My Favorite Philip K. Dick Novels

A few years ago, sci-fi fans started making jokes about how reality now feels like a Philip K. Dick novel. That was funny for the simple reason that there is no reality in Dick’s novels—everything is an illusion, a construct, a hallucination, a simulation.

So how can we live in Dick’s world, if it doesn’t exist?

Fast forward to the current moment. People are still saying that Dick’s novels are turning into reality. But it’s not a joke anymore. It’s feels more like a warning.

After all, it might be fun to watch The Matrix—a story that’s a total Dick rip-off, by the way—especially if you have a comfy seat in the theater and a big container of buttered popcorn. But you don’t want to live inside the Matrix.

All this leaves Dick’s longtime fans in an awkward situation. I once found his books entertaining—his wild imagination more than compensated for his shortcomings (especially as a prose stylist). But with each passing year, his novels are a little less fun, and a lot more disturbing.

But that doesn’t diminish their value. In fact, Dick is now a must-read author—if only as an iconoclastic thinker and social commentator. Of course, the storytelling is still important, but not as escapism. His novels have been transformed from pulp fiction into allegories or parables for our own time.

In that spirit, let me share my guide to Dick’s best works. Below I highlight seven novels. You will find full reviews of them in The Vault (where hundreds of literary reviews and sundry other articles are available for premium subscribers). Here I offer an extract from each of these separate essays on Dick’s work.

I’m focusing today on his fiction. But you may also want to check out this author’s non-fiction writing. The best source of that is The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin. (Sutin is also the author of an excellent Dick bio, entitled Divine Invasions.)

And now on to my list of Dick’s seven best novels.

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

What a crazy book! Or at least that’s how it seemed back in 1965, when Philip K. Dick published The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It was a strange book in a strange year.But not anymore. The most demented things in this story are now a reality. Just consider….

1. A ruthlessly ambitious CEO who wants to relocate to Mars, and gets caught up in a fierce rivalry with another space-traveling technocrat.
2. All this is financed by the sale of addictive technology, which now becomes the focal point of people’s leisure hours.
3. Unwary citizens find themselves addicted to tech platforms, where users are represented by avatars. But the real goal of powerful tech enterprises is to lure users into compulsive behavior that can be monetized. And not just once—but day after day.
4. As a result, huge numbers of people waste their free time and spend all their money inside these make-believe platforms. They want to escape reality, not live in it.
5. Can you blame them. Global warming is out of control, and beyond any point where it can be fixed.
6. Meanwhile, a few wealthy elites are obsessed with transhumanist technologies for extending life—which often backfire.
7. In their struggles to maintain sanity in a dystopian world, people now get therapy from a chatbot—accessed via a device they carry with them wherever they go.
8. But some heavy users are so deranged by the emerging technology…..

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A Scanner Darkly

When Philip K. Dick’s fourth wife left him in September 1970, he found himself alone in a four-bedroom house just north of San Rafael in Marin County, California. Other men, put in this situation, might sell the house, and move to something smaller. But Philip K. Dick was not like other men, so he opened up his home to a ragtag assortment of drug addicts, runaways, and juvenile delinquents.It was like a cross between a hippie commune and a crack house. And Dick, now approaching his forties, was the ringleader—although old enough to be the parent of many of his new housemates. Some of them were still in junior high….When he finally returned to writing, Dick’s experiences in this chaotic environment served as the inspiration for one of his most influential novels, A Scanner Darkly, later made into a Hollywood movie by Richard Linklater—where the various druggies are played by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder.It’s a strange, disturbing film that did poorly at the box office. But the real life figures behind the screen characters fared even worse….

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

I could tell you that the anxiety-ridden hunt for human-like androids in this book represents the queasy quest for authenticity of the late 1960s. I could tell you that the “othering” of the androids, who are hunted and killed as threats to society, reflects a critique of the Vietnam War from the perspective of Berkeley, California—where the author lived in 1968, when Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published. I could even tell you that Philip K. Dick wrote this novel for the money, anticipating the sweet movie deal that would turn his book into Blade Runner…..Alas, none of these grandiose claims has, I fear, much bearing on what Philip K. Dick actually put into this book. We need to remind ourselves that our esteemed author wrote his novel in a state of personal crisis, and any obsessions he revealed about sincerity and authenticity were personal ones, anxieties that Dick lived through each day, and didn’t need to find described in a book of philosophy or a classroom lecture. But he was crazy in the right kind of way. So readers felt the power and vibrancy of Dick’s work from this period even if the unfolding plots bordered on the surreal…..

