In honor of Philip K. Dick’s 95th birthday, Alice Sola Kim has penned a touching essay about discovering the brooding science fiction titan while she herself was a brooding teenager. She writes,
“Knowing that reality could be up for grabs, manipulated, and twisted gave me a prickly, shivery joy. But this would be a shallow pleasure without the deep sense of sadness in the best of PKD’s work. When the world you knew was ripped away from you, even if in that world you had a shitty job and couldn’t get a date, he recognized that you had to mourn. You mourned for the false world that you missed, you mourned that any kind of true, real world was elusive or else completely lost and that nothing would ever be the way it was meant to be, whatever that was.”
