Dick, Philip K.

Dick, Philip K. (Philip Kindred Dick), 1928–82, 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, film 2006), 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), Minority Report (2002), and Next (2007). In 2007 Dick posthumously reached the pinnacle of American literary respectability when four of his 1960s novels—The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik—were reissued by the Library of America.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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