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of the worst periods in his life. He sank deeper into drugs and paranoia while his writing stalled for several years. Once a prolific writer he produced nothing until 1973. After a suicide attempt and a short stay in a rehabilitation centre he moved back to California, where he fell in love with and married Tessa Busby. Drawing on his drug addiction experiences he ended his writing block by producing the novel A Scanner Darkly (1977). Philip K. Dick takes the religious, moral, His reputation in the science fiction |
community still rests largely on his pre-1965 work, notably on the novels Eye In The Sky (1957), Time Out Of Joint and The Man In The High Castle (1962). Dick's so-called "heartless people" recur like spectres in his work, in the form of mindless beings who are alternatively schizoid and isolated, as in the case of Pris Stratton, the female renegade replicant in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is Pris who helps torture J.R. Isidore's live insect by cutting off its legs one by one. Her identical double, who had the name Rachael Rosen, also kills the main character Rick Deckard's pet goat, after they - Rachael and Deckard - have had sex together. Deckard feels an empathy for both Rachael and Pris, and as a result he finds it very difficult to kill Pris in the climax of the novel. Contrary to reasonable expectation, Deckard does not hate these humanoid machines, either in the novel or the film. In fact, what appears to infuriate the character of Deckard the most is the more ominous tendency of real people acting with a coldness and absence of ethical or moral qualities, as if they themselves were the |
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