A boy leaves Earth to rescue a cat in a short novel from ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’ which has been unavailable in the UK for more than 20 years

A boy and his family leave Earth on a “gentle” quest to save his cat, Horace – not the kind of manuscript you might expect from the “Shakespeare of science fiction”, Philip K Dick. But five decades after Dick’s publisher turned down the only children’s novel the author ever wrote, and more than 20 years since it fell out of print in the UK, Nick and the Glimmung will be brought to a new audience later this year.



Dick sent the manuscript to Doubleday in the late 1960s alongside his acclaimed time-slippage story for adults, Ubik, but his editor decided to decline. Nick and the Glimmung found a publisher in 1988, six years after its author’s death, but slid out of print around 1990. A limited run was produced by the US publisher Subterranean Press in 2008, but has since sold out. Gollancz are now due to release a UK edition in September 2015.



“My understanding is that [Dick] was proud of it, but that his publishers were not as keen on him doing a slightly odd kids’ book as he was,” said Marcus Gipps, the book’s editor at Gollancz. “So it got put into a drawer, and slightly forgotten about ... Then, after his death, his estate and his publishers went through his files, and found this.”



“It’s gentle and fun,” added Gipps. “It’s not Philip K Dick going mad and psychedelic. It’s lovely story, and it also feels like a Philip K Dick book, although it does stand as a bit of a departure, even for a writer who regularly departed from reality.”



According to the publisher, Nick and Horace “discover a variety of strange and wonderful alien life forms” after they settle on Plowman’s Planet, including a Wub. This intelligent creature appeared in Dick’s first published science fiction short story, Beyond Lies the Wub, which was published in 1952.



“The wub stood sagging, its great body settling slowly,” Dick writes in the short story. “It was sitting down, its eyes half shut. A few flies buzzed about its flank, and it switched its tail. It sat. There was silence. ‘It’s a wub,’ Peterson said. ‘I got it from a native for fifty cents. He said it was a very unusual animal. Very respected.’ ‘This?’ Franco poked the great sloping side of the wub. ‘It’s a pig! A huge dirty pig!’”



Gollancz’s release of the book this autumn is part of a project to bring Dick’s entire backlist back into print. After republishing Dick’s early work and his novels which are not science fiction, Gipps explained, “Nick and the Glimmung represented a gap in his oeuvre which we could fill.”



According to Gipps, the reissue will appeal not only to fans of the writer’s science fiction, but also to younger readers looking for something a little different from the 500-page dystopias which make up so much of contemporary children’s publishing. “It’s that weird, SF-y stuff that I grew up on and that you don’t see so much any more,” he said.



Dick, added the editor, “is a major, major author, not just in terms of science fiction; he had a wider impact than that. And it’s important for us to continue his legacy.”

