Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928, alongside a twin sister named Jane who died six weeks later. He wrote about her, thought about her constantly, and is buried beside her in a grave that was marked with both names from the beginning.
Dick is the science fiction writer I’d defend against anybody who says the genre has no ideas. He’s also the one who saddens me a little, because almost nothing about his working life went right until it was too late to matter to him.
He wrote fast and for very little money, mostly paperback originals in a market that paid a few hundred dollars a book. He was poor for most of his working life, married five times, and produced an enormous quantity of work under conditions that were frequently chaotic. He died in March 1982, months before Blade Runner opened. He never saw a frame of it.
The timing of that is brutal.
He spent his whole career in the cheapest end of publishing. Publishers paid him a few hundred dollars a book, and the literary world dismissed him, and frequently the science fiction world did too. The film that made his name a brand opened after he was in the ground, and he never saw a dime of what came after it.
What followed is close to unprecedented. Eleven or more films, several television series, a Library of America edition, and a vocabulary that’s escaped into ordinary conversation about technology and reality. A writer who couldn’t sell a mainstream novel while alive is now the standard reference for what the present feels like. He also wrote most of it fast and under pressure. The best-known novels came in a stretch of a few years in the early sixties, produced at a pace that would be alarming even without everything else that was going on.
The twin is the first fact in every account of him and it belongs there. Jane died six weeks after they were born, of complications that a healthier household would probably have caught, and he was told about her throughout his childhood by a mother he blamed for the death.
He grew up with the sense that he was half of something, said so repeatedly, and put versions of a lost or shadow sister into the fiction across four decades. The grave he shares with her was cut with both names at the time of her death, forty years before he needed it. His parents divorced when he was five. His mother mainly raised him, and he moved between California and Washington and had persistent anxiety severe enough that he was tutored at home for periods. He lasted about a year at Berkeley before dropping out, and worked in a record shop for years. That’s where the enormous amount of music in the novels comes from. He sold his first story in 1951 and quit the shop to write full time, at twenty-three, into a paperback market that paid almost nothing. That was the whole professional plan and he stuck to it for thirty-one years.
What question does Philip K. Dick keep asking?
Whether the world you’re experiencing is the actual one, and how a person could possibly tell. That sounds like a single idea used repeatedly, and in a sense it is, but the variations are the point. A man discovers his memories were installed. A suburb turns out to be a constructed set. A drug produces a shared hallucination indistinguishable from the world. A character learns he’s an android and doesn’t know whether to believe it.
The second question follows immediately and is the one that matters more: if you can’t tell, what should you do?
His answer, across most of the work, is that the test isn’t epistemological but moral. You can’t verify reality. You can behave decently toward whatever is in front of you, and that behavior is the only thing that turns out to be reliably yours. An android that shows kindness and a human that shows none are sorted correctly by that test and incorrectly by any other. It’s the argument running under nearly everything he wrote. That’s the idea of his I’d defend hardest. Plenty of writers can make you doubt reality. Very few then hand you something worth doing about it, and his answer, to be decent to whatever’s in front of you, still strikes me as the most useful thing science fiction has said.
Why do Philip K. Dick adaptations keep missing the point?
Because the premises film beautifully and the anxiety doesn’t.
A story about implanted memories converts into an action film without difficulty. A story about a man who suspects his memories are implanted and can’t resolve the suspicion is much harder, because the interest is a sustained unease with no resolution, and films want a third act.
Blade Runner is the exception and it’s an exception by being loosely adapted. It keeps the mood and discards most of the novel, including a large part of what the book is about, and works because it found a visual equivalent for the dread instead of filming the plot.
Most of the rest take the premise, resolve it, and produce a thriller. The premise was never the valuable part. The unresolvable state was.
Every time a studio buys one of his stories and turns it into a chase movie, I feel cheated on his behalf. They paid for the premise and threw away the part that made anybody care. Blade Runner built its reputation by having the nerve to keep the dread. That pattern shows up across the adaptations that lost their source: the transferable element is the plot, and the plot is rarely the reason the book mattered.
How good is Philip K. Dick’s prose?
The sentence level shows it constantly: he wrote too fast and revised too little. Descriptions are perfunctory. Dialogue is often flat. Characters repeat themselves. The paperback deadlines were real and the amphetamine-assisted production schedules of his most prolific period produced books that read as though nobody had a second pass.
He’s nonetheless among the most important writers of his century, and holding both of those at the same time is useful.
What he had instead of prose was ideas at a density almost nobody matches, and an emotional investment in his premises. His characters are frightened in a way that reads as real, because the author was frightened by the same things. That combination outlasted better sentences written by people with nothing urgent to say. The lesson is that a book can survive weak execution if the thing underneath is strong enough, and no amount of polish saves a book with nothing underneath it. I’ll take his clumsy sentences over a polished novel about nothing any day of the week. Plenty of elegant books leave no mark at all, and his flat dialogue still disturbs me because he was scared of the right things.
Why are Philip K. Dick’s protagonists so ordinary?
His protagonists are almost never heroes, and this is the deliberate part of the method.
