Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.
What would happen if the course of American history had taken a different turn in the 1940s? This is now a suitable subject for the literary lions, as demonstrated by Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). But a year before Chabon was born, Philip K. Dick earned his first Hugo award for his bold alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle, a work that has gradually gained acceptance as a modern classic.
This turn of events would have delighted Dick, who died in 1982 just as his books were beginning to find an audience outside of the sci-fi field. During most of his life, he struggled financially, and while Dick longed to build a reputation as a serious writer, he found himself published by Ace Books, an imprint whose greatest claim to fame was binding pulp novels together as “two-for-ones” so that fans could read, for example, both Mike Brett’s Scream Street and John Creighton’s Stranglehold in a single thirty-five cent volume.
Needless to say, a stint in the Iowa Writers' Workshop is a much better starting point for those aspiring to literary fame. Dick himself realized how difficult it would be to extricate himself from the “genre fiction” pigeonhole in which he had been placed, but did not abandon his hopes for a highbrow audience. Around the time he wrote The Man in the High Castle, Dick noted that it might "take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer." In a surprising twist (worthy of his own topsy-turvy plots), Dick did become a highbrow success 30 years later—but did so posthumously, largely on the basis of the works he wrote as a young man.
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