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Philip K. Dick

What we really love is mindblowing Dick, which with any luck season 2 of High Castle should provide. Just finished it, and for most of the episodes it was less a sci-fi show and more wartime resistance drama like Secret Army, ah, but that last episode hinted at the weirdness that emerged in the novel. Top performer: Rufus Sewell, a truly icy portrait of villainy. It was a bit longwinded, but it sorted itself out eventually.
 
I think "longwinded" sums up my problem with this kind of show. I'll take back my "Under The Dome" jibe, that was uncalled-for, but I started to get jaded with regards to multi-season TV around the time of "Lost". You just had to invest so much of your damned time in that show - I watched 2 seasons on Channel 4, where only about 5 minutes of really exciting stuff happened each week (with much "previously on Lost" and flashbacks, and more adverts than I ever thought possible), and then it moved to Sky, and I didn't miss it.

With TMITHC, I hope they don't drift too much from the basic premise. There's padding out the plot, while keeping the general drift the same (see The Hobbit), and there's shark-jumping, rule-changing nonsense (and yes, I'm sorry, but I'm going to mention UTD again, though only in initials...).
 
Watched all the remaining episodes today.
Can't wait for season 2.
 
Tad Leckman ‏@tadleckman 10h10 hours ago
Just a reminder to prep for your Roy Batty Incept Day party!

CXnU1qdUoAAxHGy.jpg
 
A guy on another forum described the flim 'looper" as "a tight Philip k Dick stuff" - I can't disagree more. Yeah I liked Looper and yeah I get that the director has read PKD but I can only imagine PKD being as perturbed by Lopper as he was Bladerunner.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
A guy on another forum described the flim 'looper" as "a tight Philip k Dick stuff" - I can't disagree more. Yeah I liked Looper and yeah I get that the director has read PKD but I can only imagine PKD being as perturbed by Lopper as he was Bladerunner.
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Interesting. I've long held the belief that PKD was disappointed with Blade Runner and I knew he only got to see an early version before he died, but even so. My understanding was that he was upset with the dumbing down of the books themes.

However the net now says he thought the whole thing was great.

Have I done a Jason Taverner and quietly slipped into a very close parallel reality???
 
Well, Felid, you've quoted yourself and then commented "interesting", so I think there's something going on. Maybe you've moved here from the pages of The Prestige, I don't know.
 
Peripart said:
Well, Felid, you've quoted yourself and then commented "interesting", so I think there's something going on. Maybe you've moved here from the pages of The Prestige, I don't know.
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Yeah, I spotted that too.
Interesting. :D
 
Looks exciting, but as it's in New York, I won't be going.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Looks exciting, but as it's in New York, I won't be going.
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How can you be certain? Tomorrow night you may win the lottery, thus enabling you to go.

And to then take us with you, as assistant consultant facilitators.

Hmm, numbers... you might want to consider some fiendishly-complex competitive event, sort of Hunger Games crossed with Antiques Roadshow and the 11+, obviously including pugil sticks and charades. Judged by Anneka Rice and Melinda Messenger, on a tandem.

Or just charter a bigger 737...might be easier, to be honest.

Did I drop off there??? Night....night
 
Philip K. Dick Award
www.philipkdickaward.org
PKDborder1.jpeg

The Official Philip K. Dick Awards Home Page
« 2015 Philip K. Dick Award Winner Announced | Main

JANUARY 12, 2016
2016 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees Announced

The judges of the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award and the Philadelphia SF Society, along with the Philip K. Dick Trust, are pleased to announce six nominated works that comprise the final ballot for the award:

EDGE OF DARK by Brenda Cooper (Pyr)
AFTER THE SAUCERS LANDED by Douglas Lain (Night Shade Books)
(R)EVOLUTION by PJ Manney (47North)
APEX by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot Books)
WINDSWEPT by Adam Rakunas (Angry Robot Books)
ARCHANGEL by Marguerite Reed (Arche Press)

First prize and any special citations will be announced on Friday, March 25, 2016 at Norwescon 39 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, Washington.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society. Last year’s winner was THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE by Meg Elison (Sybaritic Press) with a special citation to ELYSIUM by Jennifer Marie Brissett (Aqueduct Press). The current judges are Eric James Fullilove, James C. Glass, David Higgins, Lisa Mason (chair), and Jack Skillingstead.

