[The following essay was written in 1967 and first published in a shortened form in SF Commentary, January, 1969.]

Nobody has ever accused Dick of being stupid, unoriginal, or dull, but no reviewer I've ever seen has been able to put his finger on the ways in which Dick is intelligent, original, and fascinating. One can but try.

Part of the problem is that Philip Dick's novels have several characteristics which divide him from other sf writers, and tend to sever communication with the average sf reader. As one can point out so easily, long passages in his books, although seldom whole books, are badly written by any standards. (p. 10)

Dick also shows some of the sentimentality we generally associate with the other sf writers, but his direction usually heads away from this approach. When sentimentality does appear in full soporific splendour (Barney Mayerson and Emily Hnatt in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, for example), usually it is so undermined by the framework of the novel that it becomes necessary rather than repellent.

These complaints are quibbles, at best, but they are factors that prevent Dick from writing with the bland smoothness of a John Wyndham or an Arthur Clarke. I am not saying that other types of sf writers are masters of language or are not subject to sentimentality. However, I do think that the faults of the older professionals do not disturb and annoy the reader in quite the way Dick's faults do. His best writing stands in glaring contrast with his worst.

Other features of his writing cut him adrift far more noticeably from both his fellow writers and from sf readers. Most disturbing are the illogicalities of plot and character with which he tends to undermine what might otherwise be regarded as "perfect" stories in the best of American sf traditions. In many of his novels (although he tows the line in his short stories) he appears to set himself and the reader a multi-obstacle race which both writer and reader have only a fair chance of completing. The reader drops out first, and nurses a bruised and weary sensibility to the end of the race. Afterwards he files a strong internal protest, and either refuses to take up the challenge again or approaches the next Dick book with great trepidation. (pp. 10-11)

The sheer weight of "ideas", symbols, plot factors, or whatever can be suffocating. They are introduced at surprising intervals, and are juggled around in dismaying succession. At first sight, the whole book might seem alien to even the most hard-boiled sf reader.

Dick's noticeable inability (shared by nearly all other sf writers) in the field of "characterisation" has its own drawbacks. In each of Dick's novels, all the action is seen through the mind's eye of one or other of his characters. Dick's use of the "viewpoint character" has its own special brilliance. However, such an obviously managed character elicits about as much sympathy from the reader as his favourite television camera. Therefore the centre of identification should fall back on the shoulders of the author, as in [Henry] Fielding's Tom Jones. However, all we are ever likely to see of Dick's face in his own novels is a mocking smile. This technique leaves even his best work oddly centreless. Other sf authors solve this problem by using only one character as the viewpoint of the novel. This reinforces the suspense element of the story, and gains sympathy for the protagonist. But Dick's novels are jigsaw patterns of identifications. In few of his novels does Dick bother to complete the picture. (p. 11)

Between the reviewers and myself, it is extremely difficult to locate exactly the source of Dick's fascination to readers and his undoubted importance to students of sf. The traditional approach … (criticism in terms of Plot-Character-Description) raises more problems than it solves. It is only in novels such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in which Dick punches his way out of his self-made paperbag, that we find a clue to his real power.

In this novel Dick finds a central symbol that is adequate to the whole book—the figure of Palmer Eldritch himself. However, this central idea is not so much important for what it shows about Dick's use of Plot or Characters, or because it is such a good "idea". To approach Eldritch or the novel itself in this way, is to see the flame and the cloud, feel the blast and wind, and not to notice the exploding atomic bomb. (p. 13)

[During the course of the book], Dick traces the conversion of the whole of existence into the playground of Eldritch's mind. The figure that was merely mythic at the beginning of the novel has become Godlike by the end. We are faced with a world where the mere idea of a benevolent, or even omnipotent God, seems ludicrous. Humanity is completely cut off from these resources of both objective and spiritual reality that usually give us the self-assurance to keep living.

How does Dick do it? How does he prevent the book from becoming as mad as the world pictured?

Most obviously, because of his own intelligence and tough-mindedness which can evaluate chaos without falling into it or indulging himself in it. No author, however great, could create this book and survive, if he really extended his own resources and conducted a completely radical inquiry into the nature of people under such stress. After all, what is left of people after they are subjected to such pressure? Dick cannot create characters (rather than "viewpoints") who are strong enough to be called representatives of humanity. Dick's own attitude is still too abstract and limited to appreciate the full implications of the world of Palmer Eldritch. But Dick does not conduct his novel like a [Fëdor Mikhailovich] Dostoyevsky. Dick's prose is its own excellent "melodrama", the compact, brilliantly (rather than extensively) imaginative prose of a [Victor] Hugo, of a [Charles] Dickens at his best, and of a very small number of other science fiction writers. From this point of view. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of the few masterpieces of recent science fiction.

Although it is a touchstone, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is only one of many Philip Dick books, and is certainly not representative of his usual methods. It is a summit, so the vegetation on the slopes can have quite a different hue.

Possibly the best book to discuss in contrast with Palmer Eldritch is the over-rated Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle…. Although the reviewers unanimously call this Dick's best book, and despite the Hugo Award itself, I can still admire the book only partially, and scratch my head, wondering what the fanfare was about.

To some extent, The Man in the High Castle is a textbook demonstration of Dick's best qualities. The prose is never less than incisive and the average effect is probably as good as in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. For instance, the first paragraphs of the novel catch a mood of sharply observed normality that, at the same time, warns the reader that much information has been withheld. (p. 15)

Apologists for The Man in the High Castle have paid special attention to the kinds of writing in the novel that are new for Dick, and probably unique within his work. In Chapter 14, Dick comes closest in any of his writing to a genuine exploration of the emotions and intellectual standing of one of his characters. Mr Nobusuku Tagomi, the Trade Mission official and expert in the I Ching, finds his world crumbling under the pressure of the events of the novel. Dick's writing is as powerfully abstract as ever but, for once, Dick is more concerned with his character as a victim than as a mere viewpoint. One need only compare Barney Mayerson (whose personal suffering is never a point of issue) and Tagomi to see the difference. Dick's wider perceptions within this novel go to waste. As in all of his novels, Dick is not content to explore the viewpoint of one particular character. The variety of characters and the alternation between them is far more dismaying in The Man in the High Castle than it was in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. (pp. 15-16)

The problem is that each of these characters has equal status in the plot, or the reasons are left unclear why some characters are emphasised more than others. If Dick adopts this highly patterned structure to keep readers interested, then he fails. Because each character is interesting in his or her own right, the reader hopes for long sequences which might develop the possibilities of the main characters. This hope is disappointed; Dick constructs a jigsaw in which no character completes the pattern.

If Dick adopts this structure in order to present a composite picture of a fully imagined world (in which Japan and Germany won the Second World War and together occupy America) then I would say that he fails completely. No character has interests and a viewpoint wide enough to see the whole picture. We know little more about the society of this alternate America at the end of the novel than we did at the beginning. Dick has shown many times that he is no political scientist, and I can only regret his failure to illustrate how such a political system would affect the lives of those who live under it. Compared with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose world is fully developed, but credible only within the novel, The Man in the High Castle, more than any other novel that Dick has written, is of the "What if …?" variety. However, Dick seems incapable of extrapolating the complete possible effects of fascism on American (unbelievably mild, for most of the characters), or of constructing his own bizarre type of novel, in which the reader does not bother to ask if it could "really happen".

The Man in the High Castle seems like a very different book from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The problem is that Dick depends on the same sort of manoeuvre as in Palmer Eldritch in order to unify and order his book. Dick needs a meaningful central symbol as the axle of his world. However, he tries to turn the book on two central ideas (I Ching and Hawthorne Abendsen, the "man in the high castle") and fails to make either of them give movement to the whole book. I Ching has the kind of mythic importance that lends suspense and flavour to the novel's proceedings. However, the evocation of the Japanese life-style and the dependence upon a precognitive procedure is ultimately a static device: it aids the plot but is not the plot; its use does not polarise conflicts and settle issues.

Hawthorne and his book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (a science fiction jaunt in which America and the Allies won the War) are initially even more fascinating to the reader than is I Ching. Dick wants Abendsen (who remains vague and mythical to the end of the novel, instead of acquiring the reality of a character) to be the crux of the action. But the last chapter, centring on Abendsen, is a disappointing end to the novel.

The two main symbols, as well as the other fascinating notions that festoon the narrative, and could have been invented only by Philip Dick, eventually have little meaning for the reader. They remain static within the novel. They do not change shape and illuminate the reader's view of the newly created world, but remain merely a part of it. Because Dick is a skilled storyteller, the emptiness of the book does not become apparent until the end, however. The Man in the High Castle is like a car full of perfectly working machinery, none of whose pieces connect with each other. The vehicle just does not go. (p. 16)