Philip K. Dick wrote one of the founding novels of alternate history, a book that asked what daily life in America would look like if the Axis had won the Second World War. He also wrote more than forty other novels, most of them science fiction, which have shaped film and television for over four decades. This guide covers every novel in publication order, explains where his one great alternate history sits in that body of work, and shows you where to begin.
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About Philip K. Dick
Early Life
Philip Kindred Dick was born on 16 December 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. His twin sister, Jane, died six weeks after their birth, a loss that he returned to throughout his life and that is echoed in the doubles and missing twins of his fiction.
The family moved to California while he was very young, and after his parents separated he spent part of his childhood in Washington, D.C. with his mother before returning to the Bay Area. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1947 and attended the University of California, Berkeley only briefly in 1949, leaving without a degree.
As a young man he worked in a Berkeley record shop, and that world of small retailers, repairmen and salesmen stayed with him. The ordinary working people who fill his novels, whether they live in 1950s California or on a Martian colony, come directly from those years.
Writing Career
Dick sold his first short story, “Roog”, in 1951 and was soon writing full time for the science fiction magazines. His first novel, Solar Lottery, appeared in 1955 as half of an Ace Double paperback, and a run of quick, inventive science fiction novels followed.
Through the 1950s he also wrote a series of realist novels about marriage, work and small business life in California. Publishers rejected them, and only one, Confessions of a Crap Artist, was published in his lifetime. The rest appeared after his death.
The breakthrough came in 1962 with The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the following year. The decade that followed was remarkably productive: Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik were all written within a few years of each other.
In February and March 1974 Dick had a series of visionary experiences that he spent the rest of his life trying to explain, filling thousands of pages of a private journal he called the Exegesis. Those experiences drive his final novels, beginning with VALIS. He died on 2 March 1982 in Santa Ana, California, after a stroke, a few months before the release of Blade Runner, the first major film based on his work.
Writing Style
Two questions run through almost everything Dick wrote: what is real, and what makes someone authentically human. His characters discover that their world is a stage set, a drug vision, a forgery or somebody else’s dream, and they have to decide how to act decently anyway.
His protagonists are rarely heroes. They are repairmen, shopkeepers, salesmen and minor officials, worried about money and their marriages while reality comes apart around them. That domestic scale is what makes The Man in the High Castle so effective as alternate history: the occupation of America is seen through an antiques dealer, a metalworker and a judo instructor, not through generals.
The prose is plain and fast, and the plotting can be loose, particularly in the novels written quickly for the paperback market. What keeps readers coming back is the ideas, the dark humour and a real tenderness towards people who are out of their depth.
Philip K. Dick Books in Order
Dick did not write series in the usual sense. Apart from the loosely linked VALIS trilogy, every novel stands alone, so the list below runs in order of first publication and can be read in any order you like.
It covers all 45 published novels: the science fiction, the realist novels, the two collaborations, the children’s book and the titles that appeared after his death. Where a book has been published under more than one title, both are given.
The 1950s: Early Science Fiction
1. Solar Lottery (1955)
In 2203 the ruler of the world is chosen by a random lottery, and anyone may legally try to assassinate him. Ted Benteley, an idealistic technician, swears loyalty to the wrong man on the day power changes hands. The original British edition was titled World of Chance.
2. The World Jones Made (1956)
In a post-war society that has outlawed every claim to absolute truth, a carnival fortune teller named Floyd Jones can see exactly one year into the future. His certainty makes him a very dangerous politician.
3. The Man Who Japed (1956)
Allen Purcell is a rising figure in the propaganda industry of a rigidly puritanical future state. Then he learns that he vandalised the statue of the regime’s founder, and he cannot remember why he did it.
4. Eye in the Sky (1957)
An accident at a particle accelerator throws eight visitors into a world that runs on strange and arbitrary rules. They gradually realise that the rules belong to one of them, and that more private worlds are waiting.
5. The Cosmic Puppets (1957)
Ted Barton drives back to the small Virginia town where he grew up and finds that nothing matches his memories. According to the town records, he died there as a child. This short novel is closer to fantasy than science fiction.
