Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose published work during his lifetime was almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS.
Easton Press Philip Dick books
The Man in the High Castle - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1988
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 2008
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The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards," Dick wrote of these stories. "In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real." Dick referred to himself as a "fictionalizing philosopher."
In addition to thirty-six novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, many of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
Author Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, were born six weeks prematurely to Dorothy Kindred Dick and Joseph Edgar Dick in Chicago.[12] Dick's father, a fraud investigator for the United States Department of Agriculture, had recently taken out life insurance policies on the family. An insurance nurse was dispatched to the Dick household. Upon seeing the malnourished Philip and injured Jane, the nurse rushed the babies to hospital. Baby Jane died en route, just five weeks after her birth (January 26, 1929). The death of Philip's twin sister profoundly affected his writing, relationships, and every aspect of his life, leading to the recurrent motif of the "phantom twin" in many of his books.
The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. When Philip turned five, his father was transferred to Reno, Nevada. Dorothy refused to move, and she and Joseph were divorced. Joseph fought her for custody of Philip but did not win the case. Dorothy, determined to raise Philip alone, took a job in Washington, D.C. and moved there with her son. Philip K. Dick was enrolled at John Eaton Elementary School from 1936 to 1938, completing the second through the fourth grades. His lowest grade was a "C" in written composition, although a teacher remarked that he "shows interest and ability in story telling." In June 1938, Dorothy and Philip returned to California.
Dick attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California. He and Ursula K. Le Guin were members of the same high school graduating class (1947), yet were unknown to each other at the time. After graduating from high school he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley as a German major, but dropped out before completing any coursework rather than participate in mandatory ROTC training. At Berkeley, Dick befriended poets Robert Duncan and poet and linguist Jack Spicer, who gave Dick ideas for a Martian language. Dick claimed to have been host of a classical music program on KSMO Radio in 1947. From 1948 to 1952 he worked in a record store. In 1955, Dick and his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, received a visit from the FBI. They believed this resulted from Kleo's socialist views and left-wing activities. The couple briefly befriended one of the FBI agents.
Mental health
In his boyhood, around the age of thirteen, Dick had a recurring dream for several weeks. He dreamed he was in a bookstore, trying to find an issue of Astounding Magazine. This issue of the magazine would contain the story titled "The Empire Never Ended", which would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. As the dream recurred, the pile of magazines he searched grew smaller and smaller, but he never reached the bottom. Eventually, he became anxious that discovering the magazine would drive him mad (as in Lovecraft's Necronomicon or Chambers' The King in Yellow, promising insanity to the reader). Shortly thereafter, the dreams ceased, but the phrase "The Empire Never Ended" would appear later in his work. Dick was a voracious reader of religion, philosophy, metaphysics and Gnosticism, ideas of which appear in many of his stories and visions.
On February 20, 1974, Dick was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive delivery of extra analgesic, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a pendant with a symbol that he called the "vesicle pisces". This name seems to have been based on his confusion of two related symbols, the ichthys (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in profile) that early Christians used as a secret symbol, and the vesica piscis. After the delivery woman's departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions. Although they may have been initially attributable to the medication, after weeks of visions he considered this explanation implausible. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane," Dick told Charles Platt.
Throughout February and March 1974, he experienced a series of visions, which he referred to as "two-three-seventy four" (2-3-74), shorthand for February-March 1974. He described the initial visions as laser beams and geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and of ancient Rome. As the visions increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live a double life, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century A.D. Despite his history of drug use and elevated stroke risk, Dick began seeking other rationalist and religious explanations for these experiences. He referred to the "transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and, most often, "VALIS". Dick wrote about the experiences in the semi-autobiographical novels VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.
At one point Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. He believed that an episode in his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was a detailed retelling of a story from the Biblical Book of Acts, which he had never read.
In time, Dick became paranoid, imagining plots against him by the KGB and FBI. At one point, he alleged they were responsible for a burglary of his house, from which documents were stolen. He later came to suspect that he might have committed the burglary against himself, and then forgotten he had done so. Dick himself speculated as to whether he may have suffered from schizophrenia.
