And there was a view out. Limited, no larger in fact than a comb of bees' wax. But still the thick plastic revealed the emptiness beyond, and he went over to fixedly peer. Sol, blinding, filled a portion of the panorama and he reflexively reached up to click the black filter into use. And, as he did so, he perceived his hand. His artificial, metallic, superbly efficient mechanical hand.

The above passage is from an established classic by a revered author, but what an awful piece of writing. Especially its nadir, that syntactical atrocity, "to fixedly peer".

To fixedly peer? Shudder. How can three short words form such a clunky, unwieldy, barely readable piece of English? More to the point, how did it ever pass Philip K Dick's editors, or his own internal censor?

Rereading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch recently, I had a rather strange thought: Dick should have written factual, rather than fictional, books. He obviously had a brilliant mind, with one of the most fantastic, and fantastical, imaginations I've ever come across. His ideas seemed to come from some bizarre but divine repository only accessible to this most unique of writers.

Dick took outlandish, almost inconceivable ideas and worked them through, making them real and plausible through the strictures and structures of a formidable intelligence and singular aesthetic. Churning out fascinating, distinctive books at a fierce rate, he was hugely ambitious and original.

Yet his actual writing was often dreadful. Hammy dialogue, amateurish narrative pacing, some truly terrible descriptive prose: the example above is just one of many. Great ideas, but often a poor command of the language.

If switching to non-fiction is a little bit much, then he certainly could have done with being rewritten. And I don't just mean a few editorial tweaks: I mean wholesale reworking, stripping the piece to its thematic and philosophical skeleton before fleshing it out with flair, wit, elegance, proper pacing, dialogue that rings true. In other words, what Philip K Dick needed was a a co-author.

He's not the only one; this odd coalescing of philosophical brilliance and literary ineptitude is more common, I reckon, than we imagine. And it seems to afflict science fiction to an unusual degree.

JG Ballard, Arthur C Clarke, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury: all were possessed of great minds, truly visionary in so many ways, yet all were capable of producing awkward, malformed prose, to greater or lesser degree. And virtually everything Isaac Asimov ever published could be rewritten and restyled without too much guilt.

To be fair, it's not just SF. Would it be heresy, for instance, to suggest that Jane Eyre might have been improved by judicious use of the red marker? I studied it in college, I appreciate it was profound and pioneering and seminal, but actually reading the thing, all eight thousand pages (or so it seemed at the time) … a turgid, laborious leviathan.

And then there's Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, or Jeanette Winterson's Art and Lies, or early James Ellroy, particularly Dick Contino's Blues and the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy: sizzling with energy and imagination, but the prose is histrionic, demented, exhausting. I could go on …

So tell me – am I missing the point? Or are there better examples of great books and great writers who would have been improved by a skilful co-author, or a bolder editor?