The Impact of Philip K. Dick

Through my research of Phillip K. Dick, it is very clear how much his creative fingerprint has been left on the world of science fiction. His ideas were revolutionary in the fact that many of his stories influenced the making of lots of iconic sci-fi films and TV shows. Dick wrote from the early 1950's until the early 1980s. He struggled with drug addiction, bad marriages, and long stretches of writer's block. However, he is perhaps the most influential sci-fi writer of all time. 

The biggest difference in Dick's writing is how the dystopian elements of his stories affect his characters. Through his own works like A Scanner Darkly which influenced The Matrix, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep that of course led way to Blade Runner, there is a much deeper connection to the characters in these pieces of entertainment than other installments in the genre. Dick never trusted the potential connection between man and machine, which was a common theme in his work. Through this distrust, the development of his plots tried to cause insecurities that technological innovation would always cause more problems than find solutions.

Dick's work is synonymous with dystopian literature. He believed that the future was not as bright as other sci-fi writers of his time, and it shows in Blade Runner. The setting is a futuristic and extremely rainy Los Angeles that is dark all the time and does not boast any of the great landscapes that we know of today. Industrialization has taken over the city and so have the Replicants. The idea to increase productivity by creating fake humans backfires when they become much more self-aware than imagined. However, the plot stays in this niche environment because that is how Dick liked his stories. The futuristic elements in all his works were constantly kept on smaller scales; that way the focus could still be on characters and not concepts.