MattBrady
07-15-2003, 07:21 AM
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<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 22</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<b>Blade Runners and Extraordinary Gentlemen</b>
<I>Rick Deckard kills rogue androids for a living. But what happens when he falls in love with one?
When an ordinary man buys a fake-memory trip to Mars, he finds himself trapped in a web of corporate and government deceit. Did he really travel to Mars -- and if so, what horrible thing did he do there?
In the future, an infallible precognitive crime unit stops crimes before they happen -- but now, the head of the unit is accused of a crime himself. Can he prove his innocence? </I>
You probably recognize these as the plots of three sf/action movies: <I>Blade Runner, Total Recall</I>, and <I>Minority Report</I>. You may also know that they’re all based on stories by Philip K. Dick, the late science fiction writer: <I>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</I>, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” and (surprise) “Minority Report.” Several other films have been made from Dick’s works, including <I>Screamers, Imposter</I>, and the upcoming John Woo/Ben Affleck thriller <I>Paycheck</I>.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Androids.jpg" width="190" height="297" align="right" border="0">Two notes here. First off, with the sole exception of <I>Blade Runner</I> (the most ambitious and successful of the films, commercially and artistically), these are all based on Philip Dick’s short stories -- not his novels. But in his writing, Dick was both more prolific and more highly acclaimed as a novelist. Why? We’ll come back to that momentarily…
Point two: Most of these films -- again, <I>Blade Runner</I> is a partial exception -- are action movies. But Philip K. Dick was not an action writer. His books, both science fiction and mainstream, are exercises in paranoia and reality-shifting, disturbing tales that really get under your skin, dated though many of them are now. They’ve been imitated and used as raw idea-stuff in TV, films, comics, and other prose writings for decades, but there’s an odd sense of the <b>real</b> that rarely comes through in the derived works.
Dick wrote about reality-shifting, about parallel universes, as though he’d really been there and found the whole experience profoundly disturbing. By all accounts, he <b>did</b> believe this, at least on some level. An amazingly prolific writer in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he slowed way down during the ‘70s, spending a disturbing amount of time writing his “Exegesis” -- a huge, detailed account of his bizarre cosmological/theological theories, including what he perceived to be his actual contact with extraterrestrial forces.
Dick never intended the Exegesis to be read, and from the excerpts that have been published, it’s pretty tough going. But Dick never lost his mind, or his talent; during that same period, he wrote some of his most challenging and fascinating works of fiction. In some ways, he gained greater perspective on his work, as seen in this comment from D. Scott Apel’s <I>Philip k. Dick: The Dream Connection</I>. Upon reading the galleys to his novel <I>Vaild</I>, Dick reported:
“I found out I had not written the novel I thought I had. It is a study of a man's passage into acute mental illness, his brief return to sanity, only to pass back into mental illness again, and his courage in facing the fact of his defeat. I thought it had to do with extraterrestrials."
<I>Valis</I> is an unusually personal novel for Dick, but it follows the pattern of many of his other books: Start with an ordinary man and throw a dizzying array of problems, both mundane and surreal, at him until his sense of reality cracks wide open. This basic formula led to such varied, multitextured works as <I>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip</I>, and many others. When the novels worked, the pieces fell together into a disturbing, dizzying whole, held together by invisible strands under the surface. When they didn’t, they still contained shards, bits of narrative, unsettling incidents that stuck with the reader. (<I>The Zap Gun</I> comes to mind.)
But Dick’s short stories -- most of them written early in his career -- are, of necessity, simpler. They tend to take one single idea, often a very clever one, and riff on it in a fairly short space. That makes a PKD short story a weaker, less immersive reading experience than one of his novels -- but a stronger candidate for a movie pitch-meeting, and a perfect skeleton on which to hang an action movie. <I>Total Recall</I> and <I>Minority Report</I> bear little resemblance to the stories they’re based on, but the basic story-hooks remain.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Philip Dick. William Harrison’s original short story, “Roller Ball Murder,” was a fifteen-page meditation on society’s increasing fascination with bloodsports. How do you make an action movie out of it? Easy. Add lots of Rollerball games!
