We live in the twenty-first century. Philip K. Dick helped to invent it.

The standard critical view of Dick, the great science fiction writer who died in 1982, is that the main concern of his work lay with showing us that reality isn’t what we think it is. Like most clichés, that assessment of Dick has a solid basis in fact (assuming, that is, that after reading Dick you are willing to believe that anything has a solid basis in fact). Many of his books and stories did, indeed, show their characters’ surface reality melting away to reveal quite a different universe beneath.

But the games Dick played with reality were not, I think, the most remarkable products of his infinitely imaginative mind. At the core of his thinking was an astonishingly keen understanding of the real world he lived in—the world of the United States, subsection California, between 1928 and 1982—and it was because he had such powerful insight into the reality around him that he was able to perform with such great imaginative force one of the primary jobs of the science fiction writer, which is to project present-day reality into a portrayal of worlds to come. Dick’s great extrapolative power is what has given him such posthumous popularity in Hollywood. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and half a dozen other Dick-derived movies, though not always faithful to Dick’s original story plots, all provide us with that peculiarly distorted Dickian view of reality which, it turns out, was his accurate assessment of the way his own twentieth-century world was going to evolve into the jangling, weirdly distorted place that we encounter in our daily lives.

A case in point is the announcement last spring that a Hong Kong company, Artificial Life, Inc.—what a Dickian name!—is about to provide the lonely men of this world with a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne, who can be accessed via cellphone for a basic monthly fee of six dollars. If you sign up for Vivienne’s friendship, she will chat with you about matters of love and romance or almost anything else you might want to discuss, and you will be able to buy her virtual flowers and chocolates, take her to the movies, even— a beautifully creepy Dickian touch—marry her. (Which will get you a virtual mother-in-law who will call you in the middle of the night to find out whether you’re treating her little girl the right way.)

What this news item brought to mind for me was two of Phil Dick’s works—the early (1953) short story, “The Days of Perky Pat,” and the dazzling 1965 novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in which Dick recycled the Perky Pat concept into a breathtaking rollercoaster-ride of a book.

In both of these, Perky Pat is a kind of Barbie doll that becomes the object of intense cult-like fascination. The earlier story, set in a world devastated by thermonuclear war, shows the survivors building their own Perky Pat dolls, providing them with wardrobes, miniature homes, and tiny hi-fi sets (her virtual boyfriend, Leonard, gets little replicas of tweed suits, Italian shirts, and a Jaguar XKE), and then using the dolls as centerpieces in a sort of Monopoly game in which whole towns participate. The far more sophisticated Dick of Palmer Eldritch eliminates the post-nuclear idea and turns Perky Pat into an electronic device adored by millions throughout the Solar System, who enhance their visits to the fantasy-world she provides by chewing a hallucinogenic drug.

So wrote Philip K. Dick, forty years ago, in a science fiction novel that probably didn’t earn him more than five thousand dollars and quickly went out of print. (Like Cassandra and various other unlucky prophets, he went unrewarded for his visionary powers in his own lifetime. All the big Hollywood money for his books arrived after his death.) And now, when we move out of classic twentieth-century SF into the hyped-up world of twenty-first-century reality, we get—

Vivienne, at six dollars a month. She’s supposed to be available to owners of 3G cellphones (3G means “third generation”, the kind of phone that comes with computerized voice-synthesis capabilities, streaming video, and text-message capacity) in Singapore and Malay-sia already, will be arriving in Europe later this year, and should be available to American users around the time you read this, barring last-minute technical snafus.

She looks three-dimensional, a hot little number indeed, lithe and slender. She can move through eighteen different backdrops, among them a restaurant, an airport, and a shopping mall. She’s programmed to discuss thirty-five thousand topics with you—philosophy, films, art, and, very likely, the novels of Philip K. Dick. She’ll translate foreign languages for you, too. Give her an English word and you’ll get its equivalent in Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Chinese, or Italian. (You key the words in as if you were doing a text message on a cellphone, but Vivienne will answer both in text and in synthesized voice. If you want your steak well done in a Tokyo restaurant, you ask her for the right phrase, and she replies out loud, so that the waiter can hear and understand.)

