Counterfeit Worlds: The Cinematic Universes of Philip K. Dick

INTRODUCTION

THE WORLDS DICK MADE

‘In my stories and novels, I often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person, while the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones …’

Philip K. Dick, ‘If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’, 1977 speech delivered at the Metz Festival, France

The hottest writer in Hollywood today has been dead for over 40 years. Philip K. Dick created the future in which we now live. At the very least, he was writing about it long before it ever took shape. That foresight makes this acclaimed writer of the American pulp SF era of the 1950s and 1960s a kind of Precog – a ‘precognitive’ who, like the characters in the film Minority Report (based on a Dick short story), can somehow discern the future … Now, movies and TV shows based on ideas from his short stories and novels feed our heads, as the world around us becomes ever more like those counterfeit worlds he wrote of in his fiction.

Art Spiegelman, acclaimed writer/illustrator of the holocaust graphic novel Maus said of Dick: ‘What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.’ Fellow SF author Ursula K. LeGuin saw Dick as ‘our own homegrown Borges’, while 1960s counter-culture guru Timothy Leary called him ‘a major 21st-century writer, an influential fictional philosopher of the quantum age.’ Dick’s work appealed across a broad spectrum of readers, from philosophers and other writers and thinkers, to SF fans and scientists, to moviemakers worldwide.

If science fiction can be defined as the literature of ideas, then the work of Philip K. Dick is science fiction par excellence as it contains more off-the-wall ideas per page than that of most other writers. Dick returned obsessively to a set of key themes, with the nature of reality and what it means to be human his two main philosophical concerns. He wrapped these often deep-and-meaningful cognitions in all-out action-packed pulp storylines, which makes his work attractive to Hollywood (and beyond).

It is this fertile feeding ground for high concept notions that has made Dick’s considerable volume of work the prime source for many of the biggest-grossing science fiction movies of the past 40 years. Direct adaptations of his work include the blockbusters Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as the critically acclaimed Blade Runner, but other successful films like The Truman Show and The Matrix trilogy would likely not have existed as they do (or have been so readily accepted by the moviegoing public) if the adjective ‘phildickian’ (defined as ‘having the qualities of a Philip K. Dick story’) had not entered the popular lexicon. These films are inspired, directly or indirectly, by ‘phildickian’ concepts, arising from the work of the 20th century’s most unsung literary genius.

Dick was a pulp SF author who began to ply his trade in the early 1950s for US science fiction short story magazines like If, Astounding, and Galaxy. He worked fast, churning out hundreds of stories, often selling them for little more than $100 each. Eventually, Dick moved onto the growing field of science fiction novels where he could earn up to $1,000 as an advance for each novel. He still had to work fast and be hyper-productive to make a decent living, something he struggled with throughout his life.

His work throughout the 1960s was often published as part of the Ace Doubles series which presented two short, snappy SF tales back-to-back for the price of one (often selling for under one dollar). While Dick gained a loyal fan following through that decade, the wider fame and acclaim which he sought eluded him. He also lived much of his life struggling to make ends meet as his writing failed to provide anywhere near an adequate income for him or his multiple families. His agent, Russell Galen, admitted as much in Wired magazine: ‘Phil’s work came out of an atmosphere of want and struggle. He was as prolific as he was because he needed money.’

Ironically, movie rights to his short stories have sold to Hollywood studios for sums that hugely exceed Dick’s entire lifetime earnings from his then under-appreciated writing. Case in point: Paycheck. The original short story sold to Imagination magazine in 1954 for the princely sum of $195. The film rights reportedly cost Paramount around $2 million, about 10,000 times the amount Dick was paid for originating the idea. ‘I think he would have fallen over backwards to see what Steven Spielberg paid for the rights to the short story "The Minority Report",’ noted fellow author and Dick acolyte James Blaylock in the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘Philip was the archetypal writer who lived on nothing but his meagre royalties … and then he died.’

Dick’s frequent attempts at cracking mainstream fiction reflecting suburban life in 1950s and 1960s California remained unpublished until after his death. The popular perception of Dick in the SF community was of a drug-addled (he admitted to using copious amounts of speed to fuel his writing), would-be messiah who’d gone off the rails after claiming to have seen God in 1974. Apart from some early radio dramatisations, his work remained unadapted for other media until Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner wowed appreciative cinema audiences in 1982. By then, Philip K. Dick was dead of a heart attack at the tragically early age of 53.

