Quotes of the Day

I. NOT BY ITS COVER

'I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities, but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if — '. It's 'My God, what if — '. In frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.' — Philip K. Dick, Introduction to 'The Golden Man,' 1980

Fifty years ago you could have found some of the most imaginative, rule- and mind-bending fiction, published at an insanely prolific rate. If only you knew where to look. Not in The New Yorker or Esquire or The Partisan Review — at least, not for our immediate purposes — but in tatty 35-cent magazines dedicated to science fiction. Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut and Doris Lessing would later put SF (that's the short form, folks; never, ever sci-fi) between hard covers; they won prizes and peer plaudits. But in the 50s, mad gnomes were grinding out SF tales, faster and sometimes better than the upmarket folks, but always cheaper, for the pulps: Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Beyond Fantasy Fiction and two dozen others that clogged undiscriminating newsstands.

In 1953, on the instantly-yellow pages of these infra-dig rags, one could often find the work of a 24-year-old Cal-Berkeley dropout, Philip K. Dick. When he tapped into his voluptuous unconscious to write SF, it was an instant love-hate relationship: he loved the fiction, hated the anonymity and ignominy of the SF writer's status. As Karen Anderson, wife of author Poul Anderson, remarked about SF genre writing in the 50s: 'You knew you had the shitty end of the stick, but at least you had your hand on the stick.' Dick had the stick but recoiled from its stink. He wanted to be a mainstream novelist. Writing SF, he felt like a betrayer of his higher metier — like a whore, and one who was underpaid and underappreciated. Most editors, critics and consumers of contemporary fiction didn't know Dick, and the ones who did gave him the creeps: 'The early fans were just trolls and wackos ... terribly ignorant and weird people.' As Lawrence Sutin notes in his probing and trustworthy biography 'Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick': 'What do you make of a genre that seldom attracts readers who are self-supporting?'

But it is as true for writers as it is for race-car drivers and porn actors: you do what you're good at. Dick could write fast and smart, and soon the young comer was everywhere: 28 stories published in 1953, another 35 in 1954. Consider just a fraction of this output. In the May 1953 issue of Space Science Fiction Dick had a story called 'Second Variety,' about a sophisticated line of robots that threaten to take over the earth at the end of a long war. In June, Astounding Science Fiction ran a Dick story called 'The Impostor': a man is shocked to be told he's a robot programmed to destroy the earth. The same month, in Imagination, Dick's story 'Paycheck' told of an engineer whose memory is erased after two years' work on a secret project; he must reconstruct his lost time to save the earth. The following year Dick wrote, for Fantastic Universe, 'The Minority Report,' in which a society that has obliterated all murders, by reading the minds of people who might commit them, hunts down the man in charge of this 'pre-crime' program.

II. DR. FUTURITY

'You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood.' — PKD, 1980

Dick's Mensa adventure tales usually had a surprise ending, but you have already deduced the twist to this account of the writer's early years. All four of the stories mentioned in the last paragraph were made into medium or big budget movies — respectively, 'Screamers' (1995), 'Impostor' (2002), 'Paycheck' (now in theaters) and 'Minority Report' (2002). His novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' became 'Blade Runner' in 1982. The story 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale' was adapted as 'Total Recall' in 1990, and two years later the French director J'r'me Boivin made the perverse bijou 'Confessions d'un Barjo' from Dick's non-SF novel 'Confessions of a Crap Artist.' Besides adapting his stories, Hollywood plugged into Dick's ideas. The Ian Holm character in 'Alien' — the astronaut who discovers, too late, that he's a robot — is straight from 'Impostor.' Many other Dick tales probe our ignorance, or dawning awareness, of reality, whatever that is. (Vladimir Nabokov wrote that reality is 'one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.') Spencer Olham in 'Impostor' and Garson Poole in 'The Electric Ant,' to name just two of Dick's clueless heroes, have imagined they were human, only to be told they were androids. They are like Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), the mad scientist in David Cronenberg's 'The Fly,' who, as he devolves from one species to another, has the very Dickian insight that 'I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man — and loved it! But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.'

Another, gentler phrase for fraudulent reality is virtual reality. What is 'The Matrix' but a Dick-ensian plot writ large? It tells us that we are all asleep, cocooned in ignorance, and the matrix dreams our dreams for us and calls it reality. Another SF film of 1999, Cronenberg's 'eXistenZ,' spun Dickian conceits around a creepy video game. 'You don't play the game,' says its creator (Jennifer Jason Leigh). 'The game plays you.'

