I first came across him through a movie. Spoiler alert, it’s not Blade Runner (starring Harry Ford). If you think it’s Total Recall (starring A. Schwarzenegger) or Total Recall (starring Jessy Biel) or Next (starring Nick Ca-age) you’re wrong. The year is 2006. The big movie coming out that summer was Transformers. I was looking forward to it for some reason I still don’t understand. Then saw the trailer and changed my mind. I had already started watching indie and art house movies by then and learned Richie Linklater had a film coming out with Keanu called A Scanner Darkly. Since I lived in central Delaware I assumed a small artsy movie like that would play there. Well, it didn’t. I rented it from Blockbuster ASAP and loved it. From there made the mistake of showing it to my friends that loved Transformers and no one liked it. PKD’s books came a few years later but the seed had been planted in my sub-consciousness.

Philip Kindred Dick was born December 16, 1928 in Chicago. He had a twin sister, Jane, but she died 41 days later unfortunately. His parents were Dorothy Kindred Dick and Joseph Edgar Dick. Joe’s job had them moving around and they ended up in San Francisco. Shortly after Joe was transferred to Reno, Nevada but Dorothy wanted to stay in California. They divorced. Dorothy won custody and raised Phil as a single mom. They moved to Washington D.C. Phil attended Quaker schools for a few years. They moved back to California in 1938.Two years later, when he was 12 he discovered a science fiction magazine called, “Stirring Science Stories.”

His high school years were spent at Berkeley High School with fellow legendary science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin. They didn’t know each other at the time however. Phil graduated and very shortly went to University of California Berkeley in 1948. He dropped out for medical reasons and married for the 1^st of 5 different times. His marriages were the following Jeanette Marlin 1948, Kleo Apostolides 1950 to 1959, Anne Williams Rubinstein 1959 to 1965, Nancy Hackett 1966 to 1972, and Leslie Busby 1973 to 1977. Also he has three children, Laura Archer, Isolde Freya, and Christopher Kenneth.

Kleo was heavily involved with liberal activism to the point, an FBI agent started stopping by and inspecting the young couple. They ended up being good friends with the FBI agent for the next few years.

He sold his first short story in 1951. Four years later he sold his first book, The Solar Lottery. He attempted to break into mainstream fiction. No one wanted any of it. Science fiction on the other hand fully embraced him and couldn’t get enough. In 1963 he won his only Hugo award for The Man in the High Castle. By this point he was done with mainstream fiction. He continued writing at the rate of a book or two published per year.

In the early 1970s, a woman delivered a package. It was analgesia for a dental procedure. She was wearing a Christian fish necklace. He opened the door and saw the fish or as he called it the, “vesicle Pisces.” This caused several months of visions that inspired the VALIS trilogy.

After an interview in 1982, he was hospitalized after having a series of strokes. March 2, 1982 life support was cut. He was the first science fiction writer published by the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of American classics. His library colleagues include Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, W.E.B. DuBois, and Willa Cather.

PKD’s drug habit and addiction is pretty well-known. During the 1960s his home became a haven for counterculture hippies and whatnot. Apparently his drugs of choice were amphetamines and speed. After years of using he sobered up and wrote A Scanner Darkly based on his last few years of drug use. In 1970, his 4^th wife, Nancy Hackett, left him. He was lonely in a four bedroom home so he had teenage and college age hippies hang out at his home and get high. There was a regular crew of people that are represented in A Scanner Darkly. His writing output slowed down post going sober but his ideas remained just as bizarre and insightful.

Overall his career wasn’t amazing. He was a successful writer that made a living off it but was never fully appreciated until after he died. Phil didn’t live to see Blade Runner, which came out three months after he died. He saw special effects tests and loved it. It was apparently exactly how he envisioned his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? If you look at a lot of PKD’s short stories and novels, they follow a similar formula. A regular man is caught up in a crazy situation where there’s heavy drug use that manipulates reality or perception of reality where the governing body of some kind is corrupt in some way. In addition there are two other storylines that may or may not interact with the core storyline but the central idea is fascinating and engrossing. Also the main characters have crazy names for example; Eric Sweetscent, Herb Lackmore, Lars Powderdry, Elvira Funt, and Reese Verrick.

