Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick: the writer who witnessed the future

By Adam Scovell - 2nd March 2022

Writers of science fiction often feel more prescient than others. Whether it's the threat to women's rights in the work of Margaret Atwood, the architectural and social dystopias of JG Ballard's novels, or the internet-predicting world of E M Forster's The Machine Stops (1909), the genre is replete with prophetic writers dealing with ever more familiar issues.

Out of all such writers, few seem a more unlikely seer of our times than the US author Philip K Dick, who died 40 years ago today at the age of 53. In a remarkably prolific 30-year period of work, Dick authored 44 novels and countless short stories, adaptations of which went on to redefine science fiction on screen – in particular Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), which was based on Dick's story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990), which took his 1966 short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale as its source material. More recently Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) has been turned into a hit Amazon series.

The man behind the visionary worlds

Dick was not simply an effective writer of strange fictions, but an unusual person in his own right. Burdened by deteriorating mental health, visions, and what he alleged were all manner of paranormal experiences – many of which were woven into his expansive oeuvre – Dick had a troubled and fragmented relationship with reality. In the 1970s, the author began to experience two parallel timelines of his own life, his thoughts invaded in 1974 by what he told interviewer Charles Platt was a "transcendentally rational mind", something he had many names for, but chiefly VALIS; an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It became the subject of one of his late semi-autobiographical works, the 1981 novel VALIS, published not long before his death.

Read more... Source - BBC

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