Philip K. DickWriting Style

Joe Chip's apartment door wants a nickel. He does not have one. In Ubik, the first trouble that finds the man who will spend the rest of the novel deciding whether he is alive is a coin slot, and when he argues, the door quotes the purchase contract back at him and offers to go to court. That is the whole method in one appliance.

The rule underneath it is stingy. Shift one thing about the world, then leave everything else exactly where the reader already keeps it. The Man in the High Castle shifts who won the war and then spends its pages on shop inventory, office etiquette, silver samples and a dealer's dread about the seating at a dinner party. The reader supplies the rest unasked, because whatever a book does not mark as different stays the world outside the window. Dick banked on that, book after book.

His prose is quick, serviceable and often plain to the point of shabby. VALIS opens by introducing Horselover Fat and then admitting that the third person is there to buy a little distance, which tells you how little he cared about hiding a seam. Most of his sentences carry one act plus the character's reading of that act. Many paragraphs close on a question the character has put to himself and cannot answer. He writes appliances and paperwork with more care than weather.

The furniture has dated. Mood organs, videophones, hovercars, all of it. The engine underneath has not aged a day: an ordinary world, one rule inside it that has stopped holding, and a person who still has to make rent while working out which of the two is broken. Anyone can take that. What you cannot take is the nerve to keep the strangeness cheap and domestic, and that is where the imitations come apart.

The forgery that works as well as the original

Robert Childan sells American antiques to Japanese collectors in The Man in the High Castle, and some of his stock comes out of a workshop in the same city. The Colt is new. The certificate is what makes it old. Dick keeps putting this problem on stage because it dissolves a distinction his novels want gone: if the object and the copy are physically the same, then the value sits in a document, and documents get issued. The hard part in your own draft is resisting the urge to reveal which one was real. Hold the ambiguity and the scene stays a scene. Resolve it and you have written a puzzle.

Advertising copy as chapter epigraph

Every chapter of Ubik opens with an advertisement. Ubik is a beer, then a salad dressing, then an instant coffee, then a hair spray, and each pitch signs off with a line about following the instructions on the label. By the final chapter the product is speaking as God. The move solves the problem that defeats most writers holding a metaphysical idea: how to state it without a character standing up to announce it. Sales copy is allowed to make enormous claims. Put your theme in the mouth of a brand and the reader takes the claim and the joke together, and neither one has to be defended.

The broadcast that ends a religion

Buster Friendly, the talk-show host who is on the air almost around the clock, devotes his big exclusive in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to proving that Wilbur Mercer, the suffering figure at the centre of the world's religion, is a bit-part actor on a painted set. The exposure is correct. It changes less than it should. What the tool gives you is a public, cheap, televised way to demolish something private, which hurts more than a secret would and saves you a confrontation scene. The reveal arrives as programming. Your character has to go on sitting in a room with the people who heard it.

The doll's house on Mars

Colonists in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch furnish miniature layouts of the suburban life they have lost, a house for Perky Pat and her boyfriend, and then chew an illegal drug in order to live inside the layout for a while. The accessories are sold separately. Somebody runs the supply chain, and later somebody better funded runs a rival one. Dick habitually gives the escape a price list and an owner, and that is the difference between a satirical gadget and an engine, because a product can be withheld, undercut, adulterated or nationalised. Ask who bills your characters for their consolation.

The machine that teaches the correct feelings

Martian Time-Slip sends its children to a school staffed by simulacra, and the teaching machines are built as figures like the Kindly Dad and the Angry Janitor, each one licensed to model one attitude and to reject a child who fails to respond as designed. Jack Bohlen repairs them for a living. His job puts a working man's hands inside the apparatus that certifies normality. That is the position Dick liked to write from, one rung below the people who set the standard, close enough to see the wiring. Give somebody in your story the maintenance contract instead of the boardroom seat.

The user-serviceable self

Garson Poole, in the story The Electric Ant, discovers that he is a manufactured organism with a punched tape running through his chest, and that the tape is what supplies him with a world. So he starts editing it. He punches out a hole to see what disappears, then splices in a new one to see what arrives. The idea is the one the novels circle, brought down to a workbench where a character can pick it up with a pair of tweezers. Abstractions cannot be operated. Objects can. When your theme needs testing, hand it to somebody as a device with a defect, and leave a screwdriver beside it.

