6 ms·

A great mystery of the world is how we came to have so many movies based on PKD stories. It is all out of any proportion to anything objectively identifiable ab

A great mystery of the world is how we came to have so many movies based on PKD stories. It is all out of any proportion to anything objectively identifiable about the stories themselves. Why them, and not Heinlein, or Pohl, or Anderson? They are good, but not exactly easy to translate to the screen. Not easier than other good stories. It suggests some sort of cabal wanting them produced, and moving in the shadows to make it happen. Of course this is very much in line with the stories themselves, but that doesn't help at all.

mjklin 4y ago
VALIS is real, that’s all.
is0tope 4y ago
Indeed, I've always thought there is a veritable bounty of great SciFi stories to put into film. The recent popularity of SciFi shows suggests to me that we will start to see more works transferred to the big (or small) screen, though as always this seems to be a very hit or miss process. Personally, I'd love to see e.g. The Culture novels be made into a show, or series of films. There was talk of making a Consider Phlebas TV show some time back, though I don't think it went anywhere. Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" could also do well as a stand alone movie, though possibly with Heinlein you would need to tone down the polygamy themes. As to why PKD became such a cinematic mainstay I can't quite tell. I would think part of it would be to do with the fact that many of his stories were less about the "lasers and spaceships" part of SciFi, and more about the moral and human aspect, meaning costs could be saved on big budget set pieces ala Star Wars.
- lazide 4y ago
  I’m guessing because: Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories. Culture is too difficult to convey in a movie. The relationship of the AIs to the humans in particular is too subtle to come across well, and it’s too easy to make it into a giant party with occasional inexplicable violence.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories. Didn't seem to be a problem for A Song of Ice and Fire.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      It's only quite recent that something like GOT has been possible. And GOT is pretty tame, sexually, compared to what Heinlein stories got up to. Incest is a little spicy, but those are the villans so it's a bit more accepted, and the rest of GOT is mostly just a flash of tit or dick now and then, right? More titilating than conceptually boundary pushing. Heinlein had, off the top of my head: a main character forgiving and falling in love with her rapist, mother/son incest including protagonist, big ol' family incest (more complicated and varied than I can remember the details of) including "the good guys", a transexual protagonist (including many, many sexual descriptions), many varieties of open relationships, more forms of group marriage than I've ever heard anywhere else, and a sex cult (started by the protagonist). Most of those you could probably leave out of whatever story without too much trouble, but they're not exactly small parts of their respective stories either. Still, I'd think someone could make a really good movie/show out of at least: Friday, Double Star, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, probably a few others.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    There's nothing _that_ weird in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is there? Long time since I've read it, but I think some sort of polyamory was about as out-there as it got. If they can make a docudrama about FTX (and they will) they can make that :) Even some of the others... I mean, they made the Handmaid's Tale, and that's way more distressing than most of Heinlein's Weird Sex Stuff.
    - lazide 4y ago
      You might want to re-read the Moon is a harsh mistress, then look at what’s going on in large portions of society that aren’t the west coast bubble. Matriarchal, multi generational polyamory is going to be a bit weird for half+ of society, and it’s not easy to remove that without completely rewriting almost the entire book and it’s characters.
- kcplate 4y ago
