You Don't Know Dick: An Introduction to Philip K. Dick

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You Don't Know Dick:

An Introduction to Philip K. Dick



By Mark R. Leffler

Phillip K. Dick

Even if you don't know Dick, you're probably familiar with some of his stories. Philip K. Dick, that is. Phil to his friends or any of his five ex-wives. PKD to countless fans of his over forty novels and scores of short stories, mostly in the science fiction arena.

You may be one of a couple of million moviegoers who enjoyed the paranoid conspiracies of Steven Speilberg and Tom Cruise's summer blockbuster Minority Report. That was adapted from the Dick short story by the same name that was published in 1956.

Or maybe you're a SF fan who considers 1982's Bladerunner to be a SF classic, right up there with Alien or 2001: A Space Odyssey. That one would be director Ridley Scott's vision of PKD's 1968 novel with the lovely but un-sellable title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

And of course Arnold Schwarzenegger's most thought provoking film is easily

1990's Total Recall, directed by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. It was

originally a PKD short story titled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

So maybe you do know Dick. And considering that a dozen movies or TV series

have been or are currently being developed from PKD stories, you might say

that Dick has never been so popular. So maybe a little more information

about the man might be in order:

Philip K. Dick and his twin sister Jane were born on December 16, 1928 in

Chicago. The twins were a bit premature and Jane died two weeks later. Her

loss greatly affected Phil and his later writing.

Just as murder mystery fiction dominated the Forties, the Fifties provided

a huge market for SF fiction. Magazines with such fun titles as Startling

Stories, Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy, Fantastic Universe, and the

simpler Amazing and Astounding were the dominant forms of SF publishing.

Partly fueled by his lifelong financial instability, PKD published 82

stories and three novels between 1952 and 1958. Dick was a prolific short

story writer and five collections of his stories were published during his

lifetime.

During the Sixties paperback books became the most popular forum for SF

fiction and around this time Dick generated novel after novel, usually in

the SF genre. To get a rough idea of his prodigious output, starting with

We Can Build You (written in 1962) and counting up through Our Friends From

Folix 8  (penned in 1969) Dick wrote twenty novels in seven years. That's a

pace that almost makes Stephen King and Anne Rice seem like slackers!

Considering the output and the era, it's not surprising that PKD became a

serious substance abuser, experimenting with the usual drugs of the time

but certainly subsisting at times on little more than amphetamines washed

down with Scotch and supplemented with cartons of cigarettes. During taped

conversations later published as What If Our Earth Is Their Heaven: The

Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick (The Overlook Press, 2000) he

realized the toll that such living and writing had been taking on his

health and joked that 'writer's block' was a good thing for him.

"For me it's a blessing. Because I'm an obsessive writer, and if I didn't

get writer's block I'd overload, short-circuit, and burn out right away. I

once did sixteen novels in five years. Sold every one of 'em, plus a lot of

stories. And they were all publishable. They all sold. Sixteen novels in

five years. And if I didn't get writer's block, I'd die," explained Dick.

He finally did die, in 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure. He

was awaiting publication of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Simon &

Schuster, 1982) and also the release of the film Bladerunner. Even though

it had been substantially altered from the novel, Dick was thrilled with

parts of the movie he had been shown and especially liked the casting of

Harrison Ford and Sean Young in the lead roles.

Even though PKD's popularity has only increased since his death, he was

highly acclaimed within the field of SF during his lifetime. The Man In The

High Castle (Putnam) won him the Hugo award for best SF novel of the year

in 1962. He tried several non-SF books to try to win a more mainstream

audience, but could not sell any of them to a large publishing house. One

of the best, Confessions of a Crap Artist was written in 1959 but not

published until 1975 when Paul Williams at Entwhistle Books picked it up.

Failing to connect in the mainstream literary world, Dick returned to SF

themes and his novel Flow My Tears The Policeman Said (Doubleday, 1974) won

the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Dick's later fiction and indeed the last decade of his life were dedicated

to trying to understand what he referred to as his '2/3-74' experiences.

Beginning with a beam of pink light streaming from the 'fish sign'

Christian necklace worn by a pharmacy delivery girl, PKD found himself

transported back to ancient Roman times and was given a message that led to

the diagnosis of a potentially fatal medical condition his son was later

treated for. Many themes raised by this experience are found in his last

four novels, Radio Free Albemuth (Arbor House 1985), Valis (Ballantine

1981), The Divine Invasion (Timescape 1982) and The Transmigration of

Timothy Archer.

Readers interested in the source material for the movies mentioned here

should pick up any of the collected story volumes. All of his stories are

collected in five volumes published by Underwood Miller. There are also

many fine biographical works about the fascinating life he lived, including

Paul William's Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (Arbor

House 1986), To The High Castle (Valentine Press 1989) by Gregg Rickman.

Perhaps most intriguing is a book by one of his ex-wives; Anne R. Dick

titled The Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982, A Memoir and a Biography

(Edwin Mellen Press 1995)

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