If someone were to write a history of the future as it has been dreamed up by Hollywood over the years, the chapter on today's tomorrow would belong in large part to Philip K. Dick.
The pulp sci-fi writer's mind-bending ideas hold a commanding spot in popular culture. Half a dozen movies have been made from his affably dystopian short stories and novels, including Steven Spielberg's well-received "Minority Report," in theaters now; Ridley Scott's landmark "Blade Runner" in 1982; and the big-budget Arnold Schwarzenegger hit "Total Recall" in 1990.
Three more adaptations are in the works, according to Variety: "A Scanner Darkly," which Richard Linklater is directing for executive producers Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney; "Paycheck," in development at Paramount; and "King of the Elves," which is in the budgeting stage at Disney. "Paycheck" has lived up to its title: The short story Dick originally sold for $195 was optioned for close to $2 million, his agent confirmed. If he were still alive, that would make Dick, word for word, one of the highest-paid authors in Hollywood.
Dick's influence through inspiration may be even more pronounced. Several film critics have noted that "The Matrix," "Dark City" and other alternate-reality-gone-horribly-wrong films feel a lot like Dick's novels, especially "Ubik" (1969), which envisions a world of nonstop, ubiquitous, personalized advertising. (In one of the book's more memorable scenes, the hero, Joe Chip, is threatened with a lawsuit by his door.)
The central conceit of "The Truman Show" is the same as Dick's "Time Out of Joint" (1959): A fake town has been constructed around the hero without his knowing it. The technological paranoia at the heart of "The X-Files" and "Enemy of the State" are vintage Dick. Even 2000's "Memento" owes something to Dick, who played around with similar backward-traveling narratives more than 30 years ago.
Sundance has fallen in love with Dick, too. Art house film director Darren Aronofsky said his off-kilter 1998 hit "Pi" was inspired by Dick's novels, as was Linklater's animated "Waking Life" last year.
In literature, some scholars have given Dick credit for godfathering the cyberpunk movement, the noirish wave of sci-fi writing in the late '80s and early '90s that anticipated and chronicled the darker crannies of cyberspace and computing. "The Man in the High Castle," which won science fiction's top honor, the Hugo Award, in 1963, has been called a classic of the genre. His novels are required reading in many college lit classes and Dick has developed a cult following on campuses.
Seventeen of Dick's books are in print, some of them for the first time. Vintage has accelerated plans to put 13 others into circulation, hoping to have his entire oeuvre in bookstores within two years. In the United States alone, Dick's books sold 500,000 copies last year; worldwide, the number is two to three times that, his agent says.
And to top it off, his autobiographical novel "Valis" has been made into an opera.
"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th Century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half," wrote "Maus" author Art Spiegelman.
Alas, such reverence and its rewards utterly eluded Dick while he was alive. He wrote 36 novels and more than 100 short stories without making much money or gaining much notice. He liked to tell people he survived on dog food during one hard stretch, and he often wrote at breakneck speed, while chomping amphetamines, just to stay ahead of bill collectors. Dick succumbed to a stroke 20 years ago at the age of 53, just before the first of the films based on his work, "Blade Runner," was released.
If you've read any of Dick's stories, though, you have to assume that somewhere in an alternate universe he's wearing a lopsided grin.
"Actually, I think he would be amused by his celebrity," says Isa Hackett, one of his three children.
A man wildly more popular postmortem, shaping our visions of the future from his grave, is just the kind of paradox Dick would have relished. (In "Valis," a character named Phil Dick is told that the government plans to write and publish novels in his name after his death.)
Though he wrote pulp fiction, Dick was foremost an intellectual puzzlemaker. Using a weird algebra of shifting realities, all-encompassing paranoia and slam-bang plots, he constructed wildly original mind games that call into question the nature of reality itself. Like all good puzzles, though, Dick's stories often have elegant, gasp-inducing solutions: Think O. Henry with a zap gun.
His own life story, however, may have been the most tangled brainteaser he ever concocted, with an ending as surprising as any in his books.
Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane, were born Dec. 16, 1928, in Chicago. Jane, however, survived only 40 days. It was a loss that haunted Dick and his work, leaving him with a lifelong sense of culpability for the death and surfacing in his novels repeatedly as a fixation on split identities and a search for wholeness.
In 1930, Dick and his mother settled in Berkeley, Calif., the city that was to shape his anti-authoritarian world view. He wrote his first novel at 14 and never stopped. In one five-year period, he wrote 16 novels, churning out as many as 68 pages a day.
He briefly attended UC-Berkeley but dropped out rather than fulfill the ROTC requirement. During the '60s, Dick became a bona fide hippie, immersing himself in the counterculture and in antiwar activities, as well as drugs. His house was broken into during the period, and his belongings and papers were destroyed by a bomb planted inside, feeding his already lush paranoia. He said Marin County officials warned him to leave the area or he'd be shot in the back.
He moved to the burbs and spent much of his writing life exploring the rough edges of psychosis, intoxication and hallucinated worlds.
"He wasn't remotely schizophrenic," says Dick's longtime friend and agent Russell Galen. "There was never any diagnosis of mental illness, no medical evidence for that whatsoever."
His life was certainly troubled, though. He burned through five marriages, lived with street people for a time, wore threadbare clothes most of his life, wrote to the FBI about suspected neo-Nazi plots and suffered what he thought was a nervous breakdown. Toward the end of his life, he claimed to have had a vision in which he was contacted by an alien being he called Valis, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. He spent the rest of his life writing about the experience.
"He was very gifted intellectually, and yet so emotionally fragile," says Hackett, who was a teenager when her father died. "He was often not comfortable in his own skin, as he suffered from terrible bouts of anxiety and depression."
At the same time, Hackett says, "he had a fantastic sense of humor, and he could be very charming and charismatic. His sensitivities gave him great empathy for the suffering of others."
John Simons, professor of literature at Colorado College and an expert on Dick's works, says that what made Dick's writing worthy made his life difficult.
"Dick was a strange wonderful/terrible man," Simons argues. "Crazy and compassionate, violent and gentle, mesmerizing and terrifying."
He was his own puzzle, in other words, and remained so even in death. When his heart failed after a stroke in 1982, Dick finally fulfilled his lifelong desire to be reunited with his twin sister. At his request, Dick was buried in a cemetery plot in Fort Morgan, Colo. -- the state where his parents courted -- alongside the tiny body of Jane.
Why, a rational metroplex-goer must ask, has mainstream Hollywood -- Spielberg and Tom Cruise, no less, the mainest of streams -- embraced such a countercultural tributary of loopiness and paranoia? It's as if Frank Capra had teamed up with Hunter S. Thompson for a five-pic deal.
"You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood," Dick once told an interviewer.
"There is probably more than one answer to this question," Hackett says. His "wow" factor is how recognizable the future he imagined is now, she says, because he was one of the first writers to focus on the many downsides of technology.
Others agree. "Dick's concerns are in sync with our times, with the real future we are facing, the one dominated by media, computers and virtual reality, and by commerciality rather than by rocket ships and ray guns and Orwellian totalitarianism," says Gary Goldman, who helped write the screenplay for "Total Recall" and was one of the first writers on the "Minority Report" script, as well as the movie's executive producer.
Dick himself wrote: "We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations. We are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power."
"Minority Report" the movie, which actually taps several Dickian ideas, is Exhibit A for the case. Omnipresent, electronic billboards scan your retinas for ID so they can personalize their spiel as you pass by. Think Amazon.com's automatic lists of book suggestions gone nuclear.
And the plot is, among many other things, an argument about safety vs. liberty, creepily relevant at the moment as Washington debates which civil liberties it's willing to surrender to crack down on terrorism. The conundrum Dick posits: In the interest of a crime-free city, would you be willing to arrest people before they commit crimes if psychics could predict accurately that they were going to?