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The Man in the High Castle

What would happen if the course of American history had taken a different turn in the 1940s? This is now a suitable subject for the literary lions, as demonstrated by Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). But a year before Chabon was born, Philip K. Dick earned his first Hugo award for his bold alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle, a work that has gradually gained acceptance as a modern classic….

Dick once claimed that he relied on the I Ching to help him develop the plot for this novel—and even blamed it for elements of the story that left him unsatisfied. As is so often the case with Dick, the story echoes the circumstances under which it was written. In this case, the I Ching plays a role in the plot, as characters consult it to guide their course of action. The novel also reminds us of its construction in the character of Hawthorne Abendsen, who is the enigmatic “Man in the High Castle,” an author who is writing a fictional account of alternative history, in which United States and its allies win the war. And Abendsen relies on the I Ching to write this novel-within-a-novel.

Reality blurs within the story. And the distinction between the story and outside reality—as manifested in Dick’s personal life— also grows fuzzy (another trademark of this author’s oeuvre)….

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Ubik

Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik did not win any of the major science fiction awards, but it was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels in the English language published between 1923 and 2005. At the time of his death in 1982, even Dick’s fervent fans could hardly have conceived his enshrinement on such a list, alongside Hemingway, Faulkner, and Nabokov. But Dick’s star continues to rise—in fact, it is hard to think of another writer, in any genre, whose reputation has enjoyed such an unexpected turnaround during the last quarter century….Sometimes his books lay open their tricks in the opening chapters, and readers simply go along for the ride, reasonably sure what lies ahead. But Ubik keeps you guessing at every step along the way, and your hypotheses about what is actually transpiring will probably change several times as the story progresses. You might even say that this work progresses much like a conventional mystery, with clues to be deciphered and puzzles to be solved. Only here the questions are peculiar ones—not who committed the murder, but whether a murder actually took place, not finding the body but understanding what a body might be and become, not avenging a death but reassessing the boundaries between life and death….

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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

No need to call in the policeman. Philip K. Dick has his fingerprints all over this story. Here we find the sudden alterations in the texture of reality, the haunting sense that our most cherished assumptions are fragile illusions, the harassed protagonist who struggles in the midst of an authoritarian society. And, as always, high tech gadgets and mind-altering substances.In short, it’s another day at the office for Mr. Dick.At the outset of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, we meet Jason Taverner, a famous television star whose show is watched by an avid audience of thirty million viewers. But such happy moments of well-being and acclaim never last long in a Dick novel. Before the end of the first chapter, an ex-lover tries to kill Taverner – by means of a Callisto cuddle sponge, which digs its fifty feeding tubes into his body. And by the second chapter, Taverner has awakened in a low-down, bug-infested skid-row hotel room, without any recollection of how he got there. When he tries to phone his friends and colleagues, none of them recognize him any more. On October 11, Taverner was a celebrity; on October 12 he is a nobody.If Rod Serling were there, he would walk on-stage at this point uttering those famous words: “You have just entered the Twilight Zone.”

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VALIS

There are many strange things about VALIS, but one of the strangest is the new-found brilliance to Dick’s prose. For all his creativity, Dick often wrote in a cartoonish, pulp-fiction manner—his biographer Lawrence Sutin describes it as a “slapdash quality” and notes that it prevents many critics from considering Dick in the same category as Kafka, Calvino and other writers who dealt with similar themes…..But in VALIS, Dick actually starts writing at a dazzlingly high level. The coarse pulp-fiction author disappears completely from view and instead we have an edgy prose stylist whose work can stand comparison with Pynchon and Heller and Vonnegut and Kesey and all those other renegade who redefined American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s.So, if I can borrow Jonathan Lethem’s pun, you really don’t know dick about Dick until you’ve read VALIS. I believe it is his finest novel, and the starting point for any reader who wants to see how close sci-fi can get to avant-garde fiction. But the fact is that Dick wasn’t trying to conduct an experiment in writing. He was grappling with his own demons and—this is no glib exaggeration —losing his grasp on the meaning and purpose of his life and vocation. That back story gives these pages a pathos and power that few other avant-garde novels possess. In short, it all comes together here although, sad to say, it had to come apart for Mr. Dick in order for that to happen.

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