PKD has written many interesting stories, many of which have been made into movies. I don’t know if he started cyberpunk but he’s one of the major influences.
What was it about his work that made it noteworthy?
What was characteristic of his work, whether it be good, bad or neutral?
How did his life and experiences influence his work?
What artistic influences can be seen in his work?
How involves was he with programming, computers and robotics?
I haven’t read all that much PKD (though I’ve seen my share of his movies), and based on both, I’d say he had a great talent for building dystopian futures. His characters were all right, his plots were quite good, but most of all, he had a way of pouring all of his life’s angst (reportedly quite a lot of it) into sculpting his crumbling worlds. That’s what stands out for me, anyway.
I’ve read most of his books. He wasn’t involved with computers and robotics at all - his use of robots stemmed from sf, not science. His claim to fame, especially in his early works, is the fragmenting of reality either through dreams or not being sure who was who or the reversal of time. His late work was clearly heavily influenced by drugs.
You should really read the books and not think that the movies have all that much to do with what he was really saying. Start with The Man in the High Castle of course, but also read The World Jones Made.
I think his genius was being a schizophrenic(probably, not sure if he was ever diagnosed) who was high functioning enough to bring his unusual view of the world to audiences via his novels. This was highly unusual and novel at the time.
The running theme through all his stories was the idea reality was not what it seems, that something was wrong with reality. From DADOES(how do you know if you’re human or a imposter?) TMITHC(is this the real reality? Is our reality a in universe novel?) and UBIK.
Towards the end of his life he stopped even incorporating his anxieties in his stories and outright stating he thought the world we live in is actually a hologram and true reality is back in the Roman Empire. VALIS.
I’ve read a lot of his short stories, but only some of his novels. Love the shorts, consistently creative guy who writes with a lot of panache in that format. Find his novels hard work, though - he didn’t have the writing skills to sustain cool ideas and make them into good books (IMHO).
Think the last three novels are his best by an absolute mile. He’s the same writer, but there’s an intensely personal feeling to them where he’s throwing a huge amount of himself, and his struggles with mental illness, into the writing.
My impression of PKD’s works is mainly from movies based on his short stories. My impression was that he started with a variant of “What makes humans humans?”
PKD’s speculative fiction was based on taking a part of someone’s answer “THIS makes us unique individual humans” and explores what happens when such seemingly unique traits are exchanged or interchangeable or can be synthesized.
[ul]
[li]Is it our memories? What if our memories aren’t ours? We can remember that for you, wholesale! = Total Recall[/li][li]Is it our emotions? What if we gave emotions to machines? What if we implanted false dreams in them? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? = Blade Runner[/li][li]Is it our fate, or our choices – and how do they interrelate? *The Adjustment Team *= The Adjustment Bureau[/li][/ul]
There’s others, but I can’t remember them right now.
–G!
There is a book about him which I can’t remember to identify. He did lots of speed, and he thought that he was going to be able to wrap up all of human knowledge into an “answer” to the whole thing. He was looking for the source and he thought he was getting there. He died after Blade runner was made but before it was released. (He was on set occasionally I think)
Is this a homework assignment?
My take-away from the Dick books that I’ve read is the ongoing commentary on the nature of reality. Books such as UBIK, Martian Timeslip, and Now Wait for Last Year.
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everyone here in saying that PKD (and I love his work) was a person who wrote about schizophrenia and heavy drug use under a thin veneer of science fiction. Having said that, there’s a lot of epistemology there: how do we know or learn anything about the universe, and how much of what we think we learn is real, as opposed to being filtered (tainted?) by our own perceptions?
One of his least known books, Galactic Pot-Healer, was actually the most prescient about the Internet - a world where most people had make-work jobs and entertained themselves by emailing things back and forth to their friends.
Drugs. Drugs are key in many of his works.
drad dog, Dick was never on the set of Blade Runner. He saw some of the footage that had been shot and liked it. Here’s a letter from him about his reaction to it:
Cyberpunk started just after his death. Perhaps in some vague sense he was an influence on it, but there were a lot of other influences on it. It would take a book to explain exactly how cyberpunk began and what influenced it. For that matter, it would take a book to answer each of the questions in the OP. There are several biographies of Dick.
MichaelEmouse has been around a while so I think you don’t need to worry.