The 1998 movie, The Truman Show could very well have been based on this novel. The protagonist, Ragle Gumm, lives in a quiet town, in 1959, in the mid-west and his only occupasion is his entry in the local news paper competition. However, he gradually realises that things aren't what they appear to be.
This world seems just a little TOO perfect and Ragle begins to question the basis of his reality. He begins to experience deja-vu like hallucinations. Sammy picks up cryptic radio signals and Ragle attends a Civil Defense meeting that triggers strong but vague memories. These are the first signs that something is amiss in this picture perfect America of the 50's. As Ragle and Vic attempt to find meaning among these seemingly unrelated events, they discover a web of intrigue that stretches far beyond their own local reality.
The year is 1992 !

The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962, was the novel that made Dick’s reputation, and with the possible exception of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (courtesy of the film Blade Runner), is still probably his best-known book, and, with its alternate present of a Nazi-and Japanese-occupied America, certainly his most imitated. In a certain sense, that is. For while there have been many novels and stories in which the Nazis have won World War II, there has been nothing like Dick’s vision.

PKD is tripping the switches of our minds with his vision of the world as it might have been: the African continent virtually wiped out, the Mediterranean drained to make farmland, the United States divided between the Japanese and the Nazis. In the neutral buffer zone that divides the rival superpowers in America lives the author of an underground best seller. His book – a rallying cry for all those who dream of overthrowing the occupiers – offers an alternative theory of world history. Does "reality" lie with him, or is his world just one among many others?

The novel is a prime example of the multiple levels for which Dick’s narratives have been praised. Several characters are more carefully drawn than is the usual practice in science-fiction novels, and there are even touches of humour to relieve the grimness, especially when some of these "artifacts" so prized by Japanese collectors turn out to be elaborately contrived fakes. Perhaps the most chilling effect, however, is how Dick reveals to the America of 1962, still sure of its international righteousness, how easily this nation could have surrendered its own culture under a Japanese occupation and how compatible American fears, prejudices, and desires were with Nazism. The alternate present again makes significant comments on the real one.

"A seminal work in science fiction – Philip K. Dick’s best novel, a masterfully detailed alternative world peopled by superbly realized characters." Harry Harrison

"Remarkable, fascinating. It’s all here, extrapolation, suspense, action, art philosophy, plot, character: really a superior work of fiction." Avram Davidson

"A classic. One that is going to bear re-reading, too – not for what happens, though that is subtly and believably worked out – but for the way the alternate world has been created down to the last nuance." P. Schuyler Miller, Analog

Winner of the Hugo Award.

When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch returned from a distant galaxy, he claimed to have brought a gift for mankind. Chew-Z was a drug capable of transporting people into an illusory world, a world they could live in for years without losing a second of Earth time. For the lonely colonists living out their dreary term on Mars, here was the ultimate trip, a pastime that could deliver immortality and wish fulfilment – a double-edged power over time and space.

But in return, Palmer Eldritch exacted a terrible price. He would enter, control and be a god in everyone's private universe - a universe from which there was no escape...

The alternate universes in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are created by powerful hallucinogenic drugs. The novel is set in the near-future when the increasing heat of the sun is making life on Earth impossible. The United Nations is forcing people to immigrate to Mars, an inhospitable desert waste where colonists must live in underground hovels. Because of the boredom of colony life, a drug-induced fantasy world has been devised which uses small dolls and miniature settings. When a colonist takes the drug Can-D, he becomes one of the dolls and lives for a brief time in an Earth-like setting. The manufacturer of the dolls and settings—a company named Perky Pat Layouts, after the female doll—also sells Can-D. When Palmer Eldritch returns from a deep-space exploration, he brings with him a supply of the new and more powerful drug Chew-Z. Eldritch has also acquired three "stigmata"—an artificial metallic arm, enormous steel teeth, and artificial eyes. His Chew-Z is cheaper and longer-lasting than Can-D and he soon is selling it to the Martian colonists. But Chew-Z doesn’t seem to wear off. The user is moved into a world that seems like his own but with the important difference that Palmer Eldritch has god-like powers. As the new advertisement read, "God promises eternal life, we can deliver it." Like God, Eldritch emerges as a dominating presence in all the realities inspired by the drug. The symbols, like his three stigmata, becomes tied up with larger questions in the novel about the nature of God and his relation to man.

