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Philip K. Dick

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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 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." Platt, Charles. (1980). Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. Berkley Publishing. ISBN 0425046680

Contents

Life

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, Illinois. 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. 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. Carrere, Emmanuel: I am Alive and You are Dead: A Jouney into the Mind of Philip K. Dick., page 23. Henry Holt and Company, 2005 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. Carrere, Emmanuel: I am Alive and You are Dead: A Jouney into the Mind of Philip K. Dick., page 34. Henry Holt and Company, 2005

In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Though 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:

"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.

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.

Dick was a voracious reader of works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and neo-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 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 been attributed initially to the painkillers, after weeks of these visions such a rationale becomes less probable. "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.

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. However, 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." Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Carroll & Graf, 2005

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 initialism "PKD".

Marriages and children

Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son. All five marriages ended in divorce.

Death

Dick died in Santa Ana, California of heart failure 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, that final date was carved in, and Philip K. Dick was buried beside his sister.

Afterlife

Dick has since been "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.

Works

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 [link]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is about the moral crisis experienced by a bounty hunter of escaped androids. It 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? This is the dilemma the bounty hunter has to come to terms with.

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 [link].

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is about a television star in a future police state who awakes one morning to discover that he is not famous and does not even have the identification cards crucial to his survival. Although it is not now regarded as one of his very best books, it was his first published novel after several years of silence, during which time his critical reputation had begun to grow, and 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.

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. It is currently the best-selling Dick book on Amazon.com [link].

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 the most academically studied work and was adapted into an opera by Tod Machover [link]. It was voted Dick‘s best novel at philipkdickfans.com [link]

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. At one point, Dick claimed to be in a state of enthousiasmos with VALIS, where he was informed his infant son was in danger. Another event was an episode of xenoglossia, when Dick's wife discovered him speaking Koine Greek, an ancient dialect used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. 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.

Influence and legacy

Awards

During his lifetime, Dick was awarded with:

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.)

Trivia

Bibliography

See also

Notes

External links

 

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