Philip K. Dick (Philip Kindred Dick) Biography

American science fictionnovelist, born in Chicago, educated at the University of California. Of his more than thirty novels, the best-known include Time out of Joint (1959); The Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternative history; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), which depicts a society controlled by drug-induced fantasy and television; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), later filmed as Blade Runner, set in a twenty-first century dominated by information technology; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1976), which depicts a police state of the near future; and A Scanner Darkly (1977), a dystopian fantasy, set in California in the 1990s. These works express a blackly comic vision of late twentieth-century America, seen through the distorting glass of the future, depicting a technologically sophisticated, totalitarian society controlled by multinational corporations. Several early novels of a more conventional nature, written during the 1950s and published posthumously, express a similarly acerbic view of the modern world. They include Puttering About in a Small World (1985); Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986); Mary and the Giant (1987); and The Broken Bubble (1988).