6. Time Out of Joint (1959)
Ragle Gumm lives in a quiet American town in 1959 and makes his living by winning a daily newspaper puzzle. Then small pieces of his world start to disappear, and he begins to suspect the town is not what it seems. This is the first novel in which Dick’s central theme arrives fully formed.
The 1960s: The Major Novels
7. Dr. Futurity (1960)
Dr Jim Parsons is pulled from his own century into a far future where healing the sick is a crime. He has been brought there for a reason, and it involves changing the past.
8. Vulcan’s Hammer (1960)
After a devastating war, humanity has handed government to a supercomputer called Vulcan 3. As a popular movement rises against the machine, one of its human directors starts to ask what it is really planning.
9. The Man in the High Castle (1962)
It is 1962, and the Axis powers won the Second World War. Japan governs the Pacific coast of the former United States, Nazi Germany holds the east, and a handful of ordinary people in San Francisco and the Rocky Mountain States are drawn towards a banned novel that describes a world where the Allies won. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Dick’s one true alternate history.
10. The Game-Players of Titan (1963)
On a depopulated Earth overseen by aliens from Titan, the surviving landowners gamble cities and spouses in a board game called Bluff. Pete Garden loses Berkeley in a single evening, and then a new player turns up dead.
11. Martian Time-Slip (1964)
On a dry, struggling Mars colony, repairman Jack Bohlen is hired by a powerful union boss who believes a withdrawn boy named Manfred can see through time. It was serialised in 1963 as All We Marsmen and is widely counted among Dick’s best novels.
12. The Simulacra (1964)
In a future state formed by the merger of the United States and Germany, the public adores its ageless First Lady while presidents come and go. A large cast of musicians, psychiatrists and corporate schemers each stumble on part of the secret behind the White House.
13. The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Millions of people live in underground shelters, building robots for a war they watch on television. When one shelter needs an artificial organ to save its chief mechanic, its elected leader must go up to the surface.
14. Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)
A moon that once housed a psychiatric hospital has been left to itself for decades, and the former patients have built a society organised by diagnosis. A CIA propaganda writer and his estranged wife, a psychologist, both end up involved when Earth decides to take the moon back.
15. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
Colonists on Mars escape their bleak lives with a drug that lets them share an idyllic miniature world. Then the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from deep space with a rival drug that offers much more, and nobody is certain what came back with him.
16. Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
After a nuclear war, a rural community north of San Francisco rebuilds itself around barter, homemade technology and a disc jockey stranded in orbit. The full title is Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, and it is one of Dick’s warmest books.
17. Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
Earth is caught on the wrong side of an interstellar war, and Dr Eric Sweetscent becomes personal physician to its exhausted leader. Meanwhile his wife has taken a new drug that sends its users drifting through time.
18. The Crack in Space (1966)
In an overcrowded future, a repairman finds a hole in a faulty transport device that opens onto an apparently empty parallel Earth. The discovery lands in the middle of a presidential campaign. A shorter version was published in 1964 as Cantata-140.
19. The Unteleported Man / Lies, Inc. (1966, expanded 1984)
Teleportation has made emigration to a distant colony instant, cheap and one-way, and every message home says the place is paradise. Rachmael ben Applebaum decides to make the eighteen-year journey by ship to see for himself.
The Unteleported Man was first a 1964 magazine novella and then half of a 1966 Ace Double. Dick wrote a large amount of additional material that the publisher turned down, and the expanded novel only appeared after his death, under the title Lies, Inc. from 1984. The edition in print today is Lies, Inc., so it is the one to buy, and you do not need both.
20. The Zap Gun (1967)
Lars Powderdry designs terrifying weapons in a trance for the Western bloc, and every one of them is quietly converted into a consumer gadget. When real alien satellites appear in orbit, he and his Eastern counterpart must produce a weapon that works. It was serialised as Project Plowshare.
21. Counter-Clock World (1967)
Time has started running backwards, and the dead are waking in their graves. Sebastian Hermes, who runs a small business reviving them, learns that a famous religious leader is about to return, and several powerful groups want him first.
