Philip K. Dick
16 December: Philip Kindred Dick and his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, are born six weeks prematurely on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, to Dorothy and Joseph Edgar Dick, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
26 January: Jane dies. This affects PKD's life, and is evidenced in the recurrent motif of the "phantom twin" in his books.
Joseph Dick is transferred to Reno, NV. Dorothy refuses to move, and they divorce. Dorothy is awarded custody of PKD. She takes a job in Washington DC and moves there with PKD.
PKD attends John Eaton Elementary School, and a teacher remarks that he "shows interest and ability in story telling."
PKD and his mother move to California.
PKD develops an interest in Science Fiction. He reads his first SF magazine, Stirring Science Stories.
PKD's first stories, "Le Diable," "Jungle People," "The Black Arts," "The Pirate," and "Knight Fight" are published throughout the year in the "Young Author's Club" column of The Berkeley Daily Gazette.
PKD graduates from Kerkeley High School in Berkeley CA. He and Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, etc.) are members of the same graduating class, but do not know each other.
PKD works at Art Music Company, a record store in Berkeley.
May: Marries Jeanette Marlin. They are divorced in November.
PKD attends UC Berkeley, taking classes in history, psychology, philosophy, and zoology. Through his studies in philosophy, he comes to believe that existence is based on internal human perception, which does not necessarily correspond to external reality; he describes himself as "an acosmic panentheist," believing in the universe only as an extension of God. He drops out after one semester due to anxiety.
14 June: Marries Kleo Apostolides.
While he is steadily in print throughout the 1950s—he publishes 82 short stories and 3 novels between 1952 and 1958—genre fiction does not pay well, and he lives in or in a state of near or actual poverty for much of the decade. PKD dreams of a career in mainstream fiction, and throughout this decade he also wrote a number of relatively conventional novels. In 1960 he writes that he is willing to "take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer." But his dream of mainstream success formally dies in January of 1963 when the Scott Meredith Literary Agency returns all of his unsold mainstream novels. Only one of these works, Confessions of a Crap Artist, is published during Dick's lifetime.
PKD begins to write as a full-time occupation. "Beyond Lies the Wub" is published in the July issue of Planet Stories.
His novelette, "The Defenders," is the cover story for the January issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, illustrated by Ed Emshwiller.
His short story, "The World She Wanted," is the cover story of the May issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.
Solar Lottery is PKD's first published novel. The political climate of the times and his own paranoia involving the authority he wrote about created the atmosphere from where many of his stories would emerge.
PKD and Kleo are questioned by the FBI, which they believe to be the result of Kleo's socialist views and left-wing activities.
PKD and Kleo divorce.
1 April: PKD and Anne Williams Rubinstein marry. PKD eventually becomes physically abusive with her.
25 February: PKD's first child, Laura Archer Dick, is born.
The Man in the High Castle wins the Hugo Award, the highest prize in SF.
From 1962 to 1970 PKD publishes 20 novels. The most significant is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in 1968. It is both a conflation and an intensification of the pivotally Dickian question: What is real, what is fake? What crucial factor defines humanity as distinctly "alive," versus those merely alive only in their outward appearance?
PKD develops an addiction to amphetamines, stemming in part from his need to maintain a prolific writing regimen due to the financial exigencies of the science fiction field.
After an argument with Anne, PKD tries to push her off a cliff in a car, then later claims she was trying to kill him, and convinces a psychiatrist to commit her involuntarily.
PKD and Anne divorce. PKD moves to Oakland to live with a fan, Grania Davis. Shortly after, he attempts suicide by driving off the road while she is a passenger.
6 July: PKD marries Nancy Hackett.
15 March: Isolde Freya Dick (now Isa Dick Hackett) is born.
PKD joins the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest," an anti-war pledge to pay no U.S. federal income tax. This results in the confiscation of his car by the IRS, and the a large tax debt. SF author Robert Heinlein, four-time Hugo Award winner (Double Star, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, etc.), loans him the money to pay the debt.
PKD's marriage begins to break down. Nancy moves out of their house in Santa Venetia, California, and PKD allows a number of other drug users to move into the house.
November: PKD returns home to discover that it has been burglarized, with his safe blown open and personal papers missing. The police are unable to determine the culprit, and even suspect PKD of having done it himself.
February: PKD is invited to be guest of honor at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. Within a day of arriving at the conference and giving his speech, "The Android and the Human," he informs people that he has fallen in love with a woman named Janis whom he has met there, and that he will be remaining in Vancouver. An attendee of the conference, Michael Walsh, movie critic for local newspaper The Province, invites Dick to stay in his home, but asks him to leave two weeks later due to his erratic behavior. This is followed by Janis ending their relationship and moving away.
