It Was Only a Canting Humbug

"Pretentious attention

Dismissive apprehension"

 

Serj Tankian - Empty Walls

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"what was sadder for a man of heart was the sight or the canting humbugs, who, from fear of blows, kept at an equal distance from the two camps, and who, although they allowed their selfishness and cowardice to be visible, claimed admiration for the generosity of their sentiments and the nobility of their souls. They rubbed their eyes with onions, gaped like whitings, blew violently into their handkerchiefs, and, bringing their voices out of the depths of their stomachs, groaned forth: “O Penguins, cease these fratricidal struggles; cease to rend your mother’s bosom!” As if men could live in society without disputes and without quarrels, and as if civil discords were not the necessary conditions of national life and progress. They showed themselves hypocritical cowards by proposing a compromise between the just and the unjust, offending the just in his rectitude and the unjust in his courage."

 

Anatole France, parodying the Dreyfus affair in Penguin Island

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"There was no room in the same world for men who belched and men who wouldn't tolerate belching."

Philip K. Dick - The Chromium Fence

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"I just wanna say, y'know, can we, can we all - get along? Can we, can we get along? Um... can we stop makin' it, makin' it horrible for, for the, for the older people and the, and the, an' tha keeds?..."

Rodney King, 1992

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Due to it so thoroughly embracing the short story format and Poe's "one effect" I find myself able to recall the exact endings to Science Fiction more than any other genre, the moments when our expectations of a sappy ending are turned, if not upside down, at least sideways. George R. R. Martin in particular provided some delightfully hard-hitting ones before getting himself bogged down in the fantasy epic with no ending in sight, so for the purpose of this rant let's mention Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels. Without spoiling too much, we hear tell of a far future where the human race has diverged into eloi and morlocks space men and tunnel men, on one side technocratic malaise and on the other brute primitive vitality. Then <something happens> and though it's a humdinger of a finale* I only recently noted an irksome detail. The story presents us two narratively and existentially equal breeds, yet we wag our finger directly at the educated space-man. There's really no expectation that the ignorant troglodyte in turn should have predicted error or tamped down its impact, or even had the foresight or developed the means to make the crucial overture to begin with. So why then are they still presented as matching halves of a conundrum? If you expect better from one side, then you implicitly admit it is better. Superior. And not just because it lives in the sky.

 

But sometimes both sides truly are equal(-ly stupid) and so often what was phantasmagorical reductio ad absurdum seventy-five years ago reflects all too aptly on a culture wallowing in its decay. As Hollywood has maladapted every single other PipKDick story they could get their grubby mitts on, I find their avoidance of The Chromium Fence rather glaring, especially as for a SciFi story it's inordinately easy to illustrate with make-up effects and one animatronic psych-bot. In the near future this time, American society has diverged along a political divide in... cosmetics. No shit. Actually, no sweat, or mussed hair, or bad breath, or most any natural bodily functions, unless you're on the "natural" side of the argument, in which case you make a point of being as grubby and smelly as you can be. This glorified debate over legally enforcing deodorant grows so deeply divisive that it becomes apparent whichever side wins will either forcibly convert or violently purge the other half.

Sound ridiculous? Then I'd like to remind you that countless individuals in the West now risk being fired as hostile in the workplace environment for refusing to address a self-important eunuch or virago by the royal "they" and conversely your right to buy a cake depends on whether you like hot dogs or tacos. And just like a supernumerary nipple might get you executed as a witch, it seems to matter little how little the pretexts really matter. Each new or old cause merely serves its fanatics in attacking targets of convenience, convenient means of competition for social apes obsessed with social standing. After all, it really doesn't matter why your neighbours disappear so long as you get their TV, right? If any woman has the right to order her male superior fired and move into his office by merely accusing him of <something sexual> then crime shall be supplied to fit that market demand for social "justice" by whatever definition seems most convenient. We purge the faithless and immediately forget past purges, but the opportunistic scum that got their coworkers fired and threatened lawsuits to move up corporate ladders will never be punished, and the politicians who rode lynch-mobs into office need never fear legal pursuit.

You say we should refocus on more important issues than the culture war, more practical ones (the economy, stupid) but if the fanatics are willing to murder or at least fire us for the sake of their fanaticism, that concern is quite practical. There's a universal and very real fear underlying cases like Dreyfus': that rulership willing to chase scapegoats threatens everyone, and there are no two sides to coercion or proscription enacted on imagined pretexts. It is not a debate between catholics and jews, but self-preservation in the face of such delusion as leads to walking off cliffs expecting to float.

