Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was very good at channeling his mental issues and insecurities into brilliant plots. I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person. Paranoia seems to be a surprisingly effective muse.
>I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person
I can't even see how most of them would've existed to be honest. Most of P.K. Dick's work is about his mental issues in particular in combination with the psychedelic culture he was surrounded by. Always loved the attribution in A Scanner Darkly:
Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.
In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.
Most of the above are his titles. Some which were published in serialized form before being published in a single volume (Martian Time-Slip and We Can Build You) had different titles. Letters, manuscripts, and publication notes are helpful to shed some light on this matter; e.g. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was regularly referred to as the "Archer novel" or "Bishop Timothy Archer".
I think my definition of "most" (11 of 14) and your definition of "most" (4 of 14) differs here...which is fine. We live in the "days of Perky Pat" anyway.
In total, I count 14 books with titles chosen by the publisher/editor:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dr. Bloodmoney
The Simulacrum
Ubik
We Can Build You
Martian Time-Slip
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
The Divine Invasion
A Maze of Death
Counterclock World
Radio Free Albemuth
Solar Lottery
The Zap Gun [1]
The World Jones Made
Among his notable works, the only titles PKD came up with were The Man in the High Castle, VALIS, Flow My Tears, Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly.
So. Yes, most.
Editors changed his shorts, too. I love the title "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", but PKD wanted to call it "Frozen Journey".
[1] This one was unusual in that the editor gave PKD the title and asked him to write a plot around it.
I'm just pointing out that my comment was about the list provided by the commenter above and "most" was about that list rather than all of PKD's work. What you refer to as "pedantic", I consider precision and talking about what's being discussed; someone asks "are these his titles", the answer was "yes. most of these are". Nothing more, nothing less.
Compared to Sue Grafton he was a genius at titles. Her Kinsey Millhone murder mystery series starts with "A" is for Alibi, followed by "B" Is for Burglar, and continuing to the final installment, "Y" is for Yesterday
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
Let me put into personal context: I have loved PKD's work for almost 40 years now, and I think I have read all that I found from him or about him. This said, good prose is different from the one he turned out. Compare him to his friend "ELRON" - now he was a master storyteller. Compare him to - say - Stephen King. He's not playing in the same league, maybe not even the same game. OTOH they did not have what he had - he was. great writer in spite of his often poor prose.
With respect, I have no personal investment in defending the quality of PKD’s prose; I wouldn’t even count him among my favorite authors. I’m a professional writer—and while that doesn’t make my opinion authoritative, as writers disagree on many points large and small, and there are fewer professional rules to observe than your high-school English teacher would have you believe— I’m offering a technical appraisal of his sentences, in the same manner that a mechanic may tell you, “no, your timing belt is fine—you have at least another fifty-thousand miles on it. Whoever told you otherwise was trying to cheat you.”
If by “ELRON” you mean L. Ron Hubbard—well, the shocks are worn out, the muffler’s falling off, and the tires are flat. The car’s totaled, and unless you have some personal attachment to it, I’d have it hauled off to the junkyard. (My opinion on King is more complicated—it’s a fine car, I suppose, if you’re partial to that make, but the brand ain’t what it used to be.)
This isn’t a great venue for sentence analysis, but reading PKD’s early, extremely funny, short story, “Oh, To Be A Blobel!” is instructive. [1] Read it aloud, if you can. Note the little details he throws away, the way he sneaks ironic jokes into seemingly objective descriptions. It’s a Borscht Belt routine masquerading as a science-fiction story, and perfectly constructed. But if this seems like “bad” writing to you, consider that you may not have entirely passed through his veil of irony.
That's an interesting insight, thank you. Are there any good articles about his deliberately comic / ironic approach, or his approach in general? His reliance on cliche story building troupes (like private detectives) can be off-putting at times, would love to understand better what was behind his choices.
A good starting point is Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” [1] For more recent analysis, read Jonathan Lethem: “My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality… It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism.” [2] You can also read PKD himself; he gave a few lectures that give some insight into his thinking and intentional process. [3]
I’d also suggest that when talking about PKD, it’s especially important to distinguish between “cliché” and “trope,” since these two concepts are often improperly equated in popular TV-Trope-ified discourse. A cliché, e.g. “True love conquers all,” tends to lull the reader; it terminates further thought. But a trope is merely a familiar anchor point, an allusion to a literary tradition, and (potentially) an invitation to a dialogue between the current text and some previous work. (“The hero prepares by putting on his armor,” for example, is a trope that dates back to the Iliad.)
Dick often begins with a character or situation anchored in a familiar setting (possibly for more mercenary than aesthetic reasons—he was after all scraping together a living in the context of pulp paperback novels) but step by step strips away the anchors, leaving the reader untethered to settled meaning or “consensual reality.” The undercover narcotics cop turns out to be a schismatic, unaware that he’s surveilling himself. The noir-like investigator gets arrested by another investigator who seems to be his double, pulled into another precinct identical to his own… etc.
