“The Preserving Machine”
In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?
Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.
Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the visual arts, which can at least play at abstract beauty. Novels and stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff: language, history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal instinct and time’s remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble together anything particularly sublime?
By JONATHAN LETHEM
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html?em
The Preserving Machine is a collection of science fiction stories by Philip K. Dick. It was first published by Ace Books in 1969 as part of their Ace Science Fiction Specials series. The stories had originally appeared in the magazines Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, If, Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Worlds of Tomorrow, Imagination and Satellite.
Contents
* "The Preserving Machine"
* "War Game"
* "Upon the Dull Earth"
* "Roog"
* "War Veteran"
* "Top Stand-By Job"
* "Beyond Lies the Wub"
* "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
* "Captive Market"
* "If There Were No Benny Cemoli"
* "Retreat Syndrome"
* "The Crawlers"
* "Oh, to be a Blobel!"
* "What the Dead Men Say"
* "Pay for the Printer"
Philip K. Dick
(Unpublished) Foreword to The Preserving Machine
The difference between a short story and a novel comes to this: a short story may deal with a murder; a novel deals with the murderer, and his actions stem from a psyche which, if the writer knows his craft, he has previously presented. The difference, therefore, between a novel and a short story is not length; for example, William Styron's The Long March is now published as a "short novel" whereas originally in Discovery it was published as a "long story." This means that if you read it in Discovery you are reading a story, but if you pick up the paperback version you are reading a novel. So much for that.
There is one restriction in a novel not found in short stories: the requirement that the protagonist be liked enough or familiar enough to the reader so that, whatever the protagonist does, the readers would also do, under the same circumstances...or, in the case of escapist fiction, would like to do. In a story it is not necessary to create such a reader identification character because (one) there is not enough room for such background material in a short story and (two) since the emphasis is on the deed, not the doer, it really does not matter—within reasonable limits, of course—who in a story commits the murder. In a story, you learn about the characters from what they do; in a novel it is the other way around: you have your characters and then they do something idiosyncratic, emanation from their unique natures. So it can be said that events in a novel are unique—not found in other writings; but the same events occur over and over again in stories, until, at last, a sort of code language is built up between the reader and the author. I am not sure that this is bad by any means.
Further, a novel—in particular the SF novel—creates an entire world, with countless petty details—petty, perhaps, to the characters in the novel, but vital for the reader to know, since out of these manifold details his comprehension of the entire fictional world is obtained. In a story, on the other hand, you are in a future world when soap operas come at you from every wall in the room...as Ray Bradbury once described. That one fact alone catapulted the story out of mainstream fiction and into SF.
What a SF story really requires is the initial premise which cuts it off entirely from our present world. This break must be made in the reading of, and the writing of, all good fiction...a made-up world must be presented. But there is much more pressure on an SF writer, for the break is far greater than in, say, "Paul's Case" or "Big Blonde"—two varieties of mainstream fiction which will always be with us.
It is in SF stories that SF action occurs; it is in SF novels that worlds occur. The stories in this collection are a series of events. Crisis is the key to story-writing, a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happenings so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out...usually. He can get them out; that's what matters. But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one (such long, long stories as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice are, like the Styron piece, really short novels). The implication of all this makes clear why some SF writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories. It is because anything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event. So, in terms of actions and events, the story is far less restrictive to the author than is a novel. As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do—not what he would like them to do. This is on one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.
When I look over this collection of my stories I can see what has been lost to me in the several years of strictly novel writing. These stories range in time and space; situations bubble up to the surface; characters struggle, and then the struggle is resolved and a new story begins, Relationships are made, broken. Persons appear, speak their piece, and then go away. The momentum of writing fades out briefly and then a new cast of people, and a new crisis, materializes.
In choosing these particular stories, Terry Carr has done a superb job. To start with he read the stories which I supplied as my idea of what a collection of Philip K. Dick stories ought to be like. Terry, however, went to incalculable trouble in getting together all my published stories; it took four years of work for him to finalize on the stories here contained. It includes, for example, the first story I ever sold: "Roog," to Tony Boucher's F & SF. It contains my first published story, "Beyond Lies the Wub." Then there are middle period stories such as "Pay for the Printer," "War Veteran," "Upon the Dull Earth." And, at last, recent stories, such as "If There Were no Benny Cemoli," "What the Dead Men Say," or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale."
It would not be politic for me to say that I think this is a "superb collection by a master craftsman of the field," as the blurbs say about one author after another. What I do think—and want to say—is this. No better collection of my stories could be made. Terry Carr missed nothing. I myself—I couldn't have done as well. It contains stories from every period of my writing, which covers a period of seventeen years. It is, to be blunt, definitive. (An English collection which appeared a number of years ago was decidedly not.) A brilliant editor can do so much to help an author, more than the reader realizes. "I must have read three hundred thousand words by you," Terry told me when the collection was half finished. I wonder how many it finally come to.
One more thing: I would like to list my favorite two or three stories in the book. To me, "Beyond Lies the Wub" is pleasing; then "If There Were no Benny Cemoli," and finally "The Preserving Machine," which, like "Roog," was a very early story (1952) that I sold to Tony Boucher.
Tony Boucher—what is the field going to do without him? It was his encouragement that got me to try submitting my stories; I had never imagined that they might sell. Consider this collection as dedicated to Tony and everything he represented. We shall never see another of his like. Te amo, Tony. Forever.
