If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others (1977) [pdf]
ia903105.us.archive.org
ia903105.us.archive.org
The cherry on top is the denouement, where he asks us: are you sure your world is the "real" one?
I think this formula just really matches the pace and scope of a feature-length movie. Note that TV series based on his books have not been as numerous or successful. The best of the bunch may be "Man In The High Tower", but it massively diverges from the book not too far in.
Also, he was a f*king genius at predicting future memes.
One can go high in the branches, accumulating very high propabilitys of catastrophic failures - like for example handing out nukes to every government on the planet. One can invest all into root hardening, such for example, recording a self explaining encyclopedia on a timeless media. (Youtubes primitve technology comes to mind).
Capabilitys worth is the sume of the abilitys and the disabilitys to get to them from the now. Some are worthier then others, some just postpone problems and accumulate dangers, making the high branches of the future, dangerous traps.
Luck, wishfull thinking and make-believe hope, is no solid basis for planning the future of a species. Even worser, but longterm better, shortterm suffering for longterm gains is worth alot of short term suffering. Calculated morals from traversing such a scenario tree (drasil) and the decisions based upon it can seem very strange to our eyes.
PS: One also has to admire, how remarkably "exploration" has shifted from "high risk" ventures towards "stability" aka root hardening in recent history. Resource cheap entertainement and self surveilance are keys to a stability even during environment deterioration and crisis. Nextflix, cellphone selfies and chill in the refugee camp, instead of terrorism. Whoever is lately pushing those decisions, clearly is aware of that.
haven’t seen the movie, but on the book he mentions this.
One might imagine that if our past were altered such that a light switch were in a different spot, then our past experiences of flipping the switch on every morning would also have been altered, so we would not have any reflexive habit to reach for the wrong place. It seems that PKD is imagining some kind of great process of moving minds between parallel streams of the world, instead of imagining the world shifting underneath those minds.
This reminds me of the "parking ramp dinosaur" in Anathem.
Ah yes, Douglas swinging that Mandella Effect broadsword before it was ever forged. How appropriate!
I think we could be collectively better if we had time to build both vast knowledge and wisdom and use it before dying of old age.
We don't remember much from the past because we were not alive, we don't read much about it, the available knowledge is extremely sparse and biased.
I only recently understood the scale of the generational knowledge loss.
We tend to intuitively associate longevity with old age and all of its quirkiness and frailty, but if we solved ageing, being old would not be a thing anymore.
Only species to care for our environment. Living in equilibrium with your environment isn't the same as caring about it. You can bet that if burning down the forest got you chicks as a leapord, we'd have run out of forests a long time ago. Meanwhile, we reflect on what we've done, and make our future decisions based on that reflection.
These things are "as a species", and not about individuals or political allegances in America.
I'm really tired of this hip-to-be-cynical attitude that dumps all over our species, and overlooks how amazing we are. Ironically though that's one of our redeeming character traits too.
It may bother you or make you feel uneasy or make you not want to believe it, but humans bring an immense amount of suffering into this world.
> Only species to care for our environment. Living in equilibrium with your environment isn't the same as caring about it.
For example, this is so strange. So the only way to care for the environment is to first destroy it and then try to fix it?
Is it really correct to regard humans as running the world and responsible for it, or are humans just a mechanism for making more cows?
Won't respond to the "outright" false since you say nothing further, but in response to "we created those in the first place":
That doesn't negate my message, and in fact I addressed that very point indirectly already when I said we reflect on our mistakes. No other species looks at the mess they cause and thinks "maybe we should stop doing this".
> It may bother you or make you feel uneasy or make you not want to believe it, but humans bring an immense amount of suffering into this world.
I've come from a place of misanthrope, so it absolutely does not bother me to believe it. In fact, I believed it nearly all my life. What does bother me though, is how little thought is given to the other side of the story, and the whole picture. We do bad things, but we are a net gain in terms of "goodness", whatever your definition of that word is.
