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Comment by bookofjoe | Hacker News Reader

>... terrible at titles...

I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future:

Time Out of Joint

The Man in the High Castle

Martian Time-Slip

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Clans of the Alphane Moon

The Simulacra

Now Wait for Last Year

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982)

Ubik

We Can Build You

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

A Scanner Darkly

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Radio Free Albemuth

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Minor point, but in most cases the title was made up by the editor, not Dick.

For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had several terrible tentative titles originally, including "The Electric Toad", "Do Androids Dream?", "The Electric Sheep", and, most improbably, "The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man".

Dick's editor at Doubleday came up with the current title. Dick didn't like it and thought it was too long and unwieldy.

Some more:

* The Divine Invasion: "VALIS Regained"

* The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: "Bishop Timothy Archer

* Ubik: "Death of an Anti-Watcher"

* Martian Time-Slip: "Goodmember Arnie Kott of Mars" (also serialized as "All We Marsmen" before getting its current title)

* We Can Build You: "The First in Your Family"

* A Maze of Death: "The Hour of the TENCH"

* Counterclock World: "The Dead Grow Young"

My main source here is Lawrence Sutin's excellent "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick".

All those titles are unwieldy.

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Shakespeare

It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.

That was similar to my experience too. I discovered "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in a pop-science magazine article about science fiction novels in the nineties, along with Foundation. Both titles resonated with me and ignited my imagination. Years later, I was finally able to read both and was amazed.

I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here.

Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.

In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.

I think Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a great title.

It sets up the narrative style and loads the gun for a incoming tragedy.

Isn't the point of a title to get someone to read the book (and not be disappointed by it's contents)?

I get you don't want to name a crime novel like a self help book but the title of the book is really just going to get me to pick it up off the shelf and read the back, not assume the narrative style and complete plot of the book.

Book titles are click bait and always have been.

>Isn't the point of a title to get someone to read the book (and not be disappointed by it's contents)?

For marketing departments maybe. For authors it's supposed to be a fitting name for their novel.

Authors want to sell books too. They'd, by and large, rather the title that sells more books as long as it's not totally off the mark.

A title doesn’t have to do anything other than draw the reader’s attention to the work. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is, IMO a great title — and it does relate to the humanity of the androids.

It’s a far superior title compared to “Blade Runner,” which is actually better than the book.

Anyway, I’d say that the fact we’re still talking about his work nearly 50 years after his death suggests he might not have sucked at titles…

I agree that the book title is great, but I've never understood the fawning over the movie. The art design is great, but the movie script turned a contemplative story into a generic thriller with a unique aesthetic.

Hardly generic- it is somewhat generic after what has come since, as there has been so much cheap copying of the original.

Yes, a definite instance of the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" Effect.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

In Blade Runner's case, the art design is superb. As I mentioned in my parent comment, that's not what I referred to as generic. The script though is what is generic and ham-fisted compared to the novel. It's also not a case of that meme, as I was comparing to the novel, and to earlier films which it is derivative of while taking just the skeleton of the plot from the novel.

The art design, which is the most influential aspect of the movie, is superb, but compared to the novel, the movie's script is that of a generic thriller.

That aesthetic had me riveted to the screen from the first minute to the last.

Its mostly hailed as a great artsy movie, that general audiences find super boring. I think its asethetic & art design is what its hailed for. Nobody hails bladerunner for its pacing.

Its hard to be good at everything. Being really good at one aspect is enough to get people to fawn.

I disagree on the contemplative bit. I think both are quite contemplative but in very different ways.

>Its mostly hailed as a great artsy movie, that general audiences find super boring

You make it sound like some obscure arthouse. It's one of the most influence movies of all time, art design and worldbuilding wise.

It just didn't catch on at the box office in its time. Way more serious and slower paced movies have been big hits, so it's not being "artsy" that's the problem.

Sci-fi wasn't much of a win with adults at the time, and unlike Star Wars this was an adult oriented movie.

>Nobody hails bladerunner for its pacing.

You'd be surpised.

Blade Runner passed the test of not making my children pick up the phone while watching it.

Very few movies do that.

We should make an hn movie list like that. Movies our kids watched to the end....

I can't speak to what audiences find boring now -- I know that I watched it as a kid when my attention span was not at its peak, and I found the pacing to be just fine. (I did see the much-panned version with the narration first.)

I've re-watched it quite a few times and find new things to enjoy each time. The aesthetic is hugely influential, but it also has a fantastic cast and superb acting. The soundtrack is also perfect.

The love story between Deckard and Rachel is ham-fisted, I will grant that, and if I were giving notes I'd say we need to see more of the backstory for the replicants. But IMO it succeeds far better than the book.

> There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.

How about when people dream about what they were thinking about when they fell asleep? It happens.

In the context of the story, i think "dream" should be taken as "yearn for" i.e. something you dream of having one day, not so much what you dream of at night.

