Solar Lottery

"Yes, it was Solar Lottery , called World of Chance in the UK. It’s a complicated novel; he was influenced by Balzac and all these French guys, writing complicated novels with dozens of characters. So he wrote a whole load of characters and made it real complicated, and of course his agent made him throw most of them out. As well as the French realists, he was heavily influenced by another science fiction writer named A. E. Van Vogt, and Solar Lottery shows this influence. He sold the story to Ace Books, and it was published in 1955 as one half of an Ace Double – there was another novel with it, if you turned it upside down. It’s set in an industrialised environment where the huge corporations are pretty much in charge, and they hire people in a sort of feudal industrial system. The hero, a guy named Ted Bentley, he gets fired from his job at one of these places; so he goes to the person called the ‘Quizmaster’ and signs up with him. The whole society is based on a random lottery: if your number gets picked in this mechanism called ‘the bottle’ you get to be the new Quizmaster. The current Quizmaster knows that the bottle is about to pick a new person, and he doesn’t want to give up power, but of course he has to cede it. He gives Bentley a job in his organisation, whose new mission is to assassinate the new Quizmaster. Now, by law he can attempt to assassinate the new Quizmaster, sending one assassin at a time; but every Quizmaster has a corps of telepathic security agents, the Teeps, to provide protection. So, then, how do you get an assassin through to murder him? It’s a question science fiction has looked at before. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man is the same thing: how do you murder somebody who is telepathic? But Bester has a completely different solution to Philip K. Dick’s. The Demolished Man is another influence on Solar Lottery . It’s an action story, very exciting. And as a subplot, there’s a bunch of ordinary working stiffs, and they’ve got a leader who says there’s a tenth planet on the other side of the Sun called the ‘Flame Disc,’ and they’re building up a spaceship in secret to go and find this tenth planet. It’s really got nothing to do with the main plot! But it’s an interesting subplot. So you’ve got a lot of stuff in this novel. It certainly grabs your attention. Even though it was derivative in some ways of previous writings, it’s very much a Philip K. Dick take on an old science fiction twist. To some degree, yes. He wrote a lot of science fiction novels, he wrote very fast. He was on amphetamines a lot of the time. One of his early novels , Eye in the Sky , is the one that that I read which blew my mind and turned me on to Philip K. Dick back in 1984… I was working in a factory, I’m an electrician, and this book was lying around towards midnight at the end of my shift. I picked this thing up and started reading it; midnight came, I went home and I read on into the night, and I finished it about three or four in the morning. The walls of my room had disappeared, you know, I had no idea what reality was! And this is his main theme: what is reality? I had no clue! You know, some people don’t like Dick, but if it hits you, you’re hooked: you go out the next day and buy everything you can find. That’s exactly what I did, and what a lot of his fans did. He wrote fast then because he wasn’t making much money, even though he switched to novels. Instead of $50 for a short story, he’s now making $1500 or $2,000 for a novel – which wasn’t bad back in the 1960s, but still not enough to live on. So he speed-wrote a lot of novels, and he was still trying to get his literary novels out there too. In 1961 he was living with his third wife in California, up in Marin County, north of San Francisco. She became a famous jewellery maker, her name was Anne Dick, and he was helping with her jewellery business and feeling very morose. He rented a little hut up the road, about a mile or so from his house, and he lugged his typewriter over there. He thought, he’d better write something, or he’d be polishing jewellery forever. So he started writing, and he had one word which he wrote down on a piece of paper: Mr Tagomi. And Mr Tagomi was the main character in his next novel."