Dick's world was immediately different. Spaceships, robots and computers, typically the drive of many conventional s/f stories were relegated in Dick's work to set dressing. Characters, and ideas were given centre stage. And it wasn't just the familiar stock in trade characters I was so used to. There were no single, white, young male heroes or pretty females hanging off the hero's bicep. Neither were there the typical mad scientist or superhuman robots. Dick constructed highly individual but flawed characters who didn't fit the mould of the 'typical' science fiction character. And Dick added something else just as distinctive - a queer element to his science fiction, that is missing, implied or tokenistic in mainstream science fiction of his time (1. By queer I don�t simply mean gay, but a broader sense of that which isn't simply mainstream or formula.)
Mainstream science fiction sees the science fiction story as a simple equation. Science comes first, characters second. But such formula is too easy for a talented author like Dick. His worlds are filled with the bizarre; the unusual; and the queer. In The Gameplayers of Titan, Dick gives his skycars the power of speech. This may not seem so surprising when speech recognition technology is commonplace today but what makes his work unique is the way his car's will actually argue with the characters riding in them, as if those cars had their own personalities. Satire, and humour, those literary techniques that appear so rarely in conventional science fiction are a typical in Dick's work.
Talking cars that talk back are part of Dick's project to subvert the 'hard' SF story and one he subverts so well in The Man in the High Castle. This story has none of the hardware associated with a science fiction. There are no spaceships, robots or other hard tech equipment. This was the first novel of Dick's I read and I felt like a stranger to some foreign land without a map. I missed the comfortable, safe science fiction I was so familiar with, epitomised by Star Trek where transporters, spaceships, computers, and robots are all an easily identifiable part of the fabric of the tale. But my new map, in the form of The Man in the High Castle had none of this familiar territory. I felt lost and directionless. I finished the book and put it aside. But the characters and ideas in The Man in the High Castle were so rich and dense that after finishing I felt that the book left me with a greater sense of resonance than the typical hard SF story. Dick's work was certainly queer and I wanted to read more of it.
Dick gets even more queer in his lesser known, but in many ways more compelling work - Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said. In less than 200 pages Dick manages to pack in incest, homosexuality, drug use, a fascist state apparatus, and multiple realities. With so many non-conventional ideas in this novel we are immediately aware that this is not your average 'hardware' style science fiction. And neither are the characters.
Jason Taverer, the 'hero' of Flow my Tears, the policeman Said, is not a mad scientist, strong young male, or any other typical stock SF character. Instead he is the star of a TV variety show. He awakes one day to find that he is no longer a TV star but a man who has literally no identity. Taverner sets out to discover how his life has been rewritten.
