[Music] who on Earth was Philip K dick and why does it matter he was that crazy guy that took all the drugs and wrote that Blade Runner book wasn't he who cares what made him tick as an Unwritten rule I like to separate the art from the artist the background the politics the juicy gossip just doesn't hold that much currency with me I'm far more interested in the words and the style what they actually produced rather than who they were how however a couple of years ago I started a reading project where I'll be reading
all of Philip K Dick's novels in a randomly selected order I actually invented my own version of the eing consisting of a load of pingpong balls and an old smelly golf shoe bag I call it dick bag Bingo obviously I'm now about halfway through that project and what I've discovered as I jump around the timeline of his writing career is that Dick's personality his fluctuating state of mind has sloshed over the side of his brain and left an imprint on the page of course that will be the case for most of these authors but there's
something special something extra peculiar about Dick's pseudo fictional autobiographical style I'm totally convinced that knowing more about the man himself will enhance this project for me and now I've become totally obsessed with how the fragments of fiction and real life intersect and influence each other so here is my little biop pick of PKD join me if you want to unzip the Enigma and expose more dick just like your [Music] mom don't panic I'm not going to bore you with a load of relevant details but we do have to start off with a few [ __
] up factoids Phillip Kindred dick Kindred I know I was expecting something like Kevin or Kylie or kin Philip ketamin dick would have been more appropriate but no it's Kindred no wonder he used the simple K he was born 6 weeks prematurely in Chicago on December the 16th 1928 wow that's almost a hundred years ago now we did have a twin sister Jane Charlotte dick who was obviously born at the same time but sadly she died just a few weeks later the details are a bit sketchy but it wasn't that uncommon for premature babies to
struggle back then this was right at the start of the Great Depression so poor health and poverty contributed to Jane's death that's all very sad but it gets worse well it gets weird Jane was buried in a twin grave so for Philip's entire life his only connection to his dead twin sister whenever he went to pay his respects there's his own headstone with his name already engraved on it just waiting for him to die and join his sister one day whose idea was that now when you read his books his many books about multiple personality
syndrome Iden crisis the Phantom twin mysterious young darkhaired girls you understand that his drawing from some really unresolved dark [ __ ] the way I process this is you know they say you can look back over the life of a serial killer and pinpoint the specific moments that crystallize that personality warp the identity well in a similar way I think Philip K dick had all of the triggers to become a surreal science fiction author okay young Kindred is off to a great start but I think we can just skim that stone over the pond of
his early life as a metaphor the family moved around a fair bit they lived in Reno Nevada in DC and eventually they settled in the San Francisco Bay Area his parents divorced when he was 5 years old late 1940s now he attends the the University of California in Berkeley he studies philosophy history and psychology 1948 he gets married but it only lasts a few months I'm sure he'll get better at the old keeping hold of a wife thing he'll be fine so let's just set the scene we have an intellectual young man living in the
aftermath of World War II the atomic age in a corner of the world that is at The Cutting Edge of Western Civilization you can smell the cocktail of Hope Rebellion change and Oblivion on the breeze I wonder what he's going to write [Music] [Applause] [Music] about the 1950s were a relatively stable but still difficult time for dick I think he done his absolute best to conform I think he wanted to live like a real person whatever the hell that means he got married again so that's wife number two I like to call her his 50s
wife they were together from 1950 to 1959 dick was now writing fulltime and he did have some of his science fiction short stories published but his full length novels were mainly nonscience fiction and that seemed to be the career that he really wanted Mary and the giant in Milton lumpkey territory the broken bubble all of those and more were rejected in fact the only non-sf novel that was published in his lifetime was Confessions of a crap artist in 1975 that all changed after the success of Blade Runner then Publishers knew that they could sell pretty
much anything with his name on it and they were suddenly interested in this early part of his career you know from the author of Blade Runner Humpty Dumpty and land but also during this time period he wrote science fiction novels such as vulcan's Hammer solar Lottery ey in the sky and the Magnificent time out of joint there's a lot of end of the world stuff in there he bloody loved the end of the world post-apocalyptic and dystopian and sometimes both in the same book it was very common to write about that sort of thing in
