Philip K. Dick was a writer who drew upon his own life to address the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia and transcendental experiences of all kinds. More than 10 major Hollywood movies are based on his work including Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. Born in 1929 just before the Great Crash, Dick's twin sister died when she was a month old and his parents were divorced by the time he was three. In his teens, he began to show the first signs of mental instability, but by then he was already producing fiction writing of a visionary nature.
A biography of one of the most culturally significant authors in the world. Philip K Dick loosened the bonds of the genre, ultimately making his reputation as a literary writer who happened to write speculative fiction.
Includes the stories that inspired the movies Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Paycheck, and Next "More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds." --The Wall Street Journal The Philip K. Dick Reader Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), Second Variety (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), Paycheck, The Minority Report, and twenty more.
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, written by a psychologist, investigates the inner world of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In 1974, Dick was beset by religious visions, and warned police he was an android. The book explores whether Dick's experience was a spiritual awakening or caused by mental illness.
One of the greatest writers in science fiction history, Philip K. Dick is mostly remembered for such works as Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall. His dark, fascinating work centered on alternate universes and shifting realities in worlds often governed by monopolistic corporations and authoritarian governments. His own life story seems a tussle with reality, cycling through five marriages and becoming increasingly disjointed with fits of paranoia and hallucinations fueled by abuse of drugs meant to stabilize him. His dramatic story is presented unvarnished in this biography.
"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."-Jonathan Lethem Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.
Stuart Hadley is a young radio electronics salesman in early 1950s Oakland, California. He has what many would consider the ideal life; a nice house, a pretty wife, a decent job with prospects for advancement, but he still feels unfulfilled; something is missing from his life. Hadley is an angry young man—an artist, a dreamer, a screw-up. He tries to fill his void first with drinking, and sex, and then with religious fanaticism, but nothing seems to be working, and it is driving him crazy. He reacts to the love of his wife and the kindness of his employer with anxiety and fear. One of the earliest books that Dick ever wrote, and the only novel that has never been published, Voices from the Street is the story of Hadley's descent into depression and madness, and out the other side. Most known in his lifetime as a science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick is growing in reputation as an American writer whose powerful vision is an ironic reflection of the present. This novel completes the publication of his canon. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
"As disturbing and engrossing as a work by Dick himself, Carrere's unconventional biography interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw - from cloning to reality TV - a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions."--BOOK JACKET.