In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?
Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.
Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the visual arts, which can at least play at abstract beauty. Novels and stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff: language, history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal instinct and time’s remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble together anything particularly sublime?
By JONATHAN LETHEM
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html?em
The Preserving Machine is a collection of science fiction stories by Philip K. Dick. It was first published by Ace Books in 1969 as part of their Ace Science Fiction Specials series. The stories had originally appeared in the magazines Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, If, Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Worlds of Tomorrow, Imagination and Satellite.
Contents
* "The Preserving Machine"
* "War Game"
* "Upon the Dull Earth"
* "Roog"
* "War Veteran"
* "Top Stand-By Job"
* "Beyond Lies the Wub"
* "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
* "Captive Market"
* "If There Were No Benny Cemoli"
* "Retreat Syndrome"
* "The Crawlers"
* "Oh, to be a Blobel!"
* "What the Dead Men Say"
* "Pay for the Printer"
Philip K. Dick
(Unpublished) Foreword to The Preserving Machine
The difference between a short story and a novel comes to this: a short story may deal with a murder; a novel deals with the murderer, and his actions stem from a psyche which, if the writer knows his craft, he has previously presented. The difference, therefore, between a novel and a short story is not length; for example, William Styron's The Long March is now published as a "short novel" whereas originally in Discovery it was published as a "long story." This means that if you read it in Discovery you are reading a story, but if you pick up the paperback version you are reading a novel. So much for that.
There is one restriction in a novel not found in short stories: the requirement that the protagonist be liked enough or familiar enough to the reader so that, whatever the protagonist does, the readers would also do, under the same circumstances...or, in the case of escapist fiction, would like to do. In a story it is not necessary to create such a reader identification character because (one) there is not enough room for such background material in a short story and (two) since the emphasis is on the deed, not the doer, it really does not matter—within reasonable limits, of course—who in a story commits the murder. In a story, you learn about the characters from what they do; in a novel it is the other way around: you have your characters and then they do something idiosyncratic, emanation from their unique natures. So it can be said that events in a novel are unique—not found in other writings; but the same events occur over and over again in stories, until, at last, a sort of code language is built up between the reader and the author. I am not sure that this is bad by any means.
Further, a novel—in particular the SF novel—creates an entire world, with countless petty details—petty, perhaps, to the characters in the novel, but vital for the reader to know, since out of these manifold details his comprehension of the entire fictional world is obtained. In a story, on the other hand, you are in a future world when soap operas come at you from every wall in the room...as Ray Bradbury once described. That one fact alone catapulted the story out of mainstream fiction and into SF.
What a SF story really requires is the initial premise which cuts it off entirely from our present world. This break must be made in the reading of, and the writing of, all good fiction...a made-up world must be presented. But there is much more pressure on an SF writer, for the break is far greater than in, say, "Paul's Case" or "Big Blonde"—two varieties of mainstream fiction which will always be with us.
It is in SF stories that SF action occurs; it is in SF novels that worlds occur. The stories in this collection are a series of events. Crisis is the key to story-writing, a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happenings so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out...usually. He can get them out; that's what matters. But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one (such long, long stories as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice are, like the Styron piece, really short novels). The implication of all this makes clear why some SF writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories. It is because anything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event. So, in terms of actions and events, the story is far less restrictive to the author than is a novel. As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do—not what he would like them to do. This is on one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.
When I look over this collection of my stories I can see what has been lost to me in the several years of strictly novel writing. These stories range in time and space; situations bubble up to the surface; characters struggle, and then the struggle is resolved and a new story begins, Relationships are made, broken. Persons appear, speak their piece, and then go away. The momentum of writing fades out briefly and then a new cast of people, and a new crisis, materializes.
In choosing these particular stories, Terry Carr has done a superb job. To start with he read the stories which I supplied as my idea of what a collection of Philip K. Dick stories ought to be like. Terry, however, went to incalculable trouble in getting together all my published stories; it took four years of work for him to finalize on the stories here contained. It includes, for example, the first story I ever sold: "Roog," to Tony Boucher's F & SF. It contains my first published story, "Beyond Lies the Wub." Then there are middle period stories such as "Pay for the Printer," "War Veteran," "Upon the Dull Earth." And, at last, recent stories, such as "If There Were no Benny Cemoli," "What the Dead Men Say," or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale."
It would not be politic for me to say that I think this is a "superb collection by a master craftsman of the field," as the blurbs say about one author after another. What I do think—and want to say—is this. No better collection of my stories could be made. Terry Carr missed nothing. I myself—I couldn't have done as well. It contains stories from every period of my writing, which covers a period of seventeen years. It is, to be blunt, definitive. (An English collection which appeared a number of years ago was decidedly not.) A brilliant editor can do so much to help an author, more than the reader realizes. "I must have read three hundred thousand words by you," Terry told me when the collection was half finished. I wonder how many it finally come to.
One more thing: I would like to list my favorite two or three stories in the book. To me, "Beyond Lies the Wub" is pleasing; then "If There Were no Benny Cemoli," and finally "The Preserving Machine," which, like "Roog," was a very early story (1952) that I sold to Tony Boucher.
Tony Boucher—what is the field going to do without him? It was his encouragement that got me to try submitting my stories; I had never imagined that they might sell. Consider this collection as dedicated to Tony and everything he represented. We shall never see another of his like. Te amo, Tony. Forever.