Philip K. Dick

Philip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction short story writer and novelist whose work helped define 20th-century science fiction. Born in Chicago on December 16, 1928, he moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was young. He wrote 45 novels and about 121 short stories, most of them first appearing in science fiction magazines. His fiction returned again and again to questions of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, often placing ordinary people inside alternate realities, illusory environments, authoritarian systems, drug abuse, corporate control, and altered states of consciousness.

Dick’s early life left marks that later surfaced in his books. He and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, were born six weeks prematurely; Jane died six weeks later, and the idea of a “phantom twin” became a recurrent motif in his fiction. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his mother, Dorothy, spending time in Washington, D.C., before returning to California. He was educated in Quaker schools, attended Berkeley High School, and became interested in science fiction around the time he read his first science fiction magazine, Stirring Science Stories, in 1940.

From 1948 to 1952, Dick worked at Art Music Company, a record store on Telegraph Avenue. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, from September to November 1949, taking classes in history, psychology, philosophy, and zoology before leaving with an honorable dismissal. According to his third wife Anne’s memoir, ongoing anxiety problems contributed to his departure, and he disliked mandatory ROTC training. His studies in philosophy shaped his belief that existence depends on internal human perception and may not match external reality. After reading Plato and thinking about metaphysical possibilities, he came to question whether the world is entirely real, a question that ran through many of his novels.

Dick sold his first story, “Roog,” in 1951, when he was 22, and began writing full-time. His first speculative fiction publications appeared in 1952 in Planet Stories, If, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His debut novel, Solar Lottery, was published in 1955. Commercial success was slow, and the 1950s were difficult and impoverished for him, even as he published steadily. Wider acclaim came with The Man in the High Castle in 1962, an alternative history novel that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel when Dick was 33.

He followed that success with major works including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, Ubik in 1969, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said in 1974, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. After years of drug use and a series of mystical experiences in 1974, his writing dealt more directly with theology, metaphysics, and the nature of reality, as seen in A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. He died on March 2, 1982, at age 53, from complications of a stroke.

After his death, Dick’s influence spread far beyond literary circles into film and television. Popular screen works based on his fiction include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, and Amazon Prime Video’s multi-season adaptation of The Man in the High Castle. Ubik was named by Time as one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923, and in 2007 Dick became the first science fiction writer included in The Library of America series. His words still speak to readers because they ask a plain, unsettling question: how sure are we that the world we accept is the real one?