If the lack-of-respectability of his materials bothers you (as it seemed to bother Gopnik), it may be helpful to see PKD in the tradition of Kafka, and as a precursor to the post-modernists like Robert Coover, who gleefully and intentionally play games within familiar texts to comic and profound effect. But PKD really isn’t so far away from the most interesting of his much-maligned SF pulp colleagues. See A.E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” where the author plays games with doubles, shifting narrators, and familiar pulp characters to intentionally strange and dislocating effect—although in his case, the kitsch never quite makes the transmuting leap into art.
Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.
Ubik was intentionally hilarious, with the never-fully-explained-but-there-you-go eye-eater, and the briefcase psychiatrist intended to drive you insane! (Or maybe that was from 3 Stigmata?)
Mark Weiser told me that Ubik was the inspiration of the term he coined, "Ubiquitous Computing"!
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
>The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
>Career: Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains.
>He once received a grant from Jeffrey Epstein.
>Sophia the Robot: Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while Meta's chief AI scientist called the project "complete bullshit".
Well at least she's SEXY and EASY TO CONTROL! I can't wait for Epstein's flight manifests are released, to see if Sophie is on it! I hope she didn't leave her head in the overhead bin.
END NSFW DIGRESSION
So apparently the PKD robot's head was lost after David Hanson accidentally left it in an overhead bin of an airplane: "Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad." The bomb squad may have even blown it up with another robot! I wonder if it got lucky and found its way to Poland to search for Lem's robot head.
> Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.
Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!
Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:
I have immense respect for PKDs writings, he was far far ahead of his time, sad that he was such a mess mentally.
His themes about the malleability of reality are just so prescient about the problems of the digital era. Neighbors no longer share the same narrative about what is actually happening in the world.
I often wonder what PKD would say if he were alive today. Heck, I wonder what he'd be doing today in the digital era... Imagine if he had a YouTube channel...
I suspect the microtransaction idea was in the air in the 1960s.
Nikolai Nosov's "Dunno on the Moon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon) which is a Soviet satire of American capitalism describes exactly the same idea implemented at the "Economy Hotel"
That's 4 years before Ubik.
Youtube is surprisingly good at recommending me really obscure channels that nobody else seems to be watching (often I see why, but there are some gems). And it's not recommending Mr Beast, so I must be doing something right I guess. I also get a lot of channels lately about philosophical analysis of science fiction stories, so that's pretty cool.
Can you share what you like about it? I love most of pkd works but this one I just couldn't finish, simply because it's so boring. Chapter after chapter nothing happens.
The only thing that stuck with me was that "cynicism is not a viable alternative to insanity" (not an exact quote), that's an interesting idea.
I haven't thought about Valis in a long time, but I do generally tend to label various people/organizations as "The Empire". I didn't realize how much that book stuck with me.
I'd recommend a re-read! There's so many layers to that story that show themselves only on subsequent readings. Much like the layered flow of PKD the author, PKD the character, and Horselover Fat.
As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
> As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then
What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the iron hand of authorities was loosening and more and more forbidden words were tolerated, up to the 1989 Round Table event when Poland was freed (not before strong military repression happening in 1981)
> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.
That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well.
Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.
Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia. There should be an obvious Russian transcription of his originally Russian name. Азимов for the family name, according to Wikipedia.
So it existed but was changed when being translated back, for political / antisemitic reasons?
That's the thing - "Isaac" is not a Russian name, but rather a Russian Jewish name, and is normally spelled "Исаак" (and pronounced something like ee-saah-k), which is indeed exactly how it was spelled in his birth certificate. It is also a very recognizably Jewish name - e.g. it would often be used in Russian political jokes on the subject.
And then you have USSR with its periodic antisemitic campaigns. The relevant one here is the one that started under Brezhnev in late 1960s, which is also when sci-fi in general became more popular in the USSR prompting more translations. So, publishing an author whose first name is Isaac would immediately draw attention from the censors. Seeing how anything Western was already on shaky grounds - sci-fi being allowed in the first place because it would often critique contemporary Western societies - translators played it safe by transcribing the American English pronunciation of "Isaac" into Russian, which made it Айзек (Ayzek). Which helpfully looks nothing like Исаак (Isaak), and doesn't "sound" Jewish at all to Russian ears.
This translation stuck, and it's how he is commonly known in Russian to this day.
In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system.
Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
> In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks
"Not allowed" by whom? There is a big difference between silencing journalists and a branch of the entertainment industry self-selecting for some current "meta-consensus" (dependent on their target consumers).
Personally, I think calling Putin a dictator is stretching it a bit, but I have come to realize that honest, independent media is an absolutely essential cornerstone of an "actual" democracy: As soon as political leaders can prevent their mistakes from being reported to their voters, the whole thing becomes a farce.
