Dick is considered a godfather of the Science Fiction genre Cyberpunk, but the content and significance of his work stretches beyond the confines of futuristic storytelling. Like Kafka, Dick suffered a troubling personal life and expressed the paranoia and turbulence within him through his prolific writing. Taking Kafka's dark portrayal of modern man's predicament a step further, Dick described a distopian world where schizophrenia and disorientation were the results of the pressures of life in the late twentieth century. In the 70's his writings became devoted more or less to describing in various ways the meaning of a visionary experience that he himself suffered through. He died in 1982 from illnesses that were probably the result of long-term drug-abuse, just as the first of several films based on his books was nearing completion.