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/alanmoore.jpg" width="190" height="270" align="left" border="0">And it’s happening to Alan Moore, too -- or, more accurately, it’s happening with his work. The film version of <b>From Hell</b> tones down and twists around both the disturbing graphic novel and the historical facts of the Ripper case, but retains the basic spine of the story. In this case, the quick pitch goes something like this: <I>The true story of the Jack the Ripper murders, as investigated by a haunted, clairvoyant detective</I>. But as with the Philip Dick stories, that stripped-down, genre-pegging description gives you very little sense of the graphic novel’s depths.
<b>League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</b> boasts a similarly attractive high concept: The greatest adventurers of the Victorian age band together against a grave threat. (The sequel’s pitch is even better: The League vs. H.G. Wells’s Martians!) But that description gives you no hint of the comic’s many layers: the mysteries of Mina Harker, the tensions within the team, the depravity of Hyde and the Invisible Man. The film is not out yet at this writing, and is rumored to be troubled. But even if it’s successful on its own terms, it won’t be because it captures the disturbing undertones of the original, but because of different, filmic virtues.
Alan Moore is a frighteningly imaginative man -- it’s not surprising that he’s written books that both work on their own terms and contain that seed, that high-concept fodder that Hollywood craves, but he always, <I>always</I> lets go completely when the project is optioned or being produced for film. Depending on his mood, he may dismiss it with a genteel, “movies aren’t really my thing,” or, if a little piqued, explain his dissociation with a “(Name of film project) isn’t <I>my</I> project, and I don’t see it as related to what I did at all,” and he’s off on his next story, epic, or incantation.
Moore’s <b>Lost Girls</b> has a similarly great hook, but it may be just too sexually explicit a work for mainstream film producers to consider adapting. We’ll see, once it’s finished, but it’s highly likely that we’ll never see a 100% faithful adaptation of any of Moore’s work on screen or in any other media, unless <I>he</I> has something to do with which, to this day, he hasn’t shown even the slightest interest.
Philip K. Dick died in 1982. The only film adaptation of his work produced during his lifetime was <I>Blade Runner</I>. Dick didn’t live to see its release, but he was involved with the film’s production and, despite some mixed feelings along the way, he seemed generally happy with the project. Arguably, it’s the only film adaptation that really retained the spirit of his work, if not the specific plot elements. (In some ways, it bears a greater resemblance to his short stories than to the novel it’s adapted from.)
But to Philip Dick, as to Alan Moore, the original work was always his main focus. In <I>Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words</I>, by Gregg Rickman, he tells of being asked to write the novelization of <I>Blade Runner</I> -- essentially, a novel based on the film based on the original novel. (This practice has become more common in recent years.) Dick resisted the idea; he wanted to write a literary, non-science fiction novel based on the life of a friend of his, the late Bishop Pike of California, whom he fictionalized under the name Timothy Archer.
Dick’s agent, Russell Galen, and his editor at Simon & Schuster, David Hartwell -- both very shrewd and cultured men -- compared notes. They knew that an original novel would not sell as well as a novelization of a major film -- and a non-genre novel, especially in those days, would likely sell worse than an all-new Philip Dick science fiction book (which had become rare). They reported this back to him, and he responded:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Trans.jpg" width="190" height="304" align="right" border="0"> “…my agent calls me yesterday and he says, they’ll give you $7,500 for the Timothy Archer literary novel. Or you can make $400,000 doing this novelization based on the screenplay. I says, I won’t do the goddamned novelization. I don’t want the $400,000. I do want to do this novel about Timothy Archer.”
Now, I don’t for a minute begrudge any working writer going for the big money. For most of us -- Philip Dick included -- it isn’t dangled before you every day. And if you can segment out your workload, strike a balance between high-paying work and more serious, personal writing, that’s an ideal existence in many ways. Several current comics writers practice that feat regularly. It’s even possible that, had Dick gone ahead and written the novelization, some people might have read it, remembered his name, and sought out his other works.
But.
<I>The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer</I> is my favorite Philip Dick novel. In it, he pulls off two unusual tricks for him: a first-person narrative and a female protagonist. The prose is very smooth, and psychologically it’s a masterwork. I’ve read it twice now -- not too often, don’t want to ruin it -- and both times, I found myself rushing through pages, wanting to read faster, yet actually <b>afraid</b> that it would end too quickly, almost as though I was picking up and reflecting the anxiety of the characters. Oh, and it’s got a quiet but devastating ending that pulls you abruptly outside the protagonist’s life, casting her actions in a completely different light.
