"The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently, and which may not exist all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore I’m free to say everything and nothing. I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on."
Philip K. Dick began publishing science fiction stories in the 1950s with short stories such as the Minority Report and Adjustment Team (adapted to the movie the Adjustment Bureau.) His 1962 alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle earned Dick early acclaim, including a Hugo Award for Best Novel. He followed suit with science fiction novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (written in 1968 and adapted into the movie Bladerunner) and Ubik (1969). His 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel. Following a series of religious experiences in February–March 1974, Dick's work engaged more explicitly with issues of theology, philosophy, and the nature of reality, as in such novels as A Scanner Darkly (1977) and VALIS (1981.)