THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION
“Dick dissects modern insanity through the cypher of Bob Arctor. Arctor is a man on the fringes of society. A man who realises one day that he hates his suburban existence, and so trades it in for a life among the hippie drop-outs, drug addicts and street people of Orange County, California. But Arctor is also Agent Fred, an undercover narcotics officer whose identity is hidden even from his police handlers by a “scramble suit” that makes him appear as an unmemorable blur. When an administrative error results in Agent Fred being assigned to monitor Bob Arctor, Arctor/Fred has the strange experience of monitoring his own activities through the holographic scanning equipment that gives the novel its title…”
“Science fiction is built on some incredible failures. These days, we take for granted that science fiction’s ideas and imagery dominate pop culture and define our collective reality — but many of science fiction’s most important works were originally counted as flops. Science fiction wouldn’t have most of its coolest riffs without these classics that went under the radar at the time.
“Here are 20 awesome science fiction failures, that totally made the universe worth living in…”
“And did you ever notice, the Voight-Kampff test (the test Deckard gives to determine humanity) doesn’t really use questions? Rather, Deckard describes a scene and the subject of the test reacts to it. There’s a really important lesson here: literature is our Voight-Kampff test, and it helps us to be human…
“Reading strengthens what clinicians call ‘empathic imagination’ — the ability to imagine the situation of another.”
“Dick never intended The Exegesis for publication, and aside from In Pursuit of VALIS, a tiny selection of extracts from the book that was brought out in 1991, it has remained a thing of legend only. Until last month, however, when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt brought out a huge 900-page volume, co-edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson. It’s still only about one tenth of the whole thing, but it’s a start. But what, if anything, does this text have to offer people who are not Philip K Dick?”
“When it comes to looking into the future and seeing what our surroundings might look like,Minority Report’s predictions have held up, and even come ahead of schedule. Rather than some of the more fantastic predictions out of the 1960s and 1970s as to what modern life will look like, Spielberg’s 2054 looks remarkably like the world of 2012.”
TOTAL RECALL - Official Trailer - In Theaters August 3rd (by SonyPictures)
“Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers.
“If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web.”
Philip K. Dick, by Federico Piatti - Illustrator)
“Giving a prize to a novel is, in effect, trying to second-guess posterity. If I say ‘this book is great’ I may be talking about my idiosyncratic taste. If I say ‘Dune is a classic of postwar American SF’ I’m not. Indeed, if we look at the result of the 1966 Hugo — joint winners Frank Herbert’s Dune and Roger Zelazny’s …And Call Me Conrad, it is no disparagement of Zelazny (a very interesting writer, who has written several enduring novels) to say: one of those books has been endorsed by posterity in a way that the other hasn’t. And this is the nub of my point: what matters about an award is not how it arrives at its decision. What matters is the extent to which its decision is posterity-proof.”
“One common problem for all science fiction writers is reconciling the wondrous world we could have with the one we have negligently stumbled into…
“But if we are going to manufacture our reality, couldn’t we make it a bit better? The thing we seem to like manufacturing the best are enemies, and here we are all guilty.”
Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX (by robgwilson.com)
Dear Sir Ridley.
Please fuck off.