Philip K. Dick wrote <I>The Transmigration of Timothy Archer</I> and then he died. He couldn’t have known it at the time -- he’d already planned another, ambitious sf novel to follow -- but he could not have written both <I>Transmigration</I> and the <I>Blade Runner</I> novelization.
As I said, I’d never advise a working author against making some cash from his work. But while I’m sure Dick would have found something to do with that $400,000, I’m very glad he made the choice he did. Because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have this novel that means so much to me.
And I’m kind of glad Alan Moore isn’t screwing around with <b>From Hell</b> or “LXG” coloring books, either.
**
Bibliography:
D. Scott Apel, ed., PHILIP K. DICK: THE DREAM CONNECTION (The Impermanent Press, 1987, 1999)
Philip K. Dick, IN PURSUIT OF VALIS: SELECTIONS FROM THE EXEGESIS, edited by Lawrence Sutin (Underwood-Miller, 1991)
Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter, eds., WHAT IF OUR WORLD IS THEIR HEAVEN?: THE FINAL CONVERSATIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK (Overlook Press, 2000)
Gregg Rickman, PHILIP K. DICK: IN HIS OWN WORDS, Revised Edition (Fragments West, 1988)
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, coming in August, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image <b>here</b> (http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August) . Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September, likewise previewed at <b>Rocket Comics.net</b> (http://www.rocketcomics.net/profile.html?SKU=12196). More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, <b>here</b> (http://198.65.99.89/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1490&highlight=Stuart+Moore) and <b>here</b> (http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/pulse.cgi?http%3A//www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi%3Fubb%3Dget_topic%26f%3D3 6%26t%3D001073).
See you in two weeks…
<center>A THOUSAND FLOWERS</center><center>Comics, Pop Culture, and the World Outside</center><center>Installment 22</center><center>by Stuart Moore</center>
<b>Blade Runners and Extraordinary Gentlemen</b>
<I>Rick Deckard kills rogue androids for a living. But what happens when he falls in love with one?
When an ordinary man buys a fake-memory trip to Mars, he finds himself trapped in a web of corporate and government deceit. Did he really travel to Mars -- and if so, what horrible thing did he do there?
In the future, an infallible precognitive crime unit stops crimes before they happen -- but now, the head of the unit is accused of a crime himself. Can he prove his innocence? </I>
You probably recognize these as the plots of three sf/action movies: <I>Blade Runner, Total Recall</I>, and <I>Minority Report</I>. You may also know that they’re all based on stories by Philip K. Dick, the late science fiction writer: <I>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</I>, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” and (surprise) “Minority Report.” Several other films have been made from Dick’s works, including <I>Screamers, Imposter</I>, and the upcoming John Woo/Ben Affleck thriller <I>Paycheck</I>.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Androids.jpg" width="190" height="297" align="right" border="0">Two notes here. First off, with the sole exception of <I>Blade Runner</I> (the most ambitious and successful of the films, commercially and artistically), these are all based on Philip Dick’s short stories -- not his novels. But in his writing, Dick was both more prolific and more highly acclaimed as a novelist. Why? We’ll come back to that momentarily…
Point two: Most of these films -- again, <I>Blade Runner</I> is a partial exception -- are action movies. But Philip K. Dick was not an action writer. His books, both science fiction and mainstream, are exercises in paranoia and reality-shifting, disturbing tales that really get under your skin, dated though many of them are now. They’ve been imitated and used as raw idea-stuff in TV, films, comics, and other prose writings for decades, but there’s an odd sense of the <b>real</b> that rarely comes through in the derived works.
Dick wrote about reality-shifting, about parallel universes, as though he’d really been there and found the whole experience profoundly disturbing. By all accounts, he <b>did</b> believe this, at least on some level. An amazingly prolific writer in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he slowed way down during the ‘70s, spending a disturbing amount of time writing his “Exegesis” -- a huge, detailed account of his bizarre cosmological/theological theories, including what he perceived to be his actual contact with extraterrestrial forces.
