Philip K. Dick

From the Science Channel: Literary genius, celebrated visionary, paranoid outcast: writer Philip K. Dick lived a life of ever-shifting realities straight from the pages of his mind-bending sci-fi stories. Dick's iconoclastic work fuels blockbuster films like Minority Report and Blade Runner, and inspires ground breaking research in physics, robotics—even law enforcement. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Dick pioneers the concept of virtual reality in his fiction. From this analog era, Philip K. Dick dreams into being a digital future — now realized in everything from motion-sensing video games, to the revolutionary simulated environments of UC San Diego's fully immersive StarCAVE. In the 1956 thriller The Minority Report, Dick envisions a reality where pre-crime police can peer into the future to stop crimes before they occur. Fifty years later, American police departments unveil the bleeding edge in real-world precognitive crime prevention technology. Dick's landmark 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — known to a generation of moviegoers as Blade Runner — posits a blurring of the line between man and machine. According to robot-engineers, we are now on the cusp of just such a world. The brilliant author's work continues to resound with an always-expanding audience. Through a lifetime of surreal experience, Philip K. Dick confronts readers with a deceptively simple question: What is reality? To purchase the Science Channel's excellent one-hour documentary on P. K. Dick, click here.