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Philip K. Dick on realism, consistency, and fiction

Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other ConversationsRecently I dove into the superb Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (from Melville House, publisher of the increasingly-intriguing Last Interviews collection) and am enjoying every page. I’ve written before about my semi-tortuous negotiations with PKD’s novels, and am finding some justification for my issues in these interviews with him.

With PKD I remain hamstrung: he’s more speculative and philosophical than the run-of-the-mill hard sci-fi writer. This is right up my alley. I absolutely love PKD’s questions of existence, identity, and freewill that lay the foundations of his novels; and he’s a Bay Area writer to boot. Yet I find him to be a flawed writer, one who was so-very-close to writing perfect novels but had trouble overcoming basic hurdles, such as with cardboard characters and sci-fi’s obsession with “ideas” over story.

(For the record, my list of great PKD novels, in no order, remain A Scanner Darkly and The Man in the High Castle. I’m sure PKD’s fans find that list ridiculously short and astoundingly obvious. I still pick up his work now and then, so who knows, maybe I’ll find another one to add. PKD was more than prolific.)

In The Last Interview, PKD mentions to interviewer Arthur Byron Cover his early affinity for A. E. van Vogt. (I recall being fascinated with van Vogt’s Slan in junior high school, a book built from much the same brick as Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.) PKD observes:

Dick: There was in van Vogt’s writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null-A. All the parts of that book do not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think it’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else’s writing inside or outside science fiction.

Cover: What about Damon Knight’s famous article criticizing van Vogt?

Dick: Damon feels that it’s bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor.

It’s like he’s viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he’s building your house. But reality is a mess, and yet it’s exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe that is not to be feared. [Emphasis mine.]

It’s the questions after my emphasis that make the book’s back cover (“How frightened are you of chaos? How happy are you with order?”), and for good reason: They strike near to the heart of the questions asked in all of PKD’s work.

But I’m interested in the line about the building inspector. Damon’s review of Null-A is dismissively brief (although I suspect what’s being referred to here is Knight’s essay “Cosmic Jerrybuilder”). I’ve not read Null-A, but in principle I line up behind PKD on this one.

Reality is not as sane and orderly as many writers would have us believe. If I’m critical of contemporary American literature’s obsession with “hard realism”, it’s because I think PKD has put his finger on a deep and unrecognized truth: Reality is a fragile facade, but what a thorough facade it provides. It’s one thing for the average person to think they have total understanding of things they have no access to—the heart of a politician, the mind of a celebrity, the duplicity of a boss or coworker—but it’s truly tragic when a writer writes as though they have this reality thing all sewn up.

In contemporary literature, there are often moments where the narrator will have some moment of clarity into another person’s life. Usually this moment is presented as the epiphany, although it’s rarely epiphanic. (See Charles Baxter’s “Against Epiphanies” for a better argument on this point than I’m capable of producing.) Never mind that these pseudo-epiphanies are the inverse of contemporary lit’s obsession with quiet realism and slight personal movement. These mini-epiphanies are the literature’s cult of poignancy, and they’re often not interesting because they’re predictable, rational, and orderly.

There is chaos in our world, and it produces strangeness and unexpectedness that is neither poignant nor tied to fussy notions of realism. This, I think, is what PKD was referring to.

My only quibble with PKD’s observation is that I don’t see chaos as an external dark force in the universe. We are the chaos. We produce it. I’m less concerned about the wobble in Mercury’s orbit than the ability for just about anybody to murder given the right circumstances. (See the 2015 film Circle for an exploration of just that.)

The human psyche is like a computer performing billions of calculations a second. Most of the results are wrong, some are off by orders of magnitude, but the computer smooths out the errors to walk a thin line of existence and consistency. Even with these errors, the human psyche assures itself that its footing is steady and sure, when in fact it’s walking on the foam of statistical noise. The number of calculations it gets right are the rounding error.

The noise and errors do not matter. Our minds have the cognitive plasticity to bind contradictions into coherency. We can absorb chaos and make sense of it. This, I think, is close to the heart of PKD’s novels.

Update: Shortly after posting this I discovered Damon Knight partially backtracked on his criticism of A. E. van Vogt:

Van Vogt has just revealed, for the first time as far as I know, that during this period [while writing Null-A] he made a practice of dreaming about his stories and waking himself up every ninety minutes to take notes. This explains a good deal about the stories, and suggests that it is really useless to attack them by conventional standards. If the stories have a dream consistency which affects readers powerfully, it is probably irrelevant that they lack ordinary consistency.