You see a similar facet of this problem in the US, but not because governments have secured media control, but because the media landscape has completeley stratified (with a very strong partisan bias), and a lot of voters are basically never exposed to reporting "from the other side" at all (and are saturated with appropriate "outrage-bait" all day instead).
If you are talking about Russia, then I'd say that highly critical/adversarial reporting in the west is to be expected; this is basically "play imperialist games, win imperialist prices". Just compare WW2 era US messaging/reporting on axis power (before it even got involved itself).
But I'm curious about your perspective. What do you think should the US press say about the "east" that it does not?
I don't think this is true at all, but I guess maybe we can get wishywashy about how you define "mainstream networks." Taking a couple examples from some quick googling for essays written by one of my favorite economists/commentators, Noah Smith:
1: China Is a Communist Success Story. Kinda. (2015) — He talks about how China’s state-owned enterprises and central planning have achieved huge economic growth, and says that while central planning has its limitations, China’s approach shows that it can work to a certain extent.
2: Xi Jinping vs. Macroeconomics (2023) — he analyzes Xi's shift of Chinese resources from the real estate sector to advanced manufacturing, and concludes that it's an attempt to address economic imbalances by promoting high-tech industries. Smith suggests that under certain ideological frameworks (like China's), that kind of policy could be seen as a sound response to economic challenges.
There are exceptions, but this phenomenon is well documented. I would also ask if you really think these two pieces are really representative of the opinion in the mass media, which I would barely characterize Smith as.
Not to mention that people were traveling to the west quite a bit (especially to France and the US), VCR tapes were broadly shared and they had this dichotomy of communism and the church reigning each one on everyone.
Yes, and as far as I know Stanisław Lem was also genuinely contemptuous of the 1950s default style of US sci-fi: square-jawed heroes who triumph over every puzzle, right every wrong; Cowboys and Indians on a frontier planet, manifest destiny, etc.
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
Im not super well read in that era, but i feel like that sort of square-jawed americanism was already kind of being deconstructed at that point. E.g. asimov books were all about how brain beat brawn, and violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
I'm sure you know this, but for those who might not, US sci-fi was just as varied as anywhere else... except in the domain of John W. Campbell, for decades the editor of the biggest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the country, where he very much explicitly selected for that kind of story. Lots of famous authors active in the era have tales of how they edited their work to meet Campbells demands -- I recall one where the author switched the 'human' and 'alien' species because Campbell wouldn't print a story where humanity 'lost.'
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
You're doing a genre with a complex timeline somewhat of a disservice here. Dick's career spanned two or three of the broad "waves" of SF. He was embraced by the New Wave authors probably more than any other writer not of their generation.
"Na początku 48 roku wyjechałem na miesiąc do Pragi, gdzie zostałem zatrudniony w rządowej klinice im. Klimenta Woroszyłowa (wyobraźcie sobie u nas szpital imieniem Hermanna Goeringa). I ledwo wytrzymałem ten miesiąc. Codziennie jak nie masówka na stołówce, to agitka w szpitalnych garażach. W moim rodzimym krakowskim szpitalu na Montelupich byłoby to nie do pomyślenia. My byliśmy jednak najweselszym barakiem w obozie..."
"In the beginning of 1948 I went to Praga for a month, where I worked in government health clinic named after Kliment Woroshylov (imagine a hospital named after Goering in Poland). I barely managed to survive that month. Every day either a general meeting in the dining hall or political agitation in the hospital's garages. In Kraków Montelupi's hospital where I usually worked it would be unimaginable. We indeed are the merriest barrack in the [socialist] camp..."
Poles often called themselves that because censorship was the least strict there and we had some contact with the western culture (mainly through the "Kultura Paryska" - a Polish emigrants in Paris printed a newspaper that was very influential in Poland despite being theoretically banned - it was smuggled in en masse - it was so influential that to this day the political program developed by Giedroyć and Mieroszewski in that newspaper is serving as the core for Polish foreign policy - and it's working very well so far).
It changed depending on the period (50s were the worst) - but western culture was usually pretty well known and admired in communist Poland. We had very lively jazz scene, Beatles and other rock bands were played in radio (for example in Polish Radio 3 there were whole auditions based on showcasing western music - it was considered a "safety valve for Polish youth" by the communists).
We even had yearly indie punk/rock festival in Jarocin where all the anti-mainstream western-inspired kids went to drink and sing punk songs against the system.
Don't get me wrong - communism was obviously evil. But it wasn't competent/diligent enough to be 100% totalitarian in Poland. That would take too much effort and for what? You'd get paid the same either way. If you were unlucky you could definitely go to prison for a wrong joke or song. But most people didn't.
Anyway.
Lem definitely would have written that he liked American sci-fi if he did liked it.
I'm really not a "the book is better than the movie" guy, but here I really think the movie isn't very good in comparison. It doesn't even have much to do with the book, and it loses all the intelligent humor of the original. The book is a very light short read and hilarious. The perfect introduction to Lem.
Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.
What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.
On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
When I was reading it, it seemed a lot of bits reappeared as Futurama jokes but then got to the story with the robot named Calculon and that made it obvious.
> Dick’s evidence for this denouncement was that ‘[Lem] writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not’.
Man reads some translations, suspects it might have been written by multiple people? But that's what translation is...
It's often misunderstood that translation is done by surgically deconstructing original texts and selecting accurate meanings of words to fit into grammatical structures of the new language text is to be written. That's simply not true.
Rather. You just read the original text and try and say close-enough thing in the target language. Translators are like half ghostwriters. "Accurate" translations are sometimes not even understood by audiences. And then after all the changes, translations will still containe distinct signatures for each original languages.
For entertainment contents like a novel, there will also be marketing elements involved. Some choices may have to be made. Not necessary to interfere with the author's intent - like choosing first person pronouns and ending for each sentences.
Lem's novels being written in a language spoken in a communist country means most competent translators woild be technically a "communist", whether it's just unfortunate categorical labeling or they actually had been.
So, I think, the notion that translated works of Stanisław Lem only occasionally having distinctive foreign language components, and also being not always consistent in styles with one another as if it had been written by a Communist committee with a figurehead, would be just a description of independently rediscovered process of book translation cast in unnecessarily dark light.
I wouldn't find it so weird if PKD was that kind of uninformed crazy person stuck with such preconceptions, though. Sounds like just how it works.
Lem is especially a difficult subject to tackle for a translator. He invented new but still meaningful words as easily as he breathed, and his less (overtly) serious works dabbled in extreme wordplay.
There's an interesting book[1] by Douglas Hofstadter about translation in general and also about translating his most famous book[2] (which by its nature was particularly difficult to translate) into many different languages.
2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1].
Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.
It's interesting that Tarkowsky himself didn't like the movie either.
Authors are a bit too involved emotionally to judge movies that are based on their books though. It reveals to them that the interpretation that readers make of their books or their interest in it may not be what the author intended.
I really like Lem, but Solaris is probably my least favourite of his stories. It does have the thing I most admire in Lem's work of being about true aliens - that is, not just us again but in a Halloween costume like a Star Trek alien - but somehow Solaris doesn't "work" for me even though say, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub or Futurological Congress do.
Are you a PKD fan too? The two you mentioned are amongst Lem's most Dick-ian stories. Also note, there is a newer English language translation of Solaris. I liked it better than the one I read years ago.
I had it as optional and I read it out of my own volition and some of them still stays with me after almost thirty years.
The one about writer wanted his robot to write stories, but in the end realizes that actually stories written by his robot are much better than his, want to turn the robot off but instead robot kills the writer... Makes you think about humanity, robotics, technology and what it is to be human or what is self-aware machine.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
I am fascinated by the fact those stories were assigned in school. I happen to love them. I wonder if you would have disliked them as much if they were not school assignments. Many kids grow up up hating Shakespeare and Moby Dick because they were forced to read them.
I somehow got spared and was never forced to read Moby Dick.
I recently watched “In The Heart Of the Sea” which was an adaptation of a book which recounts the tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in the early 1800s, based on the written accounts of two of the surviving crew. I haven’t read the book, but the movie frames the story as an author interviewing the last remaining survivor in old age.
Having not read Moby Dick,
I at first thought this was a movie version as the storyline kind of seemed similar but the events didn’t seem to match to what I knew.
Finally it clicked for me, and revealed at the end, that the interviewer was Herman Melville getting inspiration for his Moby Dick.
The movie has increased my curiosity and desire into reading Moby Didk.
The funny story is that Lem despised this adaptation and for a good reason if you manage to read his book. He called Tarkovsky an idiot and refused to cooperate with him on the script as Tarkovsky threw pretty much all of Lem ideas from the book to shoot Crime and Punishment in space.
If Dick and Lem were around these days, Dick would have a very vocal online following that would all insist that Dick is correct and claim that Lem is most definitely a government psyop and anyone who says otherwise is just brainwashed by the mainstream media.
Lems fiction was so wonderfully weird, I remember something about a double agent in a mental hospital trying to figure out wether the other patients are double, triple or quadruple agents. Very confusing, was a script for a movie, don't know if it ever got made
This might be "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". It has the possible double and triple agents, but it takes place in some sort of underground Pentagon rather than in a mental hospital. It's similar to Kafka's "The Process".
There is also "Hospital of the Transfiguration", which takes place in a mental hospital, though I haven't read that one.
I enjoy both of their writing. I'm not surprised PKD went to paranoid delusions, but I wonder if he also wrote to the Vatican about John Boyd and James Blish? Because on the same grounds their writings were anti-papacy.
I'm guessing Drugs, Valis or the green laser told Dick to do it.
Dick was self aware to a degree, he lightly mocked his own conspiracy theories in characters that questioned why ten speed bikes only had seven gear wheels, two at the front and five at the back.
