1980 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704, United States
Philip K. Dick attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California.
College/University
Gallery of Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, (September 1949 to November 11, 1949) with an honorable dismissal granted January 1, 1950.
Career
Gallery of Philip Dick
1973
Writer Philip K. Dick at the BBC
Gallery of Philip Dick
1982
Ridley Scott and Philip K. Dick on the set of Blade Runner
Gallery of Philip Dick
1982
Philip K. Dick: the author shortly before his death, in March 1982. Photograph: Philippe Hupp
Gallery of Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick with his cat named Magnificat
Gallery of Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick
Gallery of Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Hugo Awards
In 1963 Philip was a winner of the Hugo Award for the best novel "The Man in the High Castle"
Philip K. Dick briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, (September 1949 to November 11, 1949) with an honorable dismissal granted January 1, 1950.
(Following a devastating nuclear war, the Moral Reclamatio...)
Following a devastating nuclear war, the Moral Reclamation government took over the world and forced its citizens to live by strictly puritanical rules - no premarital sex, drunkenness, or displaying of neon signs - all of which are reinforced through a constant barrage of messaging to the public. The chief purveyor of these messages is Alan Purcell, next in line to become head of the propaganda bureau. But there is just one problem: a statue of the government’s founder has been vandalized and the head is hidden in Purcell’s closet. In this buttoned-up society, maybe all a revolution needs is one really great prank.
(When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, ...)
When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy.
(Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspape...)
Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet he’s never heard of named Marilyn Monroe. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them like "bowl of flowers" and "soft drink stand." When Ragle skips town to try to find the cause of these bizarre occurrences, his discovery could make him question everything he has ever known.
(It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The fe...)
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
(Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. T...)
Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. The planet was irradiated and most of the surviving population is sterile. The few survivors play an intricate and unending game called Bluff at the behest of the slug-like aliens who rule the planet. At stake in the game are two very important commodities: land and spouses. Pete Garden just lost his wife and Berkeley, California, but he has a plan to win them back. That is, if he isn’t derailed by aliens, psychic traitors, or his new wife.
(On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn t...)
On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn to drugs to escape a dead-end existence. Especially when the drug is Can-D, which translates its users into the idyllic world of a Barbie-esque character named Perky Pat. When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch arrives with a new drug called Chew-Z, he offers a more addictive experience, one that might bring the user closer to God. But in a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value.
(It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nu...)
It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite. And hidden amongst the survivors is Dr. Bloodmoney himself, the man responsible for it all.
(In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. P...)
In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye," blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first - but their motives are not exactly benevolent because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.
(Originally published as Do Androids Dream of Electric She...)
Originally published as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can't afford one, companies build incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They've even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and "retire" them.
(Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his t...)
Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter’s face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all.
(Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said grapples with many of t...)
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said grapples with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for - identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopia - in a rollicking chase story that earned the novel the John W. Campbell Award and nominations for the Hugo and Nebula.
(In this award-winning novel, friends can become enemies, ...)
In this award-winning novel, friends can become enemies, good trips can turn terrifying, and cops and criminals are two sides of the same coin. Dick is at turns caustically funny and somberly contemplative, fashioning a novel that is as unnerving as it is enthralling.
(What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K....)
What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick’s ground-breaking novel, and the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.
(In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick mo...)
In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist known for his work in science fiction. His novels and stories, depicting the psychological struggles of characters trapped in illusory environments, have sold millions of copies and have been the source of a number of successful motion pictures.
Background
Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, United States to Dorothy (née Kindred) and Joseph Edgar Dick, who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Philip had a twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, who died six weeks after their birth.
The author’s parents divorced when he was just five years old, and the boy was left under the care of his mother. Dorothy, determined to raise Philip alone, took a job in Washington, D.C., and moved there with her son.
Education
Philip studied at John Eaton Elementary School (1936–1938), completing the second through fourth grades. During that time he began to show interest and ability in storytelling. In 1938, Philip and his mother returned to California, and it was around that time that he became interested in science fiction.
Dick attended Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, graduating in 1947. After graduation, he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he took classes in history, psychology, philosophy, and zoology. He dropped out in favor of a job in a Berkeley record store called Art Music and a brief gig as a classical radio DJ on station KSMO.
Dick began submitting short stories to science fiction magazines in 1952 and got nowhere at first. But in 1951 a Dick story called "Roog" was accepted for publication in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By the time it appeared in print, seven more of Dick's stories had already been published. Sometimes he wrote under the name of Richard Phillips.
In 1954 he met the established science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt at a convention and was advised that novels, even given the notoriously low pay rates of science fiction publishers, were more lucrative than short stories. Dick's first novel, Solar Lottery, appeared in 1955; it concerned a corrupt lottery that determined the life courses of the participants.