Spielberg's ending sides with the view of Benjamin Franklin, who famously warned that those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither.
The short story is more paradoxical. The system of arresting people who haven't done anything yet remains intact in Dick's ending. And his last sentence suggests that the flaw in the system -- that the psychics are not infallible -- will probably recur as well. In many of his stories, Dick concludes that new technology often creates new problems of its own rather than solving the ones it was designed to fix.
But Galen doesn't buy the argument that Dick was ahead of his time. Dick wrote about issues that were just as relevant in the '50s and '60s, he argues.
"The difference is that the prejudice against him during his life because he wrote science fiction stories has slowly melted away," Galen says. "Science fiction is more accepted now."
Thanks, once again, to the movies. "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "E.T.," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Blade Runner" have broken through to mass audiences, making the galaxy safe for science fiction of all sorts, even the outrageous books of Philip K. Dick.
Part of the reason that Dick's work -- and science fiction in general -- translate so well to the big screen is that movies themselves are a kind of science fiction.
J.P. Telotte, professor of literature, communication and culture at Georgia Tech, calls cinema "fundamentally a kind of time machine, a device that effectively freed both its audience and its early users from a conventional sense of place and time." You walk into a theater and you are essentially transported, visually and emotionally, to an alternative reality. Such transportations are Dick's chief subject.
Others say his appeal is simpler, and more crass.
"The Dick projects that have become big-budget movies all have a simple but fascinating premise that gets expressed in a chase," says Goldman.
Hollywood loves Dick, the argument goes, because he was a master at creating "high concept" hooks that grab your attention in 10 seconds, Galen said. These one-line ideas can be fully developed in the very short space that a movie allows.
For example:
• An android hunter starts to wonder if he's an android himself. ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," aka "Blade Runner")
• The Germans and the Japanese have won World War II and divided America in two. Or have they? ("The Man in the High Castle")
• A detective whose two brain hemispheres have stopped talking to each other ends up spying on himself. ("A Scanner Darkly")
"Hollywood is interested in Dick for all the wrong reasons," Galen says. "It's as if a brain surgeon who also happens to be a gorgeous supermodel walked into a party and everyone said, 'Show us your breasts!' "
"Dick is fearless in pursuing the ramifications of his ideas," Goldman says. Hollywood is more squeamish. Movies made from his books miss most of his searching and philosophizing, the real art he made out of pulp.
But movies haven't hurt Dick's career, or his storytelling. Dick wrote so fast, sampling so many ideas, it was more like riffing, like jazz solos with words. Directors have taken some of these great riffs and added bass and drums, developing ideas and characters that Dick dropped before they were fully realized.
Dick acknowledged, sort of, that a rough cut of "Blade Runner" he saw just before he died had its merits.
"It was terrific," he wrote. "It bore no relation to the book. Oddly, in some ways it was better. What my story will become is one titanic, lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch.
"As a writer, though, I'd like to see some of my ideas, not just the special effects of my ideas, used."
Dick seems to be getting his wish.
"Hollywood has embraced Dick's work because the language of cinema is changing," says Jason Koornick, creator of PhilipKDick.com. Goldman concurs, arguing that an era of simplification in the movies is over, and now, as in the '60s, moviegoers are more open to unusual approaches to storytelling and narrative structure.
"It is no accident that a '60s writer like Dick is part of a revival of '60s cinema style," Goldman says.
Simons argues that Dick's lasting appeal is similar to Alfred Hitchcock's in that his heroes are average Joes and Jolenes confronting a confusing, often incomprehensible world. "Dick's basic question is: What's real or not real? What is human and what is not?" Those are questions that resonate right now, Simons says, and always will.
Dick had some answers to his questions, too, a method behind the madnesses he spun. What is most human is empathy, he believed, and acts of kindness, especially in worlds in which people behave more like the machines that surround them than humans. The test to tell the difference between a replicant and a human in "Androids" was a test for empathy.
"I like to build universes that do fall apart," Dick wrote, because "objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new."
