Master of Sci-Fi: 10 Ways Philip K. Dick Influenced Sci-Fi Movies & TV

If you’ve watched a science fiction film or television series in the last 50 years, chances are you’ve encountered something based on the works of Philip K. Dick. With 44 published novels and 121 short stories from the early ’50s until the early ’80s, his themes of alternate realities, authoritarian governments, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence have been widely regarded as substantially ahead of their time and incredibly important to the sci-fi genre.

Many of his works are known because they were turned into films or series, such as Blade Runner and The Man In The High Castle, but many of his concepts are found throughout television and cinema. He often explored bleak views of the future, tainted by technological obsession, where reality was shaped by an unseen and unchecked global regime which sought only to oppress. Sounds an awful lot like The Matrix and Terminator, right? Read on for 10 ways that Philip K. Dick influenced sci-fi movies and TV.

10 LIFE IS A SIMULATION

All the way back in 1957, Philip K. Dick wrote a little book called Eye in the Sky, which postulated that life was a simulation, and that the weak could be exploited by the powerful for dominance. The world being nothing more than a VR experience has been explored several times in film and television.

Series like Black Mirror have had episodes dealing with the concept, and the entire Matrix trilogy owes its sprawling storyline about humans being in a simulation for the benefit of machines to Dick’s musings on the matter. The doleful portrait of a sad future where humankind’s only respite is through a simulation is a timeless archetype that Dick used well before anyone else.

9 EXISTENTIALISM AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

From Blade Runner to A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick explored the concept of existentialism as it pertains to the meaning of life. In Blade Runner, his synthetic humanoids, Replicants, were the impetus of such ruminations, because they desired more life which their human counterparts seemed to take for granted. The relationship between the renegade robots and paranoid humans sparked a dialogue centered on what about life makes it worth killing over.

In A Scanner Darkly, which is a film all about hidden identities and the sharing of worlds, Dick draws on European psychologists interested in existentialism that postulated there were two worlds for each person, the idios kosmos (the private world) and the koinos kosmos (the public world). Most of Dick’s characters vacillate between the two.

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8 DYSTOPIAN DREAD

There is a nihilistic, dystopian dread that weaves its way through several of Dick’s work. Blade Runner, I, Robot, and Minority Report are some of the most recognizable for the theme, but it’s something that he brought to the attention of modern sci-fi in a way that it had never been seen before.

Most science-fiction television series and films at the time Dick was first writing (the ’50s and ’60s) were sterilized and effervescent, depicting a bucolic future for humankind that was something to look forward to, like Lost in Space or The Jetsons. But Dick proposed the future would be dark, gritty, and not always comfortable.

7 REALISM

Along with European psychologists, Dick was heavily influenced by French realist writers of the 17th century, which meant that he favored the “slice of life” form of storytelling. This was a far cry from the grandiose themes the sci-fi genre had going for it when he was writing, such as the epic space operas of Krull and Star Wars.

A series like The Man In the High Castle (which was based off of the only novel by Dick to win a Hugo Award) is an example at looking at life in the US as it exists, with one small difference; Hitler won, and controls the US with the Axis powers.

6 MULTIPLICATIVE REALITIES

If you’ve seen Inception or 12 Monkeys, chances are you’ve tried to wrap your noodle around the multiplicative realities shown in those films. Though they deal with different plots (one deals with time travel, another with dreams), their concepts remain the same; endless possibilities and realities occur simultaneously with each choice made.

In 12 Monkeys, which director Terry Gilliam admitted to being inspired in part by Dick’s writings, it deals with two men (Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis) that have to learn to deal with the futility of existence, which in the end only serves to drive them to madness, much like trying to figure out the meaning of the ending to Inception. Where one reality is an option, every other reality is an option.

5 TIME TRAVEL AND ITS REPERCUSSIONS

Dick’s sci-fi writings were often considered bleak, despondent, and unappealing to those that wanted more light-hearted fare. However, his prose had a purpose – it probed the deepest insecurities of humankind and brought them to the forefront to be seriously considered and analyzed.

A great example of this is Dick’s exploration of time-travel. He felt the technology, if it were ever developed, would result in humankind being chained to the mistakes of its past, not improve its future. This concept appears to be used the best in the Terminator franchise, where no matter what any of the antagonists seem to do, time travel is never the answer, and often ensures the same horrible outcome will occur that it’s meant to prevent.

4 MISTRUST OF TECHNOLOGY

With books like “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” which inspired Total Recall and Johnny Mnemonic, Dick expanded his construct of technological unrest among humankind. Dick was apprehensive of a future with advanced technology, not because of what it would do to us, but what we would do with it.

In the ’80s film Videodrome, the president of a cable company becomes obsessed with graphic videos of torture, which he believes to be fake but are all too real, demonstrating the hold technology can have over humans anxious for their next adrenaline rush.

3 VIRTUAL REALITY

If you’ve ever seen films like Strange Days, eXistenZ, or Brainstorm, you’re acquainted with the concept of the virtual reality they include, as well as its addictive nature. All of the films include some sort of a simulation of someone else’s thoughts and experiences that can be experienced by a VR user, or in a video game.

Even Star Trek: The Next Generation featured an episode where the entire crew of the USS Enterprise became addicted to a VR game, to the point where violence ensued if anyone tried to stop them from playing it. The lengths humans will go to experience their next technological high made Dick very uneasy.

2 THE WORLD YOU KNOW IS AN ILLUSION

Many of Dick’s works were surrealist fantasies, which featured the life of an antagonist slowly devolving as they discover the world they thought they knew is nothing but a construct. Their world may in fact be an illusion created by beings more powerful than they can comprehend.

If you watch movies like The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey stars as an ordinary average joe who slowly begins to realize his way of life is nothing but a reality show, you’ll start to see the PKD influence. He liked to make readers wonder if the love their spouse had for them, or the bond they felt between their neighbors, was even real, which became more upsetting the more they thought about it.

1 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It goes without saying that one of the biggest contributions Dick made to sci-fi was anything pertaining to artificial intelligence, explored in all its nebulous and harrowing glory. Dick mistrusted the bonding of man and machine, but used the concept to ask the question, “What does it mean to be authentically human?”

Recently with series like Westworld, and films such as I, Robot and Blade Runner, the reality of artificial intelligence is a matter of perception. Does “I think, therefore I am” apply to robots as well as humans? And if humans make robots in their image, to be more human than human, can they deny them the right to exist, when often times they exhibit behavior that is more human than human?

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