  > As to why PKD became such a cinematic mainstay I can't quite tell. I would think part of it would be to do with the fact that many of his stories were less about the "lasers and spaceships" part of SciFi, and more about the moral and human aspect, meaning costs could be saved on big budget set pieces ala Star Wars. I have always felt that they always seem to skirt the edges of plausibility much more than other sci-fi. But I think you are right, the “tech” takes a backseat to the personal story.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  They should turn stories from Love, Death, Robots animated anthology into longer episodes. There were some stories that could do with longer treatment or dive more into the universe. With streaming service, they could have variable length, most being hour long with a few making to movie length.
drewcoo 4y ago
Well . . . Stanislaw Lem had constant harping claims that Dick was a capitalist committee invention. https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
- vba616 4y ago
  It could hardly be considered unprecedented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
- Kbelicius 4y ago
  It was the other way around. Dick had constant harping claims that Lem was a communist committee invention as it says in the article that you linked.
  - smnc 4y ago
    Furthermore, from the same article: > 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.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Accusing someone of really being a secret committe that puts out work under the name of one person, as the way to explain their high quality and quantity is more of of a compliment than an attack.
- rcme 4y ago
  Obviously just a personal opinion, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a much more compelling story than Solaris (the only Lem I've read). I loved Solaris. It's a beautiful piece of writing. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had me on the edge of my seat in anticipation. I'm not surprised that Blade Runner makes a more compelling movie than Solaris's film adaptation.
irishloop 4y ago
I think some of it is simply that PKD was prolific, and created a lot of ideas pretty quickly. There are other huge authors in sci fi but I feel like a great many of them stuck to a single universe or at least thematically kind of stuck around in similar areas, whereas PKD created just a truly insane amount of ideas. Even Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is almost like 3 sci fi novels in one and its not even that long.
lmm 4y ago
A possibly salient fact is that Dick and LeGuin are essentially the two sci-fi authors who attracted academic study. Whatever the initial impetus, those doing literary analysis like to be able to cite and build on previous papers, and so it's easier for everyone else to stick to those two.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  A decent Le Guin movie would be nice. There was some sort of Earthsea Syfy series but it was execrably unwatchable.
  - vincent-manis 4y ago
    The 1980 PBS “Lathe of Heaven” was excellent. Apparently Le Guin herself was involved to some extent in the production.
    - Haga 4y ago
      [dead]
    - danbmil99 4y ago
      I recall liking the 2002 version as well but my memory of the two versions may be a bit tangled
reeckoh 4y ago
They did make a movie out of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. But the director, Paul Verhoeven, lived through WWII and found the militaristic ethos so abhorrent that he threw out most of the story and made a comical parody of the book.
- Hoasi 4y ago
  Starship Troopers is a great movie. It starts as every silly archetypal superhero movie but ends up being much more profound.
lelanthran 4y ago
> Why them, and not Heinlein, or Pohl, or Anderson? I've always thought that Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" would make a great movie (sort of like a twist on Groundhog Day, but more relevant for the intrusive ad-filled times we live in).
bruce511 4y ago
I'm thinking a combination of reasons; A) filmability - Gateway would be fantastic, but expensive to film. Counter-point would be "the Space Merchants", which would be "cheap" to film (but perhaps not please the sponsors.) B) risk. PKD stories have a proven track record. A E van Vogt not so much (as far as I know). (although Weapon Shops would be great, albeit political bait.) On the other hand its now becoming possible to film some of these stories in a non-cheesy way (think Dune) so I expect we'll see more of them.
