Comprehensive information and links about Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick , was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. Though hailed during his lifetime by peers such as Stanisław Lem, Dick received little public recognition until after his death, when several popular film adaptations of his novels introduced him to a larger audience. His work is now some of the most popular in science fiction, and has garnered both general acclaim and critical respect. Dick occasionally used the pen name .

Dick consistently explored the themes of the nature of reality and humanity in his novels, which are populated by common working people, rather than galactic elites. Foreshadowing the cyberpunk sub-genre, Dick brought the anomic world of Southern California to many of his works. His acclaimed novel, (1963, winner of the Hugo Award), is a pioneering work bridging the genres of alternative history and science fiction. He also produced a tremendous number of short stories and minor works which were published in pulp magazines.

His works are characterized by a constantly eroding sense of reality, with protagonists often discovering that those close to them (or even they themselves) are secretly robots, aliens, supernatural beings, brainwashed spies, hallucinations, dead, from another time or a combination of these. These characteristic themes are sometimes described as "Phildickian."

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Early life

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Dorothy Kindred Dick. His father, Edgar Dick, was a fraud investigator for the United States Department of Agriculture. He had a twin sister, Jane. They were born six weeks prematurely, and Jane died on January 26, 1929. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to California. The death of his twin had a profound effect on his writing, relationships, and every other aspect of his life.

Dick's parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up with his mother. He went to high school in Berkeley and briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in German, but dropped out before completing any classes. He sold records and was a disc jockey before selling his first story in 1952. He wrote full-time, more or less, from that time forward. He sold his first novel in 1955. The 1950s were a hard-scrabble time for Dick, so much so that, as he once said, "we couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He associated with the pre-1960s counterculture of California and was sympathetic to beat poets and the Communist Party. There is some dispute regarding the latter and Dick later admitted to being literally thrown out of at least one of its rallies. In 1963, he won the Hugo Award for . Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and he had a file at the FBI as a result.

Though Dick was hailed as a genius at this time in the SF world, the literary world as a whole was as yet unappreciative, and so he could only publish books at low-paying SF publishers. Consequently, while he would regularly publish novels for the next several years, he continued to struggle financially and psychologically. 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:

dl"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 the world. I don't agree with any of the 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 him in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine looking man, very impressive and 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."

Dick and his visions

In his youth, around the age of thirteen, Dick had a recurring dream for a number of weeks. He dreamt that he was in a bookstore, trying to find an issue of . This issue, when he found it, would contain a story called "The Empire Never Ended", which would reveal to him the secrets of the universe. As the dream repeated, the pile of magazines through which he was searching got smaller and smaller, but he never reached the bottom of it. Eventually, he became anxious that discovering the magazine would drive him mad (like the Lovecraftian , promising insanity to its readers). Shortly thereafter, the dreams stopped. They never returned, but the phrase "The Empire Never Ended" would appear in his later works.

table My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I've written about fascism and my fear of it.

On February 20, 1974, he was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive a delivery of additional painkillers, he noticed the woman delivering the package was wearing a pendant with what he called the "vesicle pisces". (He probably was referring to the intersecting arcs of the vesica piscis.) After her departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions. Although this may have been attributed initially to the painkillers, after weeks of these visions such a rationale becomes less probable. Throughout February and March 1974 he received a series of visions which he collectively referred to as 2-3-74, shorthand for FebruaryMarch 1974. He described his initial visions as laser beams and geometric patterns, and occasionally brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome, which he would glimpse periodically. As the pictures increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed that he began to live a double life, one as himself and one as Thomas, a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century A.D. Despite his current and past drug use, Dick accepted these visions as reality, believing that he had been contacted by a god-entity of some kind, which he referred to as Zebra, God, and most often VALIS.

; he used this term as the title of one of his novels (and continued the theme in at least three more books) and later theorized that VALIS was both a "reality generator" and a means of extraterrestrial communication. VALIS has been described as one node of an artificial satellite network originating from the star Fomalhaut in the Piscis Austrinus constellation. According to Dick, the Earth satellite used "pink laser beams" to transfer information and project holograms on Earth and to facilitate communication between an extraterrestrial species and humanity. Dick claimed that VALIS used "disinhibiting stimuli" to prep the subjects for communication, in one case the symbol of the vesicle pisces. He wrote about this experience and his beliefs that the Roman empire never ended in detail in his essay, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later".

