For Dickheads Only: Personal Reflections on Reading Way Too Much PHILIP K. DICK

As we barrel along into 2024, I find myself casting about for something new and interesting to read.  Lately I’m into memoirs and celebrity biographies.  But in my twenties I was hugely into Dick (read that phrase charitably).  I’d gone to see Ridley Scott’s Director’s Cut of BLADE RUNNER in 1992 — as it was the film’s 10 year anniversary then — and I saw in the opening credits that the movie was based on a novel entitled DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? by the then-unfamiliar-to-me author, Philip D. Dick.  Shortly thereafter I read that book.  Then I read another, and then another, and then took to the collected volumes of short stories written by this guy.  Dick offered no shortage of kooky ideas mixed with philosophical, religious, and paranoid overtones.  PKD (as he’s affectionately called by his fanbase) later suffered drug-induced psychosis or bouts of full-blown schizophrenia (or both, concurrently) and it shows in his work.  

You see, you’ve probably been influenced or entertained by this guy’s output because he wrote so much stuff Hollywood later glommed onto.   I’m sure you’ve heard of — if not seen — a few of the following: TOTAL RECALL (based on the short story WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE), SCREAMERS, PAYCHECK, ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, IMPOSTER, MINORITY REPORT, A SCANNER DARKLY, and more.   Hollywood A-Listers like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford took to his work.  John Lennon was rumored to have circled buying the rights to some of his stuff.  Now, in the dawn of the new year, I’m flirting with reading a few of Dick’s books I never got around to tackling - - especially his later ones that (allegedly) border on being completely unreadable.  

Why, I ask myself?  Clearly the guy was nuts, and reading his stuff often makes me feel bad. It’s so far out there and uniquely imaginative, tho.  Ever thought you’d be manipulated by a dishonest travel company or a Martian government into thinking you were a secret agent after you’d gotten false memories implanted into your brain?  Ever thought you’d meet God, only to find out He was the head of Communist China and really quite a malevolent figure — and only visible temporarily by taking certain psychoactive substances?  Want to read about how to become a Barbie doll for a while after ingesting a certain space chemical, or how a competitor’s drug makes you a mental prisoner of the space explorer who first discovered it?  Weird, right?  

But there’s flashes of genius in Dick’s work.  He’s the only modern science fiction writer to have stories reissued by the Library of America.  Take A SCANNER DARKLY — that’s one book I’ve not read but I saw the 2006 film starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, and Winona Ryder.  There’s a crazy new street drug called Substance D that splits a user’s personality into 2 distinct halves.  Dick’s protagonist (or antihero, whatever) takes the drug and becomes both a street-level addict as well as the police narcotics agent in charge of busting him(self).  Brilliant — but bonkers.  

As I understand it, Dick had a quasi-religious experience after going to the dentist in 1973 — he’d seen a woman at his door with an early-Christian symbol on her necklace, and around that same time he believed God or a space-based intelligence was transmitting information directly into his mind by way a thin pink beam.  He called this entity VALIS - for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System”.  He wrote a trilogy of books in honor of his religiosity that were published shortly before his death in 1982.  I toy with reading these things but again — they’re so far out there.  Don’t believe me?  Read the Wikipedia plot summary for this one:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Invasion.  

Dick had other weird preoccupations.  He later professed to believing reality was just an illusion plastered over biblical times shortly after Christ’s death.  For this reason, he considered himself a Gnostic Christian, and was fascinated by depictions of reality breaking-down in his novels and short stories.  In one of my former-favorites from the 1980’s called LIES INC., Dick details his own drug experiences with LSD, and describes them over the course of quite a few pages in the voice of one of his characters.  It’s weird stuff.  

The problem is, no other SF author does the trick for me.  Once you get a taste for Dick (read that phrase charitably), there’s no one at all quite like him.  Not even remotely.  I found Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series beyond boring.  Frank Herbert’s DUNE was a slog; I tapped out after one or two chapters.  And Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END was, well, childish in comparison (though I did finish it).   

For better or worse, there’s only one SF author that ever actually scratches my itch — it’s like I’ve ingested a space drug that’s made my mind the complete prisoner of PKD’s literature and craziness.  

Long live the works and insanity of Philip K. Dick.  Take a hit for yourself.  

By Geoffrey W. Jackson