Dick never intended the Exegesis to be read, and from the excerpts that have been published, it’s pretty tough going. But Dick never lost his mind, or his talent; during that same period, he wrote some of his most challenging and fascinating works of fiction. In some ways, he gained greater perspective on his work, as seen in this comment from D. Scott Apel’s <I>Philip k. Dick: The Dream Connection</I>. Upon reading the galleys to his novel <I>Vaild</I>, Dick reported:
“I found out I had not written the novel I thought I had. It is a study of a man's passage into acute mental illness, his brief return to sanity, only to pass back into mental illness again, and his courage in facing the fact of his defeat. I thought it had to do with extraterrestrials."
<I>Valis</I> is an unusually personal novel for Dick, but it follows the pattern of many of his other books: Start with an ordinary man and throw a dizzying array of problems, both mundane and surreal, at him until his sense of reality cracks wide open. This basic formula led to such varied, multitextured works as <I>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip</I>, and many others. When the novels worked, the pieces fell together into a disturbing, dizzying whole, held together by invisible strands under the surface. When they didn’t, they still contained shards, bits of narrative, unsettling incidents that stuck with the reader. (<I>The Zap Gun</I> comes to mind.)
But Dick’s short stories -- most of them written early in his career -- are, of necessity, simpler. They tend to take one single idea, often a very clever one, and riff on it in a fairly short space. That makes a PKD short story a weaker, less immersive reading experience than one of his novels -- but a stronger candidate for a movie pitch-meeting, and a perfect skeleton on which to hang an action movie. <I>Total Recall</I> and <I>Minority Report</I> bear little resemblance to the stories they’re based on, but the basic story-hooks remain.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to Philip Dick. William Harrison’s original short story, “Roller Ball Murder,” was a fifteen-page meditation on society’s increasing fascination with bloodsports. How do you make an action movie out of it? Easy. Add lots of Rollerball games!
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/alanmoore.jpg" width="190" height="270" align="left" border="0">And it’s happening to Alan Moore, too -- or, more accurately, it’s happening with his work. The film version of <b>From Hell</b> tones down and twists around both the disturbing graphic novel and the historical facts of the Ripper case, but retains the basic spine of the story. In this case, the quick pitch goes something like this: <I>The true story of the Jack the Ripper murders, as investigated by a haunted, clairvoyant detective</I>. But as with the Philip Dick stories, that stripped-down, genre-pegging description gives you very little sense of the graphic novel’s depths.
<b>League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</b> boasts a similarly attractive high concept: The greatest adventurers of the Victorian age band together against a grave threat. (The sequel’s pitch is even better: The League vs. H.G. Wells’s Martians!) But that description gives you no hint of the comic’s many layers: the mysteries of Mina Harker, the tensions within the team, the depravity of Hyde and the Invisible Man. The film is not out yet at this writing, and is rumored to be troubled. But even if it’s successful on its own terms, it won’t be because it captures the disturbing undertones of the original, but because of different, filmic virtues.
Alan Moore is a frighteningly imaginative man -- it’s not surprising that he’s written books that both work on their own terms and contain that seed, that high-concept fodder that Hollywood craves, but he always, <I>always</I> lets go completely when the project is optioned or being produced for film. Depending on his mood, he may dismiss it with a genteel, “movies aren’t really my thing,” or, if a little piqued, explain his dissociation with a “(Name of film project) isn’t <I>my</I> project, and I don’t see it as related to what I did at all,” and he’s off on his next story, epic, or incantation.
Moore’s <b>Lost Girls</b> has a similarly great hook, but it may be just too sexually explicit a work for mainstream film producers to consider adapting. We’ll see, once it’s finished, but it’s highly likely that we’ll never see a 100% faithful adaptation of any of Moore’s work on screen or in any other media, unless <I>he</I> has something to do with which, to this day, he hasn’t shown even the slightest interest.
Philip K. Dick died in 1982. The only film adaptation of his work produced during his lifetime was <I>Blade Runner</I>. Dick didn’t live to see its release, but he was involved with the film’s production and, despite some mixed feelings along the way, he seemed generally happy with the project. Arguably, it’s the only film adaptation that really retained the spirit of his work, if not the specific plot elements. (In some ways, it bears a greater resemblance to his short stories than to the novel it’s adapted from.)
