So do androids dream of electric sheep? I don’t answer that question here.
I’ve felt like a major lag for the last couple of days because all I’ve done is lie around and read all day, which is okay in general, but after doing it for several days in a row it gets kind of old.
Yesterday I just finished reading one of my favorite books for the third or fourth time. The book is Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was the basis for Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” starring Harrison Ford. This book is wonderful in my opinion. It is great because this is my last semester in college and I actually got to take a class in which “Androids” is an assigned reading (I really think the only book I might have been more excited to read in a class would probebaly be Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Yeah, I’m kind of a SciFi nerd as far as reading goes). I always have to strongly recommend “Androids” (And Philip K. Dick, who I think is a really good writer). One thing that a lot of people tend to do when there is a movie based on a book is try to decide which is better. In the case of “Androids” and “Blade Runner” it is kind of hard to do. Though Scott’s movie is obviously based off of Dick’s novel and some of the plot is consistant, the two really do have quite significant differences from each other. Now I love both “Androids” and “Blade Runner” and so I am reluctant to deem one better than the other, what I will say is that they are different.
That is kind of a general thing about books that are made into movies. Obviously it would be very hard to make a movie an exact replica of a book. Movies and books are different media, they present a story in a different context and style and so they are forever bound to be different from one another. Now one can do a poor job at adapting a book into movie form but at the same time one can do a really good job too.
One area of movie adaption that I’ve recently found very interesting is making Graphic Novels (or comics for those of you who don’t think a book with pictures constitutes a novel) into film. Now I’ve never tried to write a graphic novel or comic book but I kind of assume that the process is somewhat similar to writing a screen play because the vast majority of text in a comic is dialogue driven, and because it is a story told largly through images the author I’d assume needs to give direction for the illustrator in the script. In some ways I feel that the comic of graphic novel kind of bridges a gap between the standard novel and the movie.
Anyhow, that’s all for now.
