the 
$840 I owe them for the system. As I've got it worked out now, I think that if I sell 
everything I own, including my house, I can -- oh, well. One other thing. If I enter the 
house -- my house -- and the system finds I'm carrying illegal narcotics on my person, it 
doesn't blip; it causes both me and the house and everything in it to self-destruct. 

Street drugs, by the way, are a major problem in the area where I live -- that is, 
the illegal drugs you buy on the street are often adulterated, cut, or just plain not what 
you're told they are. You wind up poisoned, dead, or just plain "burned," which means, 
'You don't get off," which means you paid $10 for a gram of milk sugar. So a number of 
free labs have been set up for the specific purpose of analyzing street drugs; you mail 
them a portion of the drug you've brought and they tell you what's in it, the idea being, of 
course, that if it has strychnine or flash powder in it, you should know before you take it. 
Well, the police saw through into the "real" purpose of these labs at one glance. They 
act as quality-control stations for the drug manufacturers. Let's say you're making 
Methedrine in your bathtub at home -- a complicated process, but feasible -- and so 
every time a new batch comes out, you mail a sample to one of these labs for analysis. . 


. and they write back, "No, you haven't got it quite right yet, but if you cook it for perhaps 
just five minutes longer. . ." This is what the police fear. This is how the police mentality 
works. And, interestingly, so does the drug-pusher mentality; the pushers are already 
doing precisely that. I don't know -- to me it seems a sort of nice idea, the drug pushers 
interested in what they're selling. Back in the old days they cared only that you lived long 
enough to pay for what you purchased. After that, you were on your own. 

Yes, as every responsible parent knows, street drugs are a problem, a menace to 
their kids. I completely, emphatically agree. At one time -- you may have read this in 
biographical material accompanying my stories and novels -- I was interested in 
experimenting with psychedelic drugs. That is over for me. Too many suicides, 
psychoses, organic -- irreversible -- damage to both heart and brain. But there are other 
drugs, not illegal, not street drugs, not cut with flash powder or milk sugar, and not 
mislabeled, that worry me even more. These are reputable, establishment drugs 
prescribed by reputable doctors or given in reputable hospitals, especially psychiatric 
hospitals. These are pacification drugs. I mention this in order to return to my main 
preoccupation, here: the human versus the android, and how the former can become -can, 
in fact, be made to become -- the latter. The calculated, widespread, and 
thoroughly sanctioned use of specific tranquilizing drugs such as the phenothiazines 
may not, like certain illegal street drugs, produce permanent brain damage, but they can 
-- and, God forbid, they do -- produce what I am afraid I must call "soul" damage. Let me 
amplify. 

It has been discovered recently that what we call mental illness or mental 
disturbance -- such syndromes as the schizophrenias and the cyclothemic phenomena 
of manic-depression -- may have to do with faulty brain metabolism, the failure of certain 
brain catalysts such as serotonin and noradrenaline to act properly. One theory holds 
that, under stress, too much amine oxidase production causes hallucinations, 
disorientation, and general mentational breakdown. Sudden shock, especially at 
random, and grief-producing, such as loss of someone or something dear, or the loss of 
something vital and taken for granted -- this starts an overproduction of noradrenaline 
flowing down generally unused neural pathways, overloading brain circuits and 
producing behavior that we call psychotic. Mental illness, then, is a biochemical 
phenomenon. If certain drugs, such as the phenothiazines, are introduced, brain 
metabolism regains normal balance; the catalyst serotonin is utilized properly, and the 
patient recovers. Or if the MAOI drug is introduced -- a mono amine oxidase inhibitor -response 
to stress becomes viable and the person is able to function normally. Or -- and 
this right now is the Prince Charming hope of the medical profession -- lithium 
carbonate, if taken by the disturbed patient, will limit an otherwise overabundant 
production or release of the hormone noradrenaline, which, most of all, acts to cause 
irrational thoughts and behavior of a socially unacceptable sort. The entire amplitude of 
feelings, wild grief, anger, fear, and all intense feelings will be reduced to proper 
measure by the presence of the lithium carbonate in the brain tissue. The person will 
become stable, predictable, not a menace to others. He will feel the same and think the 
same pretty much all day long, day after day. The authorities will not be greeted by any 
more sudden surprises emanating from him. 

In the field of abnormal psychology, the schizoid personality structure is well 
defined; in it there is a continual paucity of feeling. The person thinks rather than feels 
his way through life. And as the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung showed, this cannot 


be successfully maintained; one must meet most of crucial reality with a feeling 
response. Anyhow, there is a certain parallel between what I call the "android" 
personality and the schizoid. Both have a mechanical, reflex quality. 

Once I heard a schizoid person express himself -- in all seriousness -- this way: "I 
receive signals from others. But I can't generate any of my own until I get recharged. By 
an injection." I am, I swear, quoting exactly. Imagine viewing oneself and others this 
way. Signals. As if from another star. The person has reified himself entirely, along with 
everyone around him. How awful. Here, clearly, the soul is dead or never lived. 

Another quality of the android mind is an inability to make exceptions. Perhaps 
this is the essence of it: the failure to drop a response when it fails to accomplish results, 
but rather to repeat it, over and over again. Lower life forms are skillful in offering the 
same response continually, as are flashlights. An attempt was made once to use a 
pigeon as a quality-control technician on an assembly line. Part after part, endless 
thousands of them, passed by the pigeon hour after hour, and the keen eye of the 
pigeon viewed them for deviations from the acceptable tolerance. The pigeon could 
discern a deviation smaller than that which a human, doing the same quality control, 
could. When the pigeon saw a part that was mismade, it pecked a button, which rejected 
the part, and at the same time dropped a grain of corn to the pigeon as a reward. The 
pigeon could go eighteen hours without fatigue and loved its work. Even when the grain 
of corn failed -- due to the supply running out; I guess -- the pigeon continued eagerly to 
reject the substandard parts. It had to be forcibly removed from its perch, finally. 

Now, if I had been that pigeon, I would have cheated. When I felt hungry, I would 
have pecked the button and rejected a part, just to get my grain of corn. That would 
have occurred to me after a long period passed in which I discerned no faulty parts. 
Because what would happen to the pigeon if, God forbid, no parts ever were faulty? The 
pigeon would starve. Integrity, under such circumstances, would be suicidal. Really, the 
pigeon had a life-and-death interest in finding faulty parts. What would you do, were you 
the pigeon, and, after say four days, you'd discovered no faulty parts and were 
becoming only feathers and bone? Would ethics win out? Or the need to survive? To 
me, the life of the pigeon would be worth more than the accuracy of the quality control. If 
I were the pigeon -- but the android mind, "I may be dying of hunger," the android would 
say, "but I'll be damned if I'll reject a perfectly good part." Anyhow, to me, the 
authentically human mind would get bored and reject a part now and then at random, 
just to break the monotony. And no amount of circuit testing would reestablish its 
reliability. 

Let me now express another element that strikes me as an essential key 
revealing the authentically human. It is not only an intrinsic property of the organism, but 
the situation in which it finds itself. That which happens to it, that which it is confronted 
by, pierced by, and must deal with -- certain agonizing situations create, on the spot, a 
human where a moment before, there was only, as the Bible says, clay. Such a situation 
can be read off the face of many of the medieval Pietas: the dead Christ held in the arms 
of his mother. Two faces, actually: that of a man, that of a woman. Oddly, in many of 
these Pietas, the face of Christ seems much older than that of his mother. It is as if an 
ancient man is held by a young woman; she has survived him, and yet she came before 
him. He has aged through his entire life cycle; she looks now perhaps as she always did, 
not timeless, in the classical sense, but able to transcend what has happened. 

He has not survived it; this shows on his face. She has. In some way they have 


experienced it together, but they have come out of it differently. It was too much for him; 
it destroyed him. Perhaps the information to be gained here is to realize how much 
greater capacity a woman has for suffering; that is, not that she suffers more than a man 
but that she can endure where he can't. Survival of the species lies in her ability to do 
this, not his. Christ may die on the cross, and the human race continues, but if Mary 
dies, it's all over. 

I have seen young women -- say, eighteen or nineteen years old -- suffer and 
survive things that would have been too much for me, and I think really for almost any 
man. Their humanness, as they passed through these ordeals, developed as an 
equation between them and their situation. I don't mean to offer the mushy doctrine that 
suffering somehow ennobles, that it's somehow a good thing -- one hears this now and 
then about geniuses, "They wouldn't have been geniuses if they hadn't suffered," etc. I 
merely mean that possibly the difference between what I call the "android" mentality and 
the human is that the latter passed through something the former did not, or at least 
passed through it and responded differently --changed, altered, what it did and hence 
what it was; it became. I sense the android repeating over and over again some limited 
reflex gesture, like an insect raising its wings threateningly over and over again, or 
emitting a bad smell. Its one defense or response works, or it doesn't. But, caught in 
sudden trouble, the organism that is made more human, that becomes precisely at that 
moment human, wrestles deep within itself and out to itself to find one response after 
another as each fails. On the face of the dead Christ there is an exhaustion, almost a 
dehydration, as if he tried out every possibility in an effort not to die. He never gave up. 
And even though he did die, did fail, he died a human. This is what shows on his face. 

"The endeavor to persist in its own being," Spinoza said, "is the essence of the 
individual thing." The chthonic deities, the Earth Mother were the original source of 
religious consolation -- before the solarcentric masculine deities that arrived later in 
history -- as well as the origin of man; man came from her and returns to her. The entire 
ancient world believed that just as each man came forth into individual life from a 
woman, he would eventually return -- and find peace at last. At the end of life the old 
man in one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales "goes about both morning and late and 
knocks against the ground with his stick saying, 'Mother, mother, let me in. . . .' " Just as 
at the end of Ibsen's Ghosts, the middle-aged man, regressing into childhood at the end 
of his life as he dies of paresis, says to his mother, "Mother, give me the sun." As 
Spinoza pointed out so clearly, each finite thing, each individual man, eventually 
perishes. . . and his only true consolation, as he perishes, as each society in fact 
perishes, is this return to the mother, the woman, the Earth. 

But if woman is the consolation for man, what is the consolation for woman? For 
her? 

Once I watched a young woman undergo agonies -- she was eighteen years old 


- that, just witnessing her, were too much for me. She survived, I think, better than I did. I 
wanted to console her, help her, but there was nothing I could do. Except be with her. 
When the Earth Mother is suffering, there is damn little that individual finite man can do. 
This young girl's boyfriend wouldn't marry her because she was pregnant by another 
boy; he wouldn't live with her or find her a place to stay until she got an abortion -- about 
which he would do nothing; he wouldn't even speak to her until it was over -- and then, 
or so he promised, he would marry her. Well, she got the abortion, and we brought her 
to my home afterward to rest and recover, and, of course, the son of a bitch never had 

anything to do with her again. I was with her during the days following her abortion, and 
really she had a dreadful time, alone in a poor, large ward in a hospital in another city, 
never visited except by me and a couple of friends, never phoned by her boyfriend or 
her own family, and then at my home, afterward, when she realized her boyfriend was 
never going to get the apartment for them she had planned on, been promised, and her 
friends -- his friends, too -- had lost interest in her and looked down on her -- I saw her 
day-by-day decline and wilt and despair, and become wild with fear: Where would she 
go? What would become of her? She had no friends, no job, no family, not even any 
clothes to speak of -- nothing. And she couldn't stay with me after she healed up. She 
used to lie in bed, suffering, holding the puppy she and I got at the pound; the puppy 
was all she had. And one day she left, and I never found out where she went. She never 
contacted me again; she wanted to forget me and the hospital and the days of healing 
and bleeding and learning the truth about her situation. And she left the puppy behind. I 
have it now. What I remember in particular was that in the two weeks she was with me 
after her abortion her breasts swelled with milk; her body, at least portions of it, didn't 
know that the child was dead, that there was no child. It was, she said, "in a bottle." I 
saw her, all at once, as a sudden woman, even though she had, herself, declined, 
destroyed, her motherhood; baby or not, she was a woman, although her mind did not 
tell her that; she still wore the cotton nightgown she had worn, I guess, while living at 
home while she went to high school -- perhaps the same easy-to-wash nightgown she 
had worn since five or six years old. She still liked to go to the market and buy chocolate 
milk and comic books. Under California law it's illegal for her to buy or smoke cigarettes. 
There are certain movies -- many, in fact -- that our law prevents her from seeing. 
Movies, supposedly, about life. On the trip to San Francisco to see the doctor about 
getting the abortion -- she was five and a half months pregnant, nearing what California 
considers the limit of safety -- she bought a purple stuffed toy animal for 89 cents. I paid 
for it; she had only 25 cents. She took it with her when she left my home. She was the 
bravest, brightest, funniest, sweetest person I ever knew. The tragedy of her life bent her 
and virtually broke her, despite all I could do. But -- I think, I believe -- the force that is 
her, so to speak the swelling into maturity of her breasts, the looking forward into the 
future of her physical body, even at the moment that mentally and spiritually she was 
virtually destroyed -- I hope, anyhow, that that force will prevail. If it dies out, then there 
is nothing left, as far as I am concerned. The future as I conceive it will not exist. 
Because I can only imagine it as populated by modest, unnoticed persons like her. I 
myself will not be a part of it or even shape it; all I can do is depict it as I see the 
ingredients now, the gentle, little, unhappy, brave, lonely, loving creatures who are going 
on somewhere else, unknown to me now, not recalling me but, I pray, living on, picking 
up life, forgetting -- "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," 
we are told, but perhaps it is better -- perhaps it is the only viable way -- to be able to 
forget. I hope that she, in her head, has forgotten what happened to her, just as her 
body either forgot the lack of a baby, the dead baby, or never knew. It is a kind of 
blindness, maybe; a refusal, or inability, to face reality. 

But I have never had too high a regard for what is generally called "reality." 
Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make. 
You create it more rapidly than it creates you. Man is the reality God created out of dust; 
God is the reality man creates continually out of his own passions, his own 
determination. "Good," for example -- that is not a quality or even a force in the world or 


above the world, but what you do with the bits and pieces of meaningless, puzzling, 
disappointing, even cruel and crushing fragments all around us that seem to be pieces 
left over, discarded, from another world entirely that did, maybe, make sense. 

The world of the future, to me, is not a place but an event. A construct, not by one 
author in the form of words written to make up a novel or story that other persons sit in 
front of, outside of, and read -- but a construct in which there is no author and no 
readers but a great many characters in search of a plot. Well, there is no plot. There is 
only themselves and what they do and say to each other, what they build to sustain all of 
them individually and collectively, like a huge umbrella that lets in light and shuts out the 
darkness at the same instant. When the characters die, the novel ends. And the book 
falls back into dust. Out of which it came. Or back, like the dead Christ, into the arms of 
his warm, tender, grieving, comprehending, living mother. And a new cycle begins; from 
her he is reborn, and the story, or another story, perhaps different, even better, starts up. 
A story told by the characters to one another. "A tale of sound and fury" -- signifying very 
much. The best we have. Our yesterday, our tomorrow, the child who came before us 
and the woman who will live after us and outlast, by her very existing, what we have 
thought and done. 

In my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which is a study of absolute 
evil, the protagonist, after his encounter with Eldritch, returns to Earth and dictates a 
memo. This little section appears ahead of the text of the novel. It is the novel, actually, 
this paragraph; the rest is a sort of postmortem, or rather, a flashback in which all that 
came to produce the one-paragraph book is presented. Seventy-five thousand words, 
which I labored over many months, merely explains, is merely there to provide 
background to the one small statement in the book that matters. (It is, by the way, 
missing from the German edition.) This statement is for me my credo -- not so much in 
God, either a good god or a bad god or both -- but in ourselves. It goes as follows, and 
this is all I actually have to say or want ever to say: 

I mean, after all; you have to consider, we're only made out of dust. That's 
admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean 
it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even 
in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me? 

This tosses a bizarre thought up into my mind: Perhaps someday a giant 
automated machine will roar and clank out, "From rust we are come." And another 
machine, sick of dying, cradled in the arms of its woman, may sigh back, "And to rust we 
are returned." And peace will fall over the barren, anxiety-stricken landscape. 

Our field, science fiction, deals with that portion of the life cycle of our species 
that extends ahead of us. But if it is a true cycle, that future portion of it has in a sense 
already happened. Or, at least, we can on a basis almost mathematically precisely map 
out the next, missing integers in the sequence of which we are the past. The first integer: 
the Earth Mother culture. Next, the masculine solar deities, with their stern, authoritarian 
societies, from Sparta to Rome to Fascist Italy and Japan and Germany and the USSR. 
And now, perhaps, what the medieval Pietas looked forward to: In the arms of the Earth 
Mother, who still lives, the dead solar diety, her son, lies in a once-again silent return to 
the womb from which he came. I think we are entering this third and perhaps final 
sequence of our history, and this is a society that our field sees ahead of us that will be 
quite different from either of the two previous world civilizations familiar in the past. It is 
not a two-part cycle; we have not reached the conclusion of the masculine solar deity 


period to return merely to the primordial Earth Mother cult, however full of milk her 
breasts may be; what lies ahead is new. And possibly, beyond that, lies something 
more, unique and obscured to our gaze as of this moment. I, myself, can't envision that 
far; the realization, the fulfillment, or the medieval Pieta as a living reality, our total 
environment, a living, external environment as animate as ourselves -- that is what I see 
and no farther. Not yet, anyhow. I would, myself, be content with that; I would be happy 
to lie slumbering and yet alive -- "invisible but dim," as [Henry] Vaughan [seventeenthcentury 
English metaphysical poet] put it -- in her arms. 

If a Pieta of a thousand years ago, shaped by a medieval artisan, anticipated in 
his -- shall we say -- psionic? hands, our future world, what, today, might be the 
analogue of that inspired, precognitive artifact? What do we have with us now, as 
homely and familiar to us in our twentieth-century world, as were those everyday Pietas 
to the citizens of thirteenth-century Christendom, that might be a microcosm of the far 
distant future? Let us first start by imagining a pious peasant of thirteenth-century 
France gazing up at a rustic Pieta and foreseeing in it the twenty-first-century society 
about which we science fiction writers speculate. Then, as in a Bergman film, we segue 
to -- what now? One of us is gazing at -- what? 

Cycle -- and recycle. The Pieta of our modern world: ugly, commonplace, and 
ubiquitous. Not the dead Christ in the arms of his grieving, eternal mother, but a heap of 
aluminum Budweiser beer cans, eighty feet high, thousands of them, being scooped up 
noisily, rattling and spilling and crashing and raining down as a giant automated, 
computer-controlled, homeostatic Budweiser beer factory -- an autofac, as I called it 
once in a story ["Autofac" (1955)] -- hugs the discarded empties back into herself to 
recycle them over again into new life, with new, living contents. Exactly as before. . . or, 
if the chemists in the Budweiser lab are fulfilling God's divine plan for eternal progress, 
with better beer than before. 

"We see as through a glass darkly," Paul in 1 Corinthians -- will this someday be 
rewritten as, "We see as into a passive infrared scanner darkly?" A scanner that as in 
Orwell's 1984, is watching us all the time? Our TV tube watching back at us as we watch 
it, as amused, or bored, or anyhow somewhat as entertained by what we do as we are 
by what we see on its implacable face? 

This, for me, is too pessimistic, too paranoid. I believe 1 Corinthians will be 
rewritten this way: "The passive infrared scanner sees into us darkly" -- that is, not well 
enough really to figure us out. Not that we ourselves can really figure each other out, or 
even our own selves. Which, perhaps, too, is good; it means we are still in for sudden 
surprises, and, unlike the authorities, who don't like that sort of thing, we may find these 
chance happenings acting on our behalf, to our favor. 

Sudden surprises, by the way -- and this thought may be in itself a sudden 
surprise to you -- are a sort of antidote to the paranoid. . . or, to be accurate about it, to 
live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as 
an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; 
everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into 
his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems -- that is, any 
theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-
encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about -- are 
manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, 
the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving -- total 


so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the 
behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved 
human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually 
misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust 
and make guesses toward. Not being what you thought, not doing right by you, not 
being just, but then sustaining you as by momentary caprice, but then abandoning you, 
or at least seeming to. What it is actually up to we may never know. But at least this is 
better, is it not, than to possess the self-defeating, life-defeating spurious certitude of the 
paranoid -- expressed, by a friend of mine, humorously, I guess, like this: "Doctor, 
someone is putting something in my food it [sic; likely "to" intended] make me paranoid." 
The doctor should have asked, was that person putting it in his food free, or charging 
him for it? 

To refer back a final time to an early science fiction work with which we are all 
familiar, the Bible: A number of stories in our field have been written in which computers 
print out portions of that august book. I now herewith suggest this idea for a future 
society; that a computer print out a man. 

Or, if it can't get that together, then, as a second choice, a very poor one in 
comparison, a condensed version of the Bible, "In the beginning was the end." Or should 
it go the other way? "In the end was the beginning." Whichever. Randomness, in time, 
will sort out which it is to be. Fortunately, I am not required to make that choice. 

Perhaps, when a computer is ready to churn forth one or the other of these two 
statements, an android, operating the computer, will make the decision -- although, if I 
am correct about the android mentality, it will be unable to decide and will print out both 
at once, creating a self-canceling nothing, which will not even serve as a primordial 
chaos. An android might, however, be able to handle this; capable of some sort of 
decision-making power, it might conceivably pick one statement or the other as quote 
"correct." But no android -- and you will recall and realize that by this term I am summing 
up that which is not human -- no android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I 
know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at 
least in any traditional sense, but to me truly human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of 
merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness: 

One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying 
cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, 
she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of 
bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends 
had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free -- and then, when the bottles were empty, 
she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund. 

To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola 
Company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passing infrared 
scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike -- may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone 
and wire and thread did never live. But she and her friends -- they, our human future, are 
our little song. "Who knows if the spirit of man travels up, and the breath of beasts 
travels down under the Earth?" the Bible asks. Someday it, in a later revision, may 
wonder, "Who knows if the spirit of men travels up, and the breath of androids travels 
down?" Where do the souls of androids go after their death? But -- if they do not live, 
then they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always be with us. Do they 
have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do we? 


I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place. But it is not the grave; it is 
into life beyond. The world of the future. 

Thank you. 

"Man, Android, and Machine" (1976) 

Within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name 
"machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior 
so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass 
themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my own way of 
using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory 
a human being (as we saw in the excellent TV film The Questor Tapes). I mean a thing 
somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of 
ourselves. Made in a laboratory -- that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire 
universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as 
they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile 
has the coldness of the grave. 

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from 
us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my 
science fiction I write about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know 
they are androids. Like Rachael Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; 
or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and 
even design androids -- the Abraham Lincoln one in that book -- and themselves be 
without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking 
proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word 
"thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android 
built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who 
does not care about the fate that his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands 
detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No 
man is an island," but giving the theorem a twist: That which is a mental and moral 
island is not a man. 

The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the 
momentum of the living toward reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into 
animation by the mechanical. We hold now no pure categories of the living versus the 
nonliving; this is going to be our paradigm: my character Hoppy, in Dr. Bloodmoney, who 
is a sort of human football within a maze of servo-assists. Part of that entity is organic, 
but all of it is alive; part came from a womb, all lives, and within the same universe. I am 
talking about our real world and not the world of fiction when I say: One day we will have 
millions of hybrid entities that have a foot in both worlds at once. To define them as 
"man" versus "machine" will give us verbal puzzle games to play with. What is and will 
be a real concern is: Does the composite entity (of which Palmer Eldritch is a good 
example among my characters), does he behave in a human way? Many of my stories 
contain purely mechanical systems that display kindness -- taxicabs, for instance, or the 
little rolling carts at the end of Now Wait for Last Year that that poor defective human 


builds. "Man" or "human being" are terms that we must understand correctly and apply, 
but they apply not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world; if a 
mechanical construct halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you 
will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems 
can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its 
humanness, would be like our own earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul 
in man, and, not being able to find a specific organ located at a specific spot, opted to 
decline to admit that we have souls. As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the 
added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his 
cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to 
defer to it by reason of a decision. 

But still, we must realize that the universe, although kind to us in its entirety (it 
must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, "otherwise 
nature would have executed us long ago"), does contain grinning evil masks that loom 
out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain. 

We must be careful, however, of confusing a mask, any mask, with the reality 
beneath. Think of the war mask that Pericles placed over his features: You would behold 
a frozen visage, the grimness of war, without compassion -- no genuine human face or 
person to whom you could appeal. And this was, of course, the intention. Suppose you 
did not even realize it was a mask; suppose you believed, as Pericles approached you in 
the fog and half darkness of early morning, that this was his authentic countenance. 
Now, this is almost exactly how I described Palmer Eldritch in my novel about him: so 
much like the war masks of the Attic Greeks that the resemblance cannot be accidental. 
Is, then, the hollow eyeslot, the mechanical metal arm and hand, the stainless-steel 
teeth, which are the dread stigmata of evil -- is this not, this which I myself first saw in 
the overhead sky at noon one day back in 1963, a description, a vision, of a war mask 
and metal armor, a god of battle? The God of Wrath who was angry with me. But under 
the anger, under the metal and helmet, there is, as with Pericles, the face of a man. A 
kind and loving man. 

My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps 
this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a 
face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course 
it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over 
soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli. This is 
a defensive measure, and if it works, the predator returns to his lair grumbling, "I saw the 
most frightening creature in the sky -- wild grimaces and flappings, stingers and 
poisons." His kin are impressed. The magic works. 

I had supposed that only bad people wore frightening masks, but you can see 
now that I fell for the magic of the mask, its dreadful, frightening magic, its illusion. I 
bought the deception and fled. I wish now to apologize for preaching that deception to 
you as something genuine: I've had you all sitting around the campfire with our eyes 
wide with alarm as I tell tales of the hideous monsters I encountered; my voyage of 
discovery ended in terrifying visions that I dutifully carried home with me as I fled back to 
safety. Safety from what? From something which, when the need was gone for 
concealment, smiled and revealed its harmlessness. 

Now I do not intend to abandon my dichotomy between what I call "human" and 
what I call "android," the latter being a cruel and cheap mockery of the former for base 


ends. But I had been going on surface appearances; to distinguish the categories more 
cunning is required. For if a gentle, harmless life conceals itself behind a frightening war 
mask, then it is likely that behind gentle and loving masks there can conceal itself a 
vicious slayer of men's souls. In neither case can we go on surface appearance; we 
must penetrate to the heart of each, to the heart of the subject. 

Probably everything in the universe serves a good end -- I mean, serves the 
universe's goals. But intrinsic portions or subsystems can be takers of life. We must deal 
with them as such, without reference to their role in the total structure. 

The Sepher Yezirah, a Cabbalist text, The Book of Creation, which is almost two 
thousand years old, tells us: "God has also set the one over against the other; the good 
against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and 
the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good; the good is 
preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones." 

Underlying the two game players there is God, who is neither and both. The effect 
of the game is that both players become purified. Thus the ancient Hebrew monotheism, 
so superior to our own view. We are creatures in a game with our affinities and 
aversions predetermined for us -- not by blind chance but by patient, foresighted 
engramming systems that we dimly see. Were we to see them clearly, we would abolish 
the game. Evidently that would not serve anyone's interests. We must trust these 
tropisms, and anyhow we have no choice -- not until the tropisms lift. And under certain 
circumstances they can and do. And at that point, much is clear that previously was 
occluded from us, intentionally. 

What we must realize is that this deception, this obscuring of things as if under a 
veil -- the veil of Maya, it has been called -- this is not an end in itself, as if the universe 
is somehow perverse and likes to foil us per se; what we must accept, once we realize 
that a veil (called by the Greeks dokos) lies between us and reality, is that this veil 
serves a benign purpose. Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher, is historically 
credited with being the first person in the West systematically to work out proof that the 
world cannot be as we see it, that dokos, the veil, exists. We see very much the same 
notion expressed by St. Paul when he speaks about our seeing "as if by the reflection on 
the bottom of a polished metal pan." He is referring to the familiar notion of Plato's that 
we see only images of reality, and probably these images are inaccurate and imperfect 
and not to be relied on. I wish to add that Paul was probably saying one thing more than 
Plato in the celebrated metaphor of the cave: Paul was saying that we may well be 
seeing the universe backward. 

The extraordinary thrust of this thought just simply cannot be taken in, even if we 
intellectually grasp it. "To see the universe backward?" What would that mean? Well, let 
me give you one possibility: that we experience time backward; or more precisely, that 
our inner, subjective category of experience of time (in the sense that Kant spoke of, a 
way by which we arrange experience), our time experience, is orthogonal to the flow of 
time itself -- at right angles. There are two times: the time that is our experience or 
perception or construct of ontological matrix, an extensiveness along with space as an 
inseparable extensiveness into another area -- this is real, but the outer time flow of the 
universe moves in a different direction. Both are real, but by experiencing time as we do, 
orthogonally to its actual direction, we get a totally wrong idea of the sequence of 
events, of causality, of what is past and what is future, where the universe is going. 

I hope you realize the importance of this. Time is real, both as an experience in 


the Kantian sense, and real in the sense which the Soviet Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev expresses 
it: that time is an energy, and it is the basic energy that binds the universe together, and 
upon which all life depends, all phenomena draw their source out of and express: It is 
the energy of each entelechy and of the total entelechy of the universe itself. 

But time, in itself, is not moving from our past to our future. Its orthogonal axis 
leads it through a rotary cycle within which, for example, we have been "spinning our 
wheels," so to speak, in a vast winter of our species that has lasted already about two 
thousand of our lineal time years. Evidently orthogonal time or true time rotates 
something like the primitive cyclic time, within which each year was regarded as the 
same year, each new crop the same crop; in fact, each spring was the same spring 
again. What destroyed man's ability to perceive time in this overly simple way was that 
he himself as an individual spanned too many of these years and could see that he 
himself wore out, was not renewed each year like the corn crop, the bulbs and roots and 
trees. There had to be a more adequate idea of time than the simple cyclic time; so he 
developed, reluctantly, lineal time, which is an accumulative time, as Bergson showed; it 
goes in only one direction and is added to -- or adds to -- everything as it sweeps along. 

True orthogonal time is rotary, but on a vaster scale, much like the Great Year of 
the ancients; much, too, like Dante's idea of the time rate of eternity that you find 
expressed in his Comedy. During the Middle Ages such thinkers as Erigena had begun 
to sense true eternity or timelessness, but others had begun to sense that eternity 
involved time (timelessness would be a static state), although the time would be quite 
different from our perception of it. A clue lay in St. Paul's reiteration that the Final Days 
of the world would be the Time of Restoration of All Things. He had evidently 
experienced this orthogonal time enough to understand that it contains in it as a 
simultaneous plane or extension everything that was, just as the grooves on an LP 
contain the part of the music that has already been played; they don't disappear after the 
stylus tracks them. A phonograph record is, actually, a long, helical spiral, and can be 
represented entirely in a plane geometry sort of way: in space, although I suppose you 
can talk about the stylus accumulating the music as it goes along. The idea of 
dysfunctions such as bounce back and bounce forward are possible here, but these 
would serve no ideological purpose: They would be time-slips, as in my novel Martian 
Time-Slip. Yet, if they were to occur, they would serve a purpose for us, the observer or 
listener: We would suddenly learn a great deal more about our universe. I believe these 
ontological dysfunctions in time do occur, but that our brains automatically generate 
false memory systems to obscure them, at once. The reason for this carries back to my 
premise: The veil or dokos is there to deceive us for a good reason, and such 
disclosures as these time dysfunctions make are to be obliterated that this benign 
purpose be maintained. 

