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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2493 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sci-fi club no. 33: Blade Runner discussion

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is borderline unreadable, but then that describes virtually everything Phillip K Dick ever wrote. The twin subplots of Sheep are "is it ethical to murder androids that imitate humans so well" for Deckerd and "can androids have a religion" for the androids that ties together in Mercerism, which basically becomes nihilism, which is the basic message of everything PKD ever wrote. The "Blade Runner" aspect of Sheep is reflected in a minor character Deckerd meets at the fake police station who is a cop that is also a replicant that doesn't know he's a replicant. Peebles, Fancher et. al. correctly surmised that this angle is far more human and relatable than the original Deckerd and his wife Iran, who eventually settle quite happily with yet another fake barnyard animal.

    Deckard goes to an uninhabited, obliterated region of Oregon to reflect. He climbs a hill when he is hit by falling rocks and realizes this is an experience similar to Mercer's. Rushing back to his car, he stumbles abruptly upon a toad, an animal previously thought to be extinct, and one of the animals sacred to Mercer himself. With newfound joy, Deckard brings the toad home, where Iran quickly discovers that it is just a robot. While Deckard is unhappy, he decides that he at least prefers to know the truth: whether the toad is real or artificial, remarking with an exhausted reflection upon the events that have taken place that "The electrical things have their lives too, paltry as those lives are".

The book is a hard-core waste of time. I can't recommend it.





coffeesp00ns  ·  2493 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I feel like I read a quote somewhere that Phillip K. Dick was high on speed writing a lot of his fiction because he needed to pump out books to support a family. It... might explain a lot.

I've been trying to find the quote - Can't seem to, but I have found a lot of information about Dick and his relationship with drugs, which doesn't seem to have been a good one, on the whole. I mean, most people take drugs because they have a hard time dealing with their shit, and the shit they see in the real world. It makes sense that, if Dick saw the world the way he often described it in his fiction, that he'd want to check out.

bhrgunatha  ·  2492 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I Was Philip K Dick's Reluctant Host on BBC Radio 4 might interest you.

kleinbl00  ·  2493 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I feel like I read a quote somewhere that Phillip K. Dick was high on speed writing a lot of his fiction because he needed to pump out books to support a family. It... might explain a lot.

yo.

page 11, Future Noir.

    Despite this extra income, however, Dick's financial state was still precarious. Casting about for ways to further increase his literary output, Dick hit upon a dangerous solution: amphetamines. Massive quantities of them. This gambit initially paid off with increased productivity, but eventually levied a heavy fine upon Dick's mental health, as we shall see.

    Still, the author never looked upon his early drug usage as anything other than a purely pragmatic answer to money problems. While once speaking to me in 1981, Dick himself justified his amphetamine habit by stating "I took so much speed simply because I had to support myself by writing fiction. And the only way I could do that was to write a lot of it."