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Other authors named Philip:
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Author's popularity: -1
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Popularity: 2
Vote: | Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment. |
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Vote: | Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. |
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Vote: | Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. |
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Vote: | Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. |
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Vote: | The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. |
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Vote: | The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. |
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Biography
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Philip Kindred Dick (December 16 1928 – March 2 1982), often known by his initials PKD, or by the pen name Richard Phillips, was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. Though hailed during his lifetime by peers such as Stanislaw Lem, Dick received little public recognition until after his death, when several popular film adaptations of his novels introduced him to a larger audience. His work is now some of the most popular in science fiction, and Dick has gained both general acclaim and critical respect.
Discarding the optimistic and simple world-view of Golden Age science fiction, Dick consistently explored the themes of the nature of reality and humanity in his novels, which were populated by common working people, rather than galactic elites. Foreshadowing the cyberpunk sub-genre, Dick brought the anomic world of Northern California to many of his works. His acclaimed novel, The Man in the High Castle (1963, winner of the Hugo Award), is a pioneering work bridging the genres of alternative history and science fiction. He also produced a tremendous number of short stories and minor works which were published in pulp magazines.
His works are characterized by a constantly eroding sense of reality, with protagonists often discovering that those close to them (or even they themselves) are secretly robots, aliens, supernatural beings, brainwashed spies,
hallucinations, dead
or some combination of the above.
Early life
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago, to Dorothy Kindred Dick. His father, Edgar Dick, was a fraud investigator for the United States Department of Agriculture. He had a twin sister, Jane. Both children were born six weeks premature, and Jane died on January 26, 1929. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to California.
Dick's parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up with his mother. He went to high school in Berkeley and briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in German. He sold records and was a disc jockey before selling his first story in 1952. He wrote full-time, more or less, from that time forward. He sold his first novel in 1955. The 1950s were a hard-scrabble time for Dick, so much so that, as he once said, "we couldn't even pay the late fees on a library book." He associated with the pre-1960s counterculture of California and was sympathetic to beat poets and the Communist Party. There is some dispute regarding the latter and Dick later admitted to being literally thrown out of at least one of their rallies. In 1963, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle. Dick was opposed to the Vietnam War and had a file at the FBI as a result.
Though Dick was hailed as a genius at this time in the SF world, the literary world as a whole was as yet unappreciative, and so he could only publish books at low-paying SF publishers. Consequently, while he would regularly publish novels for the next several years, he continued to struggle financially and psychologically. Even in his later years, he continued to have financial troubles. In the introduction to the 1980 short story collection "The Golden Man", Dick writes: This excerpt shows not only that Dick was continually having monetary troubles, but also the regard other SF writers had for him. Robert Heinlein was Dick's opposite in almost every way--certainly in politics, lifestyle, and writing style--yet they admired each others work. Dick said of Heinlein in the same introduction, "...I consider Heinlein my spiritual father, even though our political ideologies are totally at variance."
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Philip K. Dick".
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