Counterfeit Worlds

INTRODUCTION

THE WORLDS DICK MADE

'In my stories and novels, I often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person, while the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones .'

Philip K. Dick, 'If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others', 1977 speech delivered at the Metz Festival, France

The hottest writer in Hollywood today has been dead for over 40 years. Philip K. Dick created the future in which we now live. At the very least, he was writing about it long before it ever took shape. That foresight makes this acclaimed writer of the American pulp SF era of the 1950s and 1960s a kind of Precog - a 'precognitive' who, like the characters in the film Minority Report (based on a Dick short story), can somehow discern the future . Now, movies and TV shows based on ideas from his short stories and novels feed our heads, as the world around us becomes ever more like those counterfeit worlds he wrote of in his fiction.

Art Spiegelman, acclaimed writer/illustrator of the holocaust graphic novel Maus said of Dick: 'What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.' Fellow SF author Ursula K. LeGuin saw Dick as 'our own homegrown Borges', while 1960s counter-culture guru Timothy Leary called him 'a major 21st-century writer, an influential "fictional philosopher" of the quantum age.' Dick's work appealed across a broad spectrum of readers, from philosophers and other writers and thinkers, to SF fans and scientists, to moviemakers worldwide.

If science fiction can be defined as the literature of ideas, then the work of Philip K. Dick is science fiction par excellence as it contains more off-the-wall ideas per page than that of most other writers. Dick returned obsessively to a set of key themes, with the nature of reality and what it means to be human his two main philosophical concerns. He wrapped these often deep-and-meaningful cognitions in all-out action-packed pulp storylines, which makes his work attractive to Hollywood (and beyond).

It is this fertile feeding ground for high concept notions that has made Dick's considerable volume of work the prime source for many of the biggest-grossing science fiction movies of the past 40 years. Direct adaptations of his work include the blockbusters Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as the critically acclaimed Blade Runner, but other successful films like The Truman Show and The Matrix trilogy would likely not have existed as they do (or have been so readily accepted by the moviegoing public) if the adjective 'phildickian' (defined as 'having the qualities of a Philip K. Dick story') had not entered the popular lexicon. These films are inspired, directly or indirectly, by 'phildickian' concepts, arising from the work of the 20th century's most unsung literary genius.

Dick was a pulp SF author who began to ply his trade in the early 1950s for US science fiction short story magazines like If, Astounding, and Galaxy. He worked fast, churning out hundreds of stories, often selling them for little more than $100 each. Eventually, Dick moved onto the growing field of science fiction novels where he could earn up to $1,000 as an advance for each novel. He still had to work fast and be hyper-productive to make a decent living, something he struggled with throughout his life.

His work throughout the 1960s was often published as part of the Ace Doubles series which presented two short, snappy SF tales back-to-back for the price of one (often selling for under one dollar). While Dick gained a loyal fan following through that decade, the wider fame and acclaim which he sought eluded him. He also lived much of his life struggling to make ends meet as his writing failed to provide anywhere near an adequate income for him or his multiple families. His agent, Russell Galen, admitted as much in Wired magazine: 'Phil's work came out of an atmosphere of want and struggle. He was as prolific as he was because he needed money.'

Ironically, movie rights to his short stories have sold to Hollywood studios for sums that hugely exceed Dick's entire lifetime earnings from his then under-appreciated writing. Case in point: Paycheck. The original short story sold to Imagination magazine in 1954 for the princely sum of $195. The film rights reportedly cost Paramount around $2 million, about 10,000 times the amount Dick was paid for originating the idea. 'I think he would have fallen over backwards to see what Steven Spielberg paid for the rights to the short story "The Minority Report",' noted fellow author and Dick acolyte James Blaylock in the San Francisco Chronicle. 'Philip was the archetypal writer who lived on nothing but his meagre royalties . and then he died.'

Dick's frequent attempts at cracking mainstream fiction reflecting suburban life in 1950s and 1960s California remained unpublished until after his death. The popular perception of Dick in the SF community was of a drug-addled (he admitted to using copious amounts of speed to fuel his writing), would-be messiah who'd gone off the rails after claiming to have seen God in 1974. Apart from some early radio dramatisations, his work remained unadapted for other media until Ridley Scott's Blade Runner wowed appreciative cinema audiences in 1982. By then, Philip K. Dick was dead of a heart attack at the tragically early age of 53.

It was only after his death and the failure of Blade Runner at the box office that the cult of Philip K. Dick really took off. 'Clearly Dick was ahead of his time,' wrote Galen in Writer's Digest. 'The very elements that once branded him not fit for mainstream audiences now seem enlightened and fresh, raising disturbing questions that force us to think about the implications of modern life.' Throughout the 1980s Dick's science fiction came back into print and many of the unpublished mainstream novels saw print for the first time, providing a more rounded picture of the author and his work. Biographies began to appear, just as the influence of the visuals and atmosphere of Scott's Blade Runner dominated advertising and SF filmmaking. Dick's questioning of the nature of reality and of humanity began to become common currency in millennium media. Suddenly, the exploration of counterfeit worlds was cool.

Creative people in Hollywood had not given up on Philip K. Dick, despite the initial failure of Blade Runner. The release of Total Recall in 1990 - which proved to be the blockbuster that Blade Runner had not been - was the result of many years of endeavour to get another Philip K. Dick project into cinemas. Then the floodgates opened and many projects followed: Screamers, a Total Recall TV series which seemed to owe more to Blade Runner for its style, Impostor, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, John Woo's Paycheck, Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, and Lee Tamahori's Next. Suddenly, Philip K. Dick was the hottest story source in Hollywood, yet he'd been dead for 20 years!

The films and TV shows would continue into the first two decades of the 21st century and beyond, from the independently-produced Radio Free Albemuth (from one of Dick's trickier novels) and The Adjustment Bureau to TV series based on the Minority Report movie and Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. An anthology series - Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams - adapted 10 of his best short stories for TV, while Blade Runner proved particularly fertile ground, with a big screen sequel (Blade Runner 2049), an animated TV series (Blade Runner: Black Lotus), and a TV sequel produced by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner 2099.

Dick himself would have appreciated the films and shows made from his work, especially perhaps the French character drama Confessions d'un Barjo, a faithful (though transposed to France) version of his realist novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written in 1959, but not published until 1975) and Richard Linklater's pseudo-animated take on his confessional drug culture novel A Scanner Darkly. Dick did see some footage from Blade Runner before his untimely death and despite initially fighting the project, he was won over by the dense visual world director Ridley Scott was creating. 'I thought, these guys have figured out what life is going to be like 40 years from now,' Dick told interviewer Gregg Rickman. 'I'm completely convinced.'

Dick was a confirmed movie fan, though he preferred to watch them on cable TV later in his life than visit cinemas as he suffered from anxiety in crowds. According to Lawrence Sutin's definitive Dick biography, Divine Invasions, his father Edgar had written an unpublished family memoir called As I Remember Them. That source indicates that in telling Dick about his experiences in the First World War, where he'd served on the front lines, he'd taken him to see his first movie: 1931's All Quiet on the Western Front. Early in...