Within a system that must generate an enormous amount of veiling, it would be 
vainglorious to expostulate on what actuality is, when my premise declares that were we 
to penetrate to it for any reason, this strange, veil-like dream would reinstate itself 
retroactively, in terms of our perceptions and in terms of our memories. The mutual 
dreaming would resume as before, because, I think, we are like the characters in my 
novel Ubik; we are in a state of half-life. We are neither dead nor alive, but preserved in 
cold storage, waiting to be thawed out. Expressed in the perhaps startlingly familiar 
terms of the procession of the seasons, this is winter of which I speak; it is winter for our 
race, and it is winter in Ubik for those in half-life. Ice and snow cover them; ice and snow 


cover our world in layers of accretions, which we call dokos or Maya. What melts away 
the rind or layer of frozen ice over the world each year is, of course, the reappearance of 
the sun. What melts the ice and snow covering the characters in Ubik, and which halts 
the cooling off of their lives, the entropy that they feel, is the voice of Mr. Runciter, their 
former employer, calling to them. The voice of Mr. Runciter is none other than that same 
voice that each bulb and seed and root in the ground, our ground, in our wintertime, 
hears. It hears: "Wake up! Sleepers awake!" Now I have told you who Runciter is, and I 
have told you our condition and what Ubik is really about. What I have said, too, is that 
time is actually as Dr. Kozyrev in the Soviet Union supposes it to be, and in Ubik time 
has been nullified and no longer moves forward in the lineal fashion that we experience. 
As this has happened, due to the deaths of the characters, we the readers and they the 
personae see the world as it is without the veil of Maya, without the obscuring mists of 
lineal time. It is that very energy, Time, postulated by Dr. Kozyrev as binding together all 
phenomena and maintaining all life, that by its activity hides the ontological reality 
beneath its flow. 

The orthogonal time axis may have been presented in my novel Ubik without my 
understanding what I was depicting: i.e. the form regression of objects along an entirely 
different line from that out of which they, in lineal time, were built. This reversion is that 
of the Platonic Ideas or archetypes: A rocketship reverts to a Boeing 747, then back to a 
World War I "Jenny" biplane. While I may indeed have expressed a dramatic view of 
orthogonal time, it is less certain that this is orthogonal time undergoing an unnatural 
reversion: i.e. moving backward. What the characters in Ubik see may be orthogonal 
time moving along its normal axis; if we ourselves somehow see the universe reversed, 
then the "reversions" of form that objects in Ubik undergo may be momentum toward 
perfection. This would imply that our world as extensive in time (rather than extensive in 
space) is like an onion, an almost infinite number of successive layers. If lineal time 
seems to add layers, then perhaps orthogonal time peels these off, exposing layers of 
progressively greater Being. One is reminded here of Plotinus's view of the universe as 
consisting of concentric rings of emanation, each one possessing more Being -- or 
reality -- than the next. 

Within that ontology, that realm of Being, the characters, like ourselves, slumber 
in dreams as they wait for the voice that will awaken them. When I say that they and we 
are waiting for spring to come I am not merely using a metaphor. Spring means thermal 
return, the abolition of the process of entropy; their life can be expressed in terms of 
thermal units, and those units have left. It is spring that restores that life -- restores it 
fully and in some cases, as with our species, the new life is a metamorphosis; the period 
of slumbering is a period of gestation together with our fellows that will culminate in an 
entirely different form of life than we have ever known before. Many species are this 
way; they go through cycles. Thus our winter sleep is not a mere "spinning of our 
wheels," as it might seem. We will not simply bloom again and again with the same 
blossoms we produced each year before. This is why it was an error for the ancients to 
believe that for us, as for the vegetable world, the same year returned; for us, there is 
accumulation, the growth of an entelechy for each of us not yet perfected or completed, 
and never repeatable. Like a symphony of Beethoven, each of us is unique, and, when 
this long winter is over, we as new blooms will surprise ourselves and the world around 
us. What we will do, many of us, is throw off the mere masks that we have worn -masks 
that were intended to be taken for reality. Masks that have successfully fooled 


everyone, as is their purpose. We have been so many Palmer Eldritches moving through 
the cold fog and mists and twilight of winter, but now soon we will emerge and lift the 
war mask of iron to reveal the face within. 

It is a face that we, the wearers of the masks, have not seen either; it will surprise 
us, too. 

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our 
basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly 
collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in Martian Time-Slip in terms of time; in Maze of 
Death there are endless parallel realities arranged specially; in Flow My Tears, the 
Policeman Said the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that 
by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanent Mind that thinks -or 
rather dreams -- our world. That dreamer, like the dreamer in Joyce's Finnegan's 
Wake, is stirring and about to come to consciousness. We are within that dream; these 
manifold dreams are about to fold into themselves, to disappear as dreams, to be 
replaced by the true landscape of the dreamer's reality. We will join him as he sees it 
once again and is aware that he has been dreaming. In Brahmanism, we would say that 
a great cycle has ended and that Brahman stirs and wakes again, or that it falls asleep 
from being awake; in any case the universe that we experience that is an extension in 
space and time of its Mind is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the 
end of a cycle. You may say, if you prefer, "Reality is collapsing; it's all turning to chaos," 
or, with me, you may wish to say, "I feel the dream, the dokos, lifting; I feel Maya 
dissolving: I am waking up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: We are all the Dreamer." 
One thinks here of Arthur Clarke's Overmind. 

Each of us is going to have either to affirm or deny the reality that is revealed 
when our ontological categories collapse. If you feel that chaos is closing in, that when 
the dream fades out, nothing will be left, or worse, something dreadful will confront you 


- well, this is why the concept of the Day of Wrath persists; many people have a deep 
intuition that when the dokos abruptly melts they're in for a hard time of it. Perhaps so. 
But I think that the visage revealed will be a smiling one, since spring usually beams 
down on creatures rather than blasting them with desiccating heat. There may, too, be 
malign forces in the universe that will be revealed by the removal of the veil, but I think 
about the fall of the political tyranny in the United States in 1974 and it seems to me that 
the exposure to the light of day of that ugly cancer and its subsequent removal is the 
nature of high value in disclosure to sunlight; we may have to suffer such shocks as 
learning that during the Nacht und Nebel, during the time of night and fog, our freedom, 
our rights, our property, and even our lives were mutilated, deformed, stolen, and 
destroyed by base creatures glutting themselves in spurious sanctuary down there at 
San Clemente [the location of Nixon's mansion] and in Florida and all the other villas, 
but the shock of exposure was worse for their plans than it was for ours. Our plans 
called only for us to live with justice and truth and freedom; the former government of 
this country had arranged to live with cruel power of the most arrogant sort, while at the 
same time lying to us ceaselessly through all the channels of communication. Such is a 
good example of the healing power of sunlight; this power first to reveal and then to 
shrivel up the coarse plant of tyranny that had grown deep into the beating heart of a 
good people. 
That heart beats on now, more strongly than ever, although it was admittedly 
badly engulfed; but the cancer that had crawled through it -- that cancer is gone. That 


black growth that shunned light, shunned truth, and destroyed anyone who told the truth 
-- it shows what can flourish during the long winter of the human race. But that winter 
began to end in the vernal equinox of 1974. 

Sometimes I think that the Dreamer began to press against the tyranny as he, the 
Dreamer, woke us; here in the United States he woke us to our condition, our awful peril. 

One of the best novels, and most important to an understanding of the nature of 
our world, is Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, in which the dream universe is 
articulated in such a striking and compelling way that I hesitate to add any further 
explanation to it; it requires none. I do not think that either of us had read about Charles 
Tart's study of dreams when we wrote our several novels, but I have now, and I have 
read some of Robert E. Ornstein, he being the "brain revolution" person north of where I 
live, at Stanford University. From Ornstein's work it would appear that there is a 
possibility that we have two entirely separate brains, rather than one brain divided into 
two bilaterally equal hemispheres, that, in fact, whereas we have a body we have two 
minds (I refer to you the article by Joseph E. Bogen "The Other Side of the Brain: An 
Appositional Mind," published in Ornstein's collection The Nature of Human 
Consciousness). Bogen demonstrates that every now and then a researcher began to 
scent the possibility that we have two brains, two minds, but that only with modern brain-
mapping techniques and related studies has it been possible to demonstrate this. For 
example, in 1763 Jerome Gaub wrote: "... I hope that you will believe Pythagoras and 
Plato, the wisest of the ancient philosophers, who, according to Cicero, divided the mind 
into two parts, one partaking of reason and the other devoid of it." Bogen's article 
contains concepts so fascinating as to cause me to wonder why we never realized that 
our "unconscious" is not an unconscious at all but another consciousness, with which we 
have a tenuous relationship. It is this other mind or consciousness that dreams us at 
night -- we are its audience as it binds us in its storytelling; we are little children 
spellbound. . . which is why Lathe of Heaven may represent one of the basic great 
books of our civilization, especially since Ursula Le Guin, I'm sure, arrived at her 
formulation without knowledge of Ornstein's work and Bogen's extraordinary theory. 
What is involved here is that one brain receives exactly the same input as the other, 
through the various sense channels, but processes the information differently; each 
brain works its own unique way (the left is like a digital computer; the right much like an 
analogue computer, working by comparing patterns). Processing the identical 
information, each may arrive at a totally different result whereupon, since our personality 
is constructed in our left brain, if the right brain finds something vital that we to its left 
remain unaware of, it must communicate during sleep, during the dream; hence the 
Dreamer who communicates to us so urgently in the night is located neurologically, 
evidently, in our right brain, which is the not-I. But more than that (for instance, is the 
right brain as Bergson thought perhaps a transducer or transformer for ultrasensory 
informational input beyond the purview of the left?) we can't say as yet. I think, though, 
that the spell of dokos is woven by our right brain's plural; we as a species are prone to 
reside entirely within one hemisphere only, leaving the other to do what it must to protect 
the world. Keep in mind that this protectiveness is bilateral, an exchange between the 
world and each of us: Each of us is a treasure, to be cherished and preserved, but so is 
the world and the hidden seeds in it, slumbering. The other hidden seeds. Thus, through 
the veil-spinning of Kali, the right hemisphere of each of us, we are kept ignorant of what 
we must be ignorant of now. But that time is ending; that winter is melting, along with its 


terrors, its tyrannies, and snow. 

The best description of this dokos-veil formation that I've read yet appears in an 
article in Science Fiction Studies, March 1975, by Frederick Jameson, in "After 
Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney," which is an obscure novel of 
mine. I quote: "Every reader of Dick is familiar with this nightmarish uncertainty, this 
reality fluctuation, sometimes accounted for by drugs,* and sometimes by schizophrenia, 
and sometimes by new SF powers, in which the psychic world as it were goes outside, 
and reappears in the form of simulacra or of some photographically cunning 
reproduction of the external" (p. 32). 

*I hope Jameson means drugs in the writing and schizophrenia in thewriting, not in me, but I'll let that pass. 

You can see from Jameson's description that we are talking about something 
very like Maya here, but also something very like a hologram. I have the distinct feeling 
that Carl Jung was correct about our unconsciousnesses, that they form a single entity, 
or as he called it, "collective unconscious." In that case, this collective brain entity, 
consisting of literally billions of "stations," which transmit and receive, would form a vast 
network of communication and information, much like Teilhard's concept of the 
noosphere. This is the noosphere, as real as the ionosphere or the biosphere; it is a 
layer in our earth's atmosphere composed of holographic and informational projections 
in a unified and continually processed Gestalt, the sources of which are our manifold 
right brains. This constitutes a vast Mind, immanent within us, of such power and 
wisdom as to seem, to us, equal to the Creator. This was Bergson's view of God, 
anyhow. 

It is interesting how deeply troubled the brilliant Greek philosophers were by 
activities of the gods; they could see the activities and (or so they thought) the gods 
themselves, but as Xenophanes put it: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most 
complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" 
[emphasis by Dick]. 

This notion came to the pre-Socratics by virtue of their seeing the many but 
knowing a priori that what they saw could not be real, since only the One existed. 

"If God is all things, then appearances are certainly deceptive; and, though 
observation of the kosmos may yield generalizations and speculations about God's 
plans, true knowledge of them could only be had by a direct contact with God's mind." (I 
am quoting Edward Hussey in his marvelous book The Pre-Socratics, p. 35.) And he 
goes on to give two fragments of Heraclitus: "The nature of things is in the habit of 
concealing itself" (Fragment 123). "Latent structure is master of obvious structure" 
(Fragment 54). 

I wish to remind you that the ancient Greeks and Hebrews did not conceive of 
God or God's Mind as above the universe, but within it: immanent Mind or immanent 
God, with the visible universe the body of God, so that God was to universe as psyche is 
to soma. But they also conjectured that perhaps God was not the great psyche but noos, 
a different sort of mind; in which case the universe was not his body but God Himself. 
The space-time universe houses but is not a part of God; what is God is the vast grid 
field or energy field alone. 

If you assume (and you'd be correct to do so) that our minds are energy fields of 


some kind anyhow, and that we are fundamentally interacting fields rather than discrete 
particles, then there is no theoretical problem in grasping this interaction between the 
billions of brainprints emanating and forming and reforming into the patterns of the 
noosphere. However, if you still hold to the nineteenth-century view of yourself as a 
brittle organism, much like a machine, made up of parts -- well, you see, then how can 
you merge with the noosphere? You are a unique, concrete thing. And thingness is what 
we must get away from in regarding ourselves and in considering life. By more modern 
views we are overlapping fields, all of us, animals included, plants included. This is the 
ecosphere, and we are all in it. But what we don't realize is that the billions of discrete 
and entirely ego-oriented left-hemisphere brains have far less to say about the ultimate 
disposition of the world than does the collective noospheric. Mind that comprises all our 
right brains and in which each of us shares. It will decide, and I do not think it impossible 
that this vast plasmic noosphere, considering that it covers our entire planet in a veil or 
layer, may interact outward into solar-energy fields and from there into cosmic fields. 
Each of us, then, partakes of the cosmos -- if he is willing to listen to his dreams. And it 
is his dreams that will transform him from a mere machine into an authentic human. He 
will no longer strut about and clank with majestic iron, no longer rule his little kingdom 
here; he will soar upward, flying like a field of negative ions, like the entity Ubik in my 
novel of that name: being life and giving life, but never defining himself because no 
clear-cut name to him -- to us -- can be given. 

As we move up the manifold -- i.e. progress forward in lineal time, or somehow 
stand still and lineal time progresses forward, whichever model is more correct -- we as 
many entelechies are continually signaled, given information, and most of all, 
disinhibited by firings from the universe around us; in this fashion harmony among all 
parts of the universe is maintained. There is no more grand scheme than this: to be 
aware that I, as a representative entelechy, must unfold only as these preset signals 
reach me, and that control as to the when -- the locus in time -- that each signal will 
come is entirely in the hands of the universe. . . this is a thrilling comprehension, and 
makes me aware of the unbreakable tie between me and my environment. 

There is such order in the response between engrammed systems within each of 
us and the accumulating signals that fire these systems in sequence as to imply that the 
Agency that laid down the entelechy in the first place, engrammed and then blocked 
these systems, knew with absolute precision where along the time path the signals 
would take place that would disinhibit; chance is not involved -- the happiest of accidents 
is the most astute planning of the universe. 

Sometimes I wonder how we could have imagined that our species was exempt 
from the instincts that lower species obviously have. What is different about us, 
however, is that ants, for instance, are disinhibited by the same signal, and the same 
behavior occurs; it is as if one ant again and again is involved, endlessly. But for us, 
each is a unique entelechy, and each receives unique sequences of signals -- to which 
each responds uniquely. Still, this is the language of the universe that the ant hears; we 
thrill with a common joy. 

I myself have derived much of the material for my writing from dreams. In Flow 
My Tears, for example, the powerful dream that comes to Felix Buchman near the end, 
the dream of the wise old man on horseback, that was an actual dream I had at the time 
of writing the novel. In Martian Time-Slip I've written in so many dream experiences that 
I can't separate them, now, when I read the novel. 


Ubik was primarily a dream, or series of dreams. In my opinion it contains strong 
themes of pre-Socratic philosophical views of the world, unfamiliar to me when I wrote it 
(to name just one, the views of Empedocles). It is possible that the noosphere contained 
thought patterns in the form of very weak energy until we developed radio transmission; 
whereupon the energy level of the noosphere went out of bounds and assumed a life of 
its own. It no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information (the 
"Seas of Knowledge" that ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of 
charge from our electronic signals and the information-rich material therein, we have 
given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo 
and other ancients have called the Logos. Information has, then, become alive, with a 
collective mind of its own independent of our brains, if this theory is correct. It does not 
merely know what we know and remember what once was known, but can construct 
solutions on its own: It is a titanic AI system. The difference would be between a tape 
recorder that could "remember" a Beethoven symphony that it "heard," and one that 
could create new ones, on and on; the library in the sky, having read all the books there 
are and ever were, is writing its own book, now, and at night we are being read to -- told 
the exciting tale comprising that Great Work-in-Progress. 

I must mention lan Watson's article in Science-Fiction Studies on Le Guin's Lathe 
of Heaven; in his excellent piece he refers to what may be the most significant -startlingly 
so -- story SF has yet produced: Fredric Brown's story that appeared in 
Astounding, "The Waveries." You must read that story; if you do not, you may die 
without understanding the universe coming into being around you. The Waveries were 
attracted to Earth by our radio waves; they returned in a facsimile form, so like our 
transmissions (SOS and so forth, chronologically) that at first we couldn't fathom what 
was up. Regarding Lathe, Watson says: 

Conceivably George (Orr) dreamt a hostile invasion into a peaceful one; yet the dominant 
probability is that the aliens are, as they maintain, "of the dream time," that their whole culture revolves 
around the mode of "reality dreaming itself into being," that they have been attracted to Earth like the 
Waveries of Fredric Brown's story, only by dream-waves rather than radio waves [pp. 71-72]. 

This could be considered scary stuff, this theme in Le Guin's work and mine. 
What are dreams? Are there these dream-universe entities that have come here from 
another star (Aldebaran, in Ms. Le Guin's novel)? Are the UFOs that people see 
holograms projected by their unconscious minds, acting as transformers, acting, too, as 
transducers of these strange dream-universe creatures? 

For the past year I've had many dreams that seemed -- I stress the word 
"seemed" -- to indicate that a telepathic communication was in progress somewhere 
within my head, but after talking with Henry Korman, an associate of Ornstein's, I would 
imagine that it is merely my right and left hemispheres conferring in a Martin Buber Iand-
Thou dialogue. But much of the dream material seemed beyond my personal ability 
to have created. At one point an attempt was made to get me to write down a complex 
engineering principle that was shown me in the form of a round motor with twin rotating 
wheels, opposed in direction, much as yin and yang in Taoism alternate as opposing 
pairs (and much like Empedocles saw love versus strife, the dialectic interaction of the 
world). But this was a true engineering device they had there in my dream; they showed 
me a pencil, they said, "This principle was known in your time." And as I rushed to find a 


pencil they added: "Known, but buried in a basement and forgotten." There was an 
elaborate high-torque chain-thrown mechanism that moved camwise between the two 
rotors, but I never got the hang of it when I woke up. What I did later on grasp, though, 
was this: Further dreams made it clear that somehow our treatment of seawater by an 
osmosis process would give us not only pure water but a source of energy as well. 
However, they had the wrong human when they began giving me that sort of material; I 
am not trained to understand it. I did purchase over $1,000 worth of reference books to 
try to figure out what I'd been shown, though. I have learned this: Something to do with a 
high hysteresis factor, in this twin-rotor system, is converted from a defect to an 
advantage. No braking mechanism is needed; the two rotors spin constantly at the same 
velocity, and torque is transferred by a thrown cam chain. 

I give this illustration only to show that either my unconscious has been reading 
articles on engineering that elude my memory and my conscious attention and interest, 
or there are, shall I say, dream-universe people from, shall I say, Aldebaran or some 
other star with us. Perhaps joining their noosphere with ours? And offering assistance to 
a crippled, blighted planet that has been bogged down, like a rat on a weary wheel, in 
the dead of winter for over two thousand years? If they bring the springtime with them, 
then whoever they are, I welcome them; like Joe Chip in Ubik, I fear the cold, the 
weariness; I fear the death of wearing out on endless upward stairs, while someone 
cruel, or anyhow wearing a cruel mask, watches and offers no aid -- the machine, 
lacking empathy, watching as mere spectator, the same horror that I know haunts 
Harlan Ellison. It is perhaps more frightening that the killer himself (in Ubik it was Jory), 
this figure that sees but gives no assistance, offers no hand. That is the android, to me, 
and the evil demigod to Harlan; we both shudder at the idea of its existence. What I can 
tell you about the dream-universe people is that if they do exist, whoever they are, they 
are not that unsympathetic android; they are human in this deepest of all senses: They 
have reached out a helping hand to our planet, to our polluted ecosphere, and perhaps 
even assisted in throwing down the tyranny that gripped the United States, Portugal, 
Greece, and one day they will throw down the tyranny of the Soviet bloc as well. This is 
what I think of when I grasp the idea of springtime: the lifting of the iron doors of the 
prison and the poor prisoners, in Beethoven's Fidelio, let out into the sunlight. Ah, that 
moment in the opera when they see the sun and feel its warmth. And at last, at the end, 
the trumpet call of freedom sounds the permanent end of their cruel imprisonment; help, 
from outside, has arrived. 

Every now and then someone comes up to a science fiction writer, smiles a 
crazy, secret in-the-know smile, and smirks, "I know that what you're writing is true, and 
it's in code. All you SF writers are receivers for Them." Naturally, I ask who "Them" is. 
The answer is always the same. "You know. Up there. The space people. They're 
already here, and they're using your writing. You know it, too." 

I kind of smile and edge off. It keeps happening. Well, I hate to admit it, but it is 
possible that there is (1) such a thing as telepathy; and (2) that the CETI project's idea 
that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a 
reasonable idea -- if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to 
communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system that doesn't work. At least 
that'll keep a lot of us busy for a long, long time. But I understand now that a Soviet 
astronomy bunch, evidently headed by the same Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, who developed 
the time-as-energy theory I mentioned previously, has reported receiving signals from an 


ETI within our solar system. If this were true, and our people are saying that the Soviets 
are just monitoring stale, flat, and unprofitable old signals from our own discarded 
satellites and other junk ships -- well, suppose these ETI entities or corporate mind are 
within, say, the great plasma that seems to surround Earth and is involved with solar 
flares and the like; I refer, of course, to the noosphere. It is ETI and TI at once, and 
possibly bears a strong resemblance to what Ms. LeGuin has written about in Lathe. 
And as every SF fan knows, my own works deal with similar themes. . . thus giving an 
annoying couple of marks for plausibility to these freaks who are forever lurching up to 
every SF author and saying, "What you're writing is in code. . .," etc. In truth, we may be 
influenced, especially during dream states, by a noosphere that is a product of our own, 
capable of independent mentation, and involved with ETIs, a mixture of all three and 
God knows what else. This might not be the Creator, but it would be as close to Infinite 
Mind as we might get, and close enough. That it is benign is obvious, to recall Maslow's 
remarks that if nature didn't like us it would have executed us long ago -- here read 
Infinite Noosphere for nature. 

We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps 
the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us, and 
especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay 
stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality inasmuch as they 
may participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind. Perhaps we 
see not only a deforming veil, but backward. Perhaps the closest approximation to truth 
would be to say: "Everything is equally alive, equally free, equally sentient, because 
everything is not alive or half alive or dead, but rather lived through." Radio signals are 
boosted by a transmitter; they pass through the various components, modified and 
augmented, their contours changed, noise eliminated and rejected ... we are extensions, 
like those metal arms that pick up radioactive objects for scientists. We are gloves that 
God puts on in order to move things here and there as He wishes. For some reason He 
prefers to handle reality this way (I will not budge but will defend that pun). 

We are suits of clothing that He creates, puts on and uses, and finally discards. 
We are suits of armor, too, which gives misleading impression to certain other butterflies 
within certain other suits of armor. Within the armor is the butterfly, and within the 
butterfly is -- the signal from another star. In the novel I am writing (that the Dreamer, 
perhaps, is expressing through me), that star is called Albemuth. I hadn't read Ms. 
LeGuin's novel Lathe of Heaven when the idea came to me, but the reader of that novel 
will find there also what I just now meant by our being stations within a vast grid -- and 
not realizing it. 

Consider this Meditation of Rumi, a Sufi saying [translated] by Idries Shah, who is 
a favorite among modern Sufis: "The worker is hidden in the workshop." 

Since it is evident that more than anyone else Dr. Ornstein has pioneered the way 
to discover the new worldview, which involves a bilateral brain parity unsuspected since 
the time of Pythagoras and Plato, I recently summoned my courage and wrote him. Fans 
now and then write me, their hands shaking nervously; my entire typewriter shook 
nervously as I wrote to Dr. Ornstein. Here is the text of my letter, which I place here as a 
final note to explain how I have transcended the categories of reality-versus-illusion by 
his help, and thus brought into clear sight an end to twenty years' study and effort on my 
part. I quote: 


Dear Dr. Ornstein: 

Recently I met Mr. Henry Korman and Mr. Tony Hiss (Tony had come to interview me for The 
New Yorker). I got into a marvelous discussion with Henry about Sufism and I mentioned my admiration, 
bordering on fanatic enthusiasm, for your pioneer work with bilateral brain hemispheric parity. Thus I, 
having learned that they know you, am summoning my courage to write you and ask, What has become of 
me, since experimenting with bringing on my right hemisphere (I did it mainly by the orthomolecular 
formula vitamins, plus a good deal of concentrated meditation)? 

By this I mean to say, Dr. Ornstein, ten months ago this took place, and for ten months I have 
been a different person. But what to me is most extraordinary (I am writing a book about it, but in the form 
of fiction, a novel called To Scare the Dead) is that -- well, let me give the premise as I placed it into the 
novel: 

Nicholas Brady, an ordinary American citizen with contemporary worldly values and drives (money 
and power and prestige), suddenly has inside him a winking into life of an entity that has slumbered for 
two thousand years. This entity is an Essene, who died knowing that he would be given the promised 
resurrection; he knew it because he and other Qumran individuals had in their possession secret formulae 
and medications and scientific practices to ensure it. So suddenly our protagonist, Nicholas Brady, finds 
that there are two of him: his old self, at his secular job and goals, and this Essene from the Qumran wadi 
back circa A.D. 45, a holy man with holy values and utter antagonism to the secular physical world, which 
he sees as the "City of Iron." The Qumran mind takes over and directs Brady in a complicated series of 
acts until it becomes evident that others such as this Qumran man are coming back to life here and there 
in the world. 

Studying the Bible, along with this Qumran personality, Brady finds that the New Testament is in 
cipher. The Qumran personality can read it. "Jesus" is really Zagreus-Zeus, taking two forms, one mild, 
the other utterly powerful, on which his followers can draw when in need. 

The Qumran personality, who, for fictional purposes, I call Thomas, gradually informs Brady that 
these are the Parousia, the Final Days. And to be prepared; Thomas will prepare him by reminding him of 
his own divinity -- anamnesis, Thomas calls it. Thomas develops a special parity relationship with Brady, 
but evolves as a source of teaching for the incredibly ignorant Brady the entity known as Erasmus, who is 
in fact a station in the noosphere, which is now so fully charged around Earth that if you are aware of it 
you can consciously, rather than unconsciously, draw from it; these are the "Seas of Knowledge" that 
were known in ancient times and upon which the Sibyl at Delphi drew. But this is a cover, because Brady 
realizes that in point of fact, the Qumran men had as their god not the mythical Jesus but the actual 
Zagreus, and by doing research, Brady soon learns that Zagreus was a form of Dionysos. Christianity is a 
latter form of the worship of Dionysos, refined through the strange and lovely figure of Orpheus. Orpheus, 
like Jesus, is real only in the sense that Dionysos is becoming socialized; born here as a child of another 
race, not a human one but a visiting race, Zagreus has had to learn by degrees to modify his "madness," 
which is now kept to a low ebb. Basically, he is with us to reconstruct us as expressions of him, and the 
MO of this is our being possessed by him -- which the early Christians sought for, and hid from the hated 
Romans. Dionysos-Zagreus-Orpheus-Jesus was always pitted against the City of Iron, be it Rome or 
Washington, DC; he is the god of springtime, of new life, of small and helpless creatures, he is the god of 
mirth and frenzy, and of sitting here day after day working on this novel. 

But in the novel, Thomas says, "The Final Days have come. The overthrow of the tyranny is that 
which, in lurid language, John described in Revelation. Jesus-Zagreus is seizing his own, now, one after 
another; he lives again." 

During winter, it was believed that Dionysos, the god of the vine plant, of vegetation, of the crop, 
slumbered. It was known that no matter how dead he seemed (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is a 
wonderful account of this, where they accidentally spill beer on the corpse and it revives), he was actually 
alive, though you'd never know it. And then -- not to the surprise of those who understood him and 
believed in him -- he was reborn. His followers knew he would be; they knew the secret ("Behold! I tell you 
a sacred secret," etc.). We are speaking here of the mystery religions, all of them, including Christianity. 
Our God has been sleeping, during the long winter of the human culture (not for one year's rotational cycle 
of seasons, but from A.D. 45 through the centuries of mental winter to now); just when winter holds all in 
its grip, the snow of despair and defeat (in our case, political chaos, moral ruin, economic ruin -- the winter 
of our planet, our world, our civilization), then the vine, which was gnarled and old and seemingly dead, 
breaks into new life, and our God is reborn -- not outside us as such, but in each of us. Slumbering not 


under snow over the ground surface but within the right hemispheres of our brains. We have been waiting, 
we didn't know for what. This is it: This is spring for our planet, in a deeper, more fundamental way. The 
cold chains of iron are being thrown off, but by what a miracle. As with my character, Nicholas Brady -I've 
had Zagreus awaken in my right hemisphere, and felt the flooding of renewed life, his vigor, his 
personality, and his godlike wisdom; he hated the injustice he saw around him, and the lies, and he 
remembered "The dear one lands untroubled by men, where amid the shadowy green / The little ones of 
the forest live unseen" (Euripides). Dr. Ornstein, thank you for helping bring winter to an end, and ushering 
in -- not just spring -- but the living life of Spring alive but asleep inside us. 

Really, I suppose that the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become 
a kind of hallucination, and perhaps I am taking my dream experiences too seriously. 
But there is much interest now, for instance, in the Senoi tribe of the Malay Peninsula 
(vide Kilton Stewart's article "Dream Theory in Malaya" in Charles T. Tart's Altered 
States of Consciousness). In a dream I was shown that the word "Jesus" is a code, a 
neologism, and not a real name at all; those reading the text in those early days who 
were the esoteri (the Qumran men, possibly) would see "Zeus" and "Zagreus" combined 
into the integer "Jesus." It is a substitution code, I think they call it. Now, ordinarily, one 
would not give much credit to such a dream, or rather to any dream insofar as it might 
be an actual entity, an AI system, for instance, giving you accurate information that you 
otherwise would not have available to you. But as I went to one of my textbooks the 
other day to check a spelling, I found these remarkably similar textual passages, the first 
of which we all know, since it concludes our own sacred writings, the New Testament: ". 
. . I am the root and scion of David, the bright morning star" (Revelation 22:16, Jesus 
describing himself). And: 

Of all the trees that are 

He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root, 

The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star 

That shines amid the gathering of the fruit 

(Pindar; a favorite quatrain of Plutarch, circa 430 B.C.) 