The difference between Dick and the concocters of these virtual reality thrillers: they were playing with ideas generated by the video-game cult; Dick conjured up these notions decades before Pong, let alone Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Dick says he invented the idea of a man who didn't know he was a robot, and that he'd send his lawyers after anyone who used it. If he had patented another of his familiar plot devices — the man whose memories are implanted ('We Can Remember It for You Wholesale') or erased ('Paycheck') — he could have shut down production of 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,' co-written by Charlie Kaufman. directed by Michel Goudry and due out in March. In it Jim Carrey learns that girlfriend Kate Winslet has had her memories of their relationship erased. So he goes to her doctor to have her removed from his own memory. But during the process he falls in love with her again — and has a mighty brain battle with the doctor to reclaim the memory of a love he can't get out of his head.

III. THE PRESERVING MACHINE

"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half." — Art Spiegelman, author of 'Maus'

The influence of Dick's work is not only, or even mainly, on film. Philadicktion is everywhere. It would be lovely to invent a what-if, an alternative reality, in which the author somehow survived to see the flourishing of his reputation: cover-story tributes in the New York Times Book Review and The New Republic; the opera from his novel 'Valis'; the Mabou Mines' stage production of 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said'; the issuing of old novels (some published for the first time) in spiffy editions; a generation of readers avid for his synoptic, dystopic visions. Punk bands, for their own or their songs' names, have purloined PKD phrases; cyberpunk fiction copped his attitude. French philosophers offered lavish and indulgent exegeses of his visions — in early 1974 Dick experienced glimpses, or delusions, of a godhead he called VALIS — and R. Crumb illustrated them in 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.'

College courses investigate at length the two crucial questions that sustained Dick's writing and thinking. In a 1978 speech, titled 'How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later,' he posited these questions as: 'What are we? What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?' Year by year, readers have clued in to what Sutin calls 'the most intensely visionary fiction written by an American in this century.' Dick is the subject of a doting, amateurish documentary called 'The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick.' Sutin's biography will soon be joined by French novelist Emmanuel Carrere's 'I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick.' Michael Bishop wrote a clever pastiche of the master's themes in the novel 'The Secret Ascension,' retitled 'Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.'

And, huzzah, all Dick's long and short fiction is in print. Start with 'The Philip K. Dick Reader,' which collects 24 of his best early short fiction, including most of the stories recently filmed. Then graduate to 'The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick' — five glorious volumes, and not a lemon in the bunch. That leaves the novels, 36 of them, for your summer reading project. And oh, yes, there are more Dick film projects on the way: five of his novels have been optioned by such brahmin types as Joel Silver and Steven Soderbergh. Miramax has rights to the early story 'The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford.' Will they get made? Who knows? PKD imagined many futurist infernos, but Development Hell is Hollywood's invention. The important thing is that the movie people are trying, and paying.

One gauge of Dick's increased worth: the rights to print 'Paycheck' in 1954 cost Imagination magazine $195; the rights to film it in 2003 cost Paramount 10,000 times as much — about $2 million, according to the splendid PKD overview Frank Rose wrote for Wired. That money went to the Philip K. Dick estate. The author died, at 53, in 1982, three months before the premiere of 'Blade Runner.' He was one of those prophets whose wisdom is posthumously discovered in an attic of trash. Posterity has declared such artists immortal, and we are the richer for their bounty. Which is great if you're us, not so fabulous if you're Van Gogh, Kafka, Emily Dickinson or Phil Dick.

IV. STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH'It is Jane-in-me now, the anima or female principle.... It is Jane trying to die. Or rather, it is a rerun of Jane who actually died... But if Jane-in-me dies, she will carry me (the male twin) with her, so I must not succumb.' — PKD in 1975, quoted by Sutin

On December 16, 1928, in Chicago, fraternal twins — Philip Kindred Dick and his sister Jane Charlotte — were born six weeks prematurely to Edgar Dick, an officer in the Department of Agriculture, and his wife Dorothy. Early in 1929, Dorothy accidentally burned Jane with a hot-water bottle. The infant was six weeks old when she died. Out of his loss, Phil was granted an invisible playmate and eternal soul-mate — also, perhaps, someone against whose impossible ideal all other women, from his mother to his five wives to the clich'-ridden females in so many of his stories, would be measured and found wanting. 'She died of neglect and starvation,' Dick told Paul Williams for the 1975 Rolling Stone interview that put him finally in the mainstream. 'Injury, neglect and starvation.'