From Palmer:
" 'That thing,' he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, 'has a name which you'd recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We're the ones who've titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.'
Anne Hawthorne said, 'You mean God.'
It did not seem to him necessary to answer, beyond a slight nod. "

Time runs backwards in the Counter-Clock World. Old people emerge from their graves, grow to middle age, youth, adolescence and childhood to be finally unborn in their mothers wombs. The most powerful - and most feared - organisation in the world is the Library, in charge of expunging the written records of events, which have no longer happened. When a powerful black leader is reborn, the Library's one concern is to eliminate him before the renewal of racial violence tears the country apart.

But in this counter-clock year of 1998 it isn't that simple...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – 1968

(Blade Runner 1982 & 1992 )

In many of Dick’s books, as in Now Wait for Last Year, there is an extended meditation on the nature of reality and on the necessary distinctions between the real and the merely simulated. Yet there is always an ambivalence about Dick’s attitude toward simulacra, as seen in the sympathetic treatment of the persecuted androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In this novel, nominated for the Nebula Award in 1968, androids originally used in the colony worlds develop human traits; some escape to Earth and pose as human beings, although they are subject to destruction by bounty hunters. The central character is Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who slowly comes to a new opinion of androids. The problem posed is the proper evaluation of nonhuman life forms in an age when human life forms are becoming increasingly barren. What, the book asks, is the real meaning of humanity? Earth has been depopulated by war and its attendant ill, and in order for there to be sufficient diversity the survivors have devised electric sheep and even tiny electric spiders. Yet however hungry for the presence offline forms they become, humans look upon the androids, for which they were originally responsible, as enemies. But if androids can dream – whether man provided them with that capability or whiter it was independently developed – to what extent does that human trait equate them with real human beings?

With "Do Androids…" Dick has written a modern version of Frankenstein, for the ambivalence of man toward his own creation tends, in Dick’s novel as in Shelley’s to travesty the divine creation.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick’s most celebrated novel about simulacra, mechanical objects which simulate life. In this novel Dick posits a world in which androids are so highly developed that it is only by the most rigid testing that one can distinguish them from human beings. The key difference is the quality of empathy which humans have for other living things. The bounty hunter Rick Deckard gradually comes to feel compassion for the androids, realizing that the tests he gives measure only a subtle difference between androids and humans. In contrast to this officially-sanctioned tracking and killing of androids, this near-future society accepts artificial animals of all kinds—everything from sheep to spiders. With most real animals extinct, replicas are fashionable to own. One of the rarest animals is the toad, and when Deckard discovers one in the desert he believes he has made an important find. But even in the desert there are no real animals. Deckard’s wife notices a small control panel in the toad’s abdomen. His wife, touched by his concern for the "creature," buys some electric flies for the toad to eat. "Against this bizarre background of pervasive fakery," Philip Strick wrote in Sight and Sound, "the erosion of authentic humanity by undetectable android imitations has all the plausibility of a new and lethal plague whereby evolution would become substitution and nobody would notice the difference." Writing in Philip K. Dick , Patricia S. Warrick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "one of Dick’s finest novels," citing its "complexity of structure and idea." Androids was loosely adapted as the film Blade Runner in 1982.

Ubik – 1968

What plucked Joe Chip from the year 1992, and put him in a 1939 Willys-Knight riding toward a funeral in Des Moines, Iowa, in a world that had never heard of psis and inerts and precogs and anti-precogs and icy half-life? How could Joe's former boss, the late, great Glen Runciter, Luna-slain chief of Earth's biggest and best telepath protection service, scrawl ominous messages on lavatory mirrors? Why was Joe's beautiful and perverse mistress, Pat Conley, with her awesome power of time control, trapped with Joe in a fiendish nightmare she should have been able to end?

And it spelled the difference between life and death....

The paranoid theme is perhaps most fully worked out and combined in Ubik, which, however, may also imply a certain critique of paranoia itself.

