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Philip K. Dick's 'Ubik' To Be Filmed 225

Posted by Soulskill from the more-pkd-please dept.
bowman9991 writes "Could this be the new Blade Runner? SFFMedia reports that Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick's science fiction masterpiece 'Ubik.' First published in 1969, Ubik's central character is Joe Chip, a technician for a telepathic organization that employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers so they can secure other people's privacy. In the novel, the dead are kept in 'half-life,' a form of cryogenic suspension, with limited consciousness and communication ability. A mystical substance called Ubik, available in spray-can form, is the only thing stopping reality from disintegrating before Joe's eyes. It'll be hard to film, but fantastic if they get it right!"
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Philip K. Dick's 'Ubik' To Be Filmed More

Philip K. Dick's 'Ubik' To Be Filmed

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  • I hope it ends up more along the lines of the "A Scanner Darkly" adaptation (or Blade Runner, of course), rather than yet another dumbed-down effort like "Total Recall" or "Minority Report".

    • Re:Previous efforts (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ethanol-fueled ( 1125189 ) * on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:05PM (#23607315) Homepage Journal
      Flamebait. Total Recall was totally relevant. Where else would you find a 3-boobed chick? Kuato Lives.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ktappe ( 747125 )
      Why does everyone slam on "Total Recall"? No, it wasn't "Blade Runner" quality but it certainly was thought-provoking. Meanwhile, "A Scanner Darkly" was thoroughly annoying--I could not stand to look at it for more than a couple minutes. I wish the inventor of that posterizing technique had never come up with it.
      • Agreed, however Waking Life, uses rotoscoping too, in a far less obnoxious way (ie: more like cell animation), and is far more watchable.

        • Re:Previous efforts (Score:5, Insightful)

          by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @02:25AM (#23607999) Journal
          I loved the effect in Waking Life because they used it more as a base, then hand animated on top of it and actually made good use of the fact that it was no longer live action. Best example I could think of being when the girl was explaining love and they animated what she was saying as if you could see her thoughts.

          Fit the premise of the movie perfectly.
          It also seemed to help guide you towards what was important as most scenes seemed to be just as detailed as they needed to be, with some things shining through more.

          OTOH, A Scanner Darkley used it more as just a form of special effects, a filter to be left on to make the movie pretty. I didn't dislike it as much as some of the posters here did, but it was much more of a gimmick than an artistic tool for sure.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JebusIsLord ( 566856 )
          Really? I thought it was far more primitive (and thus eye-irritating) in Waking Life. On top of that, Waking life played out like an extremely pretentious introduction to philosophy 101. I fast-forwarded through large portions of it.

          The style worked perfectly when you consider the people in Scanner were all psychedelic drug users. They got drug use down 100%, even going so far as to hire only drug-using A-list actors. Maybe you have to have done them to appreciate...

      • Re:Previous efforts (Score:5, Funny)

        by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @12:04AM (#23607539) Homepage Journal
        Everyone slams Total Recall because they don't actually comprehend what actually was going on. So they hate the movie because what they think was actually going on was not what was going on at all.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Drasil ( 580067 )
          Total Recall was not in any way true to the short story it was 'based on', 'inspired by' would be closer to the mark. Blade Runner kept some of the spirit of the book, and was IMO a pretty good movie. Screamers and Minority Report were pretty faithful adaptations. Hopefully Ubik won't be too mangled by Hollywood, I really enjoyed the book.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Drishmung ( 458368 )
            I would disagree that it was not in any way true to the short story. While it missed the sting in the tail of the short story, the constant themes of perception vs reality were the same.

            I got much more upset about the lame physics.

