"Thomas probably wondered what the hell foreign language was happening in his head.  Then he realized it wasn't even his head..."

A Scanner Darkly - Dick's harrowing novel of drug abuse and the fringes of identity.  The nation is in the grip of an epidemic, with scores of people hooked on the drug Substance D, which is instantly addictive and causes psychosis and death to those who use it.  Fred is a police narc, tasked to monitor and report on drug user Bob Arctor.  What Fred doesn't realize is that he and Bob are actually the same person, his psyche having been split in half by abuse of Substance D, and that he is actually narcing on himself.  A bitter indictment of the motivations behind the War on Drugs with flashes of biting humor and surrealism, this novel was adapted into a terrific film by Richard Linklater.

Ubik - A dazzlingly strange novel dealing with industrial sabotage, alternate dimensions, and salvation in a can.  A team of psychic bodyguards are sent on a mission to the moon which, of course, goes horribly wrong.  They believe that they have escaped safely, but become less sure as portions of their reality seem to be reverting to the distant past.  How will they get back?  What's going on?  And what does any of this have to do with Ubik, an aerosol that promises to restore reality and help you with your household chores?  Fast and funny, this is a good place to start if you are new to the world(s) of Philip K. Dick.

The Divine Invasion - A sequel of sorts to VALIS, this novel expands upon Dick's religious and spiritual concerns.  A god-like being called Yah is trapped on a distant planet, and his attempts to bring salvation and rationality to the Earth are continually blocked by the presence of a technologically advanced, malevolent police state.  The book shares many of the same themes as VALIS but presents them in a story more closely resembling the pulpy sci-fi from early in Dick's career. 

The Man In the High Castle - Dick's breakthrough, Hugo Award winning novel presents a world in which the United States has lost World War Two.  Japan and Germany have split the land, with Japan taking the Western half, turning it into an extension of its industrial powers.  In the East, the Germans have continued their policies of genocide, turning it into a nightmarish wasteland.  In this world, several different story-lines criss-cross, offering a commentary on race and politics.  Several of the characters read a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which tells of an alternate history in which the British and US won the war.  These competing realities, and our own, might be more closely related than anyone could guess, but only one man, the reclusive author Hawthorne Abendsen, knows how.  This novel contains many of Dick's most fully realized characters and themes.

Blade Runner - One of the landmark modern science fiction films, based on Philip K. Dick's outstanding novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  The movie stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a police bounty hunter whose mission is to hunt down renegade androids on the planet Earth.  There are two problems: The androids look just like human beings, and Deckard himself might be an android.  Brilliantly directed by Ridley Scott, the film is thick with noir atmosphere and gorgeous visuals.

Minority Report - Another film loosely based on a story by Dick, this one centered around a futuristic police force known as a Pre-Crime Unit.  The force used psychics to predict when crimes are going to occur capture the bad guys before they commit the crimes... sometimes before they even know they will commit them.  When the psychics predict a murder involving the Pre-Crime Unit's main officer (played by Tom Cruise), he finds himself on the run through a heavily-surveiled city and embroiled in a conspiracy that might shake society to its very foundations.  The film bears only a passing resemblance to Dicks' short story of the same name, but never fails to entertain.  Directed by Steven Spielberg.

VALIS: The Opera by Tod Machover - Experimental composer Machover unleashed his mult-media opera version of VALIS on the world in 1987, 6 years after the publication of Dick's novel.  It follows the strange plot of the novel precisely, and it's an opera.  Enough said.