| When Philip K. Dick began writing in the early 1950s, he wrote both realist and science fiction novels. His work in both genres sharply criticized American society, but his realist novels were never published. His science fiction novels expanded the tradition of social satire typified by the work of Pohl and Kornbluth, and they were quite successful. He continued to write realist novels, however, and their failure to sell was a source of frustration and creative tension. When he abandoned realism to devote himself entirely to science fiction, he wrote one of the first great American science fiction novels, The Man In the High Castle (1962). Through the 1960s Dick's novels both challenged the traditional conventions of the genre, and analyzed contemporary culture, using distortions and estrangements available only to the science fiction writer. His fictional worlds were constructed by taking skeptical political metaphors, and making the metaphorical statements literally true in the worlds of his fiction; thus his "futures" are ways of looking at our present. All of his novels tell the story of an opposition to a controlled, technological society. In the novels of the 1970s, these oppositions lose their political quality, and become private or religious escapes. When he died in March of 1982 he had just completed an important trilogy of religious speculative novels. His contribution to the growth of science fiction equals or exceeds that of any other writer, and among his thirty-five novels are several works of lasting importance. |