            Yes, we'd agree that 'inspired by' would be closer to the mark, but as an adaptation of a short story to a film, it wasn't too bad.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AuMatar ( 183847 )
            Blade Runner kept some of the spirit of the book? What the fuck are you smoking? Lets count the subplots that Blade Runner left out:

            *The entire religion subplot, probably the most important subplot of the entire story
            *The two police departments subplot
            *Completely changed the relationship between Dekar and the female robot

            The two are both utter abominations of the source material. But Total Recall was at least an entertaining action flick. Blade Runner just managed to be boring dreck.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Drasil ( 580067 )
              Perhaps my view of Blade Runner is coloured by the fact I was the movie before reading the book, and having read the two 'sequals' that try to resolve some of the discrepancies between the film and book. I though the movie caught the sense of neglect and dereliction from the book (with kibble replaced by rain and common garbage) and to some extent the character of the main protagonist. I think that qualifies as 'some of the spirit'. It's a shame really, while I accept that Dick's books are generally hard t
            • I'd mod you up if I could. What really struck me about the novel (which I read after the film) was the way it took a morsel of something definite (what is life) and turned it into a haze. Idiots admiring robots for their intelligence. Robots admiring idiots for their empathy. Sick real cats and healthy robotic ones. People unsure of their own humanity.

              And the two police departments subplot was also brilliant!. What an unexpected headrush for the reader!

              I never really understood what was happening with the

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            I don't think Blade Runner kept any of the spirit of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The only resemblance it had to the book was a few lines here and there. Other than that, they were completely different.

            One was practically and action movie about a bounty hunter, while the other was more themed around the apocalypse, and how at the end of the world humans will hold life above all other possessions.

            The book is inspiring, while the movie is just odd.

          • Re:Previous efforts (Score:4, Insightful)

            by soliptic ( 665417 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @11:37AM (#23610359) Journal

            To be honest I think Totall Recall is about the truest PKD film adaption there is. Yes, including Blade Runner.


            The spirit of "We can remember it for you wholesale" was basically "guy has his memories messed with to think he went to Mars - or maybe it was that he did go to Mars and memories were messed with to think he didnt - etc". The film just made it longer and stacked more 'rug-pulled-from-your-under-your-feet' twists on top of each other.


            Also, although it's schlocky, so was PKD. Seriously, if you think PKD was a literary master with elegant dialogue and profound characterisation... er... read more widely? And to be clear, I'm a massive PKD fan. The value of PKD is in the brainfucking ideas, but the actual "texture" of them is fairly pulp. Like Total Recall.


            Blade Runner OTOH was verging on Hollywoodisation at it's worst. The spirit of "...Electric Sheep" was not "catch the replicant", it was far more broadly philosophical: hence all the stuff about android pets, social class, Mercerism, etc, which basically vanished from the film. Instead we got a simplified Cop Chases Bad Guy affair, with the MTV-esque depth you'd expect from an ex-advertisement director.


            So, yeah, for my money Total Recall is a way more PKDish film than Blade Runner, which I consider perhaps the most overrated sci-fi film going...

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Wicked Zen ( 1006745 )

              The spirit of "...Electric Sheep" was not "catch the replicant", it was far more broadly philosophical: hence all the stuff about android pets, social class, Mercerism, etc, which basically vanished from the film. Instead we got a simplified Cop Chases Bad Guy affair, with the MTV-esque depth you'd expect from an ex-advertisement director.

              I don't think this is fair at all. The spirit of Blade Runner is not "catch the replicant" at all. The spirit is "what makes us human?" The genius of Blade Runner (an

          • Screamers was an underrated film -- and also probably the only PKD film (prior to A Scanner Darkly) that really attempted to stay true to the source story.

            Minority Report was an OK movie but I recall it deviating substantially from the story, both in plot and feel. But it's been a long time since I read it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jdbo ( 35629 )
        Wow, I couldn't disagree more - I found the effect perfectly apt to the subject matter, as it was subtly pushed and pulled to reflect the varying characters' varying states of perception/hallucination. Doing this in live action would have made the differences between reality/intoxication/hallucination bright and clear as day, and been cheesily ham-handed as a result.

        Also, this approach was perfectly suited to push the similarities between the effects of the disguise suit and the drugs on the users' percep

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by HiVizDiver ( 640486 )
      Interestingly enough, the director of "A Scanner Darkly" (Richard Linklater) initially wanted to do "Ubik" [filmmakermagazine.com], but there was some issue with the rights with respect to Dick's estate, and Linklater thought that "A Scanner..." might make a better film anyway.

