Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2,
1982) was an American novelist,
short
story writer, and
essayist whose published
work during his lifetime was almost entirely in the
science fiction genre. Dick explored
sociological, political and
metaphysical
themes in novels dominated by
monopolistic
corporations,
authoritarian governments, and
altered states. In his later
works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal
interest in metaphysics and
theology. He
often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature
of
drug abuse,
paranoia and
schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences
in novels such as
A Scanner
Darkly and
VALIS.
The novel
The Man in the
High Castle bridged the genres of
alternate history and science fiction,
earning Dick a
Hugo Award for
Best Novel in 1963.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a
parallel universe where he is
unknown, won the
John W.
Campbell Memorial Award
for best novel in 1975. "I want to write about people I love, and
put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the
world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not
meet my standards," Dick wrote of these stories. "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 referred to himself as
a "fictionalizing
philosopher."
In addition to thirty-six novels, Dick wrote approximately 121
short stories, many of which appeared in science fiction magazines.
Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty,
nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his
death, including
Blade Runner,
Total Recall,
A Scanner Darkly and
Minority Report. In
2005,
Time magazine named
Ubik one of the one hundred greatest
English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became
the first science fiction writer to be included in
The Library of
America series.
Life
Early life
Philip
Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane
Charlotte Dick, were born six weeks prematurely to Dorothy Kindred
Dick and Joseph Edgar Dick in Chicago
.
Dick's
father, a fraud investigator for the United States
Department of Agriculture
, had recently taken out life insurance policies on
the family. An insurance nurse was dispatched to the Dick
household. Upon seeing the malnourished Philip and injured Jane,
the nurse rushed the babies to hospital. Baby Jane died en route,
just five weeks after her birth (January 26, 1929). The death of
Philip's twin sister profoundly affected his writing,
relationships, and every 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
. When Philip turned five, his father was
transferred to Reno,
Nevada
. Dorothy refused to move, and she and Joseph
divorced. Joseph fought her for custody of Philip but did not win
the case.
Dorothy, determined to raise Philip alone,
took a job in Washington,
D.C.
and moved there with her son. Philip K. Dick
was enrolled at John Eaton Elementary School from 1936 to 1938,
completing the second through the fourth grades. His lowest grade
was a "C" in written composition, although a teacher remarked that
he "shows interest and ability in story telling." In June 1938,
Dorothy and Philip returned to California.
Dick
attended Berkeley High
School in Berkeley, California
. He and
Ursula
K. Le Guin were members of the
same high school graduating class (1947), yet were unknown to each
other at the time.
After graduating from high school he briefly
attended the University of California,
Berkeley
as a German major,
but dropped out before completing any coursework rather than
participate in mandatory ROTC training.
At Berkeley, Dick befriended poet
Robert Duncan and poet and
linguist Jack Spicer,
who gave Dick ideas for a Martian language. Dick claimed to have
been host of a
classical music
program on
KSMO Radio in 1947.From 1948
to 1952 he worked in a record store.
In 1955, Dick and his
second wife, Kleo Apostolides, received a visit from the FBI
. They
believed this resulted from Kleo's
socialist views and
left-wing activities. The couple briefly
befriended one of the FBI agents.
Career
Dick sold his first story in 1951. From that point on he wrote
full-time, selling his first novel in 1955. The 1950s were a
difficult and impoverished time for Dick. He once said, "We
couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He published
almost exclusively within the science fiction genre, but dreamed of
a career in the mainstream of American literature. During the 1950s
he produced a series of nongenre, non-science fiction novels. In
1960 he wrote that he was willing to "take twenty to thirty years
to succeed as a literary writer." The dream of mainstream success
formally died in January 1963 when the Scott Meredith Literary
Agency returned all of his unsold mainstream novels. Only one of
these works,
Confessions of a Crap
Artist, was published during Dick’s lifetime.
In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for
The Man in the High Castle.
Although he was hailed as a genius in the science fiction world,
the mainstream literary world was unappreciative, and he could
publish books only through low-paying science fiction publishers
such as
Ace. Even in his later years, he
continued to have financial troubles. In the introduction to the
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."
The last novel published during Dick's life was
The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer.