23 March: PKD attempts suicide by taking an overdose of the sedative potassium bromide. Subsequently, after deciding to seek help, Dick becomes a participant in X-Kalay (a Canadian Synanon-type recovery program), and is well enough by April to return to California.
PKD will return to the events of these months while writing his 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly, which contains fictionalized depictions of the burglary of his home, his time using amphetamines and living with addicts, and his experiences of X-Kalay (portrayed in the novel as "New-Path").
PKD and Nancy divorce.
18 April: PKD marries Leslie "Tessa" Busby.
25 July: Christopher Kenneth Dick is born.
20 February: While recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth, PKD receives a home delivery of Darvon from a young woman. When he opens the door, he is struck by the beauty of the dark-haired girl and is especially drawn to her golden fish-shaped necklace (the Christian ichthys symbol). Dick later calls the symbol the "vesicle pisces." This name seems to have been based on his conflation of two related symbols, the ichthys and the vesica piscis.
PKD later recounts that as the sun glinted off the gold pendant, the reflection caused the generation of a "pink beam" of light that mesmerized him. He comes to believe that the beam had its own intelligence and imparted wisdom and clairvoyance. He is startled by a separate recurrence of the pink beam, when it reveals to him that his infant son is ill. The child is rushed to the hospital, where the suspicion is confirmed by a medical diagnosis.
After the delivery woman's departure, PKD begins experiencing strange hallucinations. He initially thinks them side effects from medication, but reconsiders this after weeks of continued hallucinations. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane," PKD later tells Charles Platt.
PKD sees the initial hallucinations as geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome. As the hallucinations increase in length and frequency, he claims that he began to live two parallel lives, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas," a Christian persecuted by Romans in the first century CE. He comes to see the pink beam as a messenger from the "transcendentally rational mind," and calls it "Zebra," "God," and, eventually, "VALIS" (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). He writes of these experiences first in the semi-autobiographical novel Radio Free Albemuth, and then in VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and the unfinished The Owl in Daylight (the VALIS trilogy).
For the rest of his life, he struggles to comprehend what is occurring, questioning his own sanity and perception of reality. For the next eight years he transcribes what thoughts he can into an eight-thousand-page, one-million-word journal dubbed the Exegesis. A recurring theme in Exegesis is his hypothesis that history had been stopped in the first century CE, and that "the [Roman] Empire never ended". He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism and despotism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground, had kept the population of Earth enslaved to worldly possessions. Dick believes that VALIS communicated with him, and anonymous others, to induce the impeachment of U.S. President Richard Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current Emperor of Rome incarnate.
During this initial period, PKD paranoia begins to grow. He writes a letter to the FBI, accusing various people, including University of California, San Diego professor Frederic Jameson, of being foreign agents of Warsaw Pact powers. He tells the FBI that Stanisław Lem (the highly influential Polish SF writer) was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion.
PKD and Tessa divorce.
VALIS is published. It becomes PKD's most academically studied book.
17 February: after completing an interview, PKD contacts his therapist, complaining of failing eyesight, and is advised to go to a hospital immediately, but does not. The following day, he is found unconscious on the floor of his home, having suffered a stroke.
25 February: PKD suffers another stroke in the hospital, which leads to brain death.
2 March: PKD is disconnected from life support and dies.
After his death, Dick's father, Joseph, takes his son's ashes to Riverside Cemetery in Fort Morgan, Colorado, (section K, block 1, lot 56), where they are buried next to his twin sister Jane, who died in infancy. Her tombstone was previously inscribed with both of their names at the time of her death, 53 years earlier.
Films
Blade Runner (1982) - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Total Recall (1990) - "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
Confessions d'un Barjo (1992) (Barjo in its English-language release) - Confessions of a Crap Artist.
Screamers (1995) - "Second Variety"
Minority Report (2002) - "The Minority Report"
Impostor (2002) - "Impostor"
Paycheck (2003) - "Paycheck"
A Scanner Darkly (2006) - A Scanner Darkly
Next (2007) - "The Golden Man"
Radio Free Albemuth (2010) - Radio Free Albemuth
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) - "Adjustment Team"
Total Recall (2012) - second film adaptation of "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
Television
The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019) - The Man in the High Castle
Minority Report (2015) - "The Minority Report"
Electric Dreams (2018) - Anthology series; standalone episodes based on PKD's works