I read Scanner Darkly a dozen years ago. I wouldn't say it was entirely near future scifi, but it was less fantasy than his usual work, though his paranoia wouldn't allow his hero to be less than the center of the universe, a factor I generally dislike in my own work. Otherwise, I liked it for its honesty, as PK Dick admitted that his drug abuse had killed him. He refuted his life in that book, even as the cancer ate away at his guts and his other famous book was being made into a movie an hour away in San Francisco, a little picture called "Blade Runner" though the original story was pretty different, called "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" the first of his books I read.
PK Dick was a very prolific author, with a couple dozen titles to his name. The thing is, they all follow a certain pattern of paranoia and if you read more than seven of his works without being able to predict him, you're not paying attention. Since he died, quite a few of his stories and novels have become movies. The best one was Minority Report, which really captured the serious essence of his work without demeaning it with vulgar displays as his most prolific director tended towards. At the time PK Dick died, he was practically a neighbor, living in rehab a couple valleys east of me. His friends in Scifi threw a con for him in my hometown, which I couldn't afford to attend and had no transportation to reach, so I never met him myself. I also missed the last chance to meet Robert Heinlein at that con but I managed to run into Frank Herbert at a coffee shop a dozen miles north one Sunday morning. My home was crawling with authors, even though most of them called LA their home. That's one of my minor superpowers. I run into famous people in weird places. Sharon Stone likes alpine lakes. Don't ask how I know. I think they like being treated in an ordinary way, and prefer not to be recognized if they have any self esteem.
The kind of fiction I'm aiming for isn't a paranoid place like PK Dick wrote about. Its more like a broken utopia, or a paused dystopia, like a combination of 1910 and your favorite internet fantasy. Laptops and windmill driven well pumps. Electric cars and bicycles. Canning bees, victory gardens, trading preserves across the fenceline, Works Projects Agency, biodiesel racecar exhibition, Worlds Fair, pocket watches, steam electric hybrid trains, carbon fiber horse buggies... sort of like Steampunk, but less dirty, more solar and laptops, less revolvers and dirty coal soot. We're moving into a very strange time, unlike any time in our history as a species. Previously, we suffered civilization collapse due to loss of food or other crucial resource. This time we still have enough food, but we're facing collapse over energy because we can't maintain unlimited growth, the constant on which the world economy is based. Once the economy went global, collapse became that much more dangerous because it will take out the whole world, not just a few countries. As a Peak Oil guru, I'm working to figure out a worldview where the public can adjust to a lifestyle where lower energy seems acceptable socially and possibly a romantic improvement over the old days of unlimited energy and unlimited consumption. The best way I can do that is by writing fiction, and since my strongest gift is in realist settings, that's what I'm working towards. I just hope I can get some of it written soon and get people reading it. So far, Mediaminer is working well. I've gotten 300x the exposure my prior website got in only 4 days of operation. I'm pleased. If I can bring more attention to myself, I can write and publish my Peak Oil stories and get people thinking about it for their own lives rather than some absurd survivalist fantasy.