Philip K Dick

1928-1982

Black and white photograph of a white man with a full white beard, wearing a forlorn expression.

Philip K Dick wrote dozens of novels in his thirty-plus year career, pumping them out at an astonishing rate in the 50s and 60s before slowing down significantly in the 70s and early 80s. Thus, it would be almost impossible and certainly foolhardy to attempt to cover them all. I’ve read several, spanning several significant eras of his career, which I hope will provide a broad outline of his output.

My personal interest lies mostly in his novels of the 70s and 80s, which strike a more personal tone and ditch many of the more kitschy SF aspects of the earlier novels. Dick led a troubled life, full of heartbreak, drugs (whether or not he himself was a user, he certainly knew a lot of users), and poverty. He looked to philosophy and religion for hope and reassurance, and it is through these lenses that he constructs his alternate worlds. Dick wrote many stories of people struggling with their own identity, trying to figure out exactly what sort of entity they truly were and whether they could trust their own minds and memories.

Philip K Dick died young, in his early 50s, after a run of masterpieces.

My Top Five

  1. Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
  2. A Scanner Darkly (1977)
  3. VALIS(1981)
  4. The Divine Invasion (1981)
  5. The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick (Essay collection)

WORKS

Time Out of Joint (1959)

A man in a small town makes his living by repeatedly winning a daily newspaper puzzle contest. This weird, unconventional job bears a remarkable resemblance to that of an unappreciated SF writer, which lends this novel an unexpected personal dimension. Eventually, he starts experiencing a series of strange hallucinations that make him question the veracity of his reality, which leads him to learn the true nature of his profession. What happens after the “twist” is less interesting and a little hokey, but the book is worth a read nonetheless.

Man in the High Castle (1962)

An alternate reality where the Axis won World War II and split the USA in half, with Japan occupying the west and Germany the east. We follow an antique dealer in San Francisco who sells American artifacts to Japanese businessmen; a man engaged in manufacturing said artifacts; as well as a Japanese bureaucrat.

While Japanese people obsessed with Americana is a real thing in our reality, the flipped occupier-occupied dynamic is meant as a criticism of American exceptionalism and its fetishization of other cultures. The main character’s ambiguous relationship to his nationality as a unwilling-yet-opportunistic sympathizer to the occupying forces is an interesting one; in fact, all the characters are actually painted with a more nuanced brush than is common in Dick’s early novels.

That being said, there is certainly some silliness inherent in the premise, and the ending, while deliberately anti-climatic, is still something of a let-down. There are a lot of interesting ideas in here, but like almost all of Dick’s novels, there’s a fundamental incoherence to the world and the plot, as if he bit off a bit more than he could chew. Personally, I find it less psychologically interesting than his later work, but on a pure SF level, its hard to argue that its not one of his best.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)

Similar to The Divine Invasion, I think this book succeeds mostly on its pure audacity. There are just so many ideas stuffed in here, and the plot goes completely off-the-rails in an utterly mystifying way.

The premise is this: Earth has set up Martian colonies to deal with its excess population, but they are so undeveloped and so lacking in self-sustainability that basically all the people sent there can do is consume, consume, consume. Their consumption takes the form of a drug called Can-D, which allows them to inhabit the bodies and lives of little dolls, for whom they can buy all sorts of clothing, accessories, vehicles, houses, and what-not. The producers of Can-D employ pre-cogs, i.e. people who can see the future, who they use to predict market trends and keep a leg up on the competition.

At the same time, a man named Palmer Eldritch has returned from the far reaches of space, perhaps after being possessed by aliens, with a new Can-D competitor named Chew-Z, and also the ability to enter people’s minds. The latter half of the book is a long and bewildering battle to prevent him from taking over the universe(?).

The amount of psychedelic trips in this one is almost overwhelming, and its hard to keep track of everything that’s going on — which is why its handy that a good half of the novel’s plot points simply disappear about halfway through. This novel feels like a production of Dick’s pure and unbridled imagination.

A Scanner Darkly (1977)

One of Dick’s most personal novels, dealing with the nature and consequences of drug abuse and the lifestyle that comes with it. The novel neither celebrates nor censures such a lifestyle, instead attempting to depict the reality of the situation from the perspective of someone inside. The SF aspects are minimal and mainly serve to elucidate the realities of drug manufacture and government surveillance.