The willingness of the left wing to embrace mass delusion has led exactly to where I predicted, all these years I've been telling you the right wing simply does that better than you, feeding back into the older mass delusions of troglodytic degenerates who literally believe that electing a grifting nepotist robber baron to destroy the government from the inside will somehow summon up a two-thousand-year-old zombie rabbi to lead them all to the land of milk and honey.

There are endless conflicts fabricated solely to supply false pretenses for powermongering, countless cases where we should get along. The trick lies in selecting the right criteria, knowing when a rat is just a rat. In particular between reason and make-believe though, the choice is life or death.

 

You've been picking the wrong one at every turn. How long did you think your luck would hold out?

It'll be your turn to play Dreyfus soon enough.

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* This is at minimum the third time I'm ripping off Martin's parting words just on this site.

999 words

"Whattodowheretogohowtodowithoutyou?

You're-my-pole-star!"

Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine

 

Watching the first half of the latest Dune movie, I was reminded of one difficulty in adapting the book. A disproportionate slice of its events are interpreted through omniscient narration of various characters' internal monologue, especially Paul's. Think of scenes like the vision after his and Jessica's escape. It's not so much the event itself as an intelligent, highly educated young man's awareness of its implications that lends it its gravitas, that ego-effacing triskelion of convoluted cross-purposes and pitfalls, of being turned into a channel for the flow of history against one's will, of standing on the brink of apotheosis and at the same time a potential end to all that has been. I won't deny young Timmy Shammy's a durn fine thesspeen and did what he could with it, but the scene simply does not work in film. Instead of momentous, it feels dragging. Certainly you're not left with the spine-tingling impression of having just witnessed the story's cusp, and in turn that lack saps subsequent chapters of much of the change in tone beyond "ah crap, dad's dead" or a change of palace/sietch scenery. Yet trying to convey visually the verbal description of Paul's inner realizations would not only eat up screen time but turn the scene into a truly Lynchian acid trip. (And that's what the water of life scene is for.)

But other alterations can be excused far less readily. Take for instance excising Princess Irulan's epigraphs and replacing them with Chani's cheekbones for the sake of shilling the pop tart. Irulan's narration helps not only foreshadow coming chapters but contextualize the story's conflict in historical terms, not merely as the aimless lurching and clashing of hordes of brainwashed simpletons but as the informed machinations of superior intellects within a sophisticated social milieu. And in this case, they could easily have been overlaid on establishing shots as voiceovers.

In other adaptations (sticking with good ones) even omissions minor in length lose their justification for the original passage's illustrative scope.

Unlike some, I never saw much problem with leaving Tom Bombadil out of The Lord of the Rings, he mostly serving to work up the fairytale atmosphere without plot tie-ins. I did lament removing the entire greater Old Forest / Barrow Downs sequence, which presaged both the ents and wraiths of later chapters and showed the wide reach of evil in Middle-Earth, and let the hobbits earn their plot-critical shortswords. Worse yet: leaving out the dunedain. Aragorn is not only the son of Arathorn, not merely royal brat #594 riding into town on his high-horse and demanding a throne jus' 'cuz, but the latest leader of a millennium-running guerilla resistance movement. Gathered support from his northern kinsmen cemented the good guys' historical, geographic and political continuity. Replacing them with a random visit from a lone Elrond not only came across as... a bit goofy... but partly restricted the scope from Tolkien's more mature worldbuilding approach toward a standard power fantasy adventure wherein designated heroes save the world.

Or take as another example Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in a world experiencing at least partial ecosystem collapse - hence the title, artificial pets having become a luxury item as more species die off. Blade Runner pretty much ignored that angle, but I've always been irked by the loss of a very minor scene in which a tiny spider futilely struggles to bite through human skin. The various juxtapositions of human/android/animal interactions set up a creeping existential dread backed by "as above, so below" comparisons* largely absent from the more character-centered movie... albeit partly compensated by Rutger Hauer's inspired rewrite of his final speech.

 

While we're on PKD and creepy-crawlies, Linklater's otherwise excellent adaptation of A Scanner Darkly left out the recounting of a sexy chick who'd rallied three male junkies to her apartment to rescue her from a bug invasion. Though eager to get in her good graces (and pants) they protest the singular bug in question is harmless. Her reply "If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself" becomes a lynchpin of the novel's attempt to humanize addicts in comparison to nominally healthy, mockingbird-slaying human psychology. Given the exchange's brevity and its reflection on the rest of the story (hint: where else does the word "harmless" show up?) was it not more plot-relevant than the sex scene?

