Ten Books from Three Authors That Impacted My Early World of Reading
Works from Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick hit me hard at a young age
I don’t know what kind of adult I’d have become if I hadn’t consumed so much science fiction in my teens and beyond, not to mention thousands of comic books, the National Lampoon, Creepy and Eerie magazine, gobs of rock and roll, and more. It was the culture at the time, and where we lived, up in the mountains, we had no TV—not because my parents were against it, but because there was no reception.
So, in my family, we grew up as readers. Voracious readers. One time, my older brother brought home J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and after he finished it for a high school assignment, I started reading it. I was probably 13 or 14 or younger, and at one point, my mom noticed I was reading it and said, “Did you read that from the beginning, or are you just reading the good parts?” I laughed and said I had started it at the beginning. She thought that was okay. I’ve always wondered what she’d have done if I’d admitted I read it only for the ‘good parts.’
So many science fiction writers went through my consciousness. Ursula K. LeGuin. Poul Anderson. Harlan Ellison. Isaac Asimov. Arthur C. Clarke, and on and on.
But three seemed to stay at the top. In no particular order, they were Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick. I’ll save Dick for last because he was the craziest and most difficult, most challenging author to read, and therefore, the most intriguing.
Robert Heinlein
Heinlein started with what I suppose were referred to as space opera stories but quickly grew into something else. His strong Libertarian bent appealed to me at the time (my, how times have changed), and his sense of story and character kept me glued to his new releases. Although, I do think he was more or less phoning it in at the end of his career. Still, when I looked through my Heinlein books library to narrow it down to just three, it was almost impossible. Here’s what I came up with, but tomorrow, I could easily swap out one for another.
Stranger in a Strange Land
“Stranger in a Strange Land” was published in 1961, and I suspect I didn’t see it until the late 60s or early 70s. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who was born on Mars and came to Earth. It won the Hugo for Best Science Fiction Novel of 1961. You can check the Wikipedia entry on the book here, but one thing that I’ve carried with me since then is Smith’s concept of “Waiting is…” The full phrase is “wait for fullness.” It struck me that, as humans, most of us are impatient, but the idea of waiting for something, being critical, and being a good thing has held with me. When Tom Petty’s “The Waiting is the Hardest Part” was released, I thought of the phrase from Heinlein’s novel.
I Will Fear No Evil
Next up is “I Will Fear No Evil,” a story that seemed to me, at the time, to be one of the wildest I’d ever read, and of course, it sent my imagination spinning. The Wikipedia synopsis of the novel, published in 1970, is freaking wild. A dying billionaire has his brain transplanted into the body of his sexy young secretary, but for some reason, both of their minds are alive and well, inside the female body. There’s legal fights over his/her fortune, and eventually, a third personality, that of his long-time lawyer, joins them inside the young female body.
Whoa. It was a helluva concept.
Time Enough For Love
“Time Enough For Love,” published in 1973, covers several periods of the ultra-long life of Lazarus Long (born Woodrow Wilson Smith), who lives to be more than 2000 years old, thanks to a mutation and a breeding experiment design to increase the human lifespan. Lazarus, or Woodrow if you will, had to keep moving because as the friends around him aged, he didn’t, and he had to move to keep people from being suspicious about why he wasn’t aging. The book is a handful of novellas all based on the same character and concept – ultra aging – and there’s space travel, going back in time to before WWI where he meets and falls in love with his own mother. Yeah, it’s full of more wild science fiction ideas.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a big presence in my early reading lineup. Although his books are generally called science fiction, they didn’t feel like the typical science fiction of the day. Instead, they were generally based on things that Vonnegut had experienced and then written novels about.
Slaughterhouse Five
“Slaughterhouse Five,” published in 1969, begins with the line, “All this happens, more or less.” It’s written in first-person and, as Wikipedia puts it, “utilizes a non-linear, non-chronological description of events to reflect Billy Pilgrim's psychological state.” Billy travels back and forth in time throughout the novel, as it centers on his capture by the German army and his survival of the Allied bombing of Dresden. Crazy stuff. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s writing has always intrigued me. It’s unlike so many of his peers, yet is so enjoyable to read. Vonnegut said the story is essentially autobiographical.
Mother Night
“Mother Night,” from 1961, tells the story of an American-born Nazi propagandist and playwright, and the novel is framed as a memoir of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. as he’s imprisoned and awaiting trial for his Nazi crimes. As Vonnegut put it in the novel’s introduction, “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Breakfast of Champions
“Breakfast of Champions,” published in 1973, tells the story of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the events that lead up to his meeting the affluent figure Dwayne Hoover and the immediate aftermath. Themes of mental illness, suicide, free will, and the strata of economic inequality are all addressed. I think what has always attracted me to Vonnegut’s writing are his simple syntax, plain-spoken characters, irony, sentimentality, black humor, and more.
