Now well-known as the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the novel filmed as Blade Runner in 1982, Philip K Dick is acclaimed as a master of imaginative fiction that explores the psychological challenges of future or illusory environments; yet during his lifetime, his short stories and novels were known to a much narrower sci-fi community.
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Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister Jane were born in Chicago in 1928. Jane died six weeks later but having learned of it while still a child, his twin’s death continued to affect Philip’s life, and the ‘phantom twin’ became an important theme in his work.
When Philip was five, his parents divorced and his mother was granted custody of the boy. They moved between Chicago, Washington and California, but in 1938, settled in Berkeley. From an early age, Philip had suffered with anxiety and neuroses as well as physical frailty; when he eventually enrolled to study philosophy, history, literature and zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, anxieties led him to leave after three months.
Out of college, Dick was still immersed in philosophical speculations. He was also a fan of the pulp magazines which, at that period, were the main outlet for science fiction. He began to write his own stories – the first published was ‘Roog’ in 1953 – and was soon writing full-time, often at speed to meet deadlines. Mainstream literature remained an ambition, but with The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo Award in 1961, Dick became a star in the science fiction firmament.
If his novels went from strength to strength, culminating in what are now cult classics – including Ubik, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (later filmed as Total Recall), A Scanner Darkly and VALIS – Dick’s mental health deteriorated with his drug use and unstable relationships. He was married five times; two broken love affairs were the occasion of suicide attempts; and in the mid-1970s he experienced a ‘divine invasion’ that was to become the theme of his later novels.
Philip K Dick died in March 1982, just months before Bladerunner took his work out of its sci-fi corner and onto the world’s screens.