Sometimes changes truly are warranted by the medium. The Road was brilliant in both book and movie form, but the book winds up with a passage which never fails to bring a tear to my eye:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

I don't care how many screenwriting/directorial awards you've won, I give you little chance of doing that paragraph justice on screen. It was replaced, however, in poignant fashion, with the screen fading to black and fading in aural ambiance evoking a different brand of irreparable loss of the mundane. A well-conceived and well-executed compromise.

But more often than not, such changes are simply concessions to the movie-going public's presumed mental feebleness compared to the page-flipping public. Innumerable books' nuance or emotive punch has been sapped by a Hollywood happy sappy ending. Even when the ending itself is not ruined, its setup still can be. The classic adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1960 omits a short episode after escaping the Morlocks. The traveler stops so far into the future that the Earth has become tidally locked with the Sun. No trace of civilization lingers, not even ruins. Along an endless, freezing beach naught survives but smears of planktonic scum and oversized, scavenging crabs. No sound greets him but the wind, and the chill of eternity encroaches ever closer. Faced with the futility and finality of existence, the time traveler hops back to his own time, to save the degenerate, yet cozily familiar and reassuring, Eloi. In the movie version, omission of the final shore leaves the impression of a hero rushing to the year 802,701 to lead a glorious rebellion of the meek against the predatory. But in the book this doubles as a retreat from ultimate reality. Is continuing the good fight a quixotic limitation of human intellect then? The vapid gesticulations of a short-lived and short-sighted ape incapable of grasping the fullness of its own place in infinity? Or a humble admission of same limitation and resolution to work within one's means? And why is this added layer presumed off-limits to the payer of a ten-dollar movie ticket yet not a ten-dollar novel?

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* I still maintain PKD hit that theme more solidly in his best story, Second Variety.

VALIS

"I need someone to show me the things in life that I can't find"

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

 

The hero saw a flash of pink light, which obviously means aliens are broadcasting a message to him about ancient wisdom reincarnate in a theatrical toddler and a conspiracy involving Roman Emperor Richard Nixon and alternate reality movie productions. There can be no other explanation for pink!

 

An online acquaintance claiming to have known Philip K. Dick described him as "a beautiful mind" with both implications that carries. We've likely all seen it in action or experienced it to a smaller extent: intelligence sees connections between ideas, but hyper-connectivity skips the crucial steps of analysis, verification or a full review of whatever flight of fancy you've so unwittingly boarded. If you're truly unlucky the damn train of thought canalizes and you lose your return ticket, to slightly overextend the metaphor.

VALIS is not PKD's last book (and far from his best) but it was the beginning of the end, and the best known manifestation of his last years increasingly fixated on the delusion that he had received a personal, gnostic revelation in a flash of light reflected off a pretty girl's neck wear, that all of reality was a sham and only he (and his hero's helpers) could see it. To be sure, a glance back at his career indicates he was always headed in that direction. His stories make such profitable Hollywood (mal)adaptations particularly for their persistent undercurrent of paranoia, the impostors and conspiracies lurking around every plot twist. His intemperate consumption of hippie-era narcotics merely sped along his decline.

Still, VALIS stands out from his other stuff in the same reality-warping vein like Ubik or Palmer Eldritch or Flow My Tears. For one it's littered with real-world reference characters, and unlike in Flow My Tears they're quite plot-irrelevant. For another, the plot itself is largely irrelevant. All you really need to know is that something, some events here and there, have altered Horselover Fat's mood and thereby triggered a deeper sink or brief surfacing from insanity - because this is a book about insanity, whether the author intended it as such or not. As such, it can be even more painful to read than A Scanner Darkly, depending on your life history.

 

I remember around twelve I realized being smart enough for introspection means smart enough to realize everything that's wrong with you... while still lacking recourse. Possibly the gruesomest moments in VALIS come during the author's self-projection's brief moments of clarity, especially when he outlines his experiences' far more plausibly parsimonious explanations to no avail, expounding his own absurdity even as he embarks on a lifetime's obsessive search for a lost marble. There's an especially cruel twist to that lingering self-reflection allowing him to realize he's gone off the deep end but unable to pinpoint where or how and spending an entire novel on the unspoken lost hope that if only he could, if he could only locate that tipping point... ah, but there are more important messianic children to locate now, aren't there?

