Maybe he was on to something: “Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come” by Brent Staples in the New York Times.

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology.

I would phrase that slightly differently: SF writers, I think, more often take some aspect of life today and develop its possibilities.

(Via Communion of Dreams.)