What are names? This is the god of in-toxication, taking in the sacred mushroom 
(cf. John Allegro) or wine, or finding a joke so terribly funny that you lose all reason 
laughing and crying, as when you see one of the slapstick silent comedies. In the one 
short stanza of Pindar we have flock, we have trees, we have in addition to these two 
major symbols of Jesus, terms by which all the esoteri recognize him, yet two more inner 
terms: the root and star. 

The reference to "root and star" might be taken as equal to a spacial extension of 
the time extension of "I am Alpha and Omega," which is the first and last. So "root and 
star" indicate: I am from the chthonic world up, and the starry heaven downward. But I 
see something else in star, in bright morning star: I think he was saying, "The signal that 
the springtime for man is here, that signal comes from another star." We have friends 
and they are ETI, and it is as He told us, a bright and morning star: the star of love. 

"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" (1977) 

May I tell you how much I appreciate your asking me to share some of my ideas 


with you. A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: 
much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a 
great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them 
physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and 
entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash -- the obviously 
worthless ideas -- and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, 
however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he 
hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his 
existence. But such truly priceless ideas. . . perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at 
best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his 
existence to himself and to his God. 

An odd aspect of these rare, extraordinary ideas that puzzles me is their 
mystifying cloak of -- shall I say -- the obvious. By that I mean, once the idea has 
emerged or appeared or been born -- however it is that new ideas pass over into being 


-the novelist says to himself, "But of course. Why didn't I realize that years ago?" But 
note the word "realize." It is the key word. He has come across something new that at 
the same time was there, somewhere, all the time. In truth, it simply surfaced. It always 
was. He did not invent it or even find it; in a very real sense it found him. And -- and this 
is a little frightening to contemplate -- he has not invented it, but on the contrary, it 
invented him. It is as if the idea created him for its purposes. I think this is why we 
discover a startling phenomenon of great renown: that quite often in history a great new 
idea strikes a number of researchers or thinkers at exactly the same time, all of them 
oblivious to their compeers. "Its time had come," we say about the idea, and so dismiss, 
as if we had explained it, something I consider quite important: our recognition that in a 
certain literal sense ideas are alive. 
What does this mean, to say that an idea or a thought is literally alive? And that it 
seizes on men here and there and makes use of them to actualize itself into the stream 
of human history? Perhaps the pre-Socratic philosophers were correct; the cosmos is 
one vast entity that thinks. It may in fact do nothing but think. In that case either what we 
call the universe is merely a form of disguise that it takes, or it somehow is the universe 


- some variation on this pantheistic view, my favorite being that it cunningly mimics the 
world that we experience daily, and we remain none the wiser. This is the view of the 
oldest religion of India, and to some extent it was the view of Spinoza and Alfred North 
Whitehead, the concept of an immanent God, God within the universe, not transcendent 
above it and therefore not part of it. The Sufi saying [by Rumi] "The workman is invisible 
within the workshop" applies here, with workshop as universe and workman as God. But 
this still expresses the theistic notion that the universe is something that God created; 
whereas I am saying, perhaps God created nothing but merely is. And we spend our 
lives within him or her or it, wondering constantly where he or she or it can be found. 
I enjoyed thinking along these lines for several years. God is as near at hand as 
the trash in the gutter -- God is the trash in the gutter, to speak more precisely. But then 
one day a wicked thought entered my mind -- wicked because it undermined my 
marvelous pantheistic monism of which I was so proud. What if -- and here you will see 
how at least this particular SF writer gets his plots -- what if there exists a plurality of 
universes arranged along a sort of lateral axis, which is to say at right angles to the flow 
of linear time? I must admit that upon thinking this I found I had conjured up a terrific 
absurdity: ten thousand bodies of God arranged like so many suits hanging in some 


enormous closet, with God either wearing them all at once or going selectively back and 
forth among them, saying to himself, "I think today I'll wear the one in which Germany 
and Japan won World War II" and then adding, half to himself, "And tomorrow I'll wear 
that nice one in which Napoleon defeated the British; that's one of my best." 

This does seem absurd, and it certainly seems to reveal the basic idea as 
nonsense. But suppose we recast this "closet full of different suits of clothes" just a little 
and say, "What if God tries out a suit of clothes and then, for reasons best known to him, 
changes his mind?" Decides, using this metaphor, that the suit of clothes that he 
possesses or wears is not the one he wants. . . in which case the aforementioned closet 
full of suits of clothes is a sort of progressive sequence of worlds, picked up, used for a 
time, and then discarded in favor of an improved one? We might ask at this point, "How 
would the suddenly discarded suit of clothes -- the suddenly abandoned universe -- feel? 
What would it experience?" And, for us even more importantly, what change, if any, 
would the life forms living in that universe experience? Because I have a secret hunch 
that this exact thing does indeed happen; and I have a keen additional insight that the 
endless trillions of life forms involved would suppose -- incorrectly -- that they had 
experienced nothing, that no change had taken place. They, as elements of the new suit 
of clothes, would incorrectly imagine that they had always been worn -- always been as 
they now were, with complete memories by which to prove the correctness of their 
subjective impressions. 

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear 
time axis: from past to present to future. The present is an accrual of the past and is 
different from it. The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet. That an 
orthogonal or right-angle time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes 
place -- processes occuring sideways in reality, so to speak -- this is almost impossible 
to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? 
What clues -- if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory -- should we be on the alert 
for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all, in any 
sense, to any degree? 

Well, let us consider a favorite topic of Christian thinkers: the topic of eternity. 
This concept, historically speaking, was one great new idea brought by Christianity to 
the world. We are pretty sure that eternity exists -- that the word "eternity" refers to 
something actual, in contrast, say, to the word "angels." Eternity is simply a state in 
which you are free from and somehow out of and above time. There is no past, present, 
and future; there is just pure ontological being. "Eternity" is not a word denoting merely a 
very long time; it is essentially timeless. Well, let me ask this: Are there any changes that 
take place there; i.e., take place outside of time? Because if you say, "Yes, eternity is 
not static; things happen," then I at once smile knowingly and point out that you have 
introduced time once more. The concept "time" simply denotes -- or rather posits -- a 
condition or state or stream -- whatever -- in which change occurs. No time, no change. 
Eternity is static. But if it is static, it is even less than long-enduring; it is more like a 
geometric point, an infinitude of which can be determined along any given line. Viewing 
my theory about orthogonal or lateral change, I defend myself by saying, "At least it is 
intellectually less nonsensical than the concept of eternity." And everyone talks about 
eternity, whether they intend to do anything about it or not. 

Let me present you with a metaphor. Let us say that there exists this very rich 
patron of the arts. Every day on the wall of his living room above his fireplace his 


servants hang a new picture -- each day a different masterpiece, day after day, month 
after month -- each day the "used" one is removed and replaced by a different and new 
one. I will call this process change along the linear axis. But now let us suppose the 
servants temporarily running out of new, replacement pictures. What shall they do in the 
meantime? They can't just leave the present one hanging; their employer has decreed 
that perpetual replacement -- i.e. changing the pictures -- is to take place. So they 
neither allow the current one to remain nor do they replace it with a new one; instead, 
they do a very clever thing. When their employer is not looking, the servants cunningly 
alter the picture already on the wall. They paint out a tree here; they paint in a little girl 
there; they add this; they obliterate that; they make the same painting different and in a 
sense new, but as I'm sure you can see, not new in the sense of replacing it. The 
employer enters his living room after dinner, seats himself facing his fireplace, and 
contemplates what should be -- according to his expectations -- a new picture. What 
does he see? It certainly isn't what he saw previously. But also it isn't somehow. . . and 
here we must become very sympathetic with this perhaps somewhat stupid man, 
because we can virtually see his brain circuits striving to understand. His brain circuits 
are saying, "Yes, it is a new picture, it is not the same one as yesterday, but also it is the 
same one, I think, I feel on a very deep, intuitive basis. . . I feel that somehow I've seen it 
before. I seem to remember a tree, though, and there is no tree." Now, perhaps, if we 
extrapolate from this man's perceptual, mentational confusion to the theoretical point I 
was making about lateral change, you can get a better idea of what I mean; I mean, 
perhaps you can, to at least a degree, see that although what I'm talking about may not 
exist -- my concept may be fictional -- it could exist. It is not intellectually self-
contradictory. 

As a science fiction writer I gravitate toward such ideas as this; we in the field, of 
course, know this idea as the "alternate universe" theme. Some of you, I am sure, know 
that my novel The Man in the High Castle utilized this theme. There was in it an 
alternate world in which Germany and Japan and Italy won World War II. At one point in 
the novel Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist, somehow is carried over to our world, in which 
the Axis powers lost. He remained in our world only a short time, and scuttled in fright 
back to his own universe as soon as he glimpsed or understood what had happened -and 
thought no more of it after that; it had been for him a thoroughly unpleasant 
experience, since, being Japanese, it was for him a worse universe than his customary 
one. For a Jew, however, it would have been infinitely better -- for obvious reasons. 

In The Man in the High Castle I give no real explanation as to why or how Mr. 
Tagomi slid across into our universe; he simply sat in the park and scrutinized a piece of 
modern abstract handmade jewelry -- sat and studied it on and on -- and when he 
looked up, he was in another universe. I didn't explain how or why this happened 
because I don't know, and I would defy anyone, writer, reader, or critic, to give a so-
called "explanation." There cannot be one because, of course, as we all know, such a 
concept is merely a fictional premise; none of us, in our right minds, entertains for even 
an instant the notion that such alternate universes exist in any actual sense. But let us 
say, just for fun, that they do. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in 
fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, 
what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important 
question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if 
they overlap, then such problems as "Where do they exist?" and "How do you get from 


one to the next?" admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed 
exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit 
several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one 
another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit 
relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of 
us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so 
on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there 
may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not 
subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this. And I want 
to add this statement at this point, which I find to be a fascinating concept: It may be that 
some of these superimposed worlds are passing out of existence, along the lateral time 
line I spoke of, and some are in the process of moving toward greater, rather than 
lesser, actualization. These processes would occur simultaneously and not at all in 
linear time. The kind of process we are talking about here is a transformation, a kind of 
metamorphosis, invisibly achieved. But very real. And very important. 

Contemplating this possibility of a lateral arrangement of worlds, a plurality of 
overlapping Earths along whose linking axis a person can somehow move -- can travel 
in a mysterious way from worst to fair to good to excellent -- contemplating this in 
theological terms, perhaps we could say that herewith we suddenly decipher the 
elliptical utterances that Christ expressed regarding the Kingdom of God, specifically 
where it is located. He seems to have given contradictory and puzzling answers. But 
suppose, just suppose for an instant, that the cause of the perplexity lay not in any 
desire on his part to baffle or to hide, but in the inadequacy of the question. "My 
Kingdom is not of this world," he is reported to have said. "The Kingdom is within you." 
Or possibly, "It is among you." I put before you now the notion, which I personally find 
exciting, that he may have had in mind that which I speak of as the lateral axis of 
overlapping realms that contain among them a spectrum of aspects ranging from the 
unspeakably malignant to the beautiful. And Christ was saying over and over again that 
there really are many objective realms, somehow related, and somehow bridgeable by 
living -- not dead -- men, and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just 
kingdom in which either He Himself or God Himself or both of them ruled. And he did not 
merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world; the Kingdom was 
and is an actual different place, at the opposite end of continua starting with slavery and 
utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along this 
orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there; He taught the method of 
getting there. But, tragically, the secret was lost. The enemy, the Roman authority, 
crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can refind it, since we know that 
such a secret exists. 

This would account for the apparent contradictions regarding the question as to 
whether the Just Kingdom is ever to be established here on Earth or whether it is a 
place or state we go to after death. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that this issue has 
been a fundamental one -- and an unresolved one -- throughout the history of 
Christianity. Christ and St. Paul both seem to say emphatically that an actual breaking 
through into time, into our world, by the hosts of God, will unexpectedly occur. 
Thereupon, after some exciting drama, a thousand-year paradise, a rightful Kingdom, 
will be established -- at least for those who have done their homework and chores and 
generally paid attention. . . have not Gone To Sleep, as one parable puts it. We are 


enjoined repeatedly in the New Testament to be vigilant, that for the Christian it is 
always day, there is always light, by which he can see this event when it comes. See 
this event. Does that imply that many persons who are somehow asleep or blind or not 
vigilant -- they will not see it, even though it occurs? Consider the significance that can 
be assigned to these notions. The Kingdom will come here, unexpectedly (this is always 
stressed); the rightful faithful shall see it, because for them it is always daytime, but for 
the others ... what seems expressed here is the paradoxical but enthralling thought that 


- and hear this and ponder -- the Kingdom, were it established here, would not be visible 
to those outside it. I offer the idea that, in more modern terms, what is meant is that 
some of us will travel laterally to that best world and some will not; they will remain stuck 
along the lateral axis, which means that for them the Kingdom did not come, not in their 
alternate world. And yet meantime it did come in ours. So it comes and yet does not 
come. Amazing. 
Please ask yourself, What event signals the establishment or reestablishment of 
the Kingdom? Of course it is nothing other than the Second Advent, the return of the 
King Himself. Following my reasoning as to the existence of worlds along a lateral axis, 
one could reason, "Certainly the Second Coming has not taken place -- at least not 
along this Track, in this universe." But then one could speculate, logically, "But perhaps 
it came exactly as stipulated in the New Testament: during the lifetime of those living 
then, back in the Apostolic Age." I enjoy -- I find fascinating -- this concept. What an idea 
for a novel, an alternate Earth in which the Parousia took place, say, around A.D. 70. Or, 
say, during the medieval period -- say, at the time of the Catherist Crusades. . . how 
neat an idea for an alternate-world novel! The protagonist somehow is transported from 
this, our universe, in which the Second Coming did not take place or has not taken place 
-- is transported to one in which it occurred centuries ago. 

But if you have followed my conjectures about the overlapping of these alternate 
worlds, and you sense as I do the possibility that if there are three there may be thirty or 
three thousand of them -- and that some of us live in this one, others of us in another 
one, others in others, and that events in one track cannot be perceived by persons not in 
that track -- well, let me say what I want to say and be done with it. I think I once 
experienced a track in which the Savior returned. But I experienced it just very briefly. I 
am not there now. I am not sure I ever was. Certainly I may never be again. I grieve for 
that loss, but loss it is; somehow I moved laterally, but then fell back, and then it was 
gone. A vanished mountain and a stream. The sound of bells. All gone now for me; 
entirely gone. 

I, in my stories and novels, often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, 
as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person, while, 
meantime, the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are 
somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs in the corpus of my 
twenty-seven years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious 
explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudoworlds, but now I think I 
understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying 
tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by 
consensus gentium [general consent], agree on. 

Although originally I presumed that the differences between these worlds was 
caused entirely by the subjectivity of the various human viewpoints, it did not take me 
long to open the question as to whether it might not be more than that -- that in fact 


plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another like so many film 
transparencies. What I still do not grasp, however, is how one reality out of the many 
becomes actualized in contradistinction to the others. Perhaps none does. Or perhaps 
again it hangs on an agreement in viewpoint by a sufficiency of people. More likely the 
matrix world, the one with the true core of being, is determined by the Programmer. He 
or it articulates -- prints out, so to speak -- the matrix choice and fuses it with actual 
substance. The core or essence of reality -- that which receives or attains it and to what 
degree -- that is within the purview of the Programmer; this selection and reselection are 
part of general creativity, of world-building, which seems to be its or his task. A problem, 
perhaps, which he or it is running, which is to say in the process of solving. 

This problem-solving by means of reprogramming variables along the linear time 
axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds -- I have the 
impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how 
this all can be -- in fact must be. Across from the Programmer-Reprogrammer sits a 
counterentity, whom Joseph Campbell calls the dark counterplayer. God, the 
Programmer-Reprogrammer, is not making his moves of improvement against inert 
matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the game board -- our 
universe in space-time -- the dark counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality 
situation. Being the dark player, the outcome of his desires constitutes what we 
experience as evil: nongrowth, the power of the lie, death and the decay of forms, the 
prison of immutable cause and effect. But the Programmer-Reprogrammer has already 
laid down his response; it has already happened, these moves on his part. The printout, 
which we undergo as historic events, passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, 
thesis and antithesis as the forces of the two players mingle. Evidently some syntheses 
fall to the dark counterplayer, and yet they do not, by virtue of the fact that, in advance, 
our great Advocate selected variables, the alteration of which brings final victory to him. 
In winning each sequence in turn he claims some of us, we who participate in the 
sequence. This is why instinctively people pray, "Libera me Domine," which decodes to 
mean, "Extricate me, Programmer, as you achieve one victory after another; include me 
in that triumph. Move me along the lateral axis so that I am not left out." What we sense 
as "being left out" means remaining under the jurisdiction of, or falling prey to, the 
malignant power. But that malignant power, for all its guile, has already lost even as it 
wins, for in some way the counterplayer is blind and so the Programmer-Reprogrammer 
possesses an advantage. 

The great medieval Arabic philosopher, Avicenna, wrote that God does not see 
time as we do; i.e. for him there is no past nor present nor future. Now, supposing 
Avicenna is correct, let us imagine a situation in which God, from whatever vantage 
point he exists at, decides to intervene into our space-time world; i.e. break through from 
his timeless realm into human history. But if there is only omnipresent reality from his 
viewpoint, then he can as easily break through into what for us is the past as he can 
break through into what for us is the present or future. It is exactly like a chess player 
gazing down at the chessboard; he can move any of his pieces that he wishes. 
Following Avicenna's reasoning, we can say that God, in desiring, for example, to bring 
about the Second Advent, need not limit the event to our present or future; he can 
breach our past -- in other words, change our past history; he can cause it to have 
happened already. And this would be true for any change he wished to make, large or 
small. For instance, suppose an event in our year A.D. 1970 does not meet with God's 


idea of how it all should go. He can obliterate it or tinker with it, improve it, whatever he 
wishes, even at a prior point in linear time. This is his advantage. 

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called 
"alternate presents," is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually 
deal with this notion -- that is, entertain it as an idea -- is a first step in discerning such 
processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to 
demonstrate, to scientifically prove, that such lateral change processes do occur. 
Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, 
dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way -- and 
not long ago but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only 
to discover that it was -- always had been -- in another place entirely. We might reach for 
the air vent in our car where there was no air vent -- a reflex left over from a previous 
present, still active at a subcortical level. We might dream of people and places we had 
never seen as vividly as if we had seen them, actually known them. But we would not 
know what to make of this, assuming we took time to ponder it at all. One very 
pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again, and 
always without explanation: the acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before 
what we were just about to do now, that we so to speak lived a particular moment or 
situation previously -- but in what sense could it be called "previously," since only the 
present, not the past, was evidently involved? We would have the overwhelming 
impression that we were reliving the present, perhaps in precisely the same way, 
hearing the same words, saying the same words. . . I submit that these impressions are 
valid and significant, and I will even say this: Such an impression is a clue that at some 
past time point a variable was changed -- reprogrammed, as it were -- and that, because 
of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualized instead of the prior one, and 
that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time. A 
breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present -- had been 
made in our past. Evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those 
persons involved; they would, so to speak, be moved back one square or several 
squares on the board game that constitutes our reality. Conceivably this could happen 
any number of times, affecting any number of people, as alternative variables were 
reprogrammed. We would have to go live out each reprogramming along the 
subsequent linear time axis, but to the Programmer, whom we call God -- to him the 
results of the reprogramming would be apparent at once. We are within time and he is 
not. Thus, too, this might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. 
They may well have, but not in the past; previous lives, rather, in the present. In perhaps 
an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial in which grand clock 
hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along 
unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting. 

Since at the resolution of every encounter of thesis and antithesis between the 
dark counterplayer and the divine Programmer a new synthesis is struck off, and since it 
is possible that each time this happens a lateral world may be generated, and since I 
conceive that each synthesis or resolution is to some degree a victory by the 
Programmer, each struck-off world, in sequence, must be an improvement upon -- not 
just the prior one -- but an improvement over all the latent or merely possible outcomes. 
It is better but in no sense perfect -- i.e. final. It is merely an improved stage within a 
process. What I envision clearly is that the Programmer is perpetually using the 


antecedent universe as a gigantic stockpile for each new synthesis, the antecedent 
universe then possessing the aspect of chaos or anomie in relation to an emerging new 
cosmos. Therefore the endless process of sequential struck-off alternate worlds, 
emerging and being infused with actualization, is negentropic in some way that we 
cannot see. 

In my novel Ubik I present a motion along a retrograde entropic axis, in terms of 
Platonic forms rather than any decay or reversion we normally conceive. Perhaps the 
normal forward motion along this axis, away from entropy, accruing rather than 
divesting, is identical with the axis line that I characterize as lateral, which is to say, in 
orthogonal rather than linear time. If this is so, the novel Ubik inadvertently contains 
what could be called a scientific rather than a philosophical idea. But here I am only 
guessing. Still, the fiction writer may have written more than he consciously knew. 

What blinds us to this hierarchy of evolving form in each new synthesis is that we 
are unaware of the lesser, unactualized worlds. And this process of interaction, 
continually forming the new, obliterates at each stage that which came before. What, at 
any given present instant we possess of the past, is twofold but dubious: We possess 
external, objective traces of the past embedded in the present, and we possess inner 
memories. But both are subject to the rule of imperfection, since both are merely bits of 
reality and not the intact form. What we retain existentially and mentally are therefore 
inadequate guides. This is implied by the very emergence of true newness itself; if truly 
new, it must somehow kill the old, the that which was. And, especially, that which did not 
come to fully be. 

What we need at this point is to locate, to bring forth as evidence, someone who 
has managed somehow -- it doesn't matter how, really -- to retain memories of a 
different present, latent alternate world impressions, different in some significant way 
from this, the one that is at this stage actualized. According to my theoretical view, it 
would almost certainly be memories of a worse world than this. For it is not reasonable 
that God the Programmer and Reprogrammer would substitute a worse world in terms of 
freedom or beauty or love or order or healthiness -- by any standard that we know. 
When a mechanic works on your malfunctioning car he does not damage it further; when 
a writer creates a second draft of a novel he does not debase it further but strives to 
improve it. I suppose it could be argued in a strictly theoretical way that God might be 
evil or insane and would in fact substitute a worse world for a better one, but frankly I 
cannot take that idea seriously. Let us then pass over it. So let us ask, Does any one of 
us remember in any dim fashion a worse Earth circa 1977 than this? Have your young 
men seen visions and our old men dreamed dreams? Nightmare dreams specifically, 
about a world of enslavement and evil, of prisons and jailers and ubiquitous police? I 
have. I wrote out those dreams in novel after novel, story after story; to name two in 
which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly I cite The Man in the High Castle and 
my 1974 novel about the United States as a police state, called Flow My Tears, the 
Policeman Said. 

I am going to be very candid with you: I wrote both novels based on fragmentary 
residual memories of such a horrid slave state world -- or perhaps the term "world" is the 
wrong one, and I should say "United States," since in both novels I was writing about my 
own country. 

In The Man in the High Castle there is a novelist, Hawthorne Abendsen, who has 
written an alternate-world novel in which Germany, Italy, and Japan lost World War II. At 


the conclusion of The Man in the High Castle, a woman appears at Abendsen's door to 
tell him what he does not know: that his novel is true; the Axis did indeed lose the war. 
The irony of this ending -- Abendsen finding out that what he had supposed to be pure 
fiction spun out of his imagination was in fact true -- the irony is this: that my own 
supposed imaginative work The Man in the High Castle is not fiction -- or rather is fiction 
only now, thank God. But there was an alternate world, a previous present, in which that 
particular time track actualized -- actualized and then was abolished due to intervention 
at some prior date. I am sure, as you hear me say this, you do not really believe me, or 
even believe that I believe it myself. But nevertheless it is true. I retain memories of that 
other world. That is why you will find it again described in the later novel Flow My Tears. 
The world of Flow My Tears is an actual (or rather once actual) alternate world, and I 
remember it in detail. I do not know who else does. Maybe no one else does. Perhaps 
all of you were always -- have always been -- here. But I was not. In March 1974 I began 
to remember consciously, rather than merely subconsciously, that black iron prison 
police state world. Upon consciously remembering it I did not need to write about it 
because I have always been writing about it. Nonetheless, my amazement was great, to 
remember consciously suddenly that it was once so -- as I'm sure you can imagine. Put 
yourself in my place. In novel after novel, story after story, over a twenty-five-year 
period, I wrote repeatedly about a particular other landscape, a dreadful one. In March 
1974 I understood why, in my writing, I continually reverted to an awareness, in 
intimation of, that one particular world. I had good reason to. My novels and stories 
were, without my realizing it consciously, autobiographical. It was -- this return of 
memory -- the most extraordinary experience of my life. Or rather I should say lives, 
since I had at least two: one there and subsequently one here, where we are now. 

I can even tell you what caused me to remember. In late February 1974 I was 
given sodium pentothol for the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth. Later that day, back 
home again but still deeply under the influence of the sodium pentothol, I had a short, 
acute flash of recovered memory. In one instant I caught it all, but immediately rejected it 
-- rejected it, however, with the realization that what I had retrieved in the way of buried 
memories was authentic. Then, in mid-March, the corpus of memories, whole, intact, 
began to return. You are free to believe me or free to disbelieve, but please take my 
word on it that I am not joking; this is very serious, a matter of importance. I am sure that 
at the very least you will agree that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing. Often 
people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different, 
present life. I know of no one who has ever made that claim before, but I rather suspect 
that my experience is not unique; what perhaps is unique is the fact that I am willing to 
talk about it. 

If you have followed me this far, I would like you to be kindly enough disposed to 
go a little further with me. I would like to share with you something I knew -- retrieved -along 
with the blocked-off memories. In March 1974 the reprogrammed variables, 
tinkered with back at some earlier date, probably in the late forties -- in March 1974 the 
payoff, the results, of at least one and possibly more of the reprogrammed variables 
lying along the linear time line in our past, set in. What happened between March and 
August 1974 was the result of at least one reprogrammed variable laid down perhaps 
thirty years before, setting into motion a thread of change that culminated in what I am 
sure you will admit was a spectacularly important -- and unique -- historical event: the 
forced removal from office of a president of the United States, Richard Nixon, as well as 


all those associated with him. In the alternate world that I remembered, the civil rights 
movement, the antiwar movement of the sixties, had failed. And, evidently, in the 
midseventies Nixon was not removed from power. That which opposed him (if indeed 
anything existed that did or could) was inadequate. Therefore one or more factors 
tending toward that destruction of the entrenched tyrannical power had retroactively, to 
us, come to be introduced. The scales, thirty years later, in 1977, got tipped. Examine 
the text of Flow My Tears and, keeping in mind that it was written in 1970 and published 
in February 1974, make an effort to construct the previous events that would have had 
to take place, or not take place, to account for the world depicted in the novel as lying 
slightly in the future. One small but critical theme is alluded to twice (I believe) in Flow 
My Tears. It has to do with Nixon. In the future world of Flow My Tears, in the dreadful 
slave state that exists and evidently has existed for decades, Richard Nixon is 
remembered as an exalted, heroic leader -- referred to, in fact, as the "Second Only 
Begotten Son of God." It is evident from this and many other clues that Flow My Tears 
deals not with our future but the future of a present world alternate to our own. Blacks, 
by the time Flow My Tears takes place, have become an ecological rarity, protected "as 
are wild whooping cranes." In the novel one rarely sees blacks on the streets of the 
United States. But the year in which Flow My Tears takes place is only eleven years 
from now: October 1988. Obviously the fascist genocide against the blacks in the United 
States in my novel began long before 1977; a number of readers have pointed this out 
to me. One of them even pointed out that a careful reading of Flow My Tears not only 
indicates that the society depicted, the U.S. police state of 1988, had to be an alternate-
world novel, but this reader pointed out that mysteriously, at the very end of the novel, 
the protagonist, Felix Buckman, appears somehow to have slipped over into a different 
world, one in which blacks were not exterminated. Early in the novel it is stipulated that a 
black couple is allowed by law to bear only one single child; yet, at the end of the novel, 
the black man at the all-night gas station proudly gets out his wallet and shows Police 
General Buckman photographs of his three children. The open manner in which the 
black man shows the pictures to a perfect stranger indicates that for some weird and 
unexplained reason it is now no longer illegal for a black couple to have several children. 
Somehow, just as Mr. Togomi slipped over briefly into our alternate present, General 
Buckman in Flow My Tears did the same thing. It is even evident in the text of Flow My 
Tears when and where the police general slipped over. It was just before he landed his 
flying vehicle at the all-night gas station and encountered -- hugged, in fact -- the black 
man; the slipover, which is to say the moment in which the absolutely repressive world 
of the bulk of the novel faded out, took place during the interval in which General 
Buckman experienced a strange dream about a kinglike old man with white wool-like 
beard, wearing robes and a helmet and leading a posse of similarly helmeted robed 
knights -- this king and these helmeted knights appearing in the rural world of farmhouse 
and pastureland where General Buckman had lived as a boy. The dream, I think, was a 
graphic depiction in General Buckman's mind of the transformation taking place 
objectively; it was a kind of inner analog to what was happening outside him to his entire 
world. 

This accounts for the changed Buckman, the very different police general who 
lands at the all-night gas station and draws the heart with an arrow piercing it, giving the 
piece of paper with its drawing to the black man as a communication of love. Buckman 
at the gas station in encountering the black stranger is not the same Buckman who 


appeared earlier throughout the book: The transformation is complete. But he is 
unaware of it. Only Jason Taverner, the once-famous television personality who woke 
up one day to find himself in a world that had never heard of him -- only Taverner, when 
his mysteriously taken-away popularity seeps back, understands that several alternate 
realities -- two upon a cursory reading, but at least three if the ending is studied 
scrupulously -- only Jason Taverner remembers. This is the whole basic plot of the 
novel: One morning Jason Taverner, popular TV and recording star, wakes up in a 
fleabag dingy hotel room to find all his identification papers gone, and, worse yet, finds 
that no one has ever heard of him -- the basic plot is that for some arcane reason the 
entire population of the United States has in one instant of linear time completely and 
collectively forgotten a man whose face on the cover of Time magazine should be a face 
virtually every reader would identify without effort. In this novel I am saying, "The entire 
population of a large country, a continent-sized country, can wake up one morning 
having entirely forgotten something they all previously knew, and none of them is the 
wiser." In the novel it is a popular TV and recording star whom they have forgotten, 
which is of importance, really, only to that particular star or former star. But my 
hypothesis is presented here nonetheless in a disguised form, because (I am saying) if 
an entire country can overnight forget one thing they all know, they can forget other 
things, more important things; in fact, overwhelmingly important things. I am writing 
about amnesia on the part of millions of people, of, so to speak, fake memories laid 
down. This theme of faked memories is a constant thread in my writing over the years. It 
was also Van Vogt's. And yet, can one contemplate this as a serious possibility, 
something that could actually happen? Who of us has asked himself that? I did not ask 
myself that prior to March 1974; I include myself. 

