Five to Twelve - Your dark literature resource pages

(-1984)

Philip Kindred Dick is the second cursed writer of this century, after HP Lovecraft. His own paranoia and use of amphetamines, his fear of the crowd brought him to design worlds where reality and madness blend. Cursed writer as he died while "Blade Runner" was being shot - a monument of science-fiction, and that he could have known "Total Recall" and "Minority Report", if he have lived.

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Starting on the death of his twin sister (that he never got over in fact), then the divorce of his parents. He suffers from agoraphobia and his life was a chase after money, both cause and effect of his taking amphetamines.

Amphetamines increase the ability to work, which is extremely necessary to him as editors pay him so badly. Amphetamines provoke anxiety, palpitations and visual dysfunctions - it is not a surprise that he started suffering from paranoia - which lead him to believe that he was the victim of the FBI and neo-nazis (following the breaking into his house). Aged 4, his parents get a divorce, and he starts publishing at a very young age (like Lovecraft). He is influenced by Van Vogt but starts developing his own myths.

"Solar Lottery" (1954) is now considered a key science-fiction book, along with Ray Bradbury's. He was married once, but had an affair with Anne Williams Rubinstein (a brunette), before convincing himself that she wanted to murder him. The female characters in his books are often brunettes with evil minds. He eventually met Kleo Apostolides who became his third wife.

The influence of his private life on his works is essential : from his addiction to LSD we understand where his confusion between dream and reality comes from. Even his only non science-fiction piece of work, "Confessions of a Crap Artist" is in fact inspired by his own financial and material difficulties.

He stopped writing from 1967 till 1973, attempted suicide, and turned mystical (the VALIS hypothesis) before his heart attack in 1984, shortly before the shooting of "Blade Runner" finished. VALIS states that "we are nodes of the true spirit, the universe is made of information, and the world that we know is an hologram, an information hypostase". This definition reminds us of the arrival of virtual worlds.

For Philip K. Dick, the world is never really our world. Madness and reality often blend, thus recalling us of the dual interpretation of the classic fantastic fiction. This is really obvious in "We can remember it for you wholesale".

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