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Movies based on PKD stories:
Complete list
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"God promises eternal life, we can provide it !" (The Three Stimatags of Palmer Eldritch)
"I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey." (PKD-1976)
This is the domain of a creative mind. Philip K. Dick has such a mind. He has achieved numerous acclaims. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep garnered great reviews, and it was made into the classic film Blade Runner. He won the Hugo award for Man In the High Castle, and two of his short stories were made into movies, but in spite of this Philip K. Dick remains underrated, and one possible reason might be that he tackles very difficult topics, topics that may be considered the property of philosophers, priests, and psychologists among others. His social critiques are often satirical and subtle, but scoring. By pointing to the frigidity of the foundations of many of our basic beliefs he manages to expose many of society's shared assumptions for what they often are-assumptions.
Philip K Dick is probably best known for his contribution to the 1982 film, Blade Runner, which is loosely adapted on the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Also his short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" was filmed in 1990 as Total Recal.
However Dick was one of the pioneers of Science Fiction with his vivid and imaginative philosophical writings. His main themes focused on our perception of reality, simulacra, and mechanical objects that simulate life, the dangers of drug abuse and man's relation to God. What is so special about Dick, is that his focus in not merely on the electrical gadgets and machines, which has become synonymous with science fiction, rather than on the individual itself. Do Android Dream serves as an example of this point, even though the novel is about androids, which are so highly developed that it is only by the most rigid testing that one can distinguish them from human beings. The key difference is the quality of empathy which humans have for other living things.
Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in 1928, but he lived most of his life in California. His first sale of a story was entitled "Roog" to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1952 and his first published story was "Beyond Lies the Wub" in Planet Stories in the same year (both collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick, 1977). Of his some one hundred and ten short stories, twenty-eight were published in 1953 and another twenty-eight in 1954, but beginning with the appearance of Solar Lottery in 1955 he turned primarily to the novel. Although his Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, his peak period for novels was perhaps 1964 to 1969, during which time sixteen volumes were published. Although it is not uncommon for a writer to progress from shorter forms to longer ones and although there was a scattering of stories from 1963 to 1967, Dick's career has sometimes proceeded intermittently with some periods of creative activity greater than others, as well as intervals of relative silence. Either the progression from the short story to the novel or the number and variety of his novels seems to have persuaded some science-fiction scholars that his short stories are lesser efforts. That opinion needs to be challenged, for some stories, such as "Autofac" (1955, collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick) and "Beyond Lies the Wub," to name but two, stand in a relationship to subsequent science-fiction writing not unlike that of Stanley G. Weinbaum's much reprinted "A Martian Odyssey" (1934).
The central problem in much of the late Philip K. Dick's science fiction is how to distinguish the real from the unreal. He once told Contemporary Authors: "My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?'" In novel after novel, Dick's characters find that their familiar world is in fact an illusion, either self-created or imposed on them by others. Dick "liked to begin a novel," Patricia Warrick wrote in Science-Fiction Studies, "with a commonplace world and then have his characters fall through the floor of this normal world into a strange new reality." Drug-induced hallucinations, robots and androids, mystical visions, paranoic elusions, and alternate or artificial worlds are the stuff of which Dick's flexible universe is made. "All of his work," Charles Platt wrote in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, "starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."
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