Philip Kindred Dick (Dec 1928 – Mar 1982) was an American science fiction writer. In addition to thirty-eight 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 StanisÅ‚aw Lem, Robert A. Heinlein, and Robert Silverberg, Dick received little general 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 [Charles] Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."
His acclaimed 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." [1]
These characteristic themes and the atmosphere of paranoia they generate are sometimes described as "Dickian" or "Phildickian."
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. He sold records and was a disc jockey 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." He associated with the pre-1960s counterculture of California and was sympathetic to beat poets and the Communist Party.[citation needed] There is some dispute regarding the latter and Dick later admitted to being literally thrown out of at least one of its rallies. Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and he had a file at the FBI as a result.
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 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 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 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."
Dick was also a voracious reader of works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and neo-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 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 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.[1]
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 had probably committed the burglary himself, and then forgotten he had done so.
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 prominantly featured in his novel Clans of the Alphane Moon, which centered on an entire society populated from the descendants of an lunar 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." [2]
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.
In this, 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.