In 1972, Dick donated his manuscripts and
papers to the Special Collections Library at California
State University, Fullerton
where they are archived in the Philip K.
Dick Science Fiction Collection in the Pollak Library. It was in
Fullerton that Philip K. Dick befriended budding science-fiction
writers
K. W.
Jeter,
James
Blaylock, and
Tim Powers.
Mental health
In his boyhood, around the age of thirteen, Dick had a
recurring dream for several weeks. He
dreamed he was in a bookstore, trying to find an issue of
Astounding Magazine.
This issue of the magazine would contain the story titled "The
Empire Never Ended", which would reveal the secrets of the universe
to him. As the dream recurred, the pile of magazines he searched
grew smaller and smaller, but he never reached the bottom.
Eventually, he became anxious that discovering the magazine would
drive him mad (as in
Lovecraft's
Necronomicon or
Chambers'
The King in Yellow, promising
insanity to the reader). Shortly thereafter, the dreams ceased, but
the phrase "The Empire Never Ended" would appear later in his work.
Dick was a voracious reader of
religion,
philosophy,
metaphysics and
Gnosticism, ideas of which appear in many of his
stories and visions.
On February 20, 1974, Dick was recovering from the effects of
sodium pentothal administered for
the extraction of an impacted
wisdom
tooth. Answering the door to receive delivery of extra
analgesic, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a
pendant with a symbol that he called the
"vesicle pisces". This name seems to have been based on his
confusion of two related symbols, the
ichthys (two intersecting arcs delineating a fish in
profile) that early
Christians used as a
secret symbol, and the
vesica piscis.
After the delivery woman's departure, Dick began experiencing
strange visions. Although they may have been initially attributable
to the medication, after weeks of visions he considered this
explanation implausible. "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 experienced a series of
visions, which he referred to as "two-three-seventy four" (2-3-74),
shorthand for February-March 1974. He described the initial visions
as
laser beams and
geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief
pictures of
Jesus and of
ancient Rome. As the visions increased in
length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live a double life,
one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a
Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st
century A.D. Despite his history of drug use and elevated
stroke risk, Dick began seeking other rationalist and
religious explanations for these experiences. He referred to the
"transcendentally rational mind" as "Zebra", "God" and, most often,
"
VALIS". Dick wrote about the experiences in
the semi-autobiographical novels
VALIS and
Radio Free Albemuth.
At one point Dick felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of
the prophet
Elijah. He believed that an
episode in his novel
Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said was a detailed retelling of a story from the Biblical
Book of Acts, which he had never
read.
In time,
Dick became paranoid, imagining plots
against him by the KGB
and FBI. At
one point, he alleged they were responsible for a burglary of his
house, from which documents were stolen. He later came to suspect
that he might have committed the burglary against himself, and then
forgotten he had done so. Dick himself speculated as to whether he
may have suffered from
schizophrenia.
Personal life
Dick married five times, and had two daughters and a son; each
marriage ended in
divorce.
- May 1948, to Jeanette Marlin – lasted six months
- June 1950, to Kleo Apostolides – divorced 1959
- 1959, to Anne Williams Rubinstein – divorced 1964
- child: Laura Archer, born February 25, 1960
- 1966, to Nancy Hackett – divorced 1972
- child: Isolde Freya Dick (now Isa Dick Hackett), born 15 March
1967
- April 18, 1973, to Leslie (Tessa) Busby – divorced 1977
- child: Christopher, born 1973
Death
Philip K.
Dick died in Santa Ana,
California
, on March 2, 1982. He had suffered a
stroke five days earlier, and was
disconnected from
life support after
his
EEG had been consistently
isoelectric
since losing consciousness.
After his death, his father Edgar took his
son's ashes to Fort Morgan, Colorado
. When his twin sister Jane died, her
tombstone had both their names carved on it, with an empty space
for Dick's death date. Brother and sister were eventually buried
next to each other.
Dick was "resurrected" by his fans in the form of a
remote-controlled
android designed in his
likeness. The android of Philip K. Dick was included on a
discussion panel in a
San Diego
Comic Con presentation about the film adaptation of the novel,
A Scanner Darkly. In
February 2006, an
America West
Airlines employee misplaced the android, and it has not yet
been found.
