In the film Blade Runner, Deckard carries a pistol called a Pfläger-Katsumata Series D 5223 – a name created by the fan community to have the initials “PKD” after Phillip K. Dick, who wrote Blade runner’s source material (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). What we are looking at today is an extremely realistic recreation of the prop gun used in the filming. Like the movie original, it was made from a Charter Arms .44 Special revolver so that it could actually fire blank rounds during filming. The other major element of the gun is the receiver form a Steyr SL bolt action rifle – the Steyr receiver is attached to the top of the revolver, complete with bolt handle. A second dummy trigger was added to mimic the look of the double set triggers offered on the Steyr, and a number of additional bits were added to give the final creation a more sci-fi look.
Many thanks to Phil for loaning me this very cool piece to show to you! I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how prop guns are often created from real guns.
Very cool idea and the result looks fantastic. Long live all film gun nerds!
the grips appear to be Ultem or PEI.usedbgor knife handles. Check Civivi knives.
The revelation that the gun made for the 1982 movie Bladerunner was a hybrid of 2 actual guns is not surprising. A lot of the “Ray-Guns” in Star Wars were made in the same way. So Bladerunner was ‘Following Tradition’ in a way. And Bladerunner came out in ’82 not produced in that year. It failed it’s initial theatre run but by the end of the year it became legendary.
End of pistol grip gives knife vibes.
I read the book in the 70s, and saw the movie at a drive-in theatre in Vermont when it came out. One of several of PKDs books that have been made into movies, basically all of them good, for example Total Recall (from “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”, the first movie was better.) and A Scanner Darkly (from the book of the same name) – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick for a complete list.
(Pedantic note: “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” is a short story not a novel.)
The “backstory” of the 1990 version of Total Recall is one of the most bizarre in Hollywood Development Hell history.
Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was first published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the April 1966 issue. That story only covers the first bit, set on Earth and dealing with REKAL. Despite being regular staples of Dick’s work, the Mars setting, the sectarian conflict, the ancient aliens, and the mutants are all original to the film, as is the ambiguity of whether or not the film is a dream. In fact, it’s not hyperbole to say the film is even more Dickesque than the short story.
The original short story was optioned in 1968 by Universal, and was to be directed by Robert Wise and star Cliff Robertson and Dana Wynter. In 1973 it went to 20th Century-Fox, where it languished for the duration of PKD’s life. (He died in 1982 shortly before the premiere of Blade Runner, which of course was based on his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.)
The rights then went to Carolco as part of a deal to hire Dan O‘Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the writers of Alien (1979) to do a four-movie “package” as a joint 20th /Carolco operation.
The story had already been “adapted out” at Universal as The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), starring George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin. While nominally based on L.P. Davies’ 1968 SF novel The Alien, the film was much closer to PKD’s “structure” for WCRIFYW.
To make things even more convoluted, SF writer Joe Haldeman was called in as a “script doctor” to make something that was actually filmable out of O’Bannon and Shusett’s attempt to expand PKD’s short story into a full-length movie. Haldeman, a longtime friend of PKD’s and the executor of his literary estate, saw that what O’Bannon and Shusett had tried to do was put together WCRIFYW and PKD’s 1964 full-length novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which was the part about Mars. Haldeman ended up adapting several concepts from his own 1974 novel All My Sins Remembered (about a spy who has his memory wiped after every assignment) to make sense of the storyline. The result is less PKD than Haldeman once the action moves to Mars.
Yes, it was a mess. Its saving grace was that (a) it had a music score by Jerry Goldsmith and (b)it was at least not as bad as the 2012 version with Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale.
clear ether
eon
Very cool. Now get your hands on one of the Planet of the Apes M1 carbine prop guns.
I would love to see you do a video on the carbines used in the original Planet of the Apes.
Can someone please send Ian a parts tray
The prop gun that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
As for the Deckard gun, it was supposedly a “Gyroc” launcher, that is firing a rocket-boosted round like the 1960s Gyrojet weapon. (Ian has done a couple of videos on that thing.)
It was supposed to have a five-shot rotary magazine, rather like the magazine setup on a Steyr SSG Marksman sniper rifle. That was what the Charter Arms Bulldog .44 Special cylinder “represented”. Instead of the cylinder latch being a normal one, it was supposed to be a magazine release; pop the “cylinder” out, shove a fully-loaded one in.
