Following this incident, Dick concluded that the Biblical prophet Elijah had saved Dick’s child’s life. Despite the fact that his son seemed healthy, he rushed the child to the hospital, where the doctors found that the child had a potentially deadly disease, which they were able to treat just in time. Following his vision, he sensed that his infant son was very sick. By a bizarre coincidence, Le Guin and Dick were members of the same graduating class in high school-but they never met each other.Ī Prophet: In 1974, Philip K. Le Guin, whose books The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) have been extravagantly praised for their intelligent and postmodern motifs. One of the few authors who can compete with Dick’s reputation is Ursula K. Dick has a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. In Dick’s futuristic society, there’s been some kind of global war, the result of which is the destruction of the environment and irradiation of the entire planet-disasters which Dick’s sci-fi predecessors before 1945 couldn’t ever have imagined.įamous classmates: Philip K. Both sides stockpiled massive numbers of nuclear missiles, even one of which could have inflicted a catastrophic amount of damage if it was ever launched. Throughout the 60s, the United States was locked in a “Cold War” with the Soviet Union, the world’s other dominant superpower. Following the detonation of an atomic weapon in Hiroshima in 1945, the world entered a nuclear age: for the first time, countries had the power to blow up entire cities. Dick’s novel also reflects the realities of the Cold War in the 1960s. In the futuristic society of Dick’s novel, consumerism runs rampant, with every family competing to buy the best, most exotic pets.
While this economic development was justly celebrated, it also led to a growing homogenization of American culture-everybody competing to buy exactly the same vacuous products. Following the 1950s, America attained an unprecedented level of prosperity, and the average family could purchase more commodities than ever before. One of Dick’s main preoccupations in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the threat of consumer culture in America. Dick’s books reflect his feelings about the state of society in the 1960s and 70s. To date, more than two dozen of his short stories or novels have been made into movies, including Minority Report (2002), Blade Runner (1982), Paycheck (2003), Total Recall (1990, remade in 2012), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Next (2007). In the 80s and 90s, the literary world as a whole (not just the sci-fi community) began to take Dick’s novels seriously. Ironically, 1982 was also the year that the first high-profile cinematic adaptation of one of his books, Blade Runner (an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), was released, to considerable acclaim. He died in 1982, poverty-stricken and depressed. Dick’s mental condition deteriorated in the 1970s, due largely to his experimentation with LSD, mescaline, and other drugs. Although many of these developed a cult following, none were as critically or commercially successfully as The Man in the High Castle. Over the course of the next two decades, Dick wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. The novel won Dick the Hugo Award, the highest honor for American science fiction.
His fortunes changed in 1963, when he published what was to become one of his most famous novels, The Man in the High Castle, a work of speculative science fiction about a world in which the Nazis won World War II. From then on, he sold dozens of stories to science fiction magazines, and published several novels, none of which were particularly successful. He began writing science fiction stories professionally in 1951. He began writing science fiction stories when he was 12 years old, and his teachers noted his talent for building suspense and telling a gripping tale. For most of his childhood, he was raised by his mother. Dick grew up in San Francisco, a city that would play a major role in his novels and short stories.
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