American · b. 1928
Hugo Award; John W. Campbell Memorial Award; SFWA Grand Master (posthumous)
Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction writer whose novels — including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — explored identity, reality, and consciousness with visionary intensity.
Philip K. Dick published over forty novels and more than a hundred short stories in a career defined by extraordinary productivity, visionary imagination, and persistent personal instability. He lived most of his adult life in modest financial circumstances, writing at great speed out of necessity, yet produced a body of work that has proved more durably influential than almost any other science fiction writer of his generation. The films adapted from his work — Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau — have collectively shaped popular ideas of what speculative fiction can be, though the novels are almost always richer than their adaptations.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the source novel for Blade Runner, follows a bounty hunter tasked with “retiring” escaped androids in a devastated post-nuclear San Francisco. The novel’s central question — what constitutes authentic humanity, and whether empathy can be reliably distinguished from its simulation — is handled with more philosophical seriousness and less visual glamour than Ridley Scott’s film. The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS are his other most widely read works, each exploring some version of his central obsessions: the nature of reality, the reliability of perception, and the question of what it means to be a person rather than a mechanism.
Dick’s biography is inseparable from his work in uncomfortable ways: he experienced a period of intense paranormal or psychotic experiences in 1974 that he spent the rest of his life trying to interpret, and his later fiction reflects this. Whether his visions were symptoms of mental illness, genuine spiritual experience, or some combination is a question his writing poses rather than answers. Readers approaching Dick for the first time should start with The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and remain aware that they are in the presence of a genuinely strange and original mind.
by Philip K. Dick
In post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts down rogue androids nearly indistinguishable from humans — the basis for the film Blade Runner.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
An undercover narc in near-future California becomes addicted to the drug he's surveilling, losing his grip on his own identity in this partly autobiographical novel by Philip K. Dick.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
In an overcrowded future Earth, colonists escape their misery through illegal hallucinations mediated by a corporate drug called Can-D. When the magnate Palmer Eldritch returns from Proxima Centauri with a new drug called Chew-Z, reality itself becomes uncertain — because Chew-Z hallucinations may not be hallucinations at all. Dick's most theologically disturbing novel.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
Joe Chip works for a psychic-shielding agency in a world of commercial telepaths, until a bomb blast sends his team into a reality that keeps regressing — a mind-bending exploration of reality, death, and consumerism.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
On a colonised Mars, a repairman named Jack Bohlen has schizophrenia, and an autistic boy named Manfred Steiner may be able to see the future. A corrupt water-union boss wants to exploit Manfred's ability for real estate speculation. The novel explores autism, time, capitalism, and the nature of reality with characteristic Dick intensity.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
An alternate history set in an Axis-occupied America where the Allies lost WWII — Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning masterwork of speculative fiction.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
Horselover Fat — a thinly veiled version of Philip K. Dick — receives a beam of pink light that reveals divine information to him in 1974. VALIS is Dick's attempt to rationalise this experience through science fiction, Gnostic theology, and painful self-examination. Part novel, part theological treatise, part mental breakdown.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Philip K. Dick
Ragle Gumm wins a newspaper contest called Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? every single day. He lives in a pleasant 1950s suburb. He begins to notice that things in his world are slightly wrong — objects dissolve, structures fail to match their descriptions, reality seems to have seams. His comfortable suburban life may be an elaborate construction.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.