“Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And - how many of us do know it?”

American science fiction writer and novelist

Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction writer and novelist. He is known for work that questioned reality, identity, and perception, and for stories that often unsettled the line between the ordinary and the strange. He wrote 45 novels and about 121 short stories, with most of his short fiction appearing in science fiction magazines. His fiction often followed characters facing alternate realities, false environments, powerful corporations, authoritarian rule, drug use, and altered states of consciousness. He is regarded as a major figure in 20th-century science fiction.