Though today widely admired for their psychological complexity and visionary insights, the novels of Philip K. Dick were published in his lifetime as standard science fiction. That is to say, cheaply and with no regard to the artwork – the generic formula of ray-guns, rocket-ships and space-battles was applied indiscriminately to his work. In the late 1950s, his first books were issued in then-popular double editions; two novels ‘back-to-back’ with interchangeable artwork by anonymous artists. Even when published individually, their packaging remained in the cost-saving pulp tradition, as befitted their status as genre fodder in the years before Dick’s critical acclaim. This applied to the UK as well as the US paperback industry, with British imprints such as Granada and Grafton, Pan and Panther turning out re-issues using the same regulation artwork.
While the pulp SF market was resistant to change, having employed the same methods successfully since the inception of the genre, Dick’s work gradually gained more literary credibility, especially in Europe. The production values of several foreign-language editions suggested an attempt to capture some of the depth which critics were beginning to detect. By the end of the 1960s and early 70s, though Dick himself had already written the bulk of his novels, the seeping of the counter-culture, the esoteric and the experimental, into the mainstream was apparent. The influences of pop-art, psychedelia and surrealism began to be manifested on book covers, with Philip K. Dick ripe for such treatment. The US Daw edition of 1965’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a favourite of John Lennon’s, is a classic of its type; no wonder the German translation of the same book was rendered as LSD-Astronauts.
Sadly Dick died in 1982, on the cusp of wider recognition, shortly before the release of Blade Runner brought his work to a whole new audience. Based on his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film’s success gave rise to an ongoing succession of lavish Hollywood adaptations. From Total Recall to Minority Report, several of the novels and stories which inspired them have since been given the ‘movie tie-in’ cover. Richard Linklater’s 2006 film of A Scanner Darkly, an ambitious ‘rotoscope’ animated version of Dick’s dystopian vision of societal breakdown and drug-induced paranoia, was also issued as a graphic novel. However, since his death, few publishers have surely even considered issuing Philip K. Dick’s novels with illustrations of rocket-fire and spaceships.
The versatile
English author Trevor Hoyle was featured on SF Forward last year, with
an introductory profile; afterwards, my friend Chris Scarfe, who grew up close
to the Hoyle family in the Newhey area of Rochdale, kindly arranged for me to
meet, and interview, the author. As an admirer of his work, it proved to be an
absorbing and wide-ranging conversation, encompassing Trevor’s early career as
an actor, television presenter and copy-writer, his influences from film and
literature and his richly varied output. This feature covers several topics relating to science fiction – which represents only a portion of his published
work – and is based on notes and a transcript of that conversation; the words
are Trevor’s own.
Part One
On science fiction authors: Philip K. Dick to me is the absolutely consummate science fiction writer, above any other. I used to read loads of science fiction in the fifties; they had four or five really good monthly magazines – Astounding Stories, Galaxy – with about eight, nine, ten new stories by all the greats, Philip K. Dick, Blish, they were nine pence each – nine old pence. I remember I used to buy them at Rochdale Market, so I devoured all the science fiction. I’ll tell you a writer I did like – E. C. Tubb, a British writer, whenever there was a story of his on the cover I went for that right away, and he wrote hundreds of stories.
On perceptions of science fiction: It’s still a bit of a ghetto. I’ve written less science fiction than mainstream fiction but when people ask ‘what do you write?’ I say ‘well I’ve written thrillers, mainstream novels, science fiction’, they immediately latch on to the SF. It’s polarised. The people who read what they call ‘proper fiction’ are still very snooty about it. They say ‘I never read science fiction’ or ‘I never go and watch science fiction movies’. So I ask them, ‘you mean you’ve never seen Alien?, you’ve never seen Blade Runner? Have you seen Frankenstein?’– that’s all science fiction. Because they think of science fiction as rockets and men in lurex pyjamas with ray guns. You know Philip K. Dick doesn’t have any of that, it’s all in here [the head] with Philip K. Dick.
On meeting Philip K. Dick: I took the family to California and before I left I was talking to a fiction editor called Nick Webb, and he said ‘Phil Dick lives in California, Santa Ana, why don’t you pay a call on him?’ … He gave me Philip K. Dick’s address but he didn’t have a phone number. So I thought, when I get to Los Angeles I’ll look in the book. I didn’t want to just turn up, I wanted to ring him and introduce myself first — say I’m a writer from the UK, we have the same editor and so on’ – but I couldn’t find any [number]. I went through directory enquiries, but no, he wasn’t listed.
