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Comment by moloch-hai | Hacker News Reader

A great mystery of the world is how we came to have so many movies based on PKD stories. It is all out of any proportion to anything objectively identifiable about the stories themselves. Why them, and not Heinlein, or Pohl, or Anderson? They are good, but not exactly easy to translate to the screen. Not easier than other good stories.

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.

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Maybe because PKD could actually write? Heinlein, Pohl, and Anderson have interesting ideas but none of them can do character development, emotion, depth, etc. PKD instantly draws you in with fully formed characters in a world you can connect with emotionally.

I agree Heinlein wrote one-dimensional characters; the male heroes were idealised versions of himself and the women were objects of wish-fulfillment.

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.

Le Guin is a great author but I struggle to engage with her characters. Brian Aldiss I think does better? And Vinge? This is sticking to the classic era. The genre has changed and there are too many more recent excellent SF writers of character to do justice to in a post

Maybe a subjective thing then, as I remember enjoying the joint character development of e.g. Ai and Estraven in Left Hand of Darkness.

A few possible explanations:

- 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.

Yes, I agree with the short story part, these are attractive to film makers and for instance I think all of the good Stephen King films are based on his short stories.

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).

Google suggests there's been a few, just not as famous as the ones you mentioned:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Moonbase

* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/

I remember seeing an advert for door into summer, never heard of the others, thanks.

There is a recent (2021) Japanese movie of The Door Into Summer. Other than being set in Japan, it was pretty faithful to the book, as I remember it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/

Indeed, I've always thought there is a veritable bounty of great SciFi stories to put into film. The recent popularity of SciFi shows suggests to me that we will start to see more works transferred to the big (or small) screen, though as always this seems to be a very hit or miss process.

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.

> 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.

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.

They should turn stories from Love, Death, Robots animated anthology into longer episodes. There were some stories that could do with longer treatment or dive more into the universe. With streaming service, they could have variable length, most being hour long with a few making to movie length.

I’m guessing because:

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.

There's nothing _that_ weird in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is there? Long time since I've read it, but I think some sort of polyamory was about as out-there as it got. If they can make a docudrama about FTX (and they will) they can make that :)

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.

I read it within the last couple of years and found the following really weird:

- 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 lean toward giving the author the benefit of the doubt here.

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.

Yes and no. You can sometimes take a decent guess at an author's inner motivations by looking at repeated themes. Heinlein was notoriously fixated on sexuality, and increasingly on child sex and incest as the years went on. MiaHM is apparently one of the tamer reads, though I have basically given up on him after reading three of his novels.

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.

I agree, for some authors it can be hard not guess at their state of mind after reading several of their books.

The hyper competent man trope is fairly ubiquitous, maybe part of what drives this one is pandering to the target audience.

It’s also pretty convenient in a story - the protagonist (if said hyper competent) doesn’t hit roadblocks they can’t overcome eventually, regardless of what they run across.

And who wouldn’t want to be hyper competent in everything?

Yeah, fair, it was very much Of Its Time (and I'd forgotten some of this; haven't read it in a long time...). That sort of thing can be adapted out easily enough, in general, though; most old sci-fi is going to have some of it. Removing the polyamory entirely would be more difficult, but _that_ probably isn't necessary.

Yeah, a lot of sci fi of the era was at best dismissive of women as actual people. But some authors were nevertheless pretty good, like Zelazny or le Guin (of course). Even Frank Herbert - the Gesserit may have been kind of evil but at least they had ambitions and power.

Was there anyone who wasn’t at least mostly evil in Herbert’s work? Haha

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.

Hmmm, arguably the Fremen were not particularly evil. But I take your point.

The Fremen also embraced a certain amount of "ends justify the means" (mostly in the unseen bit between books 1 and 2); it was ultimately Paul's _fault_, but they very much went along with it.

I’d argue an interplanetary Jihad resulting in the deaths of billions of innocents has at least a decent smidge of evil in the prosecuting of it, regardless of who started it.

Good point! Heinlein was not known for being subtle on topics like this.

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.

That, anyway, is not a mystery.

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.

You might want to re-read the Moon is a harsh mistress, then look at what’s going on in large portions of society that aren’t the west coast bubble.

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.

I mean, a bit weird, sure, but, again, they made Handmaid's Tale. And Game of Thrones. And two completely separate drama series about the Borgias! (I gather the HBO one _was_ bowdlerised a bit, but still.) If people can manage those, they can manage a bit of polyamory.

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...)

Uh, I think you’re not getting my point.

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.

> Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories.

Didn't seem to be a problem for A Song of Ice and Fire.

It's only quite recent that something like GOT has been possible.

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.

I think that at least one of the reasons is that the topic of many of his stories/novels is blurring the boundaries between the reality and non-reality (however that is defined in each novel). This is a recurring theme, with neither the reader nor the protagonist(s) being sure about things:

  * 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?

The filmmakers love this concept as it has many parallels with making films - see Inception and Matrix as examples.

Yes, great point. Was watching Blade Runner again recently, and realized this time I sided with the robots, as they mostly just wanted to live.

Same with A Scanner Darkly, the theme being “who am I?”

People have a lot of ideas, but I think there's one that trumps all. PKD was fucking cheap. I don't mean he was a spendthrift, I mean, that his rights were on sale to anyone with a nickel.

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.

A possibly salient fact is that Dick and LeGuin are essentially the two sci-fi authors who attracted academic study. Whatever the initial impetus, those doing literary analysis like to be able to cite and build on previous papers, and so it's easier for everyone else to stick to those two.

A decent Le Guin movie would be nice. There was some sort of Earthsea Syfy series but it was execrably unwatchable.

The 1980 PBS “Lathe of Heaven” was excellent. Apparently Le Guin herself was involved to some extent in the production.

I recall liking the 2002 version as well but my memory of the two versions may be a bit tangled

I think some of it is simply that PKD was prolific, and created a lot of ideas pretty quickly.

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.

They did make a movie out of Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

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.

Starship Troopers is a great movie. It starts as every silly archetypal superhero movie but ends up being much more profound.

I'm thinking a combination of reasons;

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.

VALIS is real, that’s all.

> Why them, and not Heinlein, or Pohl, or Anderson?

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).

Dang!

Can’t unthink this now.

Well . . . Stanislaw Lem had constant harping claims that Dick was a capitalist committee invention.

https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

Obviously just a personal opinion, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a much more compelling story than Solaris (the only Lem I've read). I loved Solaris. It's a beautiful piece of writing. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had me on the edge of my seat in anticipation. I'm not surprised that Blade Runner makes a more compelling movie than Solaris's film adaptation.

It could hardly be considered unprecedented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

It was the other way around. Dick had constant harping claims that Lem was a communist committee invention as it says in the article that you linked.

Furthermore, from the same article:

> 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.

Accusing someone of really being a secret committe that puts out work under the name of one person, as the way to explain their high quality and quantity is more of of a compliment than an attack.

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