How do you know you’re reading Philip K. Dick?

I think, first and pervasively, it was the strangeness. Strange, Dick was and is. I think it was that which kept me combing the SF catalogs for more by him, waiting for each new book to come out. One hears it said, “X just doesn’t think like other people.” About Dick, it was true. In the stories, you can’t tell what’s going to happen next.

And yet his characters are seemingly designed to be ordinary people—except for the occasional screaming psychotic female who is one of Dick’s specialties, and is always treated with love. They are ordinary people caught up in wildly bizarre situations, running a police force with the help of the mumblings of precognitive idiots, facing a self-replicating factory that has taken over the earth. Indeed, one of the factors in the strangeness is the care Dick takes to set his characters in the world of reality, an aspect most other writers ignore.

In how many other science fiction stories do you know what the hero does for a living when he isn’t caught up in the particular plot? Oh, he may be a member of a space crew, or, vaguely, a scientist. Or Young Werther. In Dick, you are introduced to the hero’s business concerns on page one. That’s not literally true of the short stories in this volume (I went back and checked), but the impression of the pervasiveness of “grubby” business concerns is everywhere, especially in the novels. The hero is in the antique business, say; as each new marvel turns up, he ruminates as to whether it is saleable. When the dead talk, they offer business advice. Dick never sheds his concern that we know how his characters earn their bread and butter. It is a part of the peculiar “grittiness” of Dick’s style.

Another part of the grittiness is the jerkiness of the dialog. I can never decide whether Dick’s dialog is purely unreal, or more real than most. His people do not interact as much as they deliver monologs to carry on the plot, or increase the reader’s awareness of a situation.