The world of Ubik is thoroughly saturated by commodities that foreground their status as quasi-living, mystifying signifiers. Not only do doors threaten to sue and coffee-pots demand money for services rendered; creditor robots dun free-spending debtors like Joe Chip, and animate homeopapes read the news for a specified fee. Telephones and TV sets occasionally adopt a will of their own and, much to Joe Chip’s confusion, transmit their messages in a way only very dubiously related to any human agency. One of the first clear indications in the plot that things have gone desperately wrong, that the characters may have been killed, is that money—the universal equivalent of all exchange-values—begins to alter its form. Later, the time-regression which the characters experience is charted primarily by the backward technological march of commodities, as when an ultra-modern TV set regresses into an old-fashioned radio.

Furthermore, it is not only that commodities make their presence insistently felt, sometimes comically, sometimes nightmarishly, but always in an estranging manner which invites interpretation; the world of Ubik is also one in which virtually everything is in one way or another commodified. Pat Conley, perhaps the most frightening femme fatale in the Dick canon, becomes Joe Chip’s mistress by paying a straightforward cash sum, and appropriately wears the tattoo caveat emptor (which Joe is unable to decipher). Expensive moratoriums maintain the dead in a state of "half-life," the commodity structure having produced the technology to deconstruct even the distinction between life and death. An important role in the capitalist economy of 1992 is played by Ray Hollis’s firm of hired "precogs" and telepaths, and also by the prudence organizations like Runciter Associates, which, on a strictly commercial basis, will provide "inertials" to neutralize unwanted eavesdropping and prognostication.

It is not accidental that the most intimate and valued human relationship represented in the novel is that between Joe Chip and Glen Runciter: that is, between employee and employer (as both are frequently noting), between seller and buyer of the commodity called labor-power. Finally, the entire text is semantically dominated by Ubik itself, the ultimate and universal commodity and the symbol of the ubiquity of the commodity structure. Introduced in the small commercials that serve as epigraphs to each chapter (where it is in turn presented as a make of car, a brand of beer, a brand of instant coffee, et alia), Ubik finally enters the narrative itself as a mysterious spray in an aerosol can that seems to be the most powerful "reality support" available, the only force capable of at least temporarily reversing the processes of regression and death. In the end, this strange but paradigmatic commodity is identified with theological mystery: "I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am.... I am. I shall always be."

Jason Taverner, idol of thirty million TV viewers, wakes up one morning in a sleazy hotel bedroom and finds himself a complete unknown. And that's just the start of his nightmare adventures in an American police state of the terrifyingly near future that makes 1984 look like the Age of Enlightenment...

Dick received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a near-future novel in which popular television talk show host Jason Taverner wakes up one morning in a world where he is unknown. No record even exists of his having been born, an awkward situation in the records-conscious police state that Taverner’s California has become. The explanation for this impossibility is that Taverner is living within the drug hallucination of Alys Buckner, and in that hallucination there is no place for him. The powerful drug, able to impose Alys’s hallucination on reality itself, eventually kills her, and Taverner is set free. "Dick skillfully explores the psychological ramifications of this nightmare," Gerald Jonas commented in the New York Times Book Review, "but he is even more interested in the reaction of a ruthlessly efficient computerized police state to the existence of a man, who, according to the computers, should not exist."

Who's who? - Fred, the unstoppable undercover narc in a scramble suit that gave him virtual anonymity, was out to bust doper, pusher Robert Arctor. A snap for Fred, except for one small catch... he was Robert Arctor!

What's what? - Now Donna was Robert Arctor's girl, as well as his dealer, and a pretty important broad in his life. But she was just the sort of female who was important in a lot of guys' lives... even a guy who was a narc like Fred!

Who's where? - But once Fred was assigned to get the goods on his other half, his whole world came apart. Not only wasn't he sure how to play the government's game, he wasn't even sure which side he was on... or which side he was going to let win!

With this novel Dick’s arrives at what one reviewer has called his "enigmatic best." A detailed account of a future drug culture, it weaves a plot in which Fred, an undercover narcotics agent, and Robert Arctor, a user, are one and the same more-or-less human being until the irreversible brain damage caused by Substance D leaves only a lesser being called Bruce, who at the end of the story is working in a cornfield which coceals the "lovely little blue flowers" of Mors ontologica ("Death of the spirit, The identity. The essential nature."), the apparent source of Substance D. The central enigma of the novel is Dick’s insistence that "There is no moral to this novel," when the book so obviously attacks the drug culture; and the answer to this enigma sums up what much of Dick’s work has been all about.

