Philip K. Dick
Out of context: Reply #8
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- tc_fisher0
that chart is annoying because it's apples and oranges.
i'm sure chuck palahniuk payout, juxtaposed to his books-to-movies box office receipts would have similar stats. it's not like they paid palahniuk, a then no name author, millions for his book fight club... (i'm sure the points on the back end has evened it out for him... plus the countless reprints and residules from overseas sales, which pkd never saw for any of this books or short stories or novellas)
the ones to blame for all of this are the publishing houses and the great divide between fiction and science fiction.
there is a reason why kurt vonneguet never called himself a sf writer yet most of his books have sf themes throughout. the reason being at that time, science fiction was thought about as kid fodder. little space books with robots. and they treated their writers like they treated their supposed audience. paying them little to make quite a bit of cake off of 'em.
you also have to take into account that pkd didn't write his books in a day or two.
that six grand? strech that over a couple of years. or five. or the ten years it took to write man in the high castle.
doubleday gave pkd three grand to write a scanner darkly. it took him three years... when he was finished, not only did they sell it as a sf book, they also sold it as a mainstream novel, a fiction novel. fiction writers of the time made many times the amount of sf authors...
and the copyright laws haven't changed... it's the same shit different assholes at the top.
but really, say phil dick made what he should have. make him a milionare, whatever. if that were to happen, the pkd cannon, i feel would not be as good. most of his books, minus the space and robots and rocket sci-fi stories are, more or less stories that happened to him or around him.
he lived in a paranoid world, a fucked up family life, rarely a dime on him. and he like speed. a lot.
money changes people and their perceptions. it could have changed dick if he got any.
i wonder what kind of stories we would have got from a properly paid philip k dick?
would Ubik just be about an aerosol can of hairspray? would a scanner darkly be about an FBI agent that helps people? or man in the high castle just a retelling of WWII?