Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. He often presented dystopias that are dominated by political and business hegemonic organizations. Philip K. Dick considered himself a “fictionalizing philosopher.”

Biography

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. In June 1938, Dorothy and Philip returned to California, and it was around this time that he became interested in science fiction. Dick attended high school Berkeley. He and fellow science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin were members of the same graduating class (1947) but were unknown to each other at the time. From 1949 to 1950, Philip K. Dick was a student at the University of California—Berkeley. Philip K. Dick studied history, military science, philosophy and zoology. From 1948 to 1952, Dick worked at Art Music Company, a record store on Telegraph Avenue. He was married five times. In 1947 he had a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. He was not a financially successful writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.

Works

In 1951, Philip K. Dick sold his first piece of short fiction. Four years later he sold his first novel. In the 1950s, Dick tried to write mainstream fiction. In 1963, he was awarded the Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle. His novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Time magazine declared that Dick’s Ubik was one of the greatest novels written in English since 1923.   In 1968, Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This novel would become one of Dick’s most renowned works. In 1982, the film Blade Runner was made based on this works. . For several months, Philip K. Dick had visions. These intensifying visions fueled the VALIS triology: Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The  Policeman Said".  In A Scanner Darkly published in 1977 , there is  an underlying thread of paranoia and dissociation with multiple realities perceived simultaneously Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. He spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. . The last novel Dick wrote was The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It was published shortly after his death in 1982.

In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner Total Recall A Scanner Darkly Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers ...

George Orwell

George Orwell

       George Orwell (Eric Blair), the popular English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, was born in 1903 in Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one Because of his background—he famously described his family as “lower-upper-middle class. After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism. Once back in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer.

Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Inspired by Jack London’s 1903 book The People of the Abyss, which detailed London’s experience in the slums of London, Orwell bought ragged clothes from a second-hand store and went to live among the very poor in London. After reemerging, he published a book about this experience, entitled Down and Out in Paris and London.

He later lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism. In 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political regimes. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell’s mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority.

Animal Farm And 1984

In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. . In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. 1984 is one of Orwell’s best-crafted novels, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society. In Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Orwell had witnessed the danger of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology. He illustrated that peril harshly in 1984. 1984 is one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian ( Know more about Dystopian Novels), genre. A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabularly, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," and "newspeak."

Orwell died at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life.

Click 4 memorable-quotes-of-george-orwell

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Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur Charles Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was one of the world's best-selling authors of science fiction and was widely considered one of the masters of the genre. Clarke's fiction is credited with combining flawlessly accurate technical details with such philosophically expansive themes as "spiritual" rebirth and the search for man's place in the universe.  For many years he, along with Robert A. Heilein and Isaac Asimov (Know More About Asimov) , were Known as the Big Three of Science Fiction.

Arthur C. Clarke was born on 16^th  December 1917  in the seaside town of Minehead, Somerset, England. When Clarke was 14 his father died and the family's savings declined.  Clarke was forced to look for work, at last taking a position as an auditor, but continued to pursue his earlier scientific interests.  In 1945 he published the technical paper "Extra-terrestrial Relays" laying down the principles of the satellite communication with satellites in geostationary orbits - a speculation realized 25 years later. His first piece of fiction to see publication was Rescue Party, in Astounding Science, May 1946. He obtained first class honors in Physics and Mathematics at the King's College, London, in 1948.  He married Marilyn Mayfield, an american, on June 15, 1953. They split in December 1953. In 1947, he wrote his first novel, Prelude to Space.

Clarke first visited Colombo, Sri Lanka in December 1954. It was in 1954 that Clarke started to give up space for the sea. In 1956 Clarke moved permanently to Sri Lanka, a change of locale that would show its subtle influence in such works as The Fountains of Paradis and the Rama series.

