Besides being one
of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction, this guy
was nuts.
Also one of my
favourite writers.
Dick exemplified the cliché about there being a
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, Dick became certifiably insane. But his paranoia
continued to provide material for his work.
His writing often
seems slapdash. His characters generally have no fixed personalities.
And elements of his plots are often 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 ever, is faithful in that it
does not ignore the moral question of what is human as 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 crazy, future world in
which nothing is what you expect. The downbeat ending 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 it sit for awhile
you may come to see how right it is. One is not certain 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 it leaves the reader with intriguing questions.
The 1990 Schwarzenegger action film Total Recall is also
intermittently similar to the Dick story "We Can Remember It
for You Wholesale" which it is supposedly inspired by. (Dick's brilliant and bizarre titles tend to be changed by Hollywood.)
The 1996 film Screamers is 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 was the
less successful Gary Sinise vehicle Impostor the same year.
Dick's story "Impostor" was the basis of both a short-lived television
series in 1962 and the John Woo-directed action flick Paycheck in
2003, starring Ben Affleck.
The most recent Dick work to be
adapted, as of this writing, is his paranoiac novel A Scanner Darkly
(1977), made into a semi-animated (interpolative rotoscoping, I think
they call it) film by Richard Linklater in 2006, starring Keanu Reeves,
Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. It's the most
authentically Dick flick ever, with huge patches of his insane, but so
real, dialogue lifted from the book.
Dick's most highly
regarded novel—never filmed—may be
