Why is Phillip K. Dick so hot in Hollywood?
Well, it’s not because he’s dead. Not just because he was a great writer. And not because he was even weirder than Hollywood.
But Robert Silverberg puts his finger on why Dick, whose stories are the basis for movies such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, is so hot right now.
We live in the twenty-first century. Philip K. Dick helped to invent it.
… and …
And I think we’ll see more and more of Philip K. Dick’s pulp-magazine plot concepts erupting into life all around us as the twenty-first century moves along. Even though his characters would discover, again and again, that the world around them was some sort of cardboard makeshift hiding a deeper level that was likewise unreal, what Dick the writer was actually doing was crying out, Look at all these unscrupulous gadgets: this is what our world really is, and things are only going to get worse. For us moderns it’s Phildickworld all day long. Your computer steals your bank account number and sends it to Nigeria, gaudy advertisements come floating toward us through the air, and now your telephone will flirt with you. It won’t stop there.