The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Biographical Material on Philip K. Dick" (1972)

In 1969 Paul Williams said of Philip K. Dick, "I must tell you this... Philip K. Dick will have more impact on the consciousness of this century than William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Author of thirty-one novels and almost two hundred stories published from 1951 on, he won the Hugo Award in 1963 for the Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, Man in the High Castle [1962]. His reputation, especially in intellectual circles, is worldwide; in France, for example, he has more novels in print than has any other science fiction author. The first U.S. science fiction novel to appear in Poland will be his recent Doubleday novel, Ubik [1969], acclaimed by Patrice Duvic of Editions OPTA, Paris (winner of the award for publisher of the year at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in L.A.) as "one of the most important books ever published." In February 1972 he spoke as Guest of Honor at the Second Vancouver Science Fiction Convention and lectured at the University of British Columbia. His most notable novels include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968], Maze of Death [1970], We Can Build You [1972], Martian Time-Slip [1964], Dr. Bloodmoney [1964], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965], Ubik [1969], and [The] Man in the High Castle [1962], Some of his best stories have been published in the paperback collection The Preserving Machine [1969]. Born in Chicago in 1928, Philip K. Dick has spent most of his life in the Bay Area, having attended the University of California at Berkeley. During the late fifties he lived in Point Reyes Station, Marin County, and in the early sixties in San Rafael. Now he resides in the Los Angeles area, where he lectures and writes. His early novels dealt with future societies of an anti-utopian nature; in later novels he pioneered an "inner space" multiple-reality universe presented as hallucinations drug trauma [sic]. His story "Faith of Our Fathers" in Harlan Ellison's mind-shattering anthology Dangerous Visions [1967] received a Hugo nomination and is considered one of the most "dangerous visions" in that superb collection. Recently he completed a massive new novel for Doubleday titled Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said [later published in 1974] and is currently working on a science fiction novel of a different sort: a study of one girl's mind projected onto the universe, in which her qualities, lifestyle, and values form not merely a sociological enclave but the entire world of reality. Its working title is Kathy-Jamis-Linda and threatens to occupy him for what remains of his life. In it he contrasts the authentic human versus what he calls the "android," the reflex machine posing as a living being.