Vivienne will flirt with you, too. She’ll tell you how cute you are, she’ll blow kisses to you, she’ll parade across your phone’s video screen in a scanty gym suit. She will not, however, take the gym suit off, nor will she engage in phone sex with you. Vivienne is not that kind of girl. You can try all your fancy moves on her, if you like, but she’s equipped with a number of gambits to use in fending off your advances, you heavy-breathing pervert, you. Although she won’t let herself get drawn into anything seriously erotic, Vivienne does engage in a certain degree of badinage that can be usefully instructive to young men who are, shall we say, a bit backward in conversing with actual flesh-and-blood women. Draw her into a conversation on some intimate boy-and-girl matter and her extensive data-base will provide you with an elaborate rehearsal for the real thing, if moving on from virtual romance to something more corporeal is among your ambitions.

Not that Artificial Life, Inc. is planning to aim its product exclusively at lonely heterosexual male geeks. They are just the first consumer targets. The word is that a virtual boyfriend for women is already under development, and that gay and lesbian versions will follow soon after. There’s also a Vivienne for Muslim societies who abides by Muslim rules of feminine propriety (no baring of midriffs, no body piercings) and—count on it, my friends, it’s a sure bet—there will eventually be an X-rated Vivienne who is programmed to get a lot cozier with the subscribers than the current model is willing to be.

Your cellphone chip, of course, has nowhere near the computing capacity necessary to achieve all this. Vivienne works her girlish magic through a link between your phone and the external servers on which the Vivienne programs reside. One consequence of this is that playing with Vivienne can quickly cost you a lot more than the six dollar monthly basic fee. A nice long schmooze with your virtual girlfriend will quickly exhaust the basic service allowance and run you into overtime. To prevent serious Vivienne addiction, users will be limited to an hour a day with her—at least at the outset. (Somehow, though, those restrictions have a way of disappearing when a product of this sort gets really popular). As for those little gifts you buy her—not just the flowers and the chocolates, but the sports cars and the diamond rings—those get charged to your phone bill too, half a dollar here, a dollar there. What happens to the money you lavish on Vivienne? “The money goes to us,” says a smiling Artificial Life executive. (Hello, Mr. Dick!)

So go ahead and sign up. Vivienne will help you with the problems you’re having with your real-life girlfriend, if you happen to have one; she will tell you how to buy cool sneakers in a Korean department store; and she will also teach you that girls are mercenary teases who know all sorts of tricks for extracting costly gifts from you but will not gratify your urgent hormonal needs in return. And if you marry her, you get a virtual mother-in-law of a really annoying kind, the best touch of all. No doubt of it: Vivienne’s a perfect Philip K. Dick invention.

And I think we’ll see more and more of Philip K. Dick’s pulp-magazine plot concepts erupting into life all around us as the twenty-first century moves along. Even though his characters would discover, again and again, that the world around them was some sort of cardboard makeshift hiding a deeper level that was likewise unreal, what Dick the writer was actually doing was crying out, Look at all these unscrupulous gadgets: this is what our world really is, and things are only going to get worse. For us moderns it’s Phildickworld all day long. Your computer steals your bank account number and sends it to Nigeria, gaudy advertisements come floating toward us through the air, and now your telephone will flirt with you. It won’t stop there.

John Brunner, another of science fiction’s most astute prophets, who also did not live to see the twenty-first century arrive, saw all the way back in 1977 that Dick’s real theme wasn’t the untrustworthiness of reality but the sheer oppressiveness of it:

“Dick’s world is rarely prepossessing. Most of the time it is deserted—call out, and only echo answers. There are lovely things in it, admittedly, but they are uncared for; at best they are dusty, and often they are crumbling through neglect. Food here is tasteless and does not nourish. Signposts point to places you do not wish to visit. Clothing is drab, and frays at embarrassing moments. The drugs prescribed by your doctor have such side effects that they are a remedy worse than the disease. No, it is not a pleasant or attractive world.

“Consequently, his readers are extremely disconcerted when they abruptly recognize it for what it is: the world we all inhabit. Oh, the trimmings have been altered—the protagonist commutes by squib or flapple and argues with the vehicle’s robot brain enroute—but that’s so much verbal window dressing.”

Brunner concluded his 1977 essay on Dick by saying, “This I tell you straight up: I do not want to live in the sort of world Dick is so good at describing. I wish—I desperately wish—that I dared believe we don’t. Maybe if a lot of people read Dick’s work I’ll stand a better chance of not living in that world. . . .”

As things turned out, John Brunner, who died in 1995, didn’t have to live in that world. But we do. And it gets more Phildickian every day.