The day after he died Ursula LeGuin was supposed to give the commencement address at Reed College, in Portland. She started by saying, “Yesterday the greatest science fiction author of all time, and the greatest living author in English, died. So I’m going to talk about Philip K Dick instead of give this speech I wrote.”
(Source: I took SF classes at Portland State University with Tony Wolk, a good friend of Ursula LeGuin. He’d often have her come and talk to a class.)
Now, many people I respect would still say LeGuin herself is still the literary pinnacle in SF, and I agree. That she, the most human of writers, saw such humanity in PKD — that’s always struck me.
While I think some details of your anecdote might be wrong (Dick died in early March 1982, which is probably too early for Reed College's commencement), I think it is clear that LeGuin had a lot of admiration for Dick.
She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.
The day after he died Ursula LeGuin was supposed to give the commencement address at Reed College, in Portland. She started by saying, “Yesterday the greatest science fiction author of all time, and the greatest living author in English, died. So I’m going to talk about Philip K Dick instead of give this speech I wrote.”
(Source: I took SF classes at Portland State University with Tony Wolk, a good friend of Ursula LeGuin. He’d often have her come and talk to a class.)
Now, many people I respect would still say LeGuin herself is still the literary pinnacle in SF, and I agree. That she, the most human of writers, saw such humanity in PKD — that’s always struck me.