Links


o Philip K. Dick
o philipKdick.com
o Official WWW PKD FAQ
o Exegesis Online Effort
o Philip K Dick

Related Characters


o

Related Analysis


Books (USA)


o Shifting Realities of PK. Dick
o Selections From the Exegesis
o Radio Free Albemuth
o Do Androids Dream of Electric...
o Confessions of a Crap Artist
o Divine Invasion
o Flow My Tears...
o Galactic Pot-Healer
o The Game-Players of Titan
o The Man in the High Castle
o Martian Time-Slip
o A Maze of Death
o Now Wait for Last Year
o A Scanner Darkly
o The 3 Stigmata of Palmer...
o Transmigration of Tim Archer
o Ubik
o Valis
o We Can Build You
o The World Jones Made

Books (UK)


o Shifting Realities of PK. Dick
o Selections From the Exegesis
o Radio Free Albemuth
o Do Androids Dream of Electric...
o Confessions of a Crap artist
o The Divine Invasion
o Flow My Tears...
o Galactic Pot-Healer
o The Game-Players of Titan
o The Man in the High Castle
o Martian Time-Slip
o A Maze of Death
o Now Wait for Last Year
o A Scanner Darkly
o The 3 Stigmata of Palmer...
o Transmigration of Tim Archer
o Ubik
o Valis
o We Can Build You
o The World Jones Made

Philip K. Dick [compiled by Ben Towle]


Philip K. Dick was born on December 16, 1928 in Chicago and in his lifetime he wrote over fifty volumes of novels and stories. For the bulk of his life he epitomized the cliché of the "starving artist" and by his own accounts survived for periods by eating horse meat purchased from the local pet store. Jean Baudrillard has referred to him as one of the greatest experimental writers of our era and Timothy Leary labels him "a fictional philosopher of the quantum age," yet only recently has he begun to be recognized by the mainstream literary community as anything more than a writer of pulp novels.

Although he is known to the general public mainly in connection with the films "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall," (both of which were based very loosely on his work) the true nature of his writing is of a far more philosophical nature. The two most prevalent themes addressed in Dick's work are the following: what does it mean to be human? and, what is the nature of reality? These queries are masked by Dick in an often befuddling array of time slips, shifting realities, and episodes of black humor which force the reader to ask seriously of him/herself the very questions which Dick sets out to answer.

In 1963 he was awarded science fiction's highest honor, the Hugo Award, for his novel The Man in the High Castle and, perhaps more significantly, in the months of February and March of 1974 he experienced a series of visions which intruded upon his consciousness and directly inspired his most personal work: the "Valis trilogy" which consists of Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). While still addressing the themes shared by his earlier works, these later novels moved forcefully into the arena of metaphysics, contemplating the fine line between insanity and true religious vision, exploring the ancient doctrines of gnosticism, and pondering the observable differences (if any) between the appearance of God and the discovery of a vastly advanced interstellar intelligence. His personal writings during this period were recorded in a document known as the Exegesis, an eight thousand page tome over which Dick labored for eight years. Philip K. Dick died of heart failure in 1982 at the age of 53.

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