In writing of his own life, Dick could range from brutal honesty to blatant fabulistic enhancements. No effort has been made in this volume to sort out "truth" from "fiction" in his autobiographical accounts. (Readers interested in one effort to do so may consult my Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.)

There are, in addition, selections herein from Dick's fiction: (1) two brief excerpts from an early unpublished Dick mainstream novel -- Gather Yourselves Together (written in 1949) -- featuring autobiographical elements bearing on Dick's experience of reality; and (2) the two completed chapters of the proposed sequel to The Man in the High Castle -- tentatively titled, at one point, as To Scare the Dead -- which have long deserved publication, and, in addition, benefit from being read in conjunction with "Naziism and the High Castle" and "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen."

For all selections, the year cited with the title is the year of first publication; or, if the piece is unpublished, the year in which it was written (in the case of the Exegesis, the year provided represents, in some cases, my best estimate based on internal textual clues); or if the piece was published significantly later than the writing thereof, the year it was written followed by the year of publication.

At his best, as evidenced both by his fiction and by his finest metaphysical speculations, Dick joins the great creators of parable and paradox of this century -- a lineage that includes G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Rene Daumal, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Italo Calvino.

Note to the Vintage edition: Two inadvertent errors in the dating of "The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle" and the Exegesis entry on page 328 have been corrected in this paperback edition.