Philip K. Dick

Born Philip Kindred Dick on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, six weeks premature alongside a twin sister, Jane, who died five weeks later of malnutrition, a loss that haunted his fiction as a recurring phantom-twin motif, Dick moved with his mother to the Bay Area as a small child and grew up mostly in Berkeley. He hosted a classical-music program on radio station KSMO at eighteen, worked the counter at a Telegraph Avenue record store, and enrolled at UC Berkeley as a German major in 1949, only to withdraw within months rather than take the mandatory ROTC training his antiwar convictions would not allow. His first professional sale, the short story Beyond Lies the Wub, appeared in 1952, and within a few years he was publishing science fiction at a pace few writers have matched, sustained in part by amphetamines: in 1963 and 1964 alone he wrote eleven novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternate history in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, his only major genre prize despite a career that would eventually include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the source novel for Blade Runner, and Ubik (1969). He married five times and struggled for most of his life with money, mental health, and paranoia that a 1971 burglary of his Marin County home, its safe blown open and his papers rifled by a culprit never identified, did nothing to ease. In February and March of 1974, following the extraction of two impacted wisdom teeth, he underwent a series of visionary experiences he spent the rest of his life trying to interpret, filling some eight thousand handwritten pages of what he called his Exegesis and feeding directly into his final novel, VALIS (1981). He died in Santa Ana, California, on March 2, 1982, at fifty-three, after two strokes, four months before Blade Runner reached theaters.

In February 1974, groggy after having two wisdom teeth removed, Dick opened his door to a pharmacy delivery woman wearing a gold fish pendant and asked what it meant. A beam of pink light, he later wrote, shot from the pendant into his mind and stayed for weeks, an intelligence he spent the rest of his life trying to name.