Physically, Phil grew to be tall and robust; psychologically, he was frail, painfully shy (agoraphobic, he put it). But he took jobs in retail, including one at a record store, and struck up a few intimate relationships, one of which led to a quickie marriage in his teens; a divorce was soon granted on the grounds that she had threaten to smash his beloved record collection. (Another future movie reference: 'Diner'!) At 21, he married the vibrant Kleo Apostolides.

One evening Dick accompanied Kleo to a writer's workshop and met his first guru and enabler, William Anthony Parker White, whose primary pen name was Anthony Boucher. Boucher encouraged the young writer to pursue SF and bought his first attempt, 'Roog,' for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Boucher edited. Before that story came out, though, Dick had sold another piece, 'Beyond Lies the Wub,' and enjoyed a surge of pride at seeing his first published story 'in the most lurid of all the pulp magazines on the stands at the time, Planet Stories.' The euphoria didn't last. 'As I carried four copies into the record store where I worked, a customer gazed at me and them, with dismay, and said, 'Phil, you read that kind of stuff?' I had to admit I not only read it, I wrote it.'

The prolific young writer found another supporter in Ace Books' Don Wolheim, the Roger Corman of SF. Wolheim, who in 1943 had edited the first anthology with the words science fiction on the cover, was named Ace editor-in-chief in 1952. Adhering to pinchpenny rules laid down by his boss, pulp tycoon A.A. Wyn, he would pay $1200-1500 for a full novel, $500-750 for a shorter one that would be printed as half of an Ace Double. In an Ace Double, Wolheim published Dick's first novel, the 1955 'Solar Lottery' (and 19 other Dick novels and story collections thereafter). Karen Anderson quotes SF editor Terry Carr as saying, 'If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double, it would be cut down to two 20,00-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Heads'.'

At any price, for any publisher, Dick typed furiously. By 1958, when he turned 30, he had written 13 novels and some 80 short stories that redefined SF. Not to get too nuts about Dick's early output, but in quantity, and arguably in quality, this geyser of good work compares to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald a generation before (three novels, 41 stories and a play from 1920 to 1925, when he was 29). For this work, Fitzgerald won riches and renown. Dick would have to wait a while for that payback — 20 years after his death.

V. A SCANNER DARKLY

'Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately.' — PKD, 1966

Science fiction writers of the 50s, in the first era of government schemes for space travel, imagined Martian colonies and transport from one planet or galaxy to another at the flip of a switch. Often their stories were set in the early 21st century: now. And they are about as accurate in the details of their-future our-present as the makers of ancient science fiction movies were about what became the future past. In the 1930 'Just Imagine,' set in the New York of 1980, people's names had evolved into license-plate jumbles of letters and numbers, and babies were delivered from slot machines. Granted, the tone was facetious; the film was a DeSylva, Brown and Henderson musical comedy.

But even a serious SF writer's view of the future was, typically, both expansive and presumptive. He took on faith that what was starting to happen now would continue to blossom, and rarely factored in the possibility that the people who ran the most powerful nations might shift gears, reverse the trajectory of progress. He had the imagination to predict a man on the moon, for example, but not that the moon walks would last little more than three years, from July 20, 1969, to December 14,1972. The SF writer was an optimist about science and a pessimist about humans. His stories were dreams of technological Utopias in which nightmares of personal and political dystopia were played out.

Dick volunteered some of his notions about the real future for David Wallechinsky's 1981 'Book of Predictions'; the piece is reprinted in 'The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings.' He declared that by 1985 'there will be a titanic nuclear accident in the USSR or in the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants.' (The Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986.) He predicted that in 1993 'an artificial life form will be produced in a lab.' (Dolly the cloned sheep was born, so to speak, in 1997.) By 1995, 'Computer use by ordinary citizens ... will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained information-processing experts.' (TIME went online that year.)

He also foresaw that 'an alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth,' and that in 2010 the Soviet Union ... but who had the prognostic chops to see that the U.S.S.R. would disappear in 1989? The predictions were lighthearted, non-binding, irrelevant to his reputation. Dick knew that his job was not to handicap the future. It was to explain the present. He had big visions but didn't sweat the details. 'Phil's approach to technology,' Sutin notes, 'was, simply, to make up whatever gizmo he needed to keep his characters' realities in suitably extreme states.'

For Dick, outer space was a metaphor for inner turmoil. As he wrote in 1977, 'I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.'

