Free Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin

now, bear in mind that Phil dated the start of his writing career at age twelve-which he reached on December 16, 1940 (a birth date Phil was pleased to share with his idol, Beethoven). At twelve he taught himself to type, in recognition of his vocation. He also read his first SF magazine: Stirring Science Stories. SF linked perfectly with his prior discovery of the Oz fantasies of Frank Baum: "It seemed like a small matter, my utter avidity to read each and every Oz book. Librarians haughtily told me that they 'did not stock fantastic material,' their reasoning being that books of fantasy led a child into a dreamworld and made it difficult for him to adjust properly to the 'real' world. But my interest in the Oz books was, in point of fact, the beginning of my love for fantasy, and, by extension, science fiction."

Phil became a voracious collector of SF pulps, haunting the secondhand bookstores of Berkeley. By the time he entered Garfield Junior High in 1941, Phil owned stacks of Astounding, Amazing, Unknown, and Unknown Worlds. He also regularly took in the Buck Rogers serials. Friend George Kohler recalls that Phil was a "selective" reader whose recall of stories he liked was flawless. Phil the artist would copy the pictures of sleek-finned rocket ships. Throughout his life Phil continued to cherish his pulp collections. In a 1968 essay he wrote:
What is it about sf that draws us? What is sf anyhow? It grips fans; it grips editors; it grips writers. And none make any money. When I ponder this I see always in my mind Henry Kuttner's [a prominent thirties and forties writer of SF and "weird" stories] FAIRY CHESSMEN with its opening paragraph, the doorknob that winks at the protagonist. When I ponder this I also see-outside my mind, right beside my desk-a complete file of UNKNOWN and UNKNOWN WORLDS, plus Astounding back to October 1933 ... these being guarded by a nine-hundred-pound fireproof file cabinet, separated from the world, separated from life. Hence separated from decay and wear. Hence separated from time. I paid $390 for this fireproof file which protects these magazines. After my wife and daughter these mean more to me than anything else I own-or hope to own.
Young Phil was also a regular reader of Life and National Geographic, and followed closely the radio news concerning the Nazi menace and the outbreak of World War II. In a 1979 letter, he linked his memory of Pearl Harbor to the persistent anger he bore his parents. The idealization of youth is typical:
I phoned my mother to tell her. "We're at war with Germany, Italy and Japan!" I yelled, to which she replied calmly, "No, I don't think so, Philip," and went back to her gardening. I was 12 years old and I was more in touch than a grown person. [... ] This maybe is one reason I get along so well with people a lot younger than me; I have little respect for the opinions of people my own age. I think the older you get the dumber you get. [... ] You start losing touch with reality by subtle, gradual degrees until you wind up puttering around with your flowers in the backyard while World War Three breaks out. This is how I imagine my father, assuming he's still alive: out in his backyard unaware of the world and, worse, wanting to be unaware of the world.
As the war proceeded in earnest, Phil and Dorothy settled into an economically constrained life in their cottage (in the backyard of a larger house) at 1212 Walnut Street. Early on, unaware of the atrocities, Phil wholeheartedly sided with the Allies but was duly fascinated by the Nazis-their outsized "Bismarck" battleship and goose-stepping disci pline (viewed in newsreel footage narrated by Edward R. Murrow). He enjoyed imagining superweapons: fighters faster than German Messer- schmitts, cannons larger than the Japanese twenty-inchers (from the hills Phil could see the U.S. gun emplacements guarding the Bay). But Phil was very aware that much of the war news-from both sides-was not necessarily what it seemed. He