Reading closely, Damon isn’t exactly agreeing with PKD’s comments (or mine, for that matter), but he does concede some flexibility on the supposed rigid strictures of fiction writing.

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Erik Therme (“Resthaven”) on Bridge Daughter

Bridge Daughter by Jim NelsonBridge Daughter‘s not even published yet and it’s drawing attention:

Have any new writers grasped your interest recently?

…I’m also excited about the upcoming novel, Bridge Daughter, by Jim Nelson. The first few chapters immediately drew me in, and I can’t wait to read the book in its entirety.

Erik Therme is the author of Mortom and Resthaven, a recent Kindle Scout winner. Check out his web site at eriktherme.com

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Here, Esquilax! reviews Edward Teller Dreams

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People-10_1410Dustin Heron, author of Paradise Stories and a good friend of mine, posted a rather nice review of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. An excerpt:

In one of the books funniest scenes, the two apathetic rebels stage a sit-in protest for the lack of school pride at their High School. But it’s not a throwaway scene: in this novel, every scene illuminates, tells a joke, develops characters, and moves the plot forward, and big changes for Gene and Gwen hinge on that protest and its repercussions. But the broader and more subtle work being done in that scene is what makes Nelson’s book so effective and moving: Gene and Gwen are children of Baby-Boomers who decades before put flowers in their hair and “changed the world” and continued to congratulate themselves for doing so and who all of a sudden became middle management protecting the status quo they now had a vested interest in.

Read the full review, and while you’re at it, check out Dustin’s entire web site, which features stories, essays, improvisations, and more.

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Interview with NextSpace: “Looking Ahead: Tips for Successful Career Transitions”

Earlier today Charity Yoro of NextSpace coworking posted an interview with me. On a pleasant afternoon a couple of weeks ago, sitting in Old Mint Plaza drinking New Orleans iced coffee (it was a rough slog), we talked about work, writing, and finding a balance between the two:

Capitalizing on the e-book revolution, Jim found that it was pretty easy to self-publish, as long as you could manage independently promoting your product. So last July, long before the announcement of the end of his company, Jim built a website. He published and sold his e-books on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Nobles, and iTunes.

“You have to approach your craft with the same seriousness and intention as full-time work,” says Jim. “In terms of writing, it doesn’t just happen; it’s a different process.”

Read the whole interview. The photo is me doing my best to look authorly.

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Up at The Tusk, “This Shit Ain’t Ever Going to Work”

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People-10_1410The Tusk has posted a new piece of mine about the tortured history of my new novel Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. A sample:

And how could I forget my friend’s father returning home one afternoon from work, tie loose and hair splayed, bedraggled from wrestling some top-secret problem? Most likely not a problem scientific in nature, but bureaucratic. Thirteen years of age or so, a computer geek-in-training (largely because I wanted to grow up and write video games, unaware that a prerequisite for writing video games is to have never grown up), I was fascinated with the engineering problems these nuclear scientists must have faced every day. Sitting cross-legged on the lime-green living room shag playing Axis & Allies (and losing badly), I asked how his latest project was proceeding.

He leaned down to my ear and whispered: “Jim, this shit ain’t ever going to work.” Then he went to the kitchen and cracked open a beer from the refrigerator. By “this shit” he meant the LLNL’s latest budget-busting project, the Strategic Defense Initiative, a la Star Wars, a system of laser-equipped satellites promised to protect our country from ICBM attack and end the Cold War. You know, that Cold War, the mad weapons race the laboratory at Livermore had enabled and fostered and contributed to over the prior thirty years.

Read the whole thing at The Tusk. And while you’re at it, read Nate Waggoner’s brilliant dissection of how authors’ are learning to burnish their own laurels in today’s world of social media and independent publishing, “On Self-Promotion”.

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North American Review: “Origins of The Obituarist”

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim Nelson

The North American Review blog has posted a piece I wrote for them, “Origins of The Obituarist”. In it I detail the inspiration and creative process I worked through to write my short story “The Obituarist”, which NAR accepted and published in their Summer/Fall 2009 issue. A sample from the original short story:

My editors and my fellow obituarists have a little list, The Nearly Departed we call it, celebrities and politicians and artists and authors whom we agree are not long for this world. The unlucky are crossed off the list the same day their obit hits the back pages of the Times. The unluckier are those added when that slot opens. There is no announcement, no press release of their addition. My subjects are not informed privately. We guard The Nearly Departed, not even speaking of it around lower staffers. Is it out of etiquette or some nobler purpose we do not make public our little deal pool? Or is the reason as crass and self-serving as the embarrassment of admitting we’re little more than vultures circling for the first moment we can unlock the work we’ve invested dearly in? Ah, there is one aspect to this game I am unsure of.

