Six minutes and 46 seconds into the first episode, at its first change of character and time and space, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams already looks like Black Mirror done right. The production deserves credit for bringing audio-visual sci-fi stories to web streaming like never before. Its darkness though, especially as the series seemed to suceed and move through seasons, began to seem ever less imaginative, more deliberate, often desperate — almost enough to call it doom sci-fi rather than just sci-fi.
Despite its success, I really did feel Black Mirror was letting science fiction down. Sci-fi offers at least as many storytelling opportunities as any other fiction, and then multiplies them with the unseen vastness of what is to come. Some of it turns out ridiculous, but the good is the one we can make sense of, that we can imagine and get tickled by.
Purpose of science
Few have utilised this heady concoction of opportunities better than Philip K. Dick (PKD, as he is known), the American author who created and converted nerds by the millions, but also managed to elevate sci-fi to a level where he is taught at American literature courses alongside Elliot and The Great Gatsby . He is also the one author whose work has, for some strange reason, never quite been adapted satisfactorily by the audio-visual medium.
Blade Runner was only loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ; A Scanner Darkly had Linklater abusing rotoscopy for a story that would have gotten through otherwise; the latest Blade Runner 2045 was a hype-dud that I slept through, and Total Recall had Schwarzenegger in it. Much of this is injustice.
Also, since Interstellar , there has been some kind of strange emphasis on making the science “real”. The purpose of science in science fiction seems quite clear; and PKD, often pricked for his psychedelic lifestyle, knew it had nothing to do with education.
As lost as this is getting in the data-rich info-hungry age where everyone seems able to define a neutron star but few seem to imagine the implications of the idea in narratives, the time seems primed for PKD’s work to ooze into the mainstream. There is no bad time for a good story, but one imagines the length and form of PKD’s works can be a challenge for successful and engaging cinematic adaptations.
His 44 published novels may provide enough feature-length material, but they are loopy, literary, full of questions, and milky on action. His real narrative stuff, stories of people, real and robotic, and their tremorings, mostly appears in the 120-odd short stories that he wrote for sci-fi magazines. These are tightly wound story bombs. Stretched over full-length full-budget films like Minority Report and Total Recall , they fizzle. But with this 50-minute digital streamtime, one is happy to report that they explode spectacularly, as the first episode ends.
A Sony Pictures Television production, it brings the fair heft of a large corporation that attracts established talent. Black Mirror tended towards indie uninhibitedness, but this seems a much more conventional production.
The first episode shows us a fragile Terrence Howard trying to make sense of a virtual reality. Bryan Cranston gets an episode, and also lists among the show’s executive producers. The 10 episode-series was initially planned as a transatlantic TV run between U.K.’s Channel 4 and America’s AMC, but the stateside partner seemed to get cold feet and Amazon Video jumped in to take U.S. rights.
Tattered dragons
Since then, the internet audience has ‘aggregately’ given the show a ‘weighted average’ of 6.05/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic shows slightly more favourable reviews middling around a 70/100. General consensus points to “a lack of originality and tonal cohesion”, and unfavourable comparisons to being a Black Mirror throwback. I think this is ridiculous.
The subtlety of PKD’s imagination and the sheer narrative content of his stories have been faithfully dramatised in this series, and the quiet victory that this is for sci-fi writing in general is worth celebrating. PKD passed away in 1982, a few years before most of the online streaming audience was born, yet his stories sit snug in our times and our imaginations of the future, half a century since. The questions his characters ask are the questions we are asking today, and the series packs in sufficient talent to make it all happen on screen. Yeah, the VFX is choppy, but you have already gobbled up the million-dollar Marvel banyan tales and the tattered dragons bringing snow walls down. Are you not entertained?
The writer abandoned writing about bikes and cars when he found that humans are funkier.
