I Am Alive and You Are Dead

Book excerpt: This is an unforgettable biography of the visionary grand master of science fiction, Philip K. Dick. Emmanuel Carrère follows Dick's strange odyssey from his traumatic beginnings in 1928, when his twin sister died in infancy, to his lonely end in 1982, beset by mystical visions of swirling pink light, three-eyed invaders and messages from the Roman Empire. Drawing on interviews and both published and unpublished sources, Carrère traces Dick's multiple marriages, paranoid fantasies and dizzying encounters with the drug culture of California. As disturbing and engrossing as any novel by Philip K. Dick himself, Carrère's unconventional study interweaves life and art to reveal the maddening genius whose writing foresaw - from cloning to reality TV - a world that looks ever more like one of his inventions.