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Philip Kindred Dick (December 16 1928 – March 2 1982) was an American science fiction writer. In addition to forty-four books currently in print, Dick produced a number of short stories and minor works which were published in pulp magazines. At least seven of his stories have been adapted into films. Though hailed during his lifetime by peers such as Stanisław Lem, Robert A. Heinlein, and Robert Silverberg, Dick received little public recognition until after his death.
Foreshadowing the cyberpunk sub-genre, Dick brought the anomic world of California to many of his works, exploring sociological and political themes in his early novels and stories while his later work tackled drugs and theology, drawing upon his own life experiences in novels like A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. Alternate universes and simulacra were common plot devices, with fictional worlds inhabited by common working people, rather than galactic elites. "There are no heroics in Dick's books," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroes. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."
His novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternative history and science fiction, resulting in a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who wakes up in a parallel universe where he is completely unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. In these stories, Dick wrote about people he loved, placing them in fictional worlds where he questioned the reality of ideas and institutions. "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 wrote.
Dick's stories often become seemingly surreal fantasies, with characters discovering that their everyday world is an illusion, emanating either from external entities or from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality," Charles Platt writes. "Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."
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Early life
Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, were born six weeks prematurely to Joseph Edgar and Dorothy Kindred Dick in Chicago. According to various accounts, Dorothy was unable to properly feed and care for the newborns, and Jane was badly burned by an electric blanket. Dick's father, a fraud investigator for the United States Department of Agriculture, had recently taken out life insurance policies, and an insurance nurse was dispatched to the home. Upon seeing the malnourished Philip and injured Jane, the nurse rushed the babies to the hospital, but baby Jane died on the way there, five weeks after her birth (January 26, 1929). The death of Dick's twin sister had a profound effect on his writing, relationships, and every other 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, but when Dick reached the age of five, his father was transferred to Reno, Nevada; Dorothy refused to move, so Dick's father fought for custody. Dick's mother was determined to raise Philip on her own, so she moved to Washington, D.C. where she found work. Dick was enrolled at John Eaton Elementary School from 1936 to 1938, where he completed second through fourth-grade. He was often absent from class, and he received his lowest grade (a C) in written composition, although one teacher remarked that he "shows interest and ability in story telling." In June 1938, Dorothy and Philip moved back to California.
Dick attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California and briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in German, but dropped out before completing any classes. Dick claimed to have hosted a classical music program on KSMO Radio in 1947, although details are sketchy. From 1948–1952, he worked in a record store, the only job he ever held before selling his first story in 1952. He wrote full-time, more or less, from then on. 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."
Dick's mother and his second wife (Kleo Apostolides) were sympathetic to socialism, but Dick regarded Communism as a control system equivalent to fascism. In 1955, Dick and his wife were flattered to receive a visit from the FBI, which they believed was the result of Kleo's left-wing activities. After befriending one of the agents (who taught him how to drive) Dick was surprised to learn that the FBI was actually investigating him because of a letter he had written to Soviet scientist Alexander Topchev on a technical matter.
In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Although he 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 publish books only through low-paying SF 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."
In 1972, Dick donated his manuscripts and papers to the Special Collections Library at California State University, Fullerton where it is archived in the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Collection in Pollak Library. It was at Fullerton that Dick became friends with science fiction writers K. W. Jeter and Tim Powers.
The final novel to be published during his life was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
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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 Astounding Magazine. 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 Necronomicon or The King in Yellow, promising insanity to their readers). Shortly thereafter, the dreams stopped. They never returned, but the phrase "The Empire Never Ended" would appear in his later works.
Dick was a voracious reader of works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and Gnosticism, and these ideas found their way into many of his stories as well as his visions.
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 pain medication, he noticed the woman delivering the package was wearing a pendant with what he called the "vesicle pisces". (He was probably conflating the names of two related symbols, the ichthys consisting of two intersecting arcs resembling the profile of a fish, used by the early Christians as a secret symbol, and the vesica piscis, from the centre of which the ichthys symbol can be drawn.) After her departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions. Although this may have been attributed initially to the medication, after weeks of these visions such a rationale became less plausible. "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 received a series of visions which he collectively referred to as 2-3-74, shorthand for February/March 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 past and continued 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 variously as Zebra, God, and, most often, VALIS.
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Psychology
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. He later stated that he might very well have committed the burglary himself, and then forgotten he had done so. This is echoed especially in the character of Bob Arctor/Agent Fred in A Scanner Darkly.
Dick himself speculated as to whether or not he may have suffered from schizophrenia, and themes of mental illness permeated his work, especially that of Jack Bohlen, an "ex-schizophrenic" in the 1964 novel, Martian Time-Slip. It was also prominently featured in his novel Clans of the Alphane Moon, which centered on an entire society populated from the descendants of a lunatic asylum. The topic of mental illness was of constant interest to Dick, and in 1965 he wrote an essay entitled "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes."
