Philip K. Dick

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928 along with a twin sister named Jane Charlotte Dick. Jane died a little more than a month later from malnutrition. Her death would inspire the recurring "phantom twin" motif in a number of his writings.

Dick's parents divorced when he was six. After moving about the country for a while with his mother, they settled down in Berkeley, California, where he would grow into adulthood.

He discovered science fiction as a teenager and his first stories began appearing in science fiction magazines while he was still in college.
It was also as a teen that the first signs of neurotic behavior began.

In the '50's and '60's Dick exploded on the SF scene with stories and novels that would establish his reputation as a visionary. The Man in the High Castle won a Hugo Award when it was published, and a later novel, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said won the John W. Campbell Award.

During his later life, Dick was plagued by visions and paranoid delusions which would inspire his Valis trilogy.

Dick died from a stroke in 1982, just before the completion of Blade Runner Ridley Scott's classic film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dick often investigates the metaphysical question "What Is Reality?" In his novella "Faith of Our Fathers" Mr. Tung Chien, a minor bureaucrat in a totalitarian government buys some snuff from a street peddler, goes home, and watches a speech by the leader of the government on television. He is shocked when he sees not a human talking, but a hideous mechanical construction. Thinking the snuff is a hallucinogen, he discovers that it is instead an anti-hallucinogen-the entire population has been drugged into thinking that their leader is in human form. Many of Dick's tales deal the similar themes.

Dick was also interested in gnosticism and gnostic religion creeps into several of his works, most notably, Valis.

Dick's protagonists are often powerless in society. Technology is usually seen as something horrific and dangerous. In many instances the powerless overcome the powerful, ironically, by turning the technology against the powerful as in the novel The Zap Gun.

1950
Gather Yourselves Together (1994)

1952
Voices From the Street (forthcoming 2006)

1953
Vulcan's Hammer (1960+)
Dr. Futurity (1960+)
The Cosmic Puppets (1957*)

1954
Solar Lottery (1955*)
Mary and the Giant (1987*)
The World Jones Made (1956)

1955
Eye in the Sky (1957)
The Man Who Japed (1956)

1956
A Time for George Stavros (ms. lost)
Pilgrim on the Hill (ms. lost)
The Broken Bubble (1988)

1957
Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)

1958
Nicholas and the Higs (ms. lost)
Time Out of Joint (1959)
In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)

1959
Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)

1960
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1982)
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)

1961
The Man in the High Castle (1962)

1962
We Can Build You (1972)
Martian Time-Slip (1964)

1963
Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
The Game-Players of Titan (1963)
The Simulacra (1964)
The Crack in Space (1966+)
Now Wait for Last Year (1966)

1964
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
The Zap Gun (1967)
The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny (1976*+)
The Unteleported Man (1966)

1965
The Ganymede Takeover with Ray Nelson (1967*)
Counter-Clock World (1967)

1966
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Nick and the Glimmung (for children) (1988)
Ubik (1969)

1968
Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)
A Maze of Death (1970)

1969
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)

1970
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974*)

1973
A Scanner Darkly (1977*)

1976
Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

1978
VALIS (1981)

1980
The Divine Invasion (1981)

1981
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)