the Cold War era and that was a theme that he would return to time and time again throughout his career and this is the whole point of the video as well as writing a science fiction version of the world around him he was suffering from anxiety and had a buding interest in different levels of consciousness and these Concepts were working their way into his stories I think fate and circumstances are playing a big part now if the world was ready for his mainstream stuff or if he would have had just one breakout hit I think
Phillip would have become just another interesting but ordinary writer so praise the Lord for failure and [Music] drugs sometime during the 1950s Philip got a taste for amphetamines speed uppers Benny's that kind of thing he would work all day long helping wife number two with her business then he would take a handful of pills and write all night sometimes staying up for days on end and eventually crash in and repeat Philip would later claim that everything he produced all the way up to a scanner darkle that's about 20 years of writing everything was written by
a man who was absolutely off his tits let's take the 1960s and call it a period of produ Ive Madness I'm not sure if he is actually clinically insane at this point but he definitely gets darker and weirder but for sure he keeps his eye on the ball and remains prolific this is the period where he produces most of the Stone Cold PKD Classics he was just getting warmed up in 1961 he writes the man in the High Castle it wins the Hugo Award for best novel it's not awarded until 1963 but still he's on
the map now it's a book that kind of sums up everything that I've been talking about so far the aftermath of a World War identity multi-dimensional existence it should be the ramblings of a Madman but it's [ __ ] amazing up to 1966 he was producing four five sometimes six novels a year here plus a load of short stories as well now I know they're not chunky tomes but that's some Barbara Cartland level of output Martian time slip Dr Blood Money clans of the alane Moon the three Stigmata of Palmer eldri and in 1966 ubic
and do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep oh okay all the time there's little doubt that we're tracking a man's personality through these books more drugs more weirdness the themes of these stories become ever more conceptual and somewhat fragile just like dick you can also feel that we haven't yet reached a Tipping Point or Rock Bottom however these things are gauged it's complicated the drugs are still working 10 years of hammering the brain produces maybe his best work yes it's extremely weird but also it's coherent in a messed up kind of way but just like in
ubic you can see that his reality is starting to melt this isn't going to end well is it we also had wife number three and wife number four in this period he tends to wear them out after about 5 years and then quickly move on to a new one check check check is that going to work shall I look at me or the the the camera okay hello this video is sponsored by nobody well you H not not us you you the viewers because we don't have any money and we need some of yours you
can help the channel by going to buy me a coffee which is like an online Tippin service where you just throw us a few pennies you can go to the merchandise store and buy media death cult t-shirts hoodies mugs stickers do we have stickers I'm pretty sure there are stickers on there but it's all about the t-shirts only available in Black because we're a bit metal or you can officially join the cult over at patreon which gives you exclusive access to our exclusive Discord right where we talk about exclusive science fiction stuff it's the best
place on the internet in the world and you also get access to the new podcast exclusive access patreon only podcast which is me walking around the woods talking about things like this better than this miles better than this we do appreciate any help all the links are in the description down below or you can take the moral low ground and carry on watching for [Music] free what goes up must come down in the early 1970s it looked looked like dick was done as a writer he went from Super prolific to big waves of writers block
and his life started to unravel wife number four has moved on drug people and their entourage asleeping on the couch he's writing less taking more pills surrounding himself with more and more madness it's season five of Breaking Bad there was an incident in 1971 where his house was br broken into but he was suspected of actually staging the Breakin but it's far from clear because in his statement he doesn't really admit to doing the Breakin himself but there does seem to be a finger pointed at an alternative version of himself a fabricated reality around the
incident where a different version of Philip K dick either done the Breakin or was actually admitting to the other version of Phillip doing the Breakin or something he did also suggest that the CIA broke into his house and now they were monitoring his brain waves or was it the Black Panthers or was it a version of Philip K dick from the future whatever he's definitely paranoid at this point and he's starting to live this meta life where his science fiction work and his real life are starting to overlap like many of the characters in his
