Now I have a good excuse do not like P.K.Dick work
Fans of PKD don't like to discuss just how shithouse-rat-crazy he was. Paul Sammon cataloged it in Future Noir - he stopped going to PKD's house to talk to him because PKD would come to the door with a gun one day, a hug the next. He also wasn't a "success" by any standards outside of science fiction. The adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the first real money he'd ever seen. And while PKD claimed to have only written one story on hallucinogens, he did a lot of drugs. As quoted by Sammon to explain, "I've got five kids and write science fiction for a living. I do a lot of speed." Thus did he stroke out at 53, leaving three kids and five ex-wives. If you've ever wondered why nobody adapted PKD stories until he was dead, the answer is PKD: Meanwhile, I've never read Stanislaw Lem's essay on PKD but I think I'm gonna: The '70s were shit for sci fi. Here's the books that anyone remembers from 1970 to 1975: John Christopher's The Guardians Niven's Ringworld Anne McCaffrey's Dragonquest Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven Philip Hose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go Michael Moorcock's Wizard of the Air Silverberg's Book of Skulls which isn't even sci fi Asimov's The Gods Themselves The Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic Ira Levin's Stepford Wives Crichton's Terminal Man Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama Heinlein's Time Enough for Love L'Engle's Wind in the Door PKD's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Haldeman's Forever War Niven & Pounelle's Mote in God's Eye Brunner's Shockwave Rider Of those? Lathe of Heaven Roadside Picnic Wind in the Door Shockwave Rider Actually have anything to say. The first is anarchist, the second is Russian, the third is Y/A and the fourth was hated at the time and only found an audience when William Gibson listed it as an inspiration for Neuromancer. Being honored by the SFWA in 1975 wasn't that great an honor.He physically fought with Anne Williams Rubinstein, his third wife. Dick wrote to a friend that he and Anne had "dreadful violent fights...slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house." In 1963, Dick told his neighbors that his wife was attempting to kill him and had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks. After filing for divorce in 1964, Dick moved to Oakland to live with a fan, author and editor Grania Davis. Shortly after, he attempted suicide by driving off the road while she was a passenger.
If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public. The development of interest in SF at American universities has, contrary to what might have been expected, altered nothing in this state of affairs.