Philip K. Dick by Andrew M. Butler is a critical introduction to Dick's life and work, published as part of a pocket essentials series. Butler, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University College, provides an accessible survey aimed at readers approaching Dick's fiction for the first time.
The text opens with provocative questions about Dick's identity and positions him as a writer who explored the landscapes of the mind at a time when most science fiction focused on conventional space adventure. Butler highlights Dick's signature themes: fake realities, questions about authentic human experience, and a world where psychiatrists come in suitcases and God speaks through cat food commercials.
Butler notes that Dick embodied the counter-culture a decade before the 1960s and identifies Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as his most widely known work. The volume reviews and analyzes each of Dick's novels and includes listings of additional critical resources. This compact guide represents the kind of accessible scholarship that has helped expand Dick's readership beyond the science fiction community into mainstream literary culture.