In the fall of 1971, I was preparing to start work in the prison movement with a San Rafael-based organization called the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ) – it was my “alternative service” as a conscientious objector in lieu of being inducted into the army – and my co-workers-to-be were giving me this line about, “Now you can move to Marin County,” as if this were a terrific enticement to a 25-year-old poet (made ever so much more complicated by the fact that Selective Service rules effectively precluded me from being paid for my work with the organization, so that I was also looking around for a night-time job that provide enough to live on). I’d been living in North Oakland ever since my first marriage had ended and was actively thinking of the CPHJ assignment as an occasion to move back to San Francisco. I could get a night-time job easier in the City, I reckoned, and hitchhike the 17 miles to & from work each day. I wanted to engage the writing scene in the City first hand, not as a student at SF State (which I’d been during my previous stay in San Francisco in 1966-67), and I was tired of the university-centered scene in Berkeley. But for the life of me, I could not then imagine why a writer would want to live in Marin County, unless of course it was out in the hippy enclave that was Bolinas.

 

It was at that moment that a writer in San Rafael made the newspapers in a most unusual fashion. The home of Philip K. Dick had been burglarized and his safe had been blown up. In 1971, I’d never heard of Dick & the newspaper said only that he wrote science fiction, a genre I’d paid little attention to beyond reading a few obvious books by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov & Robert Heinlein. I asked my new co-workers what they knew about all this & was told that somebody had told somebody had told somebody else that all this was drug related in some vague fashion. Either Dick was a dealer or owed a dealer some significant sum of money – at least that was the rumor. Word on the street was that Dick was a speed freak & implicit in that description was the idea that he would be both crazed & paranoid. (Having had my own crystal summer five years earlier, I was in no position to dispute that impression.) None of my new colleagues had ever met Dick – they were frankly much more animated about a motion picture that had just wrapped up its filming on & about Fourth Street, an ensemble piece with no-name actors – I was told they were “kids” – that would be called American Graffiti.

 

Although I worked for CPHJ for five years, I never met Dick. He apparently moved out of San Rafael just as soon as the dust & smoke settled, & it was years (maybe a decade) before I began to engage his works. Once I started doing so, I quickly realized that I’d let an opportunity slip by me – I would continue to read his novels as long as there were new books to read. And though Dick himself died over twenty years ago, I have yet to complete this process. A lot of which has to do with the fact that Dick was exceptionally prolific – he had the heart of a hack – and that a lot of his works were originally published by the sort of marginal-enough sci-fi paperback original publishers that they went in & out of print with strobe-effect periodicity. Now that publishers have figured out that they can profitably sell every single thing he wrote, Vintage Books is bringing many of the novels back into print all at once. Whatever their motives, good for them.

 

I just finished reading Solar Lottery, the very first novel that Dick ever published, originally appearing in 1954. Although Dick had been a peripheral member of the Berkeley renaissance scene around Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Rod McKuen & Lew Hill around 1950, he apparently didn’t set out to write sci-fi until ’52, so Lottery represents very early work indeed. But all the elements are here already – the sci-fi as theology (or is it the other way around?), the deep paranoia, the rapidly moving prose dialog, and especially that signature apprehension of Dick’s of the future as always already devastated. In some ways, though, Solar Lottery is a more unusual Dick project than most, simply because he’s trying to get a form right & to attempt that, he has to believe at some level that these forms – both the sci-fi genre & the idea of the novel as a complete arc – exist.

 

He almost manages it & a lot of what makes Solar Lottery fun reading – at least for me – comes in watching the attempt. At one level, the complex narrative logistics of a game in which world leaders are chosen literally through a version of spin the bottle, only to become the immediate target for removal via assassination, seen through the eyes of a man who just signed up with the team displaced by the last “twitch” of the bottle, requires substantial plotting infrastructure. You have to build a Rube Goldberg plot machine that operates in only one direction, which Dick does on one level reasonably well. On a second level, though, he finishes the book before he completes the plot, not in the sense of leaving the ending indeterminate & ambiguous, but rather in have several secondary threads wildly untied right when they should be knotting into a tidy bow of perfect closure. The result is a concluding chapter that does more to sweep clutter under the rug than resolve issues.

 

Before we get there, however, we see Dick operating as lean & efficient a narrative machine with regards to the one thematic arc he does care about as he will ever accomplish, rendering Solar Lottery much more of a page turner than is typically the case with him. I know at least one sci-fi writer who thinks that Dick is already far too much the page-turner, & this accelerated machine is definitely dizzying. On the other hand, it’s instructive to watch such a talented author devote so much energy to getting the dominoes to fall, only to remember at the last moment (perhaps because an editor brought it up) that he’d set all those other narrative engines spinning off in different directions & maybe it would be a good idea to at least check on them at the end.