Philip K Dick: We Can Build You

After the previous novel, this one comes as a complete contrast and quite a shock. Biographies of Philip Dick detail his various mental health issues and We Can Build You seems to reflect them, and his preoccupation with them. We are in a weird future world where mental illness is the norm and treatment mandated by the Federal Government; the various illnesses are vaguely linked to fallout from nuclear testing. This is another recurrent Dickian trope, the after-effects of all the atmospheric explosions in the fifties and sixties. At the same time, the first human simulacra are being perfected (we would nowadays call them androids).

So, utterly different territory from The Man in the High Castle. Here at one point the narrator decides he must be a simulacrum, and as he appears to collapse into mental illness himself as the story develops, it seems that the woman to whom he is attracted is also one.

We are in Frankenstein territory here, but with a twentieth century twist: is life being created when a simulacrum is built and then programmed with detailed memories of its actual human forbear? Does it have rights? Is it human? What sort of relationship can it have to our world, if it is out of its own time, and what responsibilities do its manufacturers or creators have? Once again, we are seeing what good literature and good science fiction can do: make us pause and reflect on our own world. We can also see the origins of a more famous Dick novel in which simulacra feature more dominantly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became the film Blade Runner. Even the main female character has the same name…

Can one have sex with an android? Can a human be in love with an android? Here are questions which we may be considering in our own world in the not too distant future. And if a person suffers from a personality disorder which makes their behaviour and reactions resemble those of an android, where on earth are we then? Dick is most definitely on the level of ordinary people and their lives and feelings in this novel, which eventually seems to resolves itself into an unrequited love story, and a very sad one at that.

It is rather rambling and shapeless at times, as his narrator disintegrates mentally, and even so it does become quite a gripping story as we want his love to be returned. Dick presents psychosis quite clearly, along with other more common human emotions and feelings, and as I approached the end of the novel, I could see that the next one in the timeline, Martian Time-Slip, which also deals with a range of mentally disturbed states, flows out of this one, as does the treatment of such disorders with the use of hallucinogenic drugs – much explored in the nineteen-sixties – and this leads us on to the astonishing Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Because I experienced the novel working effectively on a human level, (and I think that this is part of the unrecognised brilliance of Dick), I found the ending of the novel very sad and very moving. I also have to recognise that there were rather too many loose ends left unsorted, though…

August favourites #29: SF writer

Somewhere there had to be a space for my all-time favourite science-fiction writer, Philip K Dick. I think I have managed to collect all of his published works but cannot be sure: I need to check this one day. A troubled and tormented mind, with a brilliant imagination, an astonishing range of ideas and a gift for putting the little man, the ordinary person, at the heart of so many of his novels and stories. Picking his best novel is pretty difficult: I hesitate between The Man in the High Castle, an alternative universe plot where the Axis powers won the Second World War and German and Japan occupied the United States between them; a writer in that world imagines an alternative universe in which the Allies won… do you have a headache yet? – and Ubik, which is almost impossible to summarise, except that Ubik is a magic panacaea for almost all ills. Then there is Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? which became the stunning film Blade Runner… In the end I cannot choose from all the literally dozens of novels and stories; I could make a list of the not so good ones, but that’s not what this series is about. So let’s just have Philip Dick as my favourite science fiction writer.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

From page to screen

I suppose I’ve always been a purist when it comes to adapting a novel for television or the cinema: a book is a book for a reason, and converting it into something else – a play, a film, a TV series – always loses something. However, there are also times when something is gained…

Other forms (I’ll write more fully about significant form in a future post) add a visual element to something that was originally written to appear in print. It’s important to understand how it replaces a space that existed for the imagination to work in when we are reading: we visualise characters and places as we read, often working from our stock of memories of all the people we have ever met and the places we have been to. Thus, when we see a film after having read the book, we may feel that the casting or setting jars with what our imagination had created for us originally. Equally, if we watch a film or television adaptation first and then go on to read the book, our imagination may well be constrained by what we have seen. I do think that it’s important to allow free rein to the imagination, especially in a child’s formative years: if it’s fully developed, it will always be there; it’s a valuable and necessary part of us in so many ways.

Although adaptations add visual elements (which are often powerful and moving), they usually also necessitate trimming or cutting of much material that’s in the original text. Logically, if it takes us a total of, say, twelve hours spread over a few days to read a novel, then to turn it into a two-hour film inevitably means losing something, even though the visual elements are clearly a short-cut and substitute for many pages of written description. Even the first TV adaptation of War and Peace in the early 1970s, which lasted twenty hours (!) had to lose a great deal of Tolstoy‘s masterpiece.

So decisions are made, and can outrage us if we have read the book first and we feel that vital elements have been cut, or even worse, changed, for the sake of – what, exactly? a series suited to the US market, perhaps? However, if we come to the text after the film, we may well be enlightened by the richness of what the author offers us in the original.

What gets cut? Characterisation and location are relatively easy to do with visual support; action has the advantage of looking good on screen and keeping the viewer engaged; visual elements can create atmosphere very effectively indeed. What often suffers are the broader themes and ideas which a writer may have spent a good deal of time on: these may be lost, and their absence contribute to a more lightweight and superficial visual experience.

Things are added, too – and these are the kind of things that really jar for me. Examples: the marvellous adaptation of Jane Austen‘s Persuasion which works beautifully until the very end when the hero and heroine were instructed to kiss – for goodness’ sake! for the US audience. The adaptation of Mansfield Park where we were shown Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram in bed committing adultery. Colin Firth’s pool plunge and wet t-shirt moment. I could go on, but you get the idea, I hope. And please don’t tell me it’s all about making something relevant for a modern audience…

I have come across very good translations from book to film. I’ll cite the original TV adaptation of War and Peace again, because it was a masterpiece of its time; the early 1970s adaptation of Sartre‘s Roads to Freedom trilogy which many of my generation remember with great fondness, but which seems to have been lost forever; the TV adaptation of Middlemarch which did its best with a doorstopper of a novel; Volker Schlondorff‘s film of Grass‘ The Tin Drum, which, although only the first half of this epic novel, was stunningly faithful to the original.

Horrors include most adaptations of GCSE set books turned into theatre by companies desperate to milk the school market for cash, such as stage versions of To Kill A Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men.

Lastly, it occurred to me that science fiction comes off pretty well in the cinema, and I’m wondering why – perhaps it’s partly because of its emphasis on spectacle and imagination rather than ideas (gross oversimplification here, I know) but films such as Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey certainly managed to enhance their original novels, and I’m looking forward to seeing the series of The Man in the High Castle at some point…

Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This is the Philip Dick novel that was filmed as Blade Runner. Set in a future dystopian USA where humans are encouraged to migrate to Mars where their living standards are allegedly enhanced by android servants, Dick nudges his reader to think about what exactly it means to be human: what are the differences between humans and androids? Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, paid to ‘retire’ androids who have escaped Mars and infiltrated the deteriorating society back on Earth.

Is empathy with other people a specifically human quality, or would androids eventually be able to develop it? The sands keep shifting – or Dick keeps moving the goalposts, if you like – would you have sex with an android? Somehow, the developing cyberworld makes all these ideas more haunting, more immediate. Dick always had an amazing knack of making you uncomfortable: his future worlds are at once alien from our own, weird, and at the same time uncannily familiar in small ways: you can imagine yourself there without a great leap. I have always loved his concept of ‘kipple’, the mountains of meaningless crap that we accumulate and that can end up taking over our space and our world, collecting dust and mouldering away because we can’t get rid of them.

And the one thing that all humans in this nightmare world crave is a real living creature as a pet… empathy, or what?