Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science
fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely
visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's
words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the
plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that
makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him."
Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in
a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced
works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic,
marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious
speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative
responses to 21st-century quandaries.
This Library of America volume brings together four of
Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle
(1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate
world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and
America is divided into separate occupation zones. The
dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits
a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different
brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped
androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the
movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of
psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients
inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of
simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more
disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no
plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly
surprising texture of these astonishing books.