Celebrating Philip K Dick, the most singular voice of sci-fi in television and cinema

Philip K Dick died poor and obscure in February 1982. Six months later Blade Runner – Ridley Scott’s gorgeously glum adaptation of Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – was released. Overnight, a marginal science fiction writer became famous and fashionable. Ever since he has been Hollywood’s go-to dystopian novelist, the questions his work poses about the nature of existence becoming ever more relevant in a world in which what is real and what is not can seem interchangeable. With the emergence of the internet and the post-9/11 surveillance state, in particular, his writings have taken on the aspect of a prophecy. The Matrix was heavily influenced by Dick’s view that human experience was very possibly an elaborate fraud; Christopher Nolan’s Interception, with its folding cityscapes and dream logic, channelled the fretful surrealism of the author’s work.

Dick was also the predominant influence on Black Mirror, the Charlie Brooker Netflix smash about the dark side of the tech era. And now the writer is to have his first dedicated television series, Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, featuring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston with Ronald D Moore (responsible for the Battlestar Galactica reboot) show running. Ten Dick short stories will be adapted, with Anna Paquin, Steve Buscemi, Jack Reynor and Janelle Monae among those starring. The settings range from far future to distant past. What all have in common is the sense that nothing is truly as it seems and that the walls of reality – or what passes for “reality” – could tumble in any moment. This will be followed by the release in October of Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to the Ridley Scott classic.

People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real,” said Paul Verhoeven, who directed one of the most successful Dick adaptations, 1990’s Total Recall (from the short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’). “What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognise it, and they can only recognise it when they see it in their own lives.”

The plot of Total Recall cuts to the essence of Dick’s perspective. A construction worker is plagued by dreams of Mars. As he can’t afford to take a holiday on the Red Planet, he instead hires a company to implant artificial recollections of just such a trip. But it turns out that he is in fact a secret agent whose real life is a fiction laid atop his actual memories. Reality is fake, fantasy real. With a reality TV star in the White House and the divide between fake and real news sometimes hard to discern, both movie and story are unnervingly prophetic.

Dick was himself very clear as to the political aspect of his work. “We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups,” he said. “I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

He stopped writing interesting books in the early ’70s. Stung by years of failure and with a lifelong addiction to hallucinogenics – explaining the balls-on-the-floor trippiness of his plots – Dick lost his grip on the real world and never recovered it. “He really did go crazy, “ wrote the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik in a 2007 profile of the author. “And it wasn’t the cute-crazy of the movies, with well-cast hallucinations and Jennifer Connelly to comfort you. It was true staring madness, hell on earth.”

He had by this point concluded that history was a sham and that he was a persecuted Christian living in ancient Rome. Everything else was a delusion. “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind,” he would recall. “As if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”

“Dick’s stories tend to have themes that are always relevant,” said Ronald D Moore, show-runner of Electric Dreams. “It’s usually something about what it means to be human or has tapped into an idea of the future that is still relevant to ourselves. Artificial intelligence is still fascinating to people, and then there’s the impact of technology on society, the global village becoming smaller, and the speed of communication. That was all Dick’s terrain. He just had an interesting viewpoint of the future, and it’s not really about ’50s science fiction – it’s about very human themes that you can go back to again and again.”

“With Electric Dreams, the goal is to present Dick’s work in a modern context and to provoke debate,” Cranston told Channel 4. “We want the end of each programme to be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. We want to make people want to talk about it. That will make me very, very happy, because that’s what art should do. It should get people involved.”

Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams starts on Channel 4 on September 17.