What An Extraordinary Imagination

I have a collection of over 500 films, recorded using a digital hard drive recorder.

I used to keep my collection of films on DVD, but more recently, I have discovered that I can copy films recorded from broadcast onto a large external hard drive on my computer, thus saving me the space that so many DVDs take up. And indeed the cost of so many recordable DVDs.

Just recently, I have recorded a broadcast version of Minority Report.

This is an interesting vision of the future, and perhaps what is most interesting about it is that it was based on a short story by the American writer, Philip K Dick.

Other film fans may well recognise the name, for this writer has been behind some of the most iconic films of the last 20 years.

Although long dead,  Philip K Dick was also the writer behind Blade Runner, which many people may recognize this  as one of the most important films about the future, and a fairly  early film for Harrison Ford.

In Minority Report, the future imagined is one in which murder can be predicted by a number of extraordinary individuals, called Pre-Cognitives.

Blade Runner is of course about a future in which powerful humans are cloned for the kind of dangerous work that it would not be possible for straightforward humans to undertake, and a Blade Runner is somebody whose job is to ensure that these extraordinary human creatures do not ever come to Earth.

Their elimination is described as “Retirement”, and Harrison Ford is one such policeman.

It is quite amazing that so many incredible stories came from the imagination of one American writer, but they did.

I suspect there may be other stories that I have yet to discover have their origins in this man’s imagination, and it is truly astonishing that one person. Being able to have such insight into the possible future.

Of course, Philip K Dick is not alone in possessing this skill of imagining an extraordinary future.

I suppose what is interesting is that his work should have become translated as it has to the world of modern cinema, in which so much more is achievable by virtue of computer generated images.

CGI is in itself a quite spectacular means of making tangible what can only be imagined, and films can be made today that it would have been impossible to contemplate making at any other time in the history of cinema.

Perhaps as a consequence of this blog article, I shall research the work of Philip K Dick a little more carefully, just to see if there are other stories of his that I ought to know about.