Profiled at the Times on the occasion of his death’s silver anniversary.

John Lennon had read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (one of Dick’s best, and quite possibly the weirdest book yet written) and wanted to make a film of it. Perhaps, in some alternate universe, Lennon survived to do that, but in our world the big breakthrough was Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, based on one of Dick’s most popular novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dick never saw it. He died on March 2, 1982, after a paralysing stroke, at the age of 53, months before it was released. But he approved of the final script and had been impressed by the stylish look of the clips that he saw. In the final three years of his life, he was finally making money and receiving wider acclaim. A friend, Paul Williams, has suggested that Dick’s increasing fame “scared him a little. If people choose their own deaths, he probably died because he was finally getting the kind of broad-based recognition he’d hoped for and feared all along.”

You know, the one mistake Ridley Scott made with Blade Runner was not using the original story title… I mean, come on. That was a no brainer. I have a theory that Dick could have been wealthy earlier if he’d let sober people title his books and stories for him.