22. The Ganymede Takeover (1967)
Written with Ray Nelson. Earth has been conquered by worm-like aliens from Ganymede, and the last serious resistance is a guerrilla movement in the hills of Tennessee.
23. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
In a San Francisco emptied by war and fallout, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is assigned to track down a group of escaped androids that are almost impossible to tell from humans. What he wants most is enough money to replace his electric sheep with a living animal. This is the novel behind Blade Runner.
24. Ubik (1969)
Joe Chip works for a firm that protects clients from telepaths. After a job on the Moon goes badly wrong, he and his colleagues find the world around them decaying backwards in time, and messages from their employer appearing in very odd places.
25. Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)
Joe Fernwright mends ceramics in a grey, bureaucratic future where nobody owns any. A vast alien being called the Glimmung offers him work on a distant planet, raising a sunken cathedral from the sea.
The 1970s: Police States and Paranoia
26. A Maze of Death (1970)
Fourteen colonists arrive on the planet Delmak-O with no idea why they were sent, and their only link to the outside fails. Then they start to die, one at a time.
27. Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)
Earth is run by two genetically gifted elites, and ordinary people like Nick Appleton have no way up. Their one hope is a rebel who left for deep space years ago to find help and is now on his way back.
28. We Can Build You (1972)
A small firm that sells electronic organs builds working replicas of Abraham Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. Its co-owner, Louis Rosen, is more preoccupied with the troubled young woman who designed them. It was serialised in 1969 and 1970 as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum.
29. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)
Jason Taverner is a television star with thirty million viewers. He wakes one morning in a cheap hotel to find that nobody has heard of him and no record of him exists, which is a serious problem in a police state. Winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
30. Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
Jack Isidore, a collector of crank theories, moves in with his sister and her husband in rural Marin County and records the collapse of their marriage. Written in 1959, it is a realist novel with no science fiction element, and the only one of Dick’s mainstream books published in his lifetime.
31. Deus Irae (1976)
Written with Roger Zelazny. In the ruins left by a third world war, a new church worships the man who caused it, and a painter born without limbs is sent on a pilgrimage to find him and capture his likeness.
32. A Scanner Darkly (1977)
Bob Arctor is an undercover narcotics agent living among addicts in Orange County, California, and using the drug he is meant to be tracing. His superiors, who do not know his cover identity, order him to put Arctor under surveillance. Drawn from Dick’s own experience of the drug culture around 1970, it won the British Science Fiction Association Award.
The 1980s: The Final Novels
33. VALIS (1981)
Horselover Fat believes a beam of pink light has delivered information directly into his mind, and he sets out with a few sceptical friends to find out what sent it. Funny, painful and openly autobiographical, it is the first book of the VALIS trilogy.
34. The Divine Invasion (1981)
Herb Asher lives alone on a remote colony world until he is ordered to help his neighbour, who is carrying a child. The child is God, in exile, and the plan is to bring him back to an Earth that has been sealed against him.
35. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)
Angel Archer looks back on her father-in-law, a brilliant and restless Episcopal bishop whose faith is shaken by newly discovered ancient scrolls. It contains no science fiction at all and was the last novel Dick completed, published shortly after his death.
Novels Published After His Death
Most of these were written in the 1950s, when Dick hoped to make his name as a mainstream novelist. They are listed by year of first publication, with the year of writing noted.
36. The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1984)
Written in 1960. A feud between two neighbours in a small Marin County town, an estate agent and a designer, escalates into an elaborate hoax involving an apparently ancient skull.
37. Radio Free Albemuth (1985)
Written in 1976. Record store clerk Nicholas Brady starts receiving messages from an orbiting intelligence, while a paranoid populist named Ferris F. Fremont becomes President of the United States. This was Dick’s first attempt at the material that became VALIS, and with its invented presidency it is the closest he came to a second alternate history.
38. Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)
Written in 1957. Roger Lindahl runs a television shop in 1950s Los Angeles, and when he and his wife send their son to a boarding school in the hills they meet another couple who will unsettle their marriage.
39. In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)
Written in 1958. Bruce Stevens, a young buyer for a discount store, marries an older woman who once taught him at school and takes over her struggling typewriter shop in Boise, Idaho.
40. Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)
Written in 1960. An ageing garage owner sells his business on doctor’s orders, and the used car dealer who rents his lot becomes convinced that the old man is being swindled.
41. Mary and the Giant (1987)
Written in the mid 1950s. Mary Anne Reynolds, twenty years old and desperate to leave her small California town, takes a job in a new record shop run by a much older man.
42. The Broken Bubble (1988)
Written in 1956. A San Francisco radio presenter and his former wife become entangled with a teenage married couple who look up to them.
43. Nick and the Glimmung (1988)
Written in 1966. Dick’s only children’s novel follows a boy whose family emigrates to Plowman’s Planet so that he can keep his cat, since pets are illegal on Earth. It shares its planet and the Glimmung with Galactic Pot-Healer.
44. Gather Yourselves Together (1994)
Written around 1950, this is his earliest surviving novel. Three Americans are left behind to look after their company’s premises in China in 1949, in the days before the new Communist government arrives to take possession.
45. Voices from the Street (2007)
Written in 1952 and the last of the novels to reach print. Stuart Hadley, a young television salesman in 1950s California with a wife and a baby on the way, grows angry at his narrow life and looks to religion and politics for a way out.
The VALIS Trilogy
Dick’s only series is a loose one. VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) share no characters and no continuous plot. What joins them is a theme: each is about a person trying to make sense of an encounter with the divine.
Dick himself said that the three books form a trilogy built around one basic idea. They can be read separately, but they gain from being read in publication order, since VALIS sets out the questions the other two answer in very different ways.
Radio Free Albemuth is best read as a companion. It was the first version of VALIS, set aside in 1976 and published in 1985, and it tells a more conventional story with the same starting point. All three trilogy novels are collected with A Maze of Death in the Library of America volume VALIS and Later Novels.
Story Collections and Omnibus Editions
Dick wrote well over a hundred short stories, most of them in the 1950s, and many of the films based on his work come from stories, not novels. Two single-volume selections cover the essentials.
The Philip K. Dick Reader
A generous paperback selection weighted towards the 1950s. It includes the stories that became Total Recall (“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), Minority Report (“The Minority Report”), Paycheck and Screamers (“Second Variety”), which makes it the best choice if you are coming from the films.
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
A career-spanning selection with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem. It follows Dick from his early magazine work to the stranger stories of his last decade and is the better choice for a view of his whole range.
Library of America Editions
In 2007 Dick became the first science fiction writer published by the Library of America. The first volume, Four Novels of the 1960s, contains The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik. For a reader who wants the essential Dick in one hardback, it is hard to beat.
The second volume, Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s (2008), gathers Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. The third, VALIS and Later Novels (2009), contains A Maze of Death and the three VALIS books.
Where to Start with Philip K. Dick
Best First Book for Historical Fiction Readers
Start with The Man in the High Castle. It is the one novel in which history is Dick’s main subject, it needs no knowledge of science fiction, and it is short enough to read in a weekend.
The premise turns on a single change. In 1933 an assassin kills President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, America never fully recovers its strength, and the Axis wins the war. By 1962 the former United States is split between the Japanese-run Pacific States, a German-controlled east and a neutral strip along the Rocky Mountains.
Dick shows this world from the ground. An antiques dealer sells Americana to Japanese collectors, a Jewish metalworker hides his identity, a trade official worries about what is coming from Berlin, and a woman in Colorado goes looking for the author of a forbidden novel. Nearly everyone consults the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle, which Dick also used when plotting the book.
Do not expect a war story or a resistance thriller. It is a quiet, unsettling book about how people accommodate themselves to occupation, and about how fragile any version of history is. If you would like more context first, our guide to historical fiction vs alternate history explains how the two genres differ.
If You Want…
The book behind Blade Runner: read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It is quieter and odder than the film, and more concerned with empathy than with action.
His most inventive science fiction: try Ubik, a fast, funny and disorienting novel that many readers consider his best.
A grounded, human story: A Scanner Darkly is barely science fiction at all. It is a sad and very funny portrait of a household of addicts in 1970s California.
A small community rebuilding after catastrophe: Dr. Bloodmoney will suit readers who like ensemble novels about ordinary lives.