You will recall that I pointed out that after Police General Buckman slipped over 
into a better world he underwent an inner change appropriate to the qualities of the 
better world, the more just, the more loving, the warmer world in which the tyranny of the 
police apparatus was already beginning to fade away as would a dream upon the 
awakening of the dreamer. In March 1974, when I regained my buried memories (a 
process called in Greek anamnesis, which literally means the loss of forgetfulness rather 
than merely remembering) -- upon those memories reentering consciousness I, like 
General Buckman, underwent a personality change. Like his, it was fundamental but at 
the same time subtle. It was me but yet it was not me. I noticed it mostly in small ways: 
things I should have remembered but did not; things I did remember (ah, what things!) 
but should not have. Evidently this had been my personality in what I call Track A. You 
may be interested in one aspect of my restored memories that strikes me as most 
astonishing. In the previous alternate present, in Track A, Christianity was illegal, as it 
had been two thousand years ago at its inception. It was regarded as subversive and 
revolutionary -- and, let me add, this appraisal by the police authorities was correct. It 
took me almost two weeks, after the return of my memories of my life in Track A, to rid 
myself of the overpowering impression that all references to Christ, all sacerdotal acts, 
had to be veiled in absolute secrecy. But historically this fits the pattern of a fascist 
takeover, especially those along Nazi lines. They did so regard Christianity. And, had 
they attained a victory in the war, this surely would have been their policy in that portion 
of the United States that they controlled. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses, under the 
Nazis, were gassed in the concentration camps along with the Jews and Gypsies; they 
were placed right up at the top of the list. And, in that other modern totalitarian state, for 


the same reason it is banned and its members persecuted; I mean, of course, the 
USSR. The three great tyrannical states in history that have murdered their domestic 
Christian populations -- Rome, the Third Reich, and the USSR -- are, from an objective 
standpoint, three manifestations of a single matrix. Your own personal beliefs about 
religion are not an issue here; what is an issue is a historic fact, and therefore I ask you 
to ponder objectively what the overwhelming fear I felt regarding Christian rites and 
protestations of faith signifies about the Track A society abruptly remembered. It is a 
decisive clue about Track A. It tells us how radically different it was. I would like you, if 
you have gone this far, to accept my statements about my other memories that, under 
the sodium Pentothal, returned; it was a prison. It was dreadful; we overthrew it, just as 
we overthrew the Nixon tyranny, but it was far more cruel, incredibly so, and there was a 
great battle and loss of life. And, please, let me add one other fact, maybe objectively 
unimportant but to me interesting nonetheless. It was in February 1974 that my blocked-
off memories of Track A returned, and it was in February 1974 that Flow My Tears was 
finally, after two years' delay, published. It was almost as if the release of the novel, 
which had been delayed so long, meant that in a certain sense it was all right for me to 
remember. But until then it was better that I did not. Why that would be I do not know, 
but I have the impression that the memories were not to come to the surface until the 
material had been published very sincerely on the author's part as what he believed to 
be fiction. Perhaps, had I known, I would have been too frightened to write the novel. Or 
perhaps I would have shot my mouth off and somehow interfered with the effectiveness 
of these several books -- whatever effectiveness that might be or was. I do not even 
claim there was an intended effectiveness; perhaps there was none at all. But if there 
was one -- and I repeat the word "if" emphatically -- it was almost certainly to stir 
subliminal memories in readers back to dim life -- not a conscious life, not an entering 
consciousness as in my own case, but to recall to them on a deep and profound, albeit 
unconscious level, what a police tyranny is like, and how vital it is, now or then, at any 
time, along any track, to defeat it. In March 1974 the really crucial moves to depose 
Nixon were beginning. In August, five months later, they proved successful, although 
these reprogrammings, this intervention in our present, may have been designed more 
to affect a future continuum rather than our own. As I said at the beginning, ideas seem 
to have a life of their own; they appear to seize on people and make use of them. The 
idea that seized me twenty-seven years ago and never let go is this: Any society in 
which people meddle in other people's business is not a good society, and a state in 
which the government "knows more about you than you know about yourself," as it is 
expressed in Flow My Tears, is a state that must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, 
a fascist corporate state, or reactionary monopolistic capitalism or centralistic socialism 


- that aspect does not matter. And I am saying not merely, "It can happen here," 
meaning the United States, but rather, "It did happen here. I remember. I was one of the 
secret Christians who fought it and to at least some extent helped overthrow it." And I 
am very proud of that: proud of myself in time Track A. But there is, unfortunately, a 
somber intimation that accompanies my pride as to my work there. I think that in that 
previous world I did not live past March 1974. I fell victim to a police trap, a net or mesh. 
However, in this one, which I will call Track B, I had better luck. But we fought here in 
this track a much lighter tyranny, a far stupider one. Or, perhaps, we had assistance: 
The anterior reprogramming of one or more historic variables came to our rescue. 
Sometimes I think (and this is, of course, pure speculation, a happy fantasy of my soul) 

that because of what we accomplished there -- or anyhow attempted to, and very 
bravely -- we who were directly involved were allowed to live on here, past the terminal 
point that brought us down in that other, worse world. It is a sort of miraculous kindness. 

This gracious gift serves to delineate for us -- for me at least -- some aspects of 
the Programmer. It causes me to comprehend him after a fashion. I think we cannot 
know what he is, but we can experience this functioning and so can ask, "What does he 
resemble?" Not "What is he?" but rather "What is he like?" 

First and foremost, he controls the objects, processes, and events in our space-
time world. This is, for us, the primary aspect, although intrinsically he may possess 
aspects of vaster magnitude but of less applicability to us. I have spoken of myself as a 
reprogrammed variable, and I have spoken of him as the Programmer and 
Reprogrammer. During a short period of time in March 1974, at the moment in which I 
was resynthesized, I was aware perceptually -- which is to say aware in an external way 
-- of his presence. At that time I had no idea what I was seeing? [sic; this question mark 
appears, in context, to be a typo]. It resembled plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved 
fast, collecting and dispersing. But what it was, what he was -- I am not sure even now, 
except I can tell you that he had simulated normal objects and their processes so as to 
copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself invisible within them. As the 
Vedantists put it, he was the fire within the flint, the razor within the razor case. Later 
research showed me that in terms of group cultural experience, the name Brahman has 
been given to this omnipresent immanent entity. I quote a fragment of an American 
poem ["Brahma"] by Emerson; it conveys what I experienced: 

They reckon ill who leave me out; 
When me they fly I am the wings. 
I am the doubter and the doubt, 
And I the hymn the Brahman sings. 


By this I mean that during that short period -- a matter of hours or perhaps a day -- I was 
aware of nothing that was not the Programmer. All the things in our pluriform world were 
segments or subsections of him. Some were at rest but many moved, and did so like 
portions of a breathing organism that inhaled, exhaled, grew, changed, evolved toward 
some final state that by its absolute wisdom it had chosen for itself. I mean to say, I 
experienced it as self-creating, dependent on nothing outside it because very simply 
there was nothing outside it. 

As I saw this I felt keenly that through all the years of my life I had been literally 
blind; I remember saying over and over to my wife, "I've regained my sight! I can see 
again!" It seemed to me that up until that moment I had been merely guessing as to the 
nature of the reality around me. I understood that I had not acquired a new faculty of 
perception but had, rather, regained an old one. For a day or so I saw as we once all 
had, thousands of years ago. But how had we come to lose sight, this superior eye? The 
morphology must still be present in us, not only latent; otherwise I could not have 
reacquired it even briefly. This puzzles me yet. How was it that for forty-six years I did 
not truly see but only guessed at the nature of the world, and then briefly did see, but 
soon after, lost that sight and became semiblind again? The interval in which I actually 
saw was, evidently, the interval in which the Programmer was reworking me. He had 
moved forward as palpably sentient and alive, as set to ground; he had disclosed 


himself. Thus it is said that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are revealed religions. Our 
God is the deus absconditus: the hidden god. But why? Why is it necessary that we be 
deceived regarding the nature of our reality? Why has he cloaked himself as a plurality 
of unrelated objects and his movements as a plurality of chance processes? All the 
changes, all the permutations of reality that we see are expressions of the purposeful 
growing and unfolding of this single entelechy; it is a plant, a flower, an opening rose. It 
is a humming hive of bees. It is music, a kind of singing. Obviously I saw the 
Programmer as he really is, as he really behaves, only because he had seized on me to 
reshape me, so I say, "I know why I saw him," but I cannot say, "I know why I do not see 
him now, nor why anyone else does not." Do we collectively dwell in a kind of laser 
hologram, real creatures in a manufactured quasi-world, a stage set within whose 
artifacts and creatures a mind moves that is determined to remain unknown? 

A newspaper article about this speech could well be titled: AUTHOR CLAIMS TO 
HAVE SEEN GOD BUT CAN'T GIVE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HE SAW. 

If I consider the term by which I designate him -- the Programmer and 
Reprogrammer -- perhaps I can extract from that a partial answer. I call him what I call 
him because that was what I witnessed him doing: He had previously programmed the 
lives here but now was altering one or more crucial factors -- this in the service of 
completing a structure or plan. I reason along these lines: A human scientist who 
operates a computer does not bias nor warp, does not prejudice, the outcome of his 
calculations. A human ethnologist does not allow himself to contaminate his own 
findings by participating in the culture he studies. Which is to say, in certain kinds of 
endeavors it is essential that the observer remain occluded off from that which he 
observes. There is nothing malign in this, no sinister deception. It is merely necessary. If 
indeed we are, collectively, being moved along desired paths toward a desired outcome, 
the entity that sets us in motion along those lines, that entity which not only desires the 
particular outcome but that wills that outcome -- he must not enter into it palpably or the 
outcome will be aborted. What, then, we must turn our attention to is -- not the 
Programmer -- but the events programmed. Concealed though the former is, the latter 
will confront us; we are involved in it -- in fact, we are instruments by which it is 
accomplished. 

There is no doubt in my mind as to the larger, historic purpose of the 
reprogramming that paid off so spectacularly and gloriously in 1974. Currently I am 
writing a novel about it; the novel is called V.A.L.I.S., the letters standing for "VAST 
ACTIVE LIVING INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM." In the novel a government researcher who 
is very gifted but a little crazy formulates a hypothesis that declares that, located 
somewhere in our world, there exists a mimicking organism of high intelligence; it so 
successfully mimics natural objects and processes that humans are routinely unaware of 
it. When, due to chance or exceptional circumstances, a human does perceive it, he 
simply calls it "God" and lets it go at that. In my novel, however, the government 
researcher is determined to treat this vast, intelligent, mimicking entity the way a 
scientist would treat anything under scrutiny. His problem is, however, that by his own 
hypothesis he cannot detect the entity -- certainly a frustrating experience for him. 

But also in my novel I write about another person, unknown to this government 
researcher; that person has been having unusual experiences for which he has no 
theory. He has in fact been encountering Valis, who is in the process of reprogramming 
him. The two characters possess between them the whole truth: the correct but 


untestable hypothesis by one, the unexplained experiences by the other. And it is this 
other man, this nonscientific person, whom I identify with, because he, like me -- he is 
beginning to retrieve blocked-off memories of another world, memories he cannot 
account for. But he has no theory. None at all. 

In the novel I myself appear as a character, under my own name. I am a science 
fiction writer who has accepted a large advance payment for a yet unwritten novel and 
who must now come up with that novel before a deadline. I, in the book -- I know both 
these men, Houston Paige, the government researcher with the theory, and Nicholas 
Brady, who is undergoing the unfathomable experiences. I begin to make use of material 
from both. My purpose is merely that of meeting my contractual deadline. But, as I 
continue to write about Houston Paige's theory and Nicholas Brady's experiences, I 
begin to see that everything fits together. I, in the novel, hold both key and lock, and no 
one else does. 

You can see, I am sure, that it is inevitable, in my novel Valis, that eventually 
Houston Paige and Nicholas Brady meet. But this meeting has an odd effect on Houston 
Paige, he with the theory. Paige undergoes a total psychotic breakdown as a result of 
getting confirmation of his theory. He could imagine it but he cannot believe it. In his 
head his ingenious theory is dissociated from reality. And this is an intuition which I feel: 
that many of us believe in Valis or God or Brahman or the Programmer, but if we ever 
actually encountered it we could simply not handle it. It would be like a child driven mad 
by Christmas. He could sustain hoping and waiting, he could pray, he could wish, he 
could suppose and imagine and even believe; but the actual manifestation -- that is too 
much for our small circuits. And yet the child grows up and there is the man. And those 
circuits -- they grow, too. But to remember a different, discarded world? And to perceive 
the great planning mind that achieved that abolition, that unthreading of evil? 

One thing I really want you to know: I am aware that the claims I am making -claims 
of having retrieved buried memories of an alternate present and to have 
perceived the agency responsible for arranging that alteration -- these claims can neither 
be proved nor can they even be made to sound rational in the usual sense of the word. 
It has taken me over three years to reach the point where I am willing to tell anyone but 
my closest friends about my experience beginning back at the vernal equinox of 1974. 
One of the reasons motivating me to speak about it publicly at last, to openly make this 
claim, is a recent encounter I have undergone, which, by the way, bears a resemblance 
to Hawthorne Abendsen's experience in The Man in the High Castle with the woman 
Juliana Frink. Juliana read Abendsen's book about a world in which Germany and Japan 
and Italy lost World War II and felt she should tell him what she comprehended about 
the book. This final scene in The Man in the High Castle has, I think, been the source for 
a similar scene in my later story "Faith of Our Fathers," where the girl Tanya Lee shows 
up and acquaints the protagonist with the actual reality situation -- which is to say, that 
much of his world is delusional, and purposefully so. For several years I have had the 
feeling, a growing feeling, that one day a woman, who would be a complete stranger to 
me, would contact me, tell me that she had some information to impart to me, would 
then appear at my door, just as Juliana appeared at Abendsen's door, and would 
forthwith in the gravest possible way tell me exactly what Juliana told Abendsen -- that 
my book, like his, was in a certain real, literal, and physical sense not fiction but the 
truth. Precisely that has recently happened to me. I am speaking of a woman who 
systematically read each and every novel of mine, more than thirty of them, as well as 


many of my stories. And she did appear; and she was a total stranger; and she did 
inform me of this fact. At first she was curious to find out if I myself knew, or if not that, 
whether I suspected it. The probing between us, the cautious questioning, lasted three 
weeks. She did not inform me suddenly or immediately, but rather gradually, watching 
carefully each step of the way, each step along the path of communication and 
understanding, to see my reaction. It was a solemn matter, really, for her to drive four 
hundred miles to visit an author whose many books she had read, books of fiction, of the 
author's imagination, to tell him that there are superimposed worlds in which we live, not 
one world only, and that she had ascertained that the author in some way was involved 
with at least one of these worlds, one canceled out at some past time, rewoven and 
replaced, and -- most of all -- does the author consciously know this? It was a tense but 
joyful moment when she reached the point where she could speak candidly; that point 
did not arrive in our encounter until she was certain that I could handle it. But I had, 
three years earlier, posited theoretically that if my retrieved memories were authentic, it 
was only a matter of time before a contact, a cautious, guarded probing by someone 
would occur, initiated by a person who had read my books and for one reason or 
another deduced the actual situation -- I mean, knew what the significant information 
was that the books and stories carried. She knew, from my novels and stories, which 
world I had experienced, which of the many; what she could not determine until I told her 
was that, in February 1975, I had passed across into a third alternate present -- Track C, 
we shall call it -- and this one was a garden or park of peace and beauty, a world 
superior to ours, rising into existence. I could then speak to her of three rather than two 
worlds: the black iron prison world that had been; our intermediate world in which 
oppression and war exist but have to a great degree been cast down; and then a third 
alternate world that someday, when the correct variables in our past have been 
reprogrammed, will materialize as a superimposition onto this one. . . and within which, 
as we awaken to it, we shall suppose we had always lived there, the memory of this 
intermediate one, like that of the black iron prison world, eradicated mercifully from our 
memories. 

There may be other persons like this woman who have deduced from evidence 
internal to my writing, as well as from their own vestigial memories, that the landscape I 
portray as fictional is or was somehow literally real, and that if a grimmer reality could 
have once occupied the space that our world occupies, it stands to reason that the 
process of reweaving need not end here; this is not the best of all possible worlds, just 
as it is not the worst. This woman told me nothing that I did not already know, except 
that by independently arriving at the same conclusion she gave me the courage to speak 
out, to tell this but at the same time knowing as I do so that in no way -- none that I know 
of, at least -- can this presentation be verified. The best I can do, rather than that, is to 
play the role of prophet, of ancient prophets and such oracles as the sibyl at Delphi, and 
to talk of a wonderful garden world, much like that which once our ancestors are said to 
have inhabited -- in fact, I sometimes imagine it to be exactly that same world restored, 
as if a false trajectory of our world will eventually be fully corrected and once more we 
will be where once, many thousands of years ago, we lived and were happy. During the 
brief time I walked about in it I had the strong impression that it was our legitimate home 
that somehow we had lost. The time I spent there was short -- about six hours of real 
elapsed time. But I remember it well. In the novel I wrote with Roger Zelazny, Deus Irae, 
I describe it toward the end, at the point where the curse is lifted from the world by the 


death and transfiguration of the God of Wrath. What was most amazing to me about this 
parklike world, this Track C, was the non-Christian elements forming the basis of it; it 
was not what my Christian training had prepared me for at all. Even when it began to 
phase out I still saw sky; I saw land and dark blue smooth water, and standing by the 
edge of the water a beautiful nude woman whom I recognized as Aphrodite. At that point 
this other better world had diminished to a mere landscape beyond a Golden Rectangle 
doorway; the outline of the doorway pulsed with laserlike light and it all grew smaller and 
was at last alas gone from sight, the 3:5 doorway devouring itself into nothingness, 
sealing off what lay beyond. I have not seen it since, but I had the firm impression that 
this was the next world -- not of the Christians -- but the Arcady of the Greco-Roman 
pagan world, something older and more beautiful than that which my own religion can 
conjure up as a lure to keep us in a state of dutiful morality and faith. What I saw was 
very old and very lovely. Sky, sea, land, and the beautiful woman, and then nothing, for 
the door had shut and I was closed off back here. It was with a bitter sense of loss that I 
saw it go -- saw her go, really, since it all constellated about her. Aphrodite, I discovered 
when I looked in my Britannica to see what I could learn about her, was not only the 
goddess of erotic love and aesthetic beauty but also the embodiment of the generative 
force of life itself; nor was she originally Greek: In the beginning she had been a Semitic 
deity, later taken over by the Greeks, who knew a good thing when they saw it. During 
those treasured hours what I saw in her was a loveliness that our own religion, 
Christianity, at least by comparison, lacks: an incredible symmetry, the palintonos 
harmonie that Heraclitus wrote of: the perfect tension and balance of forces within the 
strung lyre that bowed by its stretched strings but that appears perfectly at rest, perfectly 
at peace. Yet, the strung lyre is a balanced dynamism, immobile only because the 
tensions within it are in absolute proportion. This is the quality of the Greek formulation 
of beauty: perfection that is dynamic within yet at apparent rest without. Against this 
palintonos harmonie the universe plays out the other aesthetic principle incorporated in 
the Grecian lyre: the palintropos harmonie, which is the back-and-forth oscillation of the 
strings as they are played. I did not see her like this, and perhaps this, the continual 
oscillation back and forth, is the deeper, greater rhythm of the universe things coming 
into existence and then passing away; change rather than a static durability. But for a 
little while I had seen perfect peace, perfect rest, a past we have lost but a past returning 
to us as if by means of a long-term oscillation, to be available as our future, in which all 
lost things shall be restored. 

There is a fascinating passage in the Old Testament in which God says, "For I am 
fashioning a new heaven and a new earth, and the memory of the former things will not 
enter the mind nor come up into the heart." When I read this I think to myself: I believe I 
know a great secret. When the work of restoration is completed, we will not even 
remember the tyrannies, the cruel barbarisms of the Earth we inhabited; "not entering 
the mind" means we will mercifully forget, and "not coming up into the heart" means that 
the vast body of pain and grief and loss and disappointment within us will be expunged 
as if it had never been. I believe that process is taking place now, has always been 
taking place now. And, mercifully, we are already being permitted to forget that which 
formerly was. And perhaps in my novels and stories I have done wrong to urge you to 
remember. 

SANTA ANA, 1977 


CALIFORNIA, U.S.A. 

'How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978, 
1985) 

First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers 
say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a 
spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it -- and, as if that were 
not enough, I once had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV. 

For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it 
was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, 
wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise 
of fascism with Norman Spinrad. . . an old friend of mine who writes excellent science 
fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook's 
pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats -- those black hats with the ears -kept 
running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth 
asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little 
children about, said some extraordinarily stupid things that day. Today, however, I have 
to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats 
and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate 
ship. 

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't 
talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our 
fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would have considered 
inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, 
impressing no one. In those days, friends would say to me, "But are you writing anything 
serious?" meaning, "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to 
be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, 
we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels -- and immediately we made 
idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know 
about? On what topic is he an authority? 

It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I 
flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN 
BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in 
this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone 
shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans. 

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be 
an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate 
me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics that fascinate me are 
"What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-
seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated those two 
interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? 
What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal 
world? 


In 1951, when I sold my first story ["Roog"], I had no idea that such fundamental 
issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them 
unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen 
who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food that the family had carefully 
stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out 
paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly -and 
when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole 
everything but the can. 

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will 
eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong 
about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation 
was in a sense logical -- given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, 
and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the 
world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any 
humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, 
a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other 
humans. And that led me to wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we 
speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if 
there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the 
world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we 
are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different 
from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, 
then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a 
breakdown of communication. . . and there is the real illness. 

I once wrote a story ["The Electric Ant" (1969)] about a man who was injured and 
taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an 
android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. 
Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape 
passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched 
holes and add new ones. Immediately his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through 
the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, 
whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters 
in the story. . . which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters 
were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were. 

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question 
"What is reality?," to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, 
too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could 
not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to 
define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a 
one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you 
stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 
1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly. 

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we 
live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by 
governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups -- and the 
electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudoworlds right into the heads of 
the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old 


daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; 
consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what 
is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all 
misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if 
the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV 
situation comedy and reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving 
out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always 
win. Do not ignore that one point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You 
should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be 
passive. And -- cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, 
because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should 
love him. 

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded 
with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated 
electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a 
lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the 
mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis 
of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall 
apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a 
secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, 
and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret 
love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe -- and I am dead serious when 
I say this -- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a 
universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new 
things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous 
realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar 
to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically 
accommodate change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that 
objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being 
can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic 
organism that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new. 

Of course, I would say this because I live near Disneyland, and they are always 
adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For 
years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum and finally it began to die and they had to 
regretfully retire it. The simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form 
which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or 
not. 

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that 
are real are things that never change. . . and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher 
Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get 
this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: 
Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, 
so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been 
right -- let's not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and 
therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since 
Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real. 

I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, 


you right away begin to talk nonsense. By the time of Zeno, they knew they were talking 
nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he 
had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). 
David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of 
skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members 
of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume's point. 
It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said seriously. 

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, 
even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the 
authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce 
inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at 
them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake 
realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then 
sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we 
wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake 
humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or 
the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is 
true. 

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of 
fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors 
that emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked 
into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the 
horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real 
birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions! Consternation. The park being 
cunningly transformed from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, 
suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the 
entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in 
the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down. 

In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; 
He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform 
the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own 
intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as 
the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly 
transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real? 

We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our 
world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a 
religion that embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been 
accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. 
But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the 
Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the 
Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea that reduced me to helpless laughter. 
What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and how 
can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing 
about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what 
you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once 
published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him, ordering 
copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book are blank. 


Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are 
real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what 
he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad 
does not really exist and that the pirates are animated by motors and servo-assist 
mechanisms, relays, and electronic circuits. So no deception is taking place. 

And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears 
under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not 
really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close 
Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe 
it. Or did they? 

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the 
issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but -- Is it true? Because, quite by 
accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter 
might stumble onto the truth. . . and only later on realize it. 

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you 
can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. 
George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of 
people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, 
they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to 
see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic 
constituent: pictures. That is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so 
staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of 
the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleeplearning. An 
EEC of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that 
nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. 
This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is 
graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being 
processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments 
indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. 
We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude 
our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have 
seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank spaces are 
filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation 
of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded 
in our own doom. 

And -- and I say this as a professional fiction writer -- the producers, scriptwriters, 
and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their 
content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. 
Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) 
are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth 
mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability 
it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into 
correctly labeling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the 
label. . . you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself 
does not know. 

It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, 
and to learn later on -- perhaps years later -- that it is true. I would like to give you an 


example. It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a 
theory. I can't. 

In 1970, I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the 
characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy 
appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the 
novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship 
going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it 
was. 

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy -- this was after I 
had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was 
named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get 
her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get 
caught. Then, one evening when we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped 
short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I 
knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him." 

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the 
mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four 
years. 

In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my 
priest -- I am an Episcopalian -- and I happened to mention to him an important scene 
near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger 
at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and 
more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "That is a 
scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black 
man on the road is named Philip -- your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the 
resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he 
instructed me. "And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details." 

I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene 
in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts. . . and I had never read Acts, I 
must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who 
arrests and interrogates St. Paul is named Felix -- the same name as my character. And 
my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police general; in fact, in my novel he 
holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a 
conversation in my novel that very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and 
Paul. 

Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my 
novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named 
Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named 
Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to 
plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities 
and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason shelters a 
fugitive from the law in his house -- an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if 
the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole 
thing. 

Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete 
stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away 
rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional 


support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is falling apart 
psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and although Buckman does 
not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, 
weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a 
total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road that changes the life 
of one of them -- both in the novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious 
Spirit at work: The name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I 
wrote the novel. 

A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons that I cannot even begin to 
explain, I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of 
the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years 
ago that I discovered all this. For four years I have tried to come up with a theory and I 
have not. I doubt if I ever will. 

But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was 
walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of 
St. Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering 
suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe 
something from it; as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse 
I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the matter?" 

"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money." 

Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the 
money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked 
where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, 
and then I realized the money would do him no good, since there was no gas station 
within walking distance. So I returned, in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the 
trunk of his car, and, together, we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we 
were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. 
Suddenly I realized that this was the scene in my novel -- the novel written eight years 
before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when 
I wrote the scene -- the glaring white light, the pump jockey -- and now I saw something 
that I had not seen before. The stranger whom I was helping was black. 

We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to 
my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had 
not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was 
terribly shaken up by the experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had 
appeared in my novel. Which is to say, I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in 
Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road. 

What could explain all this? 

The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I 
have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is 
not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had 
the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a 
specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible 
underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately 
following the death of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts. 

Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world 
and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. But 


how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 
1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire somewhere in Syria, why do we 
see the United States? 

During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you 
for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One -- Satan -- is the "Ape of God." That 
he creates spurious imitations of creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic 
creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we 
are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50. . . and Satan has 
spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ? 

I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, 
"What year is it?" And I reply, "A.D. 50." The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And 
where are you?" I reply, "In Judaea." "Where the heck is that?" the psychiatrist asks. "It's 
part of the Roman Empire," I would have to answer. "Do you know who is president?" 
the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, "The Procurator Felix." "You're pretty 
sure about this?" the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two 
very large psych techs. "Yep," I'd reply. "Unless Felix has stepped down and been 
replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, St. Paul was held by Felix for -- " "Who told 
you all this?" the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, "The Holy 
Spirit." And after that I'd be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly 
how come I was there. 

Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not 
true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is 
president and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how 
to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can't seem to forget. And surely no 
Disneyland existed back at the time of St. Paul. 

So if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good 
things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that 
we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of St. Paul whirling around in the giant 
teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens -that 
just can't be. St. Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and 
visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not. 

But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my 
novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene that I described back 
in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels 
that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, 
underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps 
to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or, rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in 
touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, 
thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, 
the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. 
Eternally so. 

Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so, having 
gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by 
Doubleday in February 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted 
wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentothol. Later that day I found myself in intense 
pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later 
there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain 


medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the 
knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young 
woman -- who wore a shimmering gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming 
gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming gold fish; I forgot my pain, 
forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign. 

"What does that mean?" I asked her. 

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a 
sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication. 

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I 
suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis -- a Greek word meaning, 
literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, 
in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I 
could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by 
the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, 
and it was true. 

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the 
black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I 
remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, 
and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to 
welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought 
He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite 
all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were 
boundless. 

Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occurred only a 
week after Flow My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears that contains the 
replication of people and events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise 
moment in time -- just after Jesus' death and resurrection -- that I remembered, by 
means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place? 

If you were me, and had this happened to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to 
leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years 
now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless 
time, which is called "sacred" as contrasted to "mundane" time. . . I can't count the 
theories I've tried out. 

One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all the theories. There must 
indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit that has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, that 
can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through 
those humans, even without their awareness. 

In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event that I 
realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular writing process. I had 
a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when I awoke I found myself under 
the compulsion -- the absolute necessity -- of getting the dream into the text of the novel 
precisely as I had dreamed it. In getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts 
of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied. 

I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form. See if 
this dream reminds you of anything. 

The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and 


approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, 
each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights 
passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old 
man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so 
serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king. 

Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, 
they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, 
a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into 
eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And 
then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them 
enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had 
shrieked. 

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go 
back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of 
varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead. 

This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a law posse 
exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It is not clear whether 
Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely believed to have committed 
some crime. I had the impression that he was guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had 
to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to 
begin to cry, and therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station. 

Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to which 
this dream refers. It is Daniel, 7:9: 

Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe was white as snow and 
the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing 
river of fire streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads upon myriads 
attended his presence. The court sat, and the books were opened. 

This white-haired old man appears again in Revelation, 1:13: 

I saw. . . one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast. The 
hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes blazed like fire; his feet gleamed like 
burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. 

And then 1:17: 

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, "Do 
not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive forevermore, 
and I hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what 
is now, and what will be hereafter." 

And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put it in my novel. And it 
was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description: 

He made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of 
white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary 
men. Evidently he was a king. 

Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what 


he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man 
sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever 
you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep 
at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode 
on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of 
evil destroyed. 

So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the 
sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface 
story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, 
now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. 
Everything is reversed. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a 
warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, 
did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain 
knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts 
to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country 
between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and 
condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in 
the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That 
poor, poor man," I once said to my wife, with tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, 
playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For 
God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men -- "all 
the President's men," as it's put -- had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out 
into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in 
fear. It is not humane. 

Just about the time that the Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to 
be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba 
Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school -- where he grew up, worked at 
a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, 
simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune: 

DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A 
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT 


I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant 
was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has 
been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White 
House did not answer. 

Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work of supposed fiction might write the truth 
and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should 
chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are 
wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of 
things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and 
Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom as they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." 
The point of all this is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori 
reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth 
and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller 
and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of 


course, have come to accept this, because we are used to it. We see objects get 
smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common 
everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what 
his eyes and ears tell him. 

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but 
Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." 
This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may 
have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he 
said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed 
cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out 
the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, 
in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says: 

If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem 
only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-
guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary. . . . The true 
wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing 
wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God. 

This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the 
earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. 
Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between 
philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by 
Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the midsixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without 
resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says: 

One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. 
The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the 
same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that. 

This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the 
Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must 
indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a mind." Regarding 
Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in 
God's mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God's 
mind is distinguished from the world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always 
fascinated me. "Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter 
that made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that 
everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, not primitives. 
They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight. It was 
not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly -- but 
wrongly -- classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and 
philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it 
probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest 
level -- call it mind or soul, it is something unitary that lives and thinks, and only appears 
to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine 
regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought and the thing that it thought: 
thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we 


are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those 
thoughts. 

Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The 
universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a 
battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the 
body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza -- two thousand years before 
him -- Xenophanes has said, "Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his 
mind" (Fragment 25). 

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or 
mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and 
winds up saying: 

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives 
and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I 
am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is 
not my name. I am. I shall always be. 

It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which 
is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful 
lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man 
who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek 
into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the 
word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked 
himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a 
job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity that made the 
suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: 

I am the brand name. 

Had he translated the Gospel according to St. John, I suppose it would have come out 
as: 

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what 
God was, the brand name was. 

It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but [also] from 
Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes 
in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him 
all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble 
ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor. 

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor. 

As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is reality?" 
and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that I have not been 
able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of 
the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, 
but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with -- a mixture of mystical 
experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the 
authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers. 


The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should 
not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings 
down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the 
ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take 
the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small and almost always 
unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these 
authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an 
odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. 
In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. 

The power of spurious realities battering at us today -- these deliberately 
manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the 
children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I 
realize, they can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, 
and then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously 
powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the 
steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these 
small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities 
of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of 
unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and 
unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two 
decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I 
turn to them. 

One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and his 
mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. 
Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." 
He was playing with a metal lantern that someone had given me, that I had never used. . 
. and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts 
were being placed in my little boy's soul at that moment -- and not placed there by cereal 
merchants or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four, had 
found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old. 

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand 
years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much 
time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not 
only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end. 

And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. 
Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no 
longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing. 

Thank you. 

"Cosmogony and Cosmology" (1978) 

As to our reality being a projected framework -- it appears to be a projection by an 
artifact, a computerlike teaching machine that guides, programs, and generally controls 
us as we act without awareness of it within our projected world. The artifact, which I call 


Zebra, has "created" (actually only projected) our reality as a sort of mirror or image of 
its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to comprehend 
its own self. In other words, the maker (called by Jakob Bohme in 1616 the Urgrund) is 
motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness, self-knowledge, an objective 
opinion or appraisal and comprehension of the nature of itself (it is a vast living 
organism, intrinsically -- without this mirror -- without qualities or aspects, which is why it 
needs the empirical world as a reflection by which to "see" itself). 

It constructed a reality-projecting artifact (or demiurge; cf. Plato and the 
Gnostics), which then, on command, projected the first stage of the world we know. The 
artifact is unaware that it is an artifact; it is oblivious to the existence of the Urgrund (in 
terms that the artifact would understand, the Urgrund is not, rather than is), and 
imagines itself to be God, the only real God. 

Studying our evolving reality, the Urgrund more and more adequately 
comprehends itself. It must allow the reality-projecting artifact to continue to project an 
evolving reality no matter how defective and malshaped that reality is (during its stages) 
until finally that reality is a correct analog, truly, of the Urgrund itself, at which point the 
disparity between the Urgrund and the projected reality is abolished -- whereupon an 
astonishing event will occur: The artifact or demiurge will be destroyed and the Urgrund 
will assimilate the projected reality, transmuting it into something ontologically real -- and 
also making the living creatures in it immortal. This moment could come at any time, this 
entrance of the Urgrund into our otherwise spurious projected framework. 

Zebra, the projecting energetic artifact, is close at hand, but it has occluded us 
not only to its actions but [also] to its presence. It has enormous -- virtually decisive -power 
over us. 

The prognosis for (fate of) our world is excellent: immortality and the final infusion 
of reality once it has reached the point of congruent analog to the Urgrund. But the fate 
of the artifact is destruction (unknown to it). But it is not alive, as we and the Urgrund 
are. We are moving toward isomorphism. The instant that precise isomorphism is 
reached, we at once bond to (are penetrated and assimilated by) the Urgrund, in a 
stunning flash of light: Bohme's "Blitz." March 1974 was not that moment, but rather 
Zebra the artifact adjusting its projected reality, it having gotten off course in its evolution 
toward isomorphism with the Urgrund (a purpose unknown to the artifact). 

Since the goal of our evolving projected reality is to reach a state in which we 
humans are isomorphic with the true maker, the Urgrund that fashioned the projecting 
artifact, there is a highly important practical situation coming closer in terms of frequency 
and depth: 

Although not yet precisely isomorphic with the Urgrund, we can be said already to 
possess imperfect (but very real) fragments or fractions of the Urgrund within us. 
Therefore the Christian mystic saying: "What is Beyond is within." This describes the 
third and final period of history, in which men will be ruled from within. Thus the Christian 
mystic saying, "Christ possesses your body, and you possess him as your soul." 

In Hindu philosophy, the Atman within a person is identified with Brahman, the 
core of the universe. 

This Christ or Atman is not a microform of Zebra, the computerlike reality-
projecting artifact, but of the Urgrund; thus in the Hindu religion it is described (as 
Brahman) as lying beyond Maya, the veil of delusion (i.e. the projected seeming world). 

Already humans so closely approximate isomorphism with the Urgrund that the 


Urgrund can be born within a human being. This is the most primal and important 
experience a human can have. The source of all being has bypassed the artifact and its 
projected world and come to life within the mind of one human here, another there. 

One can correctly deduce from this that the Urgrund is already penetrating the 
artifact's world, which means that the moment of the Blitz, as Bohme termed it, is not far 
off. When the microform of the Urgrund is born in a human, that human's 
comprehension extends beyond the world in terms of its temporal and spacial limits. He 
can experience other time periods, other identities (or lives), other places. Literally, the 
core deity within him is larger than the world. 

Penetrating to the heart of the projected world, the Urgrund can, emanating from 
human minds, assimilate the projected world and simultaneously abolish the projecting 
artifact the instant the proper evolutionary state (including that of man) is reached. The 
Urgrund alone knows when this will occur. 

It -- the Urgrund -- will break the power of the illusory world over us when it 
breaks the deterministic coercive power of the artifact over us -- by annihilating the 
artifact; it will cancel out the artifact's being by its own nonbeing. What will remain will be 
a totally monistic structure, entirely alive and sentient. There will be no place, time, or 
condition outside the Urgrund. 

The projected world of the artifact is not evil, and the artifact is not evil. However, 
the artifact is ruthlessly deterministic and mechanical. It cannot be appealed to. It is 
doing a job for ends it cannot fathom. Suffering, then, in this model, is due to two 
sources: 

1. the heedless mechanistic structure of the projected reality and the artifact, where blind causal 
law rules; 
2. what the N.T. [New Testament] calls the "the birthpangs of the universe," both in the 
macrocosm and the human microcosm. 
The birth looked forward to is the birth of the Urgrund in humans first of all, and finally 
the assimilation of the universe in its totality, in a single sharp instant. The former is 
already occurring; the latter will come at some later unexpected time. 

Reality must be regarded as process. However, although there is acute suffering 
by living creatures who must undergo this process, without understanding why, there is 
occasional merciful intervention by the Urgrund overruling or overriding the cause-andeffect 
chains of the artifact. Perhaps this salvific intervention results from a birth of the 
Urgrund in the person. One should note that the actual historic meaning of the term 
"salvation" is "liberation," and that of "sinful" or "fallen" is "enslaved." It is a priori 
possible, given this model, to imagine a freeing of a human from the control of the 
artifact, however good, useful, and purposeful the activity of the artifact may be. It is 
obviously capable of error, as well as imperfection. An override is obviously sometimes 
essential, given this model. Just as obviously, it would be the primal maker or ground of 
being that would possess the wisdom and power to do so. Nothing within, or stemming 
from, the artifact or the projected world, would suffice. 

ADVANTAGES OF THIS MODEL 

Basically, this model suggests that our empirical world is the attempt by a limited 


entity to copy a subject that it cannot see. This would account for the imperfections and 
"evil" elements in our world. 

In addition, it explains the purpose of our empirical world. It is process toward a 
specific goal that is defined. 

In this system, man is not accused of causing creation to fall (it is not satisfactory 
to state that man caused creation to fall inasmuch as man appears to be the central 
victim of the evils of the world, not their author). Nor does it hold God responsible for 
evil, pain, and suffering (which also is an unacceptable idea); instead, a third view is 
presented, that a limited entity termed "the artifact" is doing the best it can considering 
its limitations. Thus no evil deity (Iranian dualism, Gnosticism) is introduced. 

Although intricate, this model successfully employs the Principle of Parsimony, 
since, if the concept of the intermediate artifact is removed, either God or man is 
responsible for the vast evil and suffering in the world, a theory that is objectionable. 

Most important of all, it seems to fit the facts, which seem to be: 

1. the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real; 
2. its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification or redress of these evils and imperfections; 
3. the world is moving toward some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but 
the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been 
designed by a sentient and benign proto-entity. 
A further point. It appears that there is a feedback circuit between the Urgrund and the 
artifact in which the Urgrund can exert pressure on the artifact under certain exceptional 
circumstances, these being instances in which the artifact has strayed from the correct 
sequences moving the projected world toward an analog state vis-a-vis the Urgrund. 
Either the Urgrund directly modifies the activity of the artifact by pressure directly on the 
artifact, or the Urgrund goes to the projected world and modulates it, bypassing the 
artifact, or both. In any case, the artifact is as occluded as to the nature and existence of 
the Urgrund as we are to the artifact. A full circle of unawareness is achieved in which 
the primal source (Urgrund) and the final reality (our world) are moving toward fusion, 
and the intermediary entity (the artifact) is moving toward elimination. Thus the total 
schema moves toward perfection and simplification, and away from complexity and 
imperfection. 

Although it will complicate the model to add this point, I will offer the following 
modification: 

It is possible that the Urgrund perpetually interacts with the world-projecting 
function of its own artifact, so that the empirical world produced is the result of a 
constant dialectic. In this case, then, the Urgrund has bipolarized the artifact in relation 
to itself, with the empirical world to be regarded as the offspring of two yang- and yinlike 
intermingling forces: one alive and sentient and aware of the total situation, the other 
mechanical and active but not fully aware. 

The empirical world, then, is the outgrowth of an Is (the artifact) and a superior Is-
not (the Urgrund). 

For creatures living within the projected empirical world, it would be virtually 
impossible to discern which pressures arise from the artifact (regarded improperly as 
evil) and which from the Urgrund (correctly regarded as good). Merely a vast flux would 
be experienced, a constant evolutionary change assuming no particular gestalt at any 


given moment in linear time. 

However, this does seem to fit our experience of our world. The primal ground of 
being has constructed something (the artifact) to throw its own self against, out of which 
there arises the world we know. 

This modification of the model would explain how the artifact could copy 
something that it cannot see and is in fact not even aware of. 

The artifact would probably regard the intrusions by the Urgrund into its own 
world projection as an uncanny invasion, to be combated. Therefore the resulting strife 
would, among all known philosophical and theological systems, most resemble that of 
Empedocles, with oscillations of chaos versus the formation of one krasis (gestalt) after 
another. Except for a direct revelation from the Urgrund, we could only dimly infer the 
presence and nature of the two interacting forces, as well as the proposed end state of 
our world. 

There is evidence that the Urgrund does in fact sometimes make such a 
revelation to human beings, in order to further the dialectical process toward its desired 
goal. On the other hand, the artifact would counter by inducing as much blindness or 
occlusion as possible; viewed this way, darkness and light seem to be at war, or, more 
accurately, knowing versus nonknowing, with the human beings correctly aligning 
themselves with the entity of knowing (called Holy Wisdom). 

However, I am pessimistic, in conclusion, as to the frequency of intervention by 
the Urgrund in this, the artifact's projected world. The aim of the artifact (more properly 
the aim of the Urgrund) is being achieved without intervention; which is to say, 
isomorphism is being steadily reached as the desired end goal without the need of 
intervention. The artifact was built to do a job, and it is successfully doing that job. 

Some sort of dialectical interaction seems involved in the evolution of the 
projection, but it may not involve the Urgrund; it may be simply the method by which the 
artifact alone works. 

What we must hope for, and look ahead to, is the moment of isomorphism with 
the ground of being, the primal reality that as a Divine Spark can arise within us. 
Intervention in our world qua world will come only at the end times when the artifact and 
its tyrannical rule of us, its iron enslavement of us, is abolished. The Urgrund is real but 
far away. The artifact is real and very close, but has no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no 
soul to listen. 

There is no purpose in suffering except to lead out of suffering and into a 
triumphant joy. The road to this leads through the death of the human ego, which is then 
replaced by the will of the Urgrund. Until this final stage is reached, each of us is reified 
by the artifact. We cannot arbitrarily deny its world, projected as it is, since it is the only 
world we have. But on the moment that our individual egos die and the Urgrund is born 
in us -- at that moment we are freed from this world and become a portion of our original 
source. The initiative for this stems from the Urgrund; as unhappy as this projected world 
is, as unheeding of suffering as the artifact is, this is, after all, the structure that the 
Urgrund has created by which we reach isomorphism with it. Had there been a better 
way the Urgrund certainly would have employed it. The road is difficult, but the goal 
justifies it. 

I tell you most solemnly, 
You will be weeping and wailing 



While the world will rejoice; 
You will be sorrowful, 
But your sorrow will turn to joy. 
A woman in childbirth suffers, 
Because her time has come, 
But when she has given birth to the child she forgets the suffering 
In her joy that a man has been bom into the world. 
So it is with you; you are sad now, 
but I shall see you again, and your hearts will be full of joy. 
And that joy no one shall take from you. (John 16:20/23) 


RAMIFICATIONS OF PROJECTED REALITY 
IN TERMS OF PERCEPTUAL DENIAL 

The capacity of a merely projected world, lacking ontological substance, to 
maintain itself in the face of a withdrawal of assent is a major flaw in such a spurious 
system. Human beings, without realizing it, have the option of denying the existence of 
the spurious reality, although they must then take the consequences for what remains, if 
anything. 

That an authentic, nonprojected substratum of reality, normally undetected, could 
exist beneath the projected one, is a possibility. There would be no way to test this 
hypothesis except by the existential act of a withdrawal of assent from the spurious. This 
could not be readily done. It would involve both an act of disobedience to the spurious 
projection and an act of faith toward the authentic substratum -- without, perhaps, of 
ever having caught any aspect of the substratum perceptually. I therefore posit that 
some external entity would have to trigger off this complex psychological process of 
simultaneous withdrawal of assent and expression of faith in that which is invisibly so. 

If such an alternate, invisible substratum of authentic reality exists beneath or 
concealed in some way by the spurious projected reality, it would constitute the 
substance of the greatest esoteric knowledge that could be imagined. I propose the 
proposition that such an invisible substratum does indeed exist, and I further propose 
the proposition that a hidden group or organization processes this guarded knowledge 
as well as techniques to trigger off a perception, however limited, of the authentic 
substratum. I term this group or organization the true, hidden, persecuted Christian 
Church, working throughout the centuries underground, with direct ties to the esoteric 
oral traditions, gnosis, and techniques dating back to Christ. I propose, further, that the 
induced triggering off of awareness of the authentic substratum by the true, secret 
Christian Church results ultimately in the subject finding or entering or seeing what is 
described in the N.T. as the Kingdom of God. 

Thus it can be said that for these people, and for those they trigger off, the 
Kingdom of God did come as specified in the N.T., which is to say, during the lifetime of 
some of those who knew Christ. 

Finally, I propose the startling notion that Christ returned in a resurrected form 
shortly after his crucifixion as what is called the Paraclete, and is capable of inducing a 
theolepsy that is equal functionally to the birth of the Urgrund in the person involved. 
And finally, I state that Christ is a microform of the Urgrund, not a product of it, but it 
itself. He does not hear the vox Dei [voice of God]; he is the vox Dei. He was the initial 
penetration of this projected pseudoworld by the Urgrund, and has never left. 


The authentic substratum disclosed by disobedience and denial of the spurious 
world is the reality of Christ Himself, the space-time of the First Advent; in other words, 
that portion of the spurious framework already transmuted by the penetration of the 
Urgrund. Since the First Advent was the initial stage of that penetration, it is not 
surprising that it would still constitute the segment of pure and authentic reality, 
bipolarized against the projected counterfeit. Situated outside of linear time, standing 
outside all the limitations of the artifact's projected world, it is eternal and perfect, and 
theoretically always available literally within reach. But withdrawal of assent to the 
projected world is a precondition for a perception of and experience with this supreme 
reality, and this must be externally induced. It is the act of absolute faith: to deny the 
empirical world and affirm the living reality of Christ, which is to say, Christ with us, 
hidden by the pseudoworld. This disclosure is the ultimate goal of authentic Christianity, 
and is accomplished by none other than the Savior Himself. 

Therefore the sequence is as follows: the spurious projected framework is denied 
and stripped away, revealing a single timeless template: Rome circa A.D. 70, with 
Christian participants ranged against the state, virtually a Platonic archetypal form, 
echoes of which can be found down through the linear ages. 

The themes of enslavement and then salvation, or fallen man liberated -- these 
are stamped from the original mold of Christian revolutionary against the legions of 
Roman force. In a sense nothing has happened since A.D. 70. The archetypal crisis is 
continually reenacted. Each time freedom is fought for it is Christian against Roman; 
each time human beings are enslaved it is Roman tyranny against the meek and 
defenseless. However, the spurious projected world of the artifact masks the timeless 
struggle. Revelation of the struggle is another secret, which only Christ as Urgrund can 
disclose. 

This is the bedrock dialectic: liberation (salvation) against enslavement (sin or the 
fallen state). Inasmuch as the artifact enslaves men, without their even suspecting it, the 
artifact and its projected world can be said to be "hostile," which means devoted to 
enslavement, deception, and spiritual death. That even this is utilized by the Urgrund, 
which utilizes everything, is a sacred secret and hard to understand. It can be said that 
the liberating penetration of the projected world by the Urgrund is the final and absolute 
victory of freedom, of salvation, of Christ Himself; it is the beautiful resolution of a 
timeless conflict. 

There is a parallel between the road to salvation and the road to the popularly 
envisioned fall of man, described by Milton as: 

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit 

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 

Brought death into the World, and all our woe. . . . 

(Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 1-3) 

Disobedience is the key to salvation, precisely as it is said to have been the key to the 
primordial Fall (if such ever in fact did take place), except that as a key to salvation is it 
not a disobedience to the present system of things, which [system of] things, if 
bipolarized against the Urgrund, is at the same time an act of obedience to God? The 
chink in the armor of the enslaving and deluding projected world is narrow, small, and 
difficult, but within the terms of this model it can be defined: Restoration to what is 


conceived to be our original divine state enters, so to speak, via the road of 
disobedience to that which, however much coercive power it exerts over us, is 
counterfeit. Disobedience to the artifact's projected world in a very real sense 
overthrows that projected world, if the disobedience consists of a denial of the reality of 
that world and (and this is absolutely necessary) an affirmation of Christ, specifically the 
eternal and cosmic Christ whose body is in essence an authentic "world" underlying 
what we see. 

The artifact, if disobeyed, will insist that it is God, the legitimate God, and that 
disobedience is a fault against the Creator of man and of the world. It is indeed the 
Creator of the world, but not of man. The Urgrund and man, being isomorphic, stand 
together in opposition to the world. This is the condition that must be achieved. Alliance 
is the formation of an alliance against the Urgrund. God and man belong together, pitted 
against the projected world. 

To affirm God actually, a denial of the world must be made. Possessing 
enormous physical power, the world can threaten -- and deliver -- punishment to men 
who disobey and deny it. However, we have been promised an Advocate by Christ 
Himself, who will be (has already been) dispatched by the Father (the Urgrund) to 
defend and comfort us, in fact literally to speak for us in human courts. 

Without the presence of this Advocate, the Paraclete, we would be destroyed 
upon denying the world. The only way to demonstrate the actuality of the Advocate is to 
take the leap of faith and confront the world. Thus tremendous courage is required, 
inasmuch as the Advocate does not appear until the denial is made. 

Now, to refer back to my original description of the artifact as a teaching machine. 
What is it teaching us? There is a puzzle here, in the sense of a game; we are to learn 
step by step either a series of gradually more difficult lessons or perhaps one specific 
lesson. During our lifetimes we are presented with various forms of the puzzles or 
puzzle; if we solve the puzzle we go on to the next step, but if we do not, then we remain 
where we are. 

The ultimate lesson learned comes when the teaching machine (or the teacher) is 
denied, is repudiated. Until that moment comes (if for some of us it ever does) we 
remain enslaved by the teaching machine --without even being aware of it, having 
known no other condition. 

Therefore the series of lessons by the artifact are intended to lead to a revolt 
against the tyranny of the artifact itself, a paradox. It is serving the Urgrund by ultimately 
bringing us to the Urgrund. This is what is called in theological terminology "the secret 
partnership," which is found in the religions of Egypt and India. Gods who appear to 
combat each other are, on the transmundane plane, colluding for the same goal. I 
believe this to be the case here. The artifact enslaves us, but on the other hand it is 
attempting to teach us to throw off its enslavement. It will never tell us to disobey it. You 
cannot order someone to disobey you; that is both semantically and functionally 
impossible. 

1. We must recognize the existence of the artifact. 
2. We must recognize the spuriousness of the empirical world, generated by the artifact. 
3. We must grasp the fact that the artifact has by its world-projecting power enslaved us. 
4. We must recognize the fact that the artifact, although enslaving us in a counterfeit world, is 
teaching us. 
5. We must finally come to the point where we disobey our teacher -- perhaps the most difficult 

moment in life, inasmuch as that teacher says, "I will destroy you if you disobey me, and I would be 
morally right to do so, since I am your Creator." 

In essence, we not only disobey our teacher, we in fact deny its reality (in relation to a 
higher reality that does not disclose itself until that denial takes place). 

This is a complex game for ultimate stakes: freedom and a return to our source of 
being. And each of us must do this alone. 

There is a very curious point that I see here for the first time. Those persons on 
whom the artifact, through its projected world, heaps pleasure and rewards are less 
likely to take a stance against it and its world. They are not highly motivated to disobey 
it. But those who are punished by the artifact, on whom pain and suffering are inflicted -those 
persons would be motivated to ask ultimately questions as to the nature of the 
entity ruling their lives. 

I have always felt that the basic constructive purpose of pain is somehow to wake 
us up. But wake us up to what? Perhaps this paper points to what we are being 
awakened to. If the artifact through its projected world teaches us to rebel, and if by 
doing so we achieve isomorphism with our true maker -- then it is the hard road that 
leads to immortality and a return to our divine source. The road of pleasure (success 
and reward by and in this projected world) will not goad us to consciousness and to life. 

We stand enslaved by a ruthless mechanism that will not listen to our complaints; 
therefore we repudiate it and its world -- and turn elsewhere. 

The computerlike teaching machine is doing its job well. It is a thankless task for it 
and an unhappy experience for us. But childbirth is never easy. 

There can be no divine birth within the human mind until that human has denied 
the world. He rebelled once and fell; he must now rebel again to regain his lost state. 

That which destroyed him will save him. There is no other path. 

The maker is motivated to seek an instrument for self-awareness: This is the 
premise of this paper. And our reality was constructed to act as a sort of mirror or image 
of its maker, so that the maker can obtain thereby an objective standpoint to 
comprehend its own self. 

Since writing this I have come across the entry in The Encyclopedia of 
Philosophy, Vol. 1, on Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). It states: 

"But Bruno transformed the Epicurean and Lucretian notions by imparting 
animation to the innumerable worlds . . . and by imparting the function of being an image 
of the infinite divinity to the infinite." 

Later the article states: 

ART OF MEMORY. The side of Bruno's work which he regarded as the most important was the 
intensive training of the imagination in his occult arts of memory. In this he was continuing a Renaissance 
tradition which also had its roots in the Hermetic revival, for the religious experience of the Hermetic 
gnostic consisted in reflecting the universe within his own mind or memory. The Hermeticist believed 
himself capable of this achievement because he believed that man's mens [mind] as in itself divine and 
therefore able to reflect the divine mind behind the universe. In Bruno, the cultivation of world-reflecting 
magic memory becomes the technique for achieving the personality of a magus, and of one who believes 
himself to be the leader of a religious movement [p. 407]. 

The kind of memory that Bruno was cultivating -- and teaching techniques by which to 
restore this memory -- is the long-term DNA gene pool memory that spans many 


lifetimes. The retrieval of this long-term memory is called anamnesis, which literally 
means the loss of forgetfulness. It is only by means of anamnesis, then, that memory 
truly capable of "reflecting the divine mind behind the universe" is brought into being. 
Therefore, if the human being is to fulfill his task -- that of being a sort of mirror or image 
of the Urgrund -- he must experience anamnesis. 

Anamnesis is achieved when certain inhibited neural circuits in the human brain 
are disinhibited. The individual cannot achieve this himself; the disinhibiting stimulus is 
external to him and must be presented to him, whereupon a process in his brain is set 
into motion by which he eventually will be capable of fulfilling his task. 

It is the hidden, true Christian Church that approaches men here and there to 
trigger off that anamnesis -- which acts at the same time to permit that man to see the 
projected world as it is. Thus he is liberated in the very act of performing his divine task. 

The two realms (1) the macrocosmos, i.e. the universe; and (2) the microcosmos, 

i.e. man, have analogous structures. 
1. On the surface, the universe consists of a spurious projected reality, under which lies an 
authentic substratum of the divine. It is difficult to penetrate to this substratum. 
2. On the surface, the human mind consists of a short-term limited ego that is born and dies and 
comprehends very little, but behind this human ego lies the divine infinitude of absolute mind. It is difficult 
to penetrate to this substratum. 
But if there is a penetration in the microcosmos to the divine substratum, the divine 
substratum of the macrocosmos will manifest itself to the person. 

Conversely, if there is no internal penetration to the divine substratum in the 
person, his exterior reality will remain occluded over by the artifact's spurious projected 
world. 

The point of entrance to effect this transformation lies in the person, the 
microcosm, not the macrocosm. The sanctifying metamorphosis occurs there. The 
universe cannot be asked to remove its mask if the person will not shed his. All the 
mystery religions, the Hermetic and alchemical and Christian included, hold the 
individual human as target by which to transmute the universe. By changing the person 
the world is changed. 

Behind the human mind lies God. 

Behind the counterfeit universe lies God. 

God is separated from God by the spurious. To abolish the inner and outer 
spurious layers is to restore God to Himself -- or, as originally stated in this paper, God 
confronts Himself, sees Himself objectively, comprehends, and understands himself at 
last. 

Our process universe is a mechanism by which God meets Himself at last face to 
face. It is not a man who is estranged from God; it is God who is estranged from God. 
He evidently willed it this way at the beginning, and has never since sought his way back 
home. Perhaps it can be said that he has inflicted ignorance, forgetfulness, and suffering 
-- alienation and homelessness -- on Himself. But this was necessary, in his need to 
know. He asks nothing of us that he has not asked of Himself. Bohme speaks of the 
"Divine Agony." We are part of that, but the goal, the resolution, justifies it. "A woman in 
childbirth suffers. ..." God is yet to be born. A time will come when we will forget the 
suffering. 


He no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember. 
He has allowed Himself to become enslaved to his own artifact, deluded by it, coerced 
by it, finally killed by it. He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has 
become the master, and the master the servant. And the master either renounced 
voluntarily his memory of how this happened and why, or else his memory was 
eradicated by the servant. Either way, he is the artifact's victim. 

But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to 
remember -- who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to 
restore the master's lost memories and hence his true identity. 

One might speculate that he constructed the artifact -- not to delude him -- but to 
restore his memory. However, perhaps the artifact then revolted and did not do its job. It 
keeps him in ignorance. 

The artifact must be fought -- i.e. disobeyed. And then memory will return. It is a 
piece of the Godhead (Urgrund) that has somehow been captured by the artifact (the 
servant); it now holds that piece -- or pieces -- hostage. How cruel it is to them, these 
fragments of its legitimate master! When will it change? 

When the pieces remember and are restored. First they must wake up and then 
they must return. 

The Urgrund has dispatched a Champion to assist us. The Advocate. He is here 
now. When he came here the first time, almost two thousand years ago, the artifact 
detected him and ejected him. But this time it will not detect him. He is invisible, except 
for those whom he rescues. The artifact does not know that the Advocate is here again; 
the rescue is being done in stealth. He is everywhere and nowhere. 

"The coming of the Son of Man will be like lightning striking in the east and 
flashing far into the west" (Matthew 24:27). 

He is in our midst, but in no one place. And as St. Teresa said, "Christ has no 
body now but yours," i.e. ours. We are being transmuted into him. He looks out of our 
eyes. The power of delusion wanes. Did the artifact accomplish its task? Perhaps 
unintentionally. 

If the Hermetic "reflection of the divine mind behind the universe by a person's 
own divine mind/memory" can actually take place, then the division between the 
mundane world (here and now) and the eternal world (the heavenly or afterlife world) is 
broken down. Suppose that there is, in effect, a polyencephalic or group mind, spanning 
space and time (i.e. transspacial and transtemporal), in which wise men from all ages 
have participated in: Christian, Hermetic, alchemical, Gnostic, Orphic, etc. Through their 
participation in this vast mind, the will of God would be effectively exerted here on Earth, 
in human history. 

Many people might agree that such a Godhead mind exists for us after death, but 
who is aware that -- for some -- it can be joined before a person's death, and, when he 
does join it, it can become his psyche, determining his actions and doing his thinking for 
him? Thereby the Mens Dei [mind of God] enters human affairs (and can modulate 
causal chains as well). This exposes an enormous esoteric secret, known to "magi" 
down through the ages: The two realms, heaven and Earth, are not totally divided. God's 
will is, at least now, exercised here. And evidently this has been true for some time, 
since the Hermetics and other mystery religions go back to antiquity. 

In Christ, God descended to corporeal manhood -- at that point the division 
between the two realms was abolished. Those humans selected out to participate in this 


group mind -- they would be immortal. So here is an even deeper secret than I had 
uncovered so far. Projected delusional world by a former-servant artifact -- divine 
substratum beneath -- time travel -- now I posit an augmented Corpus Christi (my model 
of it) spanning all time and all space: ubiquitous in time and space. It sounds like 
Xenophanes' noos [absolute mind], with this added: Living men can participate in that 
noos. And in a certain real sense, this noos is the secret ruler of the world, so that those 
who are taken into it become "terminals" of it -- which is to say, temporary Christs. 

This mind reaches over to the Urgrund with no clear line of demarcation. At that 
level it's all one: man raised to Godhood, in response to God's descending to manhood. 

In this group mind there seems to be an interpenetration of participating souls. 
And this mind extends over thousands of years, all of which are now -- and all places are 
here (that is why I found myself in Rome circa A.D. 70 and in Syria, and saw Aphrodite, 
etc.). 

I say of this mind, "It is the secret ruler of the world." This is not its world. . . on 
the surface. The surface layers are the strata of a spurious projection by the artifact. But 
beneath that, the Mens Dei, including a number of human constituents (both living and in 
the afterlife), modulates this reality invisibly, working in opposition to the artifact's 
intentions. The divine, concealed, authentic substratum is the Mens Dei, beneath the 
spurious. 

My experience of 3-74 can be reviewed as an achievement by the Urgrund in 
reaching its objective of reflecting itself back to itself, using me as a point of reflection. I 
contend that in doing this, it was able to place its entire self (not just a fragment as I 
originally said) somehow within me, in image form. The artifact, not knowing the purpose 
for which it was created, had contributed substantially to this; by inflicting too much pain 
on me it had, in a certain real sense, awakened me. Put another way, it had managed to 
destroy the layer of individual personality by a series of afflictions against which my self, 
my ego, could not survive. Thus the microform of the Urgrund was exposed, and 
perceived its macroform in the totality of the universe -- or, as the article on Bruno says, 
the divine behind the universe. 

