Via Boing Boing this morning, I found an interesting New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik on the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick has long held a certain amount of fame for writing the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based, but in recent years he’s also become increasingly respected by the Keepers of the Literary Standard, as evidenced by the anthology reprints of his much of his oeuvre in the ’90s and the recently published Library of America omnibus edition of his most significant novels. As Gopnik says, “Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fueled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three.”
Now, I must be honest, all I really know of Dick’s work is some of the movies that have been based on it. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner, but I was very young at the time, and it confused the hell out of me. I remember being baffled that it didn’t follow the movie more closely, and Dick’s tendency to invent words caused me no end of frustration. I’ve always intended to give the book another try, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
In any event, Gopnik’s essay — which covers Dick’s fascinating and tumultuous life, and also offers some insightful criticism of his work — is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject. However, the point I really want to address with this entry actually turns on a single paragraph:
Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.
The future will be like the past. That so perfectly encapsulates something I’ve long thought, an idea that, to be honest, has caused my enjoyment of SF to diminish somewhat in recent years. I simply no longer have much faith in any vision of humanity’s future that doesn’t acknowledge how little we’ve actually changed, as a species, since Shakespeare’s time. As much as I love Star Trek, for example, Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of a future where human beings all work together for the betterment of the individual and the species, while inspiring and hopeful and greatly appealing to those with a certain romantic outlook, is also rather, well, silly. It assumes too much about the human potential to rise above our essentially selfish natures. It’s not that I don’t think we have this potential — on the contrary, I think we exercise it every single day — but I do think it’s always checkmated by our potential to be royally shitty to each other. I have no doubt that human beings 300 years from now will still be the same rotten, selfish, pleasure-seeking, noble, generous, wonderful creatures we’ve always been, even if we are travelling at warp speed.
This thought — that the future will basically be more of the same — applies not just to human beings, but to our environments, as well. Part of why I like Blade Runner so much — Dick saw it before his death and he liked it, too, incidentally — is the fact that its production design includes so many old-looking buildings and deliberately retro styles mingled with the futuristic high-tech stuff. I love, for example, how you can see a hulking old ’50s-vintage Cadillac in one of the street scenes, sitting in the midst of all the flying Spinners and future cars. Because that’s how the world really works. Whether because of economics (people can’t afford the latest and greatest) or matters of taste (some people just like old-fashioned styles), people retrofit old things and keep using them, long after more efficient or just plain newer things come along.
Along those lines, I love that Harry Dean Stanton wears a Hawaiian shirt in Alien, and that the shipboard dining room on Firefly is a jumble of mismatched, very 20th-century-looking furniture, centered around a big wooden table. Why wouldn’t you have a wooden table on a spaceship? It’s a humanizing element, a little bit of warmth in the middle of all that metal and plastic.
Turning to the real world, I think maybe part of the reason why there’s so much “where’s my jetpack”-type discussion these days is because, generally speaking, it doesn’t feel like anything has changed over the last few decades. It has, of course, and in some pretty dramatic ways, but they don’t look dramatic. My grandmother, for instance, was old enough to see the invention of air travel, telephones, radio, and television, not to mention the widespread adoption of the automobile. The world she left a few years ago looked extremely different from the one she entered nearly a century before. But for us younger people, the post-Baby Boom generations, things don’t look that much different. The iPod is a very different technology from the Sony Walkman, but the form factor and the function — portable music — is about the same. Cell phones, while amazing from some perspectives, are still just telephones, a very familiar part of life. Flat-screen TVs are still basically just TVs. DVDs and even video-on-demand aren’t the paradigm-changing innovations that video-cassettes were, because we’re already used to the idea of watching movies at home. The “at home” part was the big change.
Granted, you never know what new inventions may be right around the corner, but it seems to me that while the specifics of what we’re doing may change, the general categories of what we’re doing remain the same. We’re not living in domes and wearing tinfoil jumpsuits here in the real 21st Century, and I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine we will be anytime soon, if ever. If anything, the aesthetic trends these days strike me as deliberately old-fashioned; we’re attempting to recreate the look of the past, albeit with some modern convenience built in. So maybe Blade Runner, with its 1940s stylings and noir-ish feel, wasn’t that far off in its predictions after all.
And maybe, if that’s how Philip K. Dick really saw things developing, I ought to give him another look after all.