VI. I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON

'I have written and sold 23 novels, and all are terrible except one. But I am not sure which one.' — PKD, 1966

By 1954 Phil was the hot new kid. At an SF convention he was photographed by veteran writer A. E. VanVogt, whose 1948 novel 'The World of Null-A' dealt with 'implanted false memories,' a favorite Dick device. But even the most prolific author of speculative fiction could not easily support himself and his wife. Instead of steak, they bought horsemeat. 'Paycheck' could have been a parable of the SF writer's economic lot: trading in a real fortune for the chance to control his destiny and extend his legacy.

'Movies were a little difficult,' Kleo told Sutin. 'The Roxy Theater near University and San Pablo was an artsy theater that showed strange foreign films we wanted to see, but we didn't always have the money. So we would go into the lobby — the manager ran the candy counter but went upstairs a few minutes into the second feature — and we'd sneak in. But every once in a while our timing was off and Phil would be acutely embarrassed and make a big show of saying good-bye to me and buying my ticket and going home — he didn't think it would look right for me to go home too.' This at the time when he was writing many of the stories that Hollywood would option four or five decades later.

It can be said that these stories were not science fiction to Dick; they were snapshots from the lives of people and other creatures he observed. ('Roog' was inspired by a noisy neighborhood dog who barked at trash collectors; Phil imagined the dog assuming these sanitation trucks were aliens who fed on the refuse in metal 'offering urns.') As Dick put it in 1980: 'I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.'

In the 70s, reality did not meet Dick's standards. Drinking deeply of the drug culture in then Bay Area and then Orange County, he had severe hallucinations and attempted suicide. He eventually straightened out a bit, but the impact of the 1974 visitation and visions never left him. In a 1977 speech called 'If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,' he made this solemn announcement: 'Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different present life.... I rather suspect that my experience is not unique; what is perhaps unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it.'

By the late 70s he had achieved a measure of fame. Playboy finally published one of his stories, though, Sutin reveals, Dick expressed his disdain for the magazine's editorial content by donating the four-figure check to Cambodian famine relief. Dick's annual income had risen to $70,000 or so, but the money allowed him little financial security; a man with five marriages and three children has a sieve for a bank account.

He also heard mortality knocking. He felt exhausted by the creation of his latest book, 'The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.' And in September 1981 he learned of the deaths or near-fatal heart attacks of several Berkeley-area writers. In a letter to Victoria Schochet, he described its literal impact on him: '[I] drove to the grocery store, drove home and rammed a support column in our underground parking area. My unconscious was saying Enough. I knew I was going to hit the support column and even after I hit it I kept on moving. I wanted to hit it. I wanted to protest the two heart attacks.... I wanted to protest my enslavement to two decades of writing in order to pay spousal support, child support, send my older daughter to Stanford, my youngest boy to a private school, buy my ex-wife Tessa a $150,000 house — meet deadlines, rent a tux for the gala premiere of 'Blade Runner,' all the long-distance phone calls, all the answering letters from readers who plan to commit suicide and want me to talk them out of it, because I wrote about my own suicide attempt in 'Valis' and they know I'd understand. I do understand. I understand that the payoff for writers — and editors as well! — who work day after day, 16 hours a day, seven days a week ... is not happiness but sudden death or total disability; they are, as Jesus said, like 'your ancestors who ate manna in the wilderness; they are all dead.'' Within six months he had suffered a stroke and died. March 2, 1982.

VII. THE CAPTIVE MARKET

'It [the script for 'Blade Runner'] was terrific. It bore no relation to the book.... What my story will become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch.... They're not called movies for nothing. I have no complaints.' — PKD, 1981

For most of his life, Hollywood showed as little interest in Dick as he did in it. The only pre-'Blade Runner' adaptation listed on IMDb is a 60 minute TV version of 'The Impostor' for the 1962 ABC series 'Out of This World,' hosted by Boris Karloff. 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale' was optioned in 1979; it would become 'Total Recall' 11 years later. By 1981, when 'Blade Runner' was filmed, Dick had become a warm property. That year he attended a producers' party for 'Claw,' a project based on his short story 'Second Variety.' (It became 'Screamers' 14 years later. Everything takes too much time in Hollywood.) A 1968 biographical note had said Dick 'considers his best work to be 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'... because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society where a person's dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than a house or car.' When Dick managed to get a 'Blade Runner' script, he found that the animal motif was gone. (The title came from a novel by Alan Nourse that William S. Burroughs had adapted as a screenplay in 1979.)

