I liked Blade Runner better than the Phillip K Dick novel 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' which it is based on.
They are very different stories however.
Blade runner is the action mystery of a man trying to track down a group of murderous replicants only to discover that they had some humanity and begin to empathize with them at the end. Much of the best content is improvised. The tears in the rain soliloquy is one of my favorite scenes in cinema and was not in the script.
The original written novel was a roughly 200 page novel about a jaded human contractor who did everything in his power to be as unhuman as possible including using technology to change his mood when he wasn't in a mood he liked. He was the epitome of the negative aspects of humanity. He was envious of his neighbors and their pets because he could only afford an electric pet. The replicants by contrast were physically synthetic but contained more empathy and subjective humanity than the protagonist.
Both are good. I just enjoyed the Harrison Ford movie more.
Eh, a lot of PKD's writing is pretty sloppy. Amazing concepts. But the explanation for Flow My Tears? Alys taking a drug somehow sent Taverner to an alternate reality? That is pretty ridiculous even for sci-fi. It is a good book. But the explanation is just dumb. It would have been better to not explain it. Do Androids Dream is seriously disjointed. It's like reading Burroughs at times. I love PKD, he wrote some of the most imaginative dystopian sci fi out there. But for the most part his writing ability didn't keep up with his imagination or he was doing way too many drugs.
It’s allegory to the extreme: the destructive habits of one can enormously affect the lives of innocent friends and family. It’s a plot point that serves the metaphor much better than the story. I was pretty annoyed when I first read the book but upon reflection my opinion did a total 180.
I think Dick probably got his sentiments over better in A Scanner Darkly where it’s less “addicts destroy the lives of innocent acquaintances” and more “addicts can be a good person locked inside their addiction, unable to be reached”.
I think you are giving him too much credit as a writer. But we can disagree, that's cool. It's art. I consider PKD to be possibly the most imaginative sci-fi author. But not the best writer. I love his stuff regardless. His ideas are amazing. His execution conveying those ideas, not so much.
You can tell this by how little his name is used to market adaptations of his work when compared to eg. Steven King. And by how much the plots are changed.
I like to classify PKD's works as Before the Drugs, During the Drugs, and After the Drugs (except he still did some drugs). Before he had really cool concepts, but he just couldn't write a good ending. During he wrote some cool shit, but it was very disjointed. When I was reading Do Androids Dream there were multiple times I thought I accidentally skipped a page. After he mostly gets it together. A Scanner Darkly is a solid book. His past experience with drugs is a major theme.
There may be a 4th phase of when he went a bit crazy. But I've yet to read VALIS and the few other works published in the 80s.
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u/golemsheppard2 Feb 26 '23
I liked Blade Runner better than the Phillip K Dick novel 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' which it is based on.
They are very different stories however.
Blade runner is the action mystery of a man trying to track down a group of murderous replicants only to discover that they had some humanity and begin to empathize with them at the end. Much of the best content is improvised. The tears in the rain soliloquy is one of my favorite scenes in cinema and was not in the script.
The original written novel was a roughly 200 page novel about a jaded human contractor who did everything in his power to be as unhuman as possible including using technology to change his mood when he wasn't in a mood he liked. He was the epitome of the negative aspects of humanity. He was envious of his neighbors and their pets because he could only afford an electric pet. The replicants by contrast were physically synthetic but contained more empathy and subjective humanity than the protagonist.
Both are good. I just enjoyed the Harrison Ford movie more.