Authors Like Philip K. Dick

Franz Kafka

Bohemian, writing in German · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague and worked for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, investigating injury claims by industrial workers. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts unread; Brod refused and published The Trial and The Castle after Kafka’s death.

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Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine · Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949), Labyrinths (English 1962)

Borges (1899–1986) became director of Argentina’s National Library in 1955 and was completely blind by the late 1950s. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in Ficciones, concerns an invented world. In 1976 he thanked the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla after a lunch with him; he later criticised the junta’s abuses.

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Stanisław Lem

Polish · Solaris (1961), The Cyberiad (1965), His Master’s Voice (1968)

Lem (1921–2006) was born in Lwów. Solaris is about a planet-wide ocean that humans cannot understand. Lem praised Dick in the essay “A Visionary Among the Charlatans” while attacking most American science fiction; in 1974 Dick wrote to the FBI that ‘Stanisław Lem’ was probably a name used by a Communist committee.

Ursula K. Le Guin

American · The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974)

Le Guin (1929–2018) was born in Berkeley and went to the same high school as Dick. The Left Hand of Darkness made her the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. She named Dick as an influence and called The Lathe of Heaven an homage to him. In 1977 she refused a Nebula in protest at the Science Fiction Writers of America’s treatment of Lem.

Every book by Ursula K. Le Guin →

J. G. Ballard

British · The Drowned World (1962), Crash (1973), Empire of the Sun (1984)

Ballard (1930–2009) was born in the Shanghai International Settlement and interned as a boy at the Lunghua camp during the Japanese occupation, the basis of Empire of the Sun. He popularised the idea of ‘inner space’, science fiction that explores the mind rather than the galaxy.

Kurt Vonnegut

American · Player Piano (1952), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Vonnegut (1922–2007) was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and survived the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 in an underground meat locker, the experience behind Slaughterhouse-Five. His debut, Player Piano, imagines an America where machines have replaced factory workers, and several of his novels feature Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful science fiction writer.

Thomas Pynchon

American · The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Shadow Ticket (2025)

Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937 and has avoided publicity for most of his life. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas uncovers what may be a secret postal network, the Tristero. Gravity’s Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award, and his novel Shadow Ticket was published in October 2025.

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Octavia E. Butler

American · Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993)

Butler (1947–2006) was in 1995 the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. In Kindred a Black woman is pulled back from 1976 Los Angeles to a Maryland plantation; Parable of the Sower follows a fifteen-year-old girl through a collapsing California in the 2020s. Her novelette “Bloodchild” won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.

William Gibson

American-Canadian · Neuromancer (1984), Pattern Recognition (2003)

Gibson was born in 1948 and coined the word ‘cyberspace’ in his story “Burning Chrome” (1982). Neuromancer was the first book to win the Nebula, the Hugo and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has said that after watching the first twenty minutes of Blade Runner he feared his novel was sunk, because readers would think he had copied the film’s look.

Jonathan Lethem

American · Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

Lethem was born in 1964. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, blends science fiction and detective fiction, and Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award. With Pamela Jackson he co-edited The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2011). His story collection A Different Kind of Tension appeared in 2025.