Sitting at the breakfast table this morning, coffee in one hand, e-reader in the other, I discovered a passage about books in Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, his 1968 sci-fi novel which served as the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner. In Dick’s future (1992), the Earth has pretty much turned to toast and anybody who can manage it has left the planet for a better life on a colony. The Rosen Corporation has done its bit to promote colonization by creating andys (androids). However, a group of eight andys has commandeered a ship from a Martian colony and returned to Earth.
Below is a conversation between an andy named Pris and a human named J.R. Isidore who are holed up together in an abandoned apartment building. J.R. Isidore can’t leave Earth with all the others because he’s “special” i.e. he has a low IQ and so doesn’t qualify for a place on a colony.
It’s fascinating to read a passage which is so self-conscious about its own obsolescence. It’s also fascinating to read that the fiction he imagines has been stolen from libraries. Or maybe a better word is ironic given that Dick’s book is among the most “stolen” novels in history. Just imagine: books stolen from libraries on Earth and shot to Mars by autorocket, the random arrival of books spilling onto the Martian surface! I love the image.
(In the same vein, check out Dr. I.M. Levitt’s A Space Traveller’s Guide To Mars, for speculations from the 1950’s about what Mars must be like.)
Here’s the passage:
“And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction.”
“You mean old books?”
“Stories written before space travel but about space travel.”
“How could there have been stories about space travel before — “
“The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.”
“Based on what?”
“On imagination. A lot of times they turned out wrong. For example they wrote about Venus being a jungle paradise with huge monsters and women in breastplates that glistened.” She eyed him. “Does that interest you? Big women with long braided blond hair and gleaming breastplates the size of melons?”
“No,” he said.
“Irmgard is blond,” Pris said. “But small. Anyhow, there’s a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals.”
“Canals?” Dimly, he remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars.
“Crisscrossing the planet,” Pris said. “And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there’s no radioactive dust.”
“I would think,” Isidore said, “it would make you feel worse.”
“It doesn’t,” Pris said curtly.
“Did you bring any of that pre-colonial reading material back with you?” It occurred to him that he ought to try some.
“It’s worthless, here, because here on Earth the craze never caught on. Anyhow there’s plenty here, in the libraries; that’s where we get all of ours — stolen from libraries here on Earth and shot by autorocket to Mars. You’re out at night humbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there’s a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. But of course you read them before you sell them.”