'You would have to kill me,' Philip Kindred Dick once told a friend, 'and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood.' Not what you might expect to hear from someone who has since become one of its highest-paid writers. But that was 1980, two years before Hollywood made its first raid into his dark vault of ideas, and Dick was barely able to pay the rent.
This is the tragedy of a writer who in life yearned to be recognised as a literary great, only to find such acclaim in death. He died at the age of 53, three months before the release of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 interpretation of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Yet whether life would have been different had the world caught up with his ideas sooner, is difficult to say. It seems that Dick's visions caught up with him too early for his own good. A measly pay rate of US1 cent a word plagued him throughout his career, and resulted in marathon, drug-fuelled writing sessions, necessitated by the simple need to pay the rent. 'Most of my books have been written in three to eight weeks, and I really have no other conception of how to write a novel,' he said in 1974.
Four marriages slipped by as Dick tumbled towards amphetamine psychosis. The money only started to roll in after the production rights for Androids were bought, but by this time Dick was in and out of rehab. Indeed, in his twilight years he no longer regarded himself as a science-fiction writer from the US - he claimed to be a civil servant from Ancient Rome who was dreaming he was a science-fiction writer. 'I claim to remember a different, very different present life,' he said.
By 2004, Dick's estate had generated more than US$700 million from film adaptations of his books, including Total Recall (based on We'll Remember it for You Wholesale), Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, and John Woo Yu-sum's unloved Paycheck. The Truman Show bears an obvious resemblance to Time Out of Joint, about a man who thinks he's living in 1959, only to discover that it's an imitation built in 1995. Dick's worlds and civilisations founded on hoax and conspiracy clearly struck a chord with the Wachowski brothers for their Matrix series.
'We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations,' Dick wrote. 'We are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power.'
