Philip K Dick is dead, alas, so it is possible that the world we live in is not his dream. Then again I have read Ubik. And also, it would be impolite to cast PKD as the Demiurge. The again, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, but I have never associated PKD with HPL, so be quiet.

Anyhoo, I just saw this about a TV adaptation of PKDs The World Jones Made. Which of course the people with the money can make if they want to. Packed away with most of my books in a remote storage unit to protect it from evil cultists and black helicopter flying government agents, I am unable to drag out my copy of the novel, but I know it is one of his early works that I read once and never felt the need to revisit, so I am buggered if I can remember what it is about except powerful world ruler (I think). The article begins with “Netflix has confirmed that it will be adapting a Philip K. Dick book, proving that it is finally leveling up its sci-fi game”. Yeah I dunno. From memory, I can only totally recall two good adaptations of a PKD novel, and they are A Scanner Darkly and Bladerunner. I did not stick the course with The Man in The High Castle, but from the episodes I saw it deviated significantly from the novel early on. The rest of the many film adaptations are from short stories. I don’t know that adapting very early Dick amounts to significantly upping anyone’s game, but perhaps Netflix faces a very low bar? If we were talking about relatively faithful adaptations of VALIS or Ubik or Flow My Tears or 3 Stigmata or A Maze of Death, you could colour me impressed. I had some memory of Jonathan Lethem writing about how there wer a million copies of this book floating around when he was young and haunting second hand book stores in NYC, but my Lethem books are also deep underground pending the apocalypse. I did a google search and some stupid AI replied “The query seems to be a misunderstanding of the author’s name, as there is no widely known author named “Lethem World Jones.” Instead, the user is likely referring to Philip K. Dick and his 1956 science fiction novel, “The World Jones Made”. ” Thanks for assuming I am an idiot, AI. Then I remembered that Lethem was probably referring to Vulcan’s Hammer. I look forward to Bezos adapting that at Prime (sarcasm).

The writer worries: “However, the show already seems to have one major issue: it is deleting a major plot from the original books. As its showrunner, Mateo Gil, has revealed, it will completely remove the alien story from the original book”. Lord, I cannot even remember the alien story. But don’t worry about my fallibility, most PKD adaptations (except maybe A Scanner Darkly) omit significant bits. I am still waiting for the Extended New Now With Added Betterism Directors Cut of Bladerunner with Mercerism incorporated, which to me was one of the significant aspects of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The have changed the title, they have changed the story, could they not have pretended that it is an original story and saved some dosh? Does having PKDs name attached bring some chachet? I certainly wish it did!

Who knows, I may even watch it. Bet you are glad you read this.

(I also lost the link to the article, so google searched that. The AI again assumed I was wrong, which is annoying : “The query “world jones made tv” is likely a misunderstanding of historian Dan Jones’s book The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England, which he later adapted into the TV series This Is History: A Dynasty to Die For.”)