Burdened by deteriorating mental health, visions, and what he alleged were all manner of paranormal experiences – many of which were woven into his expansive oeuvre – Dick had a troubled and fragmented relationship with reality. More recently Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) has been turned into a hit Amazon series.ĭick was not simply an effective writer of strange fictions, but an unusual person in his own right. In a remarkably prolific 30-year period of work, Dick authored 44 novels and countless short stories, adaptations of which went on to redefine science fiction on screen – in particular Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), which was based on Dick's story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990), which took his 1966 short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale as its source material. Out of all such writers, few seem a more unlikely seer of our times than the US author Philip K Dick, who died 40 years ago today at the age of 53. Whether it's the threat to women's rights in the work of Margaret Atwood, the architectural and social dystopias of JG Ballard's novels, or the internet-predicting world of E M Forster's The Machine Stops (1909), the genre is replete with prophetic writers dealing with ever more familiar issues. Writers of science fiction often feel more prescient than others. – The sci-fi director of the 21st Century – Why Octavia E Butler's novels are so relevant Adverts tailored to my personality pop up. I give my details to a company to enter the digital realm. A strangely large number have the camera flipped, and are capturing their faces at different angles, as if they've forgotten what they look like. Through into the waiting room, people are staring into little screens. The machines assess the data regarding my health and microbiology. I scan codes showing my vaccination status and recent Covid test results. The technology recognises me and lets me through.

Ο χρυσαφένιος άντρας by Philip K. Dick