Personal life
Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son; each marriage ended in divorce.
May 1948, to Jeanette Marlin – lasted six months
June 1950, to Kleo Apostolides – divorced 1959
1959, to Anne Williams Rubinstein – divorced 1964
child: Laura Archer, born February 25, 1960
1966, to Nancy Hackett – divorced 1972
child: Isolde Freya Dick (now Isa Dick Hackett), born 15 March 1967
April 18, 1973, to Leslie (Tessa) Busby – divorced 1977
child: Christopher, born 1973
Death
Philip K. Dick died in Santa Ana, California, on March 2, 1982. He had suffered a stroke five days earlier, and was disconnected from life support after his EEG had been consistently isoelectric since losing consciousness. After his death, his father Edgar took his son's ashes to Fort Morgan, Colorado. When his twin sister Jane died, her tombstone had both their names carved on it, with an empty space for Dick's death date. Brother and sister were eventually buried next to each other.
Dick was "resurrected" by his fans in the form of a remote-controlled android designed in his likeness. The android of Philip K. Dick was included on a discussion panel in a San Diego Comic Con presentation about the film adaptation of the novel, A Scanner Darkly. In February 2006, an America West Airlines employee misplaced the android, and it has not yet been found.
Writing
Dick sold his first story in 1952. From that point on he wrote full-time, selling his first novel in 1955. The 1950s were a difficult and impoverished time for Dick. He once said, "We couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He published almost exclusively within the science fiction genre, but dreamed of a career in the mainstream of American literature. During the 1950s he produced a series of nongenre, non-science fiction novels. In 1960 he wrote that he was willing to "take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer." The dream of mainstream success formally died in January 1963 when the Scott Meredith Literary Agency returned all of his unsold mainstream novels. Only one of these works, Confessions of a Crap Artist, was published during Dick’s lifetime.In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Although he was hailed as a genius in the science fiction world, the mainstream literary world was unappreciative, and he could publish books only through low-paying science fiction publishers such as Ace. Even in his later years, he continued to have financial troubles. In the introduction to the 1980 short story collection The Golden Man, Dick wrote: "Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."
The last novel published during Dick's life was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. In 1972, Dick donated his manuscripts and papers to the Special Collections Library at California State University, Fullerton where they are archived in the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Collection in the Pollak Library. It was in Fullerton that Philip K. Dick befriended budding science-fiction writers K. W. Jeter, James Blaylock, and Tim Powers.
Pen names
Dick occasionally wrote under pen names, most notably Richard Philips and Jack Dowland. The surname Dowland refers to Renaissance composer John Dowland, who is featured in several works. The title Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said directly refers to Dowland's best-known composition, "Flow My Tears". In the novel The Divine Invasion, the 'Linda Fox' character is an intergalactically famous singer whose entire body of work consists of recordings of John Dowland compositions. Also, some protagonists in Dick's short fiction are named 'Dowland'.The short story "Orpheus with Clay Feet" was published under the pen name "Jack Dowland". The protagonist desires to be the muse for fictional author Jack Dowland, considered the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. In the story, Dowland publishes a short story titled "Orpheus with Clay Feet", under the pen name "Philip K. Dick". In the semi-autobiographical novel VALIS, the protagonist is named "Horselover Fat"; "Philip", or "Phil-Hippos", is Greek for "horselover", while "dick" is German for "fat" (a cognate of thick).
Although he never used it himself, Dick's fans and critics often refer to him familiarly as "PKD" (cf. Jorge Luis Borges' "JLB"), and use the comparative literary adjectives "Dickian" and "Phildickian" in describing his style and themes (cf. Kafkaesque, Orwellian).
The Man in the High Castle
It's
America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still
survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as
common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the
United States lost a war and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This
harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip
K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier
between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick
offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may
just be possible to wake.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It
was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere
among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids.
Deckard's assignment find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was,
the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be
found!
