Profile of Philip K. Dick on Famous Like Me

Philip Kindred Dick (16 December 1928 — 2 March 1982), often known by his initials PKD, and sometimes 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 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 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 Southern 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 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 some combination of the above.

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 premature, and Jane died on 26 January 1929. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to California.

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. 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 their rallies. In 1963, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and 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 writes:

"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."

This excerpt shows not only that Dick was continually having monetary troubles, but also the regard other SF writers had for him. Robert Heinlein was Dick's opposite in almost every way--certainly in politics, lifestyle, and writing style--yet they admired each other's work. Dick said of Heinlein in the same introduction, "...I consider Heinlein my spiritual father, even though our political ideologies are totally at variance."

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, 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 20 February 1974 he was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal 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 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

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. VALIS has been described as one node of an artificial satellite network originating from the star Fomalhaut in the Pisces 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 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 "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 Koiné Greek, an ancient dialect which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koiné 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, Will the Atomic Bomb Ever be Perfected, And if so, What becomes of Robert Heinlein? 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.

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.

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 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, though many more were published posthumously, most notably Lies, Inc. Dick's works may be compared with those of William S. Burroughs, though Dick is arguably less scathing and more philosophical.

Marriages and children

Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son. The first four ended in divorce; the last in his death.

• May 1948, to Jeanette Marlin (lasted six months)
• June 1950, to Kleo Apostolides (divorced 1958)
• 1958, to Anne Williams Rubinstein (children: Laura Archer, born 26 February 1960) (divorced 1964)
• 1966 or 1967 (sources conflict), to Nancy Hackett (children: Isolde, usually called "Isa") (divorced 1970)
• 18 April 1973, to Tessa Busby (children: Christopher)

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 his or her experiences, usually in journal form.

After his death (he was disconnected from life support on 2 March but his EEG had been isoelectric for five days prior to that), 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 Philip's date of death. After fifty-three years, that final date was carved in, and Philip K. Dick was buried beside his sister.

Dick's influence

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 (based on Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) the action film Total Recall faithfully translates a number of Dick themes (in particular from Dick's short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), as does Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Minority Report. All, however, introduce uncharacteristic violence and replace the typically nondescript Dick protagonist with an action hero.

Dick was apprehensive about how Blade Runner would treat his story; he refused to do a novelization of the film and was critical of it during production, especially with Ridley through articles. When given an opportunity to see some special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019 Dick was amazed the environment was "exactly as how I'd imagined it!" Following the screening Dick and Ridley had a frank but cordial discussion of Blade Runner 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, Paycheck, was a very loose adaptation of Dick's short story, and suffered greatly, both at the hands of critics and at the box office, possibly due to the film's weak script and miscasting of Ben Affleck in the role of Michael Jennings.

The 2002 film Impostor is based on Dick's 1953 short story of the same name. Starring Gary Sinise and Madeline 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 Screamers 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.

The French film Barjo is based on Dick's non-sf book Confessions of a Crap Artist.

It has been noted, though the connection (if any) is unknown, that the subjective reality created by the cryonic Life Extension system in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky and its Spanish original, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) strongly resembles that of 'half-life' in Dick's Ubik. The 1998 movie The Truman Show bears a similar resemblance to Dick's novel Time Out of Joint. 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.

K. W. Jeter's Doctor Adder series 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 Neuromancer. Dick's influence is particularly evident in Jonathan Lethem's novels, such as Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), Amnesia Moon (1995), and Girl in Landscape (1998). Hints at Dick's VALIS can also be found in Lethem's last novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Richard Linklater name-checked Dick in the climactic sequence of his experimental film "Waking Life" (2001) and is currently working on a film adaptation of Dick's A Scanner Darkly employing a similar rotoscoping process to the earlier film.

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 VALIS.

Bibliography

Best-known novels

• 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;
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the film Blade Runner, which deals with Dick's themes about replicas of real things;
• Time Out of Joint, another excellent depiction of a man discovering his world to be fake (in many ways very similar to the movie The Truman Show);
• Now Wait for Last Year, a somewhat traditional sf 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 transposes northern California culture in the early 60's onto a post apocalpytic world and raises questions of politics, society, disability and race.

Novels by year

1955

Solar Lottery

1956

The World Jones Made

The Man Who Japed

1957

Eye in the Sky

The Cosmic Puppets

1959

Time Out of Joint

1960

Dr. Futurity

Vulcan's Hammer

1962

The Man in the High Castle

1963

The Game-Players of Titan (ISBN 0679740651)

1964

Martian Time-Slip

The Simulacra

Clans of the Alphane Moon

The Penultimate Truth

1965

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb

1966

The Crack in Space

Now Wait for Last Year

The Unteleported Man

1967

Counter-Clock World

The Zap Gun

The Ganymede Takeover with Ray Nelson

1968

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

1969

Ubik

Galactic Pot-Healer

1970

A Maze of Death

Our Friends from Frolix 8

1972

We Can Build You

1974

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

1975

Confessions of a Crap Artist

1976

Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny

1977

A Scanner Darkly

1981

Valis

The Divine Invasion

1982

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

1983

The Unteleported Man (expanded edition)

1984

Lies, Inc.