The first PKD book I read was The Zap Gun. It was the wrong book to start with. While it’s enjoyable it’s a deep cut for a reason. Shortly after that I read Now Wait for Last Year and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. These hooked me for life.

Phil approached science fiction from a psychedelic, relatable and philosophical point-of-view. They manage to be very weird and out there yet feel grounded, real and human. PKD changed the scope of science fiction. There aren’t majestic chosen ones bound by fate. There aren’t giant space battles. There aren’t colossal space monsters. He wrote about mind-bending, reality-altering concepts that affect a person’s life and environment. The concept and themes fully engulf and consume everything in the pages. You see how it affects and morphs every aspect of that world. He plunged into your consciousness and challenged everything you knew and assumed to be real and tangible.

He tragically never got to see his work change the world. Let’s celebrate the life of Philip K. Dick, pick up one of his books and question your reality. You won’t regret it.

The Best:

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 1974

The VALIS trilogy, 1978-1982

The Man in the High Castle, 1963

Where to Start:

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1964

Now Wait for Last Year, 1963

A Scanner Darkly, 1977

The Deep Cuts:

Counter-Clock World, 1965

The Zap Gun, 1965

The Crack in Space, 1963

The Solar Lottery, 1955

Today at exactly 10:00pm will be the fifty-fifth anniversary of the aforementioned, The Twilight Zone. Everyone knows a few of the iconic episodes, ‘the one with a crazy twist ending,’ ‘the one with the Shat man on a plane,’ ‘the one with the talking doll,’ ‘the cookbook one,’ etc. Some of you reading this might be thinking, “So what?! I care about new things: cool, modern and sexy things like Game of Thrones, not boring ole’ Rod Serling and Buck Houghton.” Well, for those of you thinking that, George R. R. Martin wrote on the 80’s reboot of TZ. It unlocked the floodgates for nerdy entertainment in pop culture like Game of Thrones.

The Twilight Zone ran for five seasons, 1959-1964. In the fourth season they experimented with the hour long format but reverted back to half hour format for the final season. Not every episode was amazing, there were a few stinkers here and there but they hit more than they missed. Rod Serling created, narrated, and wrote the show with a staff of other highly influential writers like Richard Matheson – I am Legend (1954) and George Clayton Johnson – Logan’s Run (1967). The show tackled important social issues like war, race relations, and love struck computers much to the chagrin of CBS. There were numerous cases of ‘before they were famous’; Billy the Shat man in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, Charles ‘No Dice’ Bronson in Two, Richard ‘Jaws’ Kiel in To Serve Man, Cloris Leachman in It’s a Good Life, Richard Donner directed Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, Don Siegal directed Uncle Simon, and countless others.

On paper there is nothing mainstream about it. There were aliens, parallel universes, time travel, immortals, androids, monsters, and cowboys. Those things aren’t what most people are interested in but somehow Rod Serling and crew made it accessible. It hit at the exact right time at the exact right place. It wasn’t the first show like it however. Anthology shows had been since early radio. A few other TV shows laid the foundation. They were Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (This premiered exactly four years before TZ, October 2, 1955; 1955-1965), and One Step Beyond (1959-1961). All of these are on DVD, Hulu and Netflix, if you’re curious.

The show’s influence can be felt everywhere. TZ’s bizarre and enthralling sensibilities show up in The X-Files (1993-2002), Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Lost (2004-2010), Kolchak: the Night Stalker (1974-1975), Fringe (2008-2013), Star Trek (1966-1969), Planet of the Apes (1968), and too many others. Remember the Hugh Jackman classic Real Steel (2011), it’s based on the TZ episode, Steel. J. J. Abrams, Gene Roddenberry, and Joss Whedon were all hugely influenced by it. I could go on but that’s boring.

