Tag: philip k. dick

No Bad Ideas

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Last week Variety reported that HBO is developing a replacement for Game of Thrones: a counterfactual drama wherein the Confederacy successfully seceded. Suddenly everybody has strong opinions about alternate history!

“Confederate” chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone – freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

My Twitter TL was awash in negative reactions, many of them authored by GoT fans. The sexy-time adventures of Dumblesticks the diddling dwarf? A-OK! But grays exiting the USA? NO WAY!

Wait a minute, you say. Isn’t there a popular what-if miniseries on Amazon Prime that posits an Axis victory over the US, based on an award-winning novel by Philip K. Dick that even has its own amazing album produced by Danger Mouse? Maybe HBO is trying to make a couple of Reichsmarks on the same sort of idea?

Nope! But don’t take my word for it — here’s TeenVogue, of all outlets, to piss on your Land O’Smiles:

To some, the existence of The Man in the High Castle effectively voids any initial criticisms people have regarding Confederate because they believe both shows are essentially the same. But to adopt that stance is to be woefully uneducated about the reality of how both events have been handled historically, in their nations and throughout the globe.

You see, the Germans are totally sorry for the Holocaust whereas Americans are like totally not sorry for slavery! That’s why a show such as Confederate is nicht gut! What are you, woefully uneducated? God!

To be fair, the reason why Man in the High Castle is well received and the mere suggestion of Confederate isn’t may be because the latter hits a little too close to home. After all, I’m unaware of any Nazis-win-the-war shows coming out of Germany. On the other hand, the fact that High Castle‘s point of divergence occurred more recently — there are still people alive who experienced the 1930s and 40s — suggests that familiarity isn’t the whole explanation either.

Now if you’ve just slid from the timeline where this blog is a one long string of poop emojis and you’ve never read my writing before, let me be glacially clear: the Civil War was initiated by bellicose and arrogant slave-owners for horrible, selfish, and stupid reasons. Outmanned and outindustrialized from the get-go, the Confederacy never had a chance of winning, and the fact the war lasted as long as it did is due less to any effort by the rebels than to confusion and Federal mismanagement early in the conflict.

That said, it’s certainly symptomatic of social-media’s outrage culture that the simple idea of a fictionalized southern secession drove folks to stuff the Internet’s complaint box.

Many of those instant-coffee Turtledoves seem unaware of the deep library of Civil War-based alt-hist literature already out there. How Few Remain alone spawned ten sequels. There’s Robert Conroy’s 1862. I can recommend Terry Bisson’s odd little novel, Fire on the Mountain. The most well-known is undoubtedly The Guns of the South. And most recently there’s Ben Winters’s 2016 novel Underground Airlines, nominated for several prizes. So many trees have been killed on the subject you need an entire page on Wikipedia to keep them straight, and I have to wonder if HBO, like Amazon, would be better off adapting and expanding an existing book rather than generating an IP whole cloth.

Among alt-hist writers, in fact, the what-if-the-South-seceded trope is so common it’s cliche. The first two alt-hist stories I ever wrote involved the Civil War. “Galveston” has Johnny Reb trying to enlist an independent Texas to the Lost Cause, while “Glorieta Pass” posits an underground abolitionist resistance in the post-secession territories. If those concepts sound familiar it’s because they are — I look back on those stories now and cringe at their banality. That recognition pushed me to write better stories.

But here’s the thing, a lesson that any true creative can tell you: It’s not the idea, it’s the execution. A monster terrorizing a group of people is the plot of countless schlocky horror movies but only one of those films is Jaws. For every million landscapes painted there’s The Starry Night. Every book or movie or artistic endeavor is, at it’s core, conceptually the same as something else, some other work.

Confederate hardly has a monopoly on iffiness. Hey! Wanna hear my pitch for a show about a bunch of inmates in a WW2 POW camp? It’s like The Great Escape only it’s a sitcom where the Nazis are a bunch of buffoons and the one guy goes, “I know nothing!” a lot! It’s funny because he’s fat and has a mustache! Ha ha!

And yet if you turn on TV Land or dig deep enough into your television’s channel guide, you can watch the execution of that concept right now, still in syndication years later.

The point is, it’s not so much the elevator pitch that matters, it’s how an individual work is rendered that distinguishes it. It wasn’t the ideas for my stories that stunk. It was my execution of them.

Personally I’m a hundred times more excited to watch Jordan Peele’s production of Lovecraft Country (which I reviewed here, BTW) than I am Confederate. Maybe Confederate will be terrible, in which case viewers will be sure to let HBO know. Maybe, like High Castle, it will be brilliant.

