The author

 Minority Report  Blade Runner (of course)  Total Recall  A Scanner Darkly  Paycheck  The Matrix  Dark City  The Truman Show  Memento  Pi (etc. etc. etc.)

 Wrote 36 novels, 100+ short stories  Died at 53, just before release of Blade Runner (in 1982)  Twin sister died 40 days after birth  Grew up in Berkeley, CA (think, hippies)  Wrote first novel at 14  Immersed in counter-culture, drugs, & antiwar protests during 60s  A “touch” paranoid

 “Dick was a strange wonderful/terrible man…Crazy and compassionate, violent and gentle, mesmerizing and terrifying” (Bzdek 1).  “His ‘wow’ factor is how recognizable the future he imagined is now…Dick’s concerns are in sync with our times” (Bzdek 2).  “We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations. We are bombarded by pseudo-realities…I do not distrust their motives, I distrust their power” (Dick, qtd. in Bzdek 2).

 “‘I like to build universes that do fall apart, Dick wrote, because ‘objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism that can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new’” (qtd. in Bzdek 3).

 “Dick’s allegiance was not to literature but to writing and to the possibilities of writing as a form of protest and instant social satire” (Gopnik 2).  “I love SF…I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if’--- ‘it’s ‘My God; what if’---in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming” (Dick, qtd. in Gopnik 3).

 In his novels of the 60s, “he was taking on a more pointedly American question: Are there reliable boundaries between vicarious and real experience? Is there anything that can’t be made into a form of show business, and any form of show business that can’t be made into something more? Recreation and religion, and their intertwining, are the DNA of his worlds: the tedium of existence forces us toward ‘fun’; fun becomes the basis of our faith” (Gopnik 4).

 “he had…a hack’s habits…” (Gopnik 6).  “He has three, at most four, characters…” (6).  “narrative falsely propelled by the one- sentence paragraph…” (6).  “With the ideas removed…it could be in any standard police procedural of the period” (6).  “you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences” (6).  “paint-by-numbers prose” (6)  “Dick’s characters tend to be robots dressed up as people” (6).