BerislavLopac 4y ago
I think that at least one of the reasons is that the topic of many of his stories/novels is blurring the boundaries between the reality and non-reality (however that is defined in each novel). This is a recurring theme, with neither the reader nor the protagonist(s) being sure about things: * DADoES / Blade Runner: Who is an android/replicant and who is a human? * WCRIfYW / Total Recall: Which memories are real and which are implanted? * Ubik: Who is dead and who is alive? The filmmakers love this concept as it has many parallels with making films - see Inception and Matrix as examples.
- sogen 4y ago
  Yes, great point. Was watching Blade Runner again recently, and realized this time I sided with the robots, as they mostly just wanted to live. Same with A Scanner Darkly, the theme being “who am I?”
mattclarkdotnet 4y ago
Maybe because PKD could actually write? Heinlein, Pohl, and Anderson have interesting ideas but none of them can do character development, emotion, depth, etc. PKD instantly draws you in with fully formed characters in a world you can connect with emotionally.
- n4r9 4y ago
  I agree Heinlein wrote one-dimensional characters; the male heroes were idealised versions of himself and the women were objects of wish-fulfillment. Pohl wrote pretty well in my opinion. The psycho-therapeutic aspect of Gateway is brilliant for the sci fi of that era. Plenty of sci fi authors wrote characters comparably with PKD, such as Zelazny, Le Guin, and Bester.
  - mattclarkdotnet 4y ago
    Le Guin is a great author but I struggle to engage with her characters. Brian Aldiss I think does better? And Vinge? This is sticking to the classic era. The genre has changed and there are too many more recent excellent SF writers of character to do justice to in a post
    - n4r9 4y ago
      Maybe a subjective thing then, as I remember enjoying the joint character development of e.g. Ai and Estraven in Left Hand of Darkness.
n4r9 4y ago
A few possible explanations: - PKD wrote tonnes of short stories. Four big volumes worth, I believe. Short stories are great for movies because they present a central idea but give the director lots of freedom. - His stories frequently involved several tropes that work well in movies: drugs, massive corporate entities, multiple realities, and the everyman hero. - Other sci fi authors had a tendency to be preachy (Heinlein), or too progressive for the time (le Guin). PKD wrote in an unassuming and non-judgemental way. His characters might have had regressive opinions, but he never seemed to push what he thought was best for society.
- thorin 4y ago
  Yes, I agree with the short story part, these are attractive to film makers and for instance I think all of the good Stephen King films are based on his short stories. I always though Man who fell to earth (Bowie) was an (unofficial?) version of Stranger in a strange land, I can't think of any other Heinlein films apart from Starship Troopers (which is a pretty short story and nothing like the book).
  - n4r9 4y ago
    Google suggests there's been a few, just not as famous as the ones you mentioned: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Moonbase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Moonbase * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/
    - thorin 4y ago
      I remember seeing an advert for door into summer, never heard of the others, thanks.
  - jonjacky 4y ago
    There is a recent (2021) Japanese movie of The Door Into Summer. Other than being set in Japan, it was pretty faithful to the book, as I remember it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/
bena 4y ago
People have a lot of ideas, but I think there's one that trumps all. PKD was fucking cheap. I don't mean he was a spendthrift, I mean, that his rights were on sale to anyone with a nickel. His net worth when he died was roughly half a million in today's money. He lived pretty broke for most of his life. He always needed cash. Read Valis, it's semi-autobiographical. Or at the very least, it's self-reflective. The main character is a version of himself. It's a very interesting read because you do get a sense of not only the man himself, but what he thought of himself. And after he died, his children essentially turned his intellectual property into a business.
sogen 4y ago
Dang! Can’t unthink this now.