While 'Blade Runner' was in production, Dick wrote about it with the novelist's standard wounded cynicism — until he saw part of it and was wowed by the density of the world Ridley Scott's team had created. 'You would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you,' he said in a late 1981 interview published as 'What If Their World Is Our Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.' 'The human brain craves stimulation. And this movie will stimulate the brain, the brain will not be lulled.... The book and the movie do not fight each other. They reinforce each other.'

Scott and producer Bud Yorkin would fight over the final cut, with Yorkin winning. (Scott's version appeared in 1999.) But the density was still there in the version that hit theaters in the summer of 1982. In TIME I wrote:

Moviegoers seeking the smooth propulsion of story line look at these films and ask, 'What's going on here?' Directors and effects specialists, plumbing the of a technology that can show what has never been seen before, answer: 'There here is what's going on. The setting, the surroundings, the texture.' In 'Blade Runner,' the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. L.A. is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third World losers and carnivores, while 10 feet above them the police cars hover, monitoring the future as it molders into chaos. Like its setting and chief android Batty (Rutger Hauer), 'Blade Runner' is a beautiful deadly organism that devours life. Because this drastically cut movie has a plot that proceeds by fits and starts, "Blade Runner' is likely to disappoint viewers looking for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal for design wizardry, the movie delivers. The pleasures of texture have rarely been so savory.

That was me in 1982. Eight summers later, reviewing 'Total Recall,' I had the same impression of visual density. I wrote:

It zaps out beguiling images so quickly that viewers may want to see the film over again right away, just to catch what they missed. Verhoeven seems to have assumed that today's moviegoers have a megabyte media intelligence; then he worked like crazy to overload it. When 'Total Recall' is cooking, it induces visual vertigo. Spinning its tale at warp speed, the movie creates a coherent world that is part prophecy, part satire. On future Earth, folks flick on the wall-screen TV to check out ESPN's coverage of the Toronto-Tokyo game, then perfect their tennis stroke with the help of a teacher on hologram. Johnnycab, the robot taxi driver, chirps irrelevant pleasantries until passengers want to throttle him. A married couple debate whether to move to Mars — as if it were the suburbs — or to Saturn (''Everybody says it's gorgeous''). The film's Mars is Earth's cracked mirror image: a domed underworld of freak psychics and three-breasted prostitutes, ruled by a tyrant from whom the colonists must buy air, and he has just jacked up the price. It is on Mars, toward the end, that 'Total Recall' goes wussily misterioso in an encounter with a Yodaesque guru. 'Open your mind!'' says the mutant guru, and 'Total Recall' does just that.

Looking at the film two years ago, I decided I'd overrated it. Compared to Scott's direction of 'Blade Runner,' Paul Verhoeven's is coarse and comic-bookish, and the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original story's nerdish Quail, renamed Quaid, tilts the move toward steroidal bulk. But PKD and 'Matrix' fans will enjoy a frisson when a doctor, doing his damnedest to convince Quaid that fantasy is reality, or the other way around, hisses, 'Take the red pill!'

VIII. THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN

'It's very difficult to be true to Phil Dick and make a Hollywood movie. His thinking was subversive. He questioned everything Hollywood wanted to affirm.' — Gary Goldman, co-writer of 'Total Recall' and an executive producer of 'Minority Report,' to Frank Rose

'Dick's emergence in Hollywood seems oddly inevitable,' Rose writes. 'His career itself is a tale of alternate realities. In the flesh he was the ultimate outsider, pecking out paranoid visions that place the little guy at the mercy of the corporate machine. Yet posthumously he feeds the machine, his pseudoworlds the basis of ever more elaborate entertainments doled out by the megacorporations we pay to stuff our heads.'

Can't get much more mega than Steven Spielberg, who was in an SF frame of mind when he made 'AI' (from a Stanley Kubrick scenario) and 'Minority Report' back to back. 'AI' was set in 2051, in a bipolar world: sleek surfaces and a carnival-carnivore underbelly. In 'Minority Report,' it's 2054, and the future is more recognizable: tomorrow, only more so. (A lot must have happened in three years.) Copies of USA Today flash instant headlines as readers hold them. Cars race down vertical freeways on the facades of mile-high office buildings. On a Washington skid row, eyeless bums peddle the newest nose candy. Like 'Blade Runner,' 'Minority Report' mixes future and retro. Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), who might be a more benign John Ashcroft, and his prot'g' John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Pre-crime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic — three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes — that your brilliant, mad old uncle could have concocted it in his basement. This two-edged look fits with Spielberg's (and, before him, Scott's) idea of marrying science fiction with film noir; this is a 50-years-ago detective story set 50 years from now.