I'll go further; we are the only species to do good things, because we have freedom of choice. A dolphin doesn't sit around thinking on the moral implications of killing a shark for fun, or saving a drowning human.
> For example, this is so strange. So the only way to care for the environment is to first destroy it and then try to fix it?
Of course it isn't, and many people around the world such as native Americans don't do that.
Where we _do_ do that however, we are the only ones to think about it afterwards and try to do better.
It's so easy to be pessimistic, isn't it? To write off the whole of humanity as "bad", because that's easier than saying; "shit's hard to get right, but we're trying, and I'm part of that attempt".
That needs some backing up, as I highly doubt it's true for any definition of goodness.
> It's so easy to be pessimistic, isn't it?
It isn't about pessimism or misanthropy, which are largely irrelevant to this discussion. Realizing one is a narcissist or an alcoholic or an addict isn't pessimism. It's realization and acceptance of both the reality of the situation and that something needs to change.
What humanity needs is realization and acceptance of our destructiveness and not apathy or denial.
The rest of your post is unfortunately hopelessly human-centric. We have no basis or evidence of the feelings or thoughts of other animals. This, any such claims are anthropocentric speculations.
> That needs some backing up, as I highly doubt it's true for any definition of goodness.
Come on man, be reasonable. Sure, I could come up with a definition that wouldn't fit, like "goodness == dinosaurs", but are we really going there? Let's pin it down to something we can probably both agree on:
Goodness = That which is mostly of benefit to most animals.
Now you can say I'm "animal-centric", but so what? I'm not into post-modernist nonsense, and we can argue on why I'm calling it nonsense too.
> It isn't about pessimism or misanthropy, which are largely irrelevant to this discussion. Realizing one is a narcissist or an alcoholic or an addict isn't pessimism. It's realization and acceptance of both the reality of the situation and that something needs to change.
We mostly agree; absolutely, acceptance of reality and the will (and action!) to change is what's important. What I don't agree on though, is shitting on humans and saying we don't do that because you can find some examples of _instances of human_ which don't do that. Zooming out to the bigger picture shows that we do. Even if you found only a single instance in the 8 billion instances, it would still mean humans have at least the capacity.
> The rest of your post is unfortunately hopelessly human-centric. We have no basis or evidence of the feelings or thoughts of other animals.
It's human centric in terms of it being from the perspective of a human, but not in terms of what I'm willing to look at. Even if we "have no basis or evidence of the feelings or thoughts of other animals" (which we do^), we _try_ to. Humans try to understand what impact they're having on other animals. Animals other than humans don't.
^ Google search for "animal feeling studies" https://www.google.com/search?q=animal%20feeling%20studies
Homo sapiens are far from the only species that deliberately co-exist with others ("caring").
We humans like to put ourselves on a pedestal, that we're a special species. As far as I'm concerned: No, we're not special. We're animals just like our animal peers, and we're just another species to exist upon this planet. Humans might be (and are) amazing, but that's because life in general is amazing.
The negativity of the other comments to your post is simple astonishing. I can understand that you are sick of that.
We have the capacity for amazing things! Now let's all do the best we can to steer mostly in that direction :)
It suggests some sort of cabal wanting them produced, and moving in the shadows to make it happen. Of course this is very much in line with the stories themselves, but that doesn't help at all.
Personally, I'd love to see e.g. The Culture novels be made into a show, or series of films. There was talk of making a Consider Phlebas TV show some time back, though I don't think it went anywhere. Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" could also do well as a stand alone movie, though possibly with Heinlein you would need to tone down the polygamy themes.
As to why PKD became such a cinematic mainstay I can't quite tell. I would think part of it would be to do with the fact that many of his stories were less about the "lasers and spaceships" part of SciFi, and more about the moral and human aspect, meaning costs could be saved on big budget set pieces ala Star Wars.
Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories.