The upper (ex-Steyr) bolt section was supposed to be the “guidance control” package for the homing explosive-tipped rockets. That was how Deckard could “safely” fire the weapon in the street to “retire” Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). The rocket was literally “locked on” to her. Apparently, it didn’t get a solid lock on Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer); maybe he was just too damned fast.
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, odds are that you have read the original SF novel Logan’s Run (1967) by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The original “Sandman” gun in the novel was a revolver, described as “the kind Old West lawmen” used, with a “long, silver-chased barrel”, and having a four-round “ammopak” cylinder loaded with “one tangler, one gas, two homers”- again, all rocket-boosted. No, it was nothing like the tubular, flat black “blaster” used in the 1975 movie or the short-lived TV series.
So the gun was apparently less PKD than taken from an entirely different novel, albeit with a similar plot.
Oh, and PS;
In PKD’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Los Angeles was right out of a post-WW2 noir novel. It was sunny, hot, nearly depopulated, and the “androids” were there mainly as companions for the few actual humans still around.
And Deckard’s gun was an LAPD issue S&W Model 10 Military & Police, 4″, .38 Special.
clear ether
eon
For another homing bullets movie gun, see Michael Crichton’s 1984 “Runaway” (starring Tom Selleck). There the prop was based on a 1911. Due to the length of the mini-missiles (that are dissected in the movie) it had a magazine forward of the trigger, Mauser C96 style.
The movie is interesting also for the intensive use of surveillance and killer drones.
That was a surprisingly prescient movie, looking back on it. There was also that Dirty Harry one where the little radio-control cars are running around with bombs on board in San Francisco, blowing up real cars.
Anyone telling you that any of this drone crap is coming out of nowhere is either lying to you, or stupid as hell. The handwriting has been on the wall for way too long.
I remember talking to the guys working with FCS up here around Boeing who had done a bunch of development work on autonomous mobile mines, ones that would talk to each other and open lanes in minefields for friendlies and re-seed those lanes after. The minefields would also “heal” after breaches…
How far that crap had gotten past conceptual stages, I don’t know. I imagine that a lot of the studies about the sort of algorithms and requirements they’d need were done, and maybe some of the soft- and hardware had been worked on when the whole thing went pfffft!! into program death.
You’d be surprised how far some of this crap goes back, really. They were trying to make thermal vision work for mine detection as far back as Vietnam, something that lay forgotten in the archives until after Desert Storm when they did it again. Hughes Aerospace got paid multiple times for that, because generous Uncle Sammy done forgot he paid for that research back in the late 1960s and early 1970s… They did it again after Desert Storm, and even Hughes had forgotten about it all. I suppose it was a bit of a miracle that they went to the same contractor on it, but I suppose the fact that the thermal crap all came out of Hughes labs in the first place played a role.
I’d highly suggest checking the archives before doing any “ground-breaking” research on some good idea you’ve had. Odds are, someone else got their first, a long time ago.
I’m reminded of the number of research cycles paid for by DARPA that culminated in the PNVG goggles all chopper pilots know and loathe today.
It turns out they’re all basically re-inventions of goggles developed for the Wehrmacht in 1940. The difference is that the originals had photovoltaic cells built in that could recharge the image intensfier system simply by being exposed to sunlight for a few hours.
Naturally, when those were captured from the Afrika Corps in the Western desert, both the British and U.S. commands immediately slapped “Top Secret” labels on them, independently of each other.
So later researchers with government contracts were not only unaware of the German work, they didn’t even know such things already existed. so they had to “start from scratch” over and over again.
Which was why it took us another two decades to field even basic image-intensifier systems like AN/PVS-2, which was a battery hog to put it mildly.
Modern PNVGs aren’t much more effective, and screw pilots’ peripheral vision so badly that they probably cause as many “incidents” as they prevent.
There’s “Live and Learn”, and then there’s “Learn the same wrong lesson over and over again at enormous expense”.
