"After years of drug abuse and mental illness, Dick died impoverished and with little literary reputation outside of science-fiction circles. By the 21st century, however, he was widely regarded as a master of imaginative, paranoid fiction in the vein of Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon. While his works can definitively be categorized as science fiction, Dick was notable for focusing not on the trappings of futuristic technology, as many writers in the genre do, but on the discomfiting effects that these radically different—and often dystopian—surroundings have on the characters."
If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others One of Philip K Dick's short stories.
Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"Against the backdrop of televisions, vidphones, and mood organs, Rick meets head-on with this consummate twenty-first-century machine, the human- oid robot that has murdered its master in assertion of its liberty. Indeed, as much for its will to independence as for its manifest violence, the fugitive android threatens a community of authentic human subjects: capable of mas- querading as non-android, it blends in with mainstream society, infringing upon the boundaries of the human collective. In short, the machine, by declar- ing its right to live as an autonomous self, challenges the very categories of life and selfhood-and, in turn, the ontological prerogative of its creators"
"Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is possibly the largest archive of unreleased and unpublished material written by any major 20th century author. At over eight thousand pages, this massive, mostly hand written text by America's "home grown Borges" is arguably Dick's magnum opus, yet it remains largely unexplored. In its daily entries, diagrams and sketches, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74", a post-modern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." Dick's experiences in February and March of 1974 with what he variously called VALIS , Firebright, Sophia and Zebra sent him on a classic visionary quest through the esoteric literatures and sciences of the planet as he focused his polymath sensibility, wide ranging erudition, and zen-like humor on a cosmic whodunnit: Who -- or what -- was VALIS? Dick pursued this problem for the rest of his life, and the Exegesis stands as a unique record not only of a profound spiritual quest, but of the writer at work: reflective, self-questioning, and as always, prodigiously inventive.
Over the past three decades, Philip K. Dick has emerged as a major literary figure of rare and intense interest to a wide array of readers and scholars. Academics, fans, philosophers and film makers enjoy an unusual consensus: Dick offered ecstatically imaginative and prophetic insight into the nature of an "information society," and he did so with paradox, humor and compassion in a spirit of unyielding inquiry. The Exegesis is a brilliant, epic and wrenchingly personal working through of the diverse strands of scientific, philosophical and theological thought developed by Dick in his novels and short stories, and the range of its topics and speculations -- from early Greek philosophy to the 1960s counter-culture, from the nature of time and memory to the interpretation of his own fiction -- make it a potentially almost limitless resource for readers and scholars of his work."
Philip K. Dick and his philosophy of history: https://philipkdickreview.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/philip-k-dicks-philosophy-of-history-part-one/
