The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who use the words.

—Philip K. Dick

Forget Nostradamus. The real prophet for our age was Philip K. Dick. If you need proof, just go to the “news” section of the authoritative Web site philipkdick.com (from which the above quote was plucked). You'll find a story published recently in the English paper Independent News about a software system developed by researchers at London's Kingston University.

Called Cromatica, it examines images of people on closed-circuit TV cameras and rapidly compares their behavior patterns with those of terrorists and other felons. It automatically transmits matches to authorities, who could, presumably, arrest a terrorist before he boarded a plane.

Such a device was predicted in Philip K. Dick's short story “The Minority Report,” published in a pulp science-fiction magazine in 1956. “The Minority Report” will finally make it to the screen Friday [June 21, 2002], directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise as the head of Pre-Crimes, a police agency that uses technology to identify criminals before they commit their crimes. When the tables are turned on Cruise and he is accused of being disposed toward murdering someone he has never met, he has to prove his innocence before the crime is committed. Spielberg says his movie is not science fiction but “future reality.”

I read “The Minority Report” almost 20 years ago when I was going through an intense Philip K. Dick period, a phase that was both exhilarating and exhausting.

I am not, and probably never will be, a reader of science fiction for the same reason that I could never be a Middle East analyst: I can't keep all the tribes and temples and weapons systems straight. But a screening of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in 1982 inspired me to read the story on which it was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I spent the next few months scouring used-book stores for out-of-print Dick novels and collections of his short stories, most of which he wrote for fantasy, sci-fi and men's magazines in the '50s and '60s.

Born in 1928, Dick apparently spent most of his life hunched over a typewriter, writing books and stories and selling them by the word. He wrote more than 50 novels and hundreds of short stories, yet he somehow found time to become a serious drug user—speed, you may not be surprised to learn, was his stimulant of choice, though he indulged, with some later remorse, in hallucinogenics as well. He also found time to chase women compulsively; he was married five times.

Discovering Dick, who died the year Blade Runner was released, is not unlike discovering Duke Ellington; not only do you have enough material to keep you occupied for years, but much of it is brilliant, more of it is good and nearly all of it is fascinating. You see his influence everywhere. And, as with Ellington, much of the later work is concerned with the most intriguing subject in art: the search for the divine.

Including The Minority Report and Blade Runner, there have been six movies based specifically on Dick's work. Total Recall takes the idea of virtual reality, and not much else, from the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”; Confessions d'un Barjo, a 1992 French movie, was based on one of Dick's non-sci-fi novels, the self-lacerating Confessions of a Crap Artist; Screamers was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the druggy short story “Second Variety”; Impostor was released earlier this year, and there are at least two more in preproduction, including Paycheck and A Scanner Darkly, which Jersey Films has been trying to get off the ground for years.

But not a year goes by that I don't see a movie that has been clearly driven by Dick's primary and often paranoid obsessions, which include the manipulation of the mind through mass media and the question of what makes a human human.

Writer and director Andrew Niccol is one obvious disciple. His original script for The Truman Show bears a striking resemblance to Time Out of Joint, a 1959 novel about an ordinary fellow who is discovered by the government to have the ability to predict where enemy bombs will hit. To keep him unaware but productive, they build a phony and perfect little town around him and publish a newspaper with a puzzle that he faithfully solves every day, saving the world. Niccol's Gattaca explores the Dick theme of genetic engineering, and Simone, to be released in August, creates a movie star in a computer.

Dick's influence is easily scanned in The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Dark City and dozens of other films, including the collaboration between the late Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, last year's A.I.

Dick is hardly the only gifted sci-fi writer of his era to have been a certifiable visionary: Arthur Clarke, Harlan Ellison and even Kurt Vonnegut (whom Dick chastised for claiming not to be a sci-fi writer) were all prescient about the future in which we now exist (or, according to Dick, may not exist). And William Gibson, who vies with Dick for the title of father of cyberpunk, was even more specific in his descriptions of how the technological era would affect our lives; he even forecast Google and similar services that presurf cyberspace for us.

Dick, however, was as much philosopher as prognosticator, and his legacy is not just an endless pile of books and stories to plow through, but an enormous heap of ideas it will take us years to get our heads around.

If Spielberg has done him justice, The Minority Report will be not just a great chase film with thrilling effects, but a movie that forces us to think about man, God and law. And if it leads you down the rabbit hole Blade Runner led me down 20 years ago, remember, you still have a lifetime to explore it all.