Wake up one day to find yourself missing, with no clue as to how long. It's a more common and more justifiable fear than we care to admit, and it doesn't require alien lasers.

For my own part, I won't be reading The Divine Invasion. I'd rather go back to his early years' short stories and remember him as the author of Second Variety and The Golden Man.

The Three Censures of Philip's Transcendence

(Aforethought: spoiler alert, for those of you who care about that sort of thing. I'll be discussing a novel and two short stories, so you may want to find - if you can - and read Faith of our Fathers and The Turning Wheel if you're too lazy for the long one.)
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So let's talk about ten-foot poles. Philip K. Dick, as I commented in my last post, has been adapted to undeath. As most Hollywood attempts to cash in on a popular author or work yield unholy abominations unfit for showing even as punishments, it's no surprise most PKD adaptations have also strayed far, far from their source material. Nevertheless, movie studios push ever onward, vying for the chance to slap his name on their promotional posters.

Yet still, some of his stories remain as socially uncomfortable or politically incorrect as to send entire marketing departments into hysterics at their mere mention. While thinking of this post I've thought of two more examples, but for starters let's focus on my original notion, Palmer Eldritch... which, just to get this out of the way, is if nothing else just a freaking stellar character name!

Ever since finally reading it a couple of years ago I thought The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch would make a great movie, revolving, as it does, on visually striking changes in perception laced with a fair bit of body horror. Plus it comes pre-packaged with sex and a smidge of violence, which would save whichever penny-dreadful screenwriter landed the contract a bit of work. Discovering that characters achieve their altered states of consciousness through massive psychotropic drug use should clue you in as to large entertainment corporations' reluctance to go anywhere near the book though. It conflicts with the censorship imposed by the upper crust's facetious "war on drugs." This hurdle may be overcome (read: sanitized into an innocuously castrated script demonizing -illegal- drugs) for the love of PKD name-brand recognition and the profits it brings, were it not for the inescapable religious commentary in the novel's second half.

If even Dogma, which as far as I'm concerned pandered much too much to the mindlessness of faith, caused such an uproar with its light jabs at a slightly silly but otherwise still all-good, all-powerful deity, books like Palmer Eldritch or Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice stand no chance at being adapted in any movie market controlled by those who have an interest in maintaining the social control apparatus. Which is to say any movie market.

Yet Palmer Eldritch the parvenu almighty can still only be characterized (as with Heinlein's Yahweh) as flawed, inept, slightly capricious or power-mad and not outright evil. What if we were instead to pose that theological bugaboo: is God a bugaboo? How tragically laughable is the notion of a movie adaptation of Faith of our Fathers, which confronts us with a bloodthirsty predatory divinity inimical to the life it husbands for its own use? Could this rather more plausible interpretation of the Biblical view of God as a "shepherd" or a wolf tending his own flock ever make it to the big screen? Am I asking rhetorical questions?

Consider for just a second though the cinematic potential of an implacable, well-spoken but merciless Lovecraftian monstrosity controlling the world government and devouring lives behind a veil of hallucination in the midst of polite upper-class dinner parties. Would you watch that? Did you ever lie in bed at night as a child feeling the universe stretch into darkness in all directions from you?

Equally unmarketable if for different reasons, The Turning Wheel attacks our preconceptions of race relations and civilized thought. It dwells on the vision of that very probable future which sometimes springs up in science fiction and is quickly hushed up for political reasons: the rise of the Chinese world state in the 21st or 22nd century. Though not specifically Chinese, Dick's version of a world dominated by Asians, in which Europeans are derided and marginalized as dirty hairy "caucs" and likened to Neanderthals behind their faces could be transposed to any human social hierarchy. Specifics removed, it would merely portray humans' inter-tribal abuse and dares to fly in the face of politically correct Orientalism portraying all but Europeans as noble savages by attributing savagery and not just nobility to a non-white dominant social group.

This last story, I'm afraid really could get turned into a movie. Containing as it does a stab at Dianetics, and with Scientology coming apart at the seams lately The Turning Wheel may find traction with certain segments of the population. I fear an adaptation may get funded by Christian interests eager to hit their fellow con artists while they're down. More specifically I'm afraid it would be degraded to mere single-minded paranoid anti-Asian propaganda while ignoring its more relevant point about the fragility of human intellectual and social progress. Dick's oriental-flavored world state controls its populace through religious means, through vague mysticism and a proposition of rebirth lent a new-age feel by the adoption of a modern fad in metaphysics, to wit Hubbard's idiotic fables about soul-cleansing. It has abandoned the primacy of reason.

