“What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring?What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?”

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.