2 posts tagged “philip k. dick”
Recently, I saw the movie A Scanner Darkly on DVD, and I was pleased to see that a film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story kept the original story and tone, and didn't just build an action movie around his plot ideas (see Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck et al). It made me remember that, back in my teens and twenties, Dick was an important author to me, as a pop culture author who played with philosophical ideas about the relationship between fantasy and reality, especially in an age when technology could alter the way your brain experienced the outside world. Dick wrung more changes out of the idea of virtual reality long before the concept was a familiar concept.
It occured to me that I hadn't read any Dick in a long, long time. Back in the 1980's, I had read the most famous and celebrated Dick books, and had moved into the second tier, where you never knew if a book was going to be a masterpiece, a dud, or (most often) something with good ideas that didn't work overall. I decided to try a book that I had missed in my earlier years.
Dr. Bloodmoney, written in 1966, turns out to be an after-the-bomb book. Dick paints a near-future portrait of life in San Francisco and Marin County, then drops the bombs and follows a large cast as they struggle through the early post-bomb days, and the years of building makeshift substitutes for civilization. Characters include Hoppy, a limbless handyman with robotic prostheses, whose affability hides a chilling megalomania; Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut stranded in a satellite who becomes the friendly radio host the earth comes to depend on; and Dr. Bluthgeld, the nuclear scientist whose guilt drives him completely, but secretly, insane. The portrait of a large cast of more or less decent people muddling through a hideous historical period reminds me of one of Dick's most famous books, The Man in the High Castle. Despite some harrowing descriptions, this may be the most hopeful after-the-bomb story I know; Dick believes that not even a nuclear holocaust can destroy the human connections .that civilization depends on, and can use to rebuild.
I was in a hospital, standing in front of an elevator, after dropping my wife off for some day surgery. The elevator opened, and out came a robot. First time that ever happened to me.
The robot, a boxy looking thing with a tiny screen where its "face" would be, slowly rolled out and moved smoothly to its right. It disappeared down the corridor, swerving to avoid a gurney. The staff seemed to regard it as no big deal, so I figured it was a medical robot, rather than something trying to kill all humans.
What I saw was a Pyxis Helpmate, a courier robot that can carry drugs, supplies, meals and stuff to different parts of the hospital. Apparently, staffing a hospital is so expensive that it's worth buying a big, expensive robot to carry things around. Even more impressive is da Vinci Surgical system, helping surgeons do minimally invasive surgeries. We are, in fact, living in the future times I read about in the science fiction novels of my youth, even if we don't pass anthropomorphic Asimovian androids going about their chores as we walk down the street.
So I've been thinking about robots, and here's a few links about them. Robots-Dreams.com is a robotics blog with some cool pictures and videos. Check out these fighting robots or this one doing traditional Japanese dancing.
The Philip K. Dick android was a very cool project, until its head got lost. Dick, of course, is the science fiction writer whose greatest contribution to robot fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), is one of four novels in the Library of America's PKD edition.
Pixar is working on a mysterious project called Wall-E - all that's known is that it seems to involve a robot, and is directed by Finding Nemo's Andrew Stanton. I assume we'll see a trailer for it with next summer's Ratatouille.
UPDATE: Here's a video of a Rubik's cube-solving robot, via Metafilter:
Also: Robot Jokes from McSweeney's.
