Books On Film | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Here's one last adaptation for the classic science fiction lovers.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick was published in 1968. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic earth, most of which has been destroyed by nuclear war. Animals are prized because of their rarity and androids are used as slave workers on the planetary outposts where most humans live. 

Indistinguishable from humans on the outside, many androids try to escape to earth and pass as human. The novel follows a day in the life of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, on the hunt for escaped androids who are distinguished from humans using a polygraph-like empathy test called the Voigt-Kampf.

Ridley Scott adapted the novel into a feature film called Blade Runner in 1982. The film follows the premise of the books and keeps a lot of characters and elements in place, but diverges from the source material quite a bit. So, don't watch the film expecting. However, it's considered a scifi cult classic and was responsible for bringing Philip K. Dick's work to the attention of film studios.

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Books On Film | Minority Report

Here's another one for the science fiction and/or Philip K. Dick lovers.

Minority Report is a short story written in 1956. It tells of a future society where crime is prevented through the visions of three precognitive mutants. A 'Precrime' police division is set up to arrest criminals before crimes are committed. A captain in the division ends up accused of committing a future crime and goes on the run in search of his minority report (predicted alternative path).

In 2002, the book was adapted into a scifi thriller of the same name by Steven Spielberg. The film starred Tom Cruise as the main character and takes quite a few liberties with the source material, including a changed ending. However, the movie is very good.

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Books On Film | We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

One of my favorite science fiction films is Total Recall (1990), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone.  The film is based on a short-story titled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by popular science fiction author Philip K. Dick. 

The story, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1966, is a futuristic tale about Douglas Quail who wishes to visit the Mars colony. Unable to actually afford to he visits REKAL, a company specializing in implanting fake memories as a sort of virtual adventure.

Things turn dangerous for Quail when it turns out his planned fake trip to Mars as a secret agent may have actually already happened in real life.

A second adaptation of he book, Total Recall (2012), was also released starring Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale. Don't watch either movie expecting a page by page adaptation. Both films keep to the main premise of the short-story, but, of course, they make changes the way that movie adaptions seem to do.

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