Philip K Dick ,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future

Philip K Dick first started publishing science fiction short stories in the science fiction magazines of the early 1950s.His first published science fiction novel was Solar Lottery published in 1955.His novel a future dystopia in which life chances for the population are decided by lottery was quite prescient .At that time the notion that the state would actively promote the vice of gambling would have seemed far fetched yet it has now come to pass and is taken for granted.However at this time despite his small success as a fairly minor science fiction author Philip Dick was actually trying to become an author of mainstream literary fiction.The novels he wrote in the 1950s such as Confessions of A Crap Artist,The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt and In Milton Lumky Territory among others  are tales of suburban Californian life.It seems Philip Dick was following the same groove as Richard Yates with stories of post war America with its affluence combined with conformism.It seems probable if these books had been actually published Philip Dick would have dropping the science fiction in favor of  social realism.Like Richard Yates he would no doubt be largely forgotten now.Instead the literary novels loss turned out to be science fictions gain.It is hard to imagine Riddley Scott directing a block buster based on In Milton Lumky Territory.The key text which bridges the two worlds is The Man In The High Castle   set in California in 1961.The characters are similar to the suburbans who feature in his unpublished 50s novels.However the California they inhabit is occupied by the Japanese as a result of Americas defeat by the Axis powers in World War II who have partitioned the country in the same manner that Germany was.Philip Dick won a Hugo Award for the novel and after this largely stuck to writing science fiction.