Culture is too difficult to convey in a movie. The relationship of the AIs to the humans in particular is too subtle to come across well, and it’s too easy to make it into a giant party with occasional inexplicable violence.
Didn't seem to be a problem for A Song of Ice and Fire.
And GOT is pretty tame, sexually, compared to what Heinlein stories got up to.
Incest is a little spicy, but those are the villans so it's a bit more accepted, and the rest of GOT is mostly just a flash of tit or dick now and then, right? More titilating than conceptually boundary pushing.
Heinlein had, off the top of my head: a main character forgiving and falling in love with her rapist, mother/son incest including protagonist, big ol' family incest (more complicated and varied than I can remember the details of) including "the good guys", a transexual protagonist (including many, many sexual descriptions), many varieties of open relationships, more forms of group marriage than I've ever heard anywhere else, and a sex cult (started by the protagonist).
Most of those you could probably leave out of whatever story without too much trouble, but they're not exactly small parts of their respective stories either.
Still, I'd think someone could make a really good movie/show out of at least: Friday, Double Star, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, probably a few others.
Even some of the others... I mean, they made the Handmaid's Tale, and that's way more distressing than most of Heinlein's Weird Sex Stuff.
Matriarchal, multi generational polyamory is going to be a bit weird for half+ of society, and it’s not easy to remove that without completely rewriting almost the entire book and it’s characters.
Like, it might not be for everyone, but there have been many commercially successful TV dramas with more disturbing sexual content than Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (Now, some of his other stuff...)
GoT style sexuality (including incest in royal families, widespread prostitution, etc.) used to be pretty normal. As in, literally up until a century ago.
A handmaid’s tale (minus the massive infertility issues) is basically harem/sex slaves, which is still going on right now, and has been for most of human history near as I can tell.
The writers know how to push buttons to make that titillating and ‘tehee oh my’ type controversial, which gets eyeballs, without bringing a banhammer down on themselves.
Most heinlein (with moon as a harsh mistress being one of the mellowest!) is more in the alienates-too-many-mainstream-groups category. The large polygamy groups led today are all patriarchal, and would start lashing out at anything matriarchal. Matriarchal groups right now are pretty solidly anti-polygamy, etc.
Star ship troopers might be in the wings for a remake though, with the authoritarian bent society seems to be taking lately, but I doubt the ‘free sex’ angle would play well with the ‘rah rah fascism’ angle. Those two groups currently aren’t as well aligned. And near as I can tell, it would be even harder for people to understand satire than last time, so good luck with that angle.
And no one knows how to turn it into clicks/butts in seats reliably.
So it doesn’t get the kind of attention from writers/producers/money folks. That’s all it is.
PKD has a niche that does reliably put butts in seats, and doesn’t have the same baggage, so it does.
- Objectification and sexualisation of very young women. The main character's marriage-group has a wife who is around 14 or 15. When she dies, there is this disturbing quotation "an explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts." There's a quotation elsewhere that says "She was possibly twelve, at stage when a fem shoots up just before blossoming out into rounded softness."
- Men are portrayed as desperate, lonely, and possessive, and are only prevented from brutalising women by the threat of violence from other men who are just as possessive. There is a bizarre social ritual in which men show their "appreciation" to sexually attractive women by looking them up and down and doing a lot of whistling.
- Women are portrayed as dumb, petty and manipulative. They are often eager to abuse their sexual power over men. The only part that women play in the initial revolution is to parade seductively in front of Authority guards in order to distract them.
- Alienation of homosexuality. It describes men as "turning to other men" if times are bad, but does not countenancne the idea that some men are genuinely (perhaps only) attracted to other men.7
I'm not sure if the actual content is as weird as GoT, but here's the kicker. In GoT I got an impression of "here is a women being objectified, isn't it awful". In MiaHM I got an impression of "here is a women being objectified, isn't it wonderful and totally natural".
