When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time—in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia—no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick.

When Worlds Collide