Philip K. Dick

Dick, Philip K. - (Philip Kindred Dick), 1941–82, American science-fiction writer, b. Chicago. Dick often wrote of the psychological states of individuals caught in altered realities where the everyday merges with the world of drugs and dreams, space and time are fluid, androids are nearly indistinguishable from humans, and nothing is what it seems. His fiction is often tinged with a straight-faced, hard-edged humor. He sold the first of his 112 short stories in 1952; the first of his 36 novels, Solar Lottery, was published in 1955. While some of his works are negligable, a few are science-fiction classics. Among his best-known novels are Time Out of Joint (1959), The Man in the High Castle (1962, Hugo Award), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and the Valis trilogy (1981). Several of Dick's works have been used as the basis of films, notably the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which became Blade Runner (1982), and the stories that were made into Total Recall (1990) and Minority Report (2002), and his influence is evident in other films.

See his Collected Stories (3 vol., 1990–92) and Selected Letters (1997); G. Lee and D. E. Sauter, ed., What If Our World Is Their Heaven?, (2000), interviews; biographies by Lawrence Sutin (1989) and by his wife, A. R. Dick (1995); studies by B. Gillespie, ed. (1975), H. Pierce (1982), M. H. Greenberg and J. D. Olander, ed. (1983), K. S. Robinson (1984), P. Williams (1986), P. S. Warrick (1987), D. A. Mackey (1988), R. D. Mullen, ed. (1992), and S. J. Umland, ed. (1995).

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