You don’t know what you think you know.
But that’s what they want you to think, no?
A poet of paranoia, an artist of angst, a man whose sole form of daily exercise was whipping his head around to look back over his shoulder: That was Philip K. Dick, the Chicago native whose science-fiction novels and short stories inspired some of the most vividly original films of the last two decades, including “Minority Report,” which opens Friday, as well as “Blade Runner” (1982), “Total Recall” (1990) and “Screamers” (1995).
Dick died in 1982 at 52, just as decades of hard work were starting to pay off, just as his stories were achieving the mainstream success for which he had long yearned. For a man who believed the world quite possibly was out to get him, the irony is a little too rich, a little too much like a sucker-punch from God in the solar plexus.
“He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to die,” said Russell Galen, Dick’s literary agent for the last five years of the author’s life, who continues to represent Dick’s work. “He died on the eve of his popularity. The irony is just beyond belief.”
Or maybe not — only because in Dick’s world, nothing is beyond belief. Everything is possible. Anything that can happen, does, and it usually turns out much worse than you thought it would.
You know Dick’s work even if you don’t think you do. His ideas have permeated popular culture the old-fashioned way — not through the calculated labors of armies of black-clad publicists but through the strength and urgency of his stories. His work has burrowed its way into movies, plays and the collective nightmares of the technology-besotted 21st Century world, a world of wily robots and nosy governments and sweaty dread.
“Phil Dick was a novelist of ideas,” Galen said. “His books make you think. You think about them not days, not weeks, but decades after you put them down.”
Sure, you say, but that’s just a salesman talking; Galen racks up a profit every time somebody buys one of Dick’s 30 novels or compilations of his more than 100 short stories. Naturally he would claim that Dick knew his way around a paragraph.
A more diverse audience
But Galen has friends in highbrow places. Since Dick’s death, the author’s work has moved steadily from the center of a worship circle ringed by a small cult of sleep-deprived sci-fi fans to a high, windy plain attended by a much larger and more diverse audience. His themes — alienation, menace, a tenuous and unsettled relationship to reality, indeed a deep-seated doubtfulness that reality exists in the first place — seem as fresh and fret-inducing as a CNN bulletin that just broke into regular programming, even though Dick wrote about them, in some cases, almost a half-century ago.
“Those of us who’ve been reading him are not surprised,” said Paul Williams, a longtime friend who served as Dick’s literary executor. “We believed it would happen. He had — he has — a unique voice. He’ll be remembered as a great novelist of the 20th Century.”
Lawrence Sutin, author of the definitive biography “Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick,” said: “He was a strikingly original writer who brought new philosophical and psychological depth to the science-fiction genre. The fertility of his ideas is such that his work has proved a virtual gold mine for screenplay writers looking for startling future frameworks within which to release Hollywood-style special effects.”
Hence “Minority Report,” the upcoming film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise. In Dick’s short story of the same name, he takes a cool notion and, instead of being so enamored with the “Gee whiz!” quality of the abstract idea that it floats overhead on a breeze of theory, keeps it grounded with down-to-earth characters and plausible dialogue. Dick’s ambling, we’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world tone turns the reader into a sitting duck for the intellectual fireworks to come.
Feeling the fear
The story, set in a future in which “Pre-Cogs” — devices that can predict future crime — tip off law enforcement authorities who then round up the incipient criminals, unfolds through Anderton’s point of view. When he feels “a cold fear” at the realization that the Pre-Cogs have fingered him, you feel it too. When he runs, you’re running right along with him. Reading a Dick story, you almost want to check the upper right-hand corner to see if your finger leaves a dot of sweat when you turn the page.
Dick employs the same casual verisimilitude in novels such as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which became the film “Blade Runner,” and short stories such as “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which was turned into “Total Recall,” and “Second Variety,” which became “Screamers.”
Unlike science fiction tales that take their cues from leaping rockets and perilous planetary exploration, Dick’s generally stay closer to home: His preferred terrain is the nightmare of the everyday, spreading its darkness over the future like a bat’s wing. Somebody — the government, big business, a guilty conscience, aliens, God — is always out to get you. It’s a kind of strolling sidewalk paranoia, a metronomic dread embedded in ordinary existence. “A slow, cold chill settled over him, numbing his heart,” the author writes of the hapless scientist in the short story “Fair Game.”
Chicago roots
The man who wrote those eloquent fables of agitation was born in Chicago on Dec. 16, 1928, Sutin said, to parents who had moved there from Washington, D.C. Dick’s father, Edgar, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The author had a twin sister, Jane, who died during that first winter, leaving a permanent scar on Dick’s psyche, Sutin and others have said.
The family moved to California the next year, settling in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, Sutin said. He wrote constantly, turning out stories in those pre-laptop days on a typewriter that he kept busy long into the night, using smokeless tobacco — snuff — to stoke his imagination. “The words came out in a white heat,” Williams recalled. The urge to communicate, to spill his ideas the way a sneaky kid might dump marbles in a movie lobby just to watch the people lose their balance, burned in him. And in between stories, he wrote dozens of letters a day to friends and fans.
By all accounts, Dick was a tense, moody, troubled man who went through five marriages and battled depression, agoraphobia, anxiety and an addiction to amphetamines — the last prescribed to deal with the first three, but which, in a twist Dick might have put in a short story, only made matters worse. He had severe high blood pressure yet “didn’t take care of himself,” Galen said. In 1982, he died of a stroke a short time after viewing some early cuts of “Blade Runner.”
“He was very happy about `Blade Runner,'” Williams said. “He loved the idea of his books going out into the world that way.”
Added Galen, “He was awed by the whole idea of `Blade Runner.’ He said to me, `They took something that was in my brain, they took it out and made it real.’ He was like a little kid about it. He was going to rent a tuxedo and go to the premiere and meet the stars.”
Dick’s increasing popularity at the time of his death wasn’t luck — it was justice, according to Galen. “You take away the science-fiction veneer and these are stories that any intelligent reader would enjoy. My real accomplishment for Phil was to get these books re-published by a non-science-fiction publisher,” which he did when Vintage agreed in 1991 to repackage Dick’s work — minus traditional sci-fi covers with what Galen said the publishing industry calls B.E.M.: “bug-eyed monsters.”
Untimely success
And then there was Hollywood, which gradually began buying Dick’s stories — and whose newfound interest made the timing of his demise especially cruel.
“When the world caught up with him,” Galen said, “he died.”
But in a more reflective mood — and in yet another twist that might have intrigued Dick — Galen admitted that maybe a rich and famous Philip K. Dick wouldn’t have been a Philip K. Dick whose work anybody wanted to read anymore. “It would have corrupted him. His work came out of being in the ghetto [of sci-fi writing]. It emerged from being isolated from mainstream society.
“Make him the belle of Hollywood and what would that do to his inner angst?”
