"The floor joists of the universe," he once wrote, "are visible in my novels."
Martian Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where schizophrenia is a contagion and the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child's time-fracturing visions.
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles the deeply-interwoven stories of a multi-racial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab,
Now Wait for Last Year (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality.
In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity.
A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer's tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself.
Mixing metaphysics and madness, phantasmagoric visions of a post-nuclear world and invading extraterrestrial authoritarians, and all-too-real evocations of the drugged-out America of the 70s, Dick's work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure.