THE FAME OF THE science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who died 25 years ago next week, has grown in the years since his death, thanks largely to films based on his work, but also to changes in the world, or at least to our perception of it, that were prefigured in his writing.

Dick’s great subject was the nature of reality, and how it is shaped by human consciousness. When he began writing in the early 1950s, his obsessions were too weird for main-stream fiction. He was ahead of his time. The Man in the High Castle, his brilliant evocation of a world in which the Allies had lost the Second World War, was appreciated by few outside the world of sci-fi when it appeared in 1962; 30 years later Robert Harris had a bestseller, Fatherland, with a similar theme.

And while the reverse chronology of Martin Amis’s 1991 novel Time’s Arrowwas acclaimed for its originality, in 1967, Dick’s Counter-Clock World, in which people live their lives backwards, was too far out to be taken for serious literature.

When I met Phil Dick in the spring of 1974, he was living in a small, rented apartment in Fullerton, California, with his fifth wife and their baby, desperately broke and worried that the Internal Revenue Service was out to get him.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – his 28th novel – had just been published to great acclaim, he was one of the greatest science-fiction writers alive, yet he had no money.

This was a shock. His books had shown me that science-fiction could explore inner space just as well as outer, and had made me determined to write it myself. But the life of the man himself could have been a warning against trying to make a living at it.

Things were about to change, however. Dick’s reputation began to spread out beyond his loyal fans in the US and France after interviews in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.

John Lennon had read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (one of Dick’s best, and quite possibly the weirdest book yet written) and wanted to make a film of it. Perhaps, in some alternate universe, Lennon survived to do that, but in our world the big breakthrough was Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, based on one of Dick’s most popular novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dick never saw it. He died on March 2, 1982, after a paralysing stroke, at the age of 53, months before it was released. But he approved of the final script and had been impressed by the stylish look of the clips that he saw. In the final three years of his life, he was finally making money and receiving wider acclaim. A friend, Paul Williams, has suggested that Dick’s increasing fame “scared him a little. If people choose their own deaths, he probably died because he was finally getting the kind of broad-based recognition he’d hoped for and feared all along.”

After Blade Runner, other films of his work followed: Total Recall (1990, from the short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale), Screamers (1996, from Second Variety), Minority Report(2002), Paycheck(2003) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

Some science-fiction dates quickly, as fads fade, but not Dick’s. He probably wrote too much, driven by the need to earn a living and by psychological compulsion, and the speed at which he wrote – on speed in the early days – was sometimes reflected in unimpressive prose.

Analysing himself, he declared in 1978: “I don’t write beautifully – I just write reports about our condition.” But his best books need no special pleading. The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and at least half a dozen others – not to mention dozens of short stories – are brilliant gems. They also seem increasingly relevant to times when we are surrounded by (and argue with) intelligent machines, religion is at the top of the political agenda, our lives are increasingly monitored by unseen watchers and we still cannot define reality.

In a 1974 interview, Dick said: “The greatest incentive to write is that you can’t figure out the universe.” He never did, of course, but he went on trying all his life, and his books continue to speak to every reader who feels that same restless curiosity.

Competition

Gollancz is reissuing six of Philip K. Dick’s novels. We have five sets – each including The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Martian Time-Slip, Human Is?, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said and Dr Bloodmoney – to give away.

To enter, e-mail your answers to the following questions, with your name, address and telephone number, to bookscomp@thetimes.co.uk with “PKD competition” in the subject line.

Or write them on the back of a postcard and send them to PKD Competition, Books, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT.

1. Which of Dick’s novels did he plan by consulting the I Ching?

a) The Man in the High Castle

b) A Scanner Darkly

c) Eye in the Sky 2.

What was Dick’s middle name?

a) Kane

b) Korky

c) Kindred 3.

What is the reality-altering drug in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

a) Chew-Z

b) DeathD

c) Eez-E One entry per person.

Entries must be received by midday on Friday March 2. Winners will be notified by March 7 and prizes will be received within 28 days of notification. The Gollancz reissues are available from BooksFirst at the discounted price of £7.59 inc p&p (RRP £7.99) each. Call 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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