A sci-fi rock flick whose subliminal message brought down a president... A secret empire which had created 2000 years of false history... Mind-bending beams from a secret Soviet satellite run by three-eyed aliens from the future...

The climax of an ancient battle between the forces of Light and Darkness, and the Second Coming of the Word made flesh... Divine revelations from a mysterious intelligence called VALIS... A rip in the fabric of reality had opened. It was madness, pure and simple.

BUT WHAT IF IT WERE TRUE?

A wildly comic, richly imagined novel of a man's obsessive vision... of secret ruling intelligence’s, age-old conspiracies and the Second Coming. A sardonic, transcendent work of madness, courage and love, VALIS shatters the boundaries of science fiction to grapple with the nature of reality itself. It is Philip K. Dick's most compelling work, a testament or rebirth and hope uniquely resonant of our times.

Valis is the first book in PKD’s incomparable final trio of novels. This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.

Is God... a child, hurtled to earth in a starship, only to find Himself ruled by laws He Himself created? Is He an angry God emerging from a millennium of silence to take fiery vengeance on an Earth now ruled by the Christian-Islamic Church, the supercomputer Big Noodle, and the evil spirit Belial?

Or is God a woman - Mistress of a joyous alternative Earth, safely tucked away in an as-yet-undiscovered dimension.

The Bishop of California has entered the Dead Sea in a Datsun... From the stultifying San Francisco street scene through the corridors of human thought, Bishop Timothy Archer, alcoholic lawyer turned powerful religious head, leads his son Jeffrey, his daughter-in-law Angel, his pill-popping mistress and a cast of pained and passed-by 60s survivors on a madcap search for the ultimate Truth.

In PKD's most ambitious novel, Bishop Archer theorises, mesmerises, fornicates, fantasises and persists his way into a mystical abyss - where only the doomed can dwell.

That The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was Philip K. Dick’s last novel is a tragedy and a triumph. It is a tragedy because it broke bold new literary ground, in terms of form, viewpoint, clarity, and control, for a writer who already had many great works behind him and was only in his fifties when he died. Where would Philip K. Dick have gone from here?

It is a triumph because it is a fitting final testament for Philip K. Dick the writer and Phil the man—a return to the height of his literary powers at the untimely end of his career, a return to the true metaphysical vision and human insight of Ubik and The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Martian Time-Slip after a long period of secondary work.

And it is also somehow the purest statement of the spiritual center of Phil Dick’s work as a writer and his being as a man, as if Phil, like one of his own characters, knew somehow that the end was near, and left us this piece of clarity to give the lie to the obfuscatory cult he somehow knew was to come.

The story, though directly metaphysical and even straightforwardly religious, is, quite unlike Valis or The Divine Invasion, simple, clear, and direct. Angel, the narrator, is the wife of Bishop Archer’s son, Jeff. She introduces Tim Archer to Kirsten Lundborg, and Kirsten and the bishop become lovers. Archer becomes obsessed with the scrolls that have been found in Israel and identified with the Zadokites, a sect that predated the birth of Christ by some two hundred years. As the translations proceed, it becomes apparent that the writings of the Zadokites were the template for the parables of Jesus, and the bishops’s faith in the divinity of Christ begins to erode. Jeffery Archer commits suicide. Bishop Archer learns that the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist derives from the Zadokite practice of consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms, that is, that the mystical communion between Christians and Jesus engendered by the eating of the wafer and the drinking of the wine is nothing more than a ritual derived from a preexisting mystical mushroom cult where an actual psychedelic experience of the godhead was delivered, and this destroys his faith.

Dick throws almost as much metaphysical speculation and biblical, kabbalistic, and even Hindu scholarship into The Transmigration of Timothy Archer as he does into Valis or The Divine Invasion, and a lot of arcane material about Wallenstein and the Thirty Years War to boot, as well as other esoterica—nowhere else has he displayed the full range of his sheer intellectual breadth and depth as he does here.