New Age thinker Terrence McKenna writes of Dick the philosopher as "this incredible genius, this gentle, long-suffering, beauty-worshiping man." Dick appears on the cover of The New Republic while the critical essay within declares that "Dick's novels demand attention... . He is both lucid and strange, practical and paranoid." An electronic-music opera with a libretto based on the Dick novel Valis premieres to great acclaim in the Pompidou Center in Paris. The renowned Mabou Mines theater group performs a dramatic adaptation of the Dick novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said in Boston and New York. Punk and industrial rock bands take their names from Dick titles and pay homage to his books in their lyrics. Hollywood adapts a Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and a story ("I Can Remember It for You Wholesale") into the movies Blade Runner and Total Recall, while an acclaimed French film adaptation of yet another novel (Confessions of a Crap-Artist) was released in America in the summer of 1993 under the title Barjo. In the past two years, Dick has been the subject of laudatory front-page features in The New York Times Book Review and the L.A. Weekly -- the opposite poles, one might say, of an overall mainstream acceptance. The headline for the L.A. Weekly feature sums up the thrust of the critical turnaround: "The Novelist of the '90s Has Been Dead Eight Years."

What makes this posthumous triumph all the more wrenching is the knowledge that, during his lifetime, Dick could succeed in reaching a wide readership only within the "ghetto" of the (SF) genre -- a critically derided "ghetto" that effectively prevented serious consideration of his works from without.