: Brian J. Robb
: Counterfeit Worlds The Cinematic Universes of Philip K. Dick
: Polaris
: 9781915359049
: 1
: CHF 7.30
:
: Film: Allgemeines, Nachschlagewerke
: English
: 416
: Wasserzeichen
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: ePUB
Philip K. Dick, the visionary author behind Blade Runner, is the most adapted science fiction writer in cinema history. Though he struggled to make a living during his lifetime, his work has since served as a deep seam of ideas to be mined by filmmakers such as Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Speilberg, John Woo and Richard Linklater, resulting in some of the most successful and influential SF movies of all time. For the still-unequalled future world of Blade Runner to the mind-bending A Scanner Darkly, via the blockbusting action/adventure of Total Recall, Paycheck and Minority Report - not to mention the debt of gratitude films like The Matrix and The Truman Show owe to his work - the legacy of Philip K. Dick has revolutionised Hollywood. Illustrated with rare photos, Counterfeit Worlds is the first book to trace the history of Philip K. Dick screen adaptations, both in cinema and on television.

Brian J. Robb is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer. He has also written on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Laurel and Hardy and the Star Wars movies and he won the Tolkien Society Award for his book Middle-earth Envisioned. He is a founding editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin website and lives near Edinburgh.

INTRODUCTION

THE WORLDS DICK MADE

‘In my stories and novels, I often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person, while the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones …’

Philip K. Dick, ‘If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’, 1977 speech delivered at the Metz Festival, France

The hottest writer in Hollywood today has been dead for over 40 years. Philip K. Dick created the future in which we now live. At the very least, he was writing about it long before it ever took shape. That foresight makes this acclaimed writer of the American pulp SF era of the 1950s and 1960s a kind of Precog – a ‘precognitive’ who, like the characters in the filmMinority Report (based on a Dick short story), can somehow discern the future … Now, movies and TV shows based on ideas from his short stories and novels feed our heads, as the world around us becomes ever more like those counterfeit worlds he wrote of in his fiction.

Art Spiegelman, acclaimed writer/illustrator of the holocaust graphic novelMaus said of Dick: ‘What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.’ Fellow SF author Ursula K. LeGuin saw Dick as ‘our own homegrown Borges’, while 1960s counter-culture guru Timothy Leary called him ‘a major 21st-century writer, an influential “fictional philosopher” of the quantum age.’ Dick’s work appealed across a broad spectrum of readers, from philosophers and other writers and thinkers, to SF fans and scientists, to moviemakers worldwide.

If science fiction can be defined as the literature of ideas, then the work of Philip K. Dick is science fiction par excellence as it contains more off-the-wall ideas per page than that of most other writers. Dick returned obsessively to a set of key themes, with the nature of reality and what it means to be human his two main philosophical concerns. He wrapped these often deep-and-meaningful cognitions in all-out action-packed pulp storylines, which makes his work attractive to Hollywood (and beyond).

It is this fertile feeding ground for high concept notions that has made Dick’s considerable volume of work the prime source for many of the biggest-grossing science fiction movies of the past 40 years. Dire