      I admit I don't know "Ubik", but I enjoyed Bladerunner (based on Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", for anyone who may not know) immensely, and I really liked Linklater's adaptation of "A Scanner Darkly", so I'd definitely check this out.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iphayd ( 170761 )
      Oh come on. If you want to list a crappy PKD movie adaptation, you should list Screamers. A Second Variety was so much better. Especially the ending.

    • Re:Previous efforts (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cyberon22 ( 456844 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @07:21AM (#23608787)
      I don't mean to flame here, but Total Recall is a great film and totally blows away "A Scanner Darkly". You should give it another shot!

      The great thing about the movie is that it isn't just a visual retelling of the short story. It is a tirade against the dominance of sex and violence in the entertainment industry (our collective fantasies). The director might be somewhat tongue-in-cheek for communicating this using such a violent film, but even if the hypocrisy rubs you the wrong way the focus on fantasies of violence is a brilliant treatment of the original story since it works so well in conjunction with it: the resolution of Dick's paradox (is it a dream?) ends up irrelevant to the central message of the film. Under-emphasized elements of the book (Mars = God of War) also gain new salience.

      Total Recall is a great film because it takes good material, does it's own thing with it, and puts the viewer in a paradox much like the one it shows us. As long as we enjoyed the movie, the film has us pinned. How much of our enjoyment was because of the sex and violence the film revels in even as it critiques it?

      In contrast, "A Scanner Darkly" paid homage to the high noes of the book (and it was sweet that they included the epilogue too), but there wasn't anything really original and exceptional about the execution save the style of the animation. Worth watching, but not worth watching more than once.

  • To recreate Blade Runner... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ktappe ( 747125 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:11PM (#23607339)
    ....they need: 1) A good actor as they had in Harrison Ford. 2) Faith that their audience is intelligent, so they don't have to go all "Summer blockbuster" on us. 3) A director who is willing to give the film the atmosphere it needs. Let's cross our fingers we get all of these.

    • Re:To recreate Blade Runner... (Score:5, Funny)

      by devnulljapan ( 316200 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @12:38AM (#23607653)

      ....they need:
      1) A good actor as they had in Harrison Ford.
      2) Faith that their audience is intelligent, so they don't have to go all "Summer blockbuster" on us.
      3) A director who is willing to give the film the atmosphere it needs.
      Let's cross our fingers we get all of these.
      ...and hope against hope that Will Smith is busy that week

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MsGeek ( 162936 )
        And make sure Keanu Reeves is nowhere near the project.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by fan of lem ( 1092395 )
        Have you seen I Am Legend? While he may be a mainstay in stupid Michael Bay films, I am convinced he can pull off a convincing science fiction movie lead. And I mean in a character-oriented way, not just being action hero-y and all.
        • Have you seen I Am Legend?

          It must have been a very sad moment for Will, when he realised he'd been out-acted by Charlton Heston in Omega Man.

          • Have you seen I Am Legend?

            It must have been a very sad moment for Will, when he realised he'd been out-acted by Charlton Heston in Omega Man.

            To be out-acted by Heston is not exactly what one would call "shameful".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by WK2 ( 1072560 )

      2) Faith that their audience is intelligent, so they don't have to go all "Summer blockbuster" on us.

      Producers are delusional, but not that much.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Coming Soon: Ubik

      Starring: Hayden Christensen
      Directed By: Uwe Boll

  • Misread? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ZiakII ( 829432 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:16PM (#23607359)
    Did anyone else read Philip's Dick to be filmed? I Think it is time to goto bed.

  • I may be too overly hopeful, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Paperweight ( 865007 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:18PM (#23607371)
    I hope a gifted director comes along and makes a GOOD science fiction adaptation of Asimov's Foundation series.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Björn ( 4836 )
      Jean-Jacques Annaud, director of "The Name of the Rose", "The Bear" "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Enemy at the Gates" was actually announced the the director for Asimov's Foundation, quite some time ago. I don't know what happened with that project, but I suppose it's still a possibility.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tzot ( 834456 )
      Adding to the nearly off-topic wish list, I wonder why they haven't yet filmed "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester. It could be kept faithful to the original, and yet be a commercial success.
    • It's unfortunate that Uwe Boll has been chosen to direct Ubik...
    • I can't imagine Foundation working as a film. A miniseries might be really good though. The original books were split into shorter segments which could easily be adpated to single episodes. It would also be great to see the same treatment given to the Elijah Bailey novels, and maybe some of the later robot ones. If someone handed me the rights, I'd pick some highlights from the Complete Robot, including the invention of hyperspacial travel for the first series, then shoot the Elijah Bailey novels (inclu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Huh ?!? Foundation is one of the most boring book series ever. Totally unrealistic at several levels. As soon as I passed puberty my interest in Asimov vaned. It's in the same overrated and pseudo-important category as Heinlein. I can't see anything good coming out of it: a bunch of psychologists claiming to know the future? How exciting... and so easy to disprove at the cost of a single bullet.

