0796NOTOrpheusEurydice

Philip K. Dick.“Orpheus with Clay Feet.” Short Story. 1964.

The hero of the sci-fi short story “Orpheus with Clay Feet,” by Philip K. Dick (written under the pen name Jack Dowland), is a bored company man named Jesse Slade, who signs up for a time-travel vacation with an outfit that allows people to go back and act as muses for great works of art. Some of the best gigs are already taken—inspiring famous symphonies, and so forth— but Slade is undeterred: he wants to inspire a science-fiction writer named Jack Dowland who is known for having written a book that revolutionized the genre. When Slade arrives in the past, at Dowland’s home in Purpleblossom, Nevada, and tells Dowland that he’s there to inspire him to write science fiction, Dowland is horrified: “The future’s black,” he says. “Who wants to write about it? Keeerist.” The exchange so disgusts Dowland that he never writes about the future at all, and, instead, dies young and unknown. Upon his return through time to Muse Enterprises, where he’s berated for his blunder, Slade learns that Dowland did write one science-fiction story, about a visit from a “well-intentioned idiot from the future with deranged visions of inspiring him to write a mythological history of the world to come.” In Dick’s comic retelling, Dowland, the story’s Orpheus, is a frustrated hack, and Slade, a time-travelling Eurydice, is an un-inspirer rather than a muse. But, like more conventional versions of the story, “Opheus with Clay Feet” shows how easily the future can be lost. - Rachel Arons, The New Yorker.