"Dick is our poet of the simulacrum"

"Dick is our poet of the simulacrum in his strongest work, exploring that concept before Jean Baudrillard even knew how to spell it. If you can make a perfect replicant of a human -- so runs the essential Dick plot -- how can you say that your replicant is now, tout court, human? It is a serious problem. It bothered the hell out of Rene Descartes and John Locke but gave Mary Shelley and E.T.A. Hoffmann some terrific ideas for stories."
Frank McConnell, "You Bet Your Life: Death and the Storyteller" (1992, 1996)

thanks to Frank Bertrand for bringing this to my attention