I started Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 20+ years ago and put it down because it just didn't hold much interest for me. Sci-fi is just not my thing and Dick's short story was sci-fi to me. The movie based on this short story, Blade Runner, had the same impact on me the first time I saw it. I dismissed it as typical sci-fi fare and forgot about it. The second time I saw the film was a totally different experience. I've blogged about that before. The film was OK the first time, off-the-charts-totally-WOW the second and every other time since. I was hoping for that same kind of transformation when I picked up the book again a week ago. It should be noted that it doesn't normally take me a week to read a 105-page short story (6 days ... tops) but I wanted to be thorough. What made the movie great was the detective story. In the film, Rick Deckard is a conflicted, hard-boiled, down-on-his-luck, in-over-his-head character that muddles through as best he can. In the book, he is just a fraction of that. He has a wife, Iran, in the book (That's her in the QOTD) and a love/hate relationship with Rachael Rosen. I couldn't quite sort out how Deckard really felt about either of them. Most of the animals on Earth have died in the war or in the radioactive dust that has consumed the planet in the aftermath. The film has the look of that but doesn't really explain it. Deckard has an obsession with "live" animals and a desire to get one in order to prove to himself that he is human. It is thought that androids can't give animals love and the animals die. The book never really gets out of sci-fi. I prefer the film. As for whether Deckard, himself, is an android/replicant ... beats me.
107 days until football season ...
Quote of the Day
She stayed with him for a while and then returned to the kitchen and sat down. Next to her on the table, the electric toad was moving in its box. What did it eat? False flies, she decided.
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Blog of the day here.
Quote from said blog: "Today those concerns have to a large extent abated, and instead Blade Runner now resonates with themes of construction of identity and how much of our own identity we own."
I liked the movie better than the book also. Not that I didn't like the book, I did. I think it's that the visuals of the movie really matched what I had imagined about that world while reading the book. That happens so rarely for me.
Maybe it's the books I choose to read but I find the movies quite often are the equal of or even superior to the book they're based on but I know I'm in the minority on that one.