Philip K. Dick

Revised and Updated

Andrew M. Butler

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781903047293
• eBook ISBN: 9781842439197
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

With a reputation that is still rising as the world catches up with the prodigious outpouring of his imagination, and Hollywood repeatedly raiding his stories— Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly—Philip K. Dick remains an intriguing literary and cultural figure. At a time when most science fiction was about cowboys in outer space, Dick explored the landscapes of the mind, conjured fake realities, and was able to make readers believe six impossible things before breakfast. Perhaps best-known for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he embodied the counterculture a decade before the 1960s. This fully revised and updated look at Dick's world is a glimpse into a reality where psychiatrists come in suitcases, God speaks through cat food commercials and comes in a handy aerosol can, and where you might be a figment of someone else's imagination. This pocket-sized volume reviews and analyzes each of Dick's novels and provides a listing of other books and articles which have grappled with this genius.

Philip K. Dick: Beyond the Veil

Nottingham, 1999: I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for a much needed cup of coffee. It’s dark, so I reach for the light switch on my left. I can’t find it. I fumble around a little, but I still can’t find the switch. I take a closer look at the wall: nothing. Then I realise the light switch is on the other side of the doorway, has always been on the other side of the doorway, although I’m pretty sure I can remember a time when it wasn’t...

Canterbury, 2007: That’s just the sort of anecdote that is suitable for starting a book about Philip K. Dick. For his characters, reality is always subject to revision; take the moment in Time Out of Joint, when a character reaches for a light pull which isn’t there... Perhaps I’m remembering that rather than something which actually happened to me. And then I remember that it wasn’t me who couldn’t find the light switch, but a friend. I can remember him telling me about it, and my saying how like Philip K. Dick it was, and he got that same old glazed-over look he always got when I started that kind of conversation. So why can I remember his memory as if it happened to me?

Philip K. Dick is the Poet Laureate of false memories and fake experiences. Again and again in his stories characters take hallucinatory drugs and drift into some strange new realm, and the reader can never quite be certain whether they’ve returned to reality at the end. Or his characters are happily living their lives, only to be told that actually it’s all an illusion, that all the world’s a stage and all the people merely players. It was all a dream. (Perhaps.) Or there are stories where what we took to be hallucination turns out to be real, except that the evidence for this seems to be fake. A world, say, with a complete and utter history of the world, so complete that you can even look yourself up in the book, and read about looking yourself up. Then you stumble across a passage where one Dr Scapeziege tells someone, ‘We’ll get away with it unless they read this passage, in which they will find out that the whole book is a forgery cunningly designed to...’

In one of the novels there’s a Zippo lighter which was in Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated (not that Roosevelt was assassinated). To prove the authenticity of this artefact (look at the scratch where the bullet scraped past) there’s a framed certificate. Is the certificate genuine? Well, you could go to the trouble of getting that verified too, but sooner or later you have to take reality on trust. And hold tight when the trust turns out to be misplaced.

Even if reality is real, you can’t speak for all of its inhabitants. Is everyone you see on TV real? After all, some of these stars never seem to age. Could their ubiquity be explained by the fact that they are androids, programmed to sell us cat food and keep us hypnotised with bad game shows, holding out the hope of consumer goods we will never get, of wealth beyond our dreams?

For fifty years Dick’s accounts of the illusions and delusions of everyday life have kept increasing numbers of readers entertained. For his skewering of the American Dream in general and Cold War rhetoric in particular, he was hailed by critics as a social commentator, a political writer, even perhaps some kind of Marxist. He spoke for the poor, the powerless, the insane, those oppressed by almighty multinational corporations and corrupt world governments. But in all that social commentary, Dick kept on mentioning God, and for Marxists God was nothing more than opium for the people. And just as critical commentary on his work began building during the 1970s, Dick began to start claiming that he had seen God. Worse, he wrote novels about it. Even after his death in 1982, with postmodernity taking root in some quarters and new ageism in others, this was beyond the pale. The visionary who had written about madness, was clearly as mad as a hatter. Except, of course, God had been there all along.

The Early Years

Chicago, December 16 1928. Dorothy Kindred Dick gave birth to twins at home: Philip Kindred Dick and Jane Charlotte Dick. They were a sickly pair, and Jane died in January the next year. Dorothy perhaps blamed herself, but had other worries, as the family moved first to California, then to Colorado and then back to California. Dorothy split from her husband, Edgar, and moved to Washington DC in 1935. After three years, it was back to California. At some point Dick began writing fiction and poetry (some possibly under the name ‘Teddy’), and in 1942 wrote his first novel, Return to Lilliput. He spent a year at a private school, Ojai, but was unhappy much of the time – indeed he had psychotherapy. He later attended Berkeley High School but had some home tuition. From the age of 16 he worked in a classical music store for Herb Hollis; he lost his virginity in the basement of the shop. He moved out of his mother’s house to live with a number of poets and then got married to Jeanette Marlin. The marriage only lasted a few months, as indeed did a stint at the University of California.

This marriage became fodder for the realistic, if experimental, novel he was writing, Gather Yourselves Together, but his wilder imagination was reserved for sf short stories, which he began publishing in 1951. It was a boom time for sf magazines, and in one month alone he published six stories. He took amphetamines to help him write through the night, and quit the job at the record store. He had married again in 1950, and he and his wife Kleo were approached by the FBI to spy upon local radicals, or maybe to take a trip down to Mexico. (Dick later claimed the FBI taught him to drive.) He presented a classical music radio show (or so he later claimed). The stories brought a living of sorts, but novels were more profitable. He started writing and selling these to Ace books, who published them back-to-back with other sf novels. At the same time he was writing realist novels, but none of these sold because of their adult themes and dark sensibility. For better or worse he was stuck with sf.

