Philip K Dick was an American science fiction writer whose life, despite being a short one (he was born in 1928 and died in 1982) was a prolific one in terms of his literary production--44 novels and about 121 short stories according to Wikipedia. A number of popular movies are based on his books/stories: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and Total Recall (based on We Can Remember It For You Wholesale). What struck me when I read about his life was how little money he earned as a sci-fi writer, since that type of literature was not considered mainstream. It was so unfair that he should have struggled in his lifetime to make money when after his death his stories were made into profitable films. He lived long enough to see only one of his books, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, approach the movie screen as Blade Runner; Dick backed Ridley Scott's vision for the film but died shortly before its release in 1982 (source Wikipedia). But that is the inherent nature of an indifferent universe, which does not care a whit whether a writer (or anyone for that matter) succeeds or not.
I am currently reading Dick's novels and have finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Flow My Tears,The Policeman Said, and Ubik. I've purchased two more--A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, as well as a collection of his short stories. Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris (one of my favorite sci-fi novels and movies) was a big fan of Ubik. I've written about Solaris in another post: A New Yorker in Oslo: The Martian Chronicles and Solaris (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com). While I was reading Ubik and Flow My Tears,The Policeman Said, I had the same sorts of feelings as I had while reading Solaris. The first feeling is that I was in the presence of genius, but an otherworldly genius. His imagination knows no (human) bounds. The second was that I had truly been transported to another world, that I was living in that world. It's almost as though both Dick and Lem really lived the experiences and worlds they wrote about. Perhaps they did, even if just in their own minds. I'm not sure how Lem lived his life, but it is well-documented as to how Dick lived his. He was a drug user for most of his life; his choice of drug was amphetamines and he wrote while under the influence of speed, but he also tried psychedelics. He apparently made several suicide attempts and was preoccupied with the topic of mental illness. His stories make you understand the profound possibilities for mind expansion, fragmentation of the mind and thereby fragmentation of one's reality. I can understand that this might hold appeal for certain writers interested in exploring alternate realities, the workings of the mind, and the nature of the world around us and of the universe. Dick wrote at a time (1960s and 70s) when America was undergoing an upheaval of all the norms of society up to that time. The Vietnam War had completely unsettled American society. Psychologists such as Timothy Leary (born around the same time as Dick) were proponents of the use of LSD to treat different mental illnesses as well as to foster mind expansion in the search for personal truth. Leary received a copy of Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Dick was also a fan of H.P. Lovecraft (another favorite author of mine) because Lovecraft managed to convey in his sci-fi horror stories the sense that his stories were real. I read a collection of Lovecraft's stories over a year ago, and they still haunt me to this day. His writing grabs a hold of you and won't let go. It gets under your skin. I feel the same way about Dick's writing. I can recommend this link if you'd like to read more about Dick's interest in Christianity after he had a terrifying vision of what he was told was the devil: When Philip K. Dick turned to Christianity | Salon.com.
Although the Old Testament is not considered to be literally true, it nonetheless presents some interesting divine pronouncements, one of which is “And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die". Adam and Eve were warned against doing this. The implication is that they did not really know evil up to that point; the Garden of Eden was heaven. But they were curious as to what might happen if they did eat the fruit from this tree, egged on by the devil in the shape of a snake. I have always interpreted this passage to mean that humans would face the divine and the anti-divine head-on with no filters and that would mean that they were dead. To do so while living would split their minds apart and probably kill them. Are psychedelic drugs the fruit that could be consumed in order to reach that knowledge? If humans reach it, do they face good or evil or both? What if they cannot handle it? What if it renders them insane? I think there is something to this, but I wouldn't go down that road myself to find the answers. The reason is that I've read and seen too many sci-fi/horror novels and films that deal with such themes. Best to leave them to the realm of fiction. Even though many of these books and films are unsettling and haunting, they provide themes for reflection, which is always a good thing. I'm looking forward to reading more of Dick's works.