Those meanings are connected. I think it was a reference to counting sheep but it describes yearning as far as connecting the title to the plot.

Also, upon further reflection I don't really agree with what the other commenter said: "There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream". If you try to and manage to think in a way that causes you to become less alert, it starts to be like daydreaming, so I think this sort of falling asleep thinking is under the umbrella of dreaming.

> Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep!

Sure but its meaningful in the context of the story. The main character does literally dream of an electric sheep (in the book this is a metaphor being able to love, and by extension be human)

I don't think title metaphors have to be standalone. Very few books are like that. Its like criticizing Hamlet because if you don't read the play you have no idea who hamlet is.

> In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.

That's the theme of the movie not the book.

maybe because English is my third language, but i always loathed the scanner darkly title. so empty and try-hard.

It’s a reference to a biblical passage.

1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then we shall see face to face".

There wasn’t any clear glass back in Paul’s day. Looking through glass meant that your vision was obscured.

It's the "scanner" that I had a problem with. A device to turn printed media into PDFs... but darkly?

The scanner is the surveillance state watching your day to day life.

In case you were curious, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

1) A mechanical right hand

2) Artificial steel teeth

3) Electronic, glowing eyes

The Android Sisters answer the question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP8bOqTAco0

Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.

Arguably according to whom?

The parent. Look up the definition of arguably.

Sure, if you are reading the word "arguably" completely literally, but that's not the colloquially understood implication of the term when used to describe a work. Obviously the author of the parent comment is implying they they would possibly consider it the best PKD novel, but the colloquial meaning implied when someone uses the word arguably, generally isn't just to describe one's own opinion, but a significant portion of the popular or critical consensus.

One person could take a position opposed to the general held consensus on any topic, but if one person is the only one to hold this opinion, in english, it would generally not be described as a position that is "arguably" the case, even though if you read the word literally, one person is technically arguing it.

Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter, not your dismissive comment which isn't contributing anything. I've read the VALIS trilogy, but I've never heard any of VALIS trilogy novels described as possibly PKD's best work.

> Also, I asked because I wanted to get the above user's opinion on the matter

And you could've done just that without being passive-aggressively dismissive.

That's interpreting a lot from just four words. Opinion probably wasn't the best word for what I was referring to, but more-so their reference point for claiming that it is arguably his best work. My comment may seem dismissive to someone who hasn't read PKD, but VALIS is generally never considered a contender for his best work. To suggest that it is seems absurd which is why I responded as I did.

I am torn on whether I used the word arguably correctly in my original comment. When I first posted it, I thought I could find many sources that had argued it was PKD's best work.

Upon trying to find those sources I could only find Terence Mckenna's article on it, in which he doesn't exactly argue that it is PKD's best work https://sirbacon.org/dick.htm

Perhaps I now believe that those who read the book and "got it" would argue that it's his best book and perhaps even the best title.

But part of me wondered just now if those sources were out there and now I cannot find them.

According to you, as you have chosen to argue about it.

Not sure about the critical consensus, but VALIS is by far my favorite Dick's book. I read almost all of his works and love very many short stories and novels, however VALIS is in a class of its own in science fiction IMO.

The title is also brilliant: mysterious and vague until you learn what is stands for. What's not to like?

Thanks for reminding me of this. Just ordered it, long time since I originally read it.

"Blade Runner" was taken from a 1974 Alan E. Nourse novel called "The Bladerunner"; the name's relation to PKD is tangential at best.

The name was taken from Nourse but via ER Burroughs’ script/book. The name was bought actually. But the plot, that came from PK Dick’s novel.

There's also a 1979 science fiction novella by William S. Burroughs titled Blade Runner (a movie)

I grew up in the USSR and then Russia, so I was exposed to Stanislaw Lem's books and I loved them.

Much later, I tried reading Ubik and I just couldn't get into it. What's the point of the story? It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs. Yeah, it's absurdist but somehow far less fun than the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Another thing that really grated on my nerves, is that women are barely more than cardboard cutouts in his stories.

He wrote Transmigration of Timothy Archer because Ursula LeGuin took him to task about this

If you have any links or book recommendations to share on that history, I for one would love to know them.

I find the history of the interactions of SF authors strangely compelling -- e.g. the book "Hell's Cartographers" is a personal favourite, and it's just a set of autobiographical essays from NY 40s-70s SF authors talking about their time in the scene.

https://blog.loa.org/2010/12/what-philip-k-dick-learned-abou...

>women are barely more than cardboard cutouts in his stories

Same as Lem. Reading Return from the Stars was physically panful.

> It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs.

That is broadly true with respect to PKD. Wait until you see VALIS...

They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?

> Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?

... or even some parts of the plot ...

It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.

I'm a big fan of PKD and also Blade Runner. You've got a point about the film being so very different, but I think it's subsequent success (it wasn't that successful at the time) justifies the approach to the subject matter.

