Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint, as in Gather Darkness [a novel by Fritz Leiber]. God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else's. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I don't. I wish I had never written it; there are too many horrid forces loose in it. When I wrote it I had been taking certain chemicals and I could see the awful landscape that I depicted. But not now. Thank God. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God who lifts the sins of the world]
“Will the Atomic Bomb Ever Be Perfected?” (1966) Lawrence Sutin, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick pg. 58
thanks to Patrick Clark for sending me this
From: "Philip K. Dick: Confessions Of A SF Artist" [An Interview with Philip K. Dick]
ReplyDeleteby George Cain & Dana Longo
Denver Clarion, October 23, 1980
"I'm totally against organized religion," he states. "I believe you have a direct relation with the divine or you have no relation with the divine. It has nothing to do with faith or dogmatic creeds. The initiative comes from the divine side. There is nothing you can do. All you can do is live an honest life, be brutally honest with yourself, and hope to become an object of interest with the divine beings. Using a formula to evoke them is technically called "magic." I guess you could call me a neo-Platonist with gnostic overtones."
Note PKD's use of the phrase "divine beings," plural, and the plural pronoun, "them."