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Time Out of Joint
by Philip K. Dick (1959)

Time Out of Joint is PKD’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. On discovering some magazines dated 1997 an eccentric who solves newspaper puzzles starts thinking that his apparent world of 1959 is not all it is cracked up to be. The novel's title comes from a line in Shakespeare's play Hamlet.

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The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick (1962)

In 1962 slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names, all because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war, and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan. An alternative history with some nifty sci-fi twists thanks to the use of genuine genre tropes like parallel worlds and advanced technology well before its time.

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Martian Time-Slip
by Philip K. Dick (1964)

On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people - especially the Supreme Goodmember of the Water Worker's union - suspect that the boy's disorder may be a window into the future. PKD's take on mental illness... perhaps his own.

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
by Philip K. Dick (1965)

In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the drug Can-D, which enables users to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. The catch, however, is that Eldritch gets to be god in everyone's new private universe.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick (1968)

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment, find them and then... "retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found. PKD's greatest, brilliantly filmed as 'Blade Runner' in 1991, directed by Ridley Scott.

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Ubik
by Philip K. Dick (1969)

The head of future anti-psi security agency which jams up nosy telepaths is apparently killed. Fragments of reality become disjointed as time begins to move backwards. PKD's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation (available in a convenient aerosol spray) is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed shop for their next incarnation.

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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick (1974)

Jason Tavener is a singer and TV star. He is also a genetically modified human. He wakes up in a "sex and drugs" near-future United States that has become a police state, only to discover he is an unknown with no identity. Some pundits have speculated that the relationships with women in the story may be based on Dick’s personal life. Either way, another work of demented genius.

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A Scanner Darkly
by Philip K. Dick (1977)

Substance D is the most toxic drug ever to find its way on to the L.A. streets. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, causing, first, disorientation and then complete and irreversible brain damage. A single mind is split between a drug dealer peddling the highly addictive drug and the narc trying to catch him, which may not be the best thing to happen to law and order.

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VALIS
by Philip K. Dick (1981)

VALIS is the first book in PKD's incomparable final trio of novels. This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat, the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity, and reality as revealed through a pink laser. VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.