  • almost impossible to film (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GabrielF ( 636907 ) <GJFishman@comcast . n et> on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:19PM (#23607375)
    There's no way that Ubik could be filmed for a mainstream audience. The plot features telepaths and anti-telepaths, communication with the dead, time travel, coin-operated apartment front doors, people who suddenly turn into dust, a bomb blast that may or may not have killed all of the characters, and the usual questions about the nature of reality. Just figuring out a way to explain what the hell is going on will be a pretty big challenge. During the whole course of the plot, time is flowing backwards, so the filmmakers would have to build not just a static version of New York City, but one where all the artifacts are gradually transforming into their more primitive forms. If they can pull this off, it will be amazing, but its hard to imagine anyone tackling it without a big budget, and the eccentricities of the plot seem to preclude that. Its a wildly imaginative and thought-provoking book, and I hope someone makes it into an amazing film, I just don't expect it to ever happen. The one Dick book that I'm surprised hasn't been filmed is The Man in the High Castle, which has a much more conventional plot (by comparison) and would be more accessible to a mass audience.

    • Re:almost impossible to film (Score:4, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:24PM (#23607403)
      The plot features telepaths and anti-telepaths, communication with the dead, time travel, coin-operated apartment front doors, people who suddenly turn into dust, a bomb blast that may or may not have killed all of the characters, and the usual questions about the nature of reality.

      Just a day on the subway my friend... Please stand clear of the doors.

    • A little off topic: those coin-operated doors were like parodies of DRM. The guy owns the apartment, but the artificially intelligent front door won't open unless he pays it. Each time he has to give it a nickel. No nickel, no open. Transaction costs through the roof but hey, the door gets paid.

      The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

      He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. . . . "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity. I don't have to pay you."

      "I

    • "There's no way that Ubik could be filmed for a mainstream audience"

      That's the whole point, you're not meant to understand it. What you do is take some Lethal Substance D. before you enter the cinema, that way it'll made perfect sense. Philip K. Dick would have made a good writer, if he managed to ever stay off the chemicals, something his own mother started him on in early youth. Notice how the women in his novels are emotionally unavailable, a bit like dear old mom. Same with his five wives. He kept go

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep vs Ubik (Score:4, Informative)

    by bazald ( 886779 ) <bazald@@@zenipex...com> on Friday May 30, 2008 @11:29PM (#23607429) Homepage
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is largely set in a potentially realistic dark future setting, some things more advanced, others decaying. Most of the environment is easy to make real without making it look silly, not to downplay the great work done by Ridley Scott and everyone else involved. The one aspect of the novel that would be difficult to reasonably translate to the silver screen is Mercerism, the animal worshiping cult/religion of the future. So, they dropped it from the film, which takes a slightly different view anyway. (The only reason it would be difficult is because the way in which one tries to become one with Mercer is very abstractly represented throughout the novel.)

    Ubik on the other hand is almost entirely abstract stuff. In fact, it is more abstract than the Mercerism stuff. There is some great imagery in Ubik that would be easy to translate, but by and large, making the novel come to life without making it look ridiculous would be very difficult. The way I picture Ubik, the scenes would have to appear incomplete for most of the novel, from the standpoint of anyone in cold-pac, and that would be much harder to pull off. I doubt anyone that the current Hollywood industry is likely to pull it off. The best they could hope to do is to make something reminiscent of The Thirteenth Floor.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kegon ( 766647 )

      Mercerism was nothing to do with worshipping animals, it was about feeling empathy to someone, even if you knew that person was doomed.

