The Original Creators: Philip K. Dick

Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator"—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Philip K. Dick.

Paranoia. Metaphysics. Mental deterioration. Farce. Religion. Parallel universes. Perception. Androids. Time travel. Mysticism. Drug abuse. These and more are the mix of ingredients that go into the incredible oeuvre of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. For a man whose work was largely ignored during his lifetime, he’s gone on to have a massive influence on the genre of sci-fi (and others) in film, novels, comics and TV shows—he even lives on in artificial form as a Philip K. Dick android.

Criticised for not having the most elegant prose, it’s the power of Dick’s imagination—an imagination that is both mystical and fantastical—that has raised him above his contemporaries and caused so much to be written about him. As our world gets increasingly more technological, fragmented and confusing, his strange tales of dystopian futures and multiple realities seem ever more pertinent. The recent results from the Italian scientists who claim that they’ve found sub-atomic particles—neutrinos—that travel faster than light, could be an indication that our universe is closer to a Philip K. Dick novel than we think. Or it could just be some skewed results. His is a universe where reality is mutable and unreliable, where authority can’t be trusted, where corporations think nothing of stealing an individual’s identity and where truth is an enclave of the insane.

Both his short stories and novels have been liberally plundered to make Hollywood some money—getting diluted in the process, stripping them of their spiritual edge and disturbing truths. Because, while Hollywood sci-fi is mostly about futuristic thrills, Dick’s novels were more a way to explore philosophical ideas relating to the nature of reality, where synchronicities are in abundance and mysterious entities permeate and resonate throughout the cosmos. In Exegesis, a sprawling journal where he explored the consequences of a series of strange visions he had in February and March 1974, he wrote: “I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.”

For all his truth-seeking he also managed to baffle and confuse, creating Kafka-esque worlds of impenetrability and mystification. Even for those purported to be at the vanguard of experimental human culture, Philip K. Dick was always operating light years ahead: On the book jacket for the S.F. Masterworks edition of his novel Ubik is the following quote from the Sunday Times newspaper: “… Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac.” And that seems to encapsulate his unique mind, which produced work that was refreshing and illuminating as well as being problematic and transcendental. Even those mischievously seeking to confound people in their work couldn’t do it as well as the reality-bending mind of Philip K. Dick.

Towards the end of his life he was declared certifiably insane, but he always used his paranoid schizophrenia as material for his work. Swaths of his madness appear as dialogue in A Scanner Darkly and in chunks in his psychologically biographical novel VALIS. In the 1970s Dick wrote to the FBI proclaiming an underground Nazi cabal was trying to covertly manipulate sci-fi writers to advance its mysterious cause. And he also believed he was being persecuted by the KBG and FBI. It is these dark paranoias that haunt his work of meta-conspiracies, of distrustful realities, and hallucinogenic existences. He died on March 2, 1982, a few months before the release of the film Blade Runner.

Here’s a selection of some of his most influential and enduring works:

VALIS

As a work that explores celestial beings and human consciousness, VALIS features a character called Horselover Fat (Philip means “horse lover” in Greek and dick means “fat” in German) whose mind is slowly disintegrating. He believes his visions—that we actually live in a Black Iron Prison during first-century Judaea, and the Roman Empire (along with the devil) is trying to suppress early Christianity—reveal the hidden reality on earth. He also believes a supreme being from the Sirius star system is projecting pink lazer beams into his mind to transfer information. Dick believed all of these visions were events happening in real life.

Ubik

Reality goes askew in this nightmarish story. Joe Chip works for Glen Runciter’s company that hires people who have anti-psychic powers. The mystifying plot penetrates deep into the human psyche, disconcerting the reader as the characters find themselves travelling back through time in a decaying half-life anti-world. It’s a chilling tale that leaves the reader stunned and amazed as the revelations are unveiled. It shows Dick’s grasp of how to turn a story inside out in a truly uncanny fashion, and shows how his sci-fi has been informed by the works of Jorge Luis Borges and H.G. Wells.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is of course the novel that was adapted to become Blade Runner (above). While the film is rightfully celebrated, the novel is some shades darker than the neo-noir it went on to beget. The novel delves into the philosophical nature of what it means to be human and what essential characteristics define us—one of which seems to be empathy, shown in our affection towards animals. Set in a post-nuclear world, the novel follows the stories of J.R. Isidore—a driver for an animal repair shop—and the figure of Deckard, a bounty hunter sent to “retire” six escaped androids.

The Man in the High Castle

This alternate history novel won Dick the Hugo Award in 1963. It’s set in a world where the allies have lost the Second World War and a version of our world—The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a book within the book—is produced by a writer, Hawthorne Abendsen, using the divination tool the I Ching. Interestingly, Dick also used the occult Chinese text to write this novel, using the results of casting hexagrams to guide what the characters did. He also claims in the same interview that the openness of the ending was because the I Ching didn’t know what to do: “… when it came time to close down the novel the I Ching had no more to say. And so there’s no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime.”