As a troubled and pampered child, constantly packed off to psychiatrists of dubious provenance by his fawning mother, Dick submerged himself in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the most coldly
pessimistic of all fantasy writers.
In 1954, two years before Don Seigel's Cold War parable, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, arguably the first modern sci-fi movie, he wrote a short story in which a boy is convinced that his father has been incinerated and replaced by an alien impostor. All his greatest fictions were prescient in their countenancing of the deep, unconscious collective fears of an essentially puritanical America which was, and remains, profoundly ill at ease with the speed of scientific progress.
Ultimately, Dick was a great writer despite himself and his methodology, which involved ingesting a gargantuan amount of amphetamines and working manically on a novel until it was finished.
Perhaps because of his sustained drug abuse, he lived, as Carrere puts it, in a state of perpetual fear. He was afraid of the FBI, who visited his house more than once, and of abduction by aliens, a fate he saw as inevitable. Towards the end of his life, alone and reclusive in a ranch house in southern California, he sat in the dark, listening for hours to the Grateful Dead and devotional classical music, hallucinating about swirling pink mists out of which emerged angry creatures with three eyes. It was as though his work had invaded his life and his fictional creations his mind.
Willfully unpredictable to the end, Dick received Christian last rites on his death bed after a stroke. He was buried underneath a gravestone that had borne his name for the entire 53 years of his life, his parents having assumed that he would soon follow his malnourished three-week-old twin sister into the earth. But he survived, and the 50 novels published in his lifetime are but a fraction of the work he left behind.
Carrere's labor of love is as good a place as any to start trying to understand the enigma of Philip K. Dick, one of the few postwar novelists who deserves the title "visionary."
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