Philip K. Dick
I couldn’t tell you how I came across Philip K. Dick, but when I first read some of his works, it struck me as writing that was much different than the typical science fiction I normally read. A big question that I finally realized I had to ask as I read his novels was this: what is real, and what is perception? His novels are filled with dystopian surroundings, in worlds that are run by oppressive and opaque monolithic entities. The people and worlds are flawed in many ways, often to the point of falling apart.
A Maze of Death
“A Maze of Death” was published in 1970. It follows fourteen scientists who are sent to the planet Delmak-O to take part in a colonization project, but as you might expect, things go badly in about a thousand and one ways. If you look for contemporary reviews of the novel, some of them seem to think that the plot goes off the rails more than once, with more murders than make sense, to the point of being ineffective.
Counter-Clock World
“Counter-Clock World,” out in 1967, takes place in a future where time starts to go backward, with dead people coming to life out of their graves and eventually ungrowing to return to the womb. Crazy, right? It fascinated the hell out of me when I read it as a youngster and wondered how anyone could create such a wild concept. There are elements of religion, racism, patriotism, death and life, and so much more. It still makes my head spin.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
“The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” is a 1964 novel that, like so many other of his novels, slips back and forth between reality and unreality and is considered one of his first works to explore religious themes. And global warming. The book begins in the future, when global temperatures have risen so high that it is generally unsafe to go outside without special cooling gear during the day. There are illegal drugs, precognition, drug cults, space travel, power, and you-name-it. Writer China Meiville called it one of the top weird fiction books of all time, saying that it’s infuriating to try and choose just one of Dick’s works – he’s the outstanding figure in science fiction.
The Man in the High Castle
Finally, the one that seems to be most well-known by people not that familiar with Dick’s earlier works is “The Man in the High Castle,” which I reread a few years back when the TV series first season was released. The book was published in 1962 and depicts a world where Japan and Germany won World War II. It’s a fascinating alternative history look at the Thirties, Forties, and beyond, and starts with the assassination of President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, which resulted in the continuation of the Great Depression and led to the US becoming non-interventionist in the wars that hit Europe and Asia. The Japanese have control of the Western US, and the Germans have control of the Eastern US, although a large part of the middle of the country is uncontrolled by either. The story follows a handful of characters who are involved in trying to run businesses, hide their true heritage, fight the powers and more. One fascinating aspect to me was the element of the banned book “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” which is a novel of speculative fiction where the Allies defeat the Axis. The Germans have banned the novel, but the Japanese allow the publication. The author of the novel, Hawthorne, Abendsen, supposedly lives in a guarded estate called the High Castle. Dick has said that his inspiration came from the 1953 novel “Bring the Jubilee,” by Ward Lee, which is an alternative history of the US Civil War won by the Confederacy. “The Man in the High Castle” became a popular TV series in 2019, lasting four seasons and going much further than the actual book did.
I’m glad I ran across Philip K. Dick at such an early age. He impressed me with the idea that there was not really any tangible science fiction or fictional concept that could not be effectively brought to life in a book. I still shake my head at his works: they’re wild, thorough, fascinating, and ring true to the human condition.
Hollywood and Philip K. Dick
Of course, no doubt you know that Hollywood has at times gotten ahold of Dick’s novels and short stories as jumping-off points for movies. If you’re interested in seeing all of the movies and TV series that have come from Dick’s imagination, check out the Wikipedia listing of nearly two dozen of them.
If asked, I’d put these movies and TV series as my favorites, as the best of the bunch: Blade Runner (both the 1982 version and the follow-up in 2017, Blade Runner 2049), based on the short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep;” The Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, the two Total Recall movies (1990 and 2012), based on the short story “We Can Remember if For You Wholesale,” Paycheck, and The Adjustment Bureau. All good and worthy of your time.
When Rock Music and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Crossed Paths
It still trips me out that the prog-rock band Ambrosia took a poem by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and turned it into a minor hit in 1975. According to Tasha Good of Old Time Music, the lyrics to “Nice, Nice, Very Nice” appeared in the novel “Cat’s Cradle.”
The lyrics of “Nice, Nice, Very Nice” were written by Kurt Vonnegut and can be found in his 1963 novel, “Cat’s Cradle.” In the book, these lyrics appear as the “Fifty-third Calypso,” one of the poems from the fictional religion called Bokononism. The song reflects the concept of a “karass,” which signifies a group of people connected in a spiritually meaningful way.
The lyrics portray various characters, from a sleeping drunkard in Central Park to a Chinese dentist, a British Queen, a lion hunter, and even a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire reference. Despite their diverse backgrounds and roles in society, they are all depicted as fitting together in the same cosmic machine. The repetition of “Nice, nice, very nice” emphasizes the harmony and unity shared by these seemingly unrelated individuals.
The song appeared on Ambrosia’s first album. “Nice, Nice, Very Nice” charted at #63 on Billboard’s Hot 100, while another single from the album, “Holdin’ On to Yesterday,” was a Top 20 hit. Ambrosia went on to have several other hits.
Here’s a live version of Ambrosia doing “Nice, Nice, Very Nice.”