At one point, during an encounter with VALIS, Dick learned that his infant son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. Routine checkups on the child had shown no trouble or illness; however, Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to ensure his son's health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. His son survived thanks to the operation, which Dick attributed to the "intervention" of VALIS.

Another event was an episode of glossolalia. Dick's wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and discovered that he was speaking Koine Greek, an ancient dialect which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koine Greek was originally used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. However, this was not the first time Dick had experienced glossolalia. A decade earlier, Dick claimed he was able to think, speak, and read fluent Latin under the influence of Sandoz LSD-25.

In his essay, , Dick mentions that he began seeing pink light during an LSD experience, eight years before he wrote and attributed the so-called pink lasers to VALIS.

Regardless of the feeling that he was somehow experiencing a divine communication, Dick was unable ever to fully rationalize the events. For the rest of his life, he struggled to fully comprehend what was occurring, questioning his own sanity and perception of reality. He transcribed what thoughts he could into an 8,000 page, million word journal dubbed the . He spent sleepless nights furiously writing into this journal, in some instances high on large quantities of amphetamines, which no doubt contributed to its eclectic tone. A recurring theme in the is Dick's hypothesis that history had been stopped in the 1st century, and that the "Roman Empire never ended. He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground 1900 years earlier, had kept the population of the Earth as slaves to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had contacted him and unnamed others to induce the "impeachment" of Richard M. Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current Emperor incarnate.

As time went on, he became increasingly paranoid, imagining plots against him perpetrated by the KGB or FBI, who he believed were constantly laying traps for him. At one point he alleged that they had been responsible for a burglary at his house in which various documents had been stolen. However, he later stated that he had probably committed the burglary himself, and then forgotten he had done so.

His later works, especially the VALIS trilogy, were heavily autobiographical, many with 2-3-74 references or influences. Dick was also a voracious reader of works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and Gnosticism, and these ideas found their way into many of his stories. The final novel to be published during his life was and thus might not be reliable. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please check the section for inaccuracies and modify as needed,

Many writers have subsequently speculated that Dick may have suffered from schizophrenia; Dick was certainly interested in the topic, and wrote an essay entitled "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes."

Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son. All five marriages ended in divorce.

Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure.

After his death (he was disconnected from life support on March 2 but his EEG had been isoelectric for five days prior to that), his father Edgar brought his son's to Fort Morgan, Colorado. When his twin Jane had died, a tombstone had been carved with both of their names on it, and an empty space for Philip's date of death. After fifty-three years, that final date was carved in, and Philip K. Dick was buried beside his sister.

Like some 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 , a 2002 movie starring Gary Sinise, and adapted by, among other screenwriters, David Twohy, telling the story of a man suspected of being a living atomic bomb, cloned from an elite scientist by Centauri aliens. So far, "Impostor" is the most genuinely "Dickian" movie.

Dick was apprehensive about how the film would adapt his story; he refused to do a novelization of the film and he was critical of it during its production, and especially of its director, Ridley Scott. When given an opportunity to see some of the special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019, Dick was amazed that the environment was "exactly as how I'd imagined it!". Following the screening, Dick and Scott had a frank but cordial discussion of 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, , 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 is based on Dick's 1953 short story of the same title. 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 ; 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. .

It has been noted, though the connection (if anyPhilip K. Dick is unknown, that the subjective reality created by the cryonic Life Extension system in Cameron Crowe's . 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 ), which is set in a Gnostic alternative universe where his non-genre work is published but his science fiction is banned by a totalitarian USA in thrall with a demonically possessed Richard Nixon. Other fictional appearances by Dick include the short play 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 employing a similar rotoscoping process to the earlier film.

Valerio Evangelisti, Italy's greatest living science-fiction and fantasy writer, repeatedly acknowledged being deeply influenced by Dick, especially in his novel (1997), which can be read as a clever and surprisingly original development of ideas found in Dick's . Evident traces of Dick's influence can be also found in the fiction of another young Italian avantpop novelist, Tommaso Pincio.

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

In Emmanuel Carrère's biography of Philip K. Dick, Carrére talks briefly on the subject of Anne's abortion, and Dick's adamant protest against it. This may have been one of the reasons that inspired his controversial short story, "The Pre-persons".

The short stories of Philip K. Dick have recently been republished in five omnibus volumes, as follows: