1982 – Do Androids Dream?
I’m not sure if I understand exactly where the borderline is to be found between fantasy and science fiction. At the extremes, they are quite clearly concerned with very different elements of what is described as ‘speculative fiction’. A great deal of fantasy uses magic and other supernatural practices, with the characters living in a universe unlike our own (even if it is accessible through a magic portal), even though the stories often draw on familiar myths and legends. In contrast, science fiction relies on a technological imagination, with advanced science, space exploration, time travel and parallel universes, all addressing the possibilities of extraordinary devices and engineering marvels. However, the differences can become fuzzy as advanced technologies and supernatural abilities often begin to overlap.
At heart, I prefer fantasy. Perhaps this is because a lot of the magic is often rather tangential, and the real stories are close to ‘this world’ fiction: they draw on many of the same issues to do with love, friendship, misunderstandings, heroism, and fear. Science fiction places more emphasis on exploring the nature and consequences of possible and innovative technological developments, even if they appear wildly unlikely. However, much science fiction explores the familiar world of people, relationships, and human fallibility, too. The fact of the matter is that I enjoy stories that entertain, that tug at my sympathies, that involve me, and that are credible enough to draw me in. Yes, I do enjoy fantasy, but SF certainly has its place.
Having said this, my point is that sometimes the borderline between the two becomes hard to sustain. Among SF writers whose work I have read more recently, one writer manages to include several elements of fantasy too. The author is Philip K (for Kindred) Dick. If his books explore alternate realities and AI, they also take place in almost familiar worlds, and force us to think about what it is to be human, the nature of reality, and identity. Philip Dick encourages us to consider philosophical issues as much as consider the consequences of the next steps in scientific development, and at the same time he often weaves in some supernatural abilities to keep us on our toes!
Like many others, I first met Philip Dick’s work through cinema. Two short stories were the inspiration for two movies that were, both at the time and still today, imaginatively stunning, while providing the basis for gripping adventures.
The first was Blade Runner, a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Harrison Ford as Rick Dekard, a replicant hunter. Based on Dick’s 1968 story, the setting is a dystopian Los Angeles, set in 2019, a dark, violent, technologically advanced city, even more divided and diverse than it was back when Scott was filming. Today Blade Runner reminds me of the fate of Orwell’s 1984, in that the Los Angeles Dick described turned out to bear little resemblance to the LA of 2019, or of today. It doesn’t matter, as ignoring the challenges of imagining the future, the central focus of the film was on AI and robots.
In the story, replicants are ‘bioengineered humanoids’, an advanced form of robot designed to work in space colonies. However, some escape and come to the Earth, where they create mayhem. Dekard’s job, as a ‘blade runner’, is to find and eliminate them (in the film his task is described as ‘retiring’ them). How are they identified.? In an echo of the famous Turing Test, blade runners use the Voight-Kampff test, which is designed to distinguish replicants from humans based on their emotional responses to questions. One memorable scene is when Dekard administers the test to Rachael, the assistant to the CEO of the company that makes the replicants. It is an important and absorbing moment, which we return to when Rachael must confront her real identity later in the story. As with any really excellent film, you know even that won’t be the end of her story – nor will I tell you what it is. Watch the film!
Ridley Scott gets you hooked in, and much of the rest of the film is high powered and violent action. However, Philip Dick’s intent isn’t forgotten. The borderline between replicant and human is increasingly unclear, and we are forced to question what we mean by human and non-human. In case we hadn’t got the point, during the film we learn that many replicants only have a four-year lifespan, nicely counterposed with one human character in the film who has the ‘Methuselah Syndrome’, a genetic premature ageing disorder which is about to cut his life short. By the end of the film, when Dekard has completed his mission, we are still left wondering if the next generation of replicants will live longer, even forever. How close are they to us? The firm was based on Dick’s novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Published in 1968, it was a cult classic, but became widely read with the film’s release. Back then, if you were suffering from doubt as a writer and anxious to have people reading your books, all you had to do was to get Harrison Ford to act in a film version of your story!
