PKD would later claim that the reason all his relationships ultimately ended in failure was that ‘I am so autocratic when I’m writing… completely bellicose and defensive in terms of guarding my privacy… It’s very hard to live with me when I’m writing.’198 Yet despite the often turbulent breakups, he said, ‘I still have a good relationship with my

May 1976 proved to be a life-changing month for PKD’s writing career, too. Bantam had acquired three of PKD’s novels, Palmer Eldritch, UBIK and A Maze of Death, all down to a keen young editor called Mark Hurst. PKD received $20,000 for these three books, plus an advance of $12,000 for his planned book Valisystem A.

However, PKD adds an intriguing addition to the model by suggesting that the pineal gland was central to this process of ‘cross-bonding’. ‘As living information the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host.’358 In other words, PKD believed that the opening up of his pineal gland

There was a long delay before Roog appeared in print. So PKD’s first published story was Beyond Lies the Wub, which appeared in the July 1952 issue of Planet Stories. In this story, the ‘Wub’ of the title is a huge pig-like creature from the planet Mars that has the ability to read and control minds. The Wub is acquired by the crew of a spaceship

In May 1968, PKD was delighted when a film company bought the option for his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? There was no progress with this until some time around 1973 when the option was transferred to movie producer Herb Jaffe. However, after reading the initial screenplay, PKD was very disappointed and the project ground to a halt.

The plot involves a central character called Joe Fernwright who mends broken pottery. The Glimmung, a god-like entity made manifest in human form, meets Joe at the Cleveland spaceport and shows him a shard. This piece of pottery is termed ‘the small divine fragment’ and it comes from a huge submerged cathedral located out in space on Plowman’s

‘Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.’ – Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This was based upon a short story, ‘The Little

On 5 July 2007 I was invited to give a talk in the North of England on my first book, Is There Life After Death?: The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die. This book explored the idea that all human beings have two centres of consciousness: the ‘Eidolon’, the everyday part that lives time in a linear fashion and knows nothing other

This was, is and ever will be the confusingly fascinating world of Philip K. Dick: ‘The man who remembered the future’. Welcome to it …