I interview their colleagues and relatives under a variety of pretenses. Ethically I’m bound to supply my name and the name of my publisher, but beyond that, ethics take on a certain…plasticity. When I say I need a quote for the Sunday supplement, which Sunday? Which supplement? And my name means little to anyone outside of the Times. Of the thousands of obituaries I’ve choreographed into print, not once have I enjoyed credit. It takes a peculiar modesty to pen the death notices of the famous and infamous. It takes even slimmer pride to gallop down to the newsstand and slap through the pages to locate the twelve column inches of your painfully sculpted prose. When someone particularly famous dies, there’s whole milk in my morning cappuccino.

There are others like me at the Times, but none with as much experience. I’ve written five thousand obits but my colleagues are developing thousands more as well. The Times is prepared for at least ten thousand celebrated lives to expire. Of the glitterati and politicos that fell within my sphere, only thirty-five hundred or so have expired. Those remaining fifteen hundred obituaries are on ice in The Freezer waiting for that special phone call from my editor. The liver transplant didn’t take. Or, Dropped dead on the back nine. Or, The pack-a-day finally caught up with him. Fifteen hundred unpublished obituaries is a sweet chunk of intellectual property, as the Times‘ retained lawyers say. My legacy.

Here’s what I wrote about this character and his odd profession for North American Review:

I wanted to know if this grim duty was a primary occupation or one-off work for idle journalists. I wondered if anyone would actually aspire to join the ranks of obituarists, or if junior journalists were lassoed into the role because more senior writers could take a pass on such bleak work. I did a bit of research, online and at the city library, and discovered that this particular field of journalism is remarkably underdocumented. Obituaries are a perverse and morbid obligation, one newspapers are obviously reluctant to discuss. In fiction voids can be filled in with imagination, like spackle covering up a crack in a wall, but with so little to work with I fretted I would muff the basic facts of my story’s subject matter.

A. O. Scott said “a great obituary is like a novel in miniature.” What would a writer learn after penning these miniature novels for thirty years? Compressing lives into column inches, never receiving a byline, not even being a full-fledged member of the newsroom, merely earning a check when someone famous died?

Read the whole thing here.

(Update: A follow-up on a NY Times story on obituarists published the same day as my NAR essay can be found here, “The Gray Lady dances with The Obituarist: ‘Obituaries for the Pre-dead'”.)

“The Obituarist” is available in my new collection of short stories, A Concordance of One’s Life, available as a Kindle e-book at Amazon (and coming soon to Kobo and Apple’s iBook store).

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The Tusk’s Fiction First Friday: “Roast”

I’m pleased to share that The TEdward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People by Jim Nelsonusk has published an excerpt from my upcoming novel Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. Titled “Roast”, it’s the novel’s opening chapter and introduction to the narrator, Gene Harland. Here’s the opening grafs:

The Petrenkos were barbecuing people. They barbecued in sweaters and jeans, they barbecued in swimming trunks and bikini tops. The first clear weekend of the year, they rolled their venerable Weber out from its corner in the gardening shed and ratcheted on the attachments. With strips of steak and breasts of chicken arranged on a marble slab, they lit the mesquite and charcoal with a long match and grilled into the sunset.

Devout barbecuing people, the Petrenkos faithfully miniaturized the Great Outdoors in their backyard. It was nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny with candy-striped patio furniture. The kidney-shaped pool was as blue as Tidy Bowl water and the hose-fed slide, a kitsch Niagara Falls. Paths of crushed volcanic rock that stuck to bare feet wound between the tropical and jungly flowering greenery. The only way to leave without appearing desperate was through the patio door next to the grill, a door Ives Petrenko guarded with an oversized barbecue fork.

I’ll announce Barbecuing People‘s release here, of course.

I owe Tusk editors Lizzy Acker and Nate Waggoner (who also illustrated the piece) deep thanks for inviting me to submit this for their site. Read the whole thing!