Biographical treatments
Books
Lawrence Sutin's biography of Dick,
Divine Invasions: A Life of
Philip K. Dick, is considered the standard
biographical treatment of Dick's life.
In , French writer
Emmanuel
Carrère published
Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts
which was first translated and published in English in 2004 as
I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip
K. Dick, which the author describes in his preface in
this way:
The book you hold in your hands is a very peculiar
book.
I have tried to depict the life of Philip
K.
Dick from the inside, in other words, with the same
freedom and empathy – indeed with the same truth – with which he
depicted his own characters.
Critics of the book have complained about the lack of fact
checking, sourcing, notes and index, "the usual evidence of deep
research that gives a biography the solid stamp of authority." It
can be considered a
non-fiction
novel about his life.
Films
On August 8, 2006, actor
Paul Giamatti
announced that his company, Touchy Feely Films, plans to produce a
biopic about Dick, with the
permission of his daughter Isa Dick Hackett, through her company
Electric Shepherd
Productions. The film will bear the title of Dick's unfinished
novel
The Owl in Daylight, but is not to be an adaptation
of it. , it was scheduled to open in 2009.
Tony Grisoni, who wrote the screenplays for
Terry Gilliam's
Tideland and
Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, is writing the script, and Giamatti will play
Dick.
Writer-director John Alan Simon is making a semiautobiograhical
film based on Dick's novel
Radio Free Albemuth starring
Shea Whigham as the author.
A film titled
Your Name Here, by Matthew Wilder, features
Bill Pullman as science fiction author
William J. Frick, a character based on Dick.
BBC2 released in a biography called
Arena - Philip K Dick: A
day in the afterlife.
Style and works
Pen names
Dick occasionally wrote under
pen names,
most notably
Richard Philips and
Jack Dowland.
The surname
Dowland refers to
Renaissance composer
John Dowland, who is featured in several works.
The title
Flow My
Tears, the Policeman Said directly refers to Dowland's
best-known composition, "Flow My Tears". In the novel
The Divine Invasion, the 'Linda
Fox' character is an intergalactically famous singer whose entire
body of work consists of recordings of John Dowland compositions.
Also, some protagonists in Dick's short fiction are named
'Dowland'.
The short story "Orpheus with Clay Feet" was published under the
pen name "Jack Dowland". The protagonist desires to be the
muse for fictional author Jack Dowland, considered the
greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. In the story,
Dowland publishes a short story titled "Orpheus with Clay Feet",
under the pen name "Philip K. Dick". In the semi-autobiographical
novel
VALIS, the protagonist is named "
Horselover Fat"; "Philip", or
"Phil-Hippos", is
Greek for
"horselover", while "dick" is
German
for "fat" (a
cognate of
thick).
Although he never used it himself, Dick's fans and critics often
refer to him familiarly as "PKD" (cf.
Jorge Luis Borges' "JLB"), and use the
comparative literary adjectives "Dickian" and "Phildickian" in
describing his style and themes (cf.
Kafkaesque,
Orwellian).
Themes
Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is
"real" and the construction of
personal identity. His
stories often become surreal fantasies as the main characters
slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion
constructed by powerful external entities (such as in
Ubik), vast political conspiracies, or simply from
the vicissitudes of an
unreliable
narrator. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption
that there cannot be one, single, objective reality," writes
science fiction author
Charles Platt.
"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."
Alternate universes and
simulacra were common
plot devices, with fictional worlds inhabited
by common, working people, rather than galactic elites. "There are
no heroes in Dick's books,"
Ursula
K. Le Guin wrote, "but there
are heroics. One is reminded of
Dickens: what counts is the honesty,
constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people." Dick made no
secret that much of his ideas and work were heavily influenced by
the writings of
Carl Jung, the Swiss
founder of the theory of the human psyche he called "Analytical
Psychology" (to distinguish it from Freud's theory of
psychoanalysis). Jung was a self-taught expert on the unconscious
and mythological foundations of conscious experience and was open
to the reality underlying mystical experiences. The Jungian
constructs and models that most concerned Dick seem to be the
archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/
hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory. Many of
Dick's protagonists overtly analyze reality and their perceptions
in Jungian terms (see
Lies
Inc.), while other times, the themes are so obviously in
reference to Jung their usage needs no explanation. Dick's
self-named "
Exegesis" also contained
many notes on Jung in relation to theology and mysticism.
