This Friday, February 3, I’ll be giving a free lecture on the topic of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who lived in Fullerton and Santa Ana in the last years of his life. Some of his most acclaimed works–including A Scanner Darkly and VALIS–are set in Orange County.
The lecture will take place at ModelMania (232 W. Commonwealth Ave.) in Fullerton during the Downtown Fullerton Art Walk, from 6-9pm.
Anyone who has seen the films Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, or The Adjustment Bureau is at least familiar with the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who was one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed writers of the 20th century. He earned science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award, in 1963 for his novel The Man in the High Castle. In his lifetime, Dick published 44 novels, and approximately 121 short stories.
The impact of Philip K. Dick’s ideas about modern life cannot be underestimated. In a 2002 article from the New York Times Review of books entitled “It’s Philip Dick’s World, We Only Live In It,” Laura Miller explains Dick’s influence on postmodern literature: “Dickian devices and themes–implanted memories, commodified identities, simulacra–haunt contemporary literary fiction…The naming of years after corporate sponsors in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the downtrodden, stigmatized souls in George Saunders’s futuristic short stories, with their degrading theme park jobs, the dream worlds Haruki Murakami’s characters tumble into and out of–all partake of Dick’s peculiar mixture of wretched ontology and underdog sympathies.”
Philip K. Dick’s place in the pantheon of contemporary American writers is well-established and well-known. What is NOT well-known is that this literary titan spent the last years of his life in Fullerton, California, and that some of his best and final work (like A Scanner Darkly) is actually set in Orange County. He moved here after a mental breakdown in 1972. “There is nothing more reassuring to someone who’s gone through an acute identity crisis than clean plastic apartments, streets, restaurants, and furniture,” he wrote, “Nothing gets old or worn of dirty here because if it does the police come in and kill it.”
It was at his residence in Fullerton that Philip K. Dick had his famous “Religious Experience” after being mesmerized by the Christian fish necklace of a prescription delivery woman. His visions of God and the afterlife were documented by cartoonist Robert Crumb.
It was in PKD’s final years in Orange County that he sought to integrate a lifetime of learning and searching into searing explorations of “What is Real?” and “What is Human?”
Fullerton History 
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