San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. The
World War has killed millions, driving entire species to extinction and
sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living
creature, and for people who couldn’t afford one, companies built
incredibly realistic fakes: horses, birds, cats, sheep . . . even
humans. Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter tasked to
find six rogue androids they’re machines, but look, sound, and think
like humans clever, and most of all, dangerous humans.
Philip K.
Dick’s award-winning Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? served as the
basis for the film Blade Runner. BOOM! Studios presents the complete
novel transplanted into the comic book medium, mixing all-new
panel-to-panel continuity with the actual text from the novel in an
innovative, ground-breaking 24-issue maxi-series.
Influence
Like other more famous science fiction authors, several of Dick's stories have been made into movies. Most of these are only loosely based on Dick's original story, using them as a starting-point for a Hollywood action-adventure story. While the most admired is Ridley Scott's classic movie Blade Runner (based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) the action film Total Recall faithfully translates a number of Dick's themes (in particular from Dick's short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), as does Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report. All, however, introduce uncharacteristic violence and replace the typically nondescript Dick protagonist with an action hero.
Dick was apprehensive about how Blade Runner would treat his story; he refused to do a novelization of the film and was critical of it during production, especially of the director, Ridley Scott. When given an opportunity to see some special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019 Dick was amazed the environment was "exactly as how I'd imagined it!" Following the screening Dick and Scott had a frank but cordial discussion of Blade Runner's themes and characters, and although they had differing views Dick fully backed the film from then on. Tragically Dick passed away from a stroke less than four months before the release of the film.
John Woo's 2003 film, Paycheck, was a very loose adaptation of Dick's short story, and suffered greatly, both at the hands of critics and at the box office.
The 2002 film Impostor is based on Dick's 1953 short story of the same name. Starring Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe, the film includes two of Dick's most common themes: mental illness, which diminishes the sufferer's ability to discriminate between reality and hallucination, and a protagonist persecuted by an oppressive government.
The film Screamers (1995) was based on a Dick short story Second Variety; however, the location was altered from a war-devastated Earth in the story to a generic science fiction environment of a distant planet in the film. Second Variety has been cited as an influence on the scenes set in the machine-dominated future of The Terminator (1984) and its sequels.
The French film Barjo is based on Dick's non-sf book Confessions of a Crap Artist.
It has been noted, though the connection (if any) is unknown, that the subjective reality created by the cryonic Life Extension system in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky and its Spanish original, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) strongly resembles that of 'half-life' in Dick's Ubik. The 1998 movie The Truman Show bears a similar resemblance to Dick's novel Time Out of Joint. The 1999 David Cronenberg film "eXistenZ" features a reference to "Perky Pat", a recurring name from Dick's books, and takes as its theme virtual reality, on a number of levels.
Since his death, Dick has featured as a character in a number of novels and stories, most notably Michael Bishop's The Secret Ascension (1987; published in the UK under the author's preferred title Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas), set in a Gnostic alternative universe where his non-genre work was published but his science fiction is banned by a totalitarian USA in thrall to a demonically possessed Richard Nixon. Other fictional appearances by Dick include the short play Kindred Blood in Kensington Gore (1992) by Brian W. Aldiss and the Faction Paradox novel Of the City of the Saved... (2004) by Philip Purser-Hallard.
K. W. Jeter's Doctor Adder series has a radio disk jockey who is obviously Dick. Orval Wintermute, translator of the Nag Hammadi codices and major figure in Dick's VALIS mythos lends his name to an artificial intelligence in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Dick's influence is particularly evident in Jonathan Lethem's novels, such as Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), Amnesia Moon (1995), and Girl in Landscape (1998). Hints at Dick's VALIS can also be found in Lethem's last novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Richard Linklater name-checked Dick in the climactic sequence of his experimental film Waking Life(2001) and is currently working on a film adaptation of Dick's A Scanner Darkly employing a similar rotoscoping process to the earlier film.
One influence that may be considered unusually distant from science fiction within "culture space" is the composition by Tod Machover, and performance, of an opera VALIS.
