Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Philip K. Dick’s life was complex since his birth: he and his twin sister were born prematurely and she died after a few weeks, an event that left him with a very strong attachment. His parents divorced after a few years and he went to live with his mother in Berkeley, California. There he also attended the university but left it for reasons that, according to what was later told by his third wife Anne, were related to his growing anxiety problems and the refusal of a military training course connected to the university’s attendance.

For a few years Philip K. Dick worked in a record store but in 1952 began his career as a writer with the publication of his first short story, “Beyond Lies the Wub”, in the magazine “Planet Stories”. He decided to devote himself full time to that activity and, after publishing a lot of short fiction in various science fiction magazines, in 1955 he published his first novel, “Solar Lottery”. In those years he wrote several novels but some were published only years later and some others got lost.

From the beginning of his career, Philip K. Dick offered his readers stories in which the boundary between reality and appearance is very thin or even reality is anything but certain such as “Eye in the Sky” (1957), “Time Out of Joint” (1959), “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), winner of the Hugo Award, and “The Penultimate Truth” (1964). From this point of view “Ubik” (1969) represents in some ways his peak.

The ambiguous reality manifests itself in Philip K. Dick’s works in different ways, even in the nature of the characters, since the boundary between human and copy is also thin. It’s a subject treated in various ways in novels such as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968), from which the movie “Blade Runner” by Ridley Scott was adapted, “We Can Build You” (1972).

Philip K. Dick also tried to write non-science fiction novels as he earned little as a genre writer but without success. In 1959 he wrote “Confessions of a Crap Artist” but only in 1976, he managed to publish it. Other non-science fiction novels were published only posthumously.

In 1974 something happened to Philip K. Dick. He described it as a pink ray in his mind. Someone explained it as a mild stroke but it’s impossible to say what really happened, especially with a writer who has made of reality fragmentation his trademark. Dick used amphetamines a lot, so much to develop a drug addiction, at the center of the novel “A Scanner Darkly” (1977), while the use of other drugs is linked to rumors spread by other people but without foundation. He also had some psychological problems, linked in some cases to the difficult relationships with his various wives.

Basically, it’s hard to understand what really happened to Philip K. Dick. The fact is that in subsequent years Philip K. Dick started interpreting some of the events of his life in a mystical / religious way. He explains it in his article “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”. For this reason, his last novels have strong philosophical / religious content and form what is called the VALIS trilogy, which includes “VALIS” (1981), “The Divine Invasion” (1981), and “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” (1982). A collection of reflections on these subjects, some of which are already present in his last novels, was collected posthumously in “The Exegesis of Philip K Dick”, published only in 2011.

In the early 1980s, Philip K. Dick worked on the screenplay for “Blade Runner” but died on March 2, 1982, after a stroke. At his request, he was buried next to his twin sister. After his death his fame grew noticeably with a new wave of reprints of his novels, the publication of some that had remained unpublished when he was alive and the production of movies and TV shows adapted from his works. Dick has become an object of study, also as a precursor of postmodernism, with a reputation that has long gone far beyond the science fiction genre.