The ragged beard and deranged stare marked him as a peer of counter-culture nemesis Charles Manson, but Philip K. Dick peddled a gentler lunacy. Through the 1950s and 1960s Dick, frequently teetering on the cusp of insanity, revolutionised experimental fiction. His manic (frequently maniacal) prose seeded a school of writing that blossomed into the gonzo journalism movement of the post-hippy epoch.
Chicago-born Dick, a troubled soul from childhood, milked manifold neuroses. The bewilderingly vast canon - in excess of 50 novels and 200 short stories - he dredged from the Stygian pit of his psyche-grafted, hardcorescience fiction archetypes - space exploration, time travel, first contact with alien life - to flower power activism and a virulent distrust of big government.
Dick's tales, gauche exercises in absurdity on paper, transcended their SF roots. Forgotten and impoverished, Dick died in 1982 at his home in Santa Ana, California, aged 54. With a film based on his life about to enter production, his legacy promises to grow in stature.
Dick is today remembered chiefly as author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, marginal pieces adapted into milestone movies. In the mid-1980s, Ridley Scott's wintery cyberpunk haiku BladeRunner and Paul Verhoeven's swaggering Total Recall radicalised a tired oeuvre.
A slew of LSD-guzzling proteges, most memorably Rolling Stone enfant terribles Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson, drew attention to Dick's achievements as writer. The origins of Dick's dementia were as numerous as its manifestations. Twin sister Jane died at birth. He married five times. And nobody - nobody - read the stories.
Trapped in poverty, Dick hacked out books, typically producing three or four novels a year. His skewed vision won belated recognition within the SF fraternity when the engrossing alternative history The Man in the High Castle, positing the consequences of Axis victory in the second World War, received a "Hugo" award, the SF equivalent of an Oscar.
Such humble morsels failed to sate him. By the mid-1970s, dissipating into ignominious squalor while his apostles lived it large, his hold on reality, always tenuous, slipped utterly. Dick began to hear voices. An invisible omnipotence named "Valis" - for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" - beamed cosmic truths into his head. Dick's chimerical demagogue stoked his paranoia, commanding its secrets - specifically that the Roman Empire did not end but persisted in hidden form as a monolithic entity called the "Black Iron Prison" - be publicly disseminated. Dick, a dutiful acolyte, scurried to his typewriter.
Only Phil could write an autobiography and have it be science fiction, Dick's agent quipped on publican of Valis. He was only half joking.
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