In 1964, he began an entirely new project: collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on the development of 2001: A Space Odyssey. After 4 years, he shared an Oscar Academy Award nomination with him for the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1985, he published a sequel to 2001, 2010: Odyssey Two. He worked with Peter Hyams in the movie version of 2010. Their work was done using a Kaypro computer and a modem, for Arthur was in Sri Lanka and Peter Hyams in Los Angeles. Their communications turned into the book The Odyssey File - The Making of 2010. Other novels in the series have included 2061: Odyssey Three (1988) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1996).

In 1988 Clarke sufferred a return to mobility problems and he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome. The condition eventually confined him to a wheelchair. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death in March 18^th 2008. He was kighted by Queen Elizabeth II and was awarded Sri Lanka’s highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya.

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Isaac Asimov’s Science fiction works

Isaac Asimov’s Science fiction works

Isaac Asimov (To Know more about Asimov Click) first began reading the science fiction pulp magazines sold in his family's confectionery store in 1929. He began writing his first science fiction story, Cosmic Corkscrew, in 1937. In October he sold the third story he finished, Marooned off Vesta, to Amazing Stories ( a monthly ) Two more of his stories appeared that year, The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use in the May Amazing and Trends in the July Astounding. His single most famous piece of fiction, Nightfall, appeared in 1941,which has been described as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time".

In 1942 he published the first of his Foundation stories, later collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). It was voted the most popular series in the history of the field and has become the touchstone for all other science fiction novels. Taken together, they are his most famous work of science fiction, along with the Robot Series. Many years later, due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another,  he continued the series with Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and  Forward to the Foundation (1992). The series features his fictional science of Psychohistory in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted.

An influential vision came with another 1950 release, the story collection I, Robot, which looked at human/construct relationships and featured the Three Laws of Robotics.

Pebble in the Sky follows the plight of a man from our time accidentally transported into the distant future and into the midst of a political struggle within a galactic empire. The first volume of the Lucky Starr series appeared in 1952, and five more young adult novels would follow by 1958, each of which wrapped a rousing adventure around an accurate, detailed description of a different planetary body in the solar system. Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with  The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955.  His next work at that length would not appear until 1972: The Gods Themselves, which won a Hugo as best novel of the year, is set in a future wherein humans attempt to draw energy from a parallel universe and encounter a race of very alien beings.

When new science fiction magazines, notably Galaxy magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, appeared in the 1950s, Asimov began publishing short stories in them as well. He would later refer to the 1950s as his "golden decade". Between 1990 and 1992, three collaborative novels with Robert Silverberg were published, each based on an Asimov short story, and it seems likely that this was the limit of the latter’s contribution. The novels were The Ugly Little Boy (aka Child of Time) and Nightfall, both based on the short story of the same name, and The Positronic Man, based on The Bicentennial Man.

Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov’s Science Fiction) and penned an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines.                                 

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Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Born in Russia, (January 2, 1920) Asimov became a naturalized U.S. citizen as a child, was active in science fiction fandom while pursuing a degree in chemistry, eventually acquiring a Ph.D. He taught biochemistry for several years before turning to full-time writing in 1958. Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heilein and  Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. An immensely prolific author who penned nearly 500 books. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series his other major series are the Galsctic empire Series and the  Robot Series. Asimov died in New York City on April 6, 1992.

Biography

Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Yudovick Ozimov on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia, to Anna Rachel Berman and Judah Ozimov. The family immigrated to the United States when Asimov was a toddler, settling into the East New York section of Brooklyn.

Judah owned a series of candy shops and called upon his son to work in the stores as a youngster. Isaac Asimov was fond of learning at a young age, having taught himself to read by the age of 5; he learned Yiddish soon after, and graduated from high school at 15 to enter Columbia University. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1939 and went on to get his M.A. and Ph.D. from the same institution. In 1942, he wed Gertrude Blugerman.

In 1949, Asimov began a stint at Boston University School of Medicine, where he was hired as an associate professor of biochemistry in 1955. He eventually became a professor at the university by the late 1970s, though by that time he'd given up full-time teaching to do occasional lectures.

