Philip K. Dick

Introduction • Favorites • Works • Collection • Thesis

PKD is not only my favorite author and an inspiration in my own writing, but he is one of the most prolific and influential authors within the realm of science fiction; in his life time (1928-1982) he wrote over forty novels (mostly science fiction), a handful of essays, a truckful of short stories, thousands of pages of letters, and a philosophical journal ("The Exegesis") with a word count in the millions, of which only excerpts have been published. PKD's main themes are "what is reality?" and "what is human?" and he often writes about multiple levels of reality, artificial (virtual reality) worlds, false memory, higher or parallel planes of existence, time and space travel, cybernetics, and fake humans (androids).

Movies based directly on PKD's novels and short stories include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Barjo, Impostor, Minority Report, and Paycheck. Movies indirectly based on or in the style of his writing include The Matrix trilogy, Dark City, Fight Club, The Truman Show, eXistenZ, The Sixth Sense, Ghost in the Shell, Vanilla Sky, and Avalon.

If you've never read PKD or if you're curious about what I like, check out my personal favorites. I was impressed by PKD's works so much that I ended up spending thousands of dollars to acquire most of his books, which I researched during the 2000-2001 school year for my original bachelor's thesis on his work.

I may add more to this section in the future, but this is it for now. For a more comprehensive source of PKD-related information, I recommend checking out philipkdick.com.