Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick

Author:Philip K. Dick [Dick, Philip K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-527-8
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2015-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

PLATT: What was compelling about science fiction?

DICK: I got married when I was nineteen, and it wasn’t until a little later that I really began to write. I got married again when I was twenty-one. A point came when I began to feel that science fiction was very important. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A—there was something about that which absolutely fascinated me. It had a mysterious quality, it alluded to things unseen, there were puzzles presented that were never adequately explained. I found in it a numinous quality; I began to get an idea of a mysterious quality in the universe that could be dealt with in science fiction. I realize now that what I was sensing was a kind of metaphysical medieval world, an invisible realm of things half-seen, essentially what medieval people sensed as the transcendent world, the next world. I did not have a religious background. I was raised in a Quaker school—they’re about the only group in the world that I don’t have some grievance against; there’s no hassle between me and the Quakers—but the Quaker thing was just a lifestyle. And in Berkeley there was no religious spirit at all.

I don’t know if van Vogt would agree that he’s essentially dealing with the supernatural, but that’s what was happening in me. I was beginning to sense that what we perceived was not what was actually there. I was interested in Jung’s idea of projection—what we experience as external to us may really be projected from our unconscious, which means of course that each person’s world has to be somewhat different from everybody else’s, because the contents of each person’s unconscious will be to a certain extent unique. I began a series of stories in which people experienced worlds that were a projection of their own psyches.

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