Future Imperfect ─ Philip K. Dick at the Movies

Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive, subversive, and entertaining American authors of the last half of the twentieth century. The cinematic adaptations of Dick’s fiction have generated so much interest since Blade Runner’s 1982 release that a comprehensive assessment of these films is necessary. Future Imperfect is the only book to examine the first eight cinematic adaptations of Dick’s fiction in light of their literary sources.

In this book, Jason P. Vest explores how filmmakers as diverse as Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Linklater have each, in their turn, expanded, extrapolated, and diverged from Dick’s fiction when translating its powerful and challenging insights to the silver screen. Future Imperfect gauges how well the film adaptations of Dick’s work have captured his unique vision of the human future and how deeply his storytelling abilities have influenced the development of science fiction movies from Blade Runner to the present day.

Jason P. Vest is an assistant professor in the University of Guam’s Division of English & Applied Linguistics. He has published articles about Blade Runner, The West Wing, The X-Files, and Joanna Russ, as well as the book The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. Phillip Lopate is a professor of English at Hofstra University who teaches in the graduate programs at Columbia, the New School, and Bennington. He is the editor of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now and author of several books, including Against Joie de Vivre, available in a Bison Books edition.