To call Philip K. Dick, whose 1954 story "The Minority Report" is the basis for the new Steven Spielberg movie, a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. Dick, who died of a stroke in 1982 at 53, was fascinated by the scientific future largely as a vehicle for examining his own anxieties, longings and unstable perceptions. It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century.

... Thinking about these ideas can make your head hurt, which is true of virtually all of Dick's 36 novels and more than 100 short stories: mind-bending was almost his religion. Calling himself a "fictionalizing philosopher," he began with an assumption that causality is a shared delusion and that even concepts like space and time have a limited basis in reality.