He lived in that void along with the three missing gears.
Stanislaw Lem was far too much of a genius to believe his works were directed by any sort of committee, communist or otherwise.
He is still overlooked far too much - people seem to regard Solaris as his only work of note. But he has so works, all bizarre, imaginative, and insightful. Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are two of my lesser known favorites.
And outside of Sci-Fi he was still an absolute powerhouse. "Hospital of Transfiguration" is an absolutely haunting novel that you will keep thinking about for months later if not years, and "Journals found in a bathtub" is on a different level.
Funny how closely his own machinations resemble the (obviously comically deranged) delusions of some of his characters. He was clearly quite self-aware, as another comment noted, or could it be that the whole FBI report was a jest? It really reads exactly like a passage from his novels.
The subtext of the report to the FBI, that we must suppress artistic expression in order to protect the innocent minds from dangerous ideas, remains as relevant and intriguing today as then.
It’s a lovely piece, but maybe goes a bit too far in trying to paint Lem as some kind of human-form planet Solaris himself, failing to communicate with ordinary people. For example:
“These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by a piece like ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction:’ a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic theory. The mind reels.”
That just sounds like an ordinary letter for a 20th century European intellectual. Reading and writing in French and German was table stakes.
"""
In addition to Lem, Dick named three other sci-fi figures associated with him as in on the plot – Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson and Franz Rottensteiner (also Lem’s literary agent in the West).
"""
I've never heard of the other two, but Fredric Jameson was a well-known literary critic. I gather that he did write about science fiction, and certainly he was a Marxist, but was he really a "sci-fi figure"?
It is generally a good idea to separate one's character from one's work. I love Dick's writings very much, same as I love ones by Lem. I do not give a rat's ass about what they're like in private life.
Too bad Dick reported to the FBI that Lem was a faceless composite communist committee out to get him and brainwash the youth of America and undermine American SF with "crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks", while Lem asymmetrically thought all science fiction writers were charlatans except for Philip K Dick.
>In 1973, Lem became an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a gesture of ‘international goodwill’ on the association’s part. However, in 1976, 70 percent of the SFWA’s voted in favour of a resolution to revoke Lem’s membership. A very quick dismissal for such a prestigious author, but the reasons for his quick ejection from the organisation are clear – he didn’t seem to regard his honorary membership as any sort of honour. He considered American science fiction ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms’ and ‘bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue’, and these are just a few examples of Lem’s deprecatory attitude towards the US branch of his genre.
>Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF. It seems likely that Dick was unaware of Lem’s high opinion of him and that he took Lem’s disparaging comments personally, stating in his letter to the FBI:
>"Lem’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem’s crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated)."
Philip K. Dick should have been one of the 1st ones realizing that such a brilliant and creative work as that coming from Lem, could never have been created by a committee, much less by a communist one.
That might have been a more interesting hypothesis about motivation if Philip K Dick was denouncing Lem as a communist propaganda on stage at a convention rather than in a private letter to the FBI
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
> Due to the economic restrictions of Poland under the communist regime, Lem was unable to give Dick his due royalties. Surely losing out on this potential source of income, regardless of reason, would incline Dick unfavourably towards Lem
If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstanding is just a fig leaf.
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
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".
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Very few movies do that.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
It sets up the narrative style and loads the gun for a incoming tragedy.
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.
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.
How about when people dream about what they were thinking about when they fell asleep? It happens.
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.
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.
For marketing departments maybe. For authors it's supposed to be a fitting name for their novel.
FWIW I was a Galactic Pot-Healer fan.
No, but their badges are. Or were. I guess it's a pars pro toto thing.
... or even some parts of the plot ...
It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.
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 also like the scene where Deckard runs into another blade runner agency, further complicating the question if he's a replicant or not :)
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.
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...
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
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...
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).
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.
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
The title is also brilliant: mysterious and vague until you learn what is stands for. What's not to like?
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.
And you could've done just that without being passive-aggressively dismissive.
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.
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.
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.
Same as Lem. Reading Return from the Stars was physically panful.
That is broadly true with respect to PKD. Wait until you see VALIS...
I can't even see how most of them would've existed to be honest. Most of P.K. Dick's work is about his mental issues in particular in combination with the psychedelic culture he was surrounded by. Always loved the attribution in A Scanner Darkly:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-nov...
So. Yes, most.
Editors changed his shorts, too. I love the title "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", but PKD wanted to call it "Frozen Journey".
[1] This one was unusual in that the editor gave PKD the title and asked him to write a plot around it.
Back to original list from the parent comment that is the "above" in my comment. X denotes PKD title, O denotes otherwise:
X Time Out of Joint
X The Man in the High Castle
O Martian Time-Slip
X The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
X Clans of the Alphane Moon
X The Simulacra
X Now Wait for Last Year
O Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982)
O Ubik
O We Can Build You
X Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
X A Scanner Darkly
O The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
O Radio Free Albemuth
So..."most" of what exactly?
