Posted on 04/12/2007 10:53:09 AM PDT by pjd
Thanks. I have often cited this story in my responses to FR abortion threads. It’s powerful.
Nomating this thread for Best Vanity of the Year
You must read the wrong science fiction authors. Most I’m familiar with are libertarian, some are quite apolitical.
I used to be a HUGE Philip K. Dick fan back in the 80’s. I read everything that he wrote that I could get my hands on. It is interesting to see that Hollywood is now making film after film based upon his novels and short stories. Except that Hollywood rarely gets or trys to make the point his stories were trying to make. They warp most of them into something different than what was intended by Dick.
Try reading the Star Faction by Ken MacLeod and the other books in the series. Good Sci Fi with great political speculations to boot.
I’m a huge PKD fan and love McLeod also so maybe others will too?
I bought the Philip K Dick Reader which has this story. He also hates “robots” as evident in “Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep (novel), which was the bases for “Blade Runner” and the short-story “To Serve a Master”.
“Second Variety” - Movie Screamers
“The Minority Report” - Movie Minority Report.
“For wholesale you can Remember it” - Movie Total Recall.
Yeah, I’ve read the story. It’s a good one. It’s also in The Eye of The Sibyl and Other Classic Stories (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 5). PKD was an incredible genius.
regards,
anti-abortion ping to Narses.
Would you please ping you anti-abortion ping list here?
Thanks.
I agree.
BTW, I can never remember whether the noun is spelled Nomato or Nomatoe. ;)
Singer from Princeton U. has argued on behalf of mothers being able to decide whether to abort their children for up to 3 weeks after birth.
In England, a woman cannot be charged with homicide for killing her children within their first year after birth. She can only be charged with manslaughter because she isn’t fully responsible because of all the difficulties surrounding birth, motherhood, etc. How that changes the nature of a particularly heinous crime such that the English adopt it into their legal code is answered by the logical extension of devaluing life.
oh yes, I tell people about this story all the time. many times when I see pro-abortion ladies on TV I see his character who regrets not having a “trophy” for the mantle place.
Philip K. Dick, the greatest American writer of the 20th century. Most important too.
I’ve read about 5 or 6 Phillip K. Dick novels and I loved every one. He put a lot of thought into it.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is actually very funny satire of all the weird little cults prominent in 1960’s CA.
The best adaptation of this story is not Blade Runner but Network. Howard Beal’s “humanoids” are Philip K. Dick’s androids.
Yes. I know he was way into drugs. That is also why he knew what a waste of life they were and why he wrote very strongly against them.
He talks about this very stratghtforwardly in the afterword of A Scanner Darkly.
One of the things it could have been influenced by was the death of his twin sister at birth.
I’m not sure he hated androids, the big quandry of “Sheep” was what makes humans human and how we destroy our innate humanity, which was a recurring theme in his books. As of Scanner Darkly (IMHO the most true adaptation of one of his stories yet) he became the most filmed author out there, most of the movies made from his stories are good though they also tend to miss the point (Total Recall is a good example of that, fun movie, but completely missed the core of the story).
I think Golden Man was inspired (and I think this is explained in the notes at the end of the eponymous story collection) because editors of SF magazines at the time had a rule that mutants had to be portrayed as wise and all knowing and that all mutation was for the betterment of mankind because they were a mutant that had survived mother nature’s test and PKD could envision a situation or a mutation that was survivable and even able to spread it’s DNA but not be intellectually superior like the SF editors demanded.
The Golden Man is a beautiful idiot. Women find him sexually irresistible because of his mutation and he is difficult to catch because his pregog ability but he only really lives to breed indiscriminately and other then procreation, produces does little else.
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