Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick an American science fiction writer (1928-1982), whose paranoid, philosophically restless novels and stories explored the instability of reality, memory and identity. Though poorly rewarded in his lifetime, his work won lasting influence, inspired films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, and made him one of the most discussed authors of the twentieth century.

Early Life and Struggles

Philip Kindred Dick was born in 1928 in Chicago and grew up in California, where his family moved after his parents separated. His twin sister Jane died in infancy, an event that haunted him for the rest of his life and that some readers see reflected in his recurring themes of a lost double and an absent other half. He attended the University of California at Berkeley briefly but left before finishing.

He worked at a record shop and in radio, and from the early 1950s he wrote prolifically for the science fiction magazines, producing dozens of short stories and a stream of novels while living on the edge of poverty. He married five times and struggled with drugs and unstable health, and the precariousness of his life fed the anxious, dispossessed characters who populate his fiction.

He was drawn early to the metaphysical questions that would define his work. Even his earliest stories ask whether the world we perceive is real, whether memory can be trusted, and whether the ordinary person is free or manipulated, and these concerns became obsessive and increasingly elaborate as his career advanced.

Major Novels of the 1960s

The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962, imagines an America in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, and interweaves the lives of ordinary people under occupation with a mysterious novel-within-a-novel that seems to describe an alternative history. The book won the Hugo award and established Dick as a writer of unusual structural subtlety as well as paranoid invention.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, from 1968, follows the bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he retires fugitive androids in a decayed, depopulated San Francisco. Its questions about what counts as human, and about the empathy that distinguishes people from machines, later became the basis of the film Blade Runner and entered the mainstream of debate about artificial life.

Other novels of the decade, including Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, pushed hallucination, altered time and commercial exploitation to extremes. In Ubik, one of his finest books, the characters' world literally decays around them while a pervasive product promises restoration, a comic and dreadful image of consumer salvation.

VALIS, Gnosis and Late Visions

In 1974 Dick experienced what he described as a series of visions and revelations, which he recorded over years in a vast private journal later published as the Exegesis. He interpreted these experiences with the help of religion, philosophy and his own reading, developing an idiosyncratic metaphysics in which an ancient information system, by turns benevolent and manipulative, seemed to invade the present world.

This material shaped his late masterwork, the VALIS trilogy. VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer mix autobiography, theology and science fiction, and they ask whether the world we inhabit is a counterfeit of a truer one and whether salvation consists in seeing through it. They are among his most demanding and most personal books.

Dick's late thought draws on Christianity, Gnosticism, the I Ching and Western philosophy, and it refuses to settle into a system. He wanted fiction to unsettle rather than to console, to make the reader doubt the furniture of everyday reality, and this refusal of closure is central to his continuing appeal.

Themes and Style

The defining theme of his work is the unreliability of the world. His characters discover that their memories have been implanted, their authorities are fakes or machines, their revolts are anticipated and scripted. Beneath the plots lies the question of what remains real and trustworthy when everything can be manufactured, including the evidence of the senses and the record of the past.

A related theme is the smallness of the individual before vast and indifferent systems. The corporations, police agencies and governments in his fiction are frequently incompetent, sinister or simply beyond comprehension, and his protagonists are ordinary people, repairmen or salesmen, trying to keep a grip on a life that keeps slipping. This gives his paranoia a human and even comic dimension.

His style is plain and fast, written quickly under commercial pressure, and it is punctuated by sudden metaphysical shocks, moments in which the ground of the story gives way. The roughness that critics once held against him now reads as energy, and his best books combine pulp momentum with genuine philosophical disturbance.

Influence and Legacy

Dick had little financial success in his lifetime and died in 1982 shortly before the release of Blade Runner, the film that began his posthumous fame. Adaptations of his stories and novels, including Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and the television series based on The Man in the High Castle, brought his ideas to enormous audiences.

His influence on literature, film and philosophy has continued to grow. The adjective Dickian has entered critical vocabulary to describe reality-bending narratives, and his work is now a standard subject in courses on science fiction and speculative fiction. Writers across the mainstream and the genres cite him as a liberating example of what popular fiction can attempt.

He is remembered as the paranoid prophet of the information age, a writer who sensed early how thoroughly media, corporations and simulation could occupy the space once held by the real. His questions about authenticity and artificial life look more rather than less urgent, and his reputation now stands far above the pulp origins of his career.

See also

• Blade Runner
• Dystopia
• Gnosticism
• Simulacrum