While tribalism may be a human universal inevitably tainting soi-disant advanced societies, the ideas of the Enlightenment and its intellectual successors, of science and rationalism, of a resistance to superstition and a reliance on evidence, are a mere historical aberration, a singular accident which may very well fade out of popular knowledge. Having swept these intellectual gains under the rug along with the now-despised race which happened to stumble upon them, the world of The Turning Wheel is collapsing upon itself, settling once again into the blind thaumaturgical groping which has ruled it since the first witch-doctors mumbled gibberish.

A world in which a capsule of antibiotics must be passed off as a magical amulet. Now that is a dangerous vision and I should hope there are enough Science Fiction fans around with the intellectual integrity to discuss as sharp and poignant a story as The Turning Wheel with the self-critical honesty it deserves. The myriad pitfalls an adaptation would need to overcome, while daunting, are nothing compared to the dire need for such visions in the current regressive political climate.

PKD at the Movies

Hollywood loves Dick!

Heheh... yeah, couldn't pass that one up. Anyhoo, I wanted to suggest a Philip K. Dick story for film adaptation, but before I do, have you ever noticed his (name's) ungodly popularity? Most authors, even if quite successful in print (or e-print nowadays) should count themselves lucky if their work is ever even staged as a high school play, much less adapted with a Hollywood budget. As far as science fiction goes, even the biggest names like Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke find precious little footing on modern walks of fame.

Movie companies love Dick, though. His blatant, haunting paranoia littered his stories with spies, traitors, doppelgangers and impostors of every stripe. This lends them an uncommonly high appeal as thrillers, consistently delivering that minute-75 plot twist or dramatic unveiling to keep audiences gasping for more. Of course there's more to it than that. Anyone can tell you that movie adaptations almost never do their source material justice, so most authors or their estates may be reluctant to let their names get discredited by some Hollywood hacks' lowest-common-denominator treatment. This goes double for most good Science Fiction stories, as their social commentary tends toward the mercilessly avant-garde, stuff movie companies won't touch with the proverbial ten feet.

Philip K. Dick's accumulated a whopping thirteen movie credits to his name, and the number keeps rising. Does this mean the public is actually getting PKD stories on screen? Hell no. In most cases, the rights seem to have been bought for sheer name recognition, and little or nothing after the opening credits resembles even remotely the story it should represent. Do any of them manage to do justice to their inspiration? I'm familiar with most of these so let me go through the parts of the list which I recognize.

1) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Blade Runner
Hells yeah.
Ridley Scott built up a couple lifetimes' worth of karmic credit for giving us one of the few good SF movie adaptations, and in an era when good speculative movies were almost unheard of. Not entirely faithful to the book (I forget, did they even include the passage of the spider trying to bite the hero's hand?) but largely true to the book's spirit.

2) We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Total Recall
No.
Haven't seen the new version so won't comment on it except to wonder how you can put Kurt Wimmer and Kate Beckinsale together and still get something I've never heard anyone praise.
The 1990 version caught me at about 8-9 years old, slightly too young to fully enjoy the chick with three knockers but utterly fascinating me with the string of grotesque mutants. It was actually a pretty damn good flick, but someone at some point will have to explain what it had to do with PKD's original story, whose material dries up about fifteen minutes into the movie, after which we're treated to a largely unrelated Martian acid trip.
I've got nothing against watching Schwarzy wallop mutants to death with heavy mining equipment, but there was no real reason to append Philip K. Dick's name to this. What's more, the original story actually ends in a pretty scathing condemnation of this sort of heroic escapist fantasy, and the last word matters.

3) Second Variety
Screamers
No.
I've commented on this at length before, as it's actually my favorite PKD story... and very much not one of my favorite movies. Though a half-passable post-apocalyptic film by summer movie standards, it definitely betrayed the original story. Read Second Variety.

4) The Minority Report
Minority Report
No.
Social commentary on power-mad control freak bureaucrats sanitized to protect the viewers' delusions. See what I mean about the ten foot pole?

5) Impostor
Abstain.
Can't remember the short story, though I believe I did read it. Movie was mildly acceptable in itself.

6) A Scanner Darkly
Yes.
In fact, I'd rank this as even more faithful an adaptation than Blade Runner, albeit slightly lacking some of the book's gut-punch pathos. Unfortunately it's not one of PKD's most memorable works even if the "drug war" sadly remains quite relevant. Linklater is capable of beautiful work and I was going to suggest he'd be perfect to adapt Ubik... until reading just now that he'd originally planned to do Ubik instead of this. Well, get on it, man!