I can’t figure out if he seemed to be a sex crazed maniac because he had a lot of sex and drugs, or a sex crazed maniac because he never got laid. Probably the latter. A lot of the other attitudes follow…
One of life’s little mysteries.
Heinlein had a medical condition that progressively blocked blood flow in his brain. He increasingly needed themes that would increase his blood pressure to be able to write at all. He finally got surgery.
Even the Atreides were full on ‘the ends justify the means’, if they did nominally have ‘the good of mankind’ as the goal. Those are the most terrible dictators though.
In the context of the societies being portrayed by the books, these behaviours may be normalized. The same goes for within the context of the personality of particular characters.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the author agrees with them. Personally I'd prefer that authors in general be free to write fiction without having their creativity diminished by worrying about whether a reader is going to think that the author holds the same view.
Another classic trope of his is the "hyper-competent" man, who is incredibly self-assured, is smarter and can do everything better than the average person. Hard to say exactly what drives this, but my guess is it's either a superiority (I'm better than these fools) or inferiority (I wish I was better than these people) complex.
The hyper competent man trope is fairly ubiquitous, maybe part of what drives this one is pandering to the target audience.
And who wouldn’t want to be hyper competent in everything?
I have always felt that they always seem to skirt the edges of plausibility much more than other sci-fi. But I think you are right, the “tech” takes a backseat to the personal story.
https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
> Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF.
There are other huge authors in sci fi but I feel like a great many of them stuck to a single universe or at least thematically kind of stuck around in similar areas, whereas PKD created just a truly insane amount of ideas.
Even Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is almost like 3 sci fi novels in one and its not even that long.
But the director, Paul Verhoeven, lived through WWII and found the militaristic ethos so abhorrent that he threw out most of the story and made a comical parody of the book.
I've always thought that Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" would make a great movie (sort of like a twist on Groundhog Day, but more relevant for the intrusive ad-filled times we live in).
A) filmability - Gateway would be fantastic, but expensive to film. Counter-point would be "the Space Merchants", which would be "cheap" to film (but perhaps not please the sponsors.)
B) risk. PKD stories have a proven track record. A E van Vogt not so much (as far as I know). (although Weapon Shops would be great, albeit political bait.)
On the other hand its now becoming possible to film some of these stories in a non-cheesy way (think Dune) so I expect we'll see more of them.
* DADoES / Blade Runner: Who is an android/replicant and who is a human?
* WCRIfYW / Total Recall: Which memories are real and which are implanted?
* Ubik: Who is dead and who is alive?
Same with A Scanner Darkly, the theme being “who am I?”
Pohl wrote pretty well in my opinion. The psycho-therapeutic aspect of Gateway is brilliant for the sci fi of that era.
Plenty of sci fi authors wrote characters comparably with PKD, such as Zelazny, Le Guin, and Bester.
- PKD wrote tonnes of short stories. Four big volumes worth, I believe. Short stories are great for movies because they present a central idea but give the director lots of freedom.
- His stories frequently involved several tropes that work well in movies: drugs, massive corporate entities, multiple realities, and the everyman hero.
- Other sci fi authors had a tendency to be preachy (Heinlein), or too progressive for the time (le Guin). PKD wrote in an unassuming and non-judgemental way. His characters might have had regressive opinions, but he never seemed to push what he thought was best for society.
I always though Man who fell to earth (Bowie) was an (unofficial?) version of Stranger in a strange land, I can't think of any other Heinlein films apart from Starship Troopers (which is a pretty short story and nothing like the book).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film)
His net worth when he died was roughly half a million in today's money. He lived pretty broke for most of his life. He always needed cash.
Read Valis, it's semi-autobiographical. Or at the very least, it's self-reflective. The main character is a version of himself. It's a very interesting read because you do get a sense of not only the man himself, but what he thought of himself.
And after he died, his children essentially turned his intellectual property into a business.
Can’t unthink this now.