Science Fiction Re-Visioned: Posthuman Gothic in Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams

In this essay, I analyse two episodes from the recent television series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. I contend that, by adapting Philip K. Dick’s short stories from the 1950s for the screen, the creators of “Impossible Planet” and “The Commuter” offer an important new perspective from which to...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Mitchell, Paul
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir
Repositorio:RIUCV. Repositorio de la Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir
Idioma:español
OAI Identifier:oai:riucv.ucv.es:20.500.12466/4257
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12466/4257
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Posthuman
Gothic
Adaptation
Science fiction
Posthumano
Gótico
Adaptación
Ciencia ficción
6202 Teoría, Análisis y Crítica Literarias
Descripción
Sumario:In this essay, I analyse two episodes from the recent television series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. I contend that, by adapting Philip K. Dick’s short stories from the 1950s for the screen, the creators of “Impossible Planet” and “The Commuter” offer an important new perspective from which to appreciate the value of his early fiction, which is too often dismissed by critics as juvenilia. Moreover, by re-visioning Dick’s work as posthuman Gothic narratives, the episodes refract long-standing Gothic anxieties about alterity and (post)human existence through a lens that is more often associated with science fiction. This hybridization is instrumental to Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ interrogation of the paradigmatic binaries between life/death, interiority/exteriority and reality/virtuality. In my analysis, I use Rosi Braidotti’s theory of posthuman death, as well as Roger Luckhurst’s concept of Weird zones, to illuminate how Electric Dreams explores some of the existential issues that arise from human-technological imbrication.