Born in Chicago in December 1928, died in Santa Ana in March 1982.
Philip Kindred Dick started his life six weeks early, along with a twin sister, who died six weeks later. After this, the Dick family left Chicago and spent several years moving around the West Coast following Father Dick’s job assignments with the Dept. of Agriculture. After five years, Mother Dick née Kindred got sick of all the moving and filed for divorce. Then she took little Philip with her to Washington, DC and stuck him in a Quaker school.
After graduating, Philip returned to sunny California to start his studies at Berkeley. He never settled on a major, but did pick up a philosophy habit. Then he dropped out of school. He started writing at age 23 and spent the next ten years chronically broke and constantly rejected. His first big break was The Man in the High Castle, which won him a Hugo Award in 1962. But even with such an accolade, he could only get his work published in low-paying scifi rags. The grind of the pulp industry led to a decade of amphetamine abuse, during which he wrote twenty-one novels before burning out in 1970. Two years later, he tried to kill himself with a bottle of potassium bromide. He survived, but was much weirder for it.
Over his lifetime Philip K. Dick married and divorced five times. Out of this came three children, all of them half-siblings.
A Beam Pinkly
“I don’t believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and he is more than the universe. The universe is an extension of God into space and time. That’s the premise I start from in my work, that so-called ‘reality’ is a mass delusion that we’ve all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure.”
Philip K. Dick
In 1974 a girl came to his house to deliver some drugs. She was wearing a Christian fish necklace and when it caught the sun, Philip K. Dick saw a pink beam emanate from it. He believed the beam was an intelligent force that imparted wisdom and clairvoyance. After his encounter with the beam girl, he experienced weeks of hallucinations that continued even without the drugs. Along with the pink beam, which he’d see again and again, he saw geometric patterns, flashes of Jesus, and scenes from ancient Rome. He came to believe he was living two lives, one as himself and one as a persecuted Christian in first-century Rome named Thomas. Later that year, Philip went a bit nuts over communism and wrote a letter to the FBI accusing various professors and writers of being communist agents sent to America to sway public opinion.
Oddly enough, Carl Jung had a similar parallel lives experience in childhood. Dick was heavily influenced by Jungian concepts, particularly collective unconscious, mass hallucination, synchronicity, and personality theory. Recurring themes throughout all of his books focus on the uncertainty of reality and the fragility of personal identity.
“What constitutes the authentic human being?”
Philip K. Dick went through a lot of political phases, and even more mystical phases. In his young years, he went attended Communist Party meetings, but eventually turned into an anti-communist libertarian who sometimes described himself as a “religious anarchist.” He hated the U.S. government as much as he hated the Soviet Union, and dreamed of a government so decentralized that it was barely relevant. In 1968, he dabbled a bit in the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest, pledging to pay no federal income tax as long as the Vietnam War was active. His passions waned after the IRS confiscated his car.
In his early fifties, he suffered a pair of back to back strokes that left him brain dead. After a week, he was taken off life support. His father took his ashes to Colorado, where they were buried next to his twin sister’s. Four months later the first film adaptation of his work, Blade Runner, based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was released.
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