The Minority Writer

In 1982 writer Philip Kindred Dick walked out of an advance screening of Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, with a huge smile on his face.

After 30 years his prolific volume of writing - 36 novels and some 110 short stories - had finally paid off.

The seminal Ridley Scott film was based on his book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? But he never lived to see the profits. Or the accolade.

Rights

He never saw Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall, based on We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Or Gary Sinise's Impostor.

Or even the massive Steven Spielberg/ Tom Cruise collaboration, Minority Report, based on Dick's 1956 short story about 'pre-crime' in 2054 Washington DC.

George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 production company has bought up the rights to A Scanner Darkly and Wally Wolodarsky is to direct a children's movie for Walt Disney, based on the 1953 fantasy short story The King of the Elves.

Dead Twin

Thanks to Blade Runner, Hollywood fell in love with the five-times married, drug-addled author, who was haunted by paranoia and, like Joan of Arc, godly visions. But it was too late for PKD; days after the screening he died of a heart attack, aged 53.

Dick and twin sister Jane were born in 1928 in Chicago to Dorothy Kindred. A sickly pair, Jane died less than eight weeks later, apparently from an allergy to her mother's milk, allegedly from neglect.

PKD lived on but he never forgot his twin, with whom he shares a grave. His yearning for his dead sister did more to inspire him than any other factor - twins appear regularly in his work.

Amphetamines

Dick sold his first story to a sci-fi mag in 1952 and, three years on, his first novel, Solar Lottery, was published. He began taking amphetamines to help him write through the night.

He married first wife Jeanette at 20, to convince his mother he wasn't gay. The marriage lasted just six months. The very next year he married 19-year-old student Kleo.

A decade on, he embarked on an affair with their next-door neighbour, the recently-widowed Anne. They married and Anne produced Dick's first child, Laura, But he became paranoid about his new wife, convinced she had killed her last husband. He used her as the basis for many of his more negative female characters.

Hallucinations

In 1964, they divorced and Dick met the 21-year-old Nancy, just recovered from a nervous breakdown. He married her and they too had a daughter, Isa. She was replaced by fourth wife Kathy and then fifth wife Tess - the marriage which produced Dick's only son, Christopher.

Like many of his friends, drugs ruined Dick in the Sixties and Seventies and led to most of his marital problems. He took LSD, cannabis, speed, marijuana, amphetamines for more than a decade¿ and copious quantities of vitamin C. He had heard it was a recipe for curing schizophrenics but managed to overdose, resulting in hallucinations.

But Dick always lived a precariously fine line between reality and fantasy, anyway. "I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey," he once said.

Pink Light

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it... doesn't go away," he pointed out on another occasion.

PKD is understood to have slept very little for three years, thanks to amphetamines, and to have occasionally suffered from 'cocaine psychosis'. Once he'd cleaned up, he wrote A Scanner Darkly, about 15 friends who died or were left damaged by drugs, including himself.

After being burgled in 1971, he tried to commit suicide before checking into a drug rehab centre. The final straw came in 1974 when the writer claimed to have been contacted by a 'beam of pink light' from a satellite he called Valis: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. He turned it into an autobiographical book of the same name, but it left the world convinced he had gone mad.

Life A Fantasy

In a series of 'mystic' experiences he then claimed someone - God, his dead sister Jane, the prophet Elijah, the apostle Thomas - was contacting him. He penned his visions in his diary, Exegesis, an enormous ongoing dialogue with himself of some 8,000 pages. For his remaining years his work focused on religious matters.

Dick himself was never quite sure whether he was mad or not. But while they may have wrecked his life, his visions left him one of the most celebrated sci-fi authors of the 20th century. "I am, by profession, a science fiction writer," Dick said in Valis. "I deal in fantasy. My life is a fantasy."

Just before he died, he was interviewed about Scott's film. "All I can say is that the world in Blade Runner is where I really live," he said. "That is where I think I am anyway. This world will now be a world that every member of the audience will inhabit. It will not be my private world."