Who Was Philip K. Dick?
Philip K. Dick was the most theologically serious writer in the history of American science fiction — a novelist and short story writer whose work is organized around a single obsessive question: what is real? Born in Chicago in 1928, he grew up in California and spent most of his life in the Bay Area, publishing dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories under conditions of extreme financial pressure and psychological instability that would have destroyed a less driven writer.
His major novels — The Man in the High Castle (1962), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and the VALIS trilogy (1981–1982) — all circle the same questions: Is the world we perceive the real world? What makes a human being human rather than a machine? Is there a God, and if so, what does he want from us?
His 1974 mystical experience — which he spent the last eight years of his life attempting to understand, filling thousands of pages of private notes he called the Exegesis — produced the VALIS trilogy, his most explicitly theological work. He died before completing the trilogy. His fiction has been more widely adapted for film than that of almost any other American writer.
In Their Own Words
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.”
— attributed“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
— How to Build a Universe“The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others?”
— attributedSelected Bibliography
- The Man in the High Castle — 1962
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — 1968
- Ubik — 1969
- A Scanner Darkly — 1977
- VALIS — 1981
- The Divine Invasion — 1981
- The Transmigration of Timothy Archer — 1982
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