Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (23 page)

At fifteen, there are a multitude of things that can make us bummed out and ugly. Physically, I did not have my shit together—haystack hair, a round and unfinished face, a gawky body with these boobless tits that were all nipple. Even when we're hideous as teenagers, we also look sort of uniquely, never-again great, so when people claim they were ugly back then it's hard to believe. Yet it felt irrefutably true. And we were poor and my dad was crazy, major bummers both and a formula that equaled staying long hours at the library while embarking on the grand project of reading everything in the science fiction section.

When I found Philip K. Dick, he was no big secret. He was in a partial state of rediscovery—there were a bunch of nice paperback reissues from Vintage, plus a five-volume set of collected stories on which I systematically placed holds at the library. Everything—I placed holds on everything. Why'd I get it so bad for Philip K. Dick?

I first loved the twists. The showmanship! The pulpy excitement of it all! The first PKD book I ever read was
Eye in the Sky,
about eight visitors to a particle accelerator who get trapped in each others' subjective realities. Back then, it was so easy to wow and surprise me, and each time the world as we knew it turned out to be a construct, false,
somehow not right
—it knocked me over. Imagine PKD typing in a Benzedrine tap dance thinking that this would really get them. Did it ever. If you pet a dog in a PKD novel, get ready for the dog to melt and in the puddle will be a slip of paper that reads "SOFT-DRINK STAND."

Guest Editorial: Bummed Out and Ugly on the Occasion of Philip K. Dick's Birthday

Of course, there was more to it. Knowing that reality could be up for grabs, manipulated, and twisted gave me a prickly, shivery joy. But this would be a shallow pleasure without the deep sense of sadness in the best of PKD's work. When the world you knew was ripped away from you, even if in that world you had a shitty job and couldn't get a date, he recognized that you had to mourn. You mourned for the false world that you missed, you mourned that any kind of true, real world was elusive or else completely lost and that nothing would ever be the way it was meant to be, whatever that was.

There are cool ways to be into science fiction, and there are less cool ways. If I'm really going to dig into it, being into Philip K. Dick used to be a hipster's way of liking science fiction. (It's now probably sub-hip, a little past-hip, a bit like being into Haruki Murakami.) However, PKD is great at eluding coolness. It's a singular joy to read his work and find what is elegant and transcendental about it but also very much pulp trash—lowdown and frumpy. In
Ubik,
PKD performs a kind of genre Tourette's by continually describing the weird outfits that all of the characters wear. For. No. Good. Reason. He loved a good throwaway idea, and sprinkled things like telepathic Martian jackals and slime molds from Ganymede and psychic newspapers throughout his stories. Appropriately, his characters were often losers. They were hustlers and auditioners, scrappy people who seemed anxious all the time and had to balance getting ahead with being decent protagonists.

PKD cared about trash—or, rather, that which others deemed to be trash.

What do you do when you grow up in a world you hate? Sometimes, you do a 360-degree pivot turn on your heel and run right back into its arms. I thought absolutely none of this at the time, I'm pretty sure, but looking back, PKD's was a science fiction that made my life seem okay. Granted, the crazy of PKD's work and my dad's crazy weren't the same. My dad's crazy was sad, boring, degraded, and degrading, and as I've hopefully established, the crazy in PKD's work
is incredibly the greatest,
as well as heartbreaking and dignified in the most unexpected of ways. But all throughout PKD's stories and novels I found loserness and crazy and I found trying one's best and having it all be futile, swept into the trash with the leavings of a discarded world. I found both the things I did not want to think about and the opposite of those things, aka space shit. I think it helped.

Years ago I briefly dated someone and the best thing this person did was try to take me to the apartment PKD had been living in when he died. I say "try" because it's unclear that this was the actual apartment he lived in. It was in Orange County, and the sun was hot like a huge hand pressing down on us. Things were pretty much over between us, but I stepped closer and draped my arms over him. Pickup artists everywhere, take note: Bring her to the place where her favorite science fiction writer had a stroke and she'll go wiiiiiiiiiiiiild.

