When Vance met PKD

There are few writers more different than Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. Dick's universes are ontological nightmares of shifting realities, populated by hapless neurotics and their controlling spouses. In Vance's work reality is comfortably fixed; it's people who believe weird things. Not a lot of neurotics, either: smooth-talking tricksters with an inflated sense of self-worth are the norm.

Both authors lived in California (although Vance travelled a lot) and met a few times. Vance talked about that in an interview, and it's an interesting one not just for the personality contrast, but also for how it exemplifies Dick's personal evolution:

Look at Phil Dick. Phil Dick, besides being an awfully clever writer, he got the credentials of being crazy- he became big… there was a big clique around him. For my taste, he was too batty, too sarcastic, too sardonic, negative.. and yet, some of his stuff was just insanely funny.. but he was not a person I could relate to, at all..

(John V. : Did you meet him?)

Oh, yeah, sure..

(John V.: Did you know him well?)

Not intimately, but fairly well..

(John V.: Did you meet him at parties, in that way?)

I don’t remember, to tell you the truth.

When I first met him, he was kind of meek, quiet, I didn’t think he was going anywhere… then the last time I saw him, Poul and I were invited over to a party over in Marin county, by some woman, didn’t serve us anything, didn’t even serve wine! Anyway, Phil Dick came storming in there, crazy as a coot, didn’t acknowledge either me or Poul, stomped through, stomped out, did some other things while he was there, I forget what now. That was the last time I saw him.. wearing a cape, big boots, swaggering through… the difference between that guy and the guy that I first knew.. where did I meet him, at Scott Meredith’s office, or Anthony Boucher’s house?.. this quiet, modest, little nondescript fellow.. the difference between that guy, and the guy that came stomping through that party, you know, swaggering, like a big pirate, with a big cloak, big boots, not waving a cutlass at all, but just swaggering through there.. by this time, he had his reputation.. he was on drugs, dope, crazy or something.. He was a clever son of a gun.

Come to think to it, there are two Vance works that could be construed as vaguely Dickian. One is the short story The Men Return, about what happens when Earth enters a period of "non-causality". The other is the psychedelic/paranoid oddity The Brains of Earth (a.k.a Nopalgarth).