Defamiliarization (making the ordinary strange)

Victor Shklovsky's word for this is ostranenie, making strange, and Dick applies it to furniture rather than to syntax. Nobusuke Tagomi sits on a park bench in The Man in the High Castle, turning a piece of new silver jewellery over in his fingers, and looks up into a different San Francisco with a freeway standing over the water. A small object did that, not a machine and not a drug. The device does the work that lyric description does for other novelists, which is what lets his sentences stay flat. A world described strangely stays strange. A world described plainly, with one item in it out of place, keeps working on the reader for chapters.

Deflective point of view (the instrument that misreads)

His narration is third person and reliable about events. The doubt is loaded into the perceiver instead. Fred, the agent in A Scanner Darkly, is assigned to study scanner tapes of a suspect called Bob Arctor, and Fred is Bob Arctor, and the drug that pays for the operation is quietly severing the halves of his brain until the man on the screen stops being him. Baxter's name for this is the deflective point of view, a perspective that fails to mesh with what it sees. It is a different instrument from the unreliable narrator, who lies or hides. Nothing here lies. The equipment is faulty, and the reader watches the readings drift.

Dramatic irony held open rather than sprung

The reader gets there first, and the book knows it. In Ubik, Glen Runciter's face turns up on the coins in Joe Chip's pocket and his voice sells the product from a television commercial, so the reader has the answer assembled long before Joe does, while Joe is still working through rational explanations, one at a time, each of them careful and wrong. That gap is the suspense. It is not a twist held back for the last chapter, and Dick had little interest in the theatrical reveal, because the tension he wants comes from watching a competent man spend his effort well and get nowhere. Read him for the pleasure of being ahead and helpless.

The double bind as scene engine

Jason Taverner wakes in a cheap hotel room in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said with no papers, in a state where papers are the whole of a person, and the only route to papers runs through proving an identity that no record supports. Each move he makes to fix it exposes him further. That is the shape Dick reaches for again and again: a position where doing nothing is fatal and doing something is worse, so the character has to act, and the acting tightens the trap. The pressure comes out of the rules, which is why he rarely needs a villain in the room. Build the bind, then get out of the way.

Stacking marvels instead of following one of them all the way down

Two impossible things in the same chapter cancel each other out. The reader loses the measuring stick, and with it any way of telling which part of the scene is supposed to be alarming. Eye in the Sky is instructive here, because Dick had every excuse to pile things up: a group of visitors falls through a series of private universes, and he runs them strictly one at a time, so each world gets tested, exhausted and left behind. Discipline reads as invention. A draft with four marvels in it holds less strangeness than a draft with one, because strangeness is a ratio and the denominator is everything you left alone.

Writing paranoia as atmosphere

Dread is the easiest of these moves to fake, and the least useful once faked. Turn the lights down, thicken the adjectives, have somebody glance over a shoulder, and you have written weather. Dick's fear is administrative. The most frightening scene in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is three people, a pair of scissors and a spider at a kitchen table, working out how many legs the animal can lose and still walk, on the strength of something one of them read. Baxter warns against the story that turns meaningful too fast, and mood is how that happens. A mechanism, a claim, a test and a cost will do more than any quantity of dark.

Explaining the rule early, out of kindness

Explanation is a payment, and most drafts spend it far too early. Once the reader knows what the world is, the scenes stop being investigations and turn into confirmations, and a confirmation cannot carry a chapter. In the story Faith of Our Fathers a man takes something that cancels the official hallucination, sees another thing standing where the Absolute Benefactor of the People should be, and the story ends without telling you what it was. That restraint costs him readers who complain. It buys him readers who cannot stop. Withhold the diagnosis, keep supplying symptoms, and give your character something urgent to do meanwhile, so the withholding reads as pressure rather than coyness.

Mistaking the bleakness for the point

He is a far softer writer than his reputation, and copying only the despair strips out the part that makes despair land. Rachael Rosen goes up to the roof and pushes Deckard's goat off the edge. The goat was bought on credit. He had wanted a real animal since his sheep died, it had cost him a marriage's worth of argument, and the loss of one farm animal is the largest grief in a novel about the end of the world. That is the hardest thing here to imitate honestly, because it asks you to give your characters something small and legitimate to want. Sarcasm is cheaper. It also fails on a second reading.