DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
was published in 1968.  Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.

By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep...

They even built humans.

Emigrants to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women.  Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans to wreak, the government banned them from Earth.  But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids and to "retire" them.  But when cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

[Dick] sees all the sparkling- and terrifying- possibilities... that other authors shy away from." - Paul Williams Rolling Stone

PHILIP K. DICK was born in Chicago in 1928.  He attended the University of California at Berkley, but dropped out rather than participate in manditory ROTC training.  Remaining in California, he began writing professionally in 1952, ultimately producing thrity-six novels and five short story collections.  He won the 1962 Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle, and the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.  Dick died in 1982 of heart failure following a stroke.

"Dick never leaves the reader on safe ground." - Village Voice

Glen Runciter is dead.  Or is everbody else?  Someone died in an explosion orchestrated by Runciter's business competitors.  And, indeed, it's the kingly Runciter whose funeral is scheduled in Des Moines.  But in the meantime, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering - and sometimes scatalogical - messages from their boss.  And the world around them is warping in ways that suggest that their own time is running out.  Or already has.

Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation (the latter available in a convenient a aerosol spray) is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.

"Dick was... one of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced in this century, and his best novels constitue as significant body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last 30 years."
- Steve Erickson, L.A. Weekly