Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Author Biography

Son of Joseph Edgar Dick, a government employee, and his wife, Dorothy Kindred Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928. He lived most of his life in California, however, and spent his life commenting on America and encouraging Americans to break through to a better, less strife-filled reality. A music lover, Dick worked as an announcer on a classical music station, KSMO, in 1947, and worked in a record store from 1948 to 1952. In 1950 he attended the University of California at Berkeley, but dropped out because the University's required ROTC courses conflicted with his antiwar convictions. Meanwhile, he had begun writing, and in 1952 sold his first story, "Roog," to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the same year, Planet Stories published his more well-known short story "Beyond Lies the Wub."

In 1953, Dick published twenty-eight short stories, and another twenty-eight followed in 1954. After the success of Solar Lottery in 1955, he focused mainly on science fiction novels. In 1962, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle, an "alternate reality" novel in which the United States has lost World War II and has been split by the Germans and Japanese. He was most prolific during the years 1964 to 1969, when he published sixteen volumes; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was part of this peak. In 1974, the author claimed to have had a mystical experience during which a "transcendentally rational mind" inhabited his consciousness and straightened out his life. This led him to explore religious themes in the novels VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

During his lifetime, Dick was active in the antiwar, anti-abortion, and animal rights movements. He was also involved with drug rehabilitation programs, both out of concern for others and from personal experience. Like many artists of his generation, Dick viewed drug use as a tool for breaking through the reality of the everyday world and freeing the creative spirit. Drug use, Dick said, allowed him to experience as different a reality as possible and, therefore, to believe not only in alternate dystopic worlds but that a better world could be created. His 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explored issues of drug use and reality in its focus on a hallucinogen that never seems to wear off. Dick recognized, however, the toll that drug use had taken on him and others. He suffered pancreatic damage and the use of amphetamines resulted in high blood pressure, which eventually led to the stroke which killed him.

Dick died from heart failure after a stroke in March of 1982, soon after the release of Blade Runner. He was survived by five ex-wives and three children: Laura, Isolde, and Christopher. While Dick also wrote mainstream fiction—two novels of 1950s America, Mary and the Giant (1987) and The Broken Bubble (1988), were published posthumously—his greatest successes were within the genre that permitted him to explore questions of reality to the fullest. "My major preoccupation," Dick said, "is to question, 'What is reality?'" As the author wrote in an afterword to The Golden Man: "SF is a field of rebellion, against accepted ideas, institutions, against all that is. In my writing I even question the universe; wonder out loud if it is real, and wonder out loud if all of us are real."