Polish author Stanislaw Lem, who died recently, held all of American science fiction in the greatest of contempt, except for one person: Philip K. Dick. It’s easy to see why today. Although it took a very long time for Dick to achieve widespread fame and recognition for his work, he is now considered a giant among giants in science fiction writing: around fourteen of his works are presented in the Gollancz SF Masterworks Series, and several of his books have been turned into popular blockbusters, such as Minority Report (from the book of the same name), Bladerunner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and Total Recall (from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale).

A few months ago I got the urge to dive into some science fiction after spending some time reading almost exclusively non-fiction. Dick immediately sprang to mind; searching on Amazon, his name cropped up under the SF Masterworks series, so I started looking around. I’m the sort of guy who’ll buy a dozen books in one go, read them, and get the next lot, so I wondered about what else to get Even though I was aware of his impact on the genre, and had been a big fan of Dick’s ever since becoming aware of his existence after watching Bladerunner, I’d never really known who he was. What drove this man to create some of the most spell-binding and original SF probably since HG Wells? As luck would have it, around this time I visited a friend of mine who had just the thing, I Am Alive And Your Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrere. So, on his recommendation, I added it to the list. I’m glad I did, because it completely blew my mind.

By the author’s own admission, it’s a very “peculiar book”, namely because Carrere presents Dick as you would a character in any novel: insights into personal thoughts and trying to decipher the numerous intimate ramblings and musings that flickered across Dick’s mind like grains of sand blowing across the Sahara desert. In fact, Carrere gets so deep into Dick’s brain that, at times, it feels like you’re reading Dick writing about himself in the third person. There is, of course, the question as to how much of what Carrere wrote is actually true. Myself, I don’t particularly bother with this because there is such a level of consistancy in the character that Carrere portrays that I find it inconceivable that Dick wasn’t like this.

Dick’s story is quite gripping; I hated putting the book down even for a moment. Perhaps the best part of Carrere’s work, for me, was the correlation between events in Dick’s life and his works; it’s a fascinating insight into how a writer can use seemingly trivial events and mesh them together into works of genius. From Dick’s own experience of trying to pull a light cord in his bathroom that wasn’t there came the wonderful work of Time Out Of Joint (which has a remarkable similarity in concept to the film The Truman Show even though it prefigured that work by several decades). Perhaps the most amazing thing for me was Carrere’s description of a desperate Dick locking himself away with the I Ching to guide him as an oracle in a shack, working nine or ten hours a day in order to write The Man In The High Castle. Thanks to Carrere, I have an even greater understanding of the real genius behind this work, and others (after reading Carrere’s work, I tackled Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and it was nothing short of a pleasure to do so with a greater understanding of the context within which it was written).

But, as good things often come to an end, so did the book and, with it, the end of Dick’s career and life. I must confess that I was so drawn into the character of Dick that I cried at the end. This man simply didn’t deserve to end up the way he did, I thought; to have bestowed such literary gifts on the world - often without anyone really knowing until much later - it just didn’t seem right. It was sad, too, to see his mind descend into chaos, split personalities, hallucinations … and these were the more tame things that invaded his thoughts. Lem’s praise resulted in wild fantasies with Dick accusing him of being some communist spy trying to trap him. Towards the end, it was Dick’s ability to twist the events of his life into connections and theories that ultimately proved too much: messages from the Roman Empire, believing we were actually living in around 70AD … it gets strange. Have a read through a speech he gave to a rather dumbfounded French audience in September 1977 at the second Festival International de la Science-Fiction de Metz in France, entitled If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others. An excerpt (also quoted in Carrere’s book):

You are free to believe me or free to disbelieve, but please take my word on it that I am not joking; this is very serious, a matter of importance. I am sure that at the very least you will agree that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing. Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different, present life. I know of no one who has ever made that claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique; what perhaps is unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it.

Dick remains as unique now as he did then. Perhaps it’s not so sad, after all, that by “normal” people’s standards - if there is such a thing - he was quite mad in the last years of his life. As someone who revelled in telling stories of lone individuals aware of the truth in the world around them, perhaps he truely was alive, and the rest of us are stuck in a mass illusion, dying corpses frozen cryogenically from one of his novels. Perhaps we really are dead. If so, then long live Philip K. Dick.