In the following essay, Easterbrook cites the story “Impostor” as forming “several of Dick's paradigmatic gestures and traces a problem increasingly important to poststructural thought: that of the double and its emblematic representation of alterity.”

In the following essay, Warrick investigates “what is truly human and what only masquerades as human,” as suggested by the work of Dick.

In the following essay, Palmer regards Dick as an author “who mixes parable and fantasy with licentious impurity,” resulting in a reflection on morality and the question of humanness.

In the following essay, DiTommaso investigates the dualistic, gnostic Christian themes in Dick's early short fiction and novels.

In the following essay, Wessel explores the themes of forgery, conspiratorial “reality,” and paranoia in Dick's work and the writing of Stanislaw Lem, especially in the former's story “Shell Game” and the latter's novel Solaris.

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.

In the following essay, which was written in 1978, Dick discusses rereading his early stories, the autobiographical elements of his fiction, and his professional role and personal life as an outcast science fiction writer.

In the following essay, Warrick provides a critical overview of Dick's short fiction with a focus on the notion of morality.

In the following essay, Abrash examines Dick's early short stories and novels that portray technology and the institutional use of machines to symbolize “the values and operating principals of societies which … are clockwork worlds in their essential nature.”

In the following essay, Gillis considers the question of what is human as it applies to Dick's role as a writer of speculative fiction.

[The following essay was published in a special issue of Science-Fiction Studies devoted to Philip K. Dick's works.] In SF there is little room left for creative work that would aspire to deal with problems of our time without mystification, oversimplification, or facile entertainment: e.g., for work which would reflect on the place that Reason can occupy in the Universe, on the outer limits of concepts formed on Earth as instruments of cognition, or on such consequences of contacts with extraterrest...

What is the authentically human? What is the nature of the alien elements that are threatening and vitiating living, intelligent human beings? These questions are deeply rooted in Philip K. Dick's work, and to them he has provided a bizarre variety of answers, answers that are constantly being pushed aside and replaced by new possibilities. Finding an answer to the question of what is truly human and what only masquerades as human is, for Dick, the most important difficulty facing us. Some of Dick&#x...

Although it is often noted that Philip K. Dick is concerned with "the nature of reality," the assumption is usually that he is merely playing parlor tricks, that he is a clever sleight-of-hand artist whose entertainments are conjured out of thin air and exhibit little philosophy other than a fashionable nihilism or despair in the face of a universe thought too large and unregulated for comprehension. Yet Dick is far from being the unrelenting pessimist he is often considered. Rather, through h...

In the following essay, Zoreda employs Bakhtin's idea of dialogism to analyze Dick's story “Oh, To Be a Blobel!”

Malmgren, Carl. “Meta-SF: The Examples of Dick, LeGuin, and Russ.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (spring 2002): 22-35. In the following excerpt, Malmgren discusses “the relation between the fictive and the real” in the “meta-SF” work of Dick.

[The following essay was written in 1967 and first published in a shortened form in SF Commentary, January, 1969.] Nobody has ever accused Dick of being stupid, unoriginal, or dull, but no reviewer I've ever seen has been able to put his finger on the ways in which Dick is intelligent, original, and fascinating. One can but try.

In the following essay, Desowitz examines multiple film adaptations of Dick's work, including Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.

In the following essay, Bertrand examines the role Jungian concepts of individuation, projection, and the unconscious have upon Dick's first published short story “Beyond Lies the Wub.”

In the following essay, Bertrand analyzes two themes common to Dick's short stories and novels: what is reality and what makes a being human.

In the following review, Turan claims that what is most impressive about the film Minority Report stems from Dick's short story “The Minority Report.”

In the following essay, Lawson investigates Dick's influence upon contemporary cinema, and discusses the numerous film adaptations of Dick's stories and novels.

Philip K. Dick comes on without fanfare. All his novels are published as science fiction, which limits their "packaging" to purple-monster jackets, ensures but restricts their sales, and, above all, prevents their being noticed by most serious critics or reviewers. His prose is austere, sometimes hasty, always straightforward, with no Nabokovian fiddlefaddle. His characters are ordinary—extraordinarily ordinary—the inept small-businessman, the ambitious organization girl, the min...

Brian Aldiss has called [Philip Dick] "one of the masters of present-day discontents", a thing readily apparent in much of his work. But one of the great fascinations his work holds for me is the effects achieved when he dumps these discontents into that special machine in his head and turns on the current. It is not simply that I consider it a form of aesthetic cheating to compare one writer with another, but I cannot think of another writer with whom to compare Philip Dick. Aldiss suggests [...

Dick does not make easy reading. He lacks the informality of [Arthur C.] Clarke, the vocabulary of [Anthony] Burgess, the pointillism of [John] Fowles. His phrasing is often clumsy, bathetic, despairing, a tangle of moods and impressions hurled like warnings of imminent catastrophe. His characters tumble angrily past as if their appearance in the narrative were an unwelcome distraction. The first paragraphs of a Dick novel habitually plunge us into an environment so intact with images, purposes and objectiv...

Review of Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, by Philip K. Dick. Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 18 (15 September 2002): 1358. Twenty-one stories Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick culled from Dick's (1928-82) considerable output; all have appeared in collections before, if only in the five-volume Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (1986). Although the basis for the current selection isn't clear, the timing coincides with the release of yet another movie based on his work. Both “Beyond Lies the...

In the following review, the critic considers this five-volume set of Dick's short fiction to be both “wonderful reading” and “a publishing event.”