In the new issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, SF author Robert Silverberg writes about Philip K. Dick and Artificial Life Inc.'s Vivienne, the "networked movile interactive companion… waiting for your loving care." Silverberg reflects on the flirtbot as yet another figment of PKD's imagination that has recently become (sur)reality. From Silverberg's essay:
We live in the twenty-first century. Philip K. Dick helped to invent it.
The standard critical view of Dick, the great science fiction writer who died in 1982, is that the main concern of his work lay with showing us that reality isn't what we think it is. Like most clichés, that assessment of Dick has a solid basis in fact (assuming, that is, that after reading Dick you are willing to believe that anything has a solid basis in fact). Many of his books and stories did, indeed, show their characters' surface reality melting away to reveal quite a different universe beneath.
But the games Dick played with reality were not, I think, the most remarkable products of his infinitely imaginative mind. At the core of his thinking was an astonishingly keen understanding of the real world he lived in–the world of the United States, subsection California, between 1928 and 1982–and it was because he had such powerful insight into the reality around him that he was able to perform with such great imaginative force one of the primary jobs of the science fiction writer, which is to project present-day reality into a portrayal of worlds to come. Dick's great extrapolative power is what has given him such posthumous popularity in Hollywood. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and half a dozen other Dick-derived movies, though not always faithful to Dick's original story plots, all provide us with that peculiarly distorted Dickian view of reality which, it turns out, was his accurate assessment of the way his own twentieth-century world was going to evolve into the jangling, weirdly distorted place that we encounter in our daily lives.
Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)
