The future keepers

Philip K. DICK, the science-fiction author who struggled for years with personal demons, never saw "Blade Runner," the first Hollywood adaptation of his writing. He died of a stroke just four months shy of its release in 1982. His grieving daughter Isa, then 15, remembers going to see the film in a San Rafael theater hoping that it might, somehow, keep part of her father alive.

"I went with my mom and I remember that there were maybe two other people in the whole theater and that was the way it was everywhere -- the movie was a total failure," Isa Dick Hackett said. "I remember too that the lights came up before the dedication at the end, so I didn't even get to see that. It was like a double slap in the face."

After the bruising "Blade Runner" fiasco, Dick's family assumed that the late writer had "zero future in movies," as his daughter put it. That would have added another discouraging footnote to a pained life. Dick had five failed marriages, wrote most of his novels while gobbling amphetamines and, in the grips or paranoia or religious visions, he felt always the outsider.

But while Philip Kindred Dick was a disaffected loner in life, in death his ideas turned out to be pitch-perfect for a Digital Age that wanted science fiction not just about aliens but also about the alienated.

Posthumously, Dick became a one-man factory for Hollywood projects, with his fiction reaching the screen nine times. Among the films: Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report," Paul Verhoeven's "Total Recall," John Woo's "Paycheck" and, earlier this year, the Nicolas Cage vehicle "Next," which arrives on DVD in stores on Sept. 25.

"Blade Runner," meanwhile, has bounced back from its early obscurity to become one of the most celebrated science-fiction films ever made. In October, it returns to theaters with "Blade Runner: The Final Cut," a 25th anniversary edition that, for the first time, realizes director Ridley Scott's vision with a meticulous reworking.

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Resurgent image

All of it makes for a staggering turnaround for the family of the troubled writer whose work presaged the cyberpunk movement; there is still debate about the quality of his actual prose versus the urgency of his concepts, but now, finally, he is at least mentioned as often as the familiar icons of the genre during his lifetime, the Asimovs, Bradburys, Clarkes and Heinleins. (Four of Dick's 1960s novels have just been reissued by the prestigious Library of America, giving the paperback writer some new hardcover cachet.)