What classical music inspired Philip K. Dick as he wrote his great science fiction stories?

Open Culture has created an 11-hour Spotify playlist collecting some of Dick’s favorite classical music, expanding on a that list I built last year.

Here’s more from Open Culture:

Listen through it while reading some of Dick’s own work — don’t miss our collection of Free PKD — and you’ll understand that he cared about not just the anxieties of humanity’s future or the great works of its past, but what remains essential throughout the entire human experience. These composers will still appear on our playlists (or whatever technology we’ll use) a hundred years from now, and if we still read any sci-fi author a hundred years from now, we’ll surely read this one.

You should read every story in Dick’s Paycheck and Other Classic Stories collection, but you can sample his work online. If you follow the links below, you can read five free digital versions of Philip K. Dick stories from that collection at Project Gutenberg…

“The Variable Man”

“Mr. Spaceship”

“The Defenders”

“The Gun”

“Piper in the Woods”

In the introduction to Paycheck and Other Classic Stories, Dick described exactly why luminous concepts inspire us:

the true protagonist of a science fiction story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* science fiction the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create.

(Image via “The Variable Man“)