Second_Variety had stories about robots emulating humans, but it did not have a metaphysic of the struggle between the human and the android. It had stories about illusion but it did not have stories that dealt with the questions of reality. The Father-Thing is mainly full of stories that do have those implications. At times it seems as though Dick has found the underlying philosophy but has not realised how to use it: the title story, for instance, is mainly a horror story, even though, a synopsis of it wouldn't make it clear how it differed from one of Dick's later treatments of illusion and reality.
Dick was a radical writer, and these stories cover many of the themes of the threat of American life in the age of McCarthy - "Foster, You're Dead" is a horrible satire on the American way of paying for war, and "Tony and the Beetles" is a critique of colonialism years before Vietnam. "The Chromium Fence" is about party sectarianism used to sell the green revolution in washing powders. As long ago as 1954, Dick could see the potential in the ecological struggle was not just about the planet but about party politics. He was remarkably prescient - he knew what the implications of the American way and policy would be, and he showed individuals what the consequences would be for them. Like all good science fiction writers he was there first.
Written for the magazines (and all published) in the early fifties, these stories are also remarkably easy reading; I read this 375 page collection in just about one sitting. And, presumably because he was trying to find a market, they also deal with more than we commonly associate with Dick.
What is significant is that these stories maintain the same high standard of Dick's previous fiction, and they show how his mind was moving. For instance, there is no short story suggestive of The_Man_In_The_High Castle (written in 1961), but at least two stories provide the basis of later novels - "The Mold Of Yancy" includes the main figures of The_Penultimate_Truth, and the title story deals with the dolls later met in The Three_Stigmata_Of_Palmer_Eldritch. However, the role that Chew-Z and Can-D have in that novel has no significance in this story.
The stories remain very much more traditional than the novels - the idea of drugs, mind-expansion and a counter-culture implicit in Palmer_Eldritch are absent from the story. The story is set totally on Earth and the dolls are presented clearly as a delusion which prevent the surviviors of nuclear war from rebuilding society.
Perhaps the most interesting story in this collection, and one I had never heard of before, is "Waterspider". It shows us a group of scientists from the far future who decide that the sf writers of the nineteen fifties were actually pre-cognitives who knew all the scientific problems the scientists would encounter and their solutions, so they steal Poul Anderson from a sf conference to come and help them. Only too late do they discover that Anderson's science is a level lower even than mine.
The final story in the collection, "Oh, To Be A Blobel!", is one of Dick's rare pieces of comedy, a play on the idea of opposites eventually meeting.
This is a book well-worth having.
For something like eight years in the nineteen-fifties Philip K. Dick and his wife, Kleo, were so poor that they ate horsemeat sold in a petshop. During the day he read classic literature including German and Latin in the original and he wrote through the night, listening to classical music, especially Wagner, all the time. He had been married once before and he was married another three times before he died. If you've read his books - the SF, let alone the mainstream novels published posthumously - you already know a lot about Dick's life; what he wrote was largely autobiographical, even the SF by which he made his name, and if the SF was original so was his life, though not many would wish to repeat it.
Dick is one of those writers whose life is re-created every so often (Wells is another). When his weird novels were published in the sixties they fitted in well with the drug scene, but I never got the impression that Dick himself was an acid-head, instead it seemed that Dick understood those things because he had a comparable but different world-view; then came his religious books like Timothy_Archer and Valis, suggesting a deeper seriousness; finally, came the long unpublished realistic works which indicated a continuity with Dreiser and Steinbeck. Dying has helped him enter superstardom, along with films, and re-publication.
When it came out in hardback, Volume 5 of the Collected_Stories was called "The Little Black Box", but it was "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that was turned into Total_Recall. Dick wrote very few short stories after 1968, and those he did write are not very good, or even Dickian, but the first three-fifths of this collection are classic.
Given that gap in his work it may be surprising that it was not until the spring of 1974 that Dick had the experience that he called 2-3-74. Dick thought he met God (a sort of heretical Christian God) and spent almost all the rest of his life trying to understand the experience; almost all his last books are actually drawn from his "Exegesis", a collection of philiosophical questionings about good, evil, existence etc in all of which Dick seemed to think he had a central role to play. Other explanations of his experience are that he had a stroke, or that his longtime abuse of prescription and non-prescription drugs finally caught up with him (something I'd never appreciated before). As Dick had a hisory of mental problems from childhood, as well, I would leave God out of it, unlike Lawrence Sutin who quotes the "Exegesis" wholesale.