However I do wish that Mercerism (the religion in the book) was included in the film. Maybe someone should attempt to film a more literal adaptation.

Edit: thinking about the difference between the novel and the film makes me think of The Shining and I'm very much in the Kubrick camp - the film being a work of art by itself and so doesn't have to follow the source material.

However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.

I'd rather have the obsession everyone has for the few remaining animals on earth, and the race to own at least a replica. Electric sheep are just a background detail in the movie, while they're as central as hunting the replicants in the book...

I'd also like the scene where Deckard runs into another blade runner agency, further complicating the question if he's a replicant or not :)

Yeah, the film could have had more content about the real/artificial animals though it did feature a bit with the snake scales and the owl.

Also agree about meeting the other agency though I can imagine that would have complicated the plot a bit (disclaimer - I haven't read Androids for many years and can't remember the details of that scene).

I just think that Mercerism was a superb concept - a participatory religion. I suppose it wouldn't have really driven the story forwards in the film whereas almost every scene in the film was doing that.

Incidentally, here's PKD's short story about Mercerism: https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd092-0.html

> can't remember the details of that scene

Deckard gets arrested by a different police agency - they think they're the only ones, just like Deckard's agency. He gets accused of being an android with implanted memories.

They administer Voigt-Kampf tests to each other and while everyone ends up as human, the scene serves to make who's human and who isn't even more of a question.

What really ticks me off about all movies made from Dick's writings is that they cut off most of the ambiguity.

I shudder to think what they'd make of Ubik or A Maze of Death...

I'd love them to get around to attempting Ubik - it's a shame that Gondry abandoned his attempt.

In terms of ambiguity, surely Blade Runner is a prime example of ambiguity and the dichotomies between real/fake, light/dark, salvation/damnation, hunter/hunter etc. There's also the very significant portrayal of Roy Batty as both the villain and a Christ-like figure (e.g. nail in his hand, confronting his maker and both kissing and killing him).

Yeah, I wonder if whoever wrote the script confused Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with Divine Invasion and added Christian motives from there :)

It really really ticks me off too, because it makes multiple watchings much more interesting, and the writing has much more depth.

I don't think the human relationship stuff including the animal obsession really fits in the noir movie that Blade Runner ended up being (and hard to say that the decision to turn it into a noir thriller was a bad one considering how influential it's been). I do agree that keeping the other agency and their paranoid testing of each other would have been entirely in keeping with how the film worked out though. But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...

> But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...

If i recall correctly the way the chapter was written left me doubting everything that went on in it.

That may have been too hard to translate in movie form.

Or maybe I should reread the book... it's been a while.

Those aspects of the book are awesome but I think they run against the themes Ridley Scott was going for. Ridley Scott wanted Deckard to be an android. It's hard to interpret the unicorn scenes otherwise. The androids are shown as cruel due to their lives as slaves, but with human-like longings for life and meaning (like in Roy Baty's final speech about tears in rain). The overall point is to blur the boundary and say the androids can be meaningfully human.

Whereas Mercerism and the animal stuff in the book are all about emphasizing the ways humans are different from the androids. The androids mock Mercerism and they don't care about animals: they are incapable of empathy. They torture people and animals without compunction. The alternate police station scene, where Deckard is tested using a bone marrow test instead of Voigt-Kampff and comes out human, is evidence that he's not an android.

The book is, in my view, one of the few pieces of sci fi media that seriously raises the question "could these apparently human-like machines really be human just like us?" and answers a resounding "no". The androids are psychopaths who are unable to partake of the human experience. Ultimately PKD is concluding that they are meaningfully not human---and, furthermore, some biological homo sapiens who act like them might actually be androids, a theme you can find elsewhere in his essays [1]. To the extent that Deckard's humanity is called into question it's not whether he is physically an android, but if he is psychologically a psychopath because of his job killing androids.

[1] https://sporastudios.org/mark/courses/articles/Dick_the_andr...

> However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.

Oh I missed this. Personally I think the best PKD "adaptation" is this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/

Possibly because it wasn't an actual adaptation but low ish budget original work, with less of the constraints that a high budget brings.

FWIW the Adventure game adaptation, is -really- interesting from everything I've seen on Youtube, especially because it's apparently randomized in various ways on each play-through...

Irony: the original bladerunner novel was about a courier carrying surgical instruments so that the doctor would not be arrested for black market medical treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bladerunner

FWIW I was a Galactic Pot-Healer fan.

I did not know that. And running scalpels makes a lot more sense for that title. Because as cool as the title sounds, it doesn't make any sense for the movie. Nobody is running blades there.

Cops aren't made of copper either (nor do they belong to the Sus domesticus species), but still...

And people don't eat Cheez-Its when they spot cops, either!

> Cops aren't made of copper

No, but their badges are. Or were. I guess it's a pars pro toto thing.

Thanks for the reminder that I still have more PKD to read.

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