The Boom Years

1959. His second marriage broke up and he married Anne Rubenstein. At some point he thought of giving up writing altogether, and even started making jewellery with Anne. She suggested one last go: he came up with a novel set in an alternate present where the Nazis won the Second World War and carved up America rather as Germany had been divided. This novel, The Man in the High Castle, won the Hugo Award for best novel, an annual award given by sf fans.

And then he was on a roll. In rapid succession he churned out a series of novels, Martian Time-Slip, Dr Bloodmoney, The Simulacra... some years four or five novels appeared under his name, and they were all good. Perhaps they were hasty in construction, but no one read sf for the prose, they read it for the ideas, and these kept on coming as Dick cannibalised the unsold novels and reworked short stories.

The mid-1960s was an age of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and whilst Dick’s tastes ran more to classical music, there were no shortage of drugs in his fiction, and a reasonable amount in his private life as well: LSD, cannabis, speed, the amphetamines he’d been taking for a decade or more. He had an affair with a woman named Nancy Hackett, and in 1965 divorced Anne to marry her. He introduced Nancy’s stepmother to James Pike, the Bishop of California, and the four of them took part in séances to contact Pike’s dead son. Dick had long philosophical and theological discussions with Pike, and some of these began to appear in his fiction.

The Crash

1971. There was a price to pay, and Dick was burning his candle at both ends. Dick saw Nancy as unstable, and they had split, his home becoming an open house for all sorts of drug-taking. The writing had dried up. A manuscript, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, was given to his lawyer for safe keeping.

November. Dick’s car broke down when he was driving and no one seemed willing to come out and fix it. When Dick finally got home, he discovered that he had been burgled, his cancelled cheques had been stolen, as had any opened food packets and possibly some manuscripts. The police reaction was that he should arm himself, or even better leave town. Perhaps it was junkies in search of money or drugs, or Black Power activists who were living in the area, or opponents of the late Bishop Pike in search of heretical materials, or the FBI checking out a subversive or – a favoured theory with the police – he had done it himself.

Dick escaped as soon as he could; in February 1972 he flew up to Vancouver as guest of honour at an sf convention and stayed. A girlfriend from California refused to join him, and he tried to commit suicide before checking into a heroin rehab centre. He wasn’t a junkie, but he wanted to be on suicide watch. Then he arranged for his manuscripts to be archived at the University of California, Fullerton, and decided to fly down in April to supervise. At the airport he met Tessa: his fifth wife.

Rebirth

February 1974. Dick received a letter which was a photocopy of some socialist newspaper, with words about decay underlined. He sent this to the FBI. Listening to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, he heard voices telling him that his son had a hernia, and might die if it didn’t get attention. And in Psychology Today he found a recipe for curing schizophrenics with megadoses of vitamins; he tried this but overdosed on Vitamin C and started hallucinating Kandinsky paintings, and seeing strange pink hazes.

As the spring wore on, he became convinced that someone had contacted him: his twin Jane, Bishop Pike, the Prophet Elijah, the apostle Thomas, God, some ancient wisdom aka Sophia, aliens, Leningrad scientists who were experimenting with telepathy... or perhaps, he admitted sometimes, he’d lost it. He was convinced that Orange County was also first-century Rome, and he became struck by the parallels between The Acts of the Apostles (which he had not previously read) and his new book, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. And then in August, the old enemy of Californian radicals, Richard Milhouse Nixon, fell as a result of the Watergate affair.

Dick wrote a novel about his drug experiences, A Scanner Darkly, but his real work was a handwritten meditation on the nature of his experiences, what might have caused them, and how he had anticipated them in his fiction. A team of critics from Science Fiction Studies wanted to talk about his work in person, and Polish sf author Stanislaw Lem wanted him to go behind the Iron Curtain to pick up some royalties. Perhaps the KGB were after him, so he wrote to the FBI, offering his services as an informer. Or perhaps he was just throwing the scent off his trail.

He had begun to use autobiography in his fiction, and he decided to write a novel about his 2–3–74 experiences, completing this in 1976. His editor wasn’t entirely happy with it, and Dick did a complete rewrite. The publication of VALIS led to the widespread assumption that he had gone mad. A sort of sequel, The Divine Invasion, which was more firmly sf, didn’t change this opinion.

Meanwhile Hollywood had come calling. He had sold the rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and after it had passed through various hands, Ridley Scott was slated to direct it under the new and inexplicable title of Blade Runner. Dick wasn’t happy with the scripts he saw, and felt excluded from the project. But he faced a dilemma: should he take the money and write a novelisation, which would mean the suppression of the original book? Or should he write a mainstream novel, a roman à clef based on the life and death of Bishop Pike? Rock journalist Paul Williams had managed to publish one of the 1950s mainstream novels, Confessions of a Crap Artist in 1975, so perhaps the world was finally ready. He wrote the mainstream novel.

In February 1982, having started the process of writing another novel which would shake up the implications of 2–3–74 and splice in the life of Beethoven, Dick suffered a stroke. He never regained consciousness and died March 2 1982. He was buried in the same grave in Colorado as his twin sister, Jane.

The Afterlife

1982. Dick’s critical status has risen since his death, with special issues of academic journals, adaptations on film and stage, and a number of musicians naming tracks or albums after his work. All of the books considered unpublishable during his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• 1.  Philip K. Dick: Beyond the Veil
• 2.  Learning the Ropes 1941–1953
• 3.  A Double Life 1954–1960
• 4.  At the Peak 1961–1969
• 5.  Over the Edge? 1970–1982
• 6.  Selected Short Fiction
• 7.  Non-Fiction
• 8.  Collaborations
• 9.  Reference Materials