The plot might ostensibly follow the attempts of bounty hunter Rick Deckard to track down and "retire" life-like androids who escaped from their human owners on Mars and have returned to an Earth ravaged by World War Terminus. In fact, this is a thrillingly human work. However, it's doing Dick a disservice to cast the novel as merely the prophetic outpourings of a writer obsessed with ideas. It's difficult not to compare them to the internet: always on, always accessible, never quite real. The very first pages introduce "mood-organs", dialled up to suppress or stimulate feelings among a needy population. Hovercars may be a while off, but video calls and genetic modifications are firmly in the here and now. Indeed, barely a year goes by without the arrival of some technological advance that makes the future dreamed up by Dick in 1968 seem closer. T his novel is the source text for Ridley Scott's dystopian masterpiece Blade Runner, and it's to Philip K Dick's considerable credit that neither book nor film seem dated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |