Review by Andrew Dunn<$z$>

(Bloomberg) — Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was Kurt Vonnegut without the jokes. Raymond Chandler with robots.

He took the already flexible genre of science fiction and contorted it into a vehicle for neurotic, and sometimes poetic, chronicles of human futility in which frustrated characters vie, puny and forlorn, against inexorable physical and mental decline.

“Amazing the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke,” he wrote in “The Man in the High Castle,” one of the works the novelist Jonathan Lethem has collected in the Library of America’s “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.”

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is set 17 years after the Axis powers have won the First World War.

The Japanese and Germans have each claimed a US coast. Frank Frink and Robert Childan try to survive in Japanese-occupied California by respectively forging and selling “authentic” Americana, such as Mickey Mouse watches and Colt pistols.

To add to his difficulty, Frink, born Fink, has to hide his Jewish identity to avoid being deported to Germany.

All that would be enough to sustain a conventional sci-fi novel. What sets Dick’s work apart is his knack for taking a premise and tipping it off balance. In “High Castle,” for example, the American, German and Japanese characters all read the same banned book, written by the reclusive title character.

This book-within-a-book, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” describes a world where the Allies have won the war. It offers an imaginative escape from the horrors of fascism that turns history back on itself and undoes events as they have unfolded since 1939 — or, at least, as they have unfolded in Dick’s world.

In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Barney Mayerson works at Perky Pat Layouts, a maker of dollhouse accessories for space colonists.

These conscripts while away the time in their underground hovels by taking Can-D, an illegal drug that gives them the illusion of becoming the Barbie-like doll Pat or her boyfriend, Walt.

Mayerson’s boss secretly makes and sells Can-D to feed demand for the toys.

The novel offers Dick’s grim vision at its most unvarnished. When a new drug that gives users extraordinary hallucinations threatens to supplant Can-D and make Perky Pat obsolete, Mayerson comes face to machine-eyed face with what may be God, and the deity comes up short.

As Mayerson tells it:

“He stands with empty, open hands; he understands, he wants to help. He tries, but ... it’s just not that simple. Don’t ask me why. Maybe even he doesn’t know.” Dick would wrestle with the theme of meddlesome, imperfect gods for the rest of his l.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<$> (1968) supplied the plot for Ridley Scott’s excellent 1982 film “Blade Runner”. Its protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter who “retires” fugitive android slaves in Northern California.

Earth has been poisoned by radiation, depleted of almost all animal life. Most human beings have left the planet to colonise the solar system with the aid of their android slaves.

The question for the bounty hunter isn’t whether he can catch the androids but whether, as ever fewer natural creatures remain to confirm his humanity, he can or should feel any compassion for these nearly human machines.

“Ubik” (1969), the best-crafted of the four novels, is, like “Stigmata,” a story of corporate intrigue. Joe Chip works for a “prudence organisation” dedicated to keeping telepaths and clairvoyants from worming their way into clients’ private affairs.

The story has scarcely begun when a bomb goes off and time starts rolling backward, sending Chip on a search for the culprits.

“Ubik” unfolds with the logic of a bad dream. Death and life vie for Chip’s favour; the correct choice isn’t as obvious as it seems, and it may not be his to make.

Dick could spin a yarn, and the paperback novel gave him a vehicle for his musings on death and reality. But his books can peter out once he’s exhausted the possibilities of his premise. His prose stumbles at times, perhaps because of the pace at which he worked. His short stories, collected in five volumes by Citadel Press, show how sharp his writing could be when he focused his ideas into a few pages.

While he was alive he was a respected, prizewinning author with a limited but avid following. Months after his death, “Blade Runner” came out and his notoriety exploded. The posthumous acclaim is a typically PhilDickian conclusion to a life spent casting characters adrift in seas of uncertainty and watching them wash aground on shoals of disappointment.“Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s” is published by the Library of America (830 pa).

Andrew Dunn is a reporter on Bloomberg’s legal team. The opinions expressed are his own.