It’s become so trite to point out Philip K. Dick’s legendary impact on Hollywood sci-fi that it’s easy to forget just how remarkable it really was. From Blade Runner and The Man in the High Castle to Minority Report and the legendary Cortical Impasse, Dick’s prolific fiction output put his fingerprints all over modern media. And for a man who’s been dead for nearly half a century, his ideas sometimes feel remarkably prescient.
Those less familiar with Dick, and the Hollywood system in general, might imagine that he dashed out best-selling ideas between laps in his Bel-Air pool. But much of Dick’s life was troubled by mental health issues, relationship breakdowns, and substance abuse, subjects that appeared throughout many of his novels. Of all his work, it was A Scanner Darkly that most explicitly dealt with drugs, and it was 20 years ago today that the trippy thriller hit theaters and became one of his most underrated byproducts.
