John Alan Simon tells a similar story. He’s a director and producer who recently optioned three of Dick’s most well-known novels, VALIS, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and Radio Free Albemuth, the last of which he’s already turned into a film and will soon be distributing. As an undergraduate student seeking a temporary escape from Great Literature, he discovered The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a reading experience he now likens to the myth that LSD use would permanently rewire your brain. Except Dick’s work genuinely did rewire his brain, which was just what he wanted. "What's the point of art, really, if it doesn't influence the way we live?" he asks.

For him, Dick seemed in the mold of William Blake and William Butler Yeats, all of them radical skeptics and, occasionally, mystical visionaries. Blake famously declared, "I must invent my own system, or be enslaved by another man's," a sentiment much in line with PKD’s desire to both challenge existing authority structures and establish his own. (Anyone who’s read much of the 8,000-page Exegesis Dick left behind after his death, as I spent a year doing, knows that his restless skepticism and humility kept him from ever settling on a single philosophical system.)

But Dick’s skepticism never became nihilism; he did have bedrock beliefs. One of those was in the moral strength of "the little guy." In his works, anyone could, quite literally, save the world, often through small gestures of simple kindness. None of his characters were outsized superheroes, but they often managed to do the right thing. As fellow sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin put it, "There are no heroes in Dick's books, but there are heroics." His sense of moral democracy — a belief that despite their flaws and failings, ordinary men and women could do noble, selfless things — aligned him with the most optimistic beliefs of the 1960’s and ‘70s.

"He was the champion of the common man in a way that very few great writers are," Simon says. "For some reason a lot of them become very conservative in their more mature work. But Philip K. Dick remained that champion of the underclass. I think that's one of the reasons I love his work." Even his robots are working class: far from the magisterial HAL 9000, they’re more likely cab drivers, salesbots, and everyday androids.

And they, like their human compatriots, are trapped in a universe indifferent to their suffering, if not outright hostile. The universe does not care what you want, and may even be actively trying to thwart your intentions. The ultimate thwarting, of course, is your cessation as a human being, whether in death or through becoming somehow inhuman. In Ubik, he foregrounds and accelerates this idea: the ordinary entropy of the universe, that inexorable force pushing us all closer to death, is visibly working to undo any human progress. More often, though, entropy is simply omnipresent, grinding slowly in the background. The end result of this breakdown was the detritus Dick called "kipple," and his worlds are, as J.R. Isidore put it in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, "moving toward a state of total, absolute kippleization."