The other movie based on a Philip Dick novel was ‘Minority Report’, in this case the film has the same title as the original story. Published in 1956, this time Philip Dick had the good sense to set his story well into the future, in Washington in 2054. Looking ahead, the story centres around a police department whose role it is to capture murderers before they kill. To do this, the department uses three ‘precogs’, clairvoyant humans able to visualize details of an impending homicide. The Precogs float, drugged, in a pool, deprived of any external stimulation while their thoughts are projected onscreen and stored in a database. Would-be killers are immediately imprisoned. How very thoughtful! However, there’s one challenge. Although the PreCrime department has eliminated nearly all premeditated murders, spontaneous killings, ‘crimes of passion’, leave almost no time before the murder takes place leaving the police with extremely limited time window to intercept the killer.
Once again, the author and the film maker latch on to some troubling and intriguing issues. In this story, the concern is not about humans versus non-humans, but the nature of individual identity. We get a foretaste of this early in the film when the Chief of PreCrime (played by matinee idol Tom Cruise) is walking down a street. As he looks ahead, the billboards alongside the road speak to him, advertising clothes he might like, and reminding him of previous purchases he had made. It’s slightly uncanny, and we learn this is done using an iris recognition technology, operated by cameras installed within the advertisement boards. The film was made in 2002, when iris recognition technology was in its infancy. To find it in the film was a nice use of technological innovation. Later in the story, Tom Cruise needs to carry around a pair of human eyes to use to gain access to some key facilities (with the result he/we start worrying that they might be slowly deteriorating!).
Minority Report certainly blurred the lines between traditional fantasy and science fiction. Iris recognition technology and talking advertisements sit alongside clairvoyants able to anticipate the future. True to Philip Dick’s fascination with philosophical issues, towards the end of the film one of the clairvoyants is posed with a dilemma. He knows what is going to happen and could choose to prevent it. Can a clairvoyant actually change the future, or only know it? I won’t spoil the film by telling you what happens. Like Blade Runner, there is a lot of violence on screen, but, despite this, if you haven’t seen it, please watch it!
What is it about books and films like these that make them so compelling? Without doubt, both films are thrillers, with fast action, dramatic events, and mysteries to be solved. They are examples of Hollywood filmmaking at its best, combining professional and skilled actors, tightly written scripts, and brilliant cinematography. They draw you in. The books do the same, but once you have seen the film versions (albeit somewhat loosely adapted), the imagery of the film permeates the experience of reading the book. Harrison Ford is Dekard, and Tom Cruise is Chief John Anderton. It’s the reason I prefer to read books first, as otherwise I can’t live in the world of the story following my own imagination: it’s been filled with images of people and places. I am hoping to watch Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy one day, but I have already read all the ‘Grishaverse’ novels. Thank goodness, I tell myself. I decided to sample the first episode of Shadow and Bone, and discovered elements of some related series, especially Six of Crows, kept popping up. At first, I was frustrated, and then calmed down and realised it might help: when I do watch the seasons on television, they will be sufficiently different to be like an alternative version of a story I already know!
However, there’s more to this. Both Minority Report and Blade Runner play on the concept of something that is more than human yet still human, a paradox if you like, but also an idea that is tantalising. A good example is seeing Rachael played by Sean Young. Reading she is a ‘bioengineered humanoid’ is one thing but seeing her in the film is quite different. You watch Sean Young and keep asking yourself, “Is she ‘real’?” It makes the confrontation between what you believe about people and about robots far more open to question, as well as providing a key element of uncertainty at the end of the film: rather more compelling than Harrison Ford’s athleticism! That same question has been at the core of some other very successful movies, including ‘I, Robot’, ‘Ex Machina’, and ‘AI, Artificial Intelligence’.
The three precogs in Minority Report are equally fascinating. If some people can ‘see’ the future, why can’t we? To add to the allure of this special capability, Agatha, the precog leader, is both beautiful and somewhat ethereal. It’s a familiar cinema trope, this attractive person with extraordinary powers, and Agatha, as played by Samantha Morton, manages to be both unlike us and like us, glamorous, fascinating, yet so close to how we might be. As Scott Ridley had done in Blade Runner, once again in his career Steven Spielberg manages to make something that is magical (as well as thrilling, and all that other stuff!). People who are like us but not like us has been a theme in his films over the years, reaching back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and ET the Extra Terrestrial, (both of which received far more award nominations and popular recognition than Minority Report).
