Philip K. Dick is a giant of the science fiction world. His short, prolific career produced 44 novels and 121 short stories, of which 13 have been made into films. Dick’s works tackles what it means to be human, perhaps one reason for the popularity of his works, which has only continued to expand since his death in 1982. The latest venture into Dick’s world of alien wars, space travel, alternate histories, and metaphysical realms, comes from Channel 4’s Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, where each episode is an adaptation of a short story or novel. It opens with ‘The Hood Maker’, originally a short story published in Imagination Science Fiction in 1955. This episode stars Holliday Grainger (most recently seen in the BBC’s adaptation of crime series Strike) and Richard Madden (of Game of Thrones’ fame) as the two leads, Honor and Agent Ross, respectively.
It is a post-apocalyptic world in which the nation is divided between the ‘normals’ and human ‘teeps’ (telepathic byproducts of medical experiments). New legislation has been passed allowing law enforcement to use teeps on unwilling normals, elevating the teeps’ current status living in slums around the dilapidated city, but causing riots among those not willing to surrender the privacy of their minds. Agent Ross and teep Honor are paired to source the mysterious ‘Hood Maker’, who is distributing wax linen ‘hoods’ to block the telepathic signals allowing teeps to read minds.
Dick’s original story brazenly approached the themes of a surveillant state, something he wrote prolifically about due to a personal paranoia induced by a lifetime of amphetamine abuse. Despite spending most of his life in relative poverty and struggling with serious drug addiction, his body of work is astounding and what he has achieved posthumously is something quite rare. True ‘Dickheads’ will call him the godfather of science fiction, others may (and often do) criticise his clunky prose, but his ideas have been brought to our screens over and over again, indicating a certain morbid fascination with his work.
Tackling issues of what it truly means to be human in a posthuman reality is Blade Runner (1982), the first and most famous of these adaptations. However, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams has brought Dick’s other perfectly compact short stories into a new, clear focus. The societal anxieties that Dick conveyed in his writing in the 1950s through to the 1980s prompt us to question whether we have really demystified any of our Cold War, technophobic, right wing, latent fears. Are we in fact continuing blindly adhering to none of the warning signs, into the abyss of our Dick-ian dystopia?
Animals have been successfully cloned (Dick’s story ‘The Second Variety’), robots have been created (Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep?); computers used to note our every thought and movement can fit in our hands essentially making us trackable at all times (‘Minority Report’); the first person to live to 1000 has supposedly already been born (What The Dead Men Say); and virtual realities are all around us (‘The Empathy Box’). All these stories are becoming our reality and yet we still want to watch a show about how it might get worse? Perhaps it is in our nature to identify the worst possible outcome in order to assuage our guilt and know what not to do. In this way, we can say with confidence: at least it is not as bad as that.
It was The Economist’s journalist William Gibson who said: “the future is here – it is just not very evenly distributed.” Dick presents this disparity of modernisation throughout his stories. The rich and the poor are separated by high-rises, medical access, or interplanetary access. So what is so different between our current reality and the reality of speculative fiction? You could argue that to live forever would be horrible, that cloning animals is of no use to you and robots won’t enter your home in your lifetime. But what happens when electricity reaches every corner of the earth and the population has grown to such an extent that there is nowhere left to go but up or out? The reason Dick’s stories are of such prominence and relevance to us today, the reason they are still being translated into multiple medias and reaching greater audiences, is because we are starting to live them. It is an eerie truth but time is catching up with us.
It is a popular science fiction trope to see our own creation turn on us; from robots to computers, Dick and many other writers prioritise the concept of a desolation of our own making. The ultimate example, however, had already arrived by the end of the Second World War and, in Dick’s opinion, nuclear weaponry was the ultimate desolation of our own making. Often his stories begin in a world flattened and destroyed by nuclear weapons, as result of which technology and man have become co-dependent. Without technology the twenty-first-century-world we know would crumble, and even though the teeps and replicants may be imaginary, technology and man are not. So maybe it is as bad as that. Nuclear weapon power play has been relatively dormant since the Cold War when Dick was writing, but now, in a whole new age of North Korea vs USA, Dick has returned to the forefront of our conscience.
Channel 4 has been known to tap into an audience’s thirst for dystopic nuggets of television with the acclaimed Black Mirror (2011-) and Humans (2015-), but Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams arrives with extra baggage. The ability Dick possessed to expose ourselves at our worst while incorporating his own paranoia was, and still is, unique. If you consider Gibson to be correct, then the even distribution of the “future” is just around the corner, and with Dick’s speculations constantly turning into our realities, then the worlds he creates will not just be unfolding on our screens.
You can watch Episode 6 of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams on Sunday 29 October on Channel 4.