Philip K. Dick books
1955
Solar Lottery
1956
The World Jones Made
The Man Who Japed
1957
Eye in the Sky
The Cosmic Puppets
1959
Time Out of Joint
1960
Dr. Futurity
Vulcan's Hammer
1962
The Man in the High Castle
1963
The Game-Players of Titan
1964
Martian Time-Slip
The Simulacra
Clans of the Alphane Moon
The Penultimate Truth
1965
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
1966
The Crack in Space
Now Wait for Last Year
The Unteleported Man
1967
Counter-Clock World
The Zap Gun
The Ganymede Takeover with Ray Nelson
1968
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1969
Ubik
Galactic Pot-Healer
1970
A Maze of Death
Our Friends from Frolix 8
1972
We Can Build You
1974
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
1975
Confessions of a Crap Artist
1976
Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny
1977
A Scanner Darkly
1981
Valis
The Divine Invasion
1982
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
1983
The Unteleported Man (expanded edition)
1984
Lies, Inc.
1985
Radio Free Albemuth
Puttering About in a Small Land
In Milton Lumky Territory
1986
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
1987
Mary and the Giant
1988
The Broken Bubble
Nick and the Glimmung (for children)
1994
Gather Yourselves Together
Philip K. Dick Short stories
1952
Beyond Lies the Wub
The Gun
The Little Movement
The Skull
The Variable Man
1953
The Builder
Colony
The Commuter
The Cookie Lady
The Cosmic Poachers
The Defenders
Expendable
The Eyes Have It
The Great C
The Hanging Stranger
The Impossible Planet
Impostor
The Indefatigable Frog
The Infinities
The King of the Elves
Martians Come in Clouds
Mr. Spaceship
Out in the Garden
Paycheck
Piper in the Woods
Planet for Transients
The Preserving Machine
Project: Earth
Roog
Second Variety
Some Kinds of Life
The Trouble with Bubbles
The World She Wanted
1954
A World of Talent
The Last of the Masters
Adjustment Team
Beyond the Door
Breakfast at Twilight
The Crawlers
The Crystal Crypt
Exhibit Piece
The Father-thing
The Golden Man
James P. Crow
Jon's World
The Little Black Box
Meddler
Of Withered Apples
A Present for Pat
Prize Ship
Progeny
Prominent Author
Sales Pitch
Shell Game
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
Small Town
Souvenir
Strange Eden
Survey Team
Time Pawn
Tony and the Beetles
The Turning Wheel
Upon the Dull Earth
1955
Autofac
Captive Market
The Chromium Fence
Foster, You're Dead!
The Hood Maker
Human Is
The Mold of Yancy
Nanny
Psi-man Heal My Child!
Service Call
A Surface Raid
Vulcan's Hammer
War Veteran
1956
A Glass of Darkness
Minority Report
Pay for the Printer
To Serve the Master
1957
Misadjustment
The Unreconstructed M
1958
Null-o
1959
Explorers We
Fair Game
Recall Mechanism
War Game
1963
All We Marsmen
The Days of Perky Pat
If There Were No Benny Cemoli
Stand-by
What'll We Do With Ragland Park?
1964
Cantata 140
A Game of Unchance
Novelty Act
Oh, to be a Blobel!
Orpheus with Clay Feet
Precious Artifact
The Unteleported Man
The War with the Fnools
Waterspider
What the Dead Men Say
1965
Project Plowshare
Retreat Syndrome
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
1966
Holy Quarrel
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday
1967
Faith of our Fathers
Return Match
1968
Not By Its Cover
The Story To End All Stories
1969
A. Lincoln, Simulacrum
The Electric Ant
1972
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked
1974
The Different Stages of Love
The Pre-persons
A Little Something For Us Tempunauts
1979
The Exit Door Leads In
1980
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Rautavaara's Case
Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr
1981
The Alien Mind
1984
Strange Memories Of Death
1987
The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree
The Eye of The Sibyl
Fawn, Look Back
Stability
1988
Goodbye, Vincent
1989
11-17-80
1992
The Name of the Game is Death
Source and additional information: Philip K. Dick