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Aliases
Dick occasionally wrote using pen names, most notably Richard Philips and Jack Dowland.
The surname Dowland is a reference to the composer John Dowland, who is featured in a number of Dick works. The title Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a direct reference to Dowland's best-known composition Flow My Tears. Some protagonists in Dick's short-fiction bear the name Dowland.
Dick's short story Orpheus with Clay Feet was one such story published under the pen name Jack Dowland. The protagonist desires to be the muse for a fictional author, Jack Dowland, considered to be the greatest science-fiction author of the 20th century. In the story, Dowland publishes a story of his own, also entitled Orpheus with Clay Feet, under the pen-name Philip K. Dick.
In the semi-autobiographical novel VALIS, the protagonist is called Horselover Fat. Philip, or Phil-Hippos is Greek for Horselover, Dick is German for Fat.
Although he never used it himself, fans and critics of Dick's work often refer to him by the initials "PKD", as well as the term "Dickian" when comparing his themes in other works (much like Kafkaesque and Orwellian).
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Marriages and children
Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son. All five marriages ended in divorce.
May 1948, to Jeanette Marlin (lasted six months)
June 1950, to Kleo Apostolides (divorced 1958)
1958, to Anne Williams Rubinstein (child: Laura Archer, born February 26, 1960) (divorced 1964)
1966 or 1967 (sources conflict), to Nancy Hackett (child: Isolde, usually called "Isa") (divorced 1973)
April 18, 1973, to Tessa Busby (child: Christopher) (divorced 1976)
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Death
Dick died in Santa Ana, California on March 2, 1982, when he was disconnected from life support following a stroke. His EEG had been isoelectric for the previous five days. After his death, his father Edgar brought his son's body 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 Dick's date of death. After fifty-three years Philip K. Dick was buried beside his sister.
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The Man in the High Castle
The Man in the High Castle (1962) takes place in an alternate United States ruled by the victorious Axis powers. It is considered a defining novel in the sub genre of alternate history and is the only Dick novel to win a Hugo Award. Along with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik, it’s one of the recommended novels to newcomers to Dick’s work at philipkdickfans.com *
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) is complex in that it utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and features several layers of reality and unreality. It is also one of Dick’s first works to explore religious themes.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch takes place some time in the twenty-first century. Under the authority of the United Nations, humankind has colonized every habitable planet and moon in the solar system.
Life for most colonists is physically daunting and psychologically monotonous so the UN must draft individuals to colonize. Most colonists entertain themselves using Barbie-like “Perky Pat” dolls and the multitude of accessories manufactured by Earth-based P.P. Layouts. The company also secretly creates Can-D, an illegal but widely available hallucinogen that allows the user to "translate" into Perky Pat (if the user is female) or her boyfriend Walt (if male). This allows colonists to experience an idealized version of life on Earth in a collective unconscious hallucination.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The novel tells the story of a dying, poisoned Earth, depopulated of all 'successful' humans and home only to those with no prospects off-world, and a place of refuge for androids escaping their preset termination dates, ultimately seeking to supplant the few humans still ekeing out an existence on the home world.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is well known as the inspiration for the influential 1982 film Blade Runner. It constitutes both a conflation and intensification of Dick's pivotal question of what is reality and what is fake: Are the human-looking and -acting androids fakes or real humans? Should we treat them as machines or humans? What is the crucial factor which defines humanity as distinctly living, as opposed to those which bear merely the outward appearance of life?
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Ubik
Ubik (1969) uses extensive networks of psychics and a suspended state after death to create an eroding state of reality. In 2005, Time Magazine named it one of the hundred best English language novels published since 1923 *.
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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is about Jason Taverner, a television star in a dystopic yet foreseeably similar future police state who passes out after a physically traumatic incident involving an ex-girlfriend. Prior to the arrival of the paramedics he awakens in a dingy hotel room, wearing the same clothes and with the money in his wallet intact, although the other contents of his wallet are missing, most importantly his many forms of Government-mandated Identification cards. This precludes travel more than a few blocks in the city, as security checkpoints (staffed by the 'Pols' and 'Nats', essentially the Police and Military) allow those through who have valid ID, arrest those who lack it, and detain with impunity anyone they deem arrest worthy or are otherwise suspicious. Jason's initial belief that he was robbed is subsequently dispelled when he discovers that, just as he no longer has the crucial Ident cards, he appears to have been removed from existence. The television star Jason Taverner is entirely non-existent, without fame, reputation, or anything else he can rely upon; indeed, Jason Taverner is an 'un-person', his existence having been entirely erased from all records. Being his first published novel after several years of silence, during which time his critical reputation had begun to grow, this novel was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and is the only Dick novel nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula Award. In an essay written two years before his death, Dick described how he found out from his Episcopalian priest that an important scene from the novel was very similar to a scene in the book of Acts.
