So I was staring at my bookshelf and wanted to pick up something to read, House Of Cards by Michael Dobbs stared back at me and having just watched the series again on Virgin Media on Demand I reached for it but got sideswiped by Philip K Dick’s “Do Avatars Dream Of Electric Sheep?” … ahhh yes why not, I thought. This also ties in with a blog post from Hamlet Au over at New World Notes and listening to people on the radio pondering whether any of the real world is real or are we in a simulation, sort of like Second Life but with much better graphics and technology would be the answer if that were true, of course it’s an argument you can’t win and probably best saved for a night down the pub because that’s a debate with no end.
Philip K Dick came from an era where Mars and Alpha Centauri were the Kings of Sci Fi. Mars is no longer fashionable, to such a degree that I’m told that the remake of We Can Remember It For you Wholesale Total Recall doesn’t even include the Mars component. Alpha Centauri might be back in fashion in the Sci Fi world though now that they’ve found a planet the size of earth orbiting it. However, a theme in Sci Fi has been inhabiting worlds elsewhere, another one has been replacing human to human emotions with virtual ones or machinery. Even Woody Allen’s Sleeper and the movie Barbarella touch upon this.
