I didn't expect to see Steve Buscemi in Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams, but here I am. In Crazy Diamond, he portrays a character (another one called Ed)) who works at a lab that grows quantum consciousness. This premise is enough to get me hooked, even if those two words in isolation both need lots and lots of definition.
He has a dream of escaping from the coastal erosion impacting his sea-side property, and spends his spare time working on the boat that will fulfil that dream. Things are never simple, though; and his wife has other ideas of moving up the coast to delay the inevitable.
Buscemi is a talented actor, but his character here is portrayed with a sense of lifelessness which somehow adds the underpinnings of a man who is just a corporate shell, trying to work against, again, and here's that word once more - the inevitable.
Ed has dreams. They're in reach, but he has roots, unlike the food and fruit that that is delivered each day with decreasingly useful use-by dates. He has his wife. He has his job, but all of these things, you can tell - though it is never said, that he wants to abandon them simply sail the seas. Go on an adventure.
He spends his nights plotting. His journey. Not something sinister. He meets a woman. It starts slow, and it escalates when she meanders into his home, and appears to make herself at home.
Throughout this story, there are countless little nods and references to other work by Philip K Dick. A song that repeats the lines "Flow my tears," (the police man said?) - sheep that roam a field that look slightly less than organic - perhaps, electronic? And there is many thematic links in this story that touch on artificial consciousness and what it means to have a known expiry date.
There are no replicants in this world, but those quantum consciousnesses don't last forever. They, like everything else are ephemeral.
This instalment in Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams is one that grows more interesting as it goes on, and beyond survival, and Ed's character's simple motivations, it explores, leisurely, at times, and more urgently at other times phases of existence and decisions that everyone will need to make at some point or another.
Layer that with a lack of freedom, and the threat of a deterministic universe, and Ed's desire to sail the high seas in a boat that is probably not sea worthy, and you have a great tale about a beautiful couple of days that change fate, ripping away the structures of what it means to human, and the tiny things that bring us joy.
I have been deliberately vague in a bid to avoid spoilers. It is become apparent with each of these that I have three favourite writers at this point. Ted Chiang, Arthur C Clarke, and Philip K Dick. Dick is far more subtle in his metaphor and thematic hints, and leaves you to contemplate deeply. It's a well I am happy to drink from over and over.