The latter seems to be the way we’ve done things for the last three-quarters of a century.
clear ether
eon
…and odds are it’s in Speculative Fiction. Niel Stephenson did not invent Google Earth, Gene Roddenberry and his crew did not invent the flip-phone…
Interesting aside on thermal imaging – thanks for that. Seems gun nerds are maybe not all just single-minded geeks.
A very good if often-maligned book on the subject is The Day After Roswell by Col. Philip Corso.
In 1948, his boss, Gen. Arthur Trudeau, literally handed him a filing cabinet full of junk. And told him to figure out WTH it was and whether or not any of it would prove to be useful.
That filing cabinet contained “junk” that turned out to be early examples of fiber-optics, image intensifiers, and printed circuits.
Contrary to the myths about Roswell, Corso never identified any of it as “extraterrestrial”. He labeled it foreign technology, because quite a bit of it looked suspiciously like things he, as a foreign technology intel officer with SHAPE from 1942 to 1946, knew the Germans had been working on.
As we’ve discussed here before, Germany’s “high tech” community was so fragmented and secretive that two or four or a dozen labs could be working on similar lines of research simultaneously, each trying to outrace the others to Get The Patent First. That’s how they ended up with over a hundred and fifty design proposals for a radar proximity fuze for AA shells, none of which ever reached production. It’s why the late Ian Hogg said that the defining term of German weapon research was “Too Late”.
If Col. Corso’s work shows just a few of the things our “think tanks” worked on with some clues from Wartime German research, it’s interesting to speculate about how much we missed because it was destroyed, hidden, or simply misplaced and lost in 1945.
clear ether
eon
Whenever I look at authors like Corso, who purport to tell the whole unvarnished truth of a “secret history”, I’m always left a little ambivalent… I mean, I want to believe, but I just can’t take that final step to join in on the madness.
OK, let us posit that there are aliens who travelled light-years to get here, and who then remained willfully and deliberately in the background. Does that make any sense, at all, or does it match up with the known cases in our history where a more advanced civilization discovered a primitive one? I mean, did the Europeans hang around outside Japanese territorial waters, and kidnap the odd fisherman, anally probe him, and put him back? Did they have landing parties grabbing isolated travelers off the coast and countryside, doing the same…?
No, they did not. It was straight to “Take us to your leader…” stuff, right off from the beginning. I thus find the idea that aliens would behave differently, and would have some lunatic idea of how to do such things like the one that was first posited by one of our loonier science fiction authors, namely the so-called “Non-interference Directive”. I’m pretty sure that that moronic idea was dreamt up by Roddenberry or someone equally daffy as a dodge to get around production cost issues, just like the equally daffy transporter idea.
So… Yeah. I’d love to believe in “stolen alien technology”, but that dog don’t hunt. That’s not how things are done… You want a better model for how aliens would likely treat us? Look at Japan vs. The Europeans or how Europe did “First Contact” with the locals here on the North American continent. Those are way better models, and far more likely than “random anally probe the locals”.
The tech end of it is equally unlikely. Someone hands you a microchip, and you want to copy it? Baby, there is a metric ton of background tech like photolithography you need to invent just to begin to take advantage of that. Positing some boost to our technology from reverse-engineering that crap is backwards as hell… Imagine handing a bucket of nails and a hammer to some South Pacific Islander group, and then expecting them to come up with the Bessemer Steel Process so they can make their own iron…? Not ‘effing likely. It’d be my guess that passing off a microchip to someone who’d never seen one or who hadn’t developed the underlying production technology would be a literal waste of time; all they’d see is the same thing a Pacific Islander would see, which is “Hey, iron… We can make something with this…”, and they’d never, ever get from that end product they were handed to being able to mass-produce their own iron or steel. The real “technology cornucopia” isn’t the end-product, but the production machinery.
Not to mention, I strongly suspect that the manufacturing tech possessed by a star-faring nation that could reach this dismal isolation of ours is going to be so far beyond our stuff as to be ridiculous. As in, I bet a lot of it would be solid-state and entirely inert to anything we could do to probe it.