But in the name of pedantry, you also have The Simulacra wrong. PKD's manuscript for The Simulacra was called "First Lady of Earth".
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At least i remember that happening in a scanner darkly and do androids dream of electric sheep.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
If by “ELRON” you mean L. Ron Hubbard—well, the shocks are worn out, the muffler’s falling off, and the tires are flat. The car’s totaled, and unless you have some personal attachment to it, I’d have it hauled off to the junkyard. (My opinion on King is more complicated—it’s a fine car, I suppose, if you’re partial to that make, but the brand ain’t what it used to be.)
This isn’t a great venue for sentence analysis, but reading PKD’s early, extremely funny, short story, “Oh, To Be A Blobel!” is instructive. [1] Read it aloud, if you can. Note the little details he throws away, the way he sneaks ironic jokes into seemingly objective descriptions. It’s a Borscht Belt routine masquerading as a science-fiction story, and perfectly constructed. But if this seems like “bad” writing to you, consider that you may not have entirely passed through his veil of irony.
[1] https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd038-0.html
I’d also suggest that when talking about PKD, it’s especially important to distinguish between “cliché” and “trope,” since these two concepts are often improperly equated in popular TV-Trope-ified discourse. A cliché, e.g. “True love conquers all,” tends to lull the reader; it terminates further thought. But a trope is merely a familiar anchor point, an allusion to a literary tradition, and (potentially) an invitation to a dialogue between the current text and some previous work. (“The hero prepares by putting on his armor,” for example, is a trope that dates back to the Iliad.)
Dick often begins with a character or situation anchored in a familiar setting (possibly for more mercenary than aesthetic reasons—he was after all scraping together a living in the context of pulp paperback novels) but step by step strips away the anchors, leaving the reader untethered to settled meaning or “consensual reality.” The undercover narcotics cop turns out to be a schismatic, unaware that he’s surveilling himself. The noir-like investigator gets arrested by another investigator who seems to be his double, pulled into another precinct identical to his own… etc.
If the lack-of-respectability of his materials bothers you (as it seemed to bother Gopnik), it may be helpful to see PKD in the tradition of Kafka, and as a precursor to the post-modernists like Robert Coover, who gleefully and intentionally play games within familiar texts to comic and profound effect. But PKD really isn’t so far away from the most interesting of his much-maligned SF pulp colleagues. See A.E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” where the author plays games with doubles, shifting narrators, and familiar pulp characters to intentionally strange and dislocating effect—although in his case, the kitsch never quite makes the transmuting leap into art.
[1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
[2] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/11/14/multiple-worl...
[3] https://californiarevealed.org/do/7622580c-be04-46d6-831c-fc...
The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.
Mark Weiser told me that Ubik was the inspiration of the term he coined, "Ubiquitous Computing"!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790807
The Computer for the 21st Century:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s
I also loved The Weapon Shops of Isher, with the parallel universes and third eyes.
Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot:
https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/
There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley).
BEGIN NSFW DIGRESSION
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311690
DonHopkins on Nov 17, 2023 | prev | edit | delete [–]
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/th...
>The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
You can tell he's a serious person, because he pioneered combining AI with blockchains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
>Career: Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains.
>He once received a grant from Jeffrey Epstein.
>Sophia the Robot: Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while Meta's chief AI scientist called the project "complete bullshit".
Well at least she's SEXY and EASY TO CONTROL! I can't wait for Epstein's flight manifests are released, to see if Sophie is on it! I hope she didn't leave her head in the overhead bin.
END NSFW DIGRESSION
So apparently the PKD robot's head was lost after David Hanson accidentally left it in an overhead bin of an airplane: "Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad." The bomb squad may have even blown it up with another robot! I wonder if it got lucky and found its way to Poland to search for Lem's robot head.
Wired: Losing One’s Head:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221090733/https://www.wired...
Now Philip K. Dick’s Missing Android Head Has His Own Radio Show:
https://gizmodo.com/now-philip-k-dicks-missing-android-head-...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K. Dick's Simulacrum Paperback – April 21, 2021:
https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Head-Philip-Dicks-Simulacrum/dp...
The lost robotic head of Philip K. Dick has been rebuilt:
https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-robotic-head-of-philip-k-dick-h...
The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!
Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI
Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!
His themes about the malleability of reality are just so prescient about the problems of the digital era. Neighbors no longer share the same narrative about what is actually happening in the world.
I often wonder what PKD would say if he were alive today. Heck, I wonder what he'd be doing today in the digital era... Imagine if he had a YouTube channel...
This experience was, in fact, the basis of a novel he wrote called _Valis_.
The Empire never ended.
The only thing that stuck with me was that "cynicism is not a viable alternative to insanity" (not an exact quote), that's an interesting idea.
within it, two principles contend...
Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_October
[2] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gierek
[0] https://youtu.be/20-dt24F6sM?t=1641
That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.