Notably, Richard Linklater talks about this particular novel very specifically in his movie Waking Life, a movie which begins with a scene highly reminiscent of something which happens to the character Ragle Gumm in another of Dick's novels, Time out of Joint.
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A Scanner Darkly
A Scanner Darkly (1977) is a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural, in which an undercover narcotics detective ingests massive amounts of a dangerous drug in order to maintain his cover. It was adapted into a film by Richard Linklater which opened on July 7, 2006.
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VALIS
VALIS, (1980) is perhaps Dick’s most postmodern and autobiographical novel, examining his own supposed encounters with a divine presence. It may also be considered his most academically studied work and was adapted into an opera by Tod Machover *. It was voted Dick‘s best novel at philipkdickfans.com *
His later works, especially the VALIS trilogy, were heavily autobiographical, many with 2-3-74 references or influences. VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System; 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.
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Exegesis
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 Exegesis.
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 Exegesis 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.
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Awards
During his lifetime, Dick was awarded with:
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Films and other adaptations
A number of Dick's stories have been made into movies, most of them only loosely based on Dick's original stories, being used as a starting-point for a Hollywood action-adventure story, while introducing violence uncharacteristic of Dick's stories and replacing the typically nondescript Dick protagonist with an action hero. (Dick himself wrote a screenplay for an intended film adaptation of Ubik in 1974, but the film was never made.)
The most famous film adaptation is Ridley Scott's classic movie Blade Runner (based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Dick was apprehensive about how his story would be adapted for the film; he refused to do a novelization of the film and he was critical of it and its director, Ridley Scott, during its production. 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 Blade Runner's themes and characters, and although they had differing views, Dick fully backed the film from then on. Dick died from a stroke less than four months before the release of the film.
Total Recall (1990), based on the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, evokes a feeling similar to that of the original story while streamlining the plot. It includes such elements as the confusion of fantasy and reality, the progression towards more fantastic elements through the story, machines talking back to humans, and the protagonist's doubts about his own identity.
Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report faithfully translates many of Dick's themes, but changes major plot points and adds an action-adventure framework.
Impostor, a 2002 movie based on Dick's 1953 story of the same title, utilizes 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 a possible influence on the scenes in the machine-dominated future of The Terminator (1984) and its sequels.
John Woo's 2003 film, Paycheck, was a very loose adaptation of Dick's short story of that name, and suffered greatly both at the hands of critics and at the box office.
An animated film of A Scanner Darkly, was Directed by Richard Linklater. It stars Keanu Reeves as Fred/Bob Arctor and Winona Ryder as Donna. Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, actors both noted for drug issues, are also cast in the film. The film was produced using the process of rotoscoping: it was first shot in live-action and then the live footage was animated over.
Next, a film adaptation of the short story The Golden Man, is currently being filmed. It will star Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore.
Another stage adaptation is the opera VALIS, composed and with libretto by Tod Machover, which premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris on December 1, 1987, with a French libretto. It was subsequently revised and readapted into English, and was recorded and released on CD (Bridge Records BCD9007) in 1988.
A radio drama adaptation of Dick's short story "Mr.Spaceship" was aired by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio) in 1996 under the name "Menolippu Paratiisiin".
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Trivia
Dick's former wife Tessa was asked in an interview why she thought his original titles have rarely been used in film adaptations (Blade Runner versus Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, etc). She replied, "Actually, the books rarely carry Phil's original titles, as the editors usually wrote new titles after reading his manuscripts. Phil often commented that he couldn't write good titles. If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist." •
Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin were members of the same high school graduating class (Berkeley (Ca.) High School, 1947), yet did not know one another. Le Guin (then Ursula Kroeber) had been accelerated a grade, while Dick missed much of his senior year with the agoraphobia that would plague him as an adult. Le Guin later became one of Dick's great champions (calling him "our own home-grown Borges") and wrote The Lathe of Heaven as a conscious Dick homage; the two maintained a friendship and correspondence until Dick's death.
Films based on Dick's writing have accumulated a total revenue of around US $700 million as of 2004.
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 impaneled in a San Diego Comic Con presentation on the film adaptation of Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly. Unfortunately, sometime in February 2006, the android was "misplaced" by an airline, and has yet to be located.
In A Scanner Darkly, blue flowers are used as a central theme. The Blue Flower was a symbol of the German Romantic movement. One of the German Romantic poets was called Novalis, a name which bears striking similarity to VALIS. Many of Novalis' themes and ideas echo Dick's own Gnosticism. Part of the main character's name in VALIS is a German translation of Dick's own name.
When once questioned about why he 'enjoyed' writing such Dystopically themed stories and those in which reality was often morbidly and chaotically swept away to the detriment of the characters, Dick replied "I would never want to live in one of my novels!" .
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Bibliography
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See also
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Notes
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