For more information, contact the award administration:
Pat Lo Brutto (301) 460-3164
John Silbersack (212) 333-1513
Gordon Van Gelder (201) 876-2551

For more information about the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, http://www.psfs.org/ :
Contact Gary Feldbaum (215) 665-5752

For more information about Norwescon: http://www.norwescon.org/ : [email protected].
 
Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays

As you can probably tell if you’ve interacted with any of his hard-core fans, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick has a way of getting into readers’ heads. What better way to adapt it, then, than in the medium of radio drama, with its direct route into the head through the ears? Science fiction in general provided radio drama with a good deal of bread-and-butter subject matter since pretty much its inception, and suitably so: its producers didn’t have to bother designing distant worlds, alien races and elaborately futuristic technologies when, with the right sound design, the listeners would design it all themselves in their imaginations.

But does it really do justice to Dick to call his work “science fiction”? Sure, he knocked out a fair few straight-ahead (or sub-straight-ahead) sci-fi potboilers in his productive career, but many of his writings, despite their rough edges, qualify under Walter Benjamin’s definition of great works of literature, which “either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

Some of Dick’s novels and stories even seem to do both at once, creating their own particular (as well as peculiar) psychological space in the process. Can radio drama render a Dickian world of multilayered reality and rich paranoia as easily as it does so many Martian colonies, laser guns, and sentient computers? So you can judge that for yourself, we submit today for your approval six radio plays adapted from Dick’s stories.

http://www.openculture.com/2015/12/...k-stories-adapted-as-vintage-radio-plays.html
 
Syd Mead's work is amazing.
I have one of his books around here somewhere.
 
“Ronald D. Moore, Bryan Cranston, and Philip K. Dick” are three names you probably never expected to see in the same sentence together. But that’s what’s happening as the longtime scifi producer and the acclaimed actor are teaming up to bring the legendary writer’s work to TV in a new anthology series for the UK.

Electric Dreams: The World of Philip K. Dick will be a 10-part miniseries written by Moore, who will executively produce alongside Michael Dinner (Justified,Masters of Sex) and Bryan Cranston, who will also star in the series itself. Each episode will be a standalone story that illustrates Dick’s “prophetic vision” and “[celebrates] the enduring appeal” of the writer’s past work. Isa Dick Hackett, whose past work includes The Adjustment Bureau and The Man in the High Castle and is Dick’s daughter, will also produce the show. ...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/philip-k-dic...&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
 
Channel 4, so likely to be reasonable (i.e. better than the Beeb).
 
Mythopoeika said:
Channel 4, so likely to be reasonable (i.e. better than the Beeb).
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Not anymore. Last homegrown programme I watched on C4 was Toast of London, and that was last year. Pretty shameful for a public broadcaster.
 
Watching Season 2 of The Man In The High Castle, really dark, perhaps more so than S1. Just watched episode 3, a masterpiece. Potential war between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Obergruppenfuhrer Smith has a son who is "defective", Juliana seeks refuge in Nazi America, Frank Frink must forge a pair of Custer's cuff-links for the Yakuza, Joe Blake visits his real father in Berlin - a Reich Minister. Thats just a few of the plot threads.
 
I'm up to episode 6, it's OK, but I always got a real sense of glee in PKD's work about how weird he could be, and the mopey TV show is basically one for the "everything's awful, everyone's awful, we're going to hell in a handbasket" brigade.
 
I reached the end of season 2 of MHC, and it did pick up at the end with a note or two of optimism, which was welcome after all that doom and gloom. I seem to remember in the book the Nazis were in the process of conquering the solar system, I'd like to see that in season 3!
 
An interesting TED talk that concerns Philip K Dick & the theme of "madness"
Society is not a prerequisite for the existence of privacy. Privacy is a prerequisite for the existence of society. Howard Hendrix’s TEDxUCR talk explores the philosophical, legal, neurological and evolutionary contexts for understanding the relationship between privacy and individual human consciousness -- particularly through the lens of "madness" in the lives and works of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and Hendrix's younger brother, Vincent John "Jay" Hendrix.
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