So it existed but was changed when being translated back, for political / antisemitic reasons?
And then you have USSR with its periodic antisemitic campaigns. The relevant one here is the one that started under Brezhnev in late 1960s, which is also when sci-fi in general became more popular in the USSR prompting more translations. So, publishing an author whose first name is Isaac would immediately draw attention from the censors. Seeing how anything Western was already on shaky grounds - sci-fi being allowed in the first place because it would often critique contemporary Western societies - translators played it safe by transcribing the American English pronunciation of "Isaac" into Russian, which made it Айзек (Ayzek). Which helpfully looks nothing like Исаак (Isaak), and doesn't "sound" Jewish at all to Russian ears.
This translation stuck, and it's how he is commonly known in Russian to this day.
Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
"Not allowed" by whom? There is a big difference between silencing journalists and a branch of the entertainment industry self-selecting for some current "meta-consensus" (dependent on their target consumers).
Personally, I think calling Putin a dictator is stretching it a bit, but I have come to realize that honest, independent media is an absolutely essential cornerstone of an "actual" democracy: As soon as political leaders can prevent their mistakes from being reported to their voters, the whole thing becomes a farce.
You see a similar facet of this problem in the US, but not because governments have secured media control, but because the media landscape has completeley stratified (with a very strong partisan bias), and a lot of voters are basically never exposed to reporting "from the other side" at all (and are saturated with appropriate "outrage-bait" all day instead).
If you are talking about Russia, then I'd say that highly critical/adversarial reporting in the west is to be expected; this is basically "play imperialist games, win imperialist prices". Just compare WW2 era US messaging/reporting on axis power (before it even got involved itself).
But I'm curious about your perspective. What do you think should the US press say about the "east" that it does not?
1: China Is a Communist Success Story. Kinda. (2015) — He talks about how China’s state-owned enterprises and central planning have achieved huge economic growth, and says that while central planning has its limitations, China’s approach shows that it can work to a certain extent.
2: Xi Jinping vs. Macroeconomics (2023) — he analyzes Xi's shift of Chinese resources from the real estate sector to advanced manufacturing, and concludes that it's an attempt to address economic imbalances by promoting high-tech industries. Smith suggests that under certain ideological frameworks (like China's), that kind of policy could be seen as a sound response to economic challenges.
¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-30/china-is-...
² https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-vs-macroeconomics
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78912/manufacturing...
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Reality-Politics-News-Media...
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
See Jeannette Ng's "2019 John W. Campbell Award" acceptance speech on the topic, and commentary that followed.
"Na początku 48 roku wyjechałem na miesiąc do Pragi, gdzie zostałem zatrudniony w rządowej klinice im. Klimenta Woroszyłowa (wyobraźcie sobie u nas szpital imieniem Hermanna Goeringa). I ledwo wytrzymałem ten miesiąc. Codziennie jak nie masówka na stołówce, to agitka w szpitalnych garażach. W moim rodzimym krakowskim szpitalu na Montelupich byłoby to nie do pomyślenia. My byliśmy jednak najweselszym barakiem w obozie..."
"In the beginning of 1948 I went to Praga for a month, where I worked in government health clinic named after Kliment Woroshylov (imagine a hospital named after Goering in Poland). I barely managed to survive that month. Every day either a general meeting in the dining hall or political agitation in the hospital's garages. In Kraków Montelupi's hospital where I usually worked it would be unimaginable. We indeed are the merriest barrack in the [socialist] camp..."
Poles often called themselves that because censorship was the least strict there and we had some contact with the western culture (mainly through the "Kultura Paryska" - a Polish emigrants in Paris printed a newspaper that was very influential in Poland despite being theoretically banned - it was smuggled in en masse - it was so influential that to this day the political program developed by Giedroyć and Mieroszewski in that newspaper is serving as the core for Polish foreign policy - and it's working very well so far).
It changed depending on the period (50s were the worst) - but western culture was usually pretty well known and admired in communist Poland. We had very lively jazz scene, Beatles and other rock bands were played in radio (for example in Polish Radio 3 there were whole auditions based on showcasing western music - it was considered a "safety valve for Polish youth" by the communists).
We even had yearly indie punk/rock festival in Jarocin where all the anti-mainstream western-inspired kids went to drink and sing punk songs against the system.
Don't get me wrong - communism was obviously evil. But it wasn't competent/diligent enough to be 100% totalitarian in Poland. That would take too much effort and for what? You'd get paid the same either way. If you were unlucky you could definitely go to prison for a wrong joke or song. But most people didn't.
Anyway.
Lem definitely would have written that he liked American sci-fi if he did liked it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash_Communism
Although that was after the Hungarian Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
By the way, there’s a movie somewhat based on it with Harvie Cartell. Worth a watch.
What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.
On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
It's often misunderstood that translation is done by surgically deconstructing original texts and selecting accurate meanings of words to fit into grammatical structures of the new language text is to be written. That's simply not true.
