I must thank Emmanuel Carrère for this lovely little anecdote about SF in, I presume, the 1950s:

Terry Carr, the Ace paperback editor, used to joke that if the Bible had been published as science fiction, it would have had to be cut down to two volumes of twenty thousand words each; the Old Testament would have been re-titled “Master of Chaos,”, and the New Testament “The Thing With Three Souls.”

For those keeping score, that’s from page 16 of Carrère’s I Am Alive And You Are Dead; A Journey Into The Mind Of Phillip K. Dick, which I am not only reading but also rather enjoying at the moment. When I’m done reading, I’ll have more to say, from my relatively ignorant position — compared to friends of mine who are quite into P.K. Fick’s work, I have read only a scanty selection and know little about the man. But for the moment, I must add that:

(a) Carrère has me thinking I should read more Frederick Brown. What Mad Universe entertained me, even if it read as a bit camp in 2006.

(b) The discussion of Dick’s biographical details, and their connection to his writing, made me realize what I imagine Rudy Rucker made clear somewhere or other, but doesn’t as far as I recall mention in his Transrealist Manifesto: that his notion of Transrealism is, in fact, inspired by PK Dick’s work. (Wikipedia the Great and Terrible sez that Rucker coined the term after reading A Scanner Darkly.)

(UPDATE: Marc Laidlaw clarifies (on Facebook, not at the linked blog, but go look around anyway): “Terry Carr’s joke was, if the Bible had been published as an Ace Double…. One of my favorite jokes.”)