He was a man who wrote about the essence of reality, always questioning the nature of reality and what it means to be alive and to be human in the twentieth century - and his work is just as, if not more, relevant now that we have entered the twenty-first century.

Yes, I'm speaking of Philip K. Dick. (Horselover Fat being an author surrogate and protagonist of his 1981 novel VALIS.) He was a very troubled individual, suffering from severe paranoia - he believed that both the KGB and the FBI were constantly stalking him, and laying traps for him. He even went so far as to accuse them of robbing his house and stealing several documents. (He later said that it was possible that he himself committed the robbery, and then subsequently forgot about committing the crime.) During the period of mid-1970 to 1972, Dick housed a number of teenage drug addicts at his home, during which time Dick's dependence on amphetamines grew so strong that he did not write a word during this period. He suffered from severe agoraphobia, which caused him to miss much of his senior year in high school. You may wonder what the literary work of a man such as this might look like. Well, it is probably best if his work speak for itself. As an introduction (really a mere glimpse) into the type of bizarre worlds that he wrote of, the first line from his 1977 SF novel A Scanner Darkly will have to suffice:

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.

Obviously, one line from one novel is not enough to base any assumptions on. Nonetheless, the literary career of Philip K. Dick is a strange and interesting one. During his lifetime he was met with little critical or commercial success, despite the fact that a handful of highly-respected SF figures - such as Robert Silverberg and Robert A. Heinlein - championed his work. Yet after his death in 1982, his career really took off in Tinseltown, to the point that you would probably know him best from the (nearly always dire) film adaptations of his work: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and others, none of them (save Blade Runner) living up to the promise inherent in Dick's work. Hollywood is especially interested in the work of Dick now, but much of that interest lies in the fact that most of the movies based on his works have made money - without seeming to understand what his work actually means.

The point of this mini-essay is to really highlight the work of this remarkable writer, especially now that the Library of America is reprinting four of Dick's novels. The four novels - The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ubik (1969) - have been selected by Jonathan Lethem, another esteemed author and editor, who states:

"Dick's greatest accomplishment was to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation."

I suppose there is an upside to the fact that Dick's work has been resurrected by Hollywood - without that resurrection, most of his works would likely be long out of print by this point. Nonetheless, the fact is that many people will, at this point, associate Dick's name with Hollywood blockbusters, and, if you read his work, you will find that this association is very much unfair. However, with more publications along the lines of this upcoming Library of America book, I would hope to see Dick's literary career be rejuvenated in and of itself, and not merely because they bear those awful, horrible five words garishly printed on the cover: "NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE."

The Library of America will publish Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s in June 2007.