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Philip Kindred Dick (December 16 1928 - March 2 1982), often known by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. Though hailed by peers from Robert Heinlein to Stanislaw Lem, Dick recieved little public recognition during his life. But by the 1990s his works had become some of the most popular of all of science fiction, with Dick gaining both general acclaim and critical respect.
Discarding the optimistic and simple world-view of Golden Age science fiction, Dick consistently explored the themes of the nature of reality and humanity in his novels -- populated by common working people, rather than galactic elites. Foreshadowing the cyberpunk sub-genre, Dick brought the anomic world of Southern California to many of his works. He is also one of the first great pioneers of alternate history in his novel The Man in the High Castle. He also produced a tremendous number of short stories and minor works which were published in pulp magazines.
His works are characterized by a constantly eroding sense of reality, with protagonists often discovering that those close to them (or even they themselves) are secretly robots, aliens, supernatural beings, brainwashed spies, hallucinating, or some combination of the above.
Dick experimented with mind-altering drugs, though he often denied that they were influences on his work.
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2 Dick and his visions 3 His death 4 Dick's influence on others 5 Bibliography 6 See also 7 External links |
Dick's parents divorced when he was young, and the family uprooted to California. He went to high school in Berkeley and briefly attended the University of California-Berkeley, where he majored in German. He sold records and was a disk jockey before selling his first story in 1952. He wrote full-time, more or less, from that time forward. He sold his first novel in 1955. The 1950's were a hard-scrabble time for Dick, so much so that, as he once said, "we couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He associated with the pre-1960's counterculture of California and was sympathetic to beat poets and the Communist Party. In 1963, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Though Dick was hailed as a genius at this time in the SF world, the literary world as a whole was as yet unappreciative, and so he could only publish books at low-paying SF publishers. Consequently, while he would regularly publish novels for the next several years, he continued to struggle financially and psychologically. Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and had a file at the FBI as a result. Dick married five times, and had two daughters (Laura and Isa) and a son (Christopher).
On February 2, 1974, (A date which he would write of frequently, later calling 2-3-74 for some reason) he was recovering from the effects of sodium penthanol administered after the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive a delivery of additional pain killers, he noticed the woman delivering the package was wearing a pendant with the intersecting arcs called "vesicle pisces". After her departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions, which may have initially be attributed to the painkillers, but after weeks of these visions the cause becomes less clear. He described his initial visions as laser beams and geometric patterns, and occasionally brief pictures of Jesus Christ and ancient Rome, which he would glimpse periodically. As the pictures increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed that he began to live a double life, one as Philip and one as Thomas, a Christian persecuted by Romans thousands of years ago. Despite his current and past drug use, Philip accepted these visions as reality, believing that he had been contacted by a god-entity of some kind, which he referred to as Zebra, God, and most often VALIS. VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, he used this term as the title of one of his novels, he later theorized that it was a satellite of some kind which used beams to communicate with people on Earth. He claimed that the being used what he called "disinhibiting stimuli" to prep the subjects for the communication, in his case the vesicle pisces.
Most observers of this phenomena would conclude Dick's visions were a brief psychotic episode, and they might be correct in that assumption. However, what has allowed the mystery of Dick's experiences to endure are reports of several even more intriguing incidences. One such event, during an encounter with the VALIS, Dick learned that his son was in danger of perishing from an unnamed malady. His son was only an infant, and routine check-ups on the child had shown no trouble or illness. Dick insisted that thorough tests be run to insure his son's health. The doctor eventually complied, despite the fact that there were no apparent symptoms. During the examination doctors discovered an inguinal hernia, which would have killed the child if an operation was not quickly performed. The child survived thanks to the operation, which Dick accredited to the VALIS. Another related event was an episode of Glossolalia. Dick's wife wrote down the phonetic sounds she heard him speak, and they later discovered that he was speaking an ancient dialect of the Greek language, which he had never studied.
Regardless of the apparent evidence that he was somehow experiencing a divine communication, Dick was unable to ever fully rationalize the events. For the rest of his life, he struggled to fully comprehend what was occurring, questioning his own sanity and perception of reality. He excised what thoughts he could into an 8,000 page, million word journal dubbed the Exegesis. He spent sleepless nights furiously writing into this journal, in some instances high on large quantities of amphetamines, which lend to its eclectic tones. A recurring theme in the Exegesis is his hypothesis that history had been stopped in the 1st century, and that the "[Roman] Empire never ended". He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism, and that after forcing the Gnostics underground 1900 years earlier had kept the population of the Earth as thralls to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had contacted him and unnamed others to induce the "impeachment" (read: assassination) of Richard M. Nixon, who Dick believed to be the current Emperor incarnate.
As time went on, he became increasingly paranoid, imagining plots against him perpetrated by the KGB or FBI, who he believed were constantly laying traps for him. At one point he alleged that they had broken into his house and pilfered various documents, though later he stated that he probably committed the burglary himself, and forgotten it later.
His later works, especially the Valis trilogy, were heavily autobiographical, many with 2-3-74 references or influences. Dick was also a voracious reader of works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and Gnosticism, and these ideas found their way into many of his stories. His final novel was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick's works may be compared with those of William S. Burroughs. (Dick is arguably less scathing and more philosophical.)
Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in 1982. Ultimately, he never learned what caused his strange visions or what exactly VALIS wanted, if it wanted anything. It has been theorized that Dick suffered from epileptic discharges in his temporal lobe. This can cause subtle, non-disabling seizures which can cause feelings ranging from a general disorientation to visions often construed by the victim as "psychic" experiences or epiphanies. This particular region of the brain allows for differentiation of reality and fantasy and is very sensitive to epileptic discharges. The myriad of symptoms which go along with these discharges read like a summary of the last decade of Dick's life, and are better defined in an article of the topic of temporal lobe seizures. Part and parcel to these kind of seizures is a behavioral phenomenon called "hypergraphia", where the subject begins obsessively documenting their experiences usually in journal form. Even with these logical explanations, the whole array of Dick's life is very odd, and some events simply cannot be explained at this time.
Like other more famous science fiction authors, several of Dick's stories have been made into movies. Most of these are only loosely based on Dick's original story, using them as a starting-point for a Hollywood action-adventure story. While the most admired is Ridley Scott's classic movie Blade Runner, the action film Total Recall faithfully translates a number of Dick themes, albeit with uncharacteristic violence.
Philip K. Dick is often cited as a major influence on the Cyberpunk movement led by William Gibson, but as this work, and titles as diverse as the inventive Eye in the Sky and Martian Time Slip, the moving Galactic Pot Healer, the complex and yet delicate The Man in the High Castle and the chilling yet deeply moving A Scanner Darkly show, there was much more to his genius than just influence.
His Youth
Dick and his visions
VALIS
Exegesis
His death
Dick's influence on others
Bibliography
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Movie adaptations of Philip K. Dick's works
Awards
See also
External links