Mental illness was a constant interest of Dick's, and themes of
mental illness permeate his work. The character Jack Bohlen in the
novel
Martian Time-Slip
is an "ex-schizophrenic". The novel
Clans of the Alphane Moon
centers on an entire society made up of descendants of lunatic
asylum inmates. In 1965 he wrote the essay titled
Schizophrenia
and the Book of Changes.
Drug use was also a theme in many of Dick’s
works, such as
A Scanner
Darkly and
The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch. Dick was a drug user for much of his
life. According to a 1975 interview in
Rolling Stone, Dick wrote all of his
books published before 1970 while on
amphetamines. "
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
was the first complete novel I had written without speed," said
Dick in the interview. He also experimented briefly with
psychedelics, but wrote
The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch, which
Rolling Stone dubs "the
classic
LSD novel of all time," before he had
ever tried them. Despite his heavy amphetamine use, however, Dick
later said that doctors had told him that the amphetamines never
actually affected him, that his liver had processed them before
they reached his brain.
Selected works
The Man in the High
Castle ( ) occurs in an alternate universe United States
ruled by the victorious
Axis powers. It
is considered a defining novel of the
alternate history sub-genre, and
is the only Dick novel to win a
Hugo
Award.
Philipkdickfans.com recommends this novel, along with
Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? and
Ubik, as an introductory novel to readers new to
the writing of Philip K. Dick.
The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ( ) utilizes an array of
science fiction concepts and features several layers of reality and
unreality. It is also one of Dick’s first works to explore
religious themes. The novel takes place in the twenty-first
century, when, under
United Nations
authority, mankind has colonized the
solar
system's every
habitable planet and
moon. Life is
physically daunting and psychologically monotonous for most
colonists, so the UN must draft people to go to the colonies. Most
entertain themselves using "Perky Pat"
dolls
and accessories manufactured by
Earth-based
"P.P. Layouts". The company also secretly creates "Can-D", an
illegal but widely available hallucinogenic drug allowing the user
to "translate" into Perky Pat (if the drug user is a woman) or
Pat's boyfriend, Walt (if the drug user is a man). This
recreational use of Can-D allows colonists to experience a few
minutes of an idealized life on Earth by participating in a
collective hallucination.
Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? ( ) is the story of a bounty
hunter policing the local android population. It occurs on a dying,
poisoned Earth de-populated of all "successful" humans; the only
remaining inhabitants of the planet are people with no prospects
off-world. Androids, also known as andys, all have a preset "death"
date. However, a few andys seek to escape this fate and supplant
the humans on Earth. The 1968 story is the literary source of the
film
Blade Runner (1982). It
is both a conflation and an intensification of the pivotally
Dickian question, What is real, what is fake? Are the human-looking
and human-acting androids fake or real humans? Should we treat them
as machines or as people? What crucial factor defines humanity as
distinctly 'alive', versus those merely alive only in their outward
appearance?
Ubik ( ) uses extensive networks of
psychics and a suspended state after death in creating a state of
eroding reality. A group of psychics is sent to investigate a group
of rival psychics, but several of them are apparently killed by a
saboteur's bomb. Much of the novel flicks between a number of
equally plausible realities; the "real" reality, a state of
half-life and psychically manipulated realities. In 2005,
Time Magazine listed it among
the "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels" published since 1923.
Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said ( ) concerns Jason Taverner, a television
star living in a dystopian near-future
police state. After being attacked by an angry
ex-girlfriend, Taverner awakens in a dingy Los Angeles hotel room.
He still has his money in his wallet, but his identification cards
are missing. This is no minor inconvenience, as security
checkpoints (manned by "pols" and "nats", the police and National
Guard) are set up throughout the city to stop and arrest anyone
without valid ID. Jason at first thinks that he was robbed, but
soon discovers that his entire identity has been erased. There is
no record of him in any official database, and even his closest
associates do not recognize or remember him. For the first time in
many years, Jason has no fame or reputation to rely on. He has only
his innate charisma to help him as he tries to find out what
happened to his past and avoid the attention of the pols. The novel
was Dick's first published novel after years of silence, during
which time his critical reputation had grown, and this novel was
awarded the
John W.
