Showing once again that reality is stranger than fiction, Philip K. Dick has returned from the dead via FedEx. "In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers are creating a lifelike, android portrait of one of America's well-known science-fiction writers Philip K Dick." Among the FedEx-sponsored team is David Hanson, best known to robots.net readers as the creator of K-Bot, an android copy of his girlfriend. Much of the work was done at UTA's Automation and Robotics Research Institute where it was supervised by Paul Williams, a friend of the author. David Hanson's skills provide the life-like android head which reproduces Dick's facial expressions. Other experts have provided face recognition and expression recognition technology for the android. The robot is also said to have full speech recognition and synthesis ability combined with the best in convesational AI. For more, see the Hanson Robotics press release or the PKD-Android homepage (Flash content). You can see the android in a reconstruction of his natural habitat at the Wired Magazine NextFest, June 24-27 in Chicago.