Dick looked around his world with a kind of skinlessness. He existed in the world and it just permeated him. Mid-’50s America was overwhelmingly alive in his vision, in such a way that he saw it simultaneously as a present and as a future. He saw the makings of the late capitalist experience embedded in that mid-century triumphalist post-war moment. And it’s as though he experienced it all, in all its absurdity and its tragedy, as this overwhelming vision. And he just jotted it down as frantically as he could. And the books are so raw with that perception that they still feel like a desperate attempt to record an arriving moment. I think that’s the experience of reading Philip K. Dick. He seems to be frantically trying to transcribe an arriving reality that is urgent and totally fresh.

What’s missing from both the academic and pop movie descriptions you mention is that Dick is an immensely personal writer. In his own way, he‘s a Beat or a proto-Beat. He’s like Henry Miller. One of these gargantuan, slightly egotistical but insecure, garrulous personas that just pour themselves onto the page, and says: “Love me or hate me. This is what I feel. And these are the kind of women I find sexy. And oh my god, I hate them. They’re consuming me. And I feel really stupid today, but I’m going to tell you about….” And he just gives himself. And as anyone who’s ever tried to write literary novels or stories or a memoir can tell you – it’s not a small thing to pour yourself onto the page. And when it’s accomplished, totally, you end up with the kind of monumental writers that many people find also unpleasant or toxic or unreadable.

Yeah, I’m obsessed.  But it gets to the reason that I’m so much more moved by PKD than writers like Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson.  They’re good, and impressive, but they’re also lacking a certain nakedness.  To me.  Reading and reviewing Anne Dick’s memoir about Philip K. Dick drove home just how personal his far-out novels were.