If we step away from these books and films, the best of SF and fantasy always do far more than simply entertain. They prod us into thinking, into considering tricky and sometimes impossible questions, increasingly pertinent as we confront scientific and technological developments that make us question what we mean by intelligence, consciousness, and our emotions. Just bundles of connections and clever software? If that was Rachael, can we be sure we’re not the same? Research shows us responding to events before we know we’re doing so (even if it is only a few micro-seconds). Perhaps pre-cognition isn’t impossible?
All this reflection was taking place on a wet, cold, and windy day in Bendigo, at the end of what is said to be the coldest week of the year in Australia. I had two books competing for my attention. The first was a zany, erudite, completely improbable murder mystery, Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler. The two main characters, Arthur Bryant and John May, are elderly (certainly by the time of this, the fourth book in the series), working in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. It suits their peculiar approach, working alongside a collection of similarly odd staff. To add to the strange character of the novel, the murders are unusual, to say the least, this one using the ‘locked room’ model (people being killed without any way in which an assailant could have entered the premises, but with all those present apparently blameless). It is funny, and a suitable challenge for me. I’ll fail. As usual, I won’t work out how it was done or the identity of the murderer before I get to the end of novel (and I didn’t).
Alternatively, I had a new fantasy book, and author, to try. Susan Dennard has written several books in two series, and A Dawn Most Wicked is a prequel to her Something Strange and Deadly series. I haven’t started this one yet, but if promises to involve witches, ghosts and other ethereal spirits, with the hero and heroine assisted by what are described as an ‘outcast supernatural defense force, called Spirit-Hunters.’ If Fowler writes about humans, albeit at the weird end of the spectrum, Dennard leaves that stuff way behind in her fantasy world. Can’t wait to get into it!
What’s the attraction in either book? In the case of a murder mystery, most of the books in this genre are about identifiable and comprehendible people, and the challenge is to uncover motives, actions and complexities. Good murder mysteries are puzzles, although, if I am honest, the best ones also have romance running alongside all the detective work! The Ten Second Staircase shares some similarity with Minority Report. However, it isn’t SF, and almost all that takes place is familiar, even if the two leading detectives combine an absurd amount of largely irrelevant knowledge in their haphazard way to the truth. No precogs in London, yet the story was teetering on the edge of adding something just outside of reality, but, as I read on, the complicated and bizarre events did make sense in ‘our world’ terms.
Fair enough. Mind stretching, entertaining, and ultimately a story with a conclusion. Why is it I like fantasy just as much as detective novels? They seem so very different in almost every way you can imagine. Fantasy shares with SF the delight of encountering a world fundamentally different from our own. To read A Dawn Most Wicked is to come closer to Blade Runner territory. If I like the puzzles of a murder investigation, I revel in the lives of vampires, wizards, and all the other strange beings who live in another world. The contrast between the two types of fiction is immense, and yet, oddly enough, good fantasy often includes various puzzles, including how to deal with the familiar issues of murder, thieving, duplicity, and outright deception. Same stuff, different universes, and, yes, with romance added in both cases. I should admit I seem to end up reading many series aimed at teenagers, where love and desire, often unrequited, take up quite a lot of space – in the books, I mean!
Here I am, with two books to read. Both will offer me escape, a time to live in another world. One will make sense in terms of my experience; the other will require me to set aside what I know and embrace the impossible. Both will entertain me. If I had a third book waiting, a good alternative would be a science fiction story. In that genre I usually find myself in one of two alternative settings. One is like the world I know already, just changed by new areas of science and technology, allowing people to undertake previously impossible tasks using ‘outlandish’ inventions and systems. The other setting is more like a philosopher’s construct, pushing me hard to think about things I’ve taken for granted by proposing creatures, activities and systems that turn notions of alive, thinking and emotion on their head.
It’s heading towards the evening. Time to make a choice. Time to confess that I will go for the fantasy and read the murder mystery tomorrow. Time to confess that I will wait before searching out my next SF book. I suppose I am getting older, or more unwilling to spend time battling too many philosophical conundrums. Do androids dream? Actually, that wasn’t the whole of Philip Dick’s question: do androids dream and if they do, do they dream of electric sheep? There’s a brain twister to consider alongside my evening reading delight!
