The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

Part Four. Plot Proposals and Outlines

This section contains examples of Dick at work sketching out his ideas -- lucidly, and with a penchant both for dramatic possibilities and cognitive paradoxes -- for the consideration of agents, editors, and potential television and film producers. All four of the selections date from the late 1960s, the only period in his life in which Dick seriously attempted to break into writing for television. (One of his finest early short stories, "Colony," had been adapted, in 1956, for the X Minus One radio program, devoted to SF dramatizations.) There is no evidence that he gained even the interested attention of anyone in that industry. The lure to attempt to do so may have stemmed from the success of certain of his SF peers, such as Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, in placing scripts with the original Star Trek series.

The novel outline "Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth" (1967) was first published posthumously in New Worlds #2, edited by David Garnett (Gollancz, London, 1992).

"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967) and "TV Series Idea" (1967) have never before been published.

"Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) was first published posthumously in PKDS Newsletter, No. 18 (August 1988). The notes were written for the benefit of Bertram Berman, a filmmaker who had, in that year, obtained a first option on the just released Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). This novel was ultimately adapted (with no involvement by Berman) into the acclaimed film Blade Runner (1982). Dick was able to see some of the early rushes of that film before his death in 1982, and was decidedly enthusiastic. In an earlier stage of the production of Blade Runner, however, Dick was displeased with the then quality of the script (subsequently rewritten, to Dick's liking, by David Peoples) and vented his displeasure in "Universe Makers... and Breakers" (1981), included earlier in this volume. It is interesting to compare Dick's notes here with the film version of the novel -- Blade Runner -- that ultimately emerged.