Between 1959 and 1964 Dick published 16 science fiction novels, and several non–science fiction works. His agent returned those to him as unpublishable (although Confessions of a Crap Artist was eventually published, and several others appeared after his death), and Dick applied himself with new energy to science fiction.
His breakthrough came in 1962 with the novel The Man in the High Castle, which presented his characteristic theme of alternate realities in a relatively conventional setting: the novel imagined a United States that had lost World War II to the Axis powers. Unlike most of Dick's novels, which take place on a fantastic plane, the book relied on several years' worth of historical research and won praise from mainstream as well as science fiction critics. The Chinese I Ching book of fortune telling was used by Dick in formulating the plot and also appeared as an element in the story.
Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time–Slip, one of four Dick novels published that year, was also especially successful; it featured a character whom Dick described as an ex– schizophrenic, and it was one of a number of Dick novels in which mental illness played a significant role.
Perhaps Dick's first fully characteristic novel was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), the story of colonists on Mars who have had to leave Earth due to deteriorating environmental conditions.
Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was adapted into the film Blade Runner in 1982 and was later republished under that title. Dick at first refused to cooperate with filmmaker Ridley Scott. The book tells the story of a bounty hunter among androids, introducing the favorite Dick theme of what is definitively human—the book's androids closely resemble humans but can be distinguished from them through their inability to show empathy toward others. The book offered a nightmare vision of the near future in which most real animals have gone extinct and have been replaced by mechanical replicas.
Ubik (1969) took the idea of alternate realities to an extreme, imagining a world in which the dead seem to come back to life and a warring group of psychics move among a group of parallel realities. The following year A Philip K. Dick Omnibus was published in London, signaling a new level of popularity for Dick outside the United States. His works have been translated into a wide variety of European and Asian languages, and he has had an especially strong following in France.
Dick's novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, published in 1974, mixed themes of drug use, alternate realities, and malevolent government control in a story widely considered one of the author's best.
The year 1974 marked a turning point in Dick's life and writing. In February, recovering from dental surgery that had involved the administration of sodium pentathol, he opened the door to a young woman who was delivering him a prescription. She was wearing a medallion with the Christian fish symbol, which Dick asked about. At that point he experienced one of a series of visions that he believed added up to a major revelation about himself and the nature of the world he was living in. These visions continued through February and March of 1974; he referred to them as the two–three–seventy–four or 2–3–74 experiences.
Briefly, Dick came to believe that the world around him was an illusion, and that time had stopped in the year 70 C.E. He and the prescription deliverer were actually early Christians being persecuted by the Roman government; his first–century name was Thomas. His visions sometimes came in the form of laser beams or geometric patterns, and he believed that not only he but also God had a dual existence, with one half of the divine duality being a female who had created the illusory world. Some of his ideas had affinities with the group of early Christian philosophies collectively known as Gnosticism.
In a series of often bizarre novels written over the rest of his life, most notably Valis (1981), Dick tried to flesh out the implications of his visions. "Valis" was an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, the entity Dick believed was sending his visions and was responsible for the nature of the reality he was experiencing. The book's narrator is once again divided into a duality, alternating between Horselover Fat and the more dispassionate Philip Dick, who questions the accuracy and occasionally the sanity of Horselover Fat and by extension Philip K. Dick himself—the name Horselover Fat is a translation of his own name (he derives Philip from a pun on the Latin roots "phil hippo," or horse lover, and Dick is German for fat or thick).
Dick continued to write at a rapid pace; Valis was the first part of a vast trilogy that continued with The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), the last work to appear during Dick's life. A chronic sufferer from high blood pressure, Dick died from a stroke on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California. Sadly, he missed by just a few months the enormous success of the film Blade Runner, which marked the beginning of a consistent rise in his posthumous reputation.
(It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The fe...)
1961
Religion
Dick described himself as "an acosmic panentheist," believing in the universe only as an extension of God.
Politics
Dick tried to stay out of the political scene because of high societal turmoil from the Vietnam War; however, he did show some anti-Vietnam War and anti-governmental sentiments. In 1968, he joined the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", an anti-war pledge to pay no U.S. federal income tax, which resulted in the confiscation of his car by the IRS.
Views
Dick’s work explored philosophical, social, and political themes, with stories dominated by monopolistic corporations, alternative universes, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. His writing also reflected his interest in metaphysics and theology, and often drew upon his life experiences in addressing the nature of reality, identity, drug abuse, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences.