In adapting the Dick story, Spielberg and screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen borrow Hitchcock's Catholic belief that we are not all criminals, but we are all guilty; our humanity is our original sin. Anderton — on the run for a murder he hasn't thought of committing of a man he doesn't know — is oppressed by guilt because his young son was kidnapped while they were at a public swimming pool. Water, as both symbol and character, is everywhere in this film: in its Christian sense of baptism and absolution, in its dramatic function as either a hiding place (that terrific bathtub rendezvous with the cyberspiders) or a scene of tragedy (an abduction and two murderous drownings).

OK, so every modern action film seems to require that a member of the hero's family die to set the revenge machinery in motion. The genre also demands chases, to which Spielberg brings his inexhaustible ingenuity. But he is also keen to fold moral dilemmas into movie spectacle. Faced with irresistible impulse, he says, we can choose to resist it. Try to think of the last film in which the hero has the chance to kill a man he believes abducted and murdered his child and then, with an exertion of iron will, says no.

IX. PAYCHECK

Karen reached out, touching Jennings' head, just above the era. 'Feel there. That spot.' Jennings reached up. Above his ear, under the hair, was a tiny hard spot. 'What is it?' 'They burned through the skull there. Cut a tiny wedge from the brain. All your memories of the two years. They located them and burned them out. The SP [Security Police] couldn't possibly make you remember. It's gone. You don't have it.' — from PKD's story 'Paycheck,' 1953

The latest Dick flick has Ben Affleck as Jennings, an engineer who agrees to go undercover for three years: to perform a top-secret industrial experiment, then have his memory erased. The paycheck: $92 million in Allcom stock, which will have soared in the interim because of his expertise. It's the ultimate insider trading: he trades part of his life for a lot of money. Except that, when he emerges, he doesn't have the bundle, only a manila envelope with 20 trinkets inside: a hairpin, a subway pass, a watch, a fortune cookie slip, etc. Jennings has left himself this grab bag for a reason he doesn't know. But he'd better find out, because the FBI and the company that hired him, want him captured, or dead.

John Woo, who directed many hot-wired crime movies in Hong Kong, then the brilliant 'Face/Off' and the busy 'Mission Impossible 2,' keeps things churning here. There's the hint of a moral dilemma — do you want to change the world or save it? — and some possibly unintentional political satire when Jennings gets rough interrogation by the FBI. (The year is 2007, and we're deep into the second Bush Administration.)

But he doesn't connect with the Dick story. Instead, he recycles elements from his and other Hong Kong melodramas: a fluttering dove, dry ice, a show window shattered by a motorcycle, a point-of-view shot of a bullet speeding to its human target, and fireballs for visual spice. Screenwriter Dean Georgaris has another notion: he wants to remake Alfred Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest.' We have a handsome man in a gray suit running from both the Federal government and a gang of suave villains, with an enigmatic blond associate. Like the Hitchcock comedy-suspenser, 'Paycheck' has two shootings in public places, lots of train thrills — everything but Mount Rushmore.

This 'Paycheck' should have been fabulous: Dick meets Woo. But the movie plays like a wary negotiation between SF literature and Chinese kinesis. Neither side came out happy.

X. HUMAN IS

'I'd sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just the special effects of my ideas, used.'—PKD, 1981

For all the post-mortem respect accorded Dick's work, there has yet to be a movie that is both fully faithful to his ideas and successful on its own terms. The two best smartest adaptations — 'Blade Runner,' with its 'more human than human' androids, and 'Minority Report' — use Dick as a launching pad for their own propulsive flights of fantasy.

What's missing? The philosophy he dreamed of, and embedded in his plots of empathetic androids and cunning cyber-torpedoes. He did foresee the reduction of personal liberty by big government and big capitalism; he would be saddened but not surprised at the Bush proposals to fingerprint foreign travelers and offer a revokable license to illegal immigrants. In that sense, the most assiduous reader of Dick's work may be Dick Cheney.

Our Dick, Phil Dick, was fascinated by what-if, but also by what's-next? 'I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place,' he said in a 1972 speech. 'But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future.' It is there, in the minds of grateful readers — and, however diluted, on the huge mindscreen of the movies — that Phil Dick lives.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on on the fantastic life and astounding afterlife of SF writer Philip K. Dick