"We should ask someone," one of us said. No one came in or went out. I squinted at the ugly building trying to glean anything PKD-like about it, and the Necker Cube in my mind shifted drowsily left then right. It was probably not his building. It probably was. This was exactly the kind of place where is life would end. This was not a fitting place for him spend the last years of his life. This guy and I were being momentous and interesting. This guy and I were deluded and confused.

Oh, and now I see that was, I guess, the whole point. Happy birthday, Philip K. Dick.

Alice Sola Kim's fiction appears in
Lightspeed, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy,
and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and a MacDowell Colony residency, and has been honor-listed twice for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

ANOTHER TRANSITION

This is a time of computer transition for me—a rare event, because I'm not someone who trades in his computer for a new model every year or so. Quite the contrary: I am maddeningly, preposterously, insanely retentive when it comes to computers.

I was one of the first SF writers to switch from the typewriter to the computer. I started to investigate that possibility in 1979—not for writing, because in 1979 I had vowed to stop writing fiction forever, and actually thought I meant it—but for my financial and business records.

Computers in 1979 were pretty primitive things. The Apple II was around then, and various other makes, the Altair 8800, Imsai 8080, Tandy TRS-80, etc. They had screens, and most of them, not all, had keyboards, but where they fell short was in the matter of memory, for which an achingly slow tape-deck thing was used. I visited one of the pioneering computer stores in Berkeley, explained my needs, and the clerk suggested that I wait a year or two before buying. "They're going to put out something called a Winchester drive," he said. "All of today's computers will be obsolete overnight." A "Winchester drive" was what we call a hard disk today.

So I put the computer-buying project on the back burner, even though my "permanent" retirement from writing fiction had ended with the writing of
Lord Valentine's Castle
in 1980. A long novel like that was a considerable chore, with plenty of paper wasted as I banged out two six hundred-page drafts. But a lot was going on in my life besides writing, just then, and so it was easy to sidestep the business of buying a computer for a while.

What tipped me over into modern technology was my 1982 novel—
Lord of Darkness
—half again as long as
Castle,
nine hundred manuscript pages, and then a second draft just as long, and by the time I was done with that I never wanted to use a typewriter again. So I asked my friend Jerry Pournelle, one of the earliest computer users in our field, to explain this whole computer thing to me. He did, in a letter of about eighteen pages, a splendid essay on what computers were and how to use them, and swiftly I headed out to find one.

Those of you who weren't on the scene in 1982 may be unaware that the computers manufactured then had unique operating systems; nothing was compatible with anything else, but for machines using the CP/M operating system, and the various CP/M computers tended to exist in isolated universes. Nor did they come equipped with the fabled Winchester drives; they used floppy disks—the old fiveand-a-half-inch size. The most popular among writers then was a portable computer, the Osborne, with a postage-stampsized screen; it looked like a toy to me. But then I discovered the world of dedicated word processors made for office use. They had proprietary software that was remarkably easy to use, they were much sturdier than the flimsy machines that most of my colleagues had, and they came with hard drives—not called Winchesters any more—with enough capacity to hold several complete novels.

So I bought a Compucorp word processor, and for a huge extra amount equipped it with a gigantic ten-megabyte hard drive, the biggest available then, and in November 1982, I began with much trepidation to write a novella on that newfangled thing. I didn't really believe that yesterday's work would still be on the hard disk when I sat down to work the next day, so I printed out my new pages every day, just in case. But yesterday's work was always there the next day. And the computer proved its value in many other ways. In order to change a character's name fifty pages through the story, because it conflicted with another character's name, I simply did a search and replace, and the name-change was instantaneous, no need for me to hunt through a bulky manuscript to find every instance of the name I wanted to scrap. And when I was done with the first draft, I did my revisions by hand on the print-out, keyed them in, pressed the "print" key, and out came a flawless final draft.