I am not saying it’s impossible, but I am saying that it looks damnably unlikely to my eye. If we had alien tech to play around with, in my opinion, we’d be a hell of a lot further along than we are, and there’d be signs out there. So far, nobody has located a damn thing in range of our telescopes that looks anything like “technology”, and if there were aliens out there close enough to visit, I rather suspect we’d be able to see signs of their development at home. Even with the lightspeed limits, if intelligent life were all that common, there’d be signs of it having done what we’re likely to do, and build out their star systems. I find it very unlikely that we’d be the only parties to develop civilization capable of spaceflight and then that we’d not see signs of it all over the place. Some of those star systems we’ve spotted planets in should have, statistically, at least some signs of the mega-engineering we’ll be doing once we’re out there. Since they’re not, I also have to question the idea that we’ve had visitors of a technologic bent… If we had, it’s just too damn convenient. Where are the rest of the indicators that ought to be there, if intelligent life is as prevalent as it would need to be for visitors?
On the other hand, I also keep an open mind. A lot of this crap is just like the questions I have regarding prehistory. We know several things, but the various authorities have seemingly limited ability to connect the dots: Point the first: We know humans like the seashore, and travel along it. Second point? We know that the ancient shorelines during the last glaciation period were waaaaaaay out there on the continental shelves around the world, and that the current seashore where we always look for stuff used to be waaaaay inland… So, why are we surprised we can’t find squat for “ancient civilizations”? We aren’t (and, maybe cannot…) looking for them where they’d be most likely to be, deep underwater along the coasts. I mean, Doggerland, anyone? What wonders might be out there in the North Sea, long flooded?
Just about every human culture has some mythology about floods; ever wonder why? Consider what the melting of the glaciers must have looked like, and what something like the floods accompanying the creation of the channeled scablands out here in Washington State must have looked like to any humans unfortunate enough to be in the path…?
Hell, they could have had cities the size of ancient Rome there along the Columbia’s path to the ocean, and all we’d know about it would be buried under tens of meters of silt out there on the alluvial plain outside the mouth of the Columbia river. It would have all washed away, and we’d be none the wiser for it. How many other similar situations are there, around the world? Anyone ever really followed up on those ruins out in the Bay of Bengal?
It’s irritating to look over all the material they have and note that virtually none of it reflects the actual coastlines that existed, back then. How hard would it have been for people to have gotten across the Atlantic from Europe, back in the days of vastly lower sea levels? Anyone ever looked at that, or gone looking for the evidence? Anyone ever actually thought about how the coastlines looked, when the Americas were actually settled by the various peoples that did it? If you’re finding Polynesian DNA groups in Amazonian tribal groups, maybe our ideas about history are a little, shall we say, distorted?
You want to have a revolution in history, start looking at things from the standpoint of what the world actually looked like to our Neolithic Ice Age ancestors. It was nothing like the world of today, and what with the fact that most of it is now deep underwater, I’ll lay you long odds that the majority of the evidence is out there a few miles off the modern coastline. What we see as “the world and what it looks like” is dramatically different from what it was; anything we find along the coast today would have been deep inland for the old-timers, and thus very unlikely to have been their actual pathways to the Americas. Same story around the world, everywhere. How much easier would the Polynesians have had it, with the lower sea levels that had to have prevailed?
Anyone familiar with the “Hot/Crazy” matrix for evaluating dating partners would likely recognize the one I set up for categorizing science fiction/fantasy authors. It’s basically the same as for “Hot/Crazy”, but it’s got the two axes labeled “plausible and entertaining/insane” instead.
Phillip K. Dick hits right on the line where his stuff is bonkers nuts, but still reasonably plausible and entertaining. He’s right up there for the crazy, but it’s a sensible sort of “Well… Maybe…” crazy, the sort that makes sense when the homeless guy under the bridge is explaining his worldview to you. 99 out of 100 of those guys, you just walk on by and ignore. The 100th? Dude’s the PKD of homeless crazy people, whose ravings are sufficiently close to a skewed version of reality that you can almost, almost but not quite, come to agree with them while you’re talking to him. Two hours later, eating your lunch? You’re like “WTF was that…?”