Campbell Memorial Award for
Best Science Fiction Novel. It is the only Philip K. Dick novel
nominated for both a Hugo and for a
Nebula
Award.
In an essay written two years before dying, Dick described how he
learned from his Episcopalian priest that an important scene in
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – involving its other
main character, Police General Felix Buckman, the policeman of the
title – was very similar to a scene in the
Book of Acts. Film director
Richard Linklater discusses this novel in
his film
Waking Life, which
begins with a scene reminiscent of another Dick novel,
Time Out of Joint.
A Scanner Darkly ( ) is a
bleak mixture of science fiction and
police procedural novels; in its story, an
undercover narcotics police detective begins to lose touch with
reality after falling victim to the same permanently mind altering
drug, Substance D, he was enlisted to help fight. Substance D is
instantly addictive, beginning with a pleasant euphoria which is
quickly replaced with increasing confusion, hallucinations and
eventually total psychosis. In this novel, as with all Dick novels,
there is an underlying thread of paranoia and dissociation with
multiple realities perceived simultaneously. It was adapted to
film by
Richard Linklater.
VALIS ( ) is perhaps Dick’s most
postmodern and
autobiographical novel, examining his
own unexplained experiences (see above). It may also be his most
academically studied work, and was adapted as an
opera by
Tod Machover.
VALIS was voted Philip K. Dick‘s best novel at the website
philipkdickfans.com. Later works like the
VALIS trilogy were heavily
autobiographical, many with
"two-three-seventy-four" (2-3-74) references and influences. The
word
VALIS is the acronym for
Vast Active
Living Intelligence System; it is the title of a novel (and is
continued thematically in at least three more novels). Later, PKD
theorized that VALIS was both a "reality generator" and a means of
extraterrestrial communication. A fourth VALIS manuscript,
Radio Free Albemuth, although composed in 1976, was
discovered after his death and published in 1985. This work is
described by the publisher (Arbor House) as "an introduction and
key to his magnificent VALIS trilogy."
Regardless of the feeling that he was somehow experiencing a divine
communication, Dick was never fully able to rationalize the events.
For the rest of his life, he struggled to comprehend what was
occurring, questioning his own sanity and perception of reality. He
transcribed what thoughts he could into an eight-thousand-page,
one-million-word
journal dubbed the
Exegesis. From 1974 until
his death in 1982, Dick spent sleepless nights writing in this
journal, often under the influence of prescription amphetamines. A
recurring theme in
Exegesis is PKD's hypothesis that
history had been stopped in the 1st century
A.D., and that "the
Empire never
ended".
He saw Rome
as the
pinnacle of materialism and despotism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground, had kept the population of
Earth enslaved to worldly possessions. Dick believed that
VALIS had communicated with him, and anonymous others, to induce
the
impeachment of U.S. President
Richard M. Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current
Emperor of Rome incarnate.
In a 1968 essay titled "Self Portrait", collected in the book
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Dick
reflects on his work and lists which books he feels "might escape
World War Three":
Eye in the
Sky,
The Man in
the High Castle,
Martian
Time-Slip,
Dr.
Bloodmoney,
The Zap
Gun,
The Penultimate
Truth,
The
Simulacra,
The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch (which he refers to as "the most vital of
them all"),
Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and
Ubik. In a 1976 interview, Dick cited
A Scanner Darkly as his best work,
feeling that he "had finally written a true masterpiece, after 25
years of writing".
Awards and honors
During his lifetime, Dick received the following awards and
nominations:
The convention
Norwescon which each year
presents the
Philip K. Dick Award.
Influence and legacy
Dick has influenced many writers, including
William Gibson,
Jonathan Lethem, and
Ursula K. Le
Guin. Dick has also influenced filmmakers, his work being
compared to films such as the
Wachowski brothers's
The Matrix,
David Cronenberg's
Videodrome,
eXistenZ, and
Spider,
Charlie Kaufman's
Being John Malkovich,
Adaptation, and
Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind,
Alex Proyas's
Dark City,
Peter Weir's
The
Truman Show,
Andrew Niccol's
Gattaca,
Terry Gilliam's
12
Monkeys,
Wes Craven's
A Nightmare on Elm
Street,
David Lynch's
Mulholland Drive,
David Fincher and
Chuck Palahniuk's
Fight Club,
Cameron Crowe's
Vanilla Sky,
Darren Aronofsky's
Pi,
Richard Kelly's
Donnie Darko and
Southland Tales, and
Christopher Nolan's
Memento.
