It is perhaps the curse that every writer would like to avoid: recognition post mortem of one’s work. In addition to not being able to benefit from the economic advantages of an editorial success, the author will not have had even during his life that gratification that serves as a psychological thrust to understand that the path taken is the right one.
In the case of Philip Kindred Dick, fate was mocking, as well as cynical. The year of his death, 1982, coincided with the first vision of the cinema of Blade Runnerone of the most famous science fiction films ever and that created the dystopian imagination e noir that today we almost take it for granted to find in Sci-Fi films and novels, taken from his novel But do the androids dream of electric sheep?. In short, in March he dies, in June the film comes out in theaters and becomes a cult. What a mockery.
From then on, the work of PK Dick was looted to draw films and TV series, including Minority reportbroadcast on Canale 20 at 21 in the evening. The plot gives a partial idea of the alternative worlds present in the psyche of the American writer: in a future society the crime has been reset thanks to the gift of the precognition of three boys with extrasensory powers, and the police, based on their pre-visions, arrest the citizens who are about to commit a crime but have not yet committed it. No doubt about the fact that a human being can change his mind at the last moment? No, unless in the dreams of the three boys the chief of the police pre -crime appears, played by Tom Cruise, while killing a stranger …
Free will, responsibility and determinism, guilt and social conditioning: everything cleverly passes sifted in the mind of Dick and Minority reportdirected by Steven Spielberg, effectively makes the message.
Speaking of posthumous awards, the publication of the work of the American author in the prestigious series of the Mondadori Meridians is the publication of the work: the stigma of the science fiction writer – therefore not a true author of literature according to the petty world of mainstream publishing – was tough to be defeated, but in the end, even if with 40 years of delay, PK Dick also climbed the authors, that of the authors.
