Kirkus Reviews - February 9, 2004

Following the release of "Minority Report" and "Paycheck," Philip K. Dick, 20 years dead, has become everyone's favorite science fiction writer.

With dozens of novels and more than 100 short stories waiting, there will surely be many more film adaptations to come. So far, nobody's really gotten it right; the layered realities of "The Matrix" come closer to the feel of PKD than any of the action-adventures so far produced. Rule of thumb: The number of things exploding in a Dick movie corresponds directly to the distance from the original material (except in those instances where the protagonist is himself a bomb).

Rather than squeezing all the religious and philosophical speculation out of another PKD novel to ready it for the screen, consider these more camera-ready sci-fi possibilities, all of them as unjustly neglected as Dick was in his own lifetime.

Potentially the best science fiction movie yet to be made is one based on Alfred Bester's 1956 novel, "The Stars My Destination." A favorite of anyone who has read it, the intensely cinematic tale is set in the 25th century, with a plot loosely based on "The Count of Monte Cristo." Gully Foyle, semiliterate grunt, remakes himself to enter decadent high society, looking for revenge against those who left him to die in space during an interplanetary war. Foyle returns to an Earth with a new set of social customs evolved for people who can teleport at will. There is escape from escape-proof prisons, a tribe of primitive scientists living in salvaged spacecraft, femme fatales born high and low, full-facial tattooing and criminal plastic surgery, explosives that can take out a planet and a hallucinatory final chase sequence that remains unrivaled for its creativity after 50 years.

Like the story of Bob Crane in "Auto Focus," Herbert Kastle's "The Reassembled Man" captures a cultural moment shaped by unself-conscious male fantasy. In this concentrated dose of Madison Avenue, the Playboy Philosophy, swinging bachelors and a teenage boy's understanding of the world, loser suburbanite Ed Berner is remade by aliens into a superalpha male. His nagging wife is reduced to quivering worship; he is promoted to the best account at work; attractive young women yield to him and his new, enlarged manhood; he wins at poker and gets himself a sleek little sports car. In a climactic scene that dares to be taken seriously, Ed triumphs over his beefy bully of a neighbor at a backyard barbecue: After impressing him with the quality of his steaks and then drinking him under the table, Ed shows the neighbor's wife what a real man can do. Best played simultaneously arch and straight, like Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers."

During the same period, Paul Linebarger — godson of Sun-yat Sen, expert in psychological warfare, longtime member of America's intelligence community and a player in Sino-American politics — was living the stuff of spy movies while producing a body of work as fantastic as anything in science fiction, under the name of Cordwainer Smith. Visionary and highly visual, deeply moving and uniquely strange, the future he created is peopled by immortal Lords and Ladies as well as the Underpeople, animals raised to human states to serve them. His best-known story, "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," is set during the Rediscovery of Man, when centuries of stasis lead to the reintroduction of disease, nationalities and postage stamps. In "A Planet Named Shayol," a political prisoner is sent to a planet where the condemned gather in herds to grow spare parts — noses, arms, heads, strings of torsos trailing off of them like railroad cars — harvested for the use by the powerful. Against this landscape, equal parts Salvador Dali and Tim Burton, romance and revolution ensue.

Long before Charlie Kaufman, the influential science fiction author Barry Malzberg pinned down the horror and humor of the writer's hell in "Herovit's World." Jonathan Herovit, reduced to science fiction hackdom under the less "cosmopolitan" pen name of Kirk Poland, is unable to type one more page of his dreadful series about Mack Miller, intergalactic hero, but if he doesn't finish the book, he'll have to return the advance. He can't go on, he must go on, and so first Kirk Poland, and later Mack Miller, emerge and take over. "Herovit's World" blends scenes from Herovit's life and scenes from his space opera until the lines blur, with a result that's darker and funnier than "Adaptation" and, needless to say, more suited for adaptation than "The Orchid Thief."

Howard Mittelmark is a freelance reviewer for Kirkus Reviews.