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Hollywood was slow to recognize the potential of Philip K. Dick's work. Though he wrote the vast majority of his most popular stories in the 1950s and '60s (and won a Hugo Award for 1963's The Man in the High Castle) the only adaptation of Dick's work released during his lifetime was an episode of the Twilight Zone-esque British series Out of This World, which used his 1953 short story "Impostor" as a template. It wasn't until 1982 that Dick's oeuvre received its first—and best—cinematic adaptation: the sci-fi noir Blade Runner, which was inspired by Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Though Dick died just months before the release of Blade Runner, he got the chance to see early footage, and was so impressed by the film's visual style that he wrote a letter saying that his "life and creative work were justified and completed." In the last lines of the letter, he predicted that Blade Runner would be "one hell of a commercial success." He was wrong. Blade Runner barely grossed enough in theaters to cover the cost of its production, and was trounced at the box-office by the summer's other science-fiction films, which included E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

But Philip K. Dick, like some of his best-known characters, had a knack for predicting the future. Though Blade Runner was underappreciated upon its release, it's now widely regarded as one of the best science-fiction films of all time by both film critics and scientists. And most importantly for Dick's long-term legacy, it introduced Hollywood to his robust, untapped, science-fiction legacy. Blade Runner may have failed to connect with mainstream audiences, but there were still 44 novels and 120 short stories ripe for big-screen adaptation.

It wasn't long before Hollywood latched onto another of them: the brief, strange "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," which was originally published in a 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. After a long, troubled development process, the adaptation became the pet project of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose presence helped earn the (very) loose adaptation of the story, Total Recall, the highest opening-weekend gross of 1990.

Fans of the Schwarzenegger-starring version of Total Recall will likely be surprised to discover some of the things that aren't in Dick's 18-page source material: a trip to Mars, a sleeper-agent wife, a mutant that grows out of a man's stomach, a three-breasted prostitute, and the immortal line, "If I'm not me, than who the hell am I?" The kernel of Total Recall is present in "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale": A man who attempts to have memories of a secret agent implanted in his brain discovers that he's already, unknowingly, a secret agent. But the story hinges on a bizarre twist, revealing—spoiler alert—that the protagonist also saved Earth from being destroyed by a group of mouse-sized aliens when he was nine years old.