The Secret Ascension

"Philip K. Dick is one of the influential science fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s, among other writers; only later when they began making movies out of things like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , which became Blade Runner , did he become a cultural icon. Michael Bishop – who just died a few months ago himself, unfortunately – was one of the most thoughtful and humane writers. He’s written a number of classic novels, and he’d written essays about Philip K. Dick. “Some writers believe sci fi could save the world if people took it seriously” This one struck me as being particularly appropriate not only because Philip K. Dick appears in it as a kind of spiritual guide, but because it’s also an example of something that Dick himself did very well: an alternative history. In this particular case, it’s in the fourth or fifth term of the Nixon administration, and it’s a dystopian nightmare – which has echoes today that it probably didn’t even have at the time. The idea is that Philip K. Dick himself becomes the guiding figure for the main character, and recognises this world for what it is. It expands the notion of what you can do with recursive fiction, because you have a writer living in a dystopia, who is consulting with another writer who wrote famous dystopian fiction – the most famous one of Dick’s is The Man in the High Castl e – and Bishop was well aware of that. He writes this book very much in the style and structure of Philip K Dick novels, which is a distinctive style and a distinctive, frankly paranoid, outlook on the world. But this is one of the things you think twice about while you’re reading the novel: is this paranoid, or is this maybe happening? I think science fiction, like any other kind of literature, aligns itself along the political spectrum – you can find very militaristic science fiction, for example. With Dick, there’s a libertarian streak, which cuts the pie in a different direction. Dick himself, I think, believed in the liberating value of science fiction – believed in it as a beacon of freedom. I could almost have chosen The Man in the High Castle itself for this list, because there’s a science fiction novel in that novel, which holds out a hope of liberation for the characters. So yes, there’s an idealistic vision that science fiction has had of itself. Some writers believe it could save the world if people took it seriously, if they paid attention to the awful warnings and the wonderful promises. Good question! To some extent, yes, the same thing persists. I’ve always thought that science fiction evolves by accretion rather than evolution. In other words, the pulp stories – or even going back before the classic pulp stories, to Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells – those are all always part of the core of science fiction. Then you add space opera to that – you add the gigantic, large scale galactic empires – and that remains part of it. And then in the 1940s, you get a more realistic technological future, the kind of thing that Robert A. Heinlein wrote about… My point is that all of these layers of the history of science fiction are there for exploiting by contemporary writers. So you have writers who are fascinated by the space opera, and you have writers who are fascinated by earlier writers – who are enormously influential, even though some are now problematic in all sorts of ways. One of the reasons I put my next choice on the list is because it considers H. P. Lovecraft – who was a well-known horror writer, and only wrote some science fiction, and some fiction that you could argue may or may not be science fiction… but he was a very active horror writer. He was also a vicious racist and anti-Semite, and a bizarre character in all sorts of ways. And over the last 10 years or so, there has been a movement among writers who recognise the problems with Lovecraft, but also recognise that there is a power to that kind of cosmic horror. So you have, for example, Victor LaValle, a very successful writer now who’s making the best-seller list, writing a novella – The Ballad of Black Tom – which is a rewriting of an earlier Lovecraft story, with a black protagonist. It’s kind of in-your-face, but he’s trying to get at the effect of Lovecraft while including black characters. Another writer, Kij Johnson, has written The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe – again, a rewriting of a Lovecraft story, this time recognising women and feminism. In other words, using Lovecraft against himself, while pointing out to the reader that the power of this kind of fiction is real."