Philip K. Dick
Tech Central Station has run a neat--though somewhat chilling--piece about the sci-fi work of Philip K. Dick. Link. Excerpt:
Indeed, Dick, although stone-cold dead for nearly a quarter-century, is doing pretty well. His 50 volumes of fiction have inspired such classic movies as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall". And while there've been some duds too, such as "Impostor" and "Paycheck", it seems likely that Dick's oeuvre will continue to be data-mined.
What's his enduring appeal? Better than anyone else, Dick got at the perverse consequences of everyone and everything's being partial, fragmented, and fractalized. That is, whereas the older vision of computers was that they would lead to centralization, as mainframes such as Colossus or Skynet or HAL 9000 took over, or tried to take over, Dick saw that the reality -- or at least what we thought was reality -- would be much different. He saw a future in which technology, including brain-chemical technology, would scatter and shatter traditional modes of thought and behavior.
In the words of cartoonist/writer Art Spiegelman, "What Kafka was to the first half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half."