Again, the main character is a man struggling with his own identity: at once a drug user, living in a house with a group of paranoid ne’er-do-wells who are only trying to have a good time; and at the same time a DEA agent tasked with spying on that very same user. These two identities overlap and compete throughout the story, adding an extra layer of ambiguity to the proceedings.

VALIS (1981)

A tremendously sad novel about an alter-ego of Dick named Horselover Fat (in which Philip K Dick himself, famous SF author, also appears as a character.) Horselover Fat does not know how to stop helping people who can not be helped, even as it causes him great suffering. One day, he receives a transmission from a God-like entity via a burst of pink light and comes to understand something about the nature of time, but can’t quite come to grips with what it is. This is based on Philip K Dick’s real experience receiving a transmission from a God-like entity via a burst of pink light — you see, although a writer of SF, Dick never strays too far from his own experiences.

In an attempt to determine what exactly he has been told, Horselover Fat begins obsessively writing a journal in which he sets all his recondite learning of gnosticism and ancient philosophy to the task. (Of course, this is all ripped from Dick’s own journal; you can read selections of his exegesis in various collections.) He has arguments with his friends, some of whom are sympathetic, and a few of whom have their own ideas about God. Eventually, they all become involved with a rock musician and sound engineer who have created a film that somehow seems to connect with Fat’s experiences — the question becomes whether these guys are crazy, Fat is crazy, or all of them are crazy together.

At the core of all this is a deeply personal and emotional story of regret, of letting yourself be used, of grief, and of trying to determine the line between insanity and all the regular mundane sort of emotional irrationality that determines our actions.

The Divine Invasion (1981)

Without doubt, the strangest novel I have ever read. A sickly woman on a remote space colony becomes pregnant with the Child of God, and must find her way back to Earth while avoiding the watchful eye of a global Christian-Islamic government. Once there, the child is born, but circumstances cause him to forget his true nature. It is only through the help of another strange young child that he can restore his memories, who helps him visit a parallel world and… well, frankly, a lot of bizarre things happen.

The book is nigh inscrutable without some understanding of Dick’s obsession with gnosticism and various Christian heresies. Readers of VALIS will find thematic similarities, although the tone and style of the novels are wildly different.

I think this work is amazing, audacious, and totally unique, a must-read for anyone bought into Dick’s particular style of thought.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

Dick’s final novel continues the religious theme. Timothy Archer is an Episcopalian bishop in San Fransisco who faces a crisis of faith when confronted with new evidence emerging from the Dead Sea Scrolls that paints the early Apostles as a psilocybin cult. His naivete and unworldliness leave him totally unprepared for this change in circumstances, which is contemporaneous with the taking of a mistress and the death of his son.

All this is recounted by his daughter-in-law, Angel Archer, with a mix of admiration and frustration. Left frustrated by her futile attempts to help anyone in the story, there is a sense of doom and fatality to the novel that ties it to the dying 60s it depicts: the fall of hippy-optimism as it is crushed and bewildered by the very childish innocence it deliberately cultivated. The characters feels isolated, each living in their own version of reality, each unable to, in a sense, “grow up.” I tend to see in Angel another Dick alter-ego, venting his frustrations with himself in the form of Timothy Archer.

Of course, along with all this is the ever-present Dickian question of identity: the transmigration of souls pops up again and again, and as in VALIS, the line between miracle and psychosis is left wonderfully ambiguous.

NON-FICTION

What if Our World is Their Heaven? (1982)

A final interview with Dick that occurred in several sessions during the last six months of his life.

The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick (1995)

A collection of essays published in SF magazines throughout Dick’s life, as well as selections from his Exegesis.

FURTHER READING

The Novels of Philip K Dick by Kim Stanley Robinson (1984)

An early attempt to cover the entirety of Dick’s body of novels by an author who would go on to have his own successful career in SF. Mostly concerned with understanding Dick’s place within the SF; what separates him from his contemporaries and progenitors; and how his wide reading in philosophy, modernist novels, etc showed itself in his work — at least, when he decided to try, and wasn’t just casting off novels by the dozen to pay rent.

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick by Lawrence Sutin (1989)

A biography that does a good job connecting the themes of the novels with the life being led around them. Paints quite a sympathetic and touching portrait of the man that may provide especially the later novels with some extra resonance.


UNREAD
(too many to list; just including some I will likely read in the future)

  • Martian Time-Slip (1964)
  • The Simulacra (1964)
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) *I read this so long ago that I may as well not have.
  • Ubik (1969)
  • Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)
  • Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)