In today’s dead-tree New York Times (but apparently, based on the online date stamp, yesterday’s pixel edition), writer/editor Dana Jennings invokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick to illuminate his feelings about living with prostate cancer:

This is the way prostate cancer often feels, as if my world had turned into a Philip K. Dick dystopia in which the cold intent of many people—especially my insurer and the other bureaucrats who populate the health-care-industrial-complex—was to translate me into an abstraction, to deny my damaged and tiresome flesh-and-bloodness.

I have no idea whether or not Jennings—the author of this year’s bestselling Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music— is a science-fiction reader or fan, or just happened to pick up the Dick meme from the movies, but regardless, I think Dick would have been amused to have been conflated with a disease.

Particularly that one.