Right now I am furious because of my best friend, a girl named Doris, twenty four years old. She has cancer. I am in love with someone who could die anytime, and it makes fury against God and the world race through me, elevating my blood pressure and stepping up my heartbeat.

And so I write. I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality.

I have never yielded to reality.

That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream best-selling writers. But you are reading SF and I am writing it for you. I want to show you, in my writing, what I love (my friends) and what I savagely hate (what happens to them).

I have watched Doris suffer unspeakably, undergo torment in her fight against cancer to a degree that I cannot believe. One time I ran out of the apartment and up to a friend's place, literally ran. My doctor had told me that Doris wouldn't live much longer and I should say good-bye to her and tell her it was because she was dying. I tried to and couldn't and then I panicked and ran. At my friend's house we sat around and listened to weird records (I'm into weird music in general, both in classical and in rock; it's a comfort). He is a writer, too, a young SF writer named K. W. Jeter--a good one. We just sat there and then I said aloud, really just pondering aloud, "The worst part of it is I'm beginning to lose my sense of humor about cancer."

Philip K Dick

3. Alex_Krislov Says:
January_22nd,_2008_at_8:34_pm
Jesus von Jesus.
Good luck. I can't think of anything else to say, and, God, I wish
I could.

4. Steve Gerber Says:
January_22nd,_2008_at_8:56_pm
There's always, "Waaaaaugh!"

sgblog