Two of my favourite SF authors. I like Heinlein’s adventurous plots, libertarian political speculations, and far-out social speculations, unafraid of confronting taboos. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, often dreamed of paranoid futures – and apparently believed aliens projected ideas into his head. Perhaps a legacy of the drug abuse he wrote about in the chilling semi-autobiographical A Scanner Darkly, which is the latest Dick film adaptation. Dick’s high-tech paranoia has proven popular with film-makers, with themes like appearance vs. reality and the nature of memory. Total Recall, Minority Report, the underrated Paycheck, the classic Blade Runner and several others were all based on Dick’s novels or short stories, with more being made.
Defense Tech’s David Hambling has written a comparison of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Dick’s The Zap Gun. It turns out that the paranoid and deliberately absurd speculations of Dick succeed where the more sober Heinlein fails, in predictive terms. Dick imagines precision-guided, unmanned and non-lethal weapons, and cyber-warfare by hacking and corrupting government files – he even envisages a personal computer. Heinlein’s weapons are unmistakably 1950s and Cold War – tactical nukes and flamethrowers used on civilians in a total war. His jet-pack powered exoskeletons have been researched, but not yet made viable or popular.
I could speculate about the implications of this, but this is already an incredibly geeky post!
Pssh! Not that geeky. Wasn’t it ‘Through A Scanner Darkly’ rather than just ‘A Scanner Darkly’? Ok that was geeky.
Left by Luke on September 2nd, 2006