A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: American science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick was a complex man about whom many things can be said. Immensely talented, he was arguably a genius; and yet he was deeply troubled all his life. Prone to psychosomatic disorders, he also suffered from agoraphobia, depression, suicidal tendencies, and exhibited violent behavior to at least one of his wives. For most of his career, Dick lived in poverty, although he was prolific and wrote more than 30 novels and over 100 short stories, most of them falling under the spacious umbrella of science fiction. Things got even worse when he ruined his health by heavy use of psychedelics. Philip Kendred Dick and Jane Kendred Dick were born in Chicago on December 16th , 1928. The twins were six weeks premature and Jane died 41 days later. Dick irrationally blamed himself for her death for most of his life -- until he learned that she died of malnutrition, after which he shifted the blame to his mother. At age 1 his family moved to Berkeley, California. His parents divorced when Philip was five and his father moved to Reno, Nevada. At age six, 1934 he and his mother moved to Washington, DC. By age 7, he was placed into a "special school", in part because he refused to eat. It was during this time that a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a potential schizophrenic, a diagnosis that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As a teenager, Philip K. Dick first discovered science fiction in the traditional manner of his day -- through pulp magazines. Though sci-fi was a genre that was enormously popular, it was looked upon with suspicion by parents and literary critics, and Dick hesitated at first to fully embrace it, displaying an uneasiness with the genre that lasted his entire life. Perhaps more than any other style of literature, science fiction seemed the perfect vehicle to express Dick's interior life, its stories of parallel universes and shifting realities giving form to his anxiety attacks and his strange, telescopic sensations of being "removed from the world." He attended Berkeley High School and studied from 1945 to 1946 at the University of California at Berkeley. During these years Dick started to write science fiction stories and sold his first tale in 1952 to Planet Stories. Between the years 1955 and 1970 he wrote an average of two paperback novels a year and more than one hundred short stories. Dick's first published novel was Solar Lottery (1955). It was set on an Earth of the twenty-third century where democracy is replaced by lottery which decides people's place in society. Eventually lottery is revealed as a front for secret rulers of the world. By 1968, the year that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published, he had written 28 books. It is said that it was in this period that he began using methamphetamines in order to write enough to support himself and his family. He also began using LSD, which he wrote about, in veiled form in novels such as A Scanner Darkly (1977, dedicated to many of his friends who died or suffered damage from drug abuse, including himself) and wrote about it openly in essays that are reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Methamphetamine use would plague Philip K. Dick for the remainder of his life, and probably was a leading factor in his death. Philip K. Dick went through a series of unsuccessful marriages throughout his life. All in all, he was married five times and had three children (2 daughters, 1 son). The influence of these marriages can be seen in a great deal of his writing. In fact, it was under such circumstances, that The Man In the High Castle (1962) was written. Set in a parallel "occupied America" where Germany and Japan have won World War II, the novel hints at some "alternative" reality where the Axis powers have been defeated by the Allies. With this novel he gained first recognition as a writer and in 1963, Philip K. Dick received the "Hugo Award", the highest honor within the science fiction community. Martian Time-Slip (1964) was set in forgotten Mars, where scarce water supplies are controlled by the head of the plumbers' union. The Bleekmen are hated aliens, with whom the colonists try to live alongside. In Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) the characters are at the mercy of a cruel demiurge. A man returns from a distant galaxy with Chew-Z, a drug that allows people to slip into vast virtual-reality worlds of their own devising. But there are side effects with the drug: Paul Eldritch can enter into everyone's private reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), has become Dick's most widely read novel, thanks to of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner. Here, the android replicants are distinguishable from other humans only through the Voigt-Kampff scale, an empathy test which poses questions largely concerning the suffering of animals. When Rick Deckard, a professional android hunter, fails to feel any empathy for the artificial humans that he tracks and kills, doubts are raised about his own humanity. Androids also includes the religious movement Mercerism, a Gnostic-flavored cult that also appears in Dick's short stories. Mercerism combines doubts about reality with a subversive force and the novel raises questions about identity, memory, and morality; questions that are not easily dispatched and remain haunting the reader long after the book is finished. Most of his fiction was set in California and with his paranoid view of reality, Dick's work has revealed the threads behind technological inventions. Dick's fear of political or social repression was not mere illusion: the writer was under scrutiny by the FBI and Air Force intelligence for his connection to the American Communist party and his opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1950s and 1960s several of his novels dealt with theme of alternate world and manipulation of the reality. In Time Out Of Joint, a young man living in a small California town discovers that the world around him is an illusion, and that he is in actuality a subject in a military experiment. The main characters of Ubik (1969) learn that they have died in an accident, and that the reality they inhabit is disintegrating with the dispersal of their life-forces. In the late 1960s and especially 1970s the drug aspect and theology began to dominate the narration. On March 22, 1974, he had a transcendental mystical experience, which he described as "an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind." This experience caused Philip K. Dick to begin recording his thoughts and experiences into a journal, which he referred to as the Exegesis. The Exegesis contained a phenomenal amount of Gnostic religious thought and philosophy. The majority of his experiences and philosophies formed during this period can be found in the VALIS trilogy", which includes VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. An alternate accounting of the events of Philip K. Dick's VALIS encounter can be found in more accessible form in the novel Radio Free Albemuth, which was discovered among Dick's notes after his death, and in which the main characters have reason to believe that their everyday reality is actually the Ancient Roman Empire during the persecution of the early Christians. Philip K. Dick died of heart failure following a stroke on March 2nd, 1982 in Santa Ana, California, just a few months before the film Blade Runner, based on his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), was released. The blockbuster film Total Recall from 1990 was based on the story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and also led to a cable TV series. In the story many humans have left the planet. Rick Deckard hunts androids who have been imported to the planet from Mars. His chief wish to be able to afford to purchase and care for an artificial sheep. Philip K. Dick was a husband to five wives, a father of three children, a brother obsessed by the loss of his twin sister, and a son who blamed his mother for her daughter's death, and a father figure to countless addicts and petty criminals who crashed at his California home. To his friends, he was a warm and gentle man, always laughing and holding everything together, and yet those closest to him recognized him as the unhappiest man they had ever met. In the two decades after his death in 1982, his popularity has only increased. Most of his books are still in print, and all of his mainstream novels -- which he despaired of getitbusng published in his lifetime -- have been made available in hardcover editions. Major Hollywood movies have been filmed based on his stories and Philip K. Dick has emerged as not just a cult figure among readers of science fiction, but has been gaining acceptance and respectability among serious literary circles. Selected works:
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