Ubik is set in a complex future where psychic phenomena are commonplace, and dead people can be kept in a curious purgatorial state in which they can still dream and communicate with the living. The book’s protagonist, Joe Chip, is caught up in a terrorist attack that appears to tear a hole in reality itself; everything is decaying at an accelerated rate, and time appears to be going backwards. One of Dick’s very finest novels from this period, Ubik deals with the subjects of dream-states and malleable perceptions of reality uncannily like Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

The cinematic potential of Ubik wasn’t lost on the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who contacted Dick in 1974 with the hope of making the book into a movie. Within a month, Dick had written a screenplay – the only feature-length script he ever wrote. Although rough around the edges, it was a brilliant rendering of the ideas present in his book, and it’s a sad fact that the movie never happened; the script languished in obscurity until 1985, when it was published as Ubik: The Screenplay.

Coincidentally, 1974 was also the year that a young writer named Ron Shusett contacted Dick about his 1966 short story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Despite its brevity, Shusett immediately saw the cinematic potential in the tale. He wanted to rename it Total Recall, and imagined the short story as the film’s first act – the launch pad for an adventure movie which he’d later describe as “Raiders Of The Lost Ark Go To Mars.” Shusett paid Dick $1000 for the rights to the story.

“Phil Dick was then not a known author at all,” Shusett said, in the documentary Imagining Total Recall. “Dick was a struggling pulp writer until Blade Runner got made. [We Can Remember It For You Wholesale] was the first story that knocked me right out, which I knew would make an incredible movie. I also knew it would be incredibly expensive.”

Too expensive, it turned out, for Hollywood’s studios in the 70s. Shusett struggled to find a financial backer for Total Recall, so he and Dan O’Bannon put it aside, and worked instead on something they would later call Alien.