The 1,000 Greatest Literary Works | SciFi List | Canada List | Editor Eric home | Follow on Twitter

Genius who crossed the fine line

Besides being one of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction, this guy was crazy.

Also one of my favourite writers. Maybe most favourite.

Philip K. Dick exemplified the cliché about the fine line between genius and madness. He was known for ingesting huge amounts of drugs to keep himself writing without sleep for weeks at a time to complete his novels and short stories, and toward the end he was clinically schizophrenic. And yet—that's when his most intriguing works were composed.

Born in Chicago, he began his writing career in the early 1950s. Almost from the beginning, his works dealt with alternative realities with his characters often crossing over into other worlds. Time is twisted out of joint, human and machine are melded, reality and illusion are mixed, virtual realities are embedded in virtual realities, until the reader—and, one suspects, the author—can no longer keep it all straight.

But that's all right, for Dick's point is often that no reality is more real than any other. During the last decade of his relatively short life, when Dick became certifiably insane, his paranoia continued to provide material for his work.

Now, his writing often seems slapdash. His characters generally have no fixed personalities. And elements of his plots are built up only to be forgotten as the narratives take different turns. But, for the reader who is willing to sit back and enjoy whatever may occur, Dick always makes for compelling reading.

Here's part of what the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about Philip Kindred Dick:

The earlier PKD often lost control of his material in ideative mazes and, sidetracked, was unable to find any resolution; but, when he found the tale within his grasp, he was brilliantly inventive, gaining access to imaginative realms which no other writer of sf had reached. His sympathy for the plight of his characters—often far-from-heroic, small, ordinary people trapped in difficult existential circumstances—was unfailing, and his work had a human interest absent from that of writers engaged by complexity and convolution for their own sake. Even the most perilous metaphysical terrors of his finest novels wore a complaining, vulnerable, human face. In all his work he was astonishingly intimate, self-exposed, and very dangerous. He was the funniest sf writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them.

Popularly, his work is best known as the basis for movies that tone down his craziness. Nineteen eighty-two's Blade Runner, sometimes called the greatest science fiction movie, is faithful in that it does not ignore the moral question of what is human, raised in Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? However the film shares little else with the novel apart from featuring a cop who catches and terminates androids passing as humans. The novel is a meditation on human alienation—from each other, from society, from the environment, from ourselves—presented over a single day in a future world in which nothing is what you expect. The book's downbeat conclusion may disappoint some who expect a grand revelation, or at least an explanation of some of the craziness that has gone before, but if you let the ending sit awhile you may come to see how right it is. It is uncertain whether Dick meant for us to accept the inconsistencies as part of reality or he simply couldn't figure out how to resolve them—but in either case he leaves the reader with intriguing questions.

The 1990  action film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is also intermittently similar to the Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" which supposedly inspired it. (Note how Dick's brilliant and bizarre titles tend to be changed by Hollywood.) Total Recall 2070 was a short-lived TV series made in Canada and taking Dick's concept further afield. A movie remake is scheduled at this time of writing.

The 1996 film Screamers and the even worse 2009 sequel, Screamers: The Hunting (why? why?), are based on Dick's short story "Second Variety".

The 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, was adapted from a Dick story of the same name. As were the less successful Gary Sinise vehicle Impostor the same year and the John Woo-directed action flick Paycheck in 2003, starring Ben Affleck. Dick's story "Impostor" was also the basis of an British television episode in 1962.

The best Dick adaptation, as of this writing, is the 2006 movie based on the paranoiac novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). It's semi-animated (interpolative rotoscoping, I think they call the technique), directed by Richard Linklater and starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. This may be the most authentically Dick flick ever, with huge patches of his insane, but so real, dialogue lifted from the book.

The 2007 Nicholas Cage film Next, about a man who can see two minutes into the future, is supposedly very loosely based on The Dick Story "The Golden Man".

More recently the largely romantic Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau (2011) has been made from a Dick story.

But one of Dick's most highly regarded novel has never been filmed. In The Man in the High Castle (1962) the Nazis and the Japanese have won World War II and divided the United States between them. (Or have they?) It won the Hugo Award, sci-fi's highest recognition. Apparently a film adaptation is in the works, to be produced by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott for the BBC.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), also never adapted, is the most extreme example of a drug-fuelled reality bender without the later paranoia—and a popular choice choice for top Dick.

In 1970 Dick published a novel, A Maze of Death, for which he and a friend invented, as he says in the foreword, "an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists". Crucial junctures of the novel involve divine figures appearing to selected individuals. The visitations, it turns outs turns are part of a collective delusion (although one such incident later in the book remains unexplained).

But in 1974 Dick underwent an experience during which, he claimed, he himself he was visited by a godlike being. Much of his writing after this point dealt with the psychic and philosophical implications of this event. His works in the last few years of his life became even stranger than usual.

VALIS (1981) may be the strangest of the outright schizophrenic novels. In this combination of theology and paranoiac delusions, Dick himself appears in the work himself as a schizoid, SF-writing character who eventually discovers he is also another character in the novel. If Dick did not toil in the disreputable sci-fi genre, this work might place him among the great crazies of the literary canon, alongside Kafka and Nietzsche.

VALIS was followed by Dick last works, The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), which pick up elements of the VALIS mythos.

Insurprisingly, none of the VALIS trilogy have been turned into Hollywood films, but Radio Free Albemuth, which Dick started as a sequel to The Man in the High Castle but turned into a first draft of the VALIS story and which was published posthumously in 1985, has been adapted for an independent film in 2011. Word has it that this effort is the most faithful yet to Dick's writing and iconoclastic vision.

Also recommended in the Dick oeuvre are:
• Solar Lottery (1955), Dick's first and most conventional sci-fi novel;
• Eye in the Sky (1957), one of his first alternative-reality novels with the characters caught up in a modern world with physical laws right out of the Bible—miracles, locusts and Ptolemaic astronomy;
• The Man Who Japed (1962), whose middle presents a switch on the usual alternative reality plot that will catch you unawares, though the novel's ending may leave you unfulfilled as it's more like a short story's ironic pay-off;
• Martian Time-Slip (1964), featuring a schizoid and messianic boy who foreshadows Dick's own future obsessions;
• Now Wait for Last Year (1966), whose title sums up the time-twisting plot;
• Ubik (1969), a personal favourite in which the dead continue in a half-life and which has been in film development for a decade; and
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a story as strange as its title, in which a TV star loses proof of his own existence. Winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel of the year, and also scheduled for imminent film treatment.

You might also be interested in some not-so-insane Dick. In the 1950s he wrote several mainstream novels on middle-American life at the time, which were rejected by publishers or printed in severely limited editions. But they've been issued or reissued in recent years and are well worth looking for: Voices From the Street, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and In Milton Lumky Territory. I especially recommend the last as a good old-fashioned read in social realism, with just a touch of the Dick imagination.

— Eric

Win free books in Editor Eric's Great Literature Contest/a>

© Copyright 2002–2011 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.