Science fiction fans will find familiar the premise of Philip K. Dick's 1954 short story "The Father-Thing." In it, a young boy, Charlie, discovers that his father is not actually his father. The man in his house who comes home from work, kisses his mother, sits down to dinner, makes comments about his day at the office may look and talk like the real Mr. Walton, but Charlie knows better. He alone knows the hideous secret: that his real father has been killed, and that an alien now inhabits his body, and has usurped his life. It is no longer his father but the "Father-Thing." It is a familiar premise but an interesting one. Works like The Thing and, most famously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, were especially popular in the 1950's, expressing the fear that people are not what they seem to be. The idea that something sinister may be lurking beneath a façade of suburban complacency is certainly an important component to Jack Finney's novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the movie of the same name. But while that work is largely about the country's paranoia and suspiciousness during the McCarthy years, Dick's story has a much more personal focus. "The Father-Thing" is more personal because it is not about the invasion of a community, but of a family. The alien takeover serves as a metaphor for estrangement, as the "Father-Thing" represents the agency-driven by seemingly inscrutable motives-that irremediably damages the household and the family's stability. Dick's story, then, is both a chilling science fiction tale and a emotionally resonant work about a child's coming to grips with a home in turmoil. Where Charlie turns when he finds himself an outcast from his home is somewhat surprising, and it reveals much about Dick's ideas about community and exile.

An acclaimed science fiction writer with over forty novels to his credit, Philip K. Dick's reputation and his following have both steadily grown in the years since his death. Born in 1928 in Chicago, his family relocated to Berkeley, California when Dick was two years old. His early life was somewhat traumatic and tumultuous. His twin sister, Jane, died at just over one month old due in part to parental neglect. After his parents divorced in 1932, Dick and his mother moved frequently, living for a time in Washington, D.C., and in different sections of Berkeley.

Suffering from agoraphobia and other psychological maladies, Dick entered high school in 1944, graduated in 1947, and enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley in 1948. There he studied philosophy, but left without earning a degree.

After a stint working in a record store, Dick turned his attention to writing, beginning with short stories. In 1954 he finished his first novel, Solar Lottery, but it wasn't until the publication of The Man in the High Castle in 1963 that Dick's work began to be recognized. That novel won that year's Hugo award and would remain his most acclaimed work until 1974's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which won the John W. Campbell Award.

None of his works, however, achieved the prominence of 1968's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, his grim futuristic fantasy that inspired the breakthrough film Blade Runner (1982).

Dick's adult life was often as turbulent as his early years. He was married and divorced on numerous occasions, suffered through many illnesses, and overcame an amphetamine addiction. In the late 1970's, he had what he considered an encounter with a force from outer space that he called Valis. His experience instilled his later work with a quasi-mystical sensibility. Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of heart failure.

 

 

The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick
Continue Browsing		View Wish List