Major works:
The Man in the High Castle • Martian Time-Slip • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? • Ubik • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said • A Scanner Darkly • VALIS
“Dick commits to his visions with an emotional intensity unlike any other writer. He digs deeper and makes a life or death commitment to the situations in his novels. His books always have this doubleness. There’s a layer of satirical or fantastical inventiveness—he’s one of the great idea men of all literary history—but there’s also this personal emotional stake. He’s always putting everything he has at risk.”—Jonathan Lethem
“In Dick’s life as in his fiction, reality seems to slither from the grasp, and ascertainable facts end up as debatable assertions or mere labels.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
“Dick has as a rule taken over a rubble of building materials from the run-of-the-mill American professionals of SF, frequently adding a true gleam of originality to already worn-out concepts and, what is surely more important, erecting with such material constructions truly his own. The world gone mad, with a spasmodic flow of time and a network of causes and effects which wriggles as if nauseated, the world of frenzied physics, is unquestionably his invention.”—Stanislaw Lem
Ubik
Philip K. DickNow he became aware of an insidious, seeping, cooling-off which at some earlier and unremembered time had begun to explore him—investigating him as well as the world around him. It reminded him of their final moments on Luna. The chill debased the surfaces of objects; it warped, expanded, showed itself as bulblike swellings that sighed audibly and popped. Into the manifold open wounds the cold drifted, all the way down into the heart of things, the core which made them live. What he saw now seemed to be a desert of ice from which stark boulders jutted. A wind spewed across the plain which reality had become; the wind congealed into deeper ice, and the boulders disappeared for the most part. And darkness presented itself off at the edges of his vision; he caught only a meager glimpse of it.
But, he thought, this is projection on my part. It isn’t the universe which is being entombed by layers of wind, cold, darkness and ice; all this is going on within me, and yet I seem to see it outside. Strange, he thought. Is the whole world inside me? Engulfed by my body? When did that happen? It must be a manifestation of dying, he said to himself. The uncertainty which I feel, the slowing down into entropy—that’s the process, and the ice which I see is the result of the success of the process. When I blink out, he thought, the whole universe will disappear.
Books