It was only after his death and the failure of Blade Runner at the box office that the cult of Philip K. Dick really took off. ‘Clearly Dick was ahead of his time,’ wrote Galen in Writer’s Digest. ‘The very elements that once branded him not fit for mainstream audiences now seem enlightened and fresh, raising disturbing questions that force us to think about the implications of modern life.’ Throughout the 1980s Dick’s science fiction came back into print and many of the unpublished mainstream novels saw print for the first time, providing a more rounded picture of the author and his work. Biographies began to appear, just as the influence of the visuals and atmosphere of Scott’s Blade Runner dominated advertising and SF filmmaking. Dick’s questioning of the nature of reality and of humanity began to become common currency in millennium media. Suddenly, the exploration of counterfeit worlds was cool.

Creative people in Hollywood had not given up on Philip K. Dick, despite the initial failure of Blade Runner. The release of Total Recall in 1990 – which proved to be the blockbuster that Blade Runner had not been – was the result of many years of endeavour to get another Philip K. Dick project into cinemas. Then the floodgates opened and many projects followed: Screamers, a Total Recall TV series which seemed to owe more to Blade Runner for its style, Impostor, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, John Woo’s Paycheck, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, and Lee Tamahori’s Next. Suddenly, Philip K. Dick was the hottest story source in Hollywood, yet he’d been dead for 20 years!

The films and TV shows would continue into the first two decades of the 21st century and beyond, from the independently-produced Radio Free Albemuth (from one of Dick’s trickier novels) and The Adjustment Bureau to TV series based on the Minority Report movie and Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. An anthology series – Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams – adapted 10 of his best short stories for TV, while Blade Runner proved particularly fertile ground, with a big screen sequel (Blade Runner 2049), an animated TV series (Blade Runner: Black Lotus), and a TV sequel produced by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner 2099.

Dick himself would have appreciated the films and shows made from his work, especially perhaps the French character drama Confessions d’un Barjo, a faithful (though transposed to France) version of his realist novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written in 1959, but not published until 1975) and Richard Linklater’s pseudo-animated take on his confessional drug culture novel A Scanner Darkly. Dick did see some footage from Blade Runner before his untimely death and despite initially fighting the project, he was won over by the dense visual world director Ridley Scott was creating. ‘I thought, these guys have figured out what life is going to be like 40 years from now,’ Dick told interviewer Gregg Rickman. ‘I’m completely convinced.’

Dick was a confirmed movie fan, though he preferred to watch them on cable TV later in his life than visit cinemas as he suffered from anxiety in crowds. According to Lawrence Sutin’s definitive Dick biography, Divine Invasions, his father Edgar had written an unpublished family memoir called As I Remember Them. That source indicates that in telling Dick about his experiences in the First World War, where he’d served on the front lines, he’d taken him to see his first movie: 1931’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Early in his pulp writing career, it seems Dick was a more regular attendee at the cinema. Kleo Apostolides, Dick’s second wife, recalled their 1950s moviegoing habits: ‘Movies were a little difficult. The Roxy Theatre was an artsy theatre that showed strange, foreign films we wanted to see, but we didn’t always have the money. We’d sneak in. Every so often our timing was off and Phil would be acutely embarrassed and make a big show of saying goodbye to me and buying my ticket and going home …’

Dick biographer Daryl Mason claimed of Dick’s love of movies: ‘It’s important to note how much impact films did have on Dick’s life, his work and his emotions. He was pushing from the mid-1950s onwards to get films and TV shows made from his stories. Obviously the fees paid were influential, but from his first exposure to the cinema at three years old, and the reality-defining Second World War-era newsreels he watched as a teenager, he never lost his love for movies and consciously wrote some stories that he hoped would interest producers.’

By the time Blade Runner was in production, Dick was being invited into Hollywood elite circles to see the results of his work being transferred to the big screen. If he’d lived beyond 1982, it’s likely that Dick would have become directly involved in many of the film productions later made from his novels and short stories, as well as possibly writing directly for the screen (he’d adapted his own novel Ubik as an unmade screenplay in the early 1970s), despite his reluctance to play the Hollywood game.

By 2005, Dick’s star had risen so far – both as a literary figure and as a source for some of cinema’s most mind-bending movies – that he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Alongside Minority Report director Steven Spielberg, stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and SF artist Chesley Bonestell, Dick took his place alongside 36 other such science fiction literary luminaries as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov. Honouring the work of ‘science fiction’s greatest creators’ the SF Hall of Fame boosts its numbers by up to four new names each year.

It is perhaps not the case that Philip K. Dick was ahead of his time in creating his visions of a media-manipulated world in which global corporations ride roughshod over ordinary folks, where memory cannot be trusted and moods can be controlled and altered through drugs and technology, where the very ‘humanness’ of the person next to you cannot be taken for granted. Perhaps we have simply fallen into a world patterned after Philip K. Dick’s fiction: like the characters in Ubik trapped in ColdPac but believing they are experiencing the real world, or the protagonists of Eye in the Sky trapped one after another in each other’s paranoid fantasies. Dick didn’t predict our world, instead our counterfeit world has become a Philip K. Dick novel.

