YMMV / Philip K. Dick

• Adaptation Displacement: Chances are people watch most of the movies based on his books without knowing the source material.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Some of his works can be hard to figure out the real meaning of, with Androids being the most notable example.
• Anvilicious: Usually averted except in the case of governmental exploitation and drug rehab centres, which tend to be a rather painful subject. Also he seems to have a few issues with abortions, as the short story concerning "Pre-persons" makes fairly clear.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Both Jack Isidore from Confessions Of A Crap Artist and J.R. Isidore from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? fall under this. J.R. is a Shrinking Violet, insecure, lonely and quite convinced that he's stupid and everyone knows what's going on but him. Jack's a Conspiracy Theorist (he often sounds like Ancient Aliens, explaining other peoples' lack of interest or belief as them being "unscientific"), collects and categorises everything, is good with kids and animals, but has trouble understanding grown-ups' emotions. To sum it up, J.R. is sort-of-anxious-avoidant, while Jack is kind-of-autistic.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: In VALIS, Everyone is really Jesus In Purgatory.
  • In the sequel to VALIS, The Divine Intervention it goes one step further and actually has the physical manifestation of Jesus in purgatory. Of course, he has brain damage...
  • Odds are, in a PKD book, that you can interpret the point of view of every protagonist that isn't an outright Jerkass to come to this conclusion. Take Ubik for example. Or Flow My Tears, or Do Androids Dream or Galactic Pot Healer...
• Genre Turning Point: Pretty much every philosophically literate sci-fi writer nowadays owes it to Dick, and even deep thinkers outside the genre greatly admire what he did, even if his prose generally hasn't aged as well as his ideas.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Clans of the Alphane Moon has the "Heebs", mentally inferior humans who aren't fit to do anything more than sweep the floors. ^note It's actually short for "hebephrenia".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The protagonist of his 1960 novel Dr. Futurity is Dr. Jim Parsons.
  • Dick wrote a book in 1963 with a working title of A Terran Odyssey. It was eventually published with the name Dr. Bloodmoney, or: How We Got Along After the Bomb, as a reference to the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick's next project, three years after the release of Dr. Bloodmoney, would be 2001: A SPACE Odyssey.
  • Eye in the Sky was Dick's first novel to deal heavily with subjective reality, the theme he would practically become synonymous with. However, his Self-Insert's sober attitude, his dogged level-headedness, and his total confidence that he can see through the illusions created by other peoples' psychological problems seems like extreme wish fulfillment on Dick's part, given the trajectory of both his career and his personal life.
• Narm: For all Dick's strengths as a storyteller, his actual prose tended to be workmanlike rather than brilliant (as he was pumping out sixty pages a day while flying high on amphetamines just to scrape a meager living together), and there are times when you can see him relying on the same turns of phrase over and over again.
  • This lessened somewhat in his later career, though, or at least it can vary somewhat depending upon the novel. In The Man in the High Castle, his prose still comes off as somewhat awkward, but it turns out to be entirely deliberate; characters' diction is carefully crafted and often provides major insights into their worldviews. However, he seems to have spent much longer writing this book than most of his other '60s novels. He seems to have been able to devote more time to composing his later works, starting around Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (mostly written in 1970, published in 1974) and A Scanner Darkly (written in 1973, published in 1977), and this is reflected in their prose.
• Paranoia Fuel: And lots of it.
  • Lives on it. If you're off your meds and you read one of PKD's stories be ready to barricade yourself in an air-tight room with a shot-gun and a bottle of painkillers.
  • There's one where an unmanned drone assassinates a man, plants perfect, undeniable evidence of a scapegoat, and disguises itself as a working television as part of a corporate usurpation. Sleep tight.
• Values Dissonance: "The Pre-Persons", a very emotional story that openly treats abortion as murder of innocents (taking it to the logical or illogical extreme, since in the story children up to age of twelve can be aborted, on the grounds that "soul develops at that age" - which is a completely arbitrary boundary), comes across as Anvilicious to some people who agree with the premises of this message and as Values Dissonance to some of those who don't.
• Values Resonance: Many of Dick's stories discuss issues which are still relevant today, at a time when science fiction was considered childish, and quite of a few of his messages from 40+ years ago still ring true in the modern age.
  • Eye in the Sky, written in The '50s, ends with a white man and a black man going into the tech business together.
  • Dick's paranoia and obsession with fakes and deceptions, like the artificial president in The Simulacra, have only gotten more relevant as deep fake technology allows digital replicas of famous figures to make false statements.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: He wrote entire books that resemble extended, fictional meditations on Judeo-Christian and Gnostic semiotics. The Divine Invasion comes to mind especially.
  • The Divine Invasion will have you desperately leafing through translations of the Torah just to make sure the End Of Days isn't coming next week.

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