My personal experience with TZ is odd. As a kid I always caught it in passing. It was until very recently ‘that weird show my mom likes.’ The only episode I knew of was Eye of the Beholder. The pig faces were permanently branded onto my brain. At the time it registered as confusing, boring, weird, and for old people. I noticed earlier this year, it was on Netflix and figured why not give it a shot. I instantly loved it. It felt like when you get a gift from your grandparents but you dismiss it immediately then, a year later you realize just how awesome it is. It’s become my new go-to thing to watch and I discovered a whole new dimension of TV. So let’s celebrate this momentous day by joining Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone.

Here are my favorite episodes (Don’t get mad if I skip a classic, these are my favorites):

Number 12 Looks Just Like You – Season 5, Episode 17; This is similar to Eye of the Beholder. It’s about society’s standards of beauty and the pressures that come with it. Eye is too famous for its own good and lost some of its effectiveness. No. 12 takes the theme really runs with it in a cleverer way. It’s my favorite episode.

Judgment Night – Season 1, Episode 10; I have a soft spot for the military episodes. This is the story of a German soldier in WW2 that suddenly appears on a British civilian ship. As you watch you’ll learn how and why he got there. It’s like a Greek Myth with Nazis.

The Obsolete Man – Season 2, Episode 29; This is a beautiful episode much in the vein of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. A librarian, named Romney Wordsworth, gets the death sentence for being reading books. He’s in a world run by smug Nazi jocks. He gets to choose his own style of execution. It’s the perfect example how to have a simple message with layers of meaning behind it. Warning, it’s very heavy-handed. However, I can look past that and really enjoy it.

Mr. Dingle, the Strong – Season 2, Episode 19; Usually the comedy episodes don’t work but this one is amazing. The scrawny and weak Mr. Dingle gets super strength from Martians for an experiment. Imagine if Milhouse was given superpowers from Kang and Kodos and that’s this one. If you don’t like your dish of TZ served goofy, you will not like this. It’s extremely goofy. Also Don Rickles is in it.

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street – Season 1, Episode 22; This is a classic episode. I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said before. Just watch it if you haven’t and again if you have.

People are Alike All Over – Season 1, Episode 25; I don’t want to say too much besides a couple of astronauts go on a space mission and things take a crazy turn. It’s more fun if you go in with nothing to expect.

The Changing of the Guard – Season 3, Episode 37; Imagine Dead Poet’s Society (1989) in the Twilight Zone, it’s basically that. A young Donald Pleasance with terrible old makeup and a weird beard stars in this bittersweet Christmas tale. It’s one of the best sentimental episodes.

The Big, Tall Wish – Season 1, Episode 27; This is about simply believing in magic and the power of wishes. It’s also about alternate realities. This is a refreshing change of pace with a nearly all-black cast. It’s one of the most interesting episodes in that, it’s very grounded compared every other episode and exudes an infectious air of childlike innocence. It’s gravely underrated.

I am the Night – Color Me Black – Season 5, Episode 26; This is another heavy-handed one. It might be a little much for some but should give it a shot. A man is sentenced to death and the town excitedly waits for his death. The sky is getting progressively darker as they get closer to the hanging. Again, the message is very obvious.

The Mind and the Matter – Season 2, Episode 27; I knew I was going to love this one once I saw who was starring in it, Shelley Berman. He’s a fantastic standup from the 50s and 60s. Our hero, Archibald Beechcroft, learns how to change reality with only his mind. It’s similar to the movie Lucy (2014) but smarter, better and making a point.

Honorable Mentions:

-Execution – Season 1, Episode 26

-The Howling Man – Season 2, Episode 5

-Five Characters in Search of an Exit – Season 3, Episode 14

-The Masks – Season 5, Episode 25 *only episode directed by a woman and an actor/actress from another episode, Ida Lupino

-The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross – Season 5, Episode 16

-And When the Sky Was Opened – Season 1, Episode 11

-The After Hours – Season 1, Episode 34

-Where is Everybody? – Season 1, Episode 1