science fiction writer in the world.” Norman Spinrad trumps this with “the greatest American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Ursula LeGuin anoints him as America’s Borges, which Harlan Ellison tops by hailing him as SF’s “Pirandello, its Beckett and its Pinter.” Brian Aldiss, Michael Bishop, myself—and many others—have all written encomia as extravagant, but all these praises had very little effect on the sales of the books they garlanded during the years those books were being written. Dick managed to survive as a full-time free-lance writer only by virtue of his immense productivity. Witness, the sheer expanse of these COLLECTED STORIES, and consider that most of his readers didn’t consider Dick a short story writer at all but knew him chiefly by his novels.

It is significant, I think, that all the praise heaped on Dick was exclusively from other SF writers, not from the reputation makers of the Literary Establishment, for he was not like writers’ writers outside genre fiction. It’s not for his exquisite style he’s applauded, or his depth of characterization. Dick’s prose seldom soars, and often is lame as any Quasimodo. The characters in even some of his most memorable tales have all the “depth” of a 50s sitcom. (A more kindly way to think of it: he writes for the traditional complement of America’s indigenous commedia dell-arte.) Even stories that one remembers as exceptions to this rule can prove, on re-reading, to have more in common with Bradbury and van Vogt than with Borges and Pinter. Dick is content, most of the time, with a narrative surface as simple—even simple-minded—as a comic book. One need go no further than the first story in this book, The Little Black Box, for proof of this—and it was done in 1963, when Dick was at the height of his powers, writing such classic novels as THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and MARTIAN TIME-SLIP. Further, Box contains the embryo for another of his best novels of later years, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?