The Sonic Youth album
Sister was in part inspired
by Dick. The "sister" of the title was Dick's fraternal twin, who
died shortly after her birth, and whose memory haunted Dick his
entire life.
Adaptations
Films
A number of Dick's stories have been made into films. Dick himself
wrote a screenplay for an intended film adaptation of
Ubik in 1974, but the film was never made. Many
film adaptations have not used Dick's original titles. When asked
why this was, Dick's ex-wife Tessa said, "Actually, the books
rarely carry Phil's original titles, as the editors usually wrote
new titles after reading his manuscripts. Phil often commented that
he couldn't write good titles. If he could, he would have been an
advertising writer instead of a novelist." Films based on Dick's
writing have accumulated a total revenue of around US $700 million
as of 2004.
- Blade Runner (1982), based
on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford. A screenplay had been in the
works for years before Scott took the helm, with Dick being
extremely critical of all versions. Dick was still apprehensive
about how his story would be adapted for the film when the project
was finally put into motion. Among other things, he refused to do a
novelization of the film. But contrary to his initial reactions,
when he was given an opportunity to see some of the special effects
sequences of Los Angeles 2019, Dick was amazed that the environment
was "exactly as how I'd imagined it!" Though Ridley Scott has
mentioned he had never even read the source material. Following the
screening, Dick and Scott had a frank but cordial discussion of
Blade Runner's themes and characters, and although they
had incredibly differing views, Dick fully backed the film from
then on. Dick died from a stroke less than four months before the
release of the film.
- Total Recall (1990), based
on the short story "We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale", directed by Paul
Verhoeven and starring Arnold
Schwarzenegger. The film evokes a feeling similar to that of
the original story while streamlining the plot; however, the
action-film protagonist is totally unlike Dick's fearful and
insecure anti-hero. The film includes such Dickian elements as the
confusion of fantasy and reality, the progression towards more
fantastic elements as the story progresses, machines talking back
to humans, and the protagonist's doubts about his own identity.
Total Recall 2070 (1999),
a single season Canadian TV show (22 episodes), based on thematic
elements from "We
Can Remember It for You Wholesale" and Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? and interwoven with snippets of other Dick
stories, is much closer in feel to both Dick's works than the
better-known films based on them . The main character is aptly
named David Hume.
- Confessions d'un
Barjo ( ), titled Barjo in its English-language
release, a French film based on Dick's non-science-fiction novel
Confessions of a Crap
Artist. Reflecting Dick's popularity and critical respect
in France, Barjo faithfully conveys a strong sense of
Dick's aesthetic sensibility, unseen in the better-known film
adaptations. A brief science fiction homage is slipped into the
film in the form of a TV show.
Future
Future films based on Dick's writing include the animated
adaptation
King of the
Elves from the
Walt Disney Animation Studios,
set to be released in the winter of ;
Radio Free Albemuth, based
on Dick's
novel of the same
name, which has been completed and is currently awaiting
distribution; and a film adaptation of
Ubik which, according to Dick's daughter, Isa Dick
Hackett, is in advanced negotiation.
In February 2009, it was reported that Dick's 1954 short story
"
Adjustment Team" will be developed
as a film titled
The
Adjustment Bureau starring
Matt
Damon. In May 2009,
The Halcyon
Company, known for developing the
Terminator franchise, announced
that after
Terminator
Salvation, they will next adapt Dick's
Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said. Halcyon acquired the first-look rights to the works
of Philip K. Dick in 2007.
Stage and radio
At least two of Dick's works have been adapted for the stage.
The first
was the opera VALIS, composed and with libretto by Tod Machover, which premiered at the Pompidou
Center
in Paris
on December
1, , with a French libretto. It was subsequently revised and
readapted into English, and was recorded and released on CD (Bridge
Records BCD9007) in . The second known stage adaptation was
Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said, adapted by Linda Hartinian and produced by
the New York-based avant-garde company
Mabou
Mines. It premiered in Boston at the Boston Shakespeare Theatre
(June 18-30, 1985) and was subsequently staged in New York and
Chicago.