mjklin 4y ago

VALIS is real, that’s all.

is0tope 4y ago

Indeed, I've always thought there is a veritable bounty of great SciFi stories to put into film. The recent popularity of SciFi shows suggests to me that we will start to see more works transferred to the big (or small) screen, though as always this seems to be a very hit or miss process. Personally, I'd love to see e.g. The Culture novels be made into a show, or series of films. There was talk of making a Consider Phlebas TV show some time back, though I don't think it went anywhere. Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" could also do well as a stand alone movie, though possibly with Heinlein you would need to tone down the polygamy themes. As to why PKD became such a cinematic mainstay I can't quite tell. I would think part of it would be to do with the fact that many of his stories were less about the "lasers and spaceships" part of SciFi, and more about the moral and human aspect, meaning costs could be saved on big budget set pieces ala Star Wars.

lazide 4y ago
I’m guessing because: Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories. Culture is too difficult to convey in a movie. The relationship of the AIs to the humans in particular is too subtle to come across well, and it’s too easy to make it into a giant party with occasional inexplicable violence.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Heinlein embeds too many weird sexual themes in non-trivial ways in his stories. Didn't seem to be a problem for A Song of Ice and Fire.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    It's only quite recent that something like GOT has been possible. And GOT is pretty tame, sexually, compared to what Heinlein stories got up to. Incest is a little spicy, but those are the villans so it's a bit more accepted, and the rest of GOT is mostly just a flash of tit or dick now and then, right? More titilating than conceptually boundary pushing. Heinlein had, off the top of my head: a main character forgiving and falling in love with her rapist, mother/son incest including protagonist, big ol' family incest (more complicated and varied than I can remember the details of) including "the good guys", a transexual protagonist (including many, many sexual descriptions), many varieties of open relationships, more forms of group marriage than I've ever heard anywhere else, and a sex cult (started by the protagonist). Most of those you could probably leave out of whatever story without too much trouble, but they're not exactly small parts of their respective stories either. Still, I'd think someone could make a really good movie/show out of at least: Friday, Double Star, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, probably a few others.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  There's nothing _that_ weird in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is there? Long time since I've read it, but I think some sort of polyamory was about as out-there as it got. If they can make a docudrama about FTX (and they will) they can make that :) Even some of the others... I mean, they made the Handmaid's Tale, and that's way more distressing than most of Heinlein's Weird Sex Stuff.
  - lazide 4y ago
    You might want to re-read the Moon is a harsh mistress, then look at what’s going on in large portions of society that aren’t the west coast bubble. Matriarchal, multi generational polyamory is going to be a bit weird for half+ of society, and it’s not easy to remove that without completely rewriting almost the entire book and it’s characters.
kcplate 4y ago
> As to why PKD became such a cinematic mainstay I can't quite tell. I would think part of it would be to do with the fact that many of his stories were less about the "lasers and spaceships" part of SciFi, and more about the moral and human aspect, meaning costs could be saved on big budget set pieces ala Star Wars. I have always felt that they always seem to skirt the edges of plausibility much more than other sci-fi. But I think you are right, the “tech” takes a backseat to the personal story.
ianburrell 4y ago
They should turn stories from Love, Death, Robots animated anthology into longer episodes. There were some stories that could do with longer treatment or dive more into the universe. With streaming service, they could have variable length, most being hour long with a few making to movie length.

drewcoo 4y ago

Well . . . Stanislaw Lem had constant harping claims that Dick was a capitalist committee invention. https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

vba616 4y ago
It could hardly be considered unprecedented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
Kbelicius 4y ago
It was the other way around. Dick had constant harping claims that Lem was a communist committee invention as it says in the article that you linked.
- smnc 4y ago
  Furthermore, from the same article: > 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.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Accusing someone of really being a secret committe that puts out work under the name of one person, as the way to explain their high quality and quantity is more of of a compliment than an attack.
rcme 4y ago
Obviously just a personal opinion, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a much more compelling story than Solaris (the only Lem I've read). I loved Solaris. It's a beautiful piece of writing. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had me on the edge of my seat in anticipation. I'm not surprised that Blade Runner makes a more compelling movie than Solaris's film adaptation.

irishloop 4y ago

I think some of it is simply that PKD was prolific, and created a lot of ideas pretty quickly. There are other huge authors in sci fi but I feel like a great many of them stuck to a single universe or at least thematically kind of stuck around in similar areas, whereas PKD created just a truly insane amount of ideas. Even Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is almost like 3 sci fi novels in one and its not even that long.

lmm 4y ago

A possibly salient fact is that Dick and LeGuin are essentially the two sci-fi authors who attracted academic study. Whatever the initial impetus, those doing literary analysis like to be able to cite and build on previous papers, and so it's easier for everyone else to stick to those two.

jessaustin 4y ago
A decent Le Guin movie would be nice. There was some sort of Earthsea Syfy series but it was execrably unwatchable.
- vincent-manis 4y ago
  The 1980 PBS “Lathe of Heaven” was excellent. Apparently Le Guin herself was involved to some extent in the production.
  - Haga 4y ago
    [dead]
  - danbmil99 4y ago
    I recall liking the 2002 version as well but my memory of the two versions may be a bit tangled

reeckoh 4y ago

They did make a movie out of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. But the director, Paul Verhoeven, lived through WWII and found the militaristic ethos so abhorrent that he threw out most of the story and made a comical parody of the book.

Hoasi 4y ago
Starship Troopers is a great movie. It starts as every silly archetypal superhero movie but ends up being much more profound.

lelanthran 4y ago

> Why them, and not Heinlein, or Pohl, or Anderson? I've always thought that Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" would make a great movie (sort of like a twist on Groundhog Day, but more relevant for the intrusive ad-filled times we live in).

bruce511 4y ago

I'm thinking a combination of reasons; A) filmability - Gateway would be fantastic, but expensive to film. Counter-point would be "the Space Merchants", which would be "cheap" to film (but perhaps not please the sponsors.) B) risk. PKD stories have a proven track record. A E van Vogt not so much (as far as I know). (although Weapon Shops would be great, albeit political bait.) On the other hand its now becoming possible to film some of these stories in a non-cheesy way (think Dune) so I expect we'll see more of them.

