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sThe movie Blade Runner (1982) was the first cinema adaptation of Philip K. Dick based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Last month, I picked up the novel out of town at a Half Price Books. The store had a few copies of a U.K. Orion Books trade paperback edition. Do Androids […]
We now come to the last four stories in The Philip K. Dick Reader. These are also stories all made into movies. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (F&SF April 1966): The story that became the movie Total Recall. Douglas Quail is an office worker with an obsession of going to Mars. The wife […]
This is the fourth installment in a series wherein I examine a batch of stories from The Philip K. Dick Reader. So far, the stories show the Cold War with the potential for WWIII weighed heavily on Philip K. Dick’s mind. Robots were also a favorite topic. “Upon the Dull Earth” (Beyond Fantasy Fiction #9, […]
This is the third batch of stories examined from The Philip K. Dick Reader. “To Serve the Master” (Imagination, February 1956): Applequist is outside and finds a half-buried robot in a ravine. The robot is dead but not damaged. They were all thought destroyed years ago. Applequist lives in one of the underground cities run […]
Last week, I began to examine The Philip K. Dick Reader. I had quoted Algis Budrys who observed Dick’s short fiction in the 1950s was all over the place. Here are the next five stories: “The Last of the Masters” (Orbit No. 5, November-December 1954). Post-apocalypse is a recurring item in Dick’s fiction. This starts […]
If you go to the Internet Movie Database and type in Philip K. Dick, there are 38 credits listed. I can’t think of any other American science fiction writer from the classic era of magazine and mass-market paperbacks with this many media adaptations. Philip K. Dick was a prolific writer of science fiction stories during […]
Sensor Sweep: Black Mask, A. Conan Doyle, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, and more F. Scott Fitzgerald
Monday , 24, December 2018 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsWriting (Black Gate): The hardboiled school was born in the page of Black Mask Magazine under the editorship of George W. Sutton, with Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” (which I wrote about here…) and “Kings of the Open Palm,” and Dashiell Hammett’s “Arson Plus,” appearing in 1923. In 1924, Sutton resigned and circulation editor Phil Cody […]
Originally, this article was meant to be different. I was going to examine two approaches to science fiction. One focusing more on action, adventure, and an exciting story, and the other on ideas about society, technology, and the future. Most stories feature both elements, but have a very clear focus preference. And yet, the more […]