Philip K Dick

Philip K 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, Philip K 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, Philip K 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.

Philip K Dick's stories often descend into 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."

Philip K 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, three 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. Philip K 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.

Philip K 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, Philip K 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, Philip K 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 only publish books 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:

In 1972, Philip K 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.

Philip K 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 1970)
• April 18, 1973, to Tessa Busby (child: Christopher) (divorced 1976)

Philip K 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.

Pseudonyms: Philip Dick

Selected Bibliography
Complete Bibliography

Novels

• Solar Lottery (1955)
• Variant Title: World of Chance (1956 UK) (1955)
• The World Jones Made (1956)
• The Man Who Japed (1956)
• The Cosmic Puppets (1957)
• Eye in the Sky (1957)
• Time Out of Joint (1959)
  • Magazine/Anthology Appearances:
  • Time Out of Joint (Part 1 of 3) (1959)
• Dr. Futurity (1960)
• Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
• The Man in the High Castle (1962)
• The Game Players of Titan (1963)
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
• Martian Time-Slip (1964)
• Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
• The Simulacra (1964)
• The Unteleported Man (1964)
• The Penultimate Truth (1964)
• Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
  • Variant Title: Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965)
• Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
• The Crack in Space (1966)
• Counter Clock World (1967)
• The Ganymede Takeover (1967) with Ray Nelson
• The Zap Gun (1967)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
  • Variant Title: Blade Runner (1982)
• Ubik (1969)
• Galactic Pot Healer (1969)
• A Maze of Death (1970)
• Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
• We Can Build You (1972)
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)
• Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
• Deus Irae (1976) with Roger Zelazny
• A Scanner Darkly (1977)
• Zap Gun (1978)
• VALIS (1981)
• The Divine Invasion (1981)
• The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
• Lies, Inc. (1983)
  • Variant Title: The Unteleported Man (1983)
• The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1984)
• Radio Free Albemuth (1985)
• Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)
• In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)
• Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)
• Mary and the Giant (1987)
• Nick and the Glimmung (1988)
• The Broken Bubble (1988)
• The VALIS Trilogy (1993)
• Gather Yourselves Together (1994)
• Paycheck (2004) with Keir Dullea
• Simulacra (2004)
• Vintage PKD (2005)

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