The movie industry seems to like making PKD movies. Let’s hope the trend continues. Lots of kids don’t watch old movies, so anything remade will be new to them.

Jim

The book, however, should be made with a more faithful adaptation. Blade Runner is good, but it has little to do with the book. Sadly, short of The Masters of Science Fiction last August, I have no expectation of the film or television industry making good, accurate, science fiction.

I think PKD wanted us all to question our humanity, but I don’t think he wanted us to accept that we’re inhuman.

Of course, the reason why this is a great film and book is because it makes people think and argue.

As to Dick’s view’s on what make us human—I can’t help but think of the brilliant show DEXTER whenever that topic comes up.

Second, you are right about the animals. In the book animal ownership is a complex status thing and a way to show how humans are different from andys.

My point about us failing to love animals is how we treat them as a species. Individual we have amazing love of animals, but as a species we have overrun all the habitats on the planet and are just squeezing out all the other species. Even dogs and cats, our favorite animal friends are often abandoned and mistreated.

It’s like in the book, PKD wasn’t talking about real androids, he was writing a story attacking those people who do not have empathy or who mistreat animals.

Damn, it would be great to be in college studying PKD. I appreciate your comments and I agree with them. As the years pass I find Blade Runner more boring, and the book more interesting. I hate the way Ridley Scott tried to monkey with the story by suggesting Deckard is an android. However, I am impressed with how much of the story his screenwriters did use. I’ve heard Scott never even finished reading the book.

This recent time of reading the book on audio did make it feel a lot more like the movie than any reading before. It’s not close, but its obviously based the book, which is a lot better than some other book adaptations for film.

If you have time, leave a post telling about your studies in PKD.

I do think we need a new version, one that is somewhat faithful to the book. It doesn’t need to be spot on. In fact you can cut out a lot of stuff, but the book isn’t that thick anyway. There’s a lot more mystery and intrigue in the book than Blade Runner. I watch BR and it tends to bore me. It’s visually amazing considering when it was made, but it’s really dull and sort of drags along. The only fascinating part for me is the very end. If you remade it and stuck more to the book, even 25% more, you would see it changing drastically.

“In PKD’s story, humans are superior because they have empathy and love animals - well, it appears Dick was wrong because we have failed at both.”

Also, I don’t agree with that statement. We do care for animals today. It’s sort of silly to say we don’t give a flying hoot about them. If we didn’t we wouldn’t try to save species we decimated out of stupidity. 100 years ago we never would have thought that our chemicals and what not would have wiped out animals and habitats. If we didn’t care we’d probably not have dogs as pets, or cats or whatever, among a lot of other things we wouldn’t do. We do care about animals, we just don’t think in the long term.
Plus, animals die out ALL the time, most from nature. Remember, humans are creatures of nature too. If we wipe out a species because we eat it…that’s just part of nature, even though it sucks and might very well be wrong.
On the subject of his book, however, I think you’ve got it a little bit backwards. In Electric Sheep people don’t love animals in the way you’re saying. Real animals (meaning non-android) are a mark of social status. If you own a real sheep…well…that’s like saying you’re at a certain level in the social strata. But people disguise that by having android animals, to try to make it seem like they belong in whatever social group they are attempting to be a part of. Deckard spends most of the book trying to get something to replace his android sheep (while hunting androids of course…which is kind of interesting since social status is based on the “enslavement” or android creatures, and more so by human androids, since the highest mark of civilization, according to the folks stuck on the radiated Earth, is to migrate to Mars where you’re given a slave android). In any case, it’s applicable now as it was then. Face it, animals become more valuable when they’re nearly extinct.

Anywho, I’m just rambling. I’m doing an independent study on the works of PKD right now for college…so I have somewhat of a vest interest in his work

It would be very hard to decide if I wanted to see a new film or the remake of Android. Even if the movie industry made two PKD film adaptations a year it would be damn hard to decide their schedule.

Still it would be great to see a second intepretation DADOES? The philosophical concept the novel explores only grow more interesting the closer we get to building actual robots that are like us. I think the novel should be reinterpreted with every new generation.

It’s like the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, which has had three major movie productions, each of which reflects the new knowledge of a successive generation. With the new biography of Bly it should really change the next version.