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"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 tyra
"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 Gi
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.