No science fiction at all: Confessions of a Crap Artist is the strongest of the realist novels and a sharp picture of 1950s California.
The films in their original form: The Philip K. Dick Reader collects the short stories behind several of the best-known adaptations.
What to Leave for Later
VALIS and its companions are rewarding, but they make more sense once you know Dick’s earlier work and something of his life. The minor novels of the 1950s and mid 1960s, such as Vulcan’s Hammer or The Ganymede Takeover, are best left for readers who already know they want everything.
Books by Theme and Setting
Dick wrote very little period fiction, so his books are easier to sort by theme than by era. Most of them are set in futures that looked plausible from the California of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alternate History and the Second World War
The Man in the High Castle is the essential title here and the reason Dick belongs on a historical fiction site. It features in our guide to WW2 historical fiction alongside novels set in the war as it really happened.
Radio Free Albemuth is a lesser cousin. It imagines an authoritarian American presidency in the late 1960s and 1970s, though its real interest lies in the visionary material that became VALIS.
1950s California: The Realist Novels
Confessions of a Crap Artist, Puttering About in a Small Land, The Broken Bubble, Mary and the Giant, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike and Voices from the Street are all set in the California Dick knew. In Milton Lumky Territory moves the same concerns to Idaho.
These were contemporary novels when he wrote them, so they are not historical fiction in the strict sense. Read today, they offer a detailed record of post-war working life: small shops, car lots, record counters and uneasy marriages. Gather Yourselves Together, set in China in 1949, is the one early novel with a setting outside the United States.
Police States and Surveillance
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, The Man Who Japed, The Penultimate Truth and The Simulacra all deal with governments that watch, deceive and manage their citizens. Readers who admire the occupied worlds of alternate history often find these the most natural next step.
False Realities
Time Out of Joint, Eye in the Sky, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik and A Maze of Death are the core of what most people mean by a Philip K. Dick novel. In each, the world the characters take for granted turns out to be something else.
Life After the War
Dr. Bloodmoney, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deus Irae and The Game-Players of Titan are set after a catastrophic conflict. Dick was writing in the first decades of the nuclear age, and the fear of a third world war sits behind much of his work.
Mars and the Colonies
Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Clans of the Alphane Moon and The Unteleported Man use off-world colonies. They are less about space than about lonely settlers, failing businesses and the gap between what emigrants were promised and what they found.
Faith and Vision
VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio Free Albemuth, Counter-Clock World and Galactic Pot-Healer take religion seriously, sometimes playfully and sometimes with great intensity.
Popular Philip K. Dick Books and Adaptations
The Man in the High Castle
Published by Putnam in 1962, The Man in the High Castle was not the first novel to imagine a different outcome to a real war. Dick himself acknowledged Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, an alternate history of the American Civil War, as an influence. What his book did was show that an invented history could carry a serious literary novel, and its 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel gave the idea prestige.
Almost every later Axis-victory novel stands in its shadow. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’s Fatherland and C.J. Sansom’s Dominion all take the same starting question and answer it in a more realistic, thriller-driven way.
The cleverest element is the book within the book. Characters pass around a banned novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Allies won the war, though not quite in the way they did in our world. It lets Dick ask which history is the real one without ever stepping outside the story.
Amazon’s television adaptation, The Man in the High Castle, was created by Frank Spotnitz, with Ridley Scott and Dick’s daughter Isa Dick Hackett among the executive producers. The pilot was released in January 2015 and the series ran for four seasons and 40 episodes, ending in November 2019. Alexa Davalos played Juliana Crain and Rufus Sewell played John Smith, an American-born SS officer created for the series.
The show keeps the novel’s world and several of its characters but soon goes its own way. The forbidden book becomes a set of forbidden films, and the plot grows into a much larger story of resistance and espionage. Reading the novel after watching the series is a different and far more inward experience.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick’s most widely read novel, largely because of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. Dick died a few months before the film opened. A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve, followed in 2017.
The film takes the central situation and leaves much of the novel behind. The book’s concern with animals, its invented religion and Deckard’s marriage are almost entirely absent on screen, so the novel still has plenty to offer anyone who knows the film well.