I’ve lost track of the number of lunatic authors I’ve read whose stuff was just… Crazy. The guy who wrote “Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs? He’s well over the line for “plausible/crazy insane” on the authorial matrix. Couple of others, like Samuel R. Delaney, are up there, as well. There was a fever-dream novel or novella I found buried in the back of a library during my youth that was so utterly bizarre and alien that still can’t believe it got published, but it did… If you ever need to find evidence that the SF/Fantasy works of the 1970s were ‘effing nuts, look up I, Weapon by Charles Runyon. I’m surprised that someone hasn’t optioned that for a movie, these days. It’s right up current Hollywood’s alley, in terms of sheer perversity.
Alfred Bester (1913-1987) was probably the king of “plausible/insane” among SF writers, notably when he was almost single-handedly re-inventing written SF from about 1950 to 1965.
Tiger! Tiger aka the Stars My Destination (1956) was the uber-example of proto-cyberpunk. To say nothing of being the first to require the weird-ass typesetting that was later needed for pretty much everything Samuel R. Delany wrote, notably Babel-17 (1966).
The Demolished Man (1952) set the pattern for stories involving telepathy right down to the present. It’s not a coincidence that Walter Koenig’s nasty-assed “Psicop” on Babylon 5 was named “Bester”.
Harlan Ellison sued Carolco over the “similarities” between The Terminator (1984) and his story “Soldier From Tomorrow” in the October 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe (to say nothing of the 1965 Outer Limits TV version), but Ah-nold as the T-800 owed at least as much to Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” (F&SF August 1954) as he did to Quarlo Klobregny.
About 90% of what we came to think of as “mainstream SF” by the mid-1960s started with Alfred Bester. And yes, at the time, pretty much everybody thought he was nucking futz.
All I can say is that Bester took SF out of the “space opera” aka “blaster era” and into the “speculative fiction” aka “WTF was that?” era. One that we’re still in, pretty much.
clear ether
eon
Right on the line are J.G. Ballard (a trivia. He’s also the boy of the book, and movie “empire of the sun”, and you can see how much of his imaginery came from that experience) and, little known in the anglosphere, Serge Brussolo.
My favorite Ballard works are his “disaster quartet”, especially The Wind From Nowhere. I think it’s a crime that it has never been filmed, mostly because it would be so easy to do, especially now with CGI and the considerable number of surplus Centurions available.
And if they could make a TV series out of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, they could surely do the same from Ballard’s Vermilion Sands.
cheers
eon
@Eon
I didn’t know the Haldeman connections.
a college pal gave me a copy of “the forever war” for a birthday (twenty first I think), I re read it again within the last ten years along with “all my sins remembered” that I’d found in a charity shop.
The early 80s Bladerunner film sadly fails to convey the hero’s growing and gnawing suspicion that his memories may not be real, that are so well done in the original novel.
I hadn’t read dreams wholesale so I didn’t realise that the ambiguity about whether the adventure was an artificial dream wasn’t in the original short story.
and yes, the recent remake was disappointing.
Blade Running has acquired a newer significance in England.
it now refers to retiring the ANPR cameras monitoring traffic charging zones on London’s roads.
unreliable sources suggest that the London mayor has run out of money to replace the retired ones.
I got a copy of the director’s cut on DVD in Beijing. That version makes Deckerd’s worries very clear at the end. An ending very different from the feel good ending of the theater version
There’s a credit line in the original 1982 movie acknowledging both Alan E. Nourse (MD) and William S. Burroughs, both of whom used the title “Blade Runner” at different times.
Burroughs’ idea was a screen treatment that reads like a cross between Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded.
Nourse actually wrote a novel about a dystopian future in which government controlled all “health care” and denied it to people not deemed worth saving. The “blade runners” were outlaw doctors who gave care to those people, meaning “anybody not giving the government enough $$$$”. The “blade” of course referred to a scalpel.
In his 1995 sequel novel to the movie, Blade Runner 2; The Edge of Human, author K.W. Jeter offers a convoluted explanation for why replicant hunting detectives were called “blade runners”. All I can say is his command of German exceeds mine.
cheers
eon
Eon, the name/rank of the protagonists is really an overlooked affair, thinking about it now (and I never did before, accepting it with all SF liberty and suspense of disbelief), it really makes little sense. But this doctors connection does.
Keith, remake? You mean B.Runner sequel with both Ford and the young guy, whatshisname, released few years ago
The screenplay for Blade Runner 2048 was actually a rewrite of an early draft of the original 1982 movie script circa 1979, that was discarded because producer/director Ridley Scott didn’t like it.