ONE

THE VARIABLE MAN

‘People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams and fears are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.’

Philip K. Dick, from the Introduction to The Golden Man, 1981

Born in Chicago on 16 December 1928, Philip Kindred Dick was accompanied into the world by his twin sister Jane Charlotte. The twins were six weeks premature and in a strange numerical twist Jane died exactly six weeks later … Although he could not possibly remember the actual event, being only six weeks old and sickly himself, for Philip K. Dick the death of his twin sister was to haunt his writing and his personal life through to his own death a mere 53 years later.

Dick’s mother, Dorothy Kindred, was a tall, gaunt-looking woman who had no idea that in the winter of 1928 she was due to deliver not one but two children. His father, Joseph Edgar Dick (known as Ted or Edgar), worked for the US Department of Agriculture. The couple had recently relocated from Washington to Chicago due to Ted’s employment.

Dick had been born first, at noon, 20 minutes ahead of his ill-fated sister. He weighed in at a frail four-and-a-quarter pounds. Despite his tiny size, he was able to make an astonishing amount of noise. Jane, dark-haired and a mere three-and-a-half pounds, followed her brother into that unforgiving, freezing 1928 Chicago winter.

Undernourished and barely looked after by a mother who was not prepared for the task and a father who was often absent at work or at his men’s club, the newly-born twin Dick children struggled for survival. Strangely, by the mid-1930s Dorothy would be employed by the Federal Children’s Bureau as the author of publicly-available childcare pamphlets, suggesting she must have been an authority on raising children. Dorothy’s own mother, Edna, joined the family to help out as 1929 dawned, but even she – an experienced mother – could do little to help the fading twins. At least Edna realised the seriousness of the situation and arranged for the suffering children to be taken to hospital. On 26 January 1929, Jane Charlotte Dick died en route to hospital. Her brother, Phil, spent weeks on a ventilator until, reaching the weight of five pounds, he was allowed home, along with a supply of a special formula food. Jane was buried in the Fort Morgan cemetery in Colorado, near the town where Edgar and Dorothy had met. At his death, aged 53 in 1982, Philip K. Dick would be buried beside his sister in the same Colorado cemetery.

This was all related to Dick in some detail in a letter from his mother dated 2 August 1975. Dorothy had repeatedly told young Phil the nightmarish story of his and Jane’s birth throughout his childhood. His missing sister came to life in his imagination, taking firm hold, so much so that her absence would later come to dominate his creative life. Repeatedly told the story of those traumatic first few weeks of life by Dorothy, as if in some form of guilty mea culpa, Dick later realised that this knowledge had not served him in a positive way. ‘I heard about Jane a lot, and it wasn’t good for me,’ he told his third wife Anne, according to her memoir In Search of Philip K. Dick.

The death of his sister didn’t just have a profound effect on Dick’s psyche and psychological make-up, it made an immediate difference to his family situation. The previously strong relationship between his mother and father broke down in the wake of their daughter’s death, and by 1933 Edgar had departed from his family, leaving Dick with the mother he would grow to blame for the death of his sister.

The impact of the loss of Jane on Dick’s fictional universe cannot be over-estimated. Several of his stories and novels rely on notions of twinning, such as the real/unreal or human/android dichotomies that dominated much of his best work. In particular, Dr Bloodmoney (1965), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Divine Invasion (1981) feature twins or twinned characters, such as Edie and Bill in Dr Bloodmoney, Fred/Robert Arctor in A Scanner Darkly, and Horselover Fat/Phil Dick in Valis. Edie and Bill most vividly capture the concept that Dick sometimes expressed that his dead twin somehow lived on within him. Little girl Edie has within her an unborn twin in the form of Bill, located in her left side near the appendix. In the post-apocalyptic 1981 setting of Dr Bloodmoney, many characters have suffered mutations. The spin here is that Edie can hear Bill talking to her, expressing his desire to one day be ‘born’ like everyone else. In the Exegesis – a kind of religious diary Dick wrote daily in his later years – he vividly expressed the notion that Jane lived on within him: ‘My sister is everything to me. I am damned always to be separated from her and with her, in an oscillation. I have her in me and often outside me, but I have lost her. Two realities at once: yin/yang.’

