What a clever Dick

Steven Spielberg is the latest director to film a book by the dystopian soothsayer Philip K Dick. He won't be the last

He believed that visions bathed in pink light were passing him messages from an alien intelligence; that many of his fans were in the pay of the Kremlin; and that in a former life he'd been persecuted as a Christian in ancient Rome. By any standards, Philip K. Dick was an unusual writer. In fact, he was a near certifiable Californian freak who hammered out more than 40 books during his short life, most of them written in fortnight-long, amphetamine-fuelled frenzies. This was a man who turned fiction into performance art.