Philip K. Dick Speaks (Sorta)

futileboy writes "Erik Davis put together this posthumous interview of Philip K. Dick from some tapes he found (he explains how it came together in his introduction to the interview). It comes off pretty clean."

Comments

Re:Thoughts on Philip K. Dick, The Matrix, Mystici

[nathanh]

Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.

Humans work just fine as batteries. Feed food in, stores energy in a chemical form, can later release that energy as heat or kinetics. There's no violation of thermodynamics there.

The flaw in the Matrix story is that they use humans to feed the next generation of humans, creating an "infinite energy source". That's the violation of the second law.

If they were feeding humans with some other source of food (eg, fungus, mould) then there wouldn't have been a problem. There's certainly nothing wrong with "humans as batteries".