Phillip K. Dick
T HE MA N B E HNI ND T HE A ND R O I DS
The Simple Stuff…
•Date of Birth 16 December 1928,
Chicago, Illinois, USA
•Date of Death 2 March 1982, Santa Ana,
California, USA (heart failure)
•Birth Name Philip Kindred Dick
His Life and his works…
•His parents split during his childhood
and he moved to Berkeley, California
where he lived most of his life
•He became a published author in 1955
•His first short story "Roog.“ and his
first novel, Solar Lottery appeared in
1955
More on him and somewhat chaotic
his life…
• His most productive years were the 1950’s and ‘60’s where he
produced early a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so
novels including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Time Out Of
Joint, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and the Hugo-award
winning The Man In The High Castle.
• He was married five times!
• His career was sidetracked in the early 1970’s by drug experimentation
• Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning
novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
That Same Year…1974…
• Dick would have a intense religious experience that would
forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by
what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least
a God-like being
• Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals
regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the
event.
• At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation
and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme
schizophrenic behavior
His Last Years…
• His final novels deal with the entity he supposedly saw especially in Valis in which the titlecharacter is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a
hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction
writer named Philip K. Dick
• Much of his life he lived pay check to pay check
• He never was quite financially sound until the end of his life partly due to the money he
received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do
Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based
• Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53
• Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works Total Recall (1990),
Impostor (2001), and Minority Report (2002).
• Others that have borrowed ideas from his works include HBO’s Westworld (2016), Ex
Machina (2015), I, Robot (2004)
Interesting Personal Quotes…
• “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away.”
• “Sometimes to go insane is an appropriate response to the World.”
• “The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his
own shadow.”
• “There should be a Clause that if you find God you get to keep
Him.”
• “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation
of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control
the people who must use the words.”
Here it is…Sci-Fi coming to life again…
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0