This notion of two realities co-existing is at the centre of so much of Dick’s writing. However, his loss also found expression in his childhood days through the creation of imaginary friends. One was a girl named Teddy (according to his fifth wife Tessa), while another was dubbed Becky (according to third wife Anne). His mother’s repeated recounting of the story of his birth and Jane’s death seems to have caused Dick to conjure up his missing sister as an invisible playmate. Dick’s last wife Tessa even recalled that sometimes his imaginary ‘other half’ (the yin to his yang) was simply called Jane: ‘[Imaginary] Jane was small, with dark eyes and long hair. She was also very gutsy, always daring Phil to do things he was afraid of, helping him to get into trouble … ’

In an in-depth interview with Paul Williams in 1974, which formed the basis for an influential Rolling Stone profile and for Only Apparently Real, Williams’ book on Dick, the author spoke of his sister’s death. ‘I feel that my mother let her die. I resent the fact that my sister could have lived very readily had she been given normal treatment as a premature baby. I was a very lonely child and I would have loved to have had my sister with me all these years … ’

To date the twin theme in Dick’s work has been expressed most significantly in the cinema adaptations of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (filmed as Total Recall) and A Scanner Darkly (filmed by Richard Linklater). The visualisation of Total Recall’s rebel leader Quato (Kuato in the movie), known as The Oracle, is a malformed congenital twin who has a secondary head and arms growing out of his body – a symbiotic mutated twin within the body of another. This is a characteristic Dick concept first brought to life body-horror style by David Cronenberg’s script for an aborted version of the film. The concept survived through to the complete film, though in diluted form. The Fred/Bob Arctor split in A Scanner Darkly is at the centre of Richard Linklater’s movie version of the story, starring Keanu Reeves and using groundbreaking animation and rotoscoping techniques to bring Dick’s unique perspective to life.

Dick would search throughout his life for the ‘dark-haired girl’ of his dreams, the figure who embodied the imaginary attributes he’d given to his lost sister. The heroines who featured in his novels, alternately brave and evil, were manifestations of Jane, as were the women with whom he involved himself – especially his five wives – almost all slight, dark-haired and strong-willed.

During Dick’s earliest years, the family relocated several times. Following Jane’s death and Phil’s recovery, they moved in 1930 from Chicago via a brief stay (for Dorothy and Phil, at least) in Colorado to Sausalito and Alameda, before finally settling in Berkeley, California in 1931. Edgar took up a new position with the Department of Agriculture’s San Francisco office and two-year-old Philip was enrolled in the Quaker-run experimental Bruce Tatlock School, a progressive nursery. Dick was to remain in California for the rest of his life, specifically in the San Francisco area and then Orange County for his final decade.

Given the fate of his sister and his father’s reported phobia of germs, combined with his mother’s belief in then-prevalent ‘tough love’ theories of child-rearing, it’s not surprising that Dick developed a series of physical and mental ailments from early childhood. In the mid-1940s he received intensive psychiatric treatment for agoraphobia and other ailments. In 1946 he was also diagnosed as suffering from tachycardia, a rapid heartbeat, an unusual condition in an 18-year-old. This condition, however, would contribute directly to his early death.

While at school, in seventh grade, Dick had suffered from severe vertigo: this recurred throughout his life, especially during his brief time as a university undergraduate. His late teens saw a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a condition that terrified him. How much of this was psychosomatic reactions to his troubled childhood and upbringing, including hearing his mother’s tales of what had happened to Jane, is hard to tell. Whatever the causes, for Dick the effects of his illnesses and medical conditions were very real.

Dick biographer/interviewer Gregg Rickman, who was in contact with the author shortly before his death, suggested in his partial biography To The High Castle that Dick had even been a victim of sexual abuse. Despite a lack of any real evidence, and drawing heavily on Dick’s psychological ailments to form a diagnosis, Rickman even went so far as to select Dick’s maternal grandfather Earl Grant Kindred as the perpetrator. Rickman’s maverick, unsubstantiated claims caused a great deal of consternation in Philip K. Dick circles, resulting in one-time administrator of the Dick estate and custodian of the Philip K. Dick Society Paul Williams to speak out against ‘the Rickmanisation of Philip K. Dick’. Rickman’s theories remain little more than an interesting sideline in Dickian biography, with no clear proof to suggest they should be dwelt upon.

Dick’s interest in science fiction and fantasy developed during his childhood and early teens. In a 1968 ‘Self Portrait’ later published in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter #2 (December 1983) Dick wrote: ‘I was 12 [in 1940] when I read my first SF magazine … It was called Stirring Science Stories. I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognised the magic I had found, in earlier times, in the [Wizard of] Oz books … ’

