Showing posts with label philip k dick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philip k dick. Show all posts

Thursday, 23 May 2024

Philip K. Dick - "Do Androids Dream Of Electronic Sheep?"

Forgot how really different it was compared with Blade Runner...



    He finished undressing her. Expose her pale, cold loins. 
    "Is is a loss?" Rachel repeated. "I don't really know, I have no way to tell. how does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born, we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are. Not alive." She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, "I'm not alive! You're not going to bed with a woman. Don't be disappointed; okay? Have you ever made love to an android before?"


    "Mercerism isn't finished," Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, the thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere–he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. It grew around him as he stood holding the empty ceramic cup; the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give. 


    Mercer smiled. "It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly's disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you're still here and I'm still here." Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. "I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you."
    "I didn't like that about the whiskey," Isidore said. "That's lowering."
    "That's because you/re a highly moral person. I'm not, I don't judge, not even myself."



    "It didn't get sick. Someone–"Iran cleared her throat and went on huskily–"someone came here, got the goat out of its cage, and dragged it to the edge of the roof."
    "And pushed it off?" he siad.
    "Yes." She nodded.
    "Did you see who did it?"
    "I saw her very clearly," Iran said. "Barbour was still up here fooling around; he came own to get me and we called the police, but by then the animal was dead and she had left. A small young-looking girl with dark hair and large black eyes, very thin. Wearing a long fish-scale coat. She had a mail-pouch purse. And she made no effort to keep us from seeing her. As if she didn't care."
    "No, she didn't care," he said. "Rachel wouldn't give a damn if you saw her; she probably wanted you to, so I'd know who had done it." He kissed her. "You've been waiting up here all this time?"
    "Only for half an hour. That's when it happened, half an hour ago.." Iran, gently, kissed him back. "It's so awful. So needless."

Monday, 2 May 2022

Severance

Wonderful series about a company Lumon that "severs" work and private lives of people in their mind. When you go in, you don't remember your personal life, when you leave, you don't remember work.

Amazing absurdism. Great by role by Christopher Walken.

Story kept entertaining. Quite interesting to see the "innies vs outies", how people basically fight themselves (their outies want them to stay inside).  Good visuals of long maze-like corridors, bright and white, no mirrors, strange dialogues. Computer terminals without the escape key.

Quite a bit of Philip K Dick / Black Mirror feel to it.

Monday, 5 February 2018

Altered Carbon (2018, )

Very Blade Runner-ish series about a world where personalities (on "stacks") can just be loaded into "sleeves", bodies. And of course there's a murder mystery. Based on Philip K. Dick?

Enjoyable, though the sister, killing everybody just for him, became irritating at the end, and not quite believable.

Sunday, 19 February 2017

the Adjustment Bureau

Should have realized this is based on a short Philip K. Dick story (same name). Matt Daemon and Emily Blunt in an enjoyable but not extremely deep scifi flic, where the plan of "the chairman" keeps them apart. Until the plan gets changed. Didn't see that coming.

Monday, 6 June 2016

Philip K. Dick - "The Man in the High Castle"

The Axes have won, the USA is separated in a Nazi occupied part and a Japanese occupied part. People read the "I Ching" to make choices. A forbidden book, "The Grasshopper lies heavy", details an alternate reality where the Axes have lost...

Japanese vs Western thinking. Tao. I Ching.

At the very end the book turns out to be "written by" the I Ching (as Philip K Dick used the I Ching to write this book). Why it was written? Inner truth... because it's the truth.

Nice read, but I wasn't blown away. I think I'm missing the deeper connections here, which is a shame. Maybe I should read more Leonard Cohen poetry, then try again.