As I mentioned in a previous posting, I've been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick recently, focussing primarily on his early novels. I'm about to finish Dr. Futurity (1960). It's another mind-bending experience from the master, putting a twist on time travel that makes the plot of Twelve Monkeys seem simple-minded.
I've also been reading The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick. I found a nice bit there about the idea of an android thinking it is human, as in Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:
"That's one of of the few original ideas I've ever contributed to science fiction. I mean, most of my ideas are rehash--but that was my original idea, was that a guy could be an android and not know it."
I wonder if Dick's claim to prior art is valid. It'd be nice if there were something like an OED for sci-fi plot ideas. Speaking of which, I had a look at the entry for android in the OED for science fiction. It goes back to at least the fifties.
Comments (2)
I've been diving into PKD again lately too. I picked up "Lies, Inc.", which turns out to have a weird provenance: half of it completed and published in 1964, a follow-up half rejected by the publisher, additional material written shortly before Dick's death and the whole thing spliced together posthumously. And you know what? It's really really bad, and the different pieces don't fit together at all.
Disturbed, I went back to rereading some of my old favorites (Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said), and they were, if possible, better than I remembered them to be.
Posted by Tim Converse | December 8, 2007 6:47 PM
Posted on December 8, 2007 18:47
Check out www.technovelgy.com for the closest thing to a history of SF tropes we're likely to see. If you search by author, you can see that Dick is credited with some 73 inventions/ideas, although "android who thinks it's a human" isn't exactly listed, as far as I could tell (I only browsed through quickly, though).
Posted by Jeff Prucher | December 8, 2007 9:10 PM
Posted on December 8, 2007 21:10