Philip K. Dick in the land of the John Birch Society

From PART 2: PHILIP K. DICK, THE LAST DECADE

...He grew up mostly in Berkeley, attended the public high school, dropped out of the nearby University of California after less than a semester, wrote several failed realist novels and worked in classical record stores  -- at times reduced by poverty to eating horse meat with his first wife -- while waiting for a literary career to take off. He chose science fiction, he wrote in 1969, because its “audience is not hamstrung by middle-class prejudices and will listen to genuinely new ideas. There is less of an emphasis on mere style and more on content – as should be.”

During the '60s, he'd begun to experience acclaim in the science-fiction world, winning the Hugo, the field's major award, for “The Man in the High Castle” – a novel in which the Axis powers win the war -- and writing several dozen novels that made him the wild-man genius of a then-insular fan community. His fame eventually began to spread to the larger bohemian culture: John Lennon called Dick from his and Yoko Ono's “bed-in,” for instance, to discuss his hallucinatory philosophic novel “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich,” which the Beatle hoped to film.

The mainstream knew little of the author. His daughter Isa, born in 1967, never heard word of him outside the family. “I used to look at his apartment,” she recalls, “see all the books he had there, and wonder if every copy of his books was right there in his apartment. 'Is he really a real author?' “

Still, the Bay Area – Berkeley, Oakland and Marin County – served as home to the writer, until one day in November 1971, when he entered his house in San Rafael after getting groceries. His doors and windows had been blown out, and asbestos floated in a layer of water on the floor. His stereo and many of his papers – stored for security purposes in a half-ton steel cabinet -- were gone. To Dick, it was a confirmation of the old joke, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.”

The author would blame the Black Panthers, the KGB, neo-Nazis and other assorted culprits depending on which day you asked him; some speculate today that he was entangled in a drug deal that went bad. In any case, he wanted out of there, as soon as possible. When an offer came to appear at a science-fiction convention in Vancouver, B.C., Dick set out for Canada, and, a month later, had not yet returned..

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