      Animals were not worshipped at all. They were a status symbol because almost all of them had been wiped out from radioactive fallout.

      It would not have been difficult to add Mercerism to Blade Runner in presentation but it would have been difficult to avoid confusing the story line.

      Basically, Blade Runner was 1000 miles from DADOES. No one has ever made a decent scree

      • Animals were not worshipped at all. They were a status symbol because almost all of them had been wiped out from radioactive fallout.
        They were also another symbol of empathy. Looking after a pet required empathy and they saw this as very important in preventing another nuclear war. The scene with the androids pulling legs off a spider was incredibly poignant in the book.
  • I'm sure it will turn out just as faithful as the other adaptations of his work have!
  • Towards the end end where they had regressed from the future back to the 1930s and everyone was so old that they were crumbling into death and lacking the strength to even get up the stairs of the hotel in the 30s small town they were stuck in was one of the most powerful and heartbreaking things I have ever read.

    Please, please, please don't ruin it Hollywood. :(
  • I read Ubik in 1970 when reality dissolving in front of your eyes was standard weekend fare, thanks to Bear [wikipedia.org] and others. What I would consider to be a great movie made from this would wind up as a cult film. In order to be really popular movie, it would needs be a crappy adaptation of the book.

    • I read Ubik in 1970 when reality dissolving in front of your eyes was standard weekend fare, thanks to Bear [wikipedia.org]
      That's funny, from my experiences back in the '70's, stuff mostly dissolved in front of my eyes thanks to Beer [wikipedia.org]
  • Since "What Dreams May Come" is a movie about the dead and afterlife was film very nicely, maybe Vincent Ward would make a good director.

    Remember "UBIK" is not about time travel, as some have said, or other high SciFi topics. It is about what life is and one's perceptions. The story is mainly from a view point of someone that is in the half-life world, discovering first that they are "dead", and second how to stay "alive". Then you throw in a "vampire". ;-)

    There is another book call "Job: A Comedy of Ju
    • So I'm not the only one to read Job: A comedy of errors!

      I love that end of the book.. I could see heaven and hell just like that. Too bad about Margarethe (sp?), though she did deserve it ;).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stjobe ( 78285 )

        Too bad about Margarethe (sp?), though she did deserve it ;).
        Huh? Didn't you read to the end of the book? Last line: "Heaven is where Margrethe is."

  • Buy the book! (Score:2, Funny)

    by odsock ( 863358 )
    I guess I'd better buy the book now, before they all have Will Smith on the cover.
  • As some other ./ members have written, Ubik is a very complex book, that requires reader's attention. There are scenes in the book which would give any cgi guy nightmares, and the overall feeling is quite dark, like in many other Dick's works.

    Faced with the challenge, the director and the studio would give us the following:
    A man with a group of super sexy, super mad, super funy soldiers, who are both mutants and martial arts masters at the same time
    Dead people appearing in the sky in tones of blue and at l

  • Script (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 31, 2008 @03:54AM (#23608223)
    You all know that Dick already wrote a script, don't you?

    From wikipedia:
    "Attempts to produce an Ubik film

    In 1974, French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to write a screenplay for an Ubik film. Dick completed the screenplay, turning it in within a month, but Gorin never filmed the project. The screenplay was published in 1985 as Ubik: The Screenplay (ISBN-13: 978-0911169065)."

    I have. I have not read it. Anyone knows if it is any good or do i have to have my own judgement -.-
    • "You all know that Dick already wrote a script, don't you?"

      No, no, no, that hasn't happened in this time stream. Similarly, Andy Gibb died of a drug overdose in your time stream, while here he's still alive, appearing on television and doing benefit gigs with the Bee Gees.
  • from Wikipedia:
    "filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to write a screenplay for an Ubik film. Dick completed the screenplay, turning it in within a month, but Gorin never filmed the project. The screenplay was published in 1985 as Ubik: The Screenplay (ISBN-13: 978-0911169065)."