But to Philip Dick, as to Alan Moore, the original work was always his main focus. In <I>Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words</I>, by Gregg Rickman, he tells of being asked to write the novelization of <I>Blade Runner</I> -- essentially, a novel based on the film based on the original novel. (This practice has become more common in recent years.) Dick resisted the idea; he wanted to write a literary, non-science fiction novel based on the life of a friend of his, the late Bishop Pike of California, whom he fictionalized under the name Timothy Archer.
Dick’s agent, Russell Galen, and his editor at Simon & Schuster, David Hartwell -- both very shrewd and cultured men -- compared notes. They knew that an original novel would not sell as well as a novelization of a major film -- and a non-genre novel, especially in those days, would likely sell worse than an all-new Philip Dick science fiction book (which had become rare). They reported this back to him, and he responded:
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/flowers/Trans.jpg" width="190" height="304" align="right" border="0"> “…my agent calls me yesterday and he says, they’ll give you $7,500 for the Timothy Archer literary novel. Or you can make $400,000 doing this novelization based on the screenplay. I says, I won’t do the goddamned novelization. I don’t want the $400,000. I do want to do this novel about Timothy Archer.”
Now, I don’t for a minute begrudge any working writer going for the big money. For most of us -- Philip Dick included -- it isn’t dangled before you every day. And if you can segment out your workload, strike a balance between high-paying work and more serious, personal writing, that’s an ideal existence in many ways. Several current comics writers practice that feat regularly. It’s even possible that, had Dick gone ahead and written the novelization, some people might have read it, remembered his name, and sought out his other works.
But.
<I>The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer</I> is my favorite Philip Dick novel. In it, he pulls off two unusual tricks for him: a first-person narrative and a female protagonist. The prose is very smooth, and psychologically it’s a masterwork. I’ve read it twice now -- not too often, don’t want to ruin it -- and both times, I found myself rushing through pages, wanting to read faster, yet actually <b>afraid</b> that it would end too quickly, almost as though I was picking up and reflecting the anxiety of the characters. Oh, and it’s got a quiet but devastating ending that pulls you abruptly outside the protagonist’s life, casting her actions in a completely different light.
Philip K. Dick wrote <I>The Transmigration of Timothy Archer</I> and then he died. He couldn’t have known it at the time -- he’d already planned another, ambitious sf novel to follow -- but he could not have written both <I>Transmigration</I> and the <I>Blade Runner</I> novelization.
As I said, I’d never advise a working author against making some cash from his work. But while I’m sure Dick would have found something to do with that $400,000, I’m very glad he made the choice he did. Because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have this novel that means so much to me.
And I’m kind of glad Alan Moore isn’t screwing around with <b>From Hell</b> or “LXG” coloring books, either.
**
Bibliography:
D. Scott Apel, ed., PHILIP K. DICK: THE DREAM CONNECTION (The Impermanent Press, 1987, 1999)
Philip K. Dick, IN PURSUIT OF VALIS: SELECTIONS FROM THE EXEGESIS, edited by Lawrence Sutin (Underwood-Miller, 1991)
Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter, eds., WHAT IF OUR WORLD IS THEIR HEAVEN?: THE FINAL CONVERSATIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK (Overlook Press, 2000)
Gregg Rickman, PHILIP K. DICK: IN HIS OWN WORDS, Revised Edition (Fragments West, 1988)
**
Stuart Moore has been a writer, a comics editor for Vertigo and Marvel Knights, a kitchen worker, a book editor, and the nighttime manager of the Lawrenceville, NJ Woolworth's curtain department. He has won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999.
My current comics work: JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #22, coming in August, features a nice stand-alone story spotlighting Green Lantern and Hawkgirl; details and a great cover image <b>here</b> (http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc_display.html?cm_dc_itemCode=jladv22&month=August) . Next up is LONE, a new future-western series from Dark Horse/Rocket Comics in September, likewise previewed at <b>Rocket Comics.net</b> (http://www.rocketcomics.net/profile.html?SKU=12196). More details on these and other new projects, including GIANT ROBOT WARRIORS, VAMPIRELLA, and PARA, <b>here</b> (http://198.65.99.89/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1490&highlight=Stuart+Moore) and <b>here</b> (http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/pulse.cgi?http%3A//www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi%3Fubb%3Dget_topic%26f%3D3 6%26t%3D001073).
See you in two weeks…