books if all of this is starting to sound like the plot to aan darkley that's because it is a few years later he writes that novel and he draws directly from the experiences this part of his life that's the book that inspired this video to cut a long story short it's very likely he got himself into a bit of drug money trouble with the wrong drug money people and he fled to Vancouver for a while now he is the drug addict Crasher of sofas and surprise surprise he falls in love gets dumped takes an overdose
tries to commit suicide and at the last minute calls for help that saves his life then he checks himself into rehab the third Act of a scanner darkley feels more like a memoir that's why the last 50 pages of that book are so heartbreaking it's quite different from the rest of his UA but finally dick gets claim dick gets clean without the drugs I mean was he ever completely clean let's just say that flow my tears the policeman said even though it was initially conceived when he was [ __ ] up flow my tears is
what you get from a straight dick stop it that is a brilliantly odd book and one of the best examples of the reading experience being enhanced if you have a glimpse of what was going on inside of his head while he was writing it was this chapter called this is getting weird forget it now it's getting [ __ ] [Music] weird what the hell happened next it's 1974 and it looks like Phil's living that typical after the drugs lifestyle he's trying his best to be a normal family man wife number five living in the suburbs
a new baby and we think he's pretty sober but he's always into some super vitamin herbal New Age [ __ ] he has a wisdom tooth removed so they give him the good [ __ ] he then goes home and it looks like he had some sort of psychotic break I think over two decades of hammering the inside of your skull will leave some emotional Scar Tissue down there in the depths just lurking waiting to rear its ugly head a young female delivery driver knocks on the door she has long dark hair she's wearing a
gold necklace the dick claims emits a mesmerizing pink laser beam that fires into his brain and triggers interdimensional Tim traveling Visions this isn't his next book well it is sort of I'm describing what dick witnessed this is the incident that will influence dominate the rest of his life the doppleganger of his dead future twin the other half of his life force is the conju to a parallel universe that communicates to him through an entity called valis vast active living intelligent system he may not be the precarious drug fiend anymore but he does continue to act
erratically he's obsessed with this idea he thinks it's real wife number five leaves everything he writes for the next 8 years that's until the day he dies is connected to this event it may sound like the ramblings of a Madman it probably is but I've read what is known as the valish trilogy and radio free alboth and I got to say it stands shoulder toosh shoulder with the best that he ever produced he keeps a private Journal about his knowledge the fact that the CIA are using pink laser beams to control the population extraterrestrials an
interdimensional link to ancient Rome and the second coming the proof that we all live in a simulation oh yeah this guy gets it there's a particular fascinating well it's actually a little bit uncomfortable to be honest he's at a conference in France in 1977 delivering this information to the public he's laughed at he's ridiculed and by anyone's measure he's a very troubled man but the point is he seems to be completely convinced that what he's experiencing is real this may be the perfect opportunity to share my theory on what could be going on here he
may be the perfect method author where he convinces everybody that he's going through these episodes and he's actually living this meta science fiction life where he becomes the story but to be honest what's more likely is that reality and his drug soaked brain have morphed into one glorious dollop of dick and he somehow remained coherent or he was having a joke at our expense can I name drop is that okay I was having a conversation with Tim Powers the author Tim was part of Phil's inner C circle at the time of valis he's one of
the characters in the book he told me that Phillip was constantly changing his belief system flip-flopping his opinions and convictions all with a cheeky grin behind his hand so maybe the joke was on us one thing's for sure it definitely got really [ __ ] weird [Music] right near the end of his life dick caught a glimpse of what could have been success finally caught up with him Blade Runner was in production well it was pretty much finished and apparently dick was very enthusiastic about the future of Science Fiction and he did get to see
some of the finished film he finally made some money the world was waking up to dick just like your mom and then he was gone he died of a stroke in 1982 he's buried in that grave right next to his twin sister 53 years after his name was carved on the tombstone he left behind Five Ex-Wives three children 44 novels and 121 short stories and of course a legacy for idiots like me to poke around in and make silly videos about hopefully now you can see why I think it's important to have some context about
the man himself his books are awesome just the way they are because even when they're a hot mess and some of them are they are a piece of his personal puzzle you don't need any extra information but just catching a glimpse of how those ideas found their way from his brain onto the page is a very powerful thing a [Music]
