Authors Electric

At the beginning of this year, I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for the first time. I usually don’t feel drawn to read a book if I’m very familiar with the film based on it, but when I looked at reviews there seemed to be a consensus that the film, Blade Runner, was vastly different from the novel. That turned out to be true. It’s almost as though Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner , excised 85 per cent of the content of the novel, perhaps all the best bits, and pared it all down to a short story, an action story. That might be what happens essentially with all film adaptations, of course… I remember reading in one of Norman Mailer’s essay/non-fiction collections, long ago, an account of his sale of the rights for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. Later, he saw the film and loathed it, thought it was an abomination. Then he described talking to writer friends who told him it always went that way, that the film adaptation of any nove...