From Dreaming to Running: Putting the Android on Screen

Last week I got to attend a very nice panel from DePaul and One Book One Chicago: three scholars discussing aspects of adaptation, with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Scott's Blade Runner as the focus.

Paul Booth (who runs the wonderful DePaul Pop Culture Conference, among other virtues) chaired the panel. These were really engaging, fast-moving talks, with lots of visual aids, so notes below are just sketches and highlights.

Sulzer SF/F- A Scanner Darkly

Why would they ever use any other
cover?

For the March meeting of the Sulzer Science Fiction & Fantasy Bookclub, we discussed Philip K. Dick's “A Scanner Darkly” (1977). Among his more surreal and...pharmacological works, “Scanner” follows an undercover narcotics agent as he attempts to find the source of “Substance D” even as he becomes increasingly addicted to, and damaged by, that very drug.

The group consensus was that this was a tough read. As the book progresses, it's increasingly non-linear and non-rational, with our unreliable narrator(s) having a hard time telling reality apart from hallucination. It's also just kind of grim and sad, and we thought that Dick's closing dedication—a long list of friends who were killed or damaged by drug use—explained much of the tone of the novel.

That said, we had a great discussion. Possible spoilers below!

Silence and Bright Flashing Lights: A Brief Look at Irrationality in Earthsea and VALIS

John Lodder

At least one version of my paper starts with a joke that if Aristotle secretly wrote science fiction and fantasy as well as philosophy, and the scholastics recovered it and translated it along with De Anima and the Nicomachean Ethics and everything else, would we still have the same persistent notion today of humans as the distinctly rational animals despite the ancient and fantastical stories of space aliens and talking dragons, of intelligences human and otherwise?

Weird & Wonderful: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

For the last meeting of City Lit Book's "Weird & Wonderful" book club, we talked about Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

It is definitely a weird and wonderful read. The elephant in the room, of course, is Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of the book as the film "Bladerunner", which is wildly different, and at this point usually what people encounter first--I know it was for me. Personally, going back and reading "Do Androids Dream" the first time was a very strange experience. It's not that "Bladerunner" is a bad adaption, it's that it goes off at such an angle--it's almost like a parallel work.

We had to talk for a bit about those differences, particularly in tone and style (plot deviations are large enough to barely warrant discussion). The book doesn't read as a noir/PI/Dashiel Hammett kind of tale, at all, the dominant feel of the film. And where "Bladerunner" has a visual aesthetic of dark, neon-lit, punky/polluted futurism, "Do Androids Dream" struck us as overwhelming run-down, dusty, brown and grey, and not particularly futuristic (excepting the flying cars).