Kate Writes Great Science Fiction

[nrc@cbema.att.com (Neal R Caldwell, Ii)]

I often wonder just what makes Kate's music so special.  I doubt that 
there's any one answer to that question but the other day I ran across 
something in the introduction to a book of Philip K. Dick short stories 
that offered a some insight.  Dick attempts to identify what makes good 
science fiction.  In the process I think he touches on some ideas that 
apply just as well to other forms of art and specifically to Kate's 
music.

	Now to define _good_ science fiction.  The conceptual 
	dislocation -- the new idea, in other words -- must be truly 
	new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be 
	intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his 
	mind and wake it up to the possibility of something he had 
	not thought of.  Thus "good science fiction" is a value term,
	not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is
	such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.

	I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University 
	at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true 
	protagonist of an sf story is an idea and not a person.  If 
	it is _good_ sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, 
	probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction 
	of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-
	speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the
	author's, begins to create.  Thus sf is creative and it 
	inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large 
	does not do.  We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, 
	not a writer) read it because we love to experience this 
	chain-reaction of ideas set off in our minds by something we 
	read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best 
	science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration
	between author and reader, in which both create -- and _enjoy_ 
	doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science 
	fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

                                           Philip K. Dick
                                           May 14, 1981


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