Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth , The men who saw the future.

Philip K Dick is Hollywoods favourite science fiction writer the inspiration for films going back thirty years both adaptions of his own novels and also for works using similar themes. His work first appeared in science fiction magazines and in cheap paperback novels in the 50s ,60s and 70s.At the time popular depiction of the future barring the possibility of nuclear war were generally fairly positive. Dicks stagnant ,high tech,alienated,scuzzy , run down future turns out to have been fairly accurate as a prediction.However the future depicted in his books was actually originated by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law.Pohl and Kornbluth are largely forgotten now but in the 1950s and early 1960s they were the cutting edge of science fiction