As yet another Phil K Dick book gets the Hollywood treatment A Scanner Darkly is out now , joining Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall and the rest, I have a piece in online magazine Nth Position looking at the great mans capability as a predictor of future military technology.
The article pits his book The Zap Gun — set in the futuristic world of 2004 — against Robert Heinleins Starship Troopers. Heinlein was a Navy man and aeronautical engineer; Dick was a self-confessed flipped-out freak” with a long history of drug abuse and little knowledge of technical matters.
The result might come as a surprise: the number of hits that PKD scores is impressive, even with ideas that much have seemed deliberately absurd at the time, while Heinleins serious projections from then-current technology fail spectacularly. You might not want to take it all too seriously, but there’s some food for thought.
Especially when The Zap Gun features an electronic publication called Wep Week, devoted to pictures and specs of new weapon systems and with its own devoted — if occasionally obsessive — readership.
Did Dick really gets his information from a pink laser beam projected into his brain by an alien intelligence, as he apparently believed? Or is it just that having a seriously far-out imagination is a major asset? You dont have to be crazy to anticipate military technology, but it certainly seems to help.
– David Hambling
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I am aware of Heinlein shortcomings as a writer[1] , but I do find it interesting that we in the United States seem to be on an unstoppable slope to a society which is almost halfway between those depicted in _Starship Troopers_ and _Revolt in 2100 AD_. Every few years I drive by Jefferson Barracks and I wonder when Rev. Scudder is going to start construction of his headquarters there.
Cranky
[1] Ole’ RH was certainly an odd person, the moreso as he got older. But I do find it funny that many critics ascribe to him the thoughts and motivations of his characters when he specifically stated that he was writing /speculative/ _fiction_. Which of those two words do the critics not understand?
Being ahead of the curve always makes you look odd to the ones in the middle.
Cranky Observer said: “…we in the United States seem to be on an unstoppable slope to a society which is almost halfway between those depicted in _Starship Troopers_ and _Revolt in 2100 AD_“
A lot of it depends on whether the Bugs notice us before The Preacher takes over.
“I don’t see any support in the article for the assertion that he saw himself as making ‘serious projections.’”
Fair comment. My basis is Heinlein’s insistence on the science in his science fiction — he was one of the first to try and get it right, and the ideas in Starship Troopers do relate to technology of the time. The nuclear bazooka (the famous ‘Davy Crockett’) really was developed around the time of the book, as was the jet pack, but neither caught on.
Phil K Dick was on another planet and I’m very doubtful that his ideas came from anywhere other than his fertile brain.
I wouldn’t say that either way trying for serious prediction, but the results are interesting…
When push comes to shove, I always bet on the pink laser beam.