Divine_Invasions gives us a new Dick, in which all his work was a transmigration of his religious suffering (the cover photograph shows him looking Christ-like, though publishers' advances alone meant he suffered), and his realism is played down. I still think this world is more important than another uncertain speculative one, but Sutin will tell you how Philip K. Dick felt about it.
The book is divided into three parts - "Phil", "Nicholas" and "Phil" again. Phil is Dick himself, and Nicholas is a fictional friend, convinced that a vast supernatural being communicates with him in his sleep and later works miracles. The world moves towards totalitarian oppression - the U.S.A under the control of a President vaguely like Richard Nixon. The President, who has the support of a moral majority youth league, is either a communist plant or a psychopath or both. The supernatural being is revealed to be a benign alien from Fomalhaut, and thus not to the interests of the world's leaders on any side of the divide. VALIS is therefore destroyed. After this destruction and the failure of Nicholas' resistance to the fascists before his execution, a few notes of hope are heard as Phil ends in a prison detail. Although each section is narrated by the person in its title their voices are not very different.
Essentially Radio Free Albemuth is one version of Dick's experience which he wrote about in VALIS and elsewhere, because the divided experience of Phil and Nick in this book is the divided experience of the narrator and Horselover Fats in VALIS. Reading Dick's autobiographical material it is clear that he felt he was or had been in contact with a consciousness like VALIS's and that there was little that he thought was fictional in these books. From its style Radio Free Albemuth (the title seems to have almost no significance and is only mentioned once in the book) seems a late novel, but whether it was envisaged as a separate novel or was just an attempt abandoned and succeeded by VALIS I don't know. It is a synoptic novel in that it repeats most of Dick's best known themes, but while it is more than just a novel for completists some purchasers may feel unhappy that it covers ground previously treated in books many consider Dick's best, and covers no more.
For years through the 50's and 60's Philip K Dick wrote two SF and two mainstream novels a year. He found publishers for his SF, of the other work only Confessions_Of_A_Crap_Artist, 1975, was published in his lifetime. Puttering_About is the third mainstream novel to be published posthumously. The cover description is correct, this book is a masterpiece. Dick's paranoia was obviously justified as far as his treatment from publishers was concerned. How could they ignore work of this quality? Dick is going to become one of those authors whose position is only recognised after his or her death. I don't know if there was a plot to to force him to abandon the mainstream, as this novel is a clear critique of U.S. post-war civilian developments, the consumer society (though writers like Grace Metallious and Charles Mergendahl did write novels revealing its vacancy and unhappiness, though without Dick's ability). Some of the ideas and locations of this book were re-worked in his SF, but that re-working raises another question: did using an SF medium weaken Dick's argument, rather than elaborate and enforce it?
Puttering_About describes a couple who work in California during WW II, then in the peace open a television sales and repair shop. They are moving apart. Roger Lindahl has been psychologically wrecked by growing up on a poor farm in the dustbowl and his wife cannot appreciate the hurt. Through their young son they meet another couple - he a go-ahead businessman, she a sort of earth-mother. Part of the publisher's blurb says "the conclusion has the inevitability of a Greek tragedy" but the events of the final chapters I found unexpected.
The book is about the social implications of technology - how jobs in Californian aircraft factories were created by war, disappeared after but whose loss was made good by the social and economic consequences of television and white goods etc. The Lindahls meet the growth with too little capital and need more. Hence the easy entry of the other couple. However, Dick did not require an SF medium to deal with the effects of new technology, Lindahl's neurosis. Everything was available in contemporary life. He did not have to extrapolate the present into an SF future. Sometimes, at least, it seems SF has actually blurred reality rather than clarified it. This novel is the clear view, of which Dr_Bloodmoney is the confused and confusing SF correlative. The SF work set against the same background does not have the same power. As the mainstream novels become available Dick may be seen to have written allegories of his own time rather than prophecies of another future. However, by casting them in the genre he may have made them of less significance than his subjects deserved, rather in the way that Nostradamus' quatrains are supposed to be hidden. Nostradamus may have known that "In 1963 a President Kennedy will be killed in the USA" but if he did he did not write it down as such. Dick may have known that "Life for many Americans now is typified by the terrible lives of the Lindahls" but he was not allowed to publish that, and the message was corrupted when it appeared in an SF format.
This relationship between a theme handled in a contemporary setting and an SF melieu is obviously one that will receive a much wider study over the next few years as Dick's other books finally appear. Dick's stature will be raised because of these works. Why a masterpiece such as this could only appear in an improper form is a question that must be answered. Who were the guilty people?