The prophecy of Philip Dick

The Secret Project is now half done - how I love big bulky wool!

 

Danica is looking a lot happier now that I have steam-blocked it but I still hate the seam-look.

 

I have a disturbing number of project ideas either on the needles (no dear socks, I haven't forgotten you) or spinning around my head or in print-offs and photo-copies of patterns.  I've extended my borrowing time on Big Girl Knits and obtained a new interesting stitch idea from my ISE4 partner Beth. And I'm only committed to four more birthday presents within the next two months.

 

So of course I have chosen this time to interrupt my knitting to catch up on some long missed reading.  I am currently going through a Philip Dick stage - he was the twisted mind behind the ideas that created the films Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.  Apparently he took a lot of drugs which probably led to his early death (just a few weeks before the release of Blade Runner) and I suspect that reading some of his books may be a way of accompanying him on his drug trips without the nasty side-effects.  They have the internal logic of some of my bizarre dreams that make perfect sense while I am having them but make no sense at all once I've woken up.

 

His books explore the two philosophical ideas that obsessed him and that he never resolved during his life - "What is reality?" and "What is an authentic human being?"  What I find most fascinating is that he explores concepts that have become the reality in our world, decades after his death.  He never lived to see the growth of the Internet or creation of virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft  - but more than 40 years ago he described the issue of people becoming obsessed with a virtual world to the exclusion of the real world.

 

I fear that it is only a matter of time that science and technology catch up with some of his ideas about the role machines play in our world.