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I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005) is a fictionalised biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère, originally published in French by Éditions du Seuil as Je suis vivant et vous êtes morts (1993).

The title of the book comes from a famous sentence in Dick's novel Ubik.

In 1993, Emmanuel Carrère, who was a film critic, had already published several fantasy books, and an essay on the alternate history genre, Le détroit de Behring. With I Am Alive and You Are Dead, he wrote a biography of Philip K. Dick closely interweaving the life and work of this major science-fiction author.

For Emmanuel Carrère, the Californian novelist intertwines varied materials. First, his own visions, which come particularly from his early childhood: the account of his twin sister dying very young, seeing his father with a gas mask before his parents' divorce, the influence of an excessively puritanical mother. And also his private life with his successive wives, some of whom were not models of balance, each wife participating in a specific lifestyle at different "periods": intellectual period, bohemian period, bourgeois period, artistic period, hippy period, junky period, mystical period. Finally, Dick's own way of rewriting everything, from his private life (past, present and future) to the history of the United States and of the post-war and Cold War world. Dick's destiny was hence to write science-fiction well, with his parallel universes, despite his strong desire to write novels of general literature. These were all refused, while he was still selling, for modest prices, his numerous short stories and science-fiction novels.

Emmanuel Carrère combines Dick's "real" life (he mostly refers to Lawrence Sutin's classic biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick), his dream life, and inventions drawn from Philip K. Dick's own writings, such as his novels and even autobiographical fragments.

Emmanuel Carrère became absorbed by Dick's life and work, and gives readings of a certain number of his important short stories and novels (the fact that he does not cite the titles of a large number of them is a hint on his choices), in particular:

• The Father-Thing (short story)
• Time Out of Joint
• The Man in the High Castle
• Clans of the Alphane Moon
• Martian Time-Slip
• Now Wait for Last Year
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Faith of Our Fathers (a short story from the anthology Dangerous Visions)
• The Penultimate Truth
• Ubik
• A Maze of Death
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
• A Scanner Darkly
• The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
• The Valis trilogy
  • Valis
  • The Divine Invasion
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Carrère finished writing the book on the evening of 12 January 1993. The next morning he read an article in Libération about the Romand affair which had just occurred on Saturday. He then wrote a book about the affair that he named The Adversary, in which he quotes the book Ubik by Philip K. Dick describing the state of a friend in a coma.

• Google Books