How Philip K. Dick’s writing ushered us into the future
How Philip K. Dick’s writing (and its many adaptations) ushered us into the future Chris Knight
STRANDS OF THE NOVEL’S DNA ARE WOVEN INTO THE NEW FILM.
Philip Kindred Dick is having a renaissance. Though the trippy science fiction author died in 1982, his novels and short stories have continued to resonate well into the future he imagined, and perhaps even helped escort into being.
Since the release of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall in 1990 (based on the short story We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale), not more than a year or two has passed without another adaptation of one of Dick’s stories. But 2018 must rank as a high-water mark, with a third season of The Man in the High Castle due on Amazon, joining the 10 episodes of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams that were just released on the streaming service.
2018 also marks the 50th anniversary of Dick’s most influential novel, the Nebula Award nominee Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – better known by the title of its 1982 movie adaptation, Blade Runner. The author had a knack for the unwieldy title: he also penned The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.
For someone who encountered the movie first, reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? feels a bit like peering into an alternate reality; appropriate, since it’s a common theme for the writer, and also forms the spine of The Man in the High Castle, which takes place in a 1962 after the Allies lost the Second World War. (If you’re looking for these novels in a bookstore, be sure to ask at the counter; I’ve found more than one store that keeps Dick’s works in the back to deter thieves.)
Much of the plot of Blade Runner is there in Do Androids Dream. Rick Deckard is a west-coast bounty hunter tasked with “retiring” (i.e., executing) rogue androids who have killed their human masters in the off-world colonies and returned to Earth. The latest model is the Nexus- 6, and the only way to tell it apart from a human is through the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test. Even the test questions are lifted from the book.
But from the novel’s first page, there are weird differences as well. Deckard – played in the movie by Harrison Ford as a hard-boiled, taciturn loner – is talkative, thoughtful, an opera lover, obsessed with his pet electric sheep – and married. It’s 2021, not 2019; androids are “andys,” not replicants.
Dick’s book also introduces a host of concepts not explored by the movie. There’s the Penfield mood organ, on which users can dial any emotional state they want to experience: 481 gets you an awareness of the manifold possibilities open to you; 888 and you’ll want to watch TV no matter what’s on. Deckard and his wife argue over whether she’s going to choose six hours of self-accusatory depression or (his choice) 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters.
The novel also features a new religion called Mercerism, which mixes elements of Christianity with a big dollop of Sisyphus, and values empathy above all else. Followers tune in by grabbing the handles of an empathy box, which fuses them with everyone who is similarly connected – religion as a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. You can understand why the filmmakers found this topic too heady to cram into the already philosophically burgeoning Blade Runner, but it’s just one more thing to enjoy about the novel.
A real frisson for Blade Runner fans, however, is the way tiny, saltcrystals of ideas have passed through the celluloid membrane. “A humanoid robot is like any other machine,” Deckard says in a line that shows up almost word- for- word in Blade Runner. “It can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it’s not our problem.”
Both the owl that Deckard encounters in Blade Runner at the Tyrell company, and the ostrich that almost runs him over in the street, make a nascent appearance in Do Androids Dream. And the odd contrast in the film, between the teeming masses in the streets and the empty apartment buildings, is explained in the book: so many people have left Earth that there’s prestige in hangi ng out somewhere crowded.
While Denis Villeneuve’s sequel, Blade Runner 2049, would seem to owe most of its existence to Ridley Scott’s movie, there are additional strands of the novel’s DNA woven into the new film. At one point in Do Androids Dream, one of the artificial life forms ponders what it must feel like to give birth, or indeed to be born. Elsewhere, Deckard suggests that androids could be used as bounty hunters. Both these ideas are given a fuller airing in Blade Runner 2049.
And what of the perennial debate over whether Deckard is in fact a replicant? That conundrum is both suggested and almost (but not quite) settled in Dick’s novel, which raises the notion of false memories and an android that thinks it’s human, and plays with the Cartesian idea of an entity that acts human but lacks consciousness – or a soul, if you will.
This last notion has gained greater currency as we grapple with questions of artificial intelligence and sentience. We can converse to a limited degree with our computers; ask Siri to tell you a joke and she’ll oblige, but tell her one – try “knock knock” – and she won’t get it. Or to quote Dick: “An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism.”
Dick set his novel a little more than 50 years out when he wrote it in 1968. Those years have only brought us closer to the concepts with which he contended. No doubt a few more decades – to 2049, say – will put us into even closer touch with them; perhaps even a fusion.