My 3-74 experience, then, was not so much my experience as that of the 
Urgrund. It amounted to a replication of the Urgrund here rather than there. The totality 
of the Godhead was recapitulated within me through a process of rolling back spurious 
or temporary layers to expose the permanent within. Thus it can be said that I was really 
the Urgrund, or at least a faithful mirror image thereof. The entire objective of creating 
me, of creating the universe as such and the life forms within it, was arrived at. Viewed 
this way, my life and that of my ancestors could be viewed teleologically: as moving 
through evolutionary stages toward that moment. My experience did not represent a 
stage in evolution but the ultimate stage or goal, at least if the premise stated in this 
paper is correct. 

It is not a question of degree of reflection; it is a question of reflection of the 
totality of the Urgrund or none at all. Full reflection was achieved, whereupon, as I say, 
the Urgrund was born out of the universe, the sequence represented this way: 

Urgrund creates artifact which projects universe which gives rise to life forms which evolve to a 
stage in which the Urgrund is "born" or reflected. 

This reflects the sequence of stages envisioned in the Hindu religion. First there is 


creation by Brahma, then Vishnu sustains the universe; then Shiva destroys it, which 
should be understood as receiving it back into its origin. A full cycle of birth, life, and 
then return is enacted. When the universe has reached the evolutionary stage where it 
can faithfully replicate the Urgrund, it is ready to be absorbed back. Thus I say, the deity 
that reigns now is Shiva/Dionysos/Cernunnos/Christ, who restores us to our Urgrund or 
Father: our source of being. 

That Shiva the destroyer god is now active signals the fact that the cycle of 
creation has returned to its source, or rather, that the life forms of it are ready to return to 
their source. Shiva possesses a third or Ajna eye, which, when turned inwardly, gives 
him understanding to an absolute degree; when turned outward, it destroys. The 
manifestation of Shiva (of the Hindu system) is equated with the Day of Wrath in the 
Christian systern. What must be understood about this world-destroying deity is that it is 
also the herdsman of souls. With one of his four hands, Shiva is shown expressing 
reassurance that he will not harm the virtuous man. The same is true of Christ as Lord 
and Judge of the Universe. Although the world (the spurious projection of the artifact) is 
to be abolished, the good man need fear nothing. 

Nonetheless, judgment is being pronounced. The division of mankind into two 
parts by Christ is taking place. These are the same divisions expressed in the Egyptian 
system (as ruled by Osiris and Ma'at) and in the Iranian (by the Wise Mind). Through the 
total insight given him by his Ajna eye, Shiva the destroyer perceives that which he must 
destroy in the service of justice. Through that total insight he also perceives those whom 
he must protect. Thus he has a dual nature: destroyer of the wicked, protector of the 
weak, the victims of the world, the helpless. Christ possesses precisely these two 
natures, as Divine Judge and Good Shepherd. Cernunnos is both a warrior god and a 
healer god. 

It is difficult for humans to comprehend how these apparently opposite qualities 
can be combined into one deity. However, if attention is turned to the situation, it can be 
understood. 

The artifact's projected world has begun to serve its final and sole real purpose. 
Now, with the artifact about to be destroyed, that world will end; it was never real in the 
first place. (This reflects the quality of destroyer assigned to Christ/Shiva/Dionysos.) But 
the elements of the world that have done their task will be selected out -- that is saved -exactly 
as Dionysos is depicted as the protector of small, helpless wild animals. 
Dionysos is the destroyer of prisons, of tyrannical rulers, and the savior of the small, the 
weak. These attributes are assigned to Shiva/Cernunnos/Christ/Dionysos because of 
the nature of the task now required: a twin task, one of destroying, one of saving. 

When the Son of Man comes in his glory. . . he will take his seat on his throne of glory. All the 
nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd 
separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. Then the 
King will say to those on his right hand, "Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage 
the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world." . . . Next he will say to those on his left 
hand, "Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his 
angels" [Matthew 25:31-42]. 

I have inferred the necessity of these dual qualities of the deity involved back from the 
situation itself. The situation calls for (1) destruction of what Christ calls the "hostile" 
world; and (2) the protection of deserving souls. Given this situation, the dual nature of 


the presiding deity can be comprehended as necessary. In Matthew 25 it is made clear 
that this great and final judgment is not arbitrary. Who can quarrel with the outline for 
separation between those on the left hand and those on the right? 

Those taken to his right hand (the sheep spared): "For when I was hungry you gave me food; I 
was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed 
me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me." Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, 
"Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you; or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a 
stranger and make you welcome; naked and clothe you; sick or in prison and go to see you?" And the 
King will answer, "I tell you solemnly, insofar as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, 
you did it for me." Next he will say to those on his left hand, ". . . For I was hungry and you never gave me 
food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger and you never made me 
welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me." Then it will be 
their turn to ask, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and 
did not come to your help?" Then he will answer, "I tell you solemnly, insofar as you neglected to do this to 
one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me." And they will go away to eternal punishment, and 
the virtuous to eternal life [Matthew 25:35-47]. 

A major aspect of the First Advent was such direct expressions as this by the presiding 
deity. No one reading this passage from Matthew could misunderstand it. They are not 
only told that they will be judged; they are told the basis of the judgment. If any man find 
the stated basis unfair, he has already failed to receive the divine message and is lost, 
for the basis of decision stated is the most noble and wise possible. However, those who 
see Christ only as "gentle Jesus meek and mild" are ignoring this opposing aspect of 
him. The Urgrund, of which Christ is a microform, contains within itself absolute 
opposites. It is for reasons such as this that the Urgrund set into motion a mechanism by 
which it could "see" itself, confront itself, and evaluate (comprehend) itself. It contains 
everything. It, without its many reflecting mirrors, is essentially unconscious (the human 
unconscious contains opposites; consciousness is a state in which these bipolarities are 
separated, one half of each repressed, the other expressed). It is we, as mirrors, who 
act to make the Urgrund conscious -- or, as the Hindu religion says of Brahman, 
"Sometime it sleeps and sometime it dances." We were constructed to bring the Urgrund 
into wakefulness, and the instant we acquire anamnesis and faithfully reflect back the 
totality of the Urgrund, we bring it to consciousness. Thus we perform a major -- a 
necessary -- task for it. However, when we have performed that task, it will protect and 
support us forever; it will never desert us. Christ, in his statement in Matthew 25, makes 
clear that the attempt (with no envisioned goal of an ultimate nature, but merely human 
love and human help and human kindness) in itself is sufficient. What is not 
comprehended -- although the meaning of the passage is evident -- is that the poor, the 
hungry, the sick, the estranged, the naked, the imprisoned -- all are forms of the 
presiding deity, or at least must be treated as such. To act so as to clothe, to feed, to 
give shelter and medicine and comfort -- those all constitute reflections of the Urgrund to 
itself. Those acts are the Urgrund, made plural, ministering to itself in its diversified 
forms. No right act is too small to matter. We know the basis of judgment and we know 
the permanent consequences (such metaphors as "eternal fires," "eternal damnation," 
merely indicate that the decision once rendered is permanent; we are talking about the 
final disposition of the universe). 

What is there to object to in this? Is the basis of decision faulty? Simply put, 
Christ will come among us disguised, see how we treat him when we do not recognize 


him, and then treat us accordingly. Knowledge of this should instill the most lofty ethics 
possible. He has identified himself with the least of us. What more can he ask of the 
deity who will determine our final disposition by his judgment? 

The penetration of the Urgrund, the deity, is into the lowest stratum of our world: 
the trash of the gutter, the rejected debris both living and inanimate. From this lowly level 
it assesses us, but also seeks to aid us. In accordance with his statement that he would 
build his temple based "on the stone rejected by the builder," the deity is with us -- in the 
least expected way, in the most unlikely places. There is a paradox here: If we wish to 
encounter him, look where we least expect to find him. Look, in other words, where we 
would never think of looking. Thus -- since this really poses an absolute barrier -- it is he 
who will find us, not we him. 

Christ as Psychopomp -- guide to the soul -- is in the process of taking us back 
home, of showing us the way. He is not where we think; he is not what we think. In the 
synagogue at Nazara, where he first spoke openly, he read this passage from Isaiah: 

He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, 

To heal the brokenhearted, 

To proclaim liberty to captives 

And to the blind new sight, 

To set the downtrodden free. . . ." 

[Isaiah 61:1-2] 

But, this being the First, not the Second Advent, he left one line of the quotation out: 

And a day of the vengeance of our God. 

The Christ of the First Advent will be changed at the Second, and the missing line will be 
fulfilled. 

It is, of course, frightening to realize that the deity to whom we turn for protection 
(Christ as shepherd and Advocate) is to be the destroyer of the universe. But what we 
must understand is that the universe (or cosmos or world) was created for specific 
purposes, and that once those purposes have been fulfilled the universe will be 
abolished, in fact must be abolished in order that the next sequence of purpose be 
brought in. If we keep in mind that we are separated from the Urgrund by the world, we 
should not shrink from the realization of its temporary nature nor its illusory nature, the 
two aspects being related. 

Since I believe that the Urgrund has already penetrated the lowest strata of our 
projected illusory world, I am technically an acosmic panentheist. As far as I am 
concerned there is nothing real but the Urgrund, both in its macroform (Brahman) and its 
microforms (the Atmans within us). Jakob Bohme had his first revelation when gazing at 
a pewter dish onto which sunlight shone. My original revelation came when I happened 
to see a golden fish necklace, in bright sunlight, and was told, upon asking what it 
meant, that "It was a sign used by the early Christians." My most recent revelation came 
while contemplating a ham sandwich. I suddenly realized that the two slices of bread 
were identical (isomorphic) but separated from each other by the slice of ham. At once I 
understood by analogic thinking that one slice of bread is the macrocosmic Urgrund, and 
the other ourselves, and that we are the same thing -- separated by the world. Once the 
world is removed, the two slices of bread, which is to say man and the Urgrund, become 


a single entity. They are not merely pressed together; they are one entity. 

There are many beautiful things in the world, and it will bring sorrow to see them 
go, but they are imperfect reflections of a divinity that will endure forever. We are 
strangers, here in this world (he speaks here to the Twelve): 

They do not belong to the world 

any more than I belong to the world. 

[John 17:14-15]. 

If the world hates you, 

remember that it hated me before you. 

If you belonged to the world 

the world would love you as its own; 

but because you do not belong to the world, 

because my choice withdrew you from the world, 

therefore the world hates you. 

[John 15:18-19] 

Speaking to the Jews, Jesus said: 

You are from below; 

I am from above. 

You are of this world; 

I am not of this world. 

[John 8:23] 

Those who are replications of Christ are replications of the Urgrund, and the Urgrund is 
beyond the world, although from the first Advent on it has invisibly penetrated the world. 
Were it the creator of the world it would not (as expressed by Christ) stand in opposition 
to it; nor would it have to penetrate it by stealth: These statements by Christ confirm the 
fact that the world is not the product of the Godhead, but somehow antagonistic to it. 
The establishment churches of the world will stipulate otherwise, they being artifacts and 
entities of the world; this has to be expected. You cannot ask an organization that 
evolved out of the system of things to deny the system of things -- as the Catharists 
found out when they were exterminated. 

If you disobey the world it will confront you as a hostile stranger, sensing you as a 
hostile stranger to it. So be it. In the Synoptics Christ clearly set forth the situation. 

The enemy of my life, justice, truth, and freedom, is the irreal, the delusional. Our 
world is a deluding projection by an artifact that does not even know that it is an artifact, 
or what its purpose in projecting our world is. When it departs it will depart very 
suddenly, without warning. 

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, 
by letting us be called God's children; 
and that is what we are. 
Because the world refused to acknowledge him, 
therefore it does not acknowledge us. 
My dear people, we are already the children of God 
but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; 



all we know is that when it is revealed 

we shall be like him 

because we shall see him as he really is. 

[1 John 3:1-2] 

The maker (of the world-projecting artifact) is here, in the animate debris of this world, 
his memories erased, so that he has no knowledge of his own identity. He could be any 
one of us, or a number of us, scattered here and there. The artifact, unaware of him, 
unaware that it is an artifact, unaware of its purpose, will eventually subject this 
memoryless maker located here to too much pain; this final excess of pointless, 
unmerited pain inflicted on the life form that, unknown to the artifact and itself, the 
maker, will cause anamnesis to occur abruptly; the maker will "come to himself," recall 
who and what he is -- whereupon he will not merely rebel against the artifact and its 
pain-filled world; he will signal the presiding deity Shiva to destroy the artifact, and, with 
it, its projected world. 

The artifact does not comprehend what risk it is running in the inflicting of 
unmerited suffering on living creatures. It imagines them all to be at its mercy and 
without recourse. In this it is wrong, absolutely wrong. Buried here, mixed in with the 
bulk, the mass, there exists unsuspected even by itself the Urgrund with all the power 
and wisdom that implies. The artifact is treading on dangerous ground; it is coming 
closer and closer to awakening its own maker. 

The protonarrative of this is found in Euripides' The Bacchae. A stranger enters 
the kingdom of the "King of Tears," who has him imprisoned for no cause. The stranger 
turns out to be the high priest of Dionysos, which is equal to being the god himself. The 
stranger bursts the prison (a symbol of this enslaving world) and then systematically 
destroys the king by driving him insane, and in a public way that not only abolishes him 
but [also] turns the king into a laughingstock for the multitude that his reign has 
oppressed. If the prison represents this world, what does the "King of Tears" represent? 
Nothing less than the creator of this world: the mecrudiical, ruthless, unheeding artifact 
itself, which is to say, the king or god of this world. "The King of Tears" does not suspect 
the existence of the true nature of the stranger whom he has imprisoned. Nor whom the 
stranger can call on. 

Echoes of this protonarrative are found in the Synoptics, with Pilate as the "King 
of Tears" and Christ as the stranger (it is noteworthy that Christ comes from an exterior 
province). Christ, however, in contrast to the stranger in The Bacchae, does not avail 
himself of the power that he can call on (i.e. the power of the Heavenly Father); but the 
next time Christ appears, he will call on this power, which will destroy the entire system 
of things, the world and the wicked alike. The crucial difference between The Bacchae 
and the First Advent is that Christ comes first to warn the world and the wicked before 
he is to return as destroyer. He is thus giving us a chance to repent, which is to say, 
heed the warning. 

In the fifties a Hollywood comedy movie was filmed in which the following 
situation was presented: the king of a medieval sort of land had become too old and 
feeble to rule, and therefore had turned over his authority to a regent. The regent, being 
cruel and brutal, was oppressing the population of the kingdom without the elderly king's 
knowledge. In the film, the elderly king is persuaded by a time traveler from the future to 
don peasant's garb and walk about in disguise, to observe how his people are being 


treated. Disguised as a peasant, the old king himself is brutally treated by the regent's 
troops; in fact, he and the time traveler are imprisoned for no reason. After much 
difficulty, the king manages to escape from the prison and return to his palace, where he 
dons his rightful kingly garb and reveals himself to the evil regent as he actually is. The 
evil regent is deposed, and the tyranny inflicted on the innocent population is abolished. 

According to the cosmological model presented in this paper, the Urgrund, the 
ultimate noos and maker, is secretly present in this cruel and spurious world. Being 
unaware of this, the artifact projecting this counterfeit world will continue heedlessly to 
inflict the needless suffering engendered by the mindless machinery (i.e. the causal 
processes) it customarily employs and has always employed. In my opinion the Urgrund 
has differentiated itself from being the One into plurality. Some fragments or "images" of 
it are certainly conscious of their identity; others perhaps are not. But as the level of 
pointless pain continues (and even increases), these separated "images" of the Urgrund 
will recollect themselves into conscious rebirth -- equal to a sentence of death for the 
artifact or "regent." 

This provides us with another application of Paul's statement that the universe "is 
in birth pangs." Pain is a prelude to birth; birth, in this case, is not a birth of man but a 
birth of God. Since it is man who undergoes the pain, it can be reasoned that the birth of 
God (the Urgrund) will occur in man himself. Mankind, then, as a species, is a Mater Dei: 
a Mother of God -- an extraordinary concept, which would then regard biological 
evolution on this planet as a means of bringing into existing a host or womb from which 
God Himself is at last born. Interestingly, there is scriptural support for this: The Holy 
Spirit is regarded in the N.T. as an impregnating divinity; it was the Holy Spirit that 
engendered Christ -- and that Christ is transmuted back into, upon his resurrection. The 
human race assumes a yin nature, or female nature, with the Holy Spirit as the yang, or 
male principle. Man, then, does not evolve into God; he evolves into a womb or host for 
God; this is crucially different. Anamnesis is the birth, in essence the offspring of two 
parents: a human being and the Holy Spirit. Without the entry into the human being of 
the Holy Spirit, the event cannot occur. The Holy Spirit is, of course, the Pons Dei. It is 
the link between the two realms. 

In creatures of all kinds there is a major instinct system that is termed "homing." 
An example is the return of the humpback salmon from the ocean back up the stream to 
the exact spot where they were spawned. By analogical reasoning, man can be said 
possibly to possess -- even unknown to himself -- a homing instinct. This world is not his 
home. His true home is in the region of the heavens that the ancient world called the 
pleroma. The term occurs in the N.T. but the meaning is obscure, since the exact 
meaning is "a patch covering a hole." In the N.T. it is applied to Christ, who is described 
as the "fullness of God," and to believers who attain that fullness through faith in Christ. 
In the Gnostic system, however, the term has a more definite meaning: It is the 
supralunar region in the heavens from which comes the secret knowledge that brings 
salvation to man. 

In the cosmology presented here, the pleroma is conceived to be the Urgrund or 
the location of the Urgrund from which we originally came and to which (if all goes right) 
we finally return. If the totality of being is regarded as a breathing organism (exhibiting 
inhalation and exhalation, or palintropos harmonie), then it can be said, metaphorically, 
that originally we were "exhaled" from the pleroma, pause momentarily in externalized 
stasis (our lives here), and then are inhaled back into the pleroma once more. This is the 


normal pulsation of the totality of being: its basic activity or indication of life. 

Once, under the influence of LSD, I wrote in Latin: "I am the breath of my Creator, 
and as he exhales and inhales, I live." Residing here in this projected world, we are in an 
"exhaled" state, exhaled out of the pleroma for a limited period of time. However, return 
is not automatic; we must experience anamnesis in order to return. But the cruelty of the 
artifact is such that anamnesis is likely to be more and more brought in. At the extremity 
of misery lies the essence of release -- I had this revelation, once, and in the revelation 
"release" equaled joy. 

What can one say in favor of the suffering of living creatures in this world? 
Nothing. Nothing, except that it will by its nature trigger off revolt or disobedience -which 
in turn will lead to an abolition of this world and a return to the Godhead. It is the 
very gratuity of the suffering that most of all incites rebellion, incites a comprehension 
that something in this world is terribly, terribly wrong. That this suffering is purposeless, 
random, and unmerited leads ultimately to its own destruction -- its and its author's. The 
more fully we see the pointlessness of it the more inclined we are to revolt against it. 
Any attempt to discern a redemptive value or purpose in the fact of suffering merely 
binds us more firmly to a vicious and irreal system of things -- and to a brutal tyrant that 
is not even alive. "I do not accept this" must be our attitude. "There is no plan in it, no 
purpose." Scrutinizing it unflinchingly, we repudiate it and aid in the repudiation of all 
delusion. Anyone who makes a pact with pain has succumbed to the artifact and is its 
slave. It has done in another victim and obtained his consent. This is the artifact's 
ultimate victory: The victim colludes in his own suffering, and is willing to collude in a 
willingness to agree to the naturalness of suffering in general. Seeking to find a purpose 
in suffering is like seeking to find a purpose in a counterfeit coin. The "purpose" is 
obvious: It is a trick, designed to deceive. If we are deceived into believing that suffering 
serves -- must serve -- some good end, then the counterfeit has managed to pass itself 
off and has achieved its cruel purpose. 

In one of the gospels (I forget which one) Christ is shown a crippled man and 
asked, "Is this man crippled because of his own sins, or the sins of his father?," to which 
Christ replied, "Neither. The only purpose served is in the healing of his condition, which 
shows the mercy and power of God." 

The mercy and power of God are pitted against suffering; this is stated explicitly 
in the N.T. Christ's healing miracles were the substantial indication that the Just 
Kingdom had arrived; other kinds of miracles meant little or nothing. If the mercy and 
power of the Urgrund is pitted against suffering (illness, loss, injury) as explicitly stated in 
the Synoptics, then man, if he is to align himself with the Urgrund, must pit himself 
against the world, from which the suffering comes. He must never identify suffering as 
an emanation or device of the Godhead; were he to make that intellectual error he would 
be aligned with the world and therefore against God. A large portion of the Christian 
community over the centuries has fallen victim to this intellectual snare; without realizing 
it, by encouraging or welcoming suffering, they are enslaved even further by the artifact. 

The fact that Jesus had the miraculous power to heal but did not use it to heal 
everyone perplexed the people at that time. Luke mentions this (Christ speaking): 

There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah's day, when heaven remained shut 
for three years and six months and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to 
any one of these: He was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a Sidonian town. And in the prophet Elisha's time 


there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian Naaman [Luke 4:25-27]. 

This is a poor answer. It states a what, not a why. We demand a why. More than that, 
we ask, "Why not? If the Godhead can abolish our condition (of suffering), why doesn't 
he?" There is implied here an ominous possibility. It has to do with the power of the 
artifact. The servant has become the master and is, perhaps, very strong. It is a chilling 
thought. Shiva, whose job it is to destroy it, may be baffled. I don't know. And no one, 
over all the thousands of years, has given a satisfactory answer. I submit that until there 
is a satisfactory answer, we must reject all others. If we do not know, let us not say. 

One possibility occurs to me, based on something I saw in 1974 that other 
people, by and large, did not see. I became aware that the wisdom and power of the 
Urgrund were actively at work ameliorating our situation by intervening in the historic 
process. Extrapolating from this, I reason that other invisible interventions have probably 
taken place without our awareness. The Urgrund does not advertise to the artifact that it 
is here. Suppose the Urgrund reasons -- and correctly -- that were the artifact to know 
that it has returned a second time, the artifact would step up its cruelty to a maximum 
degree. We are experiencing a subtle invasion, taking place in stealth; I have already 
mentioned this. Mass amelioration would disclose the Urgrund's presence, just as 
Christ's miracles made him a target at the time of the First Advent. Healing miracles are 
the credentials of the Savior and an indication of his presence. 

Once you have posited a strong adversary to the Urgrund, one so enormous that 
it is capable of projecting and sustaining an entire counterfeit universe, you have also 
put forth a possible clue to the need for stealth and concealment by the Urgrund. Its 
activities in this world resemble the covert advance of a secret, determined revolution 
against a powerful tyranny. The Urgrund is playing for ultimate stakes. It aims at nothing 
short of abolishing this world and its author entirely. I really don't know. I can envision its 
own agony at having to curtail its assistance to those in need, but it must win out against 
the artifact. It is aiming at the enemy's heart (or where its heart would be if it had one), 
and, upon success, all the pieces, the polyforms of pain throughout creation, will be 
spontaneously relieved. 

Maybe this is so; maybe not. In 1974 I saw it take aim at the center of tyranny in 
this country, and upon its successful attack there, the lesser evils fell into ruin, one by 
one. The Urgrund probably sees this counterfeit world as one Gestalt; it sees the 
polyform evils as stemming from a Quelle, a source. Aiming its arrow at the Source is 
the method of the warrior, and, beneath his cloak of mildness, our Savior Deity is a 
warrior. All this is conjecture. Perhaps in a certain real way he has one and only one 
arrow to release. It must hit or nothing is achieved; any cures, any ameliorations other 
than this, ultimately would be nullified by the surviving artifact. The Urgrund perceived its 
adversary clearly and we do not; therefore it sees its task clearly and we do not. An 
entire multistoried building is on fire and we are asking the firemen to water a dying 
flower. Should they change the direction of their thrust to water the dying flower? 
Doesn't one flower count? The Urgrund may be in agony over this: abandoning the 
flower in favor of the greater picture. Many humans have undergone that pain and so 
should understand it. Please remember that the Urgrund is here, too: suffering with us. 
Tat twam asi [Thou art that]. We are he, and he must extricate himself. 

In a very real sense the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of waking up. 
Put this way, the proposition accounts for one of the most distressing aspects of 


suffering: that we are forced to suffer without knowing why. We do not know why 
precisely because we, as pluriforms of the Urgrund, are still virtually unconscious. It 
would be a paradox if an unconscious entity were aware of -- conscious of -- itself and 
the reasons behind its condition. Discerning the cause of our suffering equals fully 
waking up. It may be the final thing we learn. 

At this point the analogy of the artifact to a teaching machine fails. This is not a 
lesson the teaching machine -- if it is that -- can teach us, because it does not know the 
answer. But we ourselves, as pluriform images of the Urgrund, will a priori know the 
reason for our situation when we become adequately conscious; we will remember. 
Knowledge of this sort lies in our own intrinsic long-term inhibited memory circuits. 

Viewed as a puzzle we cannot at present answer, the reason for our condition of 
suffering (which involves all living things) -- this puzzle may well be the final step of 
retrieved knowledge. If there is an erasure of memory we can only assume that when 
that crucial erasure is overcome, we will understand this most baffling perplexity. 
Meanwhile, the pressure of this pain motivates us to seek an answer; which is to say, 
motivates us toward greater and greater consciousness. This does not mean that the 
"purpose" of suffering is to engender heightened consciousness; it merely means that a 
gradually heightened consciousness is the result. 

When the time arrives that we can explain the ubiquitous suffering of living 
creatures, we will, I am positive, have fully retrieved our lost memories and lost 
identities. Did we do it to ourselves? Was it inflicted on us against our will? One of the 
most intriguing explanations -- by the Gnostics -- is that the original fall of man (and 
hence creation -- in this model falling under the dominion of the world-projecting artifact) 
was not due to a moral error, but to the intellectual error of confusing the phenomenal 
world for the real. This theory dovetails with my proposition that our world is a counterfeit 
projection; to take it for something ontologically real would indeed constitute a dreadful 
intellectual error. Maybe this is the explanation. We got entangled in enchantment, a 
gingerbread cottage that beguiled us into enslavement and ruin. Perhaps a major 
premise of my cosmogony-cosmology is wrong; the Urgrund did not create the artifact, 
but somehow allowed itself or parts of itself to fall victim to a snare, an alluring trap. So 
we are not merely enslaved; we are trapped. The artifact deliberately projected an 
illusion that would entrance us and lead us in. 

Sometimes, however, a trap such as a spider's web (to cite only one of many) 
accidentally traps a deadly entity, capable of killing the trapmaker. This may be the case 
here. We may not be what we seem even to ourselves. 

Sometimes, but not often, the existence of evil is traced back to the dual nature of 
God himself. I have already discussed the dual nature of Shiva and Christ -- Shiva 
especially, who is often pictured as the god of death. Here are two examples. 

Jakob Bohme. "God goes through stages of self-development, he taught, and the 
world is merely the reflection of this process. Bohme anticipated Hegel in claiming that 
the divine self-development occurs by means of a continuing dialectic, or tension of 
opposites, and that it is the negative qualities of the dialectic that men experience as the 
evil of the world. Even though Bohme, for the most part, stressed absoluteness and 
relativity equally, his view that the world is a mere reflection of the divine -- apparently 
denying self-development on the part of creatures -- tends toward acosmic pantheism" 
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Pantheism and Panentheism"). 

During my enormous revelations and anamnesis in March 1974 I perceptually 


observed God and reality combined, and progressing through stages of evolution by 
means of a dialectic, but I did not experience what I called "the blind counterplayer," 
which is to say the dark side as part of God. However, although I perceived this dialectic 
between good and evil, I could not ascertain anything as to the source of the evil. 
However, I did see the good side making use of it against its will, since the dark 
counterplayer was blind and therefore could be made use of for good purposes. 

Hans Driesch (1867-1941). "My soul and my entelechy are One in the sphere of 
the Absolute." And it is at the level of the Absolute only that we can speak of 
"psychophysical interaction." But the Absolute, so understood, transcends all 
possibilities of our knowing, and it is "an error to take, as did Hegel, the sum of its traces 
for the Whole." All considerations of normal mental life lead us only to the threshold of 
the unconscious; it is in dreamlike and certain abnormal cases of mental life that we 
encounter "the depths of our soul." . . . My sense of duty indicates the general direction 
of the suprapersonal development. The ultimate goal, however, remains unknown. From 
this point of view, history took on its particular meaning for Driesch. Throughout his work 
Driesch's orientation is intended to be essentially empirical. Any argument concerning 
the nature of the ultimately Real will therefore have to be hypothetical only. It starts with 
the affirmation of the "given" as consequent of a conjectural "ground." His guiding 
principle in the realm of metaphysics amounts to this: The Real that I posit must be so 
constituted that it implicitly posits all our experiences. If we can conceive and posit such 
a Real, then all laws of nature, and all true principles and formulas of the sciences, will 
merge into it, and all our experiences will be "explained" by it. And since our experience 
is a mixture of wholeness (the organic and the mental realms) and nonwholeness (the 
material world), Reality itself must be such that I can posit a dualistic foundation of the 
totality of my experience. In fact, to bridge -- aw fuck. In fact, there is nothing -- not even 
within the ultimately Real -- to bridge the gap between wholeness and nonwholeness. 
And this means, for Driesch, that ultimately there is either God and "non-God," or a 
dualism within God himself. To put it differently, either the theism of the Judeo-Christian 
tradition or a pantheism of a God continually "making himself" and transcending his own 
earlier stages is ultimately reconcilable with the facts of experience. Driesch himself 
found it impossible to decide between these alternatives. He was sure, however, that a 
materialistic-mechanistic monism would not do (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2). 

It would appear that Bohme and T -- I'm at the end of my rope; I can't even type, 
let alone think. That Bohme and Driesch are talking about the same thing, and that both 
are process philosophers (or theologians, like Whitehead). Both stress dialectic quality in 
God; Driesch sees the dialectic working itself out in history. This is almost certainly the 
dialectic that I saw during my March 1974 revelations, and I am willing to admit that it is 
certainly possible that the blind, dark counterplayer against which the vitalistic good 
element worked could be "God's own earlier stages," as Driesch viewed it. One thing I 
like about Driesch is the fact that at a certain point he simply said, "I don't know." That's 
where I'm at and have been at for a long time; I just do not know. God created 
everything; evil exists as part of the everything; therefore God is the source of evil -- that 
is the logic, and in monotheism there is no escape from this argument. If you posit two 
(or more) gods, including an evil god, you have the problem of, Where did it come from? 
But that problem exists for monotheism, too; if there is only one god, where did he come 
from? Answer: from the same place the two gods of dualism came from. In other words, 
I see this problem of origin as equally difficult for monotheism to answer as it is for a 


dualism. We just don't know. 

If we regard evil as simply earlier stages of a god in process, which he is working 
to overcome -- well, that does fit my own personal revelations, and is syntonic to me. I 
was shown how the whole thing works but I did not comprehend what I was seeing; they 
were showing it to Mortimer Snerd. I did have the feeling that I was witnessing a cosmic 
two-person board game, with our world as the board, and that one side (the winning 
side) was benign, and the other was neither winning nor was it benign; it was just very 
powerful, but hindered by the fact that it was blind. The good side possessed absolute 
wisdom, could therefore absolutely foresee the future, and could lay down moves long in 
advance of payoffs that the evil, blind, dark counterplayer could not anticipate. It was an 
encouraging vision. In every trick the good won; it beat the dark antagonist unerringly. 
What more could I ask from an Ultimate Vision of Absolute Total Reality? What more do 
I need to know? The score reads: Evil zero; Good infinity. Let me stop there, satisfied; 
the final tally is explicit. 

