Philip K. Dick

Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, one of twin infants delivered six weeks premature to Dorothy Kindred Dick and Joseph Edgar Dick ^[1]. His twin sister Jane died in January 1929, only weeks after birth, a loss that haunted Dick for the rest of his life and that biographers treat as a wound running through his fiction, with its recurring doubles, phantom siblings, and absent women ^[2].

The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area while Philip was still small, and after his parents divorced in 1933 he was raised mainly by his mother, first in Washington, D.C. for a brief period and then in Berkeley, California ^[1]. Berkeley shaped him. He grew up around the university without ever really joining it, absorbed classical music and opera, and worked as a teenager at a record shop, a job that later surfaced in several of his mainstream novels ^[2].

Dick attended Berkeley High School, where classmate Ursula K. Le Guin was in the same graduating class of 1947, though the two future giants of American science fiction never met there ^[3]. He enrolled briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, but left without completing a degree. By his own account he suffered from anxiety and agoraphobia from an early age, conditions that made conventional employment and formal schooling difficult and that pushed him toward the solitary discipline of writing ^[2].

Dick sold his first story, "Roog", to the editor Anthony Boucher, and his first published piece, "Beyond Lies the Wub", appeared in Planet Stories in 1952 ^[2]. The early 1950s were the boom years of the American science fiction magazine, and Dick fed that market at an astonishing pace: he placed roughly 30 stories in 1953 alone and moved quickly to novels, beginning with Solar Lottery in 1955 ^[1].

Throughout the decade he also wrote a series of realist literary novels set in California, hoping to escape the genre label, but publishers rejected nearly all of them during his lifetime. Only Confessions of a Crap Artist, written in 1959, reached print before his death, appearing in 1975 ^[2]. The failure of his mainstream ambitions locked him into the paperback science fiction economy, where advances were small and output had to be relentless. That pressure, combined with his heavy use of prescribed amphetamines, helps explain both the volume and the feverish texture of his work ^[4].

Recognition arrived in 1963 when The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which the Axis powers won the Second World War and partitioned the United States, received the Hugo Award for best novel ^[1]. The book is a compact demonstration of the questions that define a Philip K. Dick biography: characters inside the novel consult a banned book describing a world where the Allies won, so that reality itself becomes a nested and unstable proposition. The award raised his standing among readers and fellow writers, though it did little for his finances.

The mid to late 1960s produced the run of novels on which Dick's reputation chiefly rests. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) imagined colonists on Mars using a hallucinogenic drug to share a communal illusion, then asked whether anyone ever escapes it. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) followed a bounty hunter retiring escaped androids in a post nuclear San Francisco and made empathy, tested by machine, the fragile marker of humanity ^[1]. Ubik (1969) trapped its characters in a decaying half life where reality regresses around them, a book Time magazine later included on its list of the 100 best English language novels published since 1923 ^[5].

Among the clearest Philip K. Dick achievements in formal terms are his awards: the Hugo for The Man in the High Castle, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said in 1975, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for A Scanner Darkly ^[2]. A Scanner Darkly (1977), drawn directly from his years inside California drug culture, closes with an author's note listing friends who died or were permanently damaged, and it remains his most personal book ^[1].

What set Dick apart was less plot machinery than preoccupation. Across dozens of books he returned to two questions he himself identified as his core subjects: what is reality, and what constitutes the authentic human being ^[4]. His futures were shabby rather than gleaming, full of failing marriages, small businessmen, malfunctioning appliances, and corporate or state powers that manipulate perception itself. Critics who once dismissed the pulp packaging came to see a serious metaphysical novelist working at speed inside a commercial form ^[3].

Dick married five times: to Jeanette Marlin in 1948, Kleo Apostolides in 1950, Anne Williams Rubenstein in 1959, Nancy Hackett in 1966, and Tessa Busby in 1973. All five marriages ended in divorce, and he had three children, Laura, Isolde (known as Isa), and Christopher ^[2]. Friends and former wives described a man who was funny, generous, and magnetic in conversation, but also suspicious, dependent, and difficult to live with ^[4].

Drugs shadowed much of his adult life. For years he took prescription amphetamines to sustain his writing pace, and after his fourth marriage collapsed in 1970 his Bay Area house filled with young people from the street drug scene, a period he later transmuted into A Scanner Darkly ^[2]. In November 1971 his home in San Rafael was broken into and his files blown open, an unsolved burglary that fed his lifelong suspicion of surveillance and conspiracy. In 1972, at a low point after a suicide attempt in Canada, he entered a rehabilitation facility called X-Kalay in Vancouver before resettling in Orange County, California ^[4].

The defining event of his last decade came in February and March of 1974, when Dick experienced a series of visions and voices he spent the rest of his life trying to interpret. He sometimes attributed them to a rational divine intelligence he called VALIS, sometimes to temporal lobe disturbance, and sometimes to nothing at all. He wrote about the episodes in a private journal that ran to thousands of pages, published in part in 2011 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick ^[6].

The 1974 experiences redirected his fiction. VALIS (1981) split its author into two characters, the narrator Phil Dick and the damaged seeker Horselover Fat, and turned his visions into a novel that is part confession, part theological satire ^[1]. The Divine Invasion followed the same year, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, completed shortly before his death and modeled in part on his friend Bishop James Pike, appeared in 1982. Publishers group the three as the VALIS trilogy ^[2].

Money pressures finally eased late in his life. Hollywood had optioned Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ridley Scott's adaptation, retitled Blade Runner, went into production with Harrison Ford. Dick was initially hostile to early script drafts but was won over after seeing test footage of the film's Los Angeles cityscape, and he was reported to be enthusiastic about the project in his final months ^[7].

He did not live to see the premiere. In February 1982 Dick suffered a stroke at his home in Santa Ana, California, followed by further strokes in the hospital, and he died on March 2, 1982, at the age of 53 ^[1]. His father took his ashes to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where they were buried beside the grave of his twin sister Jane, whose headstone had carried his name since 1929 ^[2].

Dick's afterlife in cinema has been larger than almost any other science fiction writer's. Blade Runner opened months after his death and slowly became a landmark of the genre. Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011) all grew from his stories, and The Man in the High Castle became a multi season Amazon television series beginning in 2015 ^[7]. The estates and studios have paid vastly more for his ideas than publishers ever paid the living writer, a fact often cited among the sadder Philip K. Dick facts.

Literary standing followed. In 2007 the Library of America issued Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, making Dick one of the first science fiction writers admitted to that canon making series, with two further volumes following ^[8]. Critics such as Fredric Jameson have called him one of the essential American novelists of his period, and the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, otherwise scornful of American science fiction, singled him out for praise decades earlier ^[3].

Since 1983 the Philip K. Dick Award has been presented annually for distinguished science fiction first published in paperback in the United States, a form that honors the market he actually worked in ^[2]. His anxieties have aged well: simulated realities, corporate data control, androids indistinguishable from people, and chemically altered perception are now ordinary subjects of public debate. Readers keep returning to him because his question was never whether the future would be strange, but whether we could trust our own experience of it ^[4].