Very likely I'd be using that creaky 1982 computer even now, but for the fact that in 1991 it lost contact with my printer, and the technician who usually got me through such glitches could find no way to get me through this one. By then, though, standardized PCs using DOS operating systems had appeared, so writers could send diskettes to editors and skip the manuscript stage entirely, whereas I was still plodding along with my totally noncompatible software. It was fine software—to this day, I have not encountered an easier or more flexible word-processing program than Arrow, the one that came with my Compucorp—and after nine years of experience with it, I wanted to keep on using it. But Compucorp, by then, was out of business. Then I learned that Arrow was now available in a DOS version that could be used on any of the many makes of PCs that had come into use. I did a little comparative shopping, bought a Compaq 386 computer, installed Arrow on it, and set happily to work.

I loved using it. In fact I went on using it and using it and using it as decades went by. Computers aren't supposed to last forever, and indeed most don't last more than a few years; but there I was, still turning out books on my Compaq 386 in the new century, and doing my personal and business bookkeeping on it too. The demise of my Compucorp had been a blessing in disguise; now I was a DOS user like everybody else, no longer locked into a unique and non-compatible operating system, and I could back up my work on my wife's computer, or on the second computer that I bought for my own backup purposes, or any other DOS computer I chose.

During those years the Internet happened. My computer had no modem, but that was all right, because I didn't want the distraction of e-mail or eBay or e-anything while I worked. Around 1998, I bought a laptop for Internet use in the main house, and eventually upgraded to a Macintosh iMac; but over in my office, a separate building, I worked on and on with my ever more ancient Compaq, using my beloved Arrow software.

I worked on and on, yes, but not without a certain tension as the years went by, because I knew that my office computer had lasted well beyond its plausible life span, and every morning as I headed for the office to begin the day's work I wondered whether this might be the morning when it would no longer respond. I had it all backed up on a laptop computer but, even so, I knew it would be tremendously traumatic when the day came that my good old Compaq suddenly could not be made to work.

That day came a couple of months ago. I had just written a new column for
Asimov's,
and I was backing it up onto a diskette so I could turn it into an ASCII file, take it over to the main house, convert it to a Word document, and e-mail it to the magazine, when suddenly my computer abruptly announced that its C drive—that is, the primary one—could not be found. I went into the DOS directory and saw that all the C drive files were still there—long lists of them with cryptic DOS names, stories, novels, essays, business records, everything that I had put on that computer since 1991. But I had no access to anything.

Trauma, all right. I called in a local computer expert old enough to remember DOS-based computers, C drives, floppy disks, all that ancient stuff, and for a couple of mornings he tinkered with my venerable machine. Without success, though, for the problem was within the Arrow software, not in the computer itself, and Arrow had been a thing of the past for so long that no one now working with computers had any idea how to fix a chunk of corrupted code. This, I knew, was The End, Goetterdaemmerung for my dear old Compaq at last.

The disaster wasn't total, though. I still had the entire contents of the Compaq backed up on the laptop, and I also had access to the A drive, the diskette drive, of the old computer. I wasn't able to print anything from the laptop—that's a different and very complicated story—but I could transfer any document I wanted from the laptop to a diskette, put it on the Compaq using the A drive, work with it there, and print the result. Writing to the A drive is slower than using the hard drive, of course, because I type quickly and the A drive, unable to keep up with the input at the speed with which I put it in, pauses every couple of minutes to catch up, and I have to wait while that is going on. But that's not a serious problem—certainly not while making bookkeeping entries, since those are made at a rather slower pace than the one with which I compose sentences, and even while writing essays I could easily deal with having to wait a moment for the computer before going on to the next word. Scrolling through something I've already written is slower, too, because a diskette doesn't have much memory; but I tell myself that waiting for the next line to show up is a Zen exercise for me, a belated education in learning a little patience.