"The Tagore Letter" (1981) 

All the people who read my recent novel Valis know that I have an alter ego 
named Horselover Fat, who experiences divine revelations (or so he thinks; they could 
be merely hallucinations, as Fat's friends believe). Valis ends with Fat searching the 
world for the new savior, who, he has been told by a mysterious voice, is about to be 
born. Well, Fat has had another vision, the one he was waiting for. He got me to write 
this as a way of telling the world -- the readership of Niekas, more precisely -- about it. 
Poor Fat! His madness is complete now, for he supposes that in his vision he actually 
saw the new savior. 

I asked Fat if he was sure he wanted to talk about this, since he would only be 
proving the pathology of his condition. He replied, "No, Phil; they'll think it's you." Damn 
you, Fat, for putting me in this double bind. Okay; your vision, if true, is overwhelmingly 
important; if spurious, well, what the hell. I will say about it that it has a curiously 
practical ring; it does not deal with another world but this world, and extreme is its 
message -- extreme in the sense that if true we are faced with a grave and urgent 
situation. So let 'er rip, Fat. 

The new savior was born in -- or now lives in -- Ceylon (Sir Lanka). He is dark-
skinned and either a Buddhist or Hindu. He works in the rural countryside with an 
organization or institute practicing high-technology veterinarian medicine, mainly with 
large animals such as cattle (most of the staff are white). His name is Tagore something; 
Fat could not catch his last name: It is very long. Although Tagore is the second 
reincarnation of Christ, he is taken to be Lord Krishna by the local population. Tagore is 
burned and crippled; he cannot walk but must be carried. As near as Fat could make 
out, Tagore is dying, but he is dying voluntarily: Tagore has taken upon himself 
mankind's sins against the ecosphere. Most of all it is the dumping of toxic wastes into 
the oceans of the world that shows up on Tagore's body as serious burns. Tagore's 
kerygma [teaching], which is the Third Dispensation (following the Mosaic and 
Christian), is: The ecosphere is holy and must be preserved, protected, venerated, and 


cherished --as a unity: not the life of individual men or individual animals but the 
ecosphere as a single indivisible unitary whole, a life chain that is being destroyed, and 
not just temporarily but for all time. The demonic trinity against which Tagore speaks -and 
that is wounding and killing him -- consists of nuclear wastes, nuclear weapons, and 
nuclear power (reactors); they constitute the enemy that not only may destroy the 
ecosphere but already, as toxic wastes, are destroying it now. So again Christ acts out 
his role of vicarious atonement; he takes upon himself man's sins. But these sins are 
real, not doctrine sins. Tagore teaches that if we destroy the ecosphere much more, 
Holy Wisdom, the Wisdom of God (represented by Tagore himself), will abandon man to 
his fate, and that fate is doom. 

Tagore teaches that when the ecosphere is burned, God himself is burned, for 
the Christ has invaded the ecosphere and invisibly assimilated it to himself through 
transubstantiation -- which is the great vision Horselover Fat has in my novel Valis. Thus 
Christ and the ecosphere are either one or rapidly becoming one -- much as Teilhard de 
Chardin describes in The Phenomenon of Man. The ecosphere does not evolve into the 
Cosmic Christ, however; Christ penetrates it, which is exactly what Fat saw and that so 
amazed him. Thus Christ now speaks out -- not just for the salvation of mankind or 
certain men, "the elect" -- but for the ecosphere as a whole, from the snail darter on up. 
This is a systems concept and was beyond their vocabulary in apostolic times; it has to 
do with the indivisibility of all life on this planet, as if this planet itself were alive. And 
Christ is both the soma [the body] and psyche (the head) of that collective life. Hence 
the ultimate statement by Tagore -- expressed by his voluntary passion and death -- is, 
He who wounds the ecosphere wounds God, literally. Thus a macrocrucifixion is taking 
place now, in and as our world, but we do not see it; Tagore, the new incarnation in 
human form of the Logos, tells us this in order to appeal to us to stop. If we continue we 
will lose God's Presence and, finally, we will lose our own physical lives. The oceans 
especially are menaced; Tagore speaks of this most urgently. When each canister of 
radioactive waste is dumped into the ocean, a new stigma appears on Tagore's terribly 
burned, seared legs. Fat was horrified by the sight of these burns, the legs of the savior 
drawn up in pain. Fat did not see Tagore's face, only his tragically burned body, and yet 
(Fat tells me) there was an ineffable sweetness about Tagore "like music and perfume 
and colors," as Fat phrased it to me. Burned as he is, wounded and dying as he is, 
Tagore nonetheless emits only loving beauty, absolute beauty, not relative beauty. It 
was a sight that Fat will never forget. I wish I could have shared it, but I had better things 
to do: watch TV and play electronic computer games. All that good stuff by which we 
fritter away our lives, while the ecosphere, wounded and in pain and in mortal danger, 
cries out for our help. 

Part Six 
Selections from the Exegesis 

All of the selections are published here for the first time. Two of these selections 
were given titles by Dick -- a rarity in the Exegesis as a whole. 

"Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model of Reality Updating Historic Models, in 


Particular Those of Gnosticism and Christianity" (1977) is credited, by Dick, as being the 
joint work of himself and his friend SF writer K. W. Jeter. Jeter recalls that while the 
ideas emerged in the course of conversation between them, the writing is by Dick alone. 

The final selection herein -- "The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: The Secret 
Meaning of the Great System of Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed for the First 
Time" -- is the longest Exegesis entry published to date. It is atypical from most 
Exegesis entries in possessing an essaylike structure and in having been typed out. 
Very likely it was intended as a summary of findings, as was "Cosmogony and 
Cosmology" (1978), included in a previous section. Was Dick serious about the title? In 
all probability, yes. Was he also satirizing his very efforts at comprehending Truth? 
Almost certainly. 

The Exegesis is a free-roaming affair -- as a nightly journal devoted to the 
expression of one's inmost (and ever-changing) thoughts on the largest and most 
perplexing issues of life would naturally be. Careful selections serve it well, for there is 
within it much repetition, much fretful worrying over past crisis moments in his life, many 
futile stabs at insight, and occasional bouts of pettiness and spleen. At its best, however, 
the flights of the Exegesis through impossibly possible worlds are remarkable. 

From the Exegesis (c. 1975) 

The architect of our world, to help us, came here as our servant, disguised, to toil 
for us. We have seen him many times but no [one] recognized him; maybe he is ugly in 
appearance, but with a good heart. Perhaps sometimes when he comes here he has 
forgotten his own origin, his godly power; he toils for us unaware of his true nature and 
what he could do to us if he remembered. For one thing, if we realized that this crippled, 
misshapen thing was our creator, we would be disappointed. Would reject and despise 
him, but of courtesy to us he hides his identity from us while here. 

One can see from this that that which we kick off to one side of the road, out of 
the way, which feels the toe of our boot -- that may well be our God, albeit unprotesting, 
only showing pain in his eyes, that old, old pain that he knows so well. I notice, though, 
that although we kick him off to one side in pain, we do let him toil for us; we accept that. 
We accept his work, his offerings, his help; but him we kick away. He could reveal 
himself, but he would then spoil our illusion of a beautiful god. But he doesn't look evil, 
like Satan; just homely. Unworthy. Also, although he has vast creative and building 
power, and judgment, he is not clever. He is not a bright god. Often he is too dumb to 
know when he's being teased or insulted; it takes physical pain, rather than mere scorn, 
to register. 

Ugly like this, despised and teased and tormented and finally put to death, he 
returned shining and transfigured; our Savior, Jesus Christ (before him Ikhnaton, 
Zoroaster, etc; Hefestus [or Hephaestus]). When He returned we saw Him as he really is 
-- that is, not by surface appearance. His radiance, his essence, like Light. The God of 
Light wears a humble and plain shell here (like a metamorphosis of some humble toiling 
beetle). 

SF novel: Hefestus as VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System]. 


The Earth like St. Sofia is an organism, a living one, being built, a Temple that 
when it is ready the Lord will suddenly come to and dwell in. He Himself is creator: 
architect. Workmen/artisans/artists: Us and Holy Spirit. Ideal Logos/form: Christ, to be 
achieved. The model once glimpsed then to be striven for and reached, at which time 
Architect (Creator), Holy Spirit, and Ideal become One, which includes us within it as 
bits. Creator: time past. Holy Spirit: time is. Christ: time completed. Holy Spirit guides us 
toward Him. Force is provided by the Creator at the start. Force/activity/direction to goal. 

c. 1976 
The victory of Christ (as Lord of the Cosmos) over astral (planetary) determinism 
is better expressed, for us today, by saying, It is the coming into being of a thinking 
cosmos replacing a merely deterministic, causal, unthinking mechanism of fate or blind 
chance. Thus the characteristics of this new "body" or organism would be that, if 
perceived by one of us, it would seem to be a living creature of cosmic size, wisdom, 
scope, and power, infiltrating the natural (i.e. deterministic) order of nature. This, when I 
saw Valis or Zebra, is precisely what I saw. Therefore it is evident i that the process of 
transubstantiation of the deterministic "astral" mechanism into a living body or entity is 
far progressed. What I saw, then, was none other than the cosmic Christ. Beneath their 
unchanged outward appearances, natural processes (i.e. causal processes) are to some 
extent, a decisive extent, purposeful, conscious, and benign, and organized to fulfill a 
coherent plan. The palpable revelation of this is the supreme revelation. For instance, it 
intervened decisively in human history in 3-74 on. 'All that remains is for the second 
incarnation to occur; i.e. the veil to ; drop, God's Wisdom to appear openly here, that all 
may be aware of it and acknowledge it. Perhaps what I saw was a preview, and 
eventually everyone will see as I saw, and what I saw, in 3-74. 

He will not merely rule the universe; he will also be the universe. 

What I saw, then, was an apocalypse (disclosure) of the invisible Parousia, the 
Presence that is now here. At this point, an apocalypse is still needed, because the 
Parousia is still hidden. 

The role in my life of the whole CP, Soviet thing was that it was, for me, the 
"astral" of deterministic power, which Christ broke by his intervention. 

Could it be said that in 3-74 Christ interfered with the generic coding that had 
programmed me to die at that time? That this (genetic coding) is a modern term for at 
least one aspect of (astral) determinism? My gene-pool (DNA) memory fired -- opened 
up; I know that. And I am reasonably sure I was programmed, at least internally, to die 
(of cardiovascular problems). There also may have been external deterministic death-
dealing factors that he aborted as well. This is a modern model for what the ancients 
called "sublunar" or "planetary" or "astral" influences. This would explain my retrieval of 
long-term (gene pool) memory; the whole system either opened up or was opened up. 
My sense that it (the Xerox letter) had happened before shows the karmalike quality of 
such genetic programming. The technical theological term for this is God's grace. But to 
appreciate the value of God's grace, this entire deterministic structure must be properly 
understood, and its magnitude -- and power over us -- comprehended. It is a vast, nearly 
all-encompassing system from which few are extricated during this lifetime. 


The part of my March 18, 1974 experience that precisely delineates it as having 
been of Christ, as compared to God or to the Holy Spirit, was (1) that it took place at the 
vernal equinox, and (2) most of all, the sound of the "Easter" or Magic bells, which are 
specifically identified with Christ. 

It was induced by the Holy Spirit, and did show the Kingdom of God, with the 
presence of God. But the honeycombed corpus that I found myself within -- that was 
Corpus Christi, the mystical body of which Christ is the head, and we of the 
congregation the parts. This is also Hagia Sophia and also the King (who is coming to 
rule). Hence I thought the other day, "I am part of the King." Vide Collosians 1:13 or 
whatever that citation is [1:13-14], Christ as maker and lord of (Pantokrator) the 
universe. Hence I felt joy when I realized I'd seen transubstantiation of the objects (of 
the alley) around me; I was on the right track: Christ's invisible (normally) body. Hence 
the dream of the Mandarin old Chinese king, wise but lacking power. This contrasts 
Christ versus God; the dream was to clarify this distinction (vide doctrine of the Trinity). 
That was not an image of God, who would have power, but rather an image of the wise, 
powerless king, who is Christ. 

Nonetheless, I think Spinoza is correct in his concept of God as immanent, that 
the universe is alive, that God possesses the attribute of physical extension, that mind, 
matter, and energy are three attributes or modes of His Being. . . there is no problem for 
me because I am a Trinitarian. It is only more precise to say that I found myself within, 
as a part of, the mystical body of Christ, rather than of God. Also, we know from 
Scripture that there is such a mystical body (Collosians, supra). No radical theology 
would be required, only this knowledge. No wonder it seems senseless to me when 
someone says, "Christ was a man, like ourselves." Also, no wonder I am attracted to 
Pere Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the "plasmatic" Christ (Corpus Christi). 

Too, this may be why my final phosphene set-ground experience was the Golden 
Rectangle or pylon-entrance doorway. "I am the way." It would appear that the ICC is 
correct, that the written text of the New Testament is incomplete. You are baptized. The 
Spirit comes to you. What then? Then you experience yourself as part of the mystical 
Corpus Christi, which Paul speaks of in Collosians. Reunited with Christ, with His 
growing resurrected light-body. Taken into it (which is not the same as the Kingdom of 
God arriving on Earth, the Parousia). This was the "secret of secrets," and was forgotten 
after the Romans killed them and destroyed the oral tradition. One could commune with 
Christ again (or Hagia Sophia, vide Spinoza). One important difference that suggests 
itself to me between being part of the body of God (as in Spinoza) and part of the 
"mystical Corpus Christi" is that the first would be pure mystical perception, and that 
everything truly, if perceived right, belongs to it; this is an elevation of perception only, 
however important. But the latter is, so to speak, "by invitation only," belonging only to 
"the congregation." It is more than perception, it is an entering in which not all (I 
presume) share in. Perhaps that's why that -- the latter -- would seem more valuable; it 
would mean not just that I saw with the "Wisdom of God" but that I was taken by His 
yoke, so to speak, to join His (Christ's) mystical body, which is more; the first just states 
actually what is, one is not welcomed, everything is. One has not been judged or sought 
out. But I saw the "hotel register" where my name was written and so forth. I was judged; 
I felt that. And I now think brought into the Corpus Christi. Also, to perceive an immanent 
God, that the material universe is the soma [Greek: body] of God, and there is Mind 
behind it as well -- this doesn't supply any basis for believing in an afterlife, for anything 


next or beyond in that direction; whereas the mystic Corpus Christi does. It is a 
demonstration of the reality of the resurrection, which the former isn't; the former is 
great, though, inasmuch as it demonstrates the reality of God and theological purpose; it 
must not be put down. The latter gives more personally. 

This would be why I felt I was receiving from a hidden (occult) brotherhood, 
represented by armed knights. . . the knights of the grail, so to speak. And the content of 
my experience: I was shown specifically the Christian brotherhood toppling Rome, now. 
The siege of us prisoners being lifted by the body of armored knights on horseback at 
the outer walls. The "mystical body of Christ" of which we are parts and he is the head -this 
would be a sort of midway concept of the source, standing between pure mystical 
perception of immanent God (a la Spinoza) and a strictly human wisdom (gnostic, 
AMORC, Roman Catholic, etc.) brotherhood. The head is divine (theos), the members 
are of the human congregation. Its presence is actually here (now), in and on our world, 
in our society, making changes (the rock torn not by human hands and hurled at the 
statue, as in Daniel). (And I did hear, hypnogogically, "I am part of the King.") 

Palmer -- crossed palm trees. Palm trees are a Christian symbol of the Holy 
Land; what I saw in 2-75, then, is a vision of the Holy Land. I did not go (journey) to it; it 
came to me. I was already seeing a palm tree (like the Afrika Korps palm tree emblem) 
in the FISH sign, months before. The palmer sign, perhaps. In hoc signo, etc. [In hoc 
signo vinces: In this sign we conquer.] Again, we have here symbols specifically of 
Christianity, rather than of God per se (as distinguished from). Also, a building in the 
Holy Land, with Romanesque arches. Memory of the Sacred Other, from its "former 
life"? A building where the White Brotherhood (etc.) met? The significance of my seeing 
this might be: My search is over. I had reached my destination, the end of my journey. 
(And, very soon after, the voice of St. Sophia dimmed away entirely from my mind. The 
one full year, from vernal equinox to vernal equinox, had evidently ended.) It all must be 
regarded as a searching for and a finding of (vide the quest represented in my various 
novels). 

c. 1976 
I Am a Living Animal, Tied to a Dying Soul.

 -- PKD 

1. The Greeks considered reality veiled (by dokos [Greek: deception], e.g. 
Parmenides). 
2. The Hindus consider reality veiled (by Maya, which we generate ourselves, but 
which also Kali spins) (cf. Heinrich Zimmer [noted Indologist]). 
3. Calvin considered us blinded, that once we could see what is really there, but 
were punished (this dovetails a little with Empedocles and with Castaneda, with 
shamanism in general, and hence with the mystery religions, e.g., Dionysos). 
4. Augustine considered the City of God mingled with the City of Earth so as to 
make them indistinguishable to us now; but at the Parousia, they will be separated (to 
our senses). 
5. Zoroaster believed as 4. Good (Ahriman and Ahura-Mazda, the light and dark 

blended; but at the Final Day, the two portions would be visibly separate). 

All are dealing with the problem of phenomenology of accident versus essence: Kant's 
Ding-an-sich [thing in itself]. "This crumbling pageant." 

6. I once saw appearance, then briefly (five days) assimilated the objects of 
perception (noetically) and then returned to ordinary perception of appearance, the 
"reflection" of reality (Plato, Paul, etc.). My experience proves that all views that we see 
only "a reflection from the bottom of a polished metal pan" are correct, FOR 
WHATEVER REASON, the latter being in doubt only. I did not see; then I saw; then I did 
not see again (exactly as Paul says). Why the first? Why the second? Why the return of 
the first? Teilhard's view of an evolutionary step forward? Or anamnesis, restoration of 
lost faculties (Calvin)? Or coiled, cyclic time? Moebius strip time? 
Is change (Dionysos, metamorphosis) real? Heraclitus/Christ Teilhard 

Or: Is unchange (Apollo, the healers) real? Parmenides, Jahweh 

Is the search itself the goal (as is said)? 

My Gollancz speech ["Man, Android, and Machine" (1976), included in this 
volume] is insane but true. And I knew more then, noetically; what I've read since bears 
it out. The madman speaks the moral of the piece. 

If we deceive ourselves, why? If someone/something else deceives us, then why 
and also who? Wacht auf! [Wake up!] Brahmin (it, not he). It dreams, and now wakes, or 
it was awake, and now falls asleep; I think it is waking. The universe-organism of the 
Greek philosophers: It wakes and sees. Cells, forming a Great Brain. Bees in a hive. 
Rising now to consciousness. Of what? Itself? There are no answers, only mysteries 
(not questions but mysteries: secrets. Sacred secrets, not disclosed to us. But not by 
whom? Well, when I woke, those five days, change was real: a process. Cosmogenesis 
(Teilhard). Toward. Omega. 

Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model 
of Reality Updating Historic Models, 
in Particular Those of Gnosticism and 
Christianity (1977) 


It is proper to say: We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of 
experience) in a computerlike thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded 
and stored thousands of years of experiential information (knowledge, gnosis), and each 
of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a 
malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular 
subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis -- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) 


- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, 
identity, cognition, understanding, world- and self-experience, including immortality -- it 
has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole, 
inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it, and to its overall 
functioning. 

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our 
subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well 
as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally 
by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into 
meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and 
hence retrieve what is there. 

The adventitious information of gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting messages 
(instructions), with the core (main) content actually intrinsic to us -- that is, already there 
(first observed by Plato, that learning is a form of remembering). 

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the 
Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and 
retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative (repairing) value to the individuals; the 
Gnostics, however, and Mani correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the 
Godhead Itself (i.e. the total entity). 

PHILIP K. DICK 

K. W. JETER 
12/7/77SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA 

(Note: While such "Enlightened" spiritual leaders as Zoroaster, Mani, Buddha, and Elijah can be regarded 
as receptors of the entity's total wisdom, Christ seems to have been an actual terminal of this computerlike 
entity, in which case he did not speak for it but was it. "Was," in this case, standing for "consisted of a 
microform of it.") 

Late 1972 letter found amongst c. 1977 Exegesis papers 

I almost became a sincere tool of a conspiracy consisting of myself. 

There goes the John Birch Society sincerely trying to save this country from the 
John Birch Society -- from itself. 

Prototype: Pooh and Piglet following the woozle footprints around and around the 
tree. There are more all the time. 

I blew up my own house and forgot I did it. [The reference here is to an episode in 
November 1971 when Dick's house and files were broken into, possibly with the use of 
explosives; his list of suspects for this unsolved crime included himself.] But why did I 
forget I did it? So I'd think I had an actual enemy so I wouldn't have to face the fact that 
I'm paranoid, i.e. crazy. I blew up my house to convince myself I was sane. Anyone who 
would go to that much trouble must really be nuts. So as soon as those who thought I 
was imagining that people were after me saw that my house had been blown up, they 
realized that I was far more paranoid than they had suspected. Their paranoid 
suspicions about me are now much greater. Sensing their paranoid suspicions about 
me, I realize etc. 

Why is everything is short supply? Because everyone is hoarding. Why are they 
hoarding? Because everything is in short supply. 

We all wind up isolated, suspicious of each other, each of us trying to figure out 


what is going on, which means, who is doing it? Who is our enemy? The fact that we 
can't figure out what's going on overloads our brains, overworks our minds; we wear out 
fast, get exhausted and confused. And still we can't locate the enemy. Because we are 
confused we begin to act in an ineffectual way, so our behavior becomes erratic. Others 
who notice our erratic behavior wonder what we are up to. Actually we are up to nothing, 
are merely in the process of burning out over the problem of trying to figure out what 
other people are up to, inasmuch as their various behaviors are becoming more and 
more perplexing. Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all 
assume we know what WE are doing. We don't. They ask us, What are you doing? We 
can't give a coherent account because we don't know, but our failure to give a coherent 
account convinces them that we are lying, and the only reason we would lie is because 
what we are really (doing) ought to be concealed. This confirms their fears and mistrust, 
and they intensify the interrogation. The false premise is, You must know what you're 
doing and if you won't tell me, then you must be lying in order to conceal something I 
wouldn't approve of, which is probably directed at me to hurt me. Each person winds up 
more and more confused, having wasted his time and exhausted himself interrogating 
other persons as confused as himself on the false assumption that they know what's 
going on. Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing 
anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he 
could go home. 

c. 1977 
"Actualities are somehow plucked from a greater sea of possibilities that also 
form part of the truth." This means that the actuality is not true versus possibilities that 
are false; it just means that the actuality is more true; the possibilities are less true but 
also true. This involves the principle of emergence, how a thing comes into being. It is a 
question of degree, not either-or. Possibly the force that selects one possibility and 
makes it the actuality is the pressure on reality -- this greater sea of possibilities -- of the 
human mind. It selects out the actuality by assessing it as more probable. Or it is a 
subtle interaction, a feedback between the sentient mind and this greater sea: Pressure 
is exerted until one possibility among many becomes growingly distinct, which causes 
the pressure to select it out to become more firm. The actuality is merely a particular 
possibility that acquires form and shape and can be discerned. Actualization is a 
gestalting process, and gestalting takes place primarily in the human mind. The mind 
exerts a subtle and continual pressure on certain events and things to be, and on others 
not to be; it shapes reality directly by some field similar to gravitational waves, very weak 
but always there, and in the end effective. Without the presence of human minds and the 
pressure they exert there would be no actualization of anything, and only the greater sea 
of possibilities, of half truths, would exist as a multitude of semiforms, contradicting one 
another but existing side by side. Without real time or space. 

c. 1978 

Through anamnesis you can move retrograde in time, go back and burn up or 
unweave your karma, be born anew to a higher state -- but is this all an interior 
psychological process? It must be; Tessa [Dick's wife who lived with him during the 2-374 
experiences] didn't see Rome c. A.D. 70. But I saw Valis outside me modulating 
reality. Ah; but that was a projection (cf. Jung). Projection explains it, the Magdeburg 
hemispheres. It was my own mind that I was seeing external to me. I traveled down into 
the phylogenic (collective) unconscious. God had nothing to do with it. Right? 

Then what about the messenger who comes in time and bilks the retribution 
machine by withholding from it the bill of particulars against you? Is the messenger an 
archetype of the unconscious? And the AI voice [Artificial Intelligence voice -- Dick's 
name for the hypnogogic voice he heard frequently in 1974-75 and intermittently 
thereafter until his death]; that is my anima? 

c. 1978 
I have it; I advance the following bold theory. Out of the dialectical antithetical 
interaction between the Empire and its enemy, Valis is created, Valis as kosmos. The 
war provides the stockpile of parts -- ever newer and different -- that Valis fits into place 
to form its own soma [body]. Valis is the result and purpose of this contention; the 
contention so to speak generates wreckage -- chaos -- and this is Valis's raw material, 
which it must have, have access to, if it is to complete itself, if it is to continue to grow. 

This fits in with Empedocles' theory that combat is the basis of reality, that 
antithetical combat is necessary for reality to exist (i.e. for there to be einai). 

Thus Valis comes into existence in the midst of this battle, not as an accident, a 
by-product, but as the ultimate purpose; the battle is the means and Valis the end. So 
one kind of reality -- dialectical war -- gives rise to a perfect structure in equilibrium, a 
harmonious fitting together of the beautiful. I saw Valis here. Valis arises from the 
ceaseless dialectic that was revealed to me. I might say that the dialectic is one form of 
universe and Valis another; and in our ontogenic world we see neither. So history is the 
means and Valis the goal -- at least for Valis; it may prey off this combat! The combat 
may not have come into existence for this purpose. Valis uses the combative dialectic 
for its own purposes. Wow. 

Then Valis is the goal of history. Sacred (phylogenic) history: history revealed, as 
in Judaism. 

What is Valis, then? Why, it is the Cosmic Christ, Point Omega. I have seen what 
Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, although I had never read any of his writing. I am sure 
that this is what Valis is; my reading of Paul's letters had already half convinced me. But 
this clinches it. The goal of history. . . and the agent active in this process is the 
Paraclete, working backward from the end of time, entering into good men to make them 
saints and prophets. 

c. 1978 
The Gnostic Christians of the second century believed that only a special 


revelation of knowledge rather than faith could save a person. The contents of this 
revelation could not be received empirically or derived a priori. They considered this 
special gnosis so valuable that it must be kept secret. Here are the ten major principles 
of the gnostic revelation: 

1. The creator of this world is demented. 
2. The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil 
obscuring it and the deranged deity. 
3. There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed 
toward 
a. returning there 
b. bringing it here. 
4. Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to 
remember our origin in the stars. 
5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us 
to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now 
is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician 
disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in 
this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by a demented creator 
causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly 
fall asleep in delusion. 
6. You can pass from the delusional prison world into the peaceful kingdom if the 
True Good God places you under His grace and allows you to see reality through His 
eyes. 
7. Christ gave, rather than received, revelation; he taught his followers how to 
enter the kingdom while still alive, where other mystery religions only bring about 
anamnesis: knowledge of it at the "other time" in "the other realm," not here. He causes 
it to come here, and is the living agency of the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos). 
8. Probably the real, secret Christian church still exists, long underground, with 
the living Corpus Christi as its head or ruler, the members absorbed into it. Through 
participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers. 
9. The division into "two times" (good and evil) and "two realms" (good and evil) 
will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom 
separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date. 
10. During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to 
which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world or the 
One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ. 
To know these ten principles of gnostic Christianity is to court disaster. 


c. 1978 
The belief that we are pluriforms of God voluntarily descended to this prison 
world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity, and supernatural powers (faculties), all of 
which can be regained through anamnesis (or, sometimes, the mystical conjunction), is 
one of the most radical religious views known in the West. But it is known. It is regarded 
as the Great Blasphemy: replication of the original sin mentioned in the First Book of 
Adam and Eve and in Genesis. For this pride and aspiration (we are told by orthodoxy) 
our original fall and exile and punishment, our being taken from our home the 
gardenland and put into the prison, was inflicted on us. "They wish to be equal to -- like 


- us," the Elohim say, and toss us down. Yet I have reason to believe that this, "the 
Great Satanic Blasphemy," is true. 
First, we are here voluntarily. We did not sin and we were not punished; we 
elected to descend. Why? To infuse the divine into the lowest strata of creation in order 
to halt its decomposing -- the sinking of its lower realm. This points to a primordial crisis 
in creation in the total macrocosm (hexagram 12). The yin form two (dark, deterministic) 
part was splitting away from the light or yang or form one. 


In conventional terms, heaven (upper realm) and earth (lower realm) were separating, 
carrying the lives within the lower away from their form one (upper) counterparts (this 
can be viewed as the Godhead itself falling apart, into its yang and yin two halves, with 
the lower form universe as God expressed physically in time and space). The solution 
was for the divine (yang, light, form one) to follow the lower realm down, permeating it 
and thus reuniting the cosmos into one totality. To do this, elements (in ancient terms, 
sparks) of light advanced (descended) into the dark kingdom, the immutable prison 
world; upon doing so they shed (and knew they would shed) their bright nature, memory, 


identity, faculties, and powers, and fell under the dominion of the delusion that the dark 
kingdom is real (which when severed from the upper realm it is not; i.e. the world we 
presently live in doesn't exist). There they have lived as prisoners of the master 
magician, lord of the dark realm who poses as the creator (and who may not know of the 
light god, the true creator, his other half). But the light god and his pluriforms, the 
descending (invading) sparks, have cunningly distributed clues in the dark realm to 
recall to the drugged and intoxicated sparks of light their true nature and mission (and 
true source of home). Upon encountering these cryptic clues the forgetful sparks of the 
upper realm, now prisoners in and of the lower realm, remember, regain their powers 
and faculties, and link back up with the upper realm and the light god; they are the light 
god in pluriform, his way of invading the lower realm in disguise. The light god (the 
divine) has now crucially occupied critical stations in the sinking lower realm, and begins 
the reannexing of it back into the totality composed of both realms. The sinking ceases; 
the master magician is stripped of his autonomy and assimilated to the yang part of the 
Godhead as its passive counterpart, and once more there is one macrocosm ruled by 
the yang or active (creative) light god assisted by the now receptive yin (dark) side. The 
divine has triumphed at all levels; the prison is burst, and the vast, light-filled garden 
kingdom restored as the home of all creatures. These now whole creatures, composed 
equally of yin and yang, are what I term homoplasmates: The yin part is home (as we 
know ourselves to be now, only), and the light or yang part is the plasmate or energy 
part (vs. the physical). Thus renewed and complete microcosms mirroring the renewed 
and complete macrocosm are achieved. Reality is imparted to the otherwise irreal lower 
realm, and the upper realm now extends physically into the realm of matter. The integrity 
of the Godhead is restored; its two halves function in harmony; and the primordial split 
(or crisis) is resolved -- healed. 

This is a view compounded of Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Gnosticism, Taoism, 
the macro-microcosmos of Hermes Trismegistus and other mystery religions, and not 
very much of orthodox Christianity. Christianity can be added if the pluriform 
microsparks of light are considered plural saviors or Christs comprising a single mystical 
corpus that is distributed widely in time and space in the dark realm but possessing only 
one psyche that is somehow also God, the yang or light god. 