A radio drama adaptation of Dick's short story "Mr. Spaceship" was
aired by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio) in
1996 under the name
Menolippu
Paratiisiin. Radio dramatizations of Dick's short stories
Colony and
The Defenders were aired by
NBC in
radio as part of the
series
X Minus One.
Comics
Marvel Comics plans to adapt Dick's
short story "
The Electric Ant" as a
limited series to be released in
2009. The comic will be produced by writer
David Mack (
Daredevil) and artist
Pascal Alixe (
Ultimate X-Men), with covers provided by
artist
Paul Pope.
Also in 2009, BOOM! Studios will publish a 24-issue miniseries
comic book adaptation of
Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? Blade
Runner, the 1982 film adapted from
Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep?, had previously been adapted to comics as
A Marvel
Comics Super Special: Blade Runner.
The comics magazine
Weirdo
published
The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by artist
R. Crumb in 1986. Though this is not an adaptation of
a specific book or story by Dick, it incorporates elements of
Dick's experience which he related in short stories, novels,
essays, and the
Exegesis.
In popular culture
Since his death, Dick has appeared as a character in a number of
novels and stories, most notably
Michael Bishop's
The Secret
Ascension (1987; currently published as
Philip K.
Dick Is Dead, Alas), which is set in a
Gnostic alternative universe where his non-genre
work is published but his science fiction is banned by a
totalitarian USA in thrall to a demonically possessed
Richard Nixon.
Other fictional post-mortem appearances by Dick include:
A play entitled
800 Words: the Transmigration of Philip K.
Dick by Victoria Stewart re-imagines Dick's final
days.
Contemporary philosophy
Few other writers of fiction have had such an impact on
contemporary philosophy as Dick. His foreshadowing of postmodernity
has been noted by philosophers as diverse as
Jean Baudrillard,
Fredric Jameson and
Slavoj Žižek . Žižek is especially
fond of using Dick's short stories to articulate the ideas of
Jacques Lacan.Jean Baudrillard offers
this interpretation:
"It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which
is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick
speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has
always played upon the double, on artificial replication or
imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared.
There is no more double; one is always already in the other world,
an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection
or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable,
unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer
move "through the mirror" to the other side, as we could during the
golden age of transcendence."
Bibliography
See also
References
- Stoffman, Judy "A
milestone in literary heritage" Toronto Star (February 10, 2007)
- Library of America Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
- Library of America H.P.
Lovecraft: Tales
- Associated Press "Library of America to issue volume of Philip K.
Dick" USA
Today (November 28, 2006)
- Arena - Philip K Dick: A day in the
afterlife
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick - an infinity
plus review Adam Roberts, Infinity Plus
- Philip K. Dick, "Self Portrait", 1968, (The Shifting
Realities of Philip K. Dick, 1995)
- AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP K. DICK Daniel DePerez,
September 10, 1976, Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3,
August 1976
- William Gibson on PKD, philipkdickfans.com
- Gun With Occasional Music Review, sff.net
- The SF Site Featured Review: The Lathe of Heaven, SF
Site
- Scriptorium - Philip K. Dick, The Modern Word
- How Hollywood woke up to a dark genius,
The
Daily Telegraph
- Slant Magazine DVD Review: Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind, Slant Magazine
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
The
Guardian
- On Writers and Writing; It's Philip Dick's World,
We Only Live in It, New York Times
- Philip K. Dick's Future Is Now, Washington Post
- Donnie Darko, Salon.com,
- Richard Kelly’s Revelations: Defending Southland
Tales., Cinema Scope
- Philip K. Dick's Hollywood Afterlife,
Slashdot
- calendarlive.com
- Studios weigh star packages MICHAEL FLEMING,
Feb. 24, 2009, Variety
- Philip K. Dick's 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said' Being Adapted Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net, 12 May
2009
- The Defenders at Gutenberg.org
- Philip K. Dick Press Release - BOOM! ANNOUNCES DO ANDROIDS
DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? philipkdick.com
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