Over the course of his career, Asimov won several Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as received accolades from science institutions. Asimov died in New York City on April 6, 1992, at the age of 72, from heart and kidney failure. He had dealt privately with a diagnosis of AIDS, which he'd contracted from a blood transfusion during bypass surgery. He was survived by two children and his second wife, Janet Jeppson.

Writings

Asimov's career can be divided into several periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. Asimov's first short story to be sold, "Marooned Off Vesta," was published in Amazing Stories in 1938. Years later, he published his first book in 1950, the sci-fi novel Pebble in the Sky. An influential vision came with another 1950 release, the story collection I, Robot, which looked at human/construct relationships and featured the Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov would later be credited with coming up with the term "robotics."  The year 1951 saw the release of another seminal work, Foundation, a novel that looked at the end of the Galactic Empire and a statistical method of predicting outcomes known as "psychohistory." The story was followed by two more installations, Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953), with the series continuing into the 1980s.

This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun. He began publishing nonfiction in 1952. Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite  Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, his production of nonfiction, particularlypopular science books, greatly increased, with a consequent drop in his science fiction output. Over the next quarter century, he wrote only four science fiction novels. Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of  Foundation’s Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are, however, many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories.

Asimov was also known for writing books on a wide variety of subjects outside of science fiction, taking on topics like astronomy, biology, math, religion and literary biography. A small sample of notable titles include The Human Body (1963), Asimov's Guide to the Bible (1969), the mystery Murder at the AB A (1976) and his 1979 autobiography, In Memory Yet Green.

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Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his Three Laws of Robotics and the Foudation Series .

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Cyberpunk and Biopunk (Sub-genres of Sci-Fi)

Cyberpunk and Biopunk

These are the two sub-genres of Science Fiction. Among this the cyberpunk enjoys the priority.

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a post modern form of science fiction in which the events take place partially or entirely within the ‘virtual reality’ formed by computers or computer networks, in which the characters may be either human or artificial intelligence. The term cyberpunk was coined in the late 20^th century that is used interchangeably with cyber fiction and hyper text fiction. The term cyberpunk acknowledges the increasing influence of computer technology in literature, whether manifested in terms of plot (e.g. computer oriented science fiction), medium of publication (any of fiction now available on the World Wide Web), reader participation (e.g. interactive novels that invite the reader’s creative involvement) or in some other way. Nihilism, post-modernism, and film noir techniques are common elements and the protagonist may be disaffected or reluctant anti-heroes.

          Cyberpunk gained popularity in the 1984with publication of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. Technology is important in cyberpunk fictions , hence artificial intelligence, laser, neon, synthetic music and so on. Among its better known practitioners are William Gibson, K.W. Jetter and Walter Jon Williams.

Biopunk

         

Biopunk is a techno progressive movement advocating open access to genetic information. The related biopunk science fiction genre focuses on biotechnology and subversives. Biopunk science fiction is a subgenre of cyberpunk fiction that focuses on the near-future unintended consequences of the biotechnology revolution following the discovery of recombinant DNA. Unlike cyberpunk, it builds not on information technology, but on synthetic biology.  A common feature of biopunk fiction is the "black clinic", which is a laboratory, clinic, or hospital that performs illegal, unregulated, or ethically-dubious biological modification and genetic engineering procedures.  Many features of biopunk fiction have their roots in William Gibson's Neuromancer, one of the first cyberpunk novels.

Paul Di Filippo’s Ribofunk, Paul J. McAuley’s White Devils, The Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia E. Butler…are examples of biopunk science fiction.

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Who is Richard Parker in Life of Pi?

Who is Richard Parker in Life of Pi?

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure film by Ang Lee based on the novel by Yann Martel. It tells the story of Pi Patel, a sixteen-year-old South Indian boy who survives at Pacific Ocean with a tiger, named Richard Parker. Richard Parker lives on the lifeboat with Pi and is kept alive with the food and water Pi delivers. Richard Parker develops a relationship with Pi that allows them to coexist in their struggle. Two hundred and twenty-seven days after the ship's sinking, the lifeboat washes onto a beach in Mexico. Richard Parker disappears into the nearby jungle without a glance back.

