SOURCE: Warren, Eugene. “The Search for Absolutes.” In Philip K. Dick, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, pp. 161-87. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Warren explores the struggle of Dick's characters to find an “Absolute Reality” and the profound ambiguities caused by the dependence on such a reality.

Philip K. Dick's fiction is based upon a vision of reality that gives his novels and stories tremendous force and that has undergone a clear pattern of development through his career. His fiction focuses on an intense, frightening view of our society—its mass population, its artificial environment, its confusion of the real and the fake, its loss of absolute values. In the distorting mirror of Dick's work, our commonplace illusions are paradoxically warped into the shape of truth.

This [essay] will deal with the desire of Dick's characters to know an Absolute...