Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers
23,028
edits
Philip K. Dick: Difference between revisions
m
→top: Fixing links to disambiguation pages
({{creatortropes}}) |
Derivative (talk | contribs) m (→top: Fixing links to disambiguation pages) |
||
Line 4:
{{quote|''[[VALIS|Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.]]''}}
Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982) was a [[Science Fiction]] author who wrote many influential novels. Throughout his life, he
Dick's characters typically spend much of his work wondering who they are, and whether their memories are real or fake. His stories often dealt with reality as illusion, [[Gnosticism]], crazy people, drugged up people, people who seem crazy but are in fact drugged up, people who seem drugged up who are in fact crazy, [[Government Conspiracy|government conspiracies]], [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|evil corporations]], simulacra, [[Cosmic Entity|Cosmic Entities]], [[Eldritch Abomination
He is known for writing some of the first [[Grey Goo]] stories and for writing about [[Post Modernism]] before it caught on in the academic world. He wrote serious existential and theological treatises within the context of futuristic science-fiction stories, when science-fiction novels were still in their infancy and considered as childish and peripheral by the majority of the literary world. He was one of the first authors to use fantasy and science-fiction to discuss taboo and socially risqué subjects, contemplating ideas that wouldn't be discussed in mainstream academia for decades. He mixed, deconstructed, and reconstructed philosophical and psychological ideology from everything from Carl Jung and his theories on collective consciousness through to Jean-Paul Sartre and his theories on individualism, constantly searching to define and challenge reality and the human mind. Some of his stories have been cited by big-name philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek.
Line 28:
* ''[[VALIS]]''
For the newly prospective or particularly insane reader, as a lot of PKD's works were guided by the [[Reality Subtext]] of his life, reading his works in the order they were published (or written) from oldest to most recent gives probably the best overall understanding of the development of his mind and ideas over time
----
{{creatortropes}}
* [[Adaptation Expansion]]: ''[[The Adjustment Bureau]]'' is based on a short story ("Adjustment Team") that was only a few pages long.
* [[Adaptational Attractiveness]]: Other than ''Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said'' (in which
** In a glaring example, the very first line of ''[[Minority Report]]'' has Anderton think "I'm getting old. Old and fat and bald." In the movie, he's played by [[Tom Cruise]].
* [[After the End]] - One short story dealt with survivors of a nuclear war, trying to build an escape rocket, and buying supplies from a modern day general store owner.
Line 56:
* [[Downer Ending]] - Many. ''Second Variety'', ''Sales Pitch'', ''Faith of Our Fathers''...
** Occasionally a [[Bittersweet Ending]] may be evident, but you'll never find a [[Happily Ever After]] on PKD's side of science-fiction.
*** Except for his short story "The Defenders." The Eastern and Western Blocs built robots called "leadies" to carry out [[World War III]] as [[Robot War|proxies]] while humanity waited out the nuclear holocaust in underground shelters. The leadies promptly [[Turned Against Their Masters|turned against their masters' '''wishes''']] by stopping the war, cleaning up all the damage, and
* [[Fisher Kingdom]] - The various worlds of ''Eye In the Sky'' started twisting visitors to match their worldviews. {{spoiler|Because each "world" was in fact inside someone's head in a sort of shared hallucination.}}
* [[Genre Savvy]] - the majority of Philip Dick's protagonists are paranoid enough to consider the possibility that they are unreal constructs of a hallucination, subjects of an experiment of a higher power, or constantly slipping between alterable states of reality. Exhibit A: in ''Cosmic Puppets'' the male protagonist returns to his home town to find that what he remembered never existed and the ''first'' thing he thinks of is the possibility that someone implanted false memories into his mind in order to manipulate him for nefarious causes... unfortunately he isn't [[Genre Savvy]] ''enough'' to listen to his first instinct that he should leave the town before he gets stuck there.
Line 64:
** By the time we get to the appearance of "[[Light Is Good|The Pink Light]]", the manifestation of Sophia (in different forms), and alternate interpretations of the Torah (which are then used to validate multiple levels of existence), it becomes "Aion Telos is trying to help but can't get through to humans because Yaldaboath is blocking the entrance to the Iron Fortress." [[Take a Third Option|That said]], what we're really talking about here is the intervention of the ''Advocate'' versus the Adversary, because the Godhead itself tends to be either [[Neglectful Precursors|too bored to pay attention]] or... well, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|broken.]]
* [[Grey and Gray Morality]]: all humans and sentient creatures have both redeemable and damnable qualities (with generally more time spent musing on the damnable). There is no black and white, only mixed shades of grey, and if you think you've finally come across someone who fits into either a pure white or black category, then you are probably about to find out something about them that dilutes them to grey again. The only exception from this rule are those that are manifestations of the demiurge, and even then the psychosis backing the [[Complete Monster]] always has a dimension of understanding to it that makes the reader unable to label them as definitively evil.
* [[Humans Are
* [[Intangible Time Travel]] - ''Paycheck'', with its "timescope"
** A lot of the short stories play around with the ideas of causality and time loops. At least one has an older version of the protagonist try to kill his younger self.
Line 81:
* [[Ontological Mystery]]
* [[Pragmatic Adaptation]]: Due to the incredibly dark, reality-challenging, and ideologically expansive nature of most of his works, it is almost ''impossible'' to create a faithful adaptation of one of PKD's full novels. The entire novel simply can't be pulled down into a 3-hour or less movie. For this reason, a lot of his shorter stories rather than full-length novels are made into movies: ''[[Minority Report]]'', ''[[Total Recall]]'', ''[[Paycheck]]'' etc. There are only two movies based on his actual novels that were well-made and critically-acclaimed: ''[[Blade Runner]]'', based on ''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?'', which, even on a severely curtailed script Ridley Scott travelled through [[Development Hell|Pre- and Post-production Hell]] with; and the ''[[A Scanner Darkly]]'' adaptation, which was incredibly faithful to the book but mostly because A) the director was [[Crazy Awesome|incredibly creative]], and B) it is set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]]. God help the director who takes it into his mind to tackle VALIS.
* [[Psychic Powers]] - [[Spider Sense|Precogs]] being one of the the most common, as in "The Minority Report". ''Ubik'' centers on a group of ''anti-''psychics, people whose presence blunts the efficacy of psi
** PKD himself believed that he had precognitive experiences. In [http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Three Days Later] he describes unconsciously adapting a scene from the book of Acts into his novel "Flow My Tears," and then he '''lives''' it with even the names intact a few years later.
* [[Reality Warper]]: many, with their powers constantly becoming more intricate and elaborate throughout the decades of P.K.D's writing career until you get to ''The Divine Invasion'', at which point you may need a pen, paper and a flow chart.
| |||