So I’m driving along, this balmy evening in the summertime – I’ve got the right road but where is 1049 (or whatever it was)? I pulled in to the kerb at some Spanish stucco-type buildings … and I’d stopped at exactly the right number on the five-mile-long bloody road. I went up to the, kind of Spanish grill-work, and there were about a dozen mailboxes with buttons you could thumb and an intercom. And there it was – Philip K. Dick – his name was right there along with the others. Before I pressed the button I thought, ‘I’ve got to get my act together here quickly, say who I am, mention Nick Webb’ (because that was the only connection between us). I press the button, I’m about to speak … and the gate clicks open automatically.
I didn’t say a word, I went through the gate and up to the first-floor apartment – it was C1, I can still remember the number – and the door’s slightly open. Now if you’ve read any Philip K. Dick, you’re in a Philip K. Dick story right away. I thought I’m going to freak out here in a minute, this is an hallucination. So I pushed the door open and walked in to this tiny apartment, a two-room apartment – living room, bedroom, tiny bathroom – and Phil K. Dick is sat on the sofa … on his knee he had an upturned cardboard box lid full of little pots of snuff, about 10 or 12, and he was trying these, trying to wean himself off whatever he was smoking, or cutting down on the smoking ... anyway he’s sitting there and of course he looks at me and thinks ‘who the f**k is this?’ This total bloody stranger’s just walked in. And I’m still shell shocked because I’ve walked straight into Philip K. Dick’s apartment, which is cramped and shabby, it really is. So then I introduce myself, stumble out that I’m a science fiction writer from England, we both have the same editor, blah, blah … and he kind of visibly relaxed and invited me to sit-down (in a rocking chair). The explanation for the door being open was that minutes later another science fiction writer arrived [K.W. Jeter]. When he heard the buzzer, Phil Dick must have thought ‘oh that must be Kevin’ – so I’d turned up at exactly the same point in time and space when his friend was due to arrive.
Anyway, we sat and chatted for two or three hours. During the course of the evening the phone rang, maybe two or three times, and Phil went in to the bedroom to answer it. Kevin Jeter, who was a bit younger than me, he’d say ‘oh that’s wife number three’ or ‘that’s the current girlfriend’, or whatever. They were after money, I gathered, because he was paying alimony to about two or three wives – he had several children, I believe. He wasn’t with anybody at the time, he was living alone in this apartment. So gradually I was brought up to date on who the latest phone call was from, that’s how the evening passed. Nothing remarkable really but it was still memorable. … the only thing I do remember talking about – I don’t think we talked about writing particularly, as I recall – was about money. Writers tend to do that, talk about contracts, advances, how much are you getting paid? And it came as a shock that I was getting more than him from Panther in the U.K. Phil was only getting about two or three thousand dollars advance from Ace Books, his main American publisher, ‘cause a lot of his stuff came out in paperback – again, it was the science fiction ghetto, you didn’t merit a hardback, hardbacks are for ‘proper’ books, you’re a pulp fiction writer. But I do remember thinking, ‘this guy is the best science fiction writer in the world and he’s not getting as much as I am!’
On Blade Runner: All the recognition comes later, because he died in 1982; the year I saw him was 1980 and he certainly didn’t mention to me that they were making a film of it [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] … he didn’t mention the option, I’d have remembered that. What happened of course is that Ridley Scott, another big Philip K. Dick fan, made the film and Philip Dick saw some very rough footage… he died before the film was finished but he did like the bits he saw. I’ve read an interview where he said ‘you’ve captured my vision exactly on screen, what I had in mind, that acid rain Los Angeles kind of thing’ so he did have an inkling that they were going to make a good film of it.
[Trevor has also related this meeting fictionally, both on his website and adapted for his short story ‘The 5-Sigma Certainty’ in the anthology Lemistry]
On the series Electric Dreams – and other Philip K. Dick adaptations: it’s sad because there are some good people behind it, like Bryan Cranston who is an executive producer, a brilliant actor. I had high hopes for it … I think adapting Philip K. Dick for the screen must be very hard – Ridley Scott did a brilliant job with Blade Runner but the stories are so off-the-wall … Cranston and the rest are trying their best but there’s something essential missing … it was made with the best intentions, they actually got some good actors, but it’s just not catching the essence of the man and his work.
On Blade Runner 2049: I don’t usually walk out of films; I was severely tempted this time, except the only thing that kept me in was the thought ‘what’s Harrison Ford going to be doing in this?’ He’s billed up under Ryan Gosling, and of course he doesn’t come in until three quarters of the way through and it’s two hours and fifty minutes or something... So I’m waiting [for Harrison Ford], I had to sit through the rest of the f***ing film, it’s awful, it really is, it’s so loud and it really batters your senses. I like Ryan Gosling, he’s okay, he’s an actor I can live with, but if I go and see a film, first of all I make sure I’m going to like it, I don’t go to see a film I’m going to hate, so I don’t walk out of films – but I was sorely tempted to walk out on that.
