Philip K. Dick

Phillip K. Dick had been married five times. His first wife was a woman named Jeanette Marlin. They were married in May 1948 and divorced in November the same year.

He married his second wife, Kleo Apostolides on June 14, 1950. Apostolides was a socialist and often partook in left-wing activities, and allegedly because of this, they were visited by the FBI. The couple later formed a brief friendship with an FBI agent. Dick and Apostolides parted ways in 1959.

His third wife was Anne Williams Rubinstein, whom he met in late 1958. They got married on April 1, 1959, and had one daughter, Laura Archer Dick, who was born on February 25, 1960. Anne was Philip’s muse for several characters, including Juliana, the heroine of ‘The Man in the High Castle’.

Born on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, Philip and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte, were the only children of Dorothy (née Kindred) and Joseph Edgar Dick. They were born six weeks prematurely and Jane died almost exactly six weeks later, on January 26, 1929.

The death of his twin would haunt Philip for the rest of his life and make its way to his writings as well, as a recurrent motif of “phantom twins”.

Joseph was employed at the United States Department of Agriculture and was of Irish descent. Soon after his birth, Dick’s family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. When he was five years old, his parents divorced after his father was transferred to Reno, Nevada and his mother did not want to go with him. A bitter custody battle followed and the court eventually ruled that Dick would stay with his mother.

His mother was a very independent woman and she resolved that she would raise her son on her own. Philip and Dorothy moved to Washington, D.C. and he subsequently began his education at John Eaton Elementary School. He also studied in Quaker schools. The mother and son duo came back to California in June 1938.

Dick enrolled at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California. After graduating in 1947, he was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied there for a brief period before he was given an honourable dismissal on January 1, 1950.

Phillip K. Dick had been interested in writing ever since he came back to California with his mother all those years ago. His first story was published in 1951 and he began writing fulltime soon after.

A series of his works of speculative fiction was published in the July and September issues of ‘Planet Stories’ as well as in ‘If and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’ in 1951.

By the year of composition, his first novel was ‘Gather Yourself Together’. He finished writing it in 1950 but it was published posthumously in 1994. His first published novel was ‘Solar Lottery’, which was put out as one half of ‘Ace Double #D-103’ (the other being ‘The Big Jump’ by Leigh Brackett).

At this stage in his career, Dick was not earning much from his writing. The family seemed to always lack for the necessities. He was slowly gaining a reputation as a science fiction author but he desperately wanted to be a mainstream writer.

He wrote several non-genre, relatively conventional works of fiction in the 1950s. In 1960, he claimed that he was “willing to take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer”. However, in January 1963, Scott Meredith Literary Agency sent back the manuscripts of all his mainstream novels. It served as a wake-up call for Philip and he decided to focus predominantly on science fiction.

Phillip K. Dick’s novel ‘The Man in the High Castle’ is an alternative history novel with a heavy dosage of science fiction. The story develops on the premise that the Axis powers have won the World War II and taken over the world. The book has been adapted as a television series that premiered on Amazon Video on January 15, 2015. The show’s third season is slated to be released in 2018.

His short story ‘The Minority Report’ was first published in ‘Fantastic Universe’ magazine in 1956. Director Steven Spielberg adapted the story for his 2002 film starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton.

Dick’s 1968 novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ was set in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, after Earth has been irreversibly damaged by a nuclear war. This novel later inspired Ridley Scott’s neo-noir science fiction film ‘Blade Runner’.

The 1969 book ‘Ubik’ is one of the most acclaimed novels by Dick. In 2009, Time magazine listed it among the 100 greatest novels since 1923. The plot develops in a usual Philip K. Dick setting of relative future (in this case, 1999). The Ubik, which is essentially a canned product with miraculous properties, has been interpreted as a metaphor for God by many critics, including Dick’s last wife Tessa Busby.