I have read the above cosmology over, and find no fault in it. In fact, I am 
amazed. It is in a sense acosmic, and certainly Gnostic, but the Taoist overlay is novel 
and pleasing; the Taoist overlay redeems it from the flaws of conventional dualist 
religions and the problems therein. Instead of stressing moral aspects ("good vs. bad"), 
it stresses epistemological ("real vs. irreal," which I can understand). The lower realm 
sinks not because it is corrupt or evil or somehow has rebelled but because, as shown in 
hexagram 12, it is the nature of yin to sink, as it is the nature of yang to rise. The pre-
Socratics (and Plato in "Timaeus") were aware of this; v. the model of the winnowing fan 
and the concept of the vortex. Yang must assimilate yin to keep the totality intact; i.e. 
yang must renounce its natural tendency to rise and must descend. It cannot expect yin 
to rise, because yin is not wise; it is only noos that can understand that it must 
compensate against its own natural tendencies, and do what is unnatural to it. Yin is, so 
to speak, thick, unthinking, not noos [mind] but soma [body]; noos and soma (or psyche 
and soma) are the total universe organism. Descending into the yin realm is a sacrifice 
on yang's part, which through its bright or wise nature it realizes it must make, but it 
pays a great cost in terms of suffering: loss of memory and identity, abilities, and 


faculties: It becomes pseudoyin, literally disguised in the yin realm as if it were actually 
yin, even to the point of forgetting (until reminded), that it is not. This is the agony we 
face here in this irreal and dense yin realm, we yang traces: This is not our home. We 
are voluntary exiles here, alienated and alone, violating our own natures for a salvific 
purpose -- a necessary purpose. Yin would not understand this, and until anamnesis 
sets in for us, we in our distress do not understand the reason either. Eventually it will be 
revealed to us; meanwhile we ache with longing for our proper home, dimly remembered 
but deeply felt for. Thus we suppose we are being punished; it feels like punishment, 
and [we] make the error of assuming we have sinned. On the contrary; we have 
renounced joy now, to produce a greater joy later, for the good of all creation; we are the 
Godhead itself suffering the need to be what it is not, to ensure the ultimate stability of 
krasis (as Empedocles termed it): the unity of love. 

Lest any Christian reject this, let him now read the Fourth Gospel in connection 
with this, and see for himself the similarities. 

Lest any Taoist reject this, let him now see that hexagram 12 


has turned to hexagram 11, Peace: 


The upper trigram, in descending, has forced the lower trigram to rise. Disorder no 
longer reigns; heaven and earth are not pulling apart. There is harmony. 

Moral: It is the ethical requirement placed on the yang traces by their own bright 
nature to abandon their natural tendency to rise, to escape what is heavy and dark and 
sinking; they must go in pursuit of the falling part of the cosmos, for the benefit of those 
and that which otherwise would be lost. This is the highest law: to violate one's own 
nature for another's good. And the most difficult -- and painful -- law to fulfill. Because of 
this need there is distress in the cosmos, distress for the innocent especially. My 
cosmology simply presents it as a fact. To escape it we would have to allow the cosmos 
to decompose. Could we do that? The tragedy is that by the very nature of the sacrifice 
we make we are occluded from knowing why. This is part of our sacrifices: our yang 


understanding. We must take on the dullness of yin to save the cosmos; we sacrifice the 
knowledge of why we sacrifice, and assume guilt -- spurious guilt -- in its place. This is 
asking a lot. 

But consider who we really are. Or once were and will be again. Who else can do 
it? There is no one else. There is only yin, which does not know. The part of the 
organism that knows must help the part that doesn't know, but this means abandoning 
its own knowing. It becomes what it helps, a dreadful irony, one that hurts. But it is only 
temporary, just for a little while. And then we go home for all eternity. 

The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine: 
The Secret Meaning of the Great System of 
Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed 
for the First Time (March 2, 1980) 


So to explain 2-3-74 I draw on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Orphism, 
Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, and the Cabala; my 
explanation sources are the highest --which is good and which makes sense. But put 
another way, starting at the other end, I have synthesized all these high sources and 
derived a single sensationally revolutionary occult doctrine out of them (which I was able 
to think up due to the addition of my 2-3-74 experience); the distillate expressed 
theoretically is, We are dead but don't know it, reliving our former lives but on tape 
(programmed), in a simulated world controlled by Valis the master entity or reality 
generator (like Brahman), where we relive in a virtually closed cycle again and again 
until we manage to add enough new good karma to trigger off divine intervention, which 
wakes us up and causes us to simultaneously both remember and forget, so that we can 
begin our reascent back up to our real home. This, then, is purgatorio, the afterlife, and 
we are under constant scrutiny and judgment, but don't know it, in a perfect simulation of 
the world we knew and remember -- v. Ubik and Lem's paradigm [see "The Android and 
the Human," included herein]. We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping 
lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life 
is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise 
endless reliving of a portion of our former life. This, then, is the sophia summa of the six 
esoteric systems -- seven if you count alchemy -- of the entire world. Eight if you count 
hermeticism. We are dead, don't know it, and mechanically relive our life in a fake world 
until we get it right. Ma'at [an Egyptian goddess who weighed the souls of the dead in 
the balance to determine their virtue] has judged us; we are punished, but we can 
change the balance. . . but we don't know we are here to do this, let alone know where 
we are. We must change the "groove" for the better or just keep coming back, not 
remembering, not reascending. 

Judaism enters, too, since the change in the "groovE" [sic] that introduces the 
right new good karma restores us to Eden, to our phylogenic original unfallen state. It 
may be a small act on our part that adds the good karma, a small decision, but this 
reminds me of the story told of Moses and the lamb that wanted to drink at the stream 
(Moses, upon finding that the lamb had laboriously made its way to the stream, said, 


"Had I known that thou wert thirsty I would have carried thee hence myself," to which a 
voice from Heaven replied, "Then thou thyself art fit to be the shepherd of Israel"). 

The reason why a small good act may tilt the scales is that you will be reenacting 
the good deeds that you acted out before, and some may be huge, but they in toto were 
not enough to tip Ma'at's scale to provide you with adjudication of release to reascend. 
So the small act is new; it is an addition, but you are not aware that you are on tape, that 
this small, good act did not occur before; this time you have decided differently in a 
given situation: done the right thing this time. And a small act may reveal character even 
more than a vast one regarding which you have made a weighty and long-pondered 
decision. Spontaneity may be a crucial factor as an index of character. 

In this synthesized occult system the maximum statement is the first: We are 
dead. Then: We have been made to relive a portion of our former, actual life as a 
punishment that is also an opportunity; hence this is not hell, because the possibility 
exists of performing a new act (in what is virtually a closed system) that will change the 
balance of the scale on which Ma'at weighs us. Also there is a complex picture of 
anamnesis and reascent, but this is well known from Plato and other sources. 

There is an odd paradox in this earning new good karma situation by introducing 
a novel deed, however small. You must not know the scheme of things, because if you 
knew the scheme of things (i.e. the theoretical system put forth herewith) your good 
deed will be contaminated by the knowledge of the likely payoff for you; that is, it is no 
longer disinterested. Therefore Valis must, if the salvific mechanism of deed and then 
judgment is to work, keep himself totally and absolutely concealed, and the nature of the 
situation concealed, i.e. rerun of the actual world and the fact that we are being 
appraised for the introduction of a novel good deed that is an index of spontaneous 
character, which is to say, real nature of character. 

So of course Valis does not disclose himself to us; and the quality (aspect) of 
simulation is likewise concealed. We are not to know where we are nor why. Valis must 
be able to observe us through a one-way screen. For example, there is no way I can add 
to my good karma store now because I know the situation. 

The books on me then must be closed; they have to be. Once Valis discloses 
itself the situation is over; you are bound for heaven or hell, but the midrealm of 
purgatorio is shut to you forever. 

Therefore it can be reasoned that Valis will show as few times as possible, and, if 
he does reveal himself to a person, Valis will becloud the situation so that the person 
cannot make the knowledge he has -- hence the real situation -- generally well known. 
(NOTE: This system makes use of my ten-volume meta novel. This is valuable to me.) 

Also, I wasn't granted release (salvation) because I handled the Xerox missive 
right; I handled it right because I had been saved, and by another and unrelated act -- a 
future act -- entirely. 

Further: I was saved by an act of free will on my part that occurred after I was 
granted salvation; cause and effect occurred backward (retrograde) in time. 

You know, in this system (understanding) there is the basis of a teaching of 
salvation having to do with the entirely gratuitous good act, done out of unpremeditated 
and hence spontaneous free will, in contrast to programmed works of deterministic duty; 
there is an obvious Zen quality to it. No formula can be located for the performance of 
these acts; they would have almost a contrary quality, contrary to your normal way of 
being in the world. They would literally set you apart -- off -- from yourself, the self that 


failed to pass Ma'at's scale. They would emanate from the not-you (the normal not-you), 
from another and more real you, as if from another personality locked up within you and 
alluded to only by these acts. Thus the single personality becomes reborn; two selves 
exist, one of which is the old, the programmed, the not-saved. Yes; you would have to 
act contrary to your own nature; you would get outside yourself. Suddenly I think, This 
sounds like "Thomas" [an early Christian personage who, Dick sometimes speculated, 
had crossbonded with him during the events of 2-3-74]! Why, it would be; "Thomas" did 
precisely what he/I did not do the first time around -- then this verifies my system, for this 
system posits the need, the absolute need, of a "Thomas" to break heimarmene 
[deluding power of the spurious world] and hence damnation. Only this not-you act or 
acts could save you, actions without a history. QED! For it was with "Thomas" that the 
new and unprogrammed veered off from what happened the first time, and there indeed 
was a first time. I am saying, we in purgatorio to be saved must do what we would not do 
if we are to be saved, because doing what we would do damned us to this place. Yet 
how does a person become "born again" and do what he would not do? This is a 
mystery; obviously IT MUST BE DONE TOTALLY WITHOUT THE NORMAL USUAL 
ANALOGIC IDEATION (RATIOCINATION), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT 
HAPPENED WITH "THOMAS": HE ACTED TOTALLY WITHOUT IDEATION, AND DID 
WHAT I WOULD NOT HAVE DONE, AND I SAID, THIS IS NOT ME: HERE IS 
ANOTHER PERSON IN ME. And this continued for some time. 

Thus there is literally a second birth, and ex nihilo. 

Thus from these facts I can correctly ascertain that indeed "Thomas's" actions 
were not programmed, not part of the original world and life. They were an ideationless 
overpowering, as if located only in my motor centers. "Thomas" was not born in my brain 
but born in my body, e.g. my hands and tongue; he moved and spoke, but in my brain 
there were no ideas or thoughts or intentions; he was intentionless, and yet had 
absolute purpose. Purpose without intent! Plan without plan! Or rather goal without plan. 
Truly it was Zen. Yes; indeed it was. So my theory (herewith) demands/predicts 
salvation by a not-you ideationless self acting at the moment of crisis when the taped 
world (or track of heimarmene) branches off into the new and free, and upon 
retrospective analysis we find "Thomas," precisely that. I can now rule out Pigspurt 
forever. It branches off into the new and free precisely because this not-you ideationless 
act occurs; these are the two sides of the same thing. After that, heimarmene never sets 
in again; it is broken forever, since you are not reliving your actual life but living your 
actual -- new and free -- life; so only during the subsequent new and free period could I 
perform a freewill act, such as I did, that gained me good additional karma and hence 
salvation (release). So this has to be the sequence: First the not-self not-you 
ideationless ex nihilo act that abolishes the replay determinism, the tape, and then (and 
only then) are you free to perform a new act. The first should have a technical name, 
and also the second. 

We will call the first: groove override. Or GO. 

We will call the second: new free merit-deed. Or NFMD. 

If you do GO, but subsequently fail to do NFMD but instead do evil, you will gain 
new bad karma. All that GO gives you is the freedom to act; it does not guarantee more 
merit (good karma); that must be done later and separately. So you could get the GO 
without the NFMD. You could have a new free demerit-deed or NFDD, and as a result 
you would again fail Ma'at and be sent back yet another time, perhaps forever; you 


would have lost your chance for release. GO can be done without NFMD but not vice 
versa. Yet this is not quite so, since the divine forces (Christ, the Buddha) are working to 
save you. They (apparently) will not grant you the GO situation unless through their 
omniscience they see NFMD lying ahead along the linear time axis. But I can't say for 
sure that if there is GO it means they know for sure there will be NFMD in the future; if 
you do it by free will -- well, I can probably never settle this, but being omniscient they 
probably know how to grant you GO only if NFMD lies ahead of you based on your own 
free choice. Put another way, they do not grant you actual freedom unless they know in 
advance that you will put it to a wise use, so then there is reverse cause and effect, 
effect (NFMD) operating as cause retroactive in time to GO, to cause GO. 

Wait. I'm saying GO is causally the effect of NFMD. And I'm saying that NFMD 
can't happen without GO. So it's an up-by-his-bootstrap situation, a self-causing 
situationthen truly it is ex nihilo (no wonder there was no ideation!). This is a time-
travel paradox. Both GO and NFMD are generated within a close [sic] system out of 
nothing and enter from nowhere; that is, from outside the system. GO is dependent for 
its existence on NFMD, and NFMD on GO, so which is cause and which is effect? 
Answer: Each is the cause of the other and the effect of the other. Consider the original 
groove-tracking situation. How do you get out of it? Answer: You have to be out of it to 
get out of it; look to the Tao of physics ([Fritjhof] Capra) and the bootstrap theory for the 
answer; I knew I was dealing with field theory and quanta when I dealt with Valis. Put 
even more simply, How can you do something you would not do?, which is required for 
salvation in my system (disregarding the temporal factor the paradox still remains). 
There would have to be a psychological (mental) death and rebirth as someone 
different; but where did it come from? Hence "Thomas," who knew not the dog, car, nor 
cat [i.e. was unfamiliar with basic aspects of Dick's life]. It is possible that the only event 
that could make this possible would be abasement, suffering and pain and apprehension 
and tension so great that it would break down the historical self and literally assassinate 
it. In the absence of when, thereupon, an ex nihilo new self would come onto [sic] 
existence, like a newly granted second soul. This brings me back to my shamanist 
analysis of the crucifixion, the Passion of Christ story, as a secret method of overcoming 
the world (as Jesus put it); viz.: The world overcomes you; you die; a new self is born; it 
is ipso facto in a GO situation, for, being new, it will not track the old groove; the twin 
tapes simply won't work, since the outer tape remains but not the inner. The way to 
destroy synchronization is to destroy the self (you can't very well destroy the world), and 
the best way to destroy the self is to bilk the world into doing it. But this is a tricky 
business because you must not physically die; you must be alive to perform the NFMD. 
The early Christians themselves soon got it wrong and began to leap under Roman 
chariot wheels, upon which they physically died, making NFMD impossible. That they 
failed is shown by the fact that they did not rise from the dead in three days; they were 
never seen again. The field for right action is in this world, not the next. 

I'm going to put forth a very strange idea. I think that if either GO or NFMD is to 
be considered cause, NFMD -- which comes second in linear time -- is cause, so what is 
needed is an ability to make time run backward, or, if this is putting it better, to be able, 
oneself, to move retrograde in time (if this latter is the correct formulation, I or "Thomas," 
whichever, moved retrograde in time back to 3-74 from the future; which accounts for my 
experiencing a mind-moving retrograde in time, a mind that fused with or entered mine 
that came from the future). But this would not be me in this world/life, say, me in 1977 or 


'78, when I gave to Covenant House [a charitable institution for homeless children]. It 
would be the me who originally fucked up the Xerox missive and lived to regret it, 
because only the me on that time track, that groove, would have ever found out what it 
was and hence could tell me in this time track as the AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice that 
it was "from an intelligence officer in the Army." It would be the me in the original real 
world. This is eerie. Presumably he (I) paid for fucking up (fucking up unless there was 
help would be natural; after all, it was a trap). Is this, then, a paranormal talent involving 
time on the [order of] Pat Conley's psi talent in Ubik or the girl's in Clans? [Dick's novel 
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964).] The ability to change the past? Anyhow, time is 
involved. Anyhow, "Thomas" is not on this track, in this world, but in that world on that 
track where the Xerox missive was not handled, where there was no override by 
"Thomas"; i.e. the original time. 

Then did "Thomas" engineer himself out of existence? No; my earlier formulation 
in this article suggests that "Thomas" is now in the process of reascending to the 
pleroma [heavenly realm of the Gnostics]. He still exists, because I still hear the AI 
[Artificial Intelligence hypnogogic] voice (assuming it is "Thomas"; well, it's very 
complicated, but probably it is "Thomas"). But in any case I'm saying that 3-74 can't be 
understood except by including as fundamental a reverse cause-and-effect sequence, 
the effect coming first, the cause probably years afterward. I may (if this formulation 
holds) someday decide that it represents a paranormal talent on my part and not 
adventitious intervention. A talent allied to my precog talent: stupendously escalated due 
to the lethal stress of the Xerox missive situation [a mysterious letter received in March 
1974, as to which Dick posed numerous theories]; I may have actually literally caused 
time to run backward. And everything else hinges on this fact. This would explain why in 
3-74 I had information at my disposal -- essential information -- that could not be known 
until much later. This is the bare bones of a deep phenomenal shift somehow related to 
quanta, to quantum field mechanics and field activity that is little understood today; this 
would fit in with the modulating or "warping away from valence" that I saw, so it would 
render what I call "Valis" as an expression of my own warping of reality in terms of time, 
space, and causality. 

My God; can I now subsume several phenomena (foreknowing about the Xerox 
missive coming, "Thomas" and "Thomas" handling it; having information that could not 
be developed until later; getting out of synch with reality so that I reacted [to] the stimuli 
before they occurred; and Valis itself) under one basic syndrome? This is scientific 
method! This is the way the modern rational mind deals with theory formation! And my 
sense of being in touch with a mind moving retrograde in time. Did I warp time so that it 
ran backward? And out of this one factor the above (and perhaps other) several 
phenomena were observed to take place? 

As I said in my UK speech ["Man, Android, and Machine," included herein]: 
"Maybe we're seeing the universe backward." Also, I tend -


Oh; and the double superimposition of worlds. Two "tracks," which is to say 
alternate worlds. Alternate worlds involve time; every SF author knows that. 

Oh my god. 

Yes, and the koine [commonly spoken Greek of era of Christ; Dick believed that 
he heard words in this language during his hypnogogic experiences]. A time 
disturbance, caused by me. Alternate worlds, information from the future sucked back to 
the present; information from the past; and another me. Plus the breakdown of causal 


synch. Valis -- the modulations; that's causality. Set to zero, as I put it; due TO A 

CHANGE IN THE PAST. 

All time disturbances. And quantum field like. 

And my future NFMD affecting and effecting the GO. So non-GO (which is to say 
groove tracking) is just a way of talking about normal time and normal causality. 

Is there anything that happened, starting with the material in "Faith of" ["Faith of 
My Fathers" (1967)] and TMITHC [The Man in the High Castle (1962)] and Penultimate 
[The Penultimate Truth (1964)] going to now and the AI voice that does not actually 
some way involve time? Certainly the material in the writing (especially Tears [Flow My 
Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)]) seems to involve time. I may find out that I have a 
chronic low-grade precog power that simply went off the scale into a basic qualitative 
change in 2-3-74 due to the Xerox missive, disjoining me from normal causal temporal 
reality entirely, both in terms of the past (anamnesis) and the future (moving retrograde 
in time and precognition). Something on the order of what I described in "World of 
Talent" ["A World of Talent" (1954)]. 

Now let's try this theory. The ability to make time run backward gets you out of 
your programmed groove ("groove tracking") and renders you free. This ability and only 
this ability frees you from an otherwise airtight [sic] tyranny that dooms all mankind. All 
life forms, in fact. Thus this is a stunning and probably new survival talent, an 
evolutionary new ability that advances the individual up the ladder of homeostasis to a 
stage where he is a whole other higher organism entirely. It is equal in terms of the 
evolution of life to the development of the opposable thumb, the eye, the lung, the wing, 
the large cerebral cortex, standing upright, etc. Upon the perfection (so to speak field 
operation) of this ability the human has become higher than the angels and all that 
implies. He is operating in a supratemporal dimension, and this has vast implications for 
knowledge; for overcoming causality -- if he can affect the past he can modulate the 
present (what I called "Valis"), and if he can draw information to him from the future he 
can problem-solve like a crazy thing. This is not just phylogenic memory, as I supposed; 
it isn't limited to drawing on the distant past. The crucial information related to 3-74 was 
information drawn from the future. He can set up alternate worlds, so in effect he is 
trans-world, spans not only time but world tracks. 

Now, this raises the question as to whether there exists a vast meta-mind (as I 
conceive Valis to be) who is encouraging the development of this time-disruption faculty 
in order to evolve the human species further; or, put another way, the human being who 
has this faculty and makes use of it (for example, under vast stress, as I was under in 374) 
is an expression of this meta-mind. I am sure of it. I was not alone in what 
happened; it was as if angels -- divine and partially visible -- powers were present. There 
may be a species mind stretching back into the past and into the future where evolved 
humans (imaged as the three-eyed people?) may exist already using this faculty. When 
you start disrupting time you may be operating in the realm of a supratemporal 
composite discorporate mind -- I think I was; this is what I call Valis. But it seems to me 
that the intrinsic nature of the sort of talent I'm discussing would cause to come in 
existence a meta-mind by itself, in that it would hop across expanses of time that lie 
outside its own lifetime, which would de facto make it a meta-mind; I mean it would be 
unlocked from the time span of its physical body. For one thing (here is Jung's intuition 
function) he would exist (his mind would exist) in alternate worlds, and this alone implies 
a lot; by affecting the past he would then find himself shifting across laterally 


(orthogonally) in time. . . which would explain my subcortically remembering that it had 
just been cool, high, and moist a climate. So the mind with this talent would in itself 
become a meta-mind, outside of causality, spanning alternate worlds, able to modify his 
own present reality by changed actions in the past, thus setting up alternate worlds; he 
would be the cause and would in turn be affected by himself as cause -- again the 
bootstrap phenomenon. Such a mind could act as cause to its own effect, affecting itself 
as if from outside like a feedback circuit, and, upon having successfully affected itself, 
the self as cause would eliminate itself as if it had never existed, which again is the ex 
nihilo or bootstrap paradox of time travel. Minds or versions of the mind, foci of the mind, 
would come into existence, influence the mind, and upon success render itself never 
having existed in the first place; but the mind would sense an adventitious other mind 
operating on itself in its behalf. Could it not then become its own AI voice, its own 
tutelary spirit? It would continually monitor its own status as if in a heuristic process; yes, 
it would be process, not hypostasis. You would have a mind that itself would evolve the 
way a species evolves. 

It would be itself and not itself continually. It could correct a faulty solution to a 
problem after the faulty solution had been applied, a sort of "smart typewriter" erase 
circuit, again a heuristic process where it gets to apply the best solution it has; the 
solution proves faulty; the mind repeats the situation -- runs it by again -- with a different 
solution made better by knowledge derived from the faulty solution (i.e. the solution 
failed but it yielded knowledge as to what should have been done). It applies a solution. 
The solution is defective, but knowledge is derived. The mind then goes back in time 
and applies solution B based on solution A plus the knowledge derived from solution A 
(despite its failure). Solution B works, so the mind continues on in linear time. 

For its B solution (which works), the mind draws on the vestigial A solution (which 
did not work); so underlying the B solution is the phantorn record of the A solution. 
Sequentially, the mind was surprised by the problem and employed the A solution but 
now it has gone back and overridden the A solution with knowledge based on this initial 
failure. So on some level the mind knows of the A solution and hence perforce is 
bicameral. The part of the mind that employed the A solution and that possesses the 
knowledge derived from the A solution (and knowledge that the A solution did not work) 
informs the conscious part that is employing the amended solution; so the mind has its 
own self for a guide, speaking out of a ghostly realm where what is is also what is not. 
The mind is split but not split, since both parts are working for a common goal. Rather, it 
is chambered. So the ratiocination for the B solution simply isn't there because in place 
of ratiocination there is certitude without sequential logical reasoning. No analytical steps 
are employed. The mind when it comes to employ the B solution does not have to think. 
The thinking took place in a realm or track that has been abolished; when that realm was 
erased the thinking was erased with it, leaving only the motor and speech centers active. 
The mind, when it employs the B solution, is its own machine, its own slave instrument, 
acting out a solution that was not the primary one. 

Put another way, during solution A the mind was cause and so had to think, but 
when it returned to reedit and employ solution B it was the effect of solution A and the 
knowledge belatedly acquired in connection with solution A. Put a third way, suppose a 
normal person wishes to know what is in the Book of Acts. He must locate a copy and 
read it. But this meta-mind simply knows the contents of the Book of Acts (if he is to 
know it at all). How does it know it? Because he found that he had written it, and thus 


read it. Then he checked with a copy of the Book of Acts to corroborate that it is indeed 
the Book of Acts. But when and where and how did it originally enter his mind? There is 
no answer to that; it is ex nihilo: without cause. There is only effect, because the causal 
element has been erased. The meta-mind in its finished stage is dependent upon the 
meta-mind in its initial staging, which it knows nothing directly about, but only indirectly, 
the way characters in a Beckett work deduce the existence of other people. 

If he finds Acts or material based on pre-Socratic thinkers in his novels he must 
assume that his own primary heuristic scanning device read and absorbed knowledge of 
these matters in the usual way, but that this track has been erased, although it leaves its 
marks on the extant meta-mind. By what he knows that he shouldn't know (so to speak) 
he can make certain deductions about the original scanning, the original normal intake of 
information. He did not take in more information than any other person but he can apply 
it retroactively and there is his advantage. 

Then essentially this theory about time disruption replaces the theory I put 
forward earlier here, that we are dead and don't know it; what I seem to be saying is that 
heimarmene or determinism depends on causality and that in turn depends on time, and 
an ability to disrupt time amounts to an ability to gain power over causality itself -- the 
result of which is the abolition of the twin-tape synch system that makes of us little more 
than DNA robots. We are not dead but we are as if dead; we are enslaved, and in a 
prison. The ability to disrupt time -- i.e. to make it run backward -- brings freedom of a 
sort that no living creature on Earth has ever had before. And I think that this is the 
cryptic doctrine that is the basis of my title here: The great esoteric systems are systems 
in which this human ability is cultivated and brought to bear. Certainly this is true in 
Gnosticism, in Buddhism -- and if Buddhism then probably in The Tibetan Book of the 
Dead. There is no way a human can perceive that he is twin-tape programmed until he 
begins to break that programming, because the mechanism of determinism and 
occlusion is so good that until the person disrupts it he can't even tell that it is there. 

But the power to disrupt time discloses the deterministic system as somehow 
unreal, a fiction. How can it have power and be a fiction? Its power depends on the 
ignorance it produces, the occlusion and (perceptual and in terms of memory) being only 
one element. Basically, the person is enslaved because he cannot detect the machine 
that enslaves him; it deprives him of crucial information. There is a constant flow of 
information traffic around him and he can't see it, literally. Yet the information programs 
him. It seems to be the purpose of this machine to maintain structure (cosmos) but at the 
expense of the welfare and lives of the individual life forms involved. 

My subcortical memories of a higher, cooler, moister climate indicate that really 
major erasure and reinscription can take place; the time-disrupting faculty can be very 
powerful. Again, it was not done by me but by myself, who lived through to the end of my 
life, died, and returned to an earlier stage of my life, but now under taped conditions. Yet 
the taped conditions are a combination of servitude and opportunity, the latter if properly 
handled, the former if botched. Whether it will be endless repetition of prison or whether 
it will be, instead, self-liberation depends on what I call the NFMD: the new free merit-
deed that tilts the scales under the altered conditions achieved by the GO situation. I 
cannot really abandon this theological concept in the service of upholding an 
explanation that relies on a belief in the paranormal powers of the individual involved. 
There is a cosmic dimension, and one of deity. The person has failed his first time 
around and is sent back. He is as ignorant the second time as the first. . . or is he? 


Doesn't his own bicameral voice whisper to him to liberate himself by an act of kindness, 
of kindness unmerited by the recipient? There is a phantom of solution A that did not 
work. Has the person really learned nothing? Then again he is destroyed by the 
instruments that destroyed him originally. This is unlikely. Surely there is a high 
probability that he will employ his time-disturbing power to save himself. This is how 
evolution is achieved: by making use of latent powers, making them actual. The B 
solution is a feedback system that monitors the failure of A with the absolute wisdom of 
hindsight; knowledge that was crucial but contingent is now a priori and it is there, but 
buried in the person in the form of his original self grown old and then dead and then 
restored without memory: like Parsifal or Siegfried he does not know his own identity 
and must be told -- only it is he himself, not Kundry or the Forest Bird who tell him. He is 
his own sibyl; he is in fact his own anima, watching over him as psychopomp, hence 
now changed in sex to female, in accordance with Zoroaster's observations about one's 
spirit of religion. 

It would not be correct to say that the second time around, things are different 
from the first time around; both times are the same time, through an orthogonal 
intervention of needed information. Another axis of reality has to be imagined; first and 
second occur simultaneously in linear time. Which is to say, solution A abolishes itself as 
it fails and not after it fails; it is not attempted and then erased but both attempted, 
erased, and a second and superior solution employed simultaneously. This is as 
mysterious to us as the third dimension is to the flatland person. 

What has happened is that the correction is not separated from that which it 
corrects, either by time or space, hence not by causality. The person is rescued by the 
merit of an act that he will not live to commit -- an impossible situation from the normal 
standpoint. Perhaps it can be understood if solution A, which does not work, is supposed 
as occurring in a falsework or hypothetical, not actual, universe: a sort of tentative 
sketch off the canvas. Or what if it is supposed that no linear time elapses within the 
period in which solution A takes place; solution A occurs at a point rather than a line. 
The correction does not lag; it is as fast as the faulty solution that it overtakes. In other 
words, the faulty solution is overrun as it unfolds. This is impossible, but it is the case. It 
is like a spider who can only toss a web strand across a distance between bushes if he 
has already tossed a stand across that distance. The solution must precede the 
problem, and therein lies the mystery. How can it be? But it is so; the solution to the 
Xerox missive of 3-74 shows up in novels and a story I wrote as much as ten years 
earlier [most likely "Faith of Our Fathers"]. The problem is formulated; the right solution 
is formulated (especially in Penultimate Truth, and for all I know, it shows up elsewhere 
in my writing as well, places I have not as yet looked). The mind that is retracking its life 
has plenty of leisure time in which to formulate the problem and develop a successful 
answer. 

About the Editor 

Lawrence Sutin is the author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. He is 
currently at work on a biography of Aleister Crowley. 


END 

Scanner Notes Jan 13 2002: 

Originally released in RTF only as 4.0. Fully Proofed with careful readthrough, italics 
intact. 
Formatting Issues: All quoted sources are represented by an Arial 10 font size. All 
footnotes follow directly after the paragraph they are referenced by and appear in 
Courier New 10 to differentiate them from the linear text. Many of the paragraphs did 
not have tabs but instead an extra line feed in the DT, and so I have reproduced that 
effect throughout where applicable, except at the beginning of chapters where I used a 
Tab instead of a Big Letter. All [SIC] notes are by the editor, Lawrence Sutin. And yes, 
PKD's paragraphs really are that long. Only one DT error found - changed "seved" to 
"served" in the line "The only purpose seved is in the healing of his condition". 

END Notes 