The SF pulp science fiction magazines, to which Dick would contribute in earnest, had begun in 1926 (just two years prior to Dick’s birth) with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. Printed on cheap paper manufactured from chemically-treated wood pulp (hence the term ‘pulp magazines’) and boasting garish, colourful, and increasingly fanciful covers which aimed to capture the fickle reader’s attention (if not always accurately reflecting the contents!), the pulps’ lurid success reached a peak in the 1930s and 1940s. Typically paying struggling authors a cent per word (or even a half cent in some cases), the pulps were cheap to make and cheap to buy. The economic depression of the late 1920s, early 1930s fed the American population’s desire for escape, often to the fantastic world and freaky situations of the SF pulps. Whereas individuals could seemingly make little difference to frightening global events in the real world of the 1930s, in the magical worlds of pulp fiction it was heroic, often put-upon individuals who saved this world and sometimes other worlds too. The pulps emphasised action and romance, heroism and fantasy adventure, more often than not with a triumphal, or at least a happy, ending. While some pulp practitioners did work too often and too fast, churning out crude formulaic tales, others rose above the limitations of style and formula to become the key science fiction writers of the 1930s and 1940s. The pulps would directly feed into the post-Second World War SF paperback boom. The work of various writers in the post-war years solidified the notion of science fiction as a bona fide genre within which storytellers could legitimately work.

In his lifetime, Dick would write hundreds of short stories and around 40 novels, most of them categorised in the critically despised, but commercially successful, genre of science fiction. By the age of 14, at least according to Dick himself, he’d written his first novel, entitled Return to Lilliput. Dick outlined his earliest work to interviewer Mike Hodel in 1976: ‘They rediscovered Lilliput in the modern world. Like rediscovering Atlantis. These guys report they’ve discovered Lilliput. But it’s only accessible by submarine because it’s sunk under the water. You’d think a 14-year-old kid would have a more original idea than that …’ The manuscript was lost, perhaps justly depriving later readers of Dick’s first juvenile attempts at writing.

It wasn’t only pulp science fiction which interested Dick. He read far and wide, as recounted in his 1968 ‘Self Portrait’. ‘I gorged myself on classics of literature: Proust and Pound, Kafka and Dos Passos, Pascal … I gained a working knowledge of literature from The Anabasis to Ulysses. I was not educated on SF, but on well-recognised serious writing by authors all over the world.’

Although he continued to write, hoping one day to be published in The New Yorker, the prestigious literary publication, Dick’s later teenage years saw him drift away from his vague writing ambitions as real life intervened and he had to get a job.

Between the ages of about 15 into his early 20s, Dick was employed in two Berkeley music stores – University Radio and Electronics on Shattuck Avenue, and Art Music on Telegraph – both owned by Herb Hollis. Developing a passion for music to rival that he already had for writing, Dick found a mentor in Hollis. This small businessman father-figure character would recur in Dick’s fiction, notably as Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Many of Dick’s other ‘little guy’ characters, the TV repairmen and appliance salesmen, were drawn from his time working in the music stores where he would sell not only records but radios and the new-fangled 1950s television sets.

Working for Hollis was the only formal job that Dick ever held, other than being a writer. The stores were landmarks in liberal Berkeley, and Hollis cultivated a clientele among the students of the area who found a wide range of classical and obscure jazz and folk records in stock. Dick celebrated the end of the Second World War in 1945 in the company of a gang from Hollis’ stores.

Hollis supplied records to and ran commercials (scripted by Dick) on local FM station KSMO in San Mateo in the late 1940s. Dick captured the milieu of a small town radio station in his posthumously published mainstream novel The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, written in 1956. So accurate and atmospheric is the novel that Dick’s unsubstantiated claims to have hosted a classical music show on KSMO in the 1940s may have some basis in fact. Dick’s biggest ambition at the time was to own and manage a record store, just like his mentor Herb Hollis.

Dick’s initial serious attempts at writing came in the late 1940s and were not science fiction. Both the lost novel The Earthshakers and the posthumously published Gather Yourselves Together were ‘realist’ novels which drew on the author’s own coming of age experiences, including a short-lived marriage which ended in divorce in 1948.

Living in a shared loft house at 2208 McKinley Street with several arty types, some of whom were gay, Dick had taken to questioning his own sexuality. These doubts resulted in Dick recklessly committing to marrying Jeanette Marlin, a regular customer at the Hollis stores and several years Dick’s senior, being in her late 20s. At only 19 Dick was actually below the ‘age of majority’ in California and so his mother, Dorothy, had to sign the paperwork to make the marriage legal.

While Dick had initially wooed Marlin over shared musical interests, resulting in him losing his virginity with her in the basement of Herb Hollis’ University Radio and Electronics store, it was his continual late-night playing of records that was cited as the cause of the end of the relationship in their divorce several months later in 1948. According to his fifth wife Tessa, only two months into the marriage Dick had been shocked to discover that Marlin felt it was her right to see other men. This resulted in their separation, but the official reason for divorce (branded as ‘silly grounds’ by the judge) was a threat from Marlin that she’d get her brother to come round to smash Dick’s precious extensive classical music record collection.

