this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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IIRC he did a short story about a stowaway on a ship that threw off the fuel calculations by adding an extra 75kg of mass, so that they wouldn't reach their destination if the stowaway wasn't thrown out of the airlock. (And the ship couldn't land without the captain, so...) I'm pretty sure that was a movie plot on Netflix, but I'll be damned if I could tell you the title of either.
Philip K. Dick on the other hand... His books have been turned into tons of movies, and since he was asking questions about humanity (versus being harder science fiction), they've aged much better.
I am genuinely curious why Philip Dick is so popular among the film makers. I think I read somewhere that the reason might be because his books are not very detailed, just sketches, which allows movie-makers to bend his stories to their liking. One author I would like to see adapted more, though, is probably Ted Chiang. Love his stories.
I think it's because he had such interesting ideas, things that were extremely original, but also stories and ideas that readers and audiences can relate to in some way. Some of the best science fiction can be very dense; The Diamond Age, or Solaris. Even Roadside Picnic is difficult to film, because how do you visually depict something that's entirely beyond human understanding? (Tarkovsky gave it a helluva try though!) Dick is focusing more on the people; the science fiction setting is a way to get at his ideas about things like what defines humanity.
That's my take anyways.
Right, although I never really enjoyed reading Dick. Just too dry and depressing af. Interesting ideas, though. On the point about difficulty to film, that's where games come in! I've never player Stalker, but I think it is well regarded. Same with the Metro series. And yeah, Tarkovsky is hard to watch. I don't think I finished either Solaris or Stalker