So yes, technically you could call it a “remake”.
That still doesn’t make it any good.
clear ether
eon
There is also a PC game back from the 90s based on a film, not a bad one, but in todays terms some stuff would feel dated (like graphics). Innovative points in the game is randomness in playability, in that almost every character you meet, even yourself (Blade Runner agent), could be a replicant (or it could not), and thus has several different endings. Voice acting is very well done, with some names that become famous later (like one woman from dr.House)
Before I recognized it from the movie, I thought, “Isn’t it early for April Fools?”
I am astounded at Hollywood’s ability to glamorize and cheapen. Deckard of “Androids” is a bureaucrat henpecked husband, he hunts the androids for bounty in order to buy his wife a live animal. The hero of “Remember it for you Wholesale” is a meek office worker. Anderton of “Minority Report” is old and bald. These characters were played, respectively, by Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tom Cruise.
PKD had a tendency to write about “Everyman” heroes, the guys who get caught up in things they don’t understand, can’t get any help from their “superiors”, and in the end have to get the job done as best they can, relying on their own wits and resources.
In a lot of ways, PKD’s “Everyman” is a lot like John W. Campbell’s “competent man”. Once he figures out exactly what the Hell is going on, he’s going to solve the problem, and he’s not going to wait for “meetings”, or “consensus”, or give everyone else a fair and equal chance to screw things up.
He figures if they wanted to get to decide what to do, they should have said something the first time he asked for their help.
cheers
eon
M41A Pulse Rifle from the Aliens series would be a great option to consider for future reviews if there any working examples.
Building one wouldn’t be too difficult. The “M41″was simply an M1A1 Thompson SMG with a sawn-off pump-action 12-gauge shotgun (Mossberg IIRC) under the barrel. Very like the M4 carbine / M26 MASS combination of today.
The Thompson was “disguised” by that FAMAS-type upper structure (Fiberglass), and retracting stock (made from telescoping aluminum U-channel I think).
The shotgun was disguised by having the forward handguard of our old “friend’ the Franchi SPAS-12 bolted on around it, with appropriate cutouts for loading (underneath) and ejecting (right side) plus a “slot” for the shotgun’s trigger guard.
The upper assembly had a downward extension that concealed the shotgun trigger and the Thompson magazine. it had a digital readout that was supposed to show number of rounds left in the magazine. (Full load of “10mm caseless” was supposed to be 100 rounds.)
If a movie company prop department could come up with one that fired theatrical blanks, surely our little lot should be able to take a transferable TSMG and one of those 14-inch barreled 12-gauge “shockwave” type shotguns and build one that fires live ammunition.
Then Ian could take it out to the range and see if it actually works as advertised.
cheers
eon
Imho, do not like fanfiction retconned names like this Draeger BS (worst example is star wars evil emperor who got a stupid name). Sorry, I do not need to know his freaking name!
I blame Tolkien… He set the bar so high for excessive background detail that everyone thinks they have to do it “just like he did”. Frank Herbert didn’t exactly help matters, either…
So, now what you have is fans and enthusiasts doing the work that the original authors didn’t, and it usually winds up as a bit of an incoherent mess.
PKD’s original story was a meditation on the nature of existence and mankind, wherein the protagonist is left in a state of limbo as to where he belongs. It’s a very depressing little read; the environment is wiped out, animals are a luxury item, and all the rest. It’s a very anti-human story, with a theme of “All the good/smart people have left Earth, and we’re the left-behind rejects who don’t qualify…”
When you look at it, PKD wove together a bunch of late-1960s themes and concerns: The death of the environment, then as now greatly exaggerated, the winnowing effects of off-world emigration… You can practically write down a list of all the then-prevalent worries and memes, and go down it checking off all the ones he hit.
Not that that’s a bad thing; he made it look easy, and dear God, but did he manage to churn out the works that others would turn into iconic pieces of entertainment. Albeit, in highly modified form.
One wonders what PKD might have accomplished, were he sane and off the drugs. Maybe nothing at all; maybe some really good stuff that we’d all marvel at. As is, he was a highly flawed artist that turned in some good work, but nothing really profound.