Whether in response to his failed marriage or through peer pressure as a result of living in an academic community, Dick spent the last months of 1949 trying one last time to adapt to college life, something he’d previously avoided after his less-than-stellar success at school. In September he enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, studying philosophy, history, and zoology. In addition, he had to attend military training, something he was deeply opposed to. Continuing to suffer from recurring bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia, Dick dropped out of college in November 1949 and was given an official honourable dismissal from military training in January 1950. That didn’t stop him claiming to have been expelled due to his opposition to the mandated military training, giving his academic failure a more heroic and anti-establishment sheen. Ironically, dropping out of college made Dick eligible for the draft, compulsory service in the American armed forces. Much to his relief, he was rejected due to his high blood pressure and general ill health.

All through this turmoil Dick was writing and gaining in confidence. At this time his work continued to strive to be realist and mainstream, and though his period of loft-living with the arty crowd had broadened his literary tastes, he still cultivated a strong interest in science fiction, continuing to build up an impressive collection of pulp magazines. ‘I was living in Berkeley, and all the milieu-reinforcement there was for the literary stuff,’ Dick said in a Twilight Zone Magazine interview in 1982. ‘I knew all kinds of people who were doing literary type novels. I knew some of the very fine avant-garde poets in the Bay Area – Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, that whole crowd. They all encouraged me to write, but there was no encouragement to write science fiction and no encouragement to sell anything. I wanted to sell, and I also wanted to do science fiction. My ultimate dream was to do both literary stuff and science fiction.’

Dick was certainly among literary company, and he is mentioned in Ekbert Faas’ biography of Duncan [Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society, 1983, Black Sparrow Press]: ‘With such young poet celebrities as Jack Spicer, Philip K. Dick and George Haimsohn living at 2208 McKinley Street, the rooming house had become a focus of literary activity … Philip K. Dick, from [the room] next door, who worked at a phonograph store, had an appliance for making records, a device they were quick to explore for its poetic potential … They would do charades, screaming and laughing till deep into the night … There was constant noise and laughter, as if they were celebrating a never-ending party.’

Post-marriage, Dick’s sexual horizons had been broadened too. In the company of buddy and fellow Hollis employee Vincent Lusby, he was – like most men in their early 20s in the early 1950s – on the look-out for the kind of girl who’d be impressed with his musical knowledge and access to rare records. One such was an Italian named Mary who worked in a drugstore and was unhappy in her marriage. Dick’s brief affair with her was to inform and inspire several of the love triangles that featured in his earliest attempts at writing realist novels in the 1950s, most of which were not published until after his death. Dick was writing mainstream short stories too, and the occasional fantasy-tinged SF tale, all of which were regularly rejected by the editors of literary journals and pulp magazines alike. In the first half of the 1950s, in both romance and writing, the 20-something Philip K. Dick was floundering, practising both arts and preparing for later success.

Dick had learned much about life under the patient tutelage of Herb Hollis. It was, however, another father figure who would ease Dick’s path to becoming a published author. Anthony Boucher was a Berkeley resident and renowned science fiction editor. Boucher’s writing career had begun in 1941 for Unknown, and he became a regular contributor to that title and Astounding, turning out science fiction with an often humorous bent. By 1949 he was one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A perceptive editor, Boucher was credited with raising the literary standards of much science fiction through the 1950s, especially via his criticism which appeared regularly in mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune.

Despite having his free time to write restricted by his job at Hollis’ stores, Dick continued to persevere with his mainstream writing, collecting a steadily mounting pile of demoralising rejection slips along the way. Dick would write late into the night. So began a habit which he would maintain for the rest of his life: playing classical music records while writing. His rejection slips were defiantly and proudly taped to the walls. Even the return of 17 manuscripts, all rejected in a single day, failed to knock the confidence of the would-be author.

Like so many of the people he met during the 1950s, Philip K. Dick first met SF editor Anthony Boucher in the Art Music store. Boucher was also a record collector and hosted his own show, Golden Voices of the Opera, on KPFA in Berkeley. In his 1968 ‘Self Portrait’, Dick recalled: ‘I listened to the programme [and] I got to meet him. He came to the record store in which I worked and we had a long talk.’ Boucher was something of a revelation to the conflicted Dick. ‘I discovered that a person could be not only mature [Boucher was in his early 40s], but mature and educated, and still enjoy SF! Tony Boucher had entered my life, and by doing so, had determined its whole basic direction.’