BerislavLopac 4y ago

I think that at least one of the reasons is that the topic of many of his stories/novels is blurring the boundaries between the reality and non-reality (however that is defined in each novel). This is a recurring theme, with neither the reader nor the protagonist(s) being sure about things: * DADoES / Blade Runner: Who is an android/replicant and who is a human? * WCRIfYW / Total Recall: Which memories are real and which are implanted? * Ubik: Who is dead and who is alive? The filmmakers love this concept as it has many parallels with making films - see Inception and Matrix as examples.

sogen 4y ago
Yes, great point. Was watching Blade Runner again recently, and realized this time I sided with the robots, as they mostly just wanted to live. Same with A Scanner Darkly, the theme being “who am I?”

mattclarkdotnet 4y ago

Maybe because PKD could actually write? Heinlein, Pohl, and Anderson have interesting ideas but none of them can do character development, emotion, depth, etc. PKD instantly draws you in with fully formed characters in a world you can connect with emotionally.

n4r9 4y ago
I agree Heinlein wrote one-dimensional characters; the male heroes were idealised versions of himself and the women were objects of wish-fulfillment. Pohl wrote pretty well in my opinion. The psycho-therapeutic aspect of Gateway is brilliant for the sci fi of that era. Plenty of sci fi authors wrote characters comparably with PKD, such as Zelazny, Le Guin, and Bester.
- mattclarkdotnet 4y ago
  Le Guin is a great author but I struggle to engage with her characters. Brian Aldiss I think does better? And Vinge? This is sticking to the classic era. The genre has changed and there are too many more recent excellent SF writers of character to do justice to in a post
  - n4r9 4y ago
    Maybe a subjective thing then, as I remember enjoying the joint character development of e.g. Ai and Estraven in Left Hand of Darkness.

n4r9 4y ago

A few possible explanations: - PKD wrote tonnes of short stories. Four big volumes worth, I believe. Short stories are great for movies because they present a central idea but give the director lots of freedom. - His stories frequently involved several tropes that work well in movies: drugs, massive corporate entities, multiple realities, and the everyman hero. - Other sci fi authors had a tendency to be preachy (Heinlein), or too progressive for the time (le Guin). PKD wrote in an unassuming and non-judgemental way. His characters might have had regressive opinions, but he never seemed to push what he thought was best for society.

thorin 4y ago
Yes, I agree with the short story part, these are attractive to film makers and for instance I think all of the good Stephen King films are based on his short stories. I always though Man who fell to earth (Bowie) was an (unofficial?) version of Stranger in a strange land, I can't think of any other Heinlein films apart from Starship Troopers (which is a pretty short story and nothing like the book).
- n4r9 4y ago
  Google suggests there's been a few, just not as famous as the ones you mentioned: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Eaters * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Moonbase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Moonbase * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/
  - thorin 4y ago
    I remember seeing an advert for door into summer, never heard of the others, thanks.
- jonjacky 4y ago
  There is a recent (2021) Japanese movie of The Door Into Summer. Other than being set in Japan, it was pretty faithful to the book, as I remember it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/

bena 4y ago

People have a lot of ideas, but I think there's one that trumps all. PKD was fucking cheap. I don't mean he was a spendthrift, I mean, that his rights were on sale to anyone with a nickel. His net worth when he died was roughly half a million in today's money. He lived pretty broke for most of his life. He always needed cash. Read Valis, it's semi-autobiographical. Or at the very least, it's self-reflective. The main character is a version of himself. It's a very interesting read because you do get a sense of not only the man himself, but what he thought of himself. And after he died, his children essentially turned his intellectual property into a business.

sogen 4y ago

Dang! Can’t unthink this now.