do androids dream of philip k. dick?

i can’t admit to having read a lot of philip k. dick. the piece of dick’s writing i am most familar with is “do androids dream of electric sheep?”, later made into the classic film “bladerunner” which not only presaged the arrival of the cyberpunk genre but redefined movie making standards in terms of its sets, the expectations a film could make of its audience, and science fiction films as a genre.

bladerunner gathered together some disparate but incredible talent ranging from the soundtrack which features the music of vangelis, to the lead character played by a young hunky harrison ford

, side-by-side with rutger hauer as the bad guy

and the strikingly attractive darryl hannah as pris . . . .

for an overview of “do androids dream of electric sheep?” this is a good place to start . . . . androids.

this is by far and away the most comprehensive and well-written overview of bladerunner, i’ve come across.

the next link takes you to an interesting graphic interpretation of a series of events which happened to dick in march of 1974. understandably, he spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what happened.

this extraordinary document comprising eight linked pages of graphic novel depicts what dick perceived as religious experiences. these same experiences have since been described by others as a schizophrenic bout. regardless of their nature, the experiences point in part to something of how and why dick was driven to create not alternate worlds and universes, but worlds resembling our very own. perhaps within his experiencing of this world was an echo that allowed him to describe the commonplace such that it became other.

this same approach underwrites the work of the cyberpunk writers, particularly william gibson.

as jean baudrillard, the french cultural theorist wrote:
"It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move "through the mirror" to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence."[