Boucher held writing classes at his home on Thursday evenings. For a nominal one dollar fee, aspiring writers could submit their manuscripts to Boucher for analysis, discussion, and critical feedback. Among the eight-to-ten students who regularly attended were Ron Goulart (in 1951), later a successful SF writer, and Philip and Dorothy Dick (often, when he was overcome with fear or literary stage fright, Dorothy would attend in Dick’s stead as well as in her own right). ‘Tony dutifully read my painful first efforts,’ wrote Dick in his ‘Self Portrait’. ‘The literary ones he did not respond to, but to my surprise he seemed quite taken with a short fantasy …’

Boucher’s advice was both literary and economic: he liked the short story, entitled Roog, but perhaps more importantly he believed that Dick could actually sell it to one of the pulps. Boucher made Dick repeatedly revise Roog, until he finally bought it for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Dick was a proper, albeit pulp, writer at last. In October 1951, at the age of 22, Philip K. Dick had made his first professional sale for the princely sum of $75. Although Roog was his first sale, the first story to actually appear in print was Beyond Lies the Wub, which appeared in the July 1952 edition of Planet Stories. ‘This caused me to begin to write more and more fantasy stories, then SF,’ he wrote. Apart from periods of occasional writer’s block, Dick would not stop writing from this point forward until his death.

It seemed Dick’s life was on a roll. Just prior to meeting Boucher, he’d met his second wife, 18-year-old Kleo Apostolides, again in the Art Music store. The Greek, dark-haired Kleo and Dick had bonded over their shared love of opera and she’d soon moved into his shared attic apartment, displacing his roommates and lodgers. Kleo was a student attending the University of California at Berkeley who was also holding down a variety of part-time jobs. In May 1950 the pair moved to a new house at 1126 Francisco Street in West Berkeley, which Phil had been making payments on, and by June 1950 they were married. Kleo strongly supported Dick’s writing ambitions and – like his mother – was even roped into attending Boucher’s classes on his behalf to take notes. When Dick was fired by Herb Hollis for supporting another fired member of staff in a dispute, Kleo was convinced that the timing – just after he’d begun selling stories to magazines – was a sign that it was time he moved on with his life anyway.

‘I began to mail off stories to other magazines, and lo-and-behold, Planet Stories bought a short story of mine,’ wrote Dick in his ‘Self Portrait’. ‘I forgot my [retail] career in seconds and began to write all the time. Within the month after quitting my job, I made a sale to Astounding and Galaxy. They paid very well, and I knew then that I would never give up trying to build my life around a science fiction career.’

By May 1952 Dick had sold four more stories following Roog, all through his own efforts. On the advice of Boucher, though, he decided it was time he had an agent who could more effectively represent him to the 25 or so pulp magazines that were around in the early 1950s. Dick followed many other pulp writers to the door of Scott Meredith who’d just set up his own agency specialising in material for the pulp magazines. Dick initially tried to get Meredith to represent only his mainstream work, still believing he could sell it, but Meredith insisted on taking the SF material too.

Dick was ideally placed to take advantage of the explosion in pulp fiction. Meredith was also ideally placed to supply material of decent quality to the New York pulp editors who, by 1953, were filling 27 regular magazines. It was a hungry market, one which appreciated authors like Philip K. Dick who could quickly turn out imaginative stories, to length and to deadline. In 1952 Phil published four short stories. In 1953 his annual total had leapt to 30, including seven in June 1953 alone. In 1954, 28 stories saw print. By 1955, 15 of his stories were grouped together for hardback book publication in the UK by Rogers and Cowan under the title A Handful of Darkness. Such hardback publication was almost unheard of for US pulp writers. Issued in the US in 1957 by Ace Books, The Variable Man was a second collection of short stories in book form. Philip K. Dick was writing stories at the rate of one a week: he was now what he’d always yearned to be, a published writer with a solid income and a secure future.

October 1956 saw the first media adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story. Science fiction radio anthology show X Minus One aired a version of Colony, a story published in the June 1953 edition of Galaxy, edited by Horace Gold. Gold was an eccentric agoraphobic Canadian-born writer and editor who’d been toiling in the SF sphere since the 1930s. Dick bonded with Gold over their mutual medical problems, but he eventually stopped selling stories to the editor as he was repeatedly upset by Gold’s habit of altering writers’ work. A handful of other radio adaptations of his stories followed, including The Defenders for X Minus One and others for Exploring Tomorrow on New York station WOR in 1958.

The only story which Dick ever sold to John W. Campbell’s Astounding, the prime title among the pulps, also appeared in June 1953. Impostor contains much that Dick would later expand upon in his novels and was the first significant outing for themes and situations which would recur in his fiction and, as a result of the film Blade Runner, come to dominate the popular perception of what Dick’s work was about. It’s no surprise, then, that Impostor was also to form the basis for a TV adaptation and a movie.

Spence Olham, a defence researcher in Earth’s war with the ‘Outspacers’, is suspected of being a ‘humanoid robot’ who has killed and replaced the real Oldham in an attempt by the aliens to infiltrate Earth’s defence establishment. Implanted memories convince Oldham that he’s not the replacement, but the ‘real’ thing and he goes on the run. Adding to the danger is the ‘U-bomb’ carried within the android which will explode in response to a key phrase. It’s the pursuers, determined to kill Oldham at all costs, who appear to be inhuman. The robot replacement they are pursuing engages the reader’s sympathy. It’s all here in this one story: androids replacing humans, the intriguing question of ‘what is real?’ and ‘what is human?’, and totally convincing implanted, fake memories – all the major elements of the ‘phildickian’ universe were in place with Impostor.