They’re salesmen, repairmen, small-business owners, minor bureaucrats, men worried about alimony and rent. The cosmic disturbance happens to somebody who’s behind on payments.
That grounding makes the strangeness land. A metaphysical crisis experienced by a philosopher is an essay. The same crisis experienced by a man who has to be at work tomorrow is a story, because the ordinary obligations don’t stop when reality becomes unreliable. It also produces the distinctive feel of his fiction, where an argument about a bill interrupts a scene about the nature of consciousness. That interruption is the realism, and it’s available to any writer working with a large idea.
What does The Man in the High Castle do differently?
His most conventionally respected novel imagines an America divided between Germany and Japan after losing the Second World War, and it does something with that premise that almost nobody copies.
Inside the novel there’s another novel, banned and widely circulated. That describes an alternative history in which the Allies won. That imagined book doesn’t describe our world either. It describes a third version, close to ours and wrong in specific ways. So the reader is holding a book about people reading a book about a history that resembles the reader’s own without matching it. The effect is that the reader’s confidence in their own timeline becomes one more thing the novel has put in question. That’s the technique working at full strength. He didn’t write a scene where somebody explains that reality is uncertain. He built a structure that makes the reader feel it while turning pages. Anyone working on speculative material should study that construction. The architecture delivers the idea and never states it. That’s why it survives rereading and an explained version wouldn’t.
How did poverty shape Philip K. Dick’s writing?
He was paid badly for twenty years and the effect is visible in everything. Paperback originals in his period paid a flat fee with no meaningful royalty, so the only way to earn a living was volume. He produced eleven novels in a two-year stretch at his peak, on a schedule no writer could sustain without chemical assistance, and he didn’t sustain it without.
In hopes of a market that paid better, he wrote non-genre novels and couldn’t sell them. Most were published after his death, when his name would move copies. The literary establishment that now takes him seriously wouldn’t print him while he needed the money. His financial position improved only at the very end, when the option on Do Androids Dream provided the first real payment of his life. He died before the film. There’s a caution in that beyond the sadness of it. The conditions a writer works under shape the work permanently, and a body of fiction produced at that pace under that pressure was never going to be polished. Reading him with that in mind changes what counts as a flaw and what counts as a cost.
This part is galling. The same establishment that wouldn’t print his mainstream novels while he needed rent money published them once his name could move copies. That’s the publishing business at its worst, and I don’t think it’s changed nearly as much as people like to believe.
What was the pink light Philip K. Dick described?
He had an experience he spent the rest of his life trying to explain, and any honest account has to include it. Over several weeks he underwent what he described as a series of visions and transmissions, including a beam of pink light that he believed conveyed information. He came to think that some part of him was living in first-century Rome, and that the intervening centuries were a kind of overlay.
He then wrote about eight thousand pages of private notes trying to work out what had happened, entertaining every explanation available including mental illness, stroke, drugs, divine contact and self-deception. He never settled on one, and the refusal to settle is the interesting part.
The late novels come out of that material directly. They’re stranger and more personal than the earlier work, and readers divide sharply on whether they’re his best or the point at which the wheels came off.
What I take from it is that the man who spent thirty years writing about characters unable to verify their own experience then had an experience he couldn’t verify, and applied the same relentless uncertainty to himself. He didn’t claim revelation. He interrogated it for eight years. I find that more impressive than any conversion story. He had every reason to declare himself a prophet and sell it, and he spent eight years arguing with himself instead. I wish more writers had that kind of honesty about their own certainties.
What can a writer take from Philip K. Dick?
Four things. Ground the enormous idea in the ordinary. A metaphysical crisis matters to a reader when it happens to somebody who still has to pay rent, and the interruption of the cosmic by the mundane is the realism.
Refuse the resolution when the question is better. The unresolvable state was his product, and every adaptation that resolves it produces something smaller. Make the test moral instead of factual. If a reader can’t verify what’s true, give them a way to judge what’s right, and the story keeps its stakes without needing an answer.
Write the thing that frightens you. His prose is weak and his books survived, because the fear in them is real. That transfers, and craft can’t cover its absence.
How should you mark Philip K. Dick Day?
Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It’s a different and stranger book from the film. Or Ubik. It’s the one people who love him tend to name first. The short stories are the efficient entry point, since the ideas arrive at their highest concentration and the prose problems matter least at that length.
December 16 is also Jane Austen’s birthday. That produces a funny pairing. Two writers a century and a half apart, both preoccupied with characters who can’t see their own situation clearly, arriving at completely opposite methods.
If you write, do the exercise. Take your largest idea and give it to somebody with a mundane and pressing problem. Then let the mundane problem keep interrupting. That collision is the whole technique. He deserved far better than he got while he was alive, and a culture that now quotes him daily owes him a debt it can’t pay. Read him for the fear and the ideas, forgive the sentences, and you’ll see why a man paid like a paperback hack outlasted most of the respected novelists of his generation.
For the rest of the field I’ve written about Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke, and the films are ranked from the masterpieces tier down.