Twenty-five years ago today, the world lost Philip K. Dick (at right with cat), a dystopian science fiction writer whose 1960s and 70s novels of paranoid freakery have somehow become mainstream Hollywood movie SF like Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. During his lifetime, Dick was critically acclaimed but couldn't find mass audiences for his stream-of-consciousness books about authoritarian surveillance societies of the future. Classic Dick books like The Man in the High Castle (1962), Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) *and A Scanner Darkly (1977) are literate meditations on repressive governments, pharmaceutical consciousness, and media-induced madness. But there aren't a lot of space battles or dumb Larry Niven-style aliens, so the SF fans stayed away.
After his death from a stroke in 1982, Philip K. Dick began to enjoy the sort of popularity he'd never had in life. Ridley Scott's 1981 genre-transforming film Blade Runner, based on *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, *got the public interested in Dick's other work. Perhaps their interest was also piqued because 1980s culture made Dick's work truly relevant. Suddenly, in the Reagan/Thatcher Era, it made perfect sense to read stories about Hollywood's mediascape blurring into politics, ubiquitous high tech surveillance, and a world saturated by commercial culture. Whatever the reason, Dick is now guaranteed a prominent place in the history of science fiction and literature. His work is classic, and a must-read for anybody who likes biting social satire with their speculative tales.
I have always had a special relationship with Dick because in A Scanner Darkly, he perfectly captured the landscape of my youth: Orange County, California. As his characters careen in a drugged-out haze of police fetishism through Santa Ana, Irvine, and other OC cities that don't get mentioned on *The O.C., *Dick stages the pure, blank horror of suburban life in the fake paradise of SoCal. The ugliness of the planned community, a utopian experiment gone wrong, is everywhere in that book -- whenever I read it, I viscerally recall the disturbing experience of living in Irvine during the Reagan-Bush Cold War years.
Fans of Dick call themselves Dickheads. Today, on the 25th anniversary of this visionary's death, you can become a Dickhead too. Just pick up one of his novels and give it a whirl.
Philip K. Dick ["official" website of a guy who died before websites existed -- how freaky is that?]
