“I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.”
― Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928. He had a twin that died soon after they were born. Later, when he suffered from schizophrenia, he sometimes wondered if this was because his twin was attempting to exist in his body.
This is the type of thing Dick often wondered about. The ghostly twin, the doppelganger, the split self or the other self, were constant themes in his work.
He discovered Science Fiction in an early Sci-Fi magazine when he was twelve. He went to Berkeley High School, and, intriguingly, graduated in the same class as Ursula K. Le Guin. Dick then attended UC Berkeley, where he studied philosophy before dropping out due to extreme anxiety issues around his refusal to undergo mandatory ROTC training. His studies in philosophy, however, allowed to him to ask epistemological and ethical questions no one else in science fiction at the time was asking.
Dick helped Science Fiction out of what is usually called its “golden age” (think: those cheap magazines with ridiculous aliens and women with big breasts on the cover) and into what is sometimes called the “New Wave” science fiction of the 60’s and 70’s.
Really, what he did was establish what we now think of as “speculative fiction”. Instead of writing about a war vs. mindless Martian squid creatures or something (which, particularly in writers like Heinlein, was a sort of cover for colonialist/fascist thinking), Dick asked, what kind of drugs would be necessary to be able live a human life on Mars? What would happen, then, when every human settler on Mars eventually becomes a drug addict? The sci-fi element is merely what allows him to ask new questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be “alien”.
What if humans are becoming more like robots, and robots more like humans? What does a moral imperative look like in a future where the circumstances of life are far different from what they are now?
He lived most of his life in the Bay Area, where he struggled financially. When he visited France, however (a culture less obsessed with defining works according to genre and ranking genres according to an established hierarchy), he happily discovered he was a celebrity there.
How can one depict the process of entropy in fiction? If Jungian synchronicity does exist, what does that tell us about the nature of the universe?
Dick was also a drug addict, in addition to his extensive mental health issues. Like many in the 60’s counterculture, he seems not to have understood the cost of extensive drug use until it was too late. In the early 70’s, he began having paranormal experiences and suffered from four years of writer’s block. In 1974 he underwent a mystical experience, during which an outside, supreme “intelligence” revealed the true nature of reality to him. Imagine the plot of the Matrix, except Neo divines on his own the nature of the Matrix, and cannot escape it. Oh, and our actual reality is biblical times. His last few novels explore the possibilities of these alternate realities, and what they mean for personal freedom.
What if what we thought was a story following an unreliable narrator is actually about the unreliability of that narrator’s reality?
What if the paranoid person is right?
Dick died in 1982, following a series of strokes, just four months before the release of Blade Runner, the first movie adaptation of his work.
On Film:
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” —1 Corinthians 13
Much of the work of Philip K. Dick took place in what has been called “The Uncanny Valley”, that region of uncertainty and discomfort humans experience in encounters with the not-quite-human.
He was also one of the most prescient writers of modernity. The internet, virtual reality, driver-less cars, 3-D printing, facial recognition equipment, bots, generative A.I., were all concepts he was writing about in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Dick was similar to Nietzsche in that they almost had too many ideas. He wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories before his death at 53. Many of those novels contain scenes or subplots with concepts that another writer might have built an entire novel around.
“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”
― Philip K. Dick
As a huge fan of Philip K. Dick, I find it difficult to imagine the landscape of modern film without his work. Some of his novels and stories have been adapted outright and made into successful films and shows, such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, and The Man In The High Castles. Dick has influenced not only certain filmmakers directly, who in turn influence other filmmakers, he has also been a massive influence on many of the writers whose works are adapted into films. As an example: Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, recently adapted by Bong Joon Ho as the film Mickey 17. The Matrix, Ex Machina, and Her all feel like they are adapted from stories Dick never wrote. As filmmakers continue to imagine alternative presents or near futures—and as a society we become more anxious about the potential consequences of our technologies—I find this influence to be even more pervasive.
Dick never had the chance to write a story involving CAPTCHA, but this short academy-award winning film written and directed by Victoria Warmerdam feels like something directly from Dick’s imagination. It’s eerie, it makes the viewer question their own reality, and ultimately uses “science fiction” devices to ask philosophical questions.
Some of these questions—such as, does developed artificial intelligence possess personhood? what if they are embodied? who then determines how such beings exist?—are ones that are still very new to the human species.
But embodied AI is coming. So they are questions we should develop answers to.
Some of my favorite works by Philip K. Dick:
The Man in the High Castle
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ubik
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Galactic Pot-Healer
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
Selected Short Stories
“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick