|
|
|
|
|
|
as long as one is able to hold on. Often the change at 800 words involves a blatant reversing of the values some character or thing has represented: a friend turns out to be an enemy, an enemy a friend, what we thought was useful is useless, an escape is a trap, etc. Often the reversals are given some coherence by the continuity offered by the hero (as in Slan) or by a fixed deep structure (such as the truth in "The Weapon Shop" that the armed strangers are liberators, while the familiar authorities are oppressors). What is remarkable about these fairly mechanical and hasty exercises is how profound they can seem. The van Vogt rule of a new idea every 800 words is a way of generating complexity and of enforcing at least the illusion of a relentless dialectic. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What I am calling the 800-word rule is an explicitly acknowledged device for van Vogt. I do not know of any such explicit acknowledgement on Dick's part. Yet the central importance of van Vogt's practice for Dick's sense of SF is easily documented. In his interview with Charles Platt, Dick twice points to The World of Null-A as a central text which "absolutely fascinated" him. "A lot of what I wrote, which looks like taking acid, is really the result of taking van Vogt very seriously." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Huntington, "Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity," Science-Fiction Studies 15, No. 2 (July 1989): 15354 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In something of the same way in which Jommy Cross was a relatively superior human being, able to do what the ordinary person could not do, so we may see van Vogt as a relatively superior SF writer, able to imagine what the ordinary science fiction writer of 1940 could not imagine. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Throughout the modern scientific era, as we have taken some pains to notice, existence has been divided into two partsan area of securely known things and another area of unknownness. But van Vogt no longer observed this distinction between here and out there, between the Village and the World Beyond the Hill. To his way of thinking, knowledge and mystery were inextricably intertwined in all times and places. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As van Vogt saw it, so great was the imperfection of our perception and thought that even the here-and-now was all but a total mystery to us. At the same time, however, the farthest star and the most remote moment |
|
|
|
|
|