Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16 1928--March 2 1982), often known by his initials PKD, or by the pen name Richard Phillips, was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. Though hailed during his lifetime by peers such as Stanislaw 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 Dick has gained both general acclaim and critical respect.Discarding the optimistic and simple world-view of Golden Age science fiction, Dick consistently explored the themes of the nature of reality and humanity in his novels, which were populated by common working people, rather than galactic elites. Foreshadowing the cyberpunk sub-genre, Dick brought the anomic world of Northern California to many of his works. His acclaimed novel, The Man in the High Castle (1963, winner of the Hugo Award), is a pioneering work bridging the genres of alternate 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, hallucinating, or some combination of the above.
Dick experimented with mind-altering drugs, though he often denied that they were influences on his work.
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago, to Dorothy Kindred Dick. His father, Edgar Dick, was a fraud investigator for the USDA. He had a twin sister, Jane. The children were both born six weeks premature, and the girl died on January 26, 1929. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to California.
Dick's parents divorced when he was young; 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. He sold records and was a disk 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 1950's 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-1960's counterculture of California and was sympathetic to beat poets and the Communist Party. In 1963, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. 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. Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and had a file at the FBI as a result.
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. 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, 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.
On February 20, 1974 he was recovering from the effects of sodium penthanol administered after 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 initially been attributed to the painkillers, after weeks of these visions, such a rationale becomes less probable. Throughout February and March of 1974 he received a series of visions which he collectively referred to as 2-3-74, shorthand for February/March of 1974. He described his initial visions as laser beams and geometric patterns, and occasionally brief pictures of Jesus Christ 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 C.E. 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. VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, he used this term as the title of one of his novels, he later theorized that it was a satellite of some kind which used beams to communicate with people on Earth. He claimed that the being used what he called "disinhibiting stimuli" to prep the subjects for the communication, in his case the vesicle pisces.
Most observers of this phenomenon would conclude that Dick's visions were a brief psychotic episode, and they might be correct in that assumption. However, what has allowed the mystery of Dick's experiences to endure are reports of several even more intriguing incidences. At one point, during an encounter with the 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. The child survived thanks to the operation, which Dick accredited to the VALIS.
Another event was an episode of glossolalia. Dick's wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and Dick wrote that they later discovered that he was speaking an ancient dialect of the Greek language, which he had never studied.
Regardless of the apparent evidence 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 excised 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, and that after forcing the Gnostics underground 1900 years earlier had kept the population of the Earth as thralls to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had contacted him and unnamed others to induce the "impeachment" (read: assassination) of Richard M. Nixon, who 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 broken into his house and pilfered various documents, though later he stated that he 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. His final novel was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick's works may be compared with those of William S. Burroughs. (Dick is arguably less scathing and more philosophical.)
Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son. The first four ended in divorce; the last in his death.
Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in 1982 without having learned what had caused his strange visions. It has been theorized that Dick suffered from epileptic discharges in his temporal lobe. This can cause subtle, non-disabling seizures which can cause feelings ranging from a general disorientation to visions often construed by the victim as "psychic" experiences or epiphanies. This particular region of the brain allows for differentiation of reality and fantasy and is very sensitive to epileptic discharges. The symptoms which go along with these discharges read like a summary of the last decade of Dick's life. Part and parcel to these kind of seizures is a behavioral phenomenon called "hypergraphia", where the subject begins obsessively documenting their experiences usually in journal form.
After his death (he was disconnected from life support on March 2, but his EEG had been flat for five days prior to that), his father Edgar, who was still alive at that point, 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 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 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 Blade Runner, the action film Total Recall faithfully translates a number of Dick themes, albeit with uncharacteristic violence.
Philip K. Dick is often cited as a major influence on the Cyberpunk movement led by William Gibson, but as this work, and titles as diverse as the inventive Eye in the Sky and Martian Time Slip, the moving Galactic Pot-Healer, the complex and yet delicate The Man in the High Castle and the chilling yet deeply moving A Scanner Darkly show, there was much more to his genius than just influence.
One influence unusually distant from science fiction within "culture space" is the composition by Tod Machover, and performance, of an opera VALIS. This distance is suggested by at least one music reviewer explaining the character "Horselover Fat" as being introduced by the opera's librettist, in order to interact with the PKD character in the opera. The fact that "Horse-lover Fat" was in fact invented by PKD, included in the novel to interact with a Philip-Dick character, and more or less faithfully retained in the opera, betrays a striking communication gap.
Youth
Dick and his visions
VALIS
Exegesis
Marriages and children
Death
Dick's influence on others
Quotes
For more quotes, see Philip K. Dick on Wikiquote.Bibliography
Short stories
The short stories of Philip K. Dick have recently been republished in five omnibus volumes, as follows:
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- All We Marsmen
- The Days of Perky Pat
- If There Were No Benny Cemoli
- Stand-by
- What'll We Do With Ragland Park?
- Cantata 140
- A Game of Unchance
- Novelty Act
- Oh, to be a Blobel!
- Orpheus with Clay Feet
- Precious Artifact
- The Unteleported Man
- The War with the Fnools
- Waterspider
- What the Dead Men Say
- Project Plowshare
- Retreat Syndrome
- Holy Quarrel
- We Can Remember It For You Wholesale
- Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday
- Faith of our Fathers
- Return Match
- Not By Its Cover
- The Story To End All Stories
- A. Lincoln, Simulacrum
- The Electric Ant
- Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked
- The Different Stages of Love
- The Pre-persons
- A Little Something For Us Tempunauts
- The Exit Door Leads In
- I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
- Rautavaara's Case
- Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr
- The Alien Mind
- Strange Memories Of Death
- The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree
- The Eye of The Sibyl
- Fawn, Look Back
- Stability
- Goodbye, Vincent
- 11-17-80
- The Name of the Game is Death
Novels: recommendations
Most of Dick's novels are very accessible and make quick reading; a few, however, most notably his final trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), were inspired by his VALIS experience and involve religious material some readers find dense and inscrutable.
Some good choices for a reader new to Dick are The Man in the High Castle, which takes place in an alternate America ruled by the victorious Axis powers, and which features an early exploration by Dick into the questions of false worlds he would later ask in VALIS; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the inspiration for the film Blade Runner, which deals with Dick's themes about replicas of real things; another excellent depiction of a man discovering his world to be fake is Time out of Joint (in many ways very similar to the movie Truman Show); Now Wait for Last Year, a somewhat traditional sci-fi novel involving time travel, Dick's theme of reality-altering drugs, more questions of replicas, and a fine example of Dick's recurring dark-haired female character; and Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, which features northern California culture in the early 60's and questions of politics and society.
For the more patient reader, Dick's masterpiece VALIS is a unique piece of literature. It started out as a traditional sci-fi novel (early draft work can be seen in the collection ), turned into a missive as Dick attempted to demonstrate the truth of his paranoia, and ended up including a moving admission of insanity layered on top of the book.
;1955:Solar Lottery
;1956:The World Jones Made
Novels by year
;1957:Eye in the Sky
- The Cosmic Puppets
- Vulcan's Hammer
- The Simulacra
- Clans of the Alphane Moon
- The Penultimate Truth
- Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
- Now Wait for Last Year
- The Unteleported Man
- The Zap Gun
- The Ganymede Takeover with Ray Nelson
- Galactic Pot-Healer
- Our Friends from Frolix 8
- The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
- Puttering About in a Small Land
- In Milton Lumky Territory
- Nick and the Glimmung (for children)
Movie adaptations of Philip K. Dick's works
Awards
See also
External links