My wife and I were in Heidelberg on an academic grant at this time— among other things, I’d write an academic paper called, “Towards Robot Consciousness.” Pop and his new woman friend came to visit us in the fall of 1979. It was a mournful, uncomfortable encounter. Pop was a mess—he was consumed with guilt about leaving Mom, and he was drinking more heavily than ever before. His girlfriend was stiff and brittle with us. She disapproved of me, as if I were unworthy of being Pop’s son.
After a few long days, I put them on a train for Paris. They were planning to stay in a good hotel and live it up. Poor Pop. He’d done his duty all his life. Now Death was stalking him and he was trying to have fun. Seeing his train pull away, I felt as if my heart would break.
What to do? I started work on my third science fiction novel. I figured I’d write a transreal novel inspired by actual people I knew—but without overtly using myself as a character, as I’d done in my previous two novels Spacetime Donuts and White Light. I sensed that this move would open up the vibe.
One character, called Cobb Anderson, would be an old man modeled on my father in his current state. To some extent I could project myself into this character too. For all our disagreements over the years, Pop and I never were all that different. Another factor in my writing about Pop was that I was in some sense trying to inoculate myself against ending up like him—besotted, afraid of death, and on the run from my family.
The other character in my novel was a young guy called Sta-Hi Mooney, based on my wild and wacky friend Dennis Poague—a guy who used to turn up in Geneseo, New York, to visit his big brother Lee who was teaching there with me in the early 1970s. What I liked about Dennis was that he seemed to have no internal censor. He always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a fanciful mind, and a hipster, motor-mouth style of speech. And, as with Cobb, there’s something of me in Sta-Hi, too.
In the opening scene, Cobb is sitting on a beach in Florida drinking sherry, and he’s approached by his double. At first I thought I was writing a time-travel novel, but then I hit upon the notion of treating the human mind as software. Cobb’s double is a robot copy of his physical form, some other robots will extract Cobb’s personality from his brain, and they’ll run the extracted human software on the robot who looks like Cobb.
“Software.” In 1979, this was a technical and little-known word—I’d picked it up from an article in the Scientific American. I decided to use it for the title of my book. I finished Software near the end of our stay in Heidelberg, in the summer of 1980, and I had no trouble selling it to Ace Books, who’d already published White Light.
My idea of copying a person onto a robot was a fresh concept in those days, and my book also drew some intensity from its father/son theme and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters—the boppers.
I should mention that, although I knew all about the theory of computation from my studies of mathematical logic, I didn’t know jack about real-world computers—we SF writers very often don’t know the technical details of what we’re talking about. In 1979, the only way to access a computer was to use a text terminal with its nasty, inscrutable protocols—or to feed a deck of punched programming cards to a giant machine in a basement.
An oddly anachronistic thing about Software is that, in those years, I couldn’t imagine there being a really small computing device with the power of a human brain. So, instead of giving my Cobb-emulating robot a supercomputer that could fit inside this bopper’s skull, I had the Cobb robot’s brain be a big supercooled clunker that follows the robot around in the back of a refrigerated van that’s disguised as a Mr. Frostee truck. But that’s okay. It makes the novel more fun. And, at a deeper level, the brain in the truck is nice concrete symbol for an organization which maintains complete control over its agents.
Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in the spring of 1982. By then he’d become one of my favorite authors, and I’d began thinking about him a lot. At this point, I was living as a freelance writer in, ironically enough, the conservative town of Lynchburg, Virginia.
Some writers and editors were organizing an annual literary award honoring the memory of Philip K. Dick—and in the fall of 1982, my Ace Book editor, Susan Allison, told me that my novel Software had been nominated. I felt like I had a good shot at the award, given that my SF has that something of the same off-kilter, subversive quality as Phil’s. I began dreaming that my writing income might rise to a sustainable level.
And in March of 1983, I got the Philip K. Dick award for Software. My wife Sylvia and I flew up to New York City for the awards ceremony. Earlier that evening we had dinner with Susan Allison, the editor David Hartwell, a writer friend of Phil’s called Ray Faraday Nelson, and the well-known author Tom Disch—who was the one who’d initially proposed starting the award. Disch was a good guy, immensely hip and cultured.
Our whole party walked over to Times Square, where we saw Bladerunner, the brand-new movie based on Phil’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. On the way over, I talked to Ray Nelson.
I liked the Bladerunner movie a lot, particularly the first part, with the blimps bearing electronic billboards, the cop smoking pot while he interviewed the android, and the dark futuristic city with the neon lights glinting off pavements slick with rain. The last part of the movie seemed too violent, and inappropriately so, given that Phil’s Androids novel had largely been about empathy and peace. But that’s Hollywood.
“Phil would have loved it,” Ray Nelson reassured me. Actually, I’d been wondering if Phil’s worrying about the movie in progress was what drove him to his fatal stroke.
The award ceremony was in an artist’s loft, with the hallways covered in reflective silver paint. One of the first people I ran into was my artist friend Barry Feldman from college. Incredibly, he was wearing a suit, and he looked like Chico Marx at the opera. He seemed just a bit envious of me getting an award—although Barry was a great painter, working all day long in his studio, he wasn’t breaking into the gallery scene. On a sudden whim, I told Barry he could pose as me and enjoy the fame.
As I was such an outsider to the SF scene, nobody knew what I looked like, and the substitution worked for about half an hour. Barry stood by the door shaking hands and signing books, twinkling with delight. I stood across the room, drinking and hanging out with Sylvia, my friend Eddie Marritz, his wife Hanna, and the editor Gerard Vanderleun, who’d handled my non-fiction book The Fourth Dimension for Houghton-Mifflin. In the end the identities got sorted out, and I met the people I needed to meet—among them was Susan Protter, who’d end up being my literary agent for the years to come.
Later that evening I stood on the bar at one end of the silvery room and delivered a short speech that I’d composed on the plane up from Lynchburg.
“If I say that Phil Dick is not really dead, then this is what I mean: He was such a powerful writer that his works exercise a sort of hypnotic force. Many of us have been Phil Dick for brief flashes, and these flashes will continue as long as there are readers. ... I’d like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-philosopher-SF-writer form, if you like. . . . If it is at all possible for a spirit to return from the dead, I would imagine that Phil would be the one to do it. Let’s keep our eyes open tonight, he may show up.”