1985

Radio Free Albemuth

Puttering About in a Small Land

In Milton Lumky Territory

1986

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

1987

Mary and the Giant

1988

The Broken Bubble

Nick and the Glimmung (for children)

1994

Gather Yourselves Together

Short stories

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

1. The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Stories, ISBN 0806511532
2. We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Other Stories, ISBN 0806512091
3. Second Variety and Other Stories, ISBN 0806512261
4. The Minority Report and Other Stories, ISBN 0806512768
5. The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Stories, ISBN 0806513284

1952

Beyond Lies the Wub

The Gun

The Little Movement

The Skull

The Variable Man

1953

The Builder

Colony

The Commuter

The Cookie Lady

The Cosmic Poachers

The Defenders

Expendable

The Eyes Have It

The Great C

The Hanging Stranger

The Impossible Planet

Impostor

The Indefatigable Frog

The Infinities

The King of the Elves

Martians Come in Clouds

Mr. Spaceship

Out in the Garden

Paycheck

Piper in the Woods

Planet for Transients

The Preserving Machine

Project: Earth

Roog

Second Variety

Some Kinds of Life

The Trouble with Bubbles

The World She Wanted

1954

A World of Talent

The Last of the Masters

Adjustment Team

Beyond the Door

Breakfast at Twilight

The Crawlers

The Crystal Crypt

Exhibit Piece

The Father-thing

The Golden Man

James P. Crow

Jon's World

The Little Black Box

Meddler

Of Withered Apples

A Present for Pat

Prize Ship

Progeny

Prominent Author

Sales Pitch

Shell Game

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford

Small Town

Souvenir

Strange Eden

Survey Team

Time Pawn

Tony and the Beetles

The Turning Wheel

Upon the Dull Earth

1955

Autofac

Captive Market

The Chromium Fence

Foster, You're Dead! In German: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/2797/dick.htm

The Hood Maker

Human Is

The Mold of Yancy

Nanny

Psi-man Heal My Child!

Service Call

A Surface Raid

Vulcan's Hammer

War Veteran

1956

A Glass of Darkness

Minority Report

Pay for the Printer

To Serve the Master

1957

Misadjustment

The Unreconstructed M

1958

Null-o

1959

Explorers We

Fair Game

Recall Mechanism

War Game

1963

All We Marsmen

The Days of Perky Pat

If There Were No Benny Cemoli

Stand-by

What'll We Do With Ragland Park?

1964

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

1965

Project Plowshare

Retreat Syndrome

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

1966

Holy Quarrel

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday

1967

Faith of our Fathers

Return Match

1968

Not By Its Cover

The Story To End All Stories

1969

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum

The Electric Ant

1972

Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked

1974

The Different Stages of Love

The Pre-persons

A Little Something For Us Tempunauts

1979

The Exit Door Leads In

1980

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

Rautavaara's Case

Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr

1981

The Alien Mind

1984

Strange Memories Of Death

1987

The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree

The Eye of The Sibyl

Fawn, Look Back

Stability

1988

Goodbye, Vincent

1989

11-17-80

1992

The Name of the Game is Death

Film adaptations of Philip K. Dick's works

• Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) is based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) is based on his short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
• Confessions d'un Barjo (Jérôme Boivin, 1992) is based on his novel Confessions of a Crap Artist.
• Screamers (Christian Duguay, 1995) is based on his short story Second Variety.
• Impostor (Gary Fleder, 2000) is based on the short story of the same name. A 1960s TV series was also based on the story.
• Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) is based on the short story of the same name.
• Paycheck (John Woo, 2003) is based on the short story of the same name.
• A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) is based on the novel of the same name.

• Dick's personal essay Strange Memories of Death was adapted into a short film of the same name by Yates House Studios, but the film has yet to be distributed.

Awards

• Hugo Awards
  • Best Novel
    • 1963 - The Man in the High Castle (winner)
    • 1975 - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (nominee)
  • Best Novelette
    • 1968 - Faith of Our Fathers (nominee)
• Nebula Awards
  • Best Novel
    • 1965 - Dr. Bloodmoney (nominee)
    • 1965 - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (nominee)
    • 1968 - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (nominee)
    • 1974 - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (nominee)
    • 1982 - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (nominee)
• John W. Campbell Memorial Award
  • Best Novel
    • 1975 - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (winner)

Biographies

• Carrere, Emmanuel. Bent, Timothy. (translator) (2005). I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick. Picador. ISBN 0312424515 [reviewed by Michael Saler in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 August 2005, page 10]
• Dick, Ann R. (Former Wife). (1995). Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982: A Memoir and Biography of the Science Fiction Writer. Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0773491376
• Mason, Daryl. (2006). The Biography of Philip K. Dick. Gollancz. ISBN 0575072806
• Sutin, Lawrence (Official biographer). (1991). Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Citadel Press; Rep edition. ISBN 0806512288
• Williams,Paul. (1986). Only Apparently Real - The Worlds of Philip K. Dick. Entwhistle Books. ISBN 0934558310

Interviews

• Apel, D. Scott. (1999). Philip K. Dick : The Dream Connection. The Impermanent Press. ISBN 1886404038
• Lee, Gwen (ed). What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations Of Philip K. Dick. Overlook Press. ISBN 1585673781

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Philip K. Dick