Philip Kendred Dick and Jane Kendred Dick were born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 16th, 1928. Dick's fraternal twin, Jane, died 41 days later. At age 1 his family moved to Berkeley, California. His parents divorced when Philip was five and his father moved to Reno, Nevada. At age six, 1934 he and his mother moved to Washington, DC. By age 7, he was placed into a "special school", in part because he refused to eat. It was during this time that a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a potential schizophrenic, a diagnosis that would haunt him for the rest of his life. In 1939, he and his mother family moved back to Berkeley. It was here that he first encountered the Oz series of L. Frank Baum, which he cited as highly influential. He briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley, but dropped out before completing any classes. He worked variously as an advertising copywriter, a DJ on a classical music radio station (KSMO, Berkeley), and in a record store.
He sold his first story at age 22, in 1951. In June of 1953, he had 7 stories being published simultaneously in a variety of science fiction magazines, including Analog, Galaxy and F+SF. His first novel, The Solar Lottery, was published in 1954.
Philip K. Dick is one of the two or three genuinely great writers born and bred in the world of SF, and remains one of the most significant interpreters of America in the latter part of the twentieth century and a genius visionary of the future. He was not an easy man - erratic, oft-married, half-insane for years, paranoid - and his publishing career was not an easy one. His bibliography is deceptive: many of his early books did not appear until after his death, and he wrote fast and erratically when he was in spate, with the result that masterpieces and clumsy commercial fictions appeared one after another.
For his alternative history masterpiece The Man in the High Castle (1962) Philip K. Dick was awarded the 1963 Hugo Award. He was also awarded the 1967 British SF Award for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). Another great work of science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), was the basis for the famous cult movie classic Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott. Philip Dick's short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale inspired the shoot-em-up film Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven. Later on, Dick's story Second Variety was turned into a motion picture called Screamers (1995), directed by Christian Duduay. More recent (2002) movie adaptations include Impostor (starring Gary Sinise, directed by Gary Fleder), and Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise, directed by Steven Spielberg), based on the short stories with the same name.
By 1968, the year that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published, he had written 28 books. It is said that it was in this period that he began using methamphetamines in order to write enough to support himself and his family. He also began using LSD, which he wrote about, in veiled form in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and wrote about it openly in essays that are reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Methamphetamine use would plague Philip K. Dick for the remainder of his life, and probably was a leading factor in his death.
There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that he did not sleep for a period of three years, and suffered from "cocaine psychosis" on at least one occasion. However, by the end of his life, he had published over 50 novels and short story collections, and was even able to see a rough cut of Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott film based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was released shortly after his death.
His novels have been required reading for modern literature courses. In 1997, Virgin Interactive Entertainment released a video game for Blade Runner, using the voices of many of the original cast 15 years after the film's theatrical release, a testament to its enduring legacy.
Philip K. Dick went through a series of unsuccessful marriages throughout his life. All in all, he was married five times and had three children (2 daughters, 1 son). The influence of these marriages can be seen in a great deal of his writing. In fact, it was under such circumstances, that The Man In the High Castle was written. Those familiar with the plot of The Man In the High Castle will recognize Dick's real life circumstances, i.e., the jewelry making, as inspiration for one of the central themes of the novel. In 1963, Philip K. Dick received the Hugo Award for The Man In the High Castle. On March 22, 1974, the day after the vernal equinox, Philip K. Dick had a transcendental mystical experience, which he described as "an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind." This experience caused Philip K. Dick to begin recording his thoughts and experiences into a journal, which he referred to as the Exegesis. The Exegesis contained a phenomenal amount of Gnostic religious thought and philosophy. The majority of his experiences and philosophies formed during this period can be found in the VALIS trilogy", which includes VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. An alternate accounting of the events of Philip K. Dick's VALIS encounter can be found in more accessible form in the novel Radio Free Albemuth, which was discovered among Dick's notes after his death.
Philip K. Dick was an incredibly imaginative writer, with the ability to twist every day circumstances around to such a degree that even the most mundane of situations could become outrageous and alien. He often felt that it was his role, as an author to write stories that would "wake up" his readers to the ills and perils of society. Nearly every story he ever wrote probed the nature of truth and reality, repeatedly asking "What is actually real?" in one form or another. Philip K. Dick died of heart failure following a stroke on March 2nd, 1982 in Santa Ana, California.
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