His Dark Vision of the Future Is Now

By RICHARD CORLISS

Verne and Vonnegut, Borges and Burgess, Lessing and LeGuin--they all wrote science fiction that was taken seriously during their lives. Philip K. Dick's work, no less serious or searching, was confined to the ghetto of SF (that's the short form, folks--never, ever sci-fi). He stalked through earthly life, through five wives, a drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, seeing his SF novels published in tatty Ace paperbacks, his other fiction regularly rejected. When he died, in 1982, at 53, mainstream readers didn't know Phil Dick.

It would be lovely to invent an alternative reality in which Dick somehow survived to see the flourishing of his reputation: cover-story tributes in the New York Times Book Review and the New Republic; the opera made from his novel Valis; the issuing of old novels (some published for the first time) in spiffy editions; a generation of readers avid for his teeming, dystopic visions. "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century," wrote Maus author Art Spiegelman, "Philip K. Dick is to the second half."

His work has also inspired six movies--the first, Blade Runner (from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), released just after his death. Total Recall (from the story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale") followed in 1990, then the French Barjo (from Confessions of a Crap Artist) and Screamers (from "Second Variety"). This year, two more: the O.K. Impostor and now Minority Report.

Would Dick be pleased with these films? In 1980 he told an interviewer, "You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood." And for all the postmortem respect accorded Dick's work, no movie yet has been both fully faithful to his ideas and successful on its own terms. The two best--Blade Runner, with its "more human than human" androids, and Minority Report--use Dick as a launching pad for their own propulsive flights of fantasy.

What's missing? The philosophy he dreamed of. Behind the plots of empathetic androids and cybertorpedoes, two questions obsessed Dick: What is real? and What is human? He also asked, What's next? "I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place," he said in a 1972 speech. "But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future." It is in his future, our present--in readers' minds and on the huge mindscreen of the movies--that Phil Dick lives. --By Richard Corliss