Other Screen Adaptations
Several of the best-known films come from short stories. Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), with Arnold Schwarzenegger, is based on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and was remade in 2012. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), with Tom Cruise, expands a 1956 story about arresting people for crimes they have not yet committed.
Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006), with Keanu Reeves, stays close to the novel and uses animation traced over live footage. Other adaptations include Screamers (1995), Impostor (2002), Paycheck (2003), Next (2007), The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and a film of Radio Free Albemuth (2010). Confessions of a Crap Artist was filmed in France in 1992 as Confessions d’un Barjo.
On television, the anthology series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams adapted ten of the short stories as stand-alone episodes for Channel 4, beginning in 2017.
Awards and Recognition
Dick’s reputation during his lifetime was far smaller than it is now, but he did win the major awards of his field.
- Hugo Award for Best Novel (1963) for The Man in the High Castle
- John W. Campbell Memorial Award (1975) for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
- British Science Fiction Association Award (1978) for A Scanner Darkly
He was also shortlisted for the Nebula Award five times, for Dr. Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
The most significant recognition came later. In 2007 the Library of America published Four Novels of the 1960s, making him the first science fiction writer in a series devoted to the classics of American literature.
Legacy and Posthumous Publications
Philip K. Dick died on 2 March 1982, aged 53, and his body of work is complete. No further novels are coming. At his death he was planning a book called The Owl in Daylight, but it was never written, and three early mainstream novels are known to be lost.
What followed was one of the more remarkable afterlives in modern fiction. Between 1984 and 2007 ten previously unpublished novels reached print, most of them the realist books that publishers had turned down in the 1950s. A selection from his private journal was published in 2011 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.
The Philip K. Dick Award was founded in his memory and first presented in 1983. It honors distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States, the format in which most of his own novels first appeared.
His critical standing has risen steadily since. The film adaptations brought new readers, the Library of America volumes confirmed his place in American literature, and the word “Dickian” is now a common shorthand for stories in which reality cannot be trusted. For a fuller archive of bibliographies, essays and interviews, the long-running reader site at philipdick.com is a useful resource.
For alternate history in particular, his legacy is hard to overstate. The Man in the High Castle showed that the genre could be literary, ambiguous and character-led, and it remains the book that most later writers in the field are measured against.
Similar Authors You’ll Enjoy
Len Deighton
The closest match for readers who came to Dick through The Man in the High Castle. Len Deighton wrote SS-GB, set in a Britain occupied by Germany in 1941, and it makes a perfect companion piece: where Dick is philosophical and oblique, Deighton is a precise, procedural thriller writer. Read the two together and you have both poles of the Axis-victory novel.
Robert Harris
Robert Harris wrote Fatherland, a detective story set in a victorious Third Reich in 1964. It is the most accessible novel in the tradition Dick founded, and Harris’s other historical thrillers will appeal to anyone who enjoys tightly researched suspense.
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove is the most prolific alternate history writer of all, and he works on a far larger scale than Dick. The Guns of the South is a good single-volume start, and the Worldwar series drops an alien invasion into the middle of the Second World War.
Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik takes alternate history in a more adventurous direction. Her Temeraire series, which begins with His Majesty’s Dragon, replays the Napoleonic Wars with dragons as an air force. The tone is very different from Dick, but the method is the same: change one thing and follow the consequences honestly.
C.J. Sansom
Best known for his Tudor mysteries, C.J. Sansom also wrote Dominion, set in a 1952 Britain that made peace with Germany in 1940. Like The Man in the High Castle, it is most interested in how ordinary people live under an authoritarian settlement.
Philip Kerr
Philip Kerr did not write alternate history, but his Bernie Gunther novels are the best fiction about living and working inside the real Third Reich. They suit readers who want the moral unease of Dick’s occupied America in a historically accurate setting.
Related Alternate History
Philip K. Dick is one of the cornerstone authors of our alternate history section. These guides place The Man in the High Castle among the other major works of the genre.
