2nd March marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Philip K Dick: sci-fi visionary, literary genius, prophet of the postmodern, and sometime drug addict and schizophrenic.

Science fiction eludes precise definition, but even under a broad understanding, it has existed for more than eight centuries. In literary terms, the 13th century story Theologus Autodidactus by Islamic scholar Ibn al-Nafis can perhaps be recognised as the first science fiction novel, which depicts the story of a spontaneously generated human being who encounters mankind and witnesses the future Apocalypse.

Since sci-fi has existed for so long, it would be a gross oversimplification – and a disservice to the genre – to attempt to list the most prominent sci-fi authors.The influence of one writer in particular, however, cannot be underestimated. The legacy of PKD’s, light-years (!) ahead of everyone else, has informed and inspired, in sci-fi and beyond, since his work was first published in the early 1950s. The concepts he introduced into the genre are so fundamental and so foundational that they are today almost sci-fi cliché.

Dick’s writing is endlessly self-reflexive, treating time and memory as spatial rather than linear phenomena. Postmodernism at its finest: unsettling, thought-provoking, and relentlessly mind-bending. The much-loved Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which sci-fi fans everywhere know as the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) asks whether robots designed to mimic humans can experience humanity themselves. Can a counterfeit be better than the original? And what is reality, anyway? As one character in the novel says, “Everything is true. Everything anybody has ever thought”. If the word ‘trippy’ springs to mind, you’d be entirely right. “Fish cannot carry guns”; “it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane”. And at times, he actually did.

It is testament to his sheer creativity that, he managed to synthesise neo-noir, dark-deco grime-light concepts so well that they have become staples which modern sci-fi, in literature and film, could not do without.