The Two Stories of Pi Patel

The last part of the story describes a conversation between Pi and two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who are conducting an inquiry into the shipwreck. They meet him at the hospital in Mexico where he is recovering. Pi tells them his tale, with the tiger, but the officials rejects it as unbelievable. Pi then offers them a second story in which he is adrift on a lifeboat not with zoo animals, but with the ship's cook, a sailor with a broken leg, and his own mother. The cook amputates the sailor's leg for use as fishing bait, and then kills the sailor and Pi's mother for food. Pi then kills the cook and dines on him.

It is implied that the hyena symbolizes the cook, the zebra the sailor, the orangutan Pi's mother, and the tiger Pi. Pi points out that neither story can be proven nor neither explains the cause of the shipwreck.

Who is Richard Parker?

Depending on which of Pi's stories you believe, Richard Parker is either a real tiger or simply an imagination of Pi’s mind. We know that it is difficult to consider a tiger co-existing with a boy in a small boat for more than 200 days. He might be considered as either the projection of Pi or a symbolic presentation.

Though Richard Parker is quite fearsome, ironically his presence helps Pi stay alive. Alone on the lifeboat, Pi has many issues to face in addition to the tiger onboard. Renewed, Pi is able to take concrete steps toward ensuring his continued existence: searching for food and keeping himself motivated. Caring and providing for Richard Parker keeps Pi busy and passes the time. Without Richard Parker to challenge and distract him, Pi might have given up on life. After he washes up on land in Mexico, he thanks the tiger for keeping him alive.

Richard Parker: Pi’s Fear

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, and shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
                                                                     Yann Martel Life of Pi

          Pi knew that fear is the only true opponent in life. In the middle of the ocean, among various other threats and needs, the real problem that Pi faced was the tiger. The portrayal of Richard Parker can be a symbolic presentation of the fear of the shipwrecked Pi. The main emotion that Pi felt throughout his adventures journey was fear, the fear the sea, the fear of survival…When he was at the zoo with Anandi, Pi says Richard Parker is the most magnificent creature in their zoo. He had always amazed and feared the huge tiger. Thus when he faced his life’s true opponent, fear, it is natural that he compares that instinct or situation with the most fearful thing he ever saw, Richard Parker.

       

  Pi soon finds that if he doesn’t fight the fear, it will conquer him. So he decides to control his fear. You could see Pi trains the tiger to control him.

“Without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.”

Through several training exercises, he dominates Parker. This success gives him confidence, making his other obstacles seem less insurmountable. Renewed, Pi is able to take concrete steps toward ensuring his continued existence: searching for food and keeping himself motivated. Without Richard Parker to challenge and distract him, Pi might have given up on life. ultimately he reaches the shores of Mexico. The fear of sea or survival no more haunts him, Richard Parker is no more present in his life. It slowly withdraws into the wild.

The same fear that could defeat him became his motivator. If Pi doesn’t develop an uncontrollable fear, he couldn’t be active and survive the 227 days. The fear of survival helps him to find the bravery that lied within him.  In life ‘fear’ can, sometimes act as a motive. The fear of the future outcome of a particular act or living style makes one to act responsibly. The same fear of survival, Richard Parker, helped him to act and survive in the middle of the ocean.

The Second Story

In the second story (the one without animals) Pi represents the tiger. Pi, a pure vegeterian, had to cath fish and eat it. To survive in the vast ocean he had to develop a more aggressive nature. He had to kill the murderer of his loving mother. For all these things, Pi, had to devolope some animalistic insticnts. Thus he imagine himself as the most fearsome animal he ever witnessed, Richard Parker. The brutality of his mother’s death and his own shocking act of revenge are too much for Pi to deal with, and he finds it easier to imagine a tiger as the killer, rather than himself in that role.

The real question is , which story do you, prefer? The answer or explanation depends on your preference of the two stories.