Rather. You just read the original text and try and say close-enough thing in the target language. Translators are like half ghostwriters. "Accurate" translations are sometimes not even understood by audiences. And then after all the changes, translations will still containe distinct signatures for each original languages.
For entertainment contents like a novel, there will also be marketing elements involved. Some choices may have to be made. Not necessary to interfere with the author's intent - like choosing first person pronouns and ending for each sentences.
Lem's novels being written in a language spoken in a communist country means most competent translators woild be technically a "communist", whether it's just unfortunate categorical labeling or they actually had been.
So, I think, the notion that translated works of Stanisław Lem only occasionally having distinctive foreign language components, and also being not always consistent in styles with one another as if it had been written by a Communist committee with a figurehead, would be just a description of independently rediscovered process of book translation cast in unnecessarily dark light.
I wouldn't find it so weird if PKD was that kind of uninformed crazy person stuck with such preconceptions, though. Sounds like just how it works.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
[1] https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE
Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.
Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw&t=1434
My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.
Authors are a bit too involved emotionally to judge movies that are based on their books though. It reveals to them that the interpretation that readers make of their books or their interest in it may not be what the author intended.
I still despise those moralist fables.
But his other works? i love them! My favorite is The Star Diaries, despite having some robot stories in them.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
I recently watched “In The Heart Of the Sea” which was an adaptation of a book which recounts the tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in the early 1800s, based on the written accounts of two of the surviving crew. I haven’t read the book, but the movie frames the story as an author interviewing the last remaining survivor in old age.
Having not read Moby Dick, I at first thought this was a movie version as the storyline kind of seemed similar but the events didn’t seem to match to what I knew.
Finally it clicked for me, and revealed at the end, that the interviewer was Herman Melville getting inspiration for his Moby Dick.
The movie has increased my curiosity and desire into reading Moby Didk.
Both Lem (Solaris) and Strugatsky Brothers (Roadside Picnic turned into Stalker) disliked what Tarkovsky did.
There is also "Hospital of the Transfiguration", which takes place in a mental hospital, though I haven't read that one.
I'm guessing Drugs, Valis or the green laser told Dick to do it.
He lived in that void along with the three missing gears.
He is still overlooked far too much - people seem to regard Solaris as his only work of note. But he has so works, all bizarre, imaginative, and insightful. Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are two of my lesser known favorites.
Even his lighter work (Cyberiad, Ijon Tichy) is very insightful
The subtext of the report to the FBI, that we must suppress artistic expression in order to protect the innocent minds from dangerous ideas, remains as relevant and intriguing today as then.
"The Spearhead of Cognition", 1987, https://germanponte.com/txt/catscan/sterling.html#ym2
“These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by a piece like ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction:’ a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic theory. The mind reels.”
That just sounds like an ordinary letter for a 20th century European intellectual. Reading and writing in French and German was table stakes.
I've never heard of the other two, but Fredric Jameson was a well-known literary critic. I gather that he did write about science fiction, and certainly he was a Marxist, but was he really a "sci-fi figure"?
Lem and Dick are such precious peas in a pod!
Too bad Dick reported to the FBI that Lem was a faceless composite communist committee out to get him and brainwash the youth of America and undermine American SF with "crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks", while Lem asymmetrically thought all science fiction writers were charlatans except for Philip K Dick.
https://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick
https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) (depauw.edu) 140 points by pmoriarty on June 19, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
>In 1973, Lem became an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a gesture of ‘international goodwill’ on the association’s part. However, in 1976, 70 percent of the SFWA’s voted in favour of a resolution to revoke Lem’s membership. A very quick dismissal for such a prestigious author, but the reasons for his quick ejection from the organisation are clear – he didn’t seem to regard his honorary membership as any sort of honour. He considered American science fiction ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms’ and ‘bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue’, and these are just a few examples of Lem’s deprecatory attitude towards the US branch of his genre.
>Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF. It seems likely that Dick was unaware of Lem’s high opinion of him and that he took Lem’s disparaging comments personally, stating in his letter to the FBI:
>"Lem’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem’s crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated)."
A solid accusation of being a commie is just the cover that Lem needed to stay out of trouble back home in Poland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc
The Congress (2013) Scan Scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
HN thread about "Bruce Willis Sells Deepfake Likeness Rights So His 'Twin' Can Star in Movies" and The Congress discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33044479
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36209861
>People who haven't used psychedelics don't tend to get or appreciate The Congress as much as those who have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34953477
>I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent.
THE CONGRESS - Entering The Animation Zone - Film Clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqzaZcivh4
THE CONGRESS clip1- Miramount Nagasaki Lobby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk
This actually explains it pretty well:
The Congress - Escape from Reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ1hFKDCpd8
As a slow burner / future cult classic it's about the same as ExistenZ another of my favourites.
If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstanding is just a fig leaf.