Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Also known as Blade Runner this is the novel by Phillip K Dick that I just finished reading.
Good stuff. Compulsively bizarre and I must say, that this is the farthest from the original book that I have ever seen a movie diverge, and that includes Starship Troopers.
Amazingly weird yet at the same time readable. Dick doesn't descend, as do some, into writing a story that makes no sense in order to prove a point. There is actually a plot, absurd as it may be.
I say absurd in the existential sense of the word, pointing to the futility of everything we do in the face of the greater cosmic forces. I think the quest of the novel's hero, to destroy rogue androids in order to buy a real animal, is a fine example of this. The androids aren't hurting anyone on earth, though they did kill people to get there, and the animal will only die eventually anyway. What is the point of doing this? From an existential point of view, doing something is in itself its own purpose and reward. Of course this novel is blithely anti-existentialist at the same time, because the protagonist, who as a human possesses a fair degree of empathy (the novel's theme being what makes us human is our empathy for other sentient things) does not feel very rewarded at the end. In a bizarre way its kind of realistic in the end despite the fact that events would probably never realistically unfold as described. Whew.
Not sure how much I can take from this for what I'm working on now, at least not from the perspective of craft, though I do seek to emulate wit be it from Dick, Ellison or whoever. Still I feel enriched having read it.
Just began reading Heinlein's novel Friday. Good stuff. Heinlein is like unto a god.
Good stuff. Compulsively bizarre and I must say, that this is the farthest from the original book that I have ever seen a movie diverge, and that includes Starship Troopers.
Amazingly weird yet at the same time readable. Dick doesn't descend, as do some, into writing a story that makes no sense in order to prove a point. There is actually a plot, absurd as it may be.
I say absurd in the existential sense of the word, pointing to the futility of everything we do in the face of the greater cosmic forces. I think the quest of the novel's hero, to destroy rogue androids in order to buy a real animal, is a fine example of this. The androids aren't hurting anyone on earth, though they did kill people to get there, and the animal will only die eventually anyway. What is the point of doing this? From an existential point of view, doing something is in itself its own purpose and reward. Of course this novel is blithely anti-existentialist at the same time, because the protagonist, who as a human possesses a fair degree of empathy (the novel's theme being what makes us human is our empathy for other sentient things) does not feel very rewarded at the end. In a bizarre way its kind of realistic in the end despite the fact that events would probably never realistically unfold as described. Whew.
Not sure how much I can take from this for what I'm working on now, at least not from the perspective of craft, though I do seek to emulate wit be it from Dick, Ellison or whoever. Still I feel enriched having read it.
Just began reading Heinlein's novel Friday. Good stuff. Heinlein is like unto a god.