PHILIP K. DICK
He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane, in Chicago on
December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his mother Dorothy Kindred
- from her maiden name came Dick's middle initial. Jane died six weeks
after her birth, a loss that Phil felt deeply throughout his life. As
time went on, Phil came, with whatever justice, to blame his mother for
Jane's death. His relationship with both of his parents was decidedly
difficult, and made only more so when they divorced when he was five
years old.
Sister Jane, his mother, and his father served as models for many of the
characters who would populate Dick's fictional universes in the decades
to come. In particular, the death of Jane - and Phil's traumatic sense
of separation from her, an experience common to many twins who have lost
their sibling - contributed to the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas that
dominated his creative work - science fiction (SF)/mainstream,
real/fake, human/android. It was out of these pressing dualities that
the two vast questions emerged which Dick often cited as encompassing
his writing: What is Real? and What is Human?
Mother Dorothy retained custody over her son, and they eventually
settled in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, graduated from high school, and
briefly attended the University of California in 1949 before dropping out.
Starting in seventh grade, however, Dick began suffering from bouts of
extreme vertigo; the vertigo recurred with special intensity during his
brief undergraduate stint. In his late teens, Dick later recalled, he
was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia - a label that terrified
him. Other psychotherapists and psychiatrists in later years would offer
other diagnoses, including the one that Dick was quite sane.
Leaving aside medical terminology, there is no question that Dick felt
himself, throughout his life, to suffer from bouts of psychological
anguish that he frequently referred to as "nervous breakdowns." His
experience of these was transmuted into fictional portraits, most
notably of "ex-schizophrenic" Jack Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).
In a 1968 "Self Portrait" he recalled the moment of discovery of the
genre that would ultimately set him free to write of the complex
realities of his own personal experience:
"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine?it was
called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues?.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 recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in
the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with
science?In any case my view became magic equals science?and science
(of the future) equals magic."
This is not to say that Dick read only SF during his coming of age
years. On the contrary, he was an omnivorous and devouring reader,
taking in Xenophon's Anabasis, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the French
realists such as Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant - all this and much
more by his early twenties. Dick gave credit to the American
Depression-era writer James T. Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, for
helping Dick see how to construct the SF stories that he sold in such
numbers to the SF pulps in the early 1950s.
And even though Dick never lost his yearning to be accepted by the
literary mainstream, he always regarded it as a kind of treason to
deprecate the SF genre he grew up on and flourished in. As he wrote in
1980, two years before his death:
"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional
world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have,
because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay,
so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to
reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all
about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read
the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling
writers?.This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write
it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild
possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in
frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."
He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane, in Chicago on
December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his mother Dorothy Kindred
- from her maiden name came Dick's middle initial. Jane died six weeks
after her birth, a loss that Phil felt deeply throughout his life. As
time went on, Phil came, with whatever justice, to blame his mother for
Jane's death. His relationship with both of his parents was decidedly
difficult, and made only more so when they divorced when he was five
years old.
Sister Jane, his mother, and his father served as models for many of the
characters who would populate Dick's fictional universes in the decades
to come. In particular, the death of Jane - and Phil's traumatic sense
of separation from her, an experience common to many twins who have lost
their sibling - contributed to the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas that
dominated his creative work - science fiction (SF)/mainstream,
real/fake, human/android. It was out of these pressing dualities that
the two vast questions emerged which Dick often cited as encompassing
his writing: What is Real? and What is Human?
Mother Dorothy retained custody over her son, and they eventually
settled in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, graduated from high school, and
briefly attended the University of California in 1949 before dropping out.
Starting in seventh grade, however, Dick began suffering from bouts of
extreme vertigo; the vertigo recurred with special intensity during his
brief undergraduate stint. In his late teens, Dick later recalled, he
was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia - a label that terrified
him. Other psychotherapists and psychiatrists in later years would offer
other diagnoses, including the one that Dick was quite sane.
Leaving aside medical terminology, there is no question that Dick felt
himself, throughout his life, to suffer from bouts of psychological
anguish that he frequently referred to as "nervous breakdowns." His
experience of these was transmuted into fictional portraits, most
notably of "ex-schizophrenic" Jack Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).
In a 1968 "Self Portrait" he recalled the moment of discovery of the
genre that would ultimately set him free to write of the complex
realities of his own personal experience:
"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine?it was
called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues?.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 recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in
the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with
science?In any case my view became magic equals science?and science
(of the future) equals magic."
This is not to say that Dick read only SF during his coming of age
years. On the contrary, he was an omnivorous and devouring reader,
taking in Xenophon's Anabasis, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the French
realists such as Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant - all this and much
more by his early twenties. Dick gave credit to the American
Depression-era writer James T. Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, for
helping Dick see how to construct the SF stories that he sold in such
numbers to the SF pulps in the early 1950s.
And even though Dick never lost his yearning to be accepted by the
literary mainstream, he always regarded it as a kind of treason to
deprecate the SF genre he grew up on and flourished in. As he wrote in
1980, two years before his death:
"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional
world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have,
because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay,
so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to
reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all
about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read
the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling
writers?.This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write
it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild
possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in
frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."