Discussed here are the eight novels that Patricia Warrick considers representative of Dick's finest writing--the works that will become classics, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Warrick shows that Dick had a remarkable sense of the cultural transformation taking place in the last half of the 20th century. Dick points out the cracks in our institutions, our ideologies, and our value systems that will inevitably lead to their collapse. His moral vision perceived a universe of infinite possibility, with shapes that constantly transformed themselves--a universe in process. And his mind was a mind in motion, constantly questioning, finding answers, rejecting them in order to seek other possibilities. For Dick, having fixed, unchangeable answers was tantamount to entropy and death.