America in the 1950s was in the grip of widespread political paranoia, with the rise of the ‘red menace’ feared by those in power. Post-war political expression was regarded as suspicious by the authorities and the FBI was tasked with the job of compiling dossiers on potential ‘political subversives’. Dick’s wife Kleo had attended several political meetings as a student and had been photographed by the FBI. One day in late 1953 or early 1954, two black-suited FBI agents arrived at Kleo and Dick’s home, intent on questioning her about others pictured in the photos. Agents Smith and Scruggs got more than they bargained for at the Dick household and found themselves drawn into in-depth discussions of the local Berkeley political scene. Scruggs, in particular, became friendly with the couple, according to Kleo. The FBI man even provided driving lessons for Dick, after he was given the gift of a 1952 Studebaker by a writer ex-neighbour who was relocating to New York. Later, the FBI men offered Dick and Kleo an all-expenses opportunity to study at the University of Mexico, if they would provide regular reports on student activities there. The pair politely declined and the visits by the FBI men slowly decreased.

For Dick, the feeling of being under surveillance by the authorities was to have a lasting impact. Although Smith and Scruggs appeared to have been on little more than a fishing expedition, looking for information, Dick was left with an uneasy feeling that he was being targeted by those in power. It was a feeling that would both inform much of his fiction and cause him much anguish in years to come.

In ‘Self Portrait’ Philip K. Dick was critical of his often hastily-written short story output. ‘With only a few exceptions, my magazine-length stories were second rate,’ admitted Dick, candidly. ‘Standards were low in the early 1950s. I did not know many technical skills in writing which are essential … the viewpoint problem, for example. Yet, I was selling; I was making a good living, and at the 1954 Science Fiction World Convention [Worldcon, an annual event since 1939, where Dick met fan and soon-to-be author Harlan Ellison], I was very readily recognised and singled out … ’

Dick realised that if he were to move his work away from the pulp magazines and into a form that might be more readily accepted critically and have a chance of lasting longer, he should be writing novels. He prepared for months before embarking on his first SF novel aimed directly at publication. ‘I assembled characters and plots, several plots all woven together, and then wrote everything into the book that I could think up. It was bought by Donald Wollheim at Ace Books and titled Solar Lottery.’ Dick’s mentor Anthony Boucher reviewed the book favourably in The New York Herald-Tribune, which was followed by other positive reviews in Astounding and Infinity. ‘It seemed to me that magazine-length writing was going downhill – and not paying very much. You might get $20 for a story and $4,000 for a novel. So I decided to bet everything on the novel; I wrote The World That Jones Made, and later, The Man Who Japed.’ Dick considered his next novel, Eye in the Sky, to be his genuine breakthrough. ‘Tony [Boucher] gave it the Best Novel of the Year rating. [It turned out] I was a better novel writer than a short story writer. Money had nothing to do with it; I like writing novels and they went over well … ’

Dick was an industrious writer. Between 1951 and 1958, he wrote over 80 short stories and 13 novels. Six of these novels were science fiction and all sold. Seven of his novels were mainstream, contemporary realist fiction which failed to sell, but that was where his true ambitions lay. For over a year, between 1956 and 1957, Dick abandoned science fiction altogether and concentrated on his realist work. His wife of the time, Kleo, noted: ‘Publishing a mainstream novel would have been his dearest dream. Not mainstream, necessarily, but just not science fiction.’ Dick felt he’d stumbled into science fiction success too easily and so had a certain amount of contempt for his rapidly produced work. Most science fiction novels were published as paperback originals and so were not taken seriously by critics, especially those whose approbation Dick craved. Science fiction paperbacks were perceived as disposable, barely one step above pulp magazines. However, as far as Phil and Kleo were concerned, critically approved of or not, the science fiction novels were paying the bills.

In the 1950s Donald A. Wollheim’s Ace Books was the major market for science fiction, publishing two novels every month in single volumes, known as Ace Doubles. The other major player was Ballantine, but their output was nowhere near as numerous or frequent. Although Ballantine paid better, it was to Wollheim’s Ace Doubles (later DAW Books) that Dick would sell the majority of his work through to the middle of the 1960s.

Dick knew that his novels had to take a different approach to his many short stories. The short stories had been full of action and character, with ingenious twists. That aspect was to later make them ideal source material for high concept Hollywood movies. The novels, however, were more character based and concerned with building a coherent future world. There were plots and action, but