Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction writer and novelist whose work might have been, once again, too forward for his time. His premature demise at the age of 53 deprived him of enjoying the repercussions achieved by some of the later films inspired by his work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, or Minority Report, to name but a few – or TV shows such as The Man in the High Castle, Black Mirror or the one we have chosen for this post. Electric Dreams is an anthology series inspired by ten of Dick’s short stories, which were adapted for the small screen to explore futuristic visions without losing sight of the present so that the audience finds reasons to question the nature of today’s reality.
The ten episodes in Electric Dreams explore philosophical issues about the complexity of humankind, leaning more heavily towards intangible things, with a production more focused on subtle mystery than moments of shock or violence. They unfold a window to the future by showing us dystopian societies still far away enough to qualify as fantasy but close enough to provoke us into reflecting on how close we are to living in such dystopias.
The first episode was released in September 2017, at a time of considerable political turmoil – the outcome of which remains uncertain – in some ways similar to the cold war that followed World War II, when Dick’s fiction was first published. We had better pay attention to his concerns this time!
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