- Alternate History: Complete Guide, the starting point for the whole section
- Best Alternate History Books, the essential novels across every period
- Best Alternate History WW2 Novels, for more Axis-victory and changed-war fiction
- Best Alternate History Series, for readers who want a longer commitment
- Historical Fiction vs Alternate History, on where one genre ends and the other begins
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Philip K. Dick book to start with?
For readers of historical fiction, start with The Man in the High Castle. It is his one true alternate history, it won the Hugo Award, and it needs no background in science fiction. If you would prefer his science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik are the most popular starting points.
Do you need to read Philip K. Dick’s books in order?
No. Almost all of his novels are standalone and can be read in any order. The only exception is the loosely linked VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), which is best read in publication order.
How many novels did Philip K. Dick write?
Forty-five novels by Philip K. Dick have been published, counting his two collaborations and his one children’s novel, Nick and the Glimmung. Ten of them appeared after his death in 1982. He also wrote well over a hundred short stories.
Is Philip K. Dick a historical fiction author?
Mostly not. The great majority of his novels are science fiction, and he also wrote a group of realist novels set in 1950s America. He belongs on a historical fiction shelf because of The Man in the High Castle, one of the founding novels of alternate history.
What is The Man in the High Castle about?
It is set in 1962 in a world where the Axis powers won the Second World War. The former United States is divided between Japan in the west and Nazi Germany in the east, with a neutral zone in the Rocky Mountains. The story follows several ordinary people whose lives are touched by a banned novel that imagines an Allied victory.
How historically accurate is The Man in the High Castle?
It is alternate history, so its events are invented, but it grows from a real moment: the attempt on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami in 1933, which in the novel succeeds. Dick researched Nazi Germany closely, and the leading Nazi figures who appear or are mentioned are real people. The book is better read as a study of life under occupation than as a realistic military scenario.
How is The Man in the High Castle TV series different from the book?
The Amazon series, which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2019, keeps the setting and several characters but tells a much bigger story. The banned novel becomes a collection of forbidden films, and new characters such as John Smith are added. The novel is shorter, quieter and more ambiguous.
Which films are based on Philip K. Dick’s work?
The best known are Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Others include Screamers, Impostor, Paycheck, Next, The Adjustment Bureau and Blade Runner 2049. Many of them are based on short stories, not novels.
Is Blade Runner based on a Philip K. Dick novel?
Yes. Blade Runner is based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, published in 1968. The film keeps the bounty hunter and the escaped androids but leaves out much of the novel, so the book is still worth reading if you know the film.
What is the VALIS trilogy?
It is a group of three late novels: VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). They share a theme, the search for meaning after a religious experience, but not characters or plot. Radio Free Albemuth, an earlier version of VALIS published in 1985, is often read alongside them.
What is the difference between The Unteleported Man and Lies, Inc.?
They are two versions of the same novel. The Unteleported Man is the short version published in 1966. Lies, Inc. is the expanded version containing material Dick added later, published after his death, and it is the edition in print today.
Are Philip K. Dick’s books suitable for younger readers?
Most are written for adults. They contain drug use, mental illness, violence and some sexual content, and A Scanner Darkly and the VALIS books are especially dark. Older teenagers who enjoy science fiction usually manage Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle without difficulty. Nick and the Glimmung is his only book written for children.
When did Philip K. Dick die, and are there any new books coming?
He died on 2 March 1982 in Santa Ana, California, at the age of 53. His body of work is complete. The last of his previously unpublished novels, Voices from the Street, appeared in 2007, and no further novels are expected.
What awards did Philip K. Dick win?
He won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for A Scanner Darkly. The Philip K. Dick Award, first presented in 1983, is named in his honour.
Conclusion
Philip K. Dick is not a historical novelist, and it would be misleading to present him as one. He is a science fiction writer who, once, turned his obsession with false realities on history itself and produced a book that helped define a genre.
That book, The Man in the High Castle, is the place to start. If its mood stays with you, A Scanner Darkly and Ubik show what he could do elsewhere, and the Library of America’s Four Novels of the 1960s gathers four of his best in one volume.
If it is the changed history that interests you most, go next to Len Deighton and Robert Harris, and then into the wider alternate history section below.
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