But it’s a little rich for dorks who nerd out over E.L. James-scribed Dungeon & Dragons fanfic to shut down an idea before it even steps across the drawbridge. It’s even more ignorant for some of those same people to be writers and artists. They ought to know better.

Last Year to Start Next Year

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Variety reports that Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel Now Wait for Last Year has been optioned as a film, with production scheduled to begin Q3 2012.

With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Michel Gondry having already drafted a script for Ubik (was there ever a better match between director/screenwriter and source material?), this news means my two favorite PKD novels will be coming soon to a nearby cineplex. Undoubtedly in Imax HD 3D Smell-O-Vision.

Don’t know much about PKD or the plot to Now Wait for Last Year? Here’s a book review I wrote a while back:

Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s
Philip K. Dick
The Library of America (1128 pp, $40, July 2008)
Originally appeared in Black Gate #13, Spring 2009.

In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, television celebrity Jason Taverner awakens after being attacked by an alien parasite to discover no one knows him. Without identification, Taverner must stumble through the police state his status previously allowed him to ignore, a world wherein the student riots of the late 1960s led to a Second Civil War and a totalitarian United States.

Of course, the very minute he leaves his hotel room Taverner drops into a vipers’ nest of fake IDs, snitches, and Gestapo. “Don’t come to the attention of the authorities,” ruminates the eponymous Policeman. “Don’t ever interest us. Don’t make us want to know more about you.” But Taverner can’t help it; his unique anonymity raises him to fame once more, only now in the sinister eyes of the police alone. And why not? “If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely,” Taverner tells another character. “Fear makes you always, always hold something back.”

Not every one of Dick’s protagonists in Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, chosen and annotated by Jonathan Lethem, is so self-possessed. Yet all live in malignant futures, each a distorted reflection in a shattered funhouse mirror. In the bleak Now Wait for Last Year, Earth’s government has aligned itself with Lilistar in a losing war against the ant-like reegs, a conflict in which withdrawal or a separate peace with the reegs will surely lead to occupation by the Stalinesque ‘Starmen. ‘Starmen agents hook the wife of surgeon Eric Sweetscent on the new drug JJ-180; one dose addicts completely and there is no cure. She in turn addicts her husband. Which then is the more terrifying — the reegs? The ‘Starmen? Or his wife?

Dick’s novels have a rough-draftness about them that wouldn’t be accepted in today’s publishing; Taverner’s assault by the extraterrestrial, for example, fades from Flow’s memory, the cause for his survival never explained or even hinted at. Some scenes have a tacked-on quality as if Dick were simply trying to reach his word count, but in the end they only add to the surreal flow of the narrative in which the reader can never be certain if what the characters experience occurs outside their own skulls.

Two readable yet otherwise average sixties sci-fi offerings, Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney, open the volume, paving a road toward the terminal inclusion, Dick’s masterpiece A Scanner Darkly. Much different in style and tone than his other works, more emotive with the cynicism cranked a hundredfold, Scanner, like the others, revolves around fear and drugs and the disabled, mentally or otherwise, and responsibility toward them. But the world of Scanner is the most dreadful, a modern, indistinguishable Los Angeles inhabited by freaks and heads, and narcs posing as freaks and heads, and freaks and heads posing as narcs. A rabbit hole beyond paranoia, a society superficially functional but made worthless with distrust. “What’s there really in this world, Bob?” asks one character. “It’s a stopping place to the next where they punish us here because we were born evil.” Drugs are solace from the policeman’s flagellation; and by book’s end an incarceration just the same. No parole from the penitentiary of existence.

Various political stripes — anarchists, liberals, libertarians — lay claim to Dick as one of their own but he belongs to no one. He was a Nixon-hating pill popper whose philosophy was anti-authoritarianism. His concerns were not about the structure of governments or the fairness of taxation but with the wheels and cogs of a person’s mind — of the reality specific to each individual, to paraphrase one of his talking taxicabs. Somewhere in the Erlenmeyer flask of Five Novels bubbles Dick’s antidote to our modern poison of conformity, to the dystopia he imagined in a thousand varieties. We live in a time where screaming SWAT teams kick in the doors of wrong addresses and everyone screams to vote for his guy and not the other and if you don’t do what the screamers say then there’s something wrong with you, something aberrant — you’re someone who needs his door kicked in most of all. It’s a future Philip K. Dick foresaw. It’s his world. We’re living in it.