I don’t want to offend anybody. It’s an inoffensive novel. It will not offend any reader anywhere. No bad words. Now that’s another thing. It could not be published as science fiction by Doubleday because it had four letter words in it. And their science fiction list does not allow four letter words in a book. There were too many of them to remove them. If there only had been a few, like in Deus Irae, which they bought from me and Roger Zelazny. There were only a few four letter words so they inked them out and then marketed it as science fiction. And I had never known this before. I didn’t know the distinction between science fiction and mainstream was the number of four letter words.
Philip K. Dick (via swimmingunder)