Philip K. Dick says, "Wake Up!"

In the early nineties, I was on a Philip K. Dick kick, I devoured every novel of his I could get my hands on. He and Kurt Vonnegut are the only "Sci-Fi" writers I've ever really totally "absorbed." Dick is a great writer with an extraordinary imagination. His characters are usually "average" men and women confronted with strange, mind-bending worlds. The underlying questions always seem to be: What is reality? What is it to be a human being? - My kind of guy.

More than a decade ago, I became obsessed with Dick, thinking I had come across a kindred soul. I totally incorporated his worlds, made them part of my history, my internal territory, and then kind of lost touch with him. So, it's a pleasure to rediscover him, (I'm reading a biography about him called "Divine Invasions.") now. It's like finding an old friend, one that you for some inexplicable reason lost touch with. I realize many of his obsessions are also mine. Philip is gone, but his novels live on.

Here's Philip Dick looking back on his own fiction: "I am a fictionalizing philosopher...what I tell is the truth...I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps, they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and for them, my corpus of writing is one long rationcination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration and presentation, analysis and response and personal history."