Through his studies in philosophy, he believed that existence is based on internal human perception, which does not necessarily correspond to external reality. After reading the works of Plato and pondering the possibilities of metaphysical realms, Dick came to the conclusion that, in a certain sense, the world is not entirely real and there is no way to confirm whether it is truly there.
Dick made no secret that much of his thinking and work was heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Jung. The Jungian constructs and models that most concerned Dick seem to be the archetypes of the collective unconscious, group projection/hallucination, synchronicities, and personality theory.
Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is real and the construction of personal identity. His heroes are ordinary men (and they were always men) trying to act humanely in a world in which they experienced constant destabilization. His stories often become surreal fantasies, as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion assembled by powerful external entities.
In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link discussed eight themes or 'ideas and motifs': Epistemology and the Nature of Reality, Know Thyself, The Android and the Human, Entropy and Pot Healing, The Theodicy Problem, Warfare and Power Politics, The Evolved Human, and 'Technology, Media, Drugs and Madness'.
Quotations:
"There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'."
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
"Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
"The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give."
"Reality is just a point of view."
"Everything in life is just for a while."
"Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness."
"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others?"
"Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don't."
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
"There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive."
Personality
Dick’s emotional state went through many changes throughout his life. The death of his twin sister 41 days after their birth is the first of many scars Dick would face. He would be involved in a string of bad marriages and was addicted to drugs. His level of output was inconsistent and he would experience periods of intense creativity and dark times where he wouldn’t write. His own emotional and psychological states play a major role in the tone of his work throughout the years. Noticing the change in Dick’s writing style from the 50’s to the 80’s is a look at the struggles of a creative genius. His attempts to demonstrate the ever-expanding potential of the universe are personal journeys into his own realities.
Quotes from others about the person
"Dick's third major theme is his fascination with war and his fear and hatred of it. One hardly sees critical mention of it, yet it is as integral to his body of work as oxygen is to water." - Steven Owen Godersky
"All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely." - Charles Platt.
"There are no heroes in Dick's books but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people." - Ursula K. Le Guin
"Dick's fiction calls up our basic cultural assumptions, requires us to reexamine them, and points out the destructive destinations to which they are carrying us. The American Dream may have succeeded as a means of survival in the wilderness of early America; it allowed us to subdue that wilderness and build our holy cities of materialism. But now, the images in Dick's fiction declare, we live in a new kind of wilderness, a wasteland wilderness, because those cities and the culture that built them are in decay. We need a new American dream to overcome this wasteland." - Patricia S. Warrick
"Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as give the impression of one lost in their labyrinth." - Stanislaw Lem
"He never went anywhere, and never left his house. I didn't realize what a big deal it was then, but the older I get, the less I want to go anywhere. We live in the mountains, on a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere. … He didn't like driving either. I remember he had a car for about three or four years before he passed away and it only had about 600 miles on it." - Christopher Dick
"The worlds through which Philip Dick's characters move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice. Reality is approximately as dependable as a politician's promise." - Roger Zelazny
"To call Philip K. Dick … a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. … It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century." - David Edelstein
Interests
Theatre
Writers
K. W. Jeter, James Blaylock, Tim Powers, Robert Dunkan, Franz Kafka
Sport & Clubs
Rugby
Connections
In 1948 Dick married Jeanette Marlin; the marriage, the first of Dick's five, lasted only six months. On June 14, 1950 the author married his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, the union which had lasted for 9 years. Philip was married for a third time to Anne Williams Rubinstein (1959 - 1965), and he had a young daughter, Laura.
Dick married twice more; his marriages to Nancy Hackett (1966 - 1972) and Tessa Busby (1973 - 1977) each produced a child - Isolde and Christopher, respectively.
Father:
Joseph Edgar Dick
Mother:
Dorothy Kindred
Daughter:
Isa Dick Hackett
ex-wife:
Jeanette Marlin
ex-wife:
Kleo Apostolides
ex-wife:
Anne Williams Rubinstein
ex-wife:
Nancy Hackett
ex-wife:
Tessa Busby
Daughter:
Laura Archer
Son:
Christopher Kenneth
References
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions, acknowledged by the Dick family as the official Philip K. Dick biography, illuminates the life of the man who loosed the bonds of the science-fiction genre and profoundly influenced such writers as Pynchon, Delillo, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem.
2005
The Search for Philip K. Dick
Offering an intimate perspective on the life of an important, prolific author, this revealing biography uncovers the inner workings of a cult figure through his tumultuous relationship with his third wife.
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick
In The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, clinical psychologist Kyle Arnold probes the fascinating mystery of Dick's heart and mind, and shows readers how early traumas opened Dick to profound spiritual experiences while also predisposing him toward drug dependency and violence.