Was author Philip K. Dick a brilliant, mystical visionary whose time has finally come? Or was he a justly ignored madman whose paranoid fantasies filled an endless series of lumpily written science-fiction novels?

Nine years after his death from a stroke at age 53, the American reading public will finally have a chance to find out.

Best known as the writer whose works were filmed as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall," Dick wrote 43 novels and hundreds of short stories, but he never managed to earn a decent living in his profession.

Despite this obscurity (most of his material has been out of print for years), Dick's crazed lifestyle and obsessive concerns about the nature of reality and the meaning of the universe earned him a fanatical cult following--both inside and outside the often hermetic world of science fiction.

That audience may be about to expand exponentially: Vintage Books, the prestigious paperback house, recently released Dick's VALIS trilogy, thematically related novels about mysticism and the search for a Higher Meaning that the author wrote at the end of his life.

This trio of books is, however, only a small part of the flood of Dickiana that has been published or is due for publication this year:

* A five-volume collection of his complete short stories.

* A collection of his letters.

* Lawrence Sutin's "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick," published last year by Harmony/Crown.

* "Welcome to Reality: The Nightmares of Philip K. Dick" (Broken Mirrors Press), an anthology of stories written in the Dick style, featuring work by such prominent science-fiction authors as Thomas Disch, Norman Spinrad and Robert Silverberg.

In addition, composer Tod Machover has written an opera based on the novel "VALIS" (the first volume of the trilogy) which has been recorded on Bridge Records and performed in Paris, Boston, New York and Tokyo, and several of Dick's works are in development as films.

"At his best, he was a fine author and explored ground that isn't often explored in science fiction," adds Philadelphia-based Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. "He speculated on the nature of reality, and what the secret behind life really is."

"A lot of the fascination with Dick has to do with his personality," says Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction author based in Pine Mountain, Ga., who has written a novel about Dick. "He has always fascinated people as a person."