On A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater: it’s faithful to the book… it’s done very cleverly, that kind of computerised grainy quality you get. I’ve never seen another film made that way, using the same process [rotoscope].
This particularly fertile year saw the
publication of works by a trio of arguably the most influential science fiction
authors of the second half of the twentieth century: J.G. Ballard (The Crystal World and The Impossible Man); Ray Bradbury (S is for Space); and the even more
prolific Philip K. Dick (Now Wait for
Last Year, The Crack in Space and
The Unteleported Man). Jon Savage’s
study of ‘the year that the decade exploded’ considers that among the opportunities
1966 offered was the freedom “to envision what the future might be”; with it,
the scope for science fiction was growing. It is probably no coincidence that
on either side of the Atlantic, both Ballard and Dick began to emerge as the
definitive writers of their era – even if only acknowledged retrospectively.
To look back half a century, for this
short study of science fiction in 1966, suggests the difficulty of ‘envisioning
the future’ and imagining the world even a relatively short distance into the
future, a skill mastered by few artists or thinkers in any field; who knows
what those looking back in 2066 will make of 2016, let alone 1966?
Part Two
By 1966
Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known and most successful of American science
fiction writers, a position confirmed by the release that year of Fahrenheit 451, adapted from his 1953
novel by the celebrated French director François Truffaut in a big-budget production starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. Depicting a future society in which books are banned and indeed burned – the title refers to the
temperature at which they burn – the film’s success cemented Bradbury’s status.
A documentary made earlier that decade captures him close to the peak of his
powers, discussing his inspirations and working methods, a portrait of a
confident and contented artist. Born in 1920, a man steeped in the ‘Golden Age’
of science fiction magazines and pulp publishing, and a masterful exponent of
the genre’s staple mid-century themes of alien contact, space exploration and
time travel, Bradbury’s profile grew post-War, with numerous adaptations of his stories for radio, cinema and television helping him to reach an ever-broader
audience. By the time of his death in 2012, he had amassed a large and
impressive body of work, and remains a revered figure in science fiction’s
gradual journey to literary acceptance.
Philip
K. Dick, a close contemporary of Bradbury’s, who had also been born in Illinois
before moving to California (and likewise largely self-educated), was neither
acclaimed nor particularly well-known in 1966, beyond a small group of
enthusiastic admirers. He was prolific however, and in that calendar year
saw the publication of three novels – Now Wait for Last
Year, The Crack in Space and The Unteleported Man – showcasing his
wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy and religion, which he often
struggled to fit within the constraints of genre publishing. In addition, he wrote the novel Ubik (not published until 1969) and the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, later very loosely adapted as the film Total Recall, in 1966. Though all of these, like
the majority of his books from the 1960s onward, are concerned with artificial
states of mind, communication and language, the individual’s place within
society, and often raise complex questions on the nature of reality, their
packaging reflects the limitations which American SF authors still worked
under. Startlingly at odds with the imaginative content, their cover artwork
relies on a tired formula of ray-guns and rocket-ships which bear little or no
relation to Dick’s thematic preoccupations. It was not until 1982, when his
1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (itself begun in 1966) was filmed as Blade Runner,
that the sophisticated nature of his fiction began to be recognised outside science
fiction circles. Sadly, he died shortly before the film’s release (though,
having been shown the opening twenty minutes of footage, he was quoted by Paul Sammon as saying, “it was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.”) The years since have seen a proliferation of further film adaptations of his work, in tandem with a steady re-appraisal
of his career, to the point where he is arguably regarded as the genre’s pre-eminent
writer, a status Bradbury once popularly enjoyed.
While the pulp SF market was resistant to change, having employed the same methods successfully since the inception of the genre, Dick’s work gradually gained more literary credibility, especially in Europe. The production values of several foreign-language editions suggested an attempt to capture some of the depth which critics were beginning to detect. By the end of the 1960s and early 70s, though Dick himself had already written the bulk of his novels, the seeping of the counter-culture, the esoteric and the experimental, into the mainstream was apparent. The influences of pop-art, psychedelia and surrealism began to be manifested on book covers, with Philip K. Dick ripe for such treatment. The US Daw edition of 1965’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a favourite of John Lennon’s, is a classic of its type; no wonder the German translation of the same book was rendered as LSD-Astronauts. 