    I've read interviews with Dick where he described how he envisioned the film. The book describes modern technology devolving into more primitive forms. He said that he wanted the film to be shot on the highest quality me
  • Ubik is utterly psychedelic. Telepathy, subjective realities that border on the hallucination and a warped flow of time will combine to make the movie very difficult to render in a way that will connect to mainstream audiences not under the influence of mind altering drugs. Of course there is always the option of emasculating the scenario to produce a bland simplified Hollywood-compatible blockbuster with extra explosions...

  • May never be filmed (Score:3, Informative)

    by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Saturday May 31, 2008 @05:40AM (#23608487) Homepage Journal
    Just because someone acquired the movie rights to a book doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day. It's not uncommon for rights to be bought and then for the project to languish indefinitely.

    Purchasing rights != filming movie
  • The company that managed to get the rights to Ubik is the French company Celluloid Dreams. Ignoring all the inevitable inspired frog jokes, this immediately made me more hopeful. French cinema brought us Delicatessen (highly recommended if you haven't seen it), The 5th Element (any fellow Moebius fans here?) and City of Lost Children et al.

    You can have a look at their portfolio [imdb.com] of which I recognise only two (Son of Rambow and The Magic Flute) and both were determined art-house flicks. Perhaps there is a c

    • Can't say the same for myself.

      But in any case, I do not think there is much case for the opinion that the story is a dying man's hallucinations. For one thing, that would obviate the need for the story. For another, it would have made any mention of the frozen "vampires" completely irrelevant to the story... but they are in fact a central part of it. And finally, if that were Dick's intent, he would have made it more obvious.
  • This is great news!

    No matter how many times I have read it, this book has never failed to generate such an incredible and tight aura, with an awesomely strange atmosphere, and feels to me like it truly is a shining example of what the definition of mindf*ck should be about. (In the meantime, and since this thing probably won't see the light of day until 2011, you'd hardly go wrong if you went and bought the book, and read it! You won't be disappointed!)

    Along the same lines, I think that William Gibson
  • .. all over town. Quick, where's my Ubik?

  • After painfully watching the TV remake of The Andromeda Strain [imdb.com], I've given up hope for deep Sci-Fi movies as were made in the 1960's / 1970's. What will be interjected and hammered home into the script includes, but is not limited to (a) some theme about how we are destroying our natural resources (bonus points for global warming), (b) rights of various groups of people whether it has anything to do with the story line or not, (c) stereotypical casting of various characters, (c) HAVE to explain EVERY ASPE

  • Besides being an amazing novel, Ubik is interesting because Phil actually wrote a SCRIPT to be filmed for Ubik. It's been published. You can buy it. It is, as far as I know, his only foray into screenwriting.

  • If you actually read Ubik... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Saturday May 31, 2008 @07:15PM (#23613591) Homepage Journal

    If you actually read Ubik, you'll find that it's an exceedingly minor Philip K. Dick novel -- to my eye, it looks as though it was written really rapidly, with an ending tacked on at random when he had enough pages. Call Dick a great writer if you like, but every single work of a great writer is not deserving of the label "masterpiece". Not that this has anything to do with what kind of film they're going to make (if any -- most film deals flop without producing anything, you guys know that, right?) because as with all the other Dick novels that have been "filmed" the screen-writers will do whatever they want to movie-up the material. The metaphysical joke that Dick had in mind (the answer to everything is everywhere) isn't going to survive the process. Essentially, they paid for the rights to a Philip K. Dick novel, just so they could say that they did.

    While we're on the subject, can I point out that Philip K. Dick is not the only science fiction writer in the world? Like I said, call him a great writer if you like, but if so there are other great writers whose material could be raided help get the screenwriters off of the dime. You could film Brunner's "Stand on Zanibar", or Sturgeon's "More than Human", or Aldis' "Barefoot in the Head", or Delany's "Babel-17", or Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time", or Sterling's "Holy Fire"...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 )
      If you actually read Ubik, you'll find that it's an exceedingly minor Philip K. Dick novel

      Funny, because I've read a few of his works (mainly his more notable stuff), and 1) I thought it was quite good (as good as Do Androids Dream..., definitely better than The Man in the High Castle), and 2) so do most other critics and readers of his stuff.

      But, hey, it's obviously more cool to buck the trend and look like some sort of high-brow outsider...

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