For anyone who hasn't heard of him Philip K dick is one of the most prolific and celebrated science fiction or future noir novelists of the 20th Century. In the mid 1960s a degree of pessimism entered science fiction writing in America and Britain, previously stories of Flash Gordon, Dan Dare and Buck Rogers had dominated stories, comics and magazines. There was a feeling after World War Two in the new atomic age where jet aircraft, radio and radar had revolutionised so much that there was literally no limit to human achievement and this translated through into popular culture. In Britain writers like JG Ballard, William Golding and Mervyn Peake painted a gloomy picture of man's future, a sense of the apocalyptic was building up as the cold war progressed, nuclear war seemed inevitable, and, from the late 60's onwards so did environmental collapse.
In America Philip K Dick, a deeply paranoic writer who at one point in his career believed he was channeling information from an alien godlike entity called Valis wrote a series of dystopian novels. Core themes that run through them are the powerlessness of the individual when pitted against vast faceless organisations, the alienating capacity of ever advancing technology and the sense that the real is no longer the real when the real can be perfectly replicated.
Here are a couple of links to his sites
http://www.philipkdick.com/aa_biography.html
http://io9.com/5380798/dick-believed-blade-runner-would-revive-a-dying-genre