Last, and also decidedly least.
7) The Golden Man
Next
Yeah, "next!" is exactly what I thought as soon as I saw the theatrical poster for this movie. I've never watched it and so help me Pan the goat-footed god, I never will. At various points in my life, I've had to eat some serious crow for sometimes jumping the gun and, say for example criticizing Cloud Atlas before actually watching it. In this case though? All I needed to see was Nick Cage's dramatically posed mug as a heroic, dashing prophet fighting against the forces of anarchy for (insert heroic motivations here) God, country and the love of a good woman. It's crap. I don't need to watch it to know it's crap. Because it's crap!

Which is sad, because like Second Variety, The Golden Man ranks as one of those truly classic hard-hitting Science Fiction short stories which cram a total head-trip in a few brief pages. Without giving too much away (read it!) I will say that it absolutely hinges on the title character being not only a statuesque, physically imposing and even beautiful figure, not only inhuman but also distinctively subhuman. Nicholas Cage the boy next door discoursing with his star-crossed lady love in perfectly facile vernacular strays as far from the story's purpose as Hamlet would by cheerfully riding around in a clown-car at the World Cup. May you rot, Gary Goldman.

Anyway, more Dickishness tomorrow.

Second Variety

Well, I was going to do a TNG episode review tonight but as it turns out there's very little to say about The Arsenal of Freedom. It's a character development episode meant to flesh out various crew members' interactions but unlike the previous such attempt, 001...0...something, the bynar episode, you know the one with the bulb-heads, the interactions in this one come across as contrived and overextended. Aside from a well-played pseudovillain who embodies every sleazy, line-spewing "pusher" and the thankfully toned-down Data scenes, it's kind of a wash. Not terrible by the abysmal standards of television but not worth mentioning.
...
...
Eeeeeexcept that it did remind me of something, as most things do. See, the episode concerns a planet of weapons manufacturers who were wiped out by their own automated creations. The cold war yielded scads of such cautionary tales which we are now forgetting, to our detriment. However, the topic of humans fabricating their own death by machines comes up more famously in robot-themed stories, and the robot uprising in fiction predates Terminator (the first movie of that series having come out three or four years before TNG started) or even Isaac Asimov's robot novels. It's been a central feature of robot stories since the word "robot" was coined by Karel Capek in 1920 in Rossum's Universal Robots, and arguably before robots were even robots. To stand out when addressing such a crowded thematic milieu you have to come up with something extra, and for the like we must turn to that peerless master of paranoia, Philip K. Dick. Now, as a general rule you should read a story before discussing it so I would encourage a perusal of Second Variety so I don't have to worry about spoilers.

As I watched The Arsenal of Freedom's ending I kept thinking "they could've done more with this" and that the half of the episode dedicated to soulful tete-a-tetes between Troi and LaForge or LaForge and the redshirts or Picard and Crusher (the good Crusher, not the good-Crusher) or Riker and Yar would've have been better spent fleshing out the planet's fate and the nature of the (non-sentient) robots' programming. There's even a very PKD-ish vibe to the initial scene in which the crew is greeted by a hologram masquerading as Riker's long-lost Starfleet Academy friend - and even that goes nowhere, abandoned by Act 2. But back to the main topic.

Ah, yes, the good Mr. Dick loved his impostors, impersonators and other doppelgangers. Second Variety exemplifies his trademark late-game character reveal plot twists which have made his stories so ripe for adaptation (usually with predictably disastrous Hollywood-style results) but more so than most it piles three reveals upon each other, the crucial one snuck in so masterfully under the reader's radar that by the last paragraph we're hit with the same revelation as the protagonist himself.
Reveals:
1) Robots are wiping out humanity, partly by infiltrating our last strongholds (revealed relatively early on)
2) Humanity is doomed because Hendricks was fooled all along (the sort of twist ending we might get from a good Twilight Zone episode)
3) The robots are also wiping each other out. The extra stroke of genius which made that admirable nutjob one of the best SF writers in history.

Now, Second Variety was adapted into an action flick called Screamers which flopped largely based on its own lack of merit. As with most adaptations, it threw out the story's best features in favor of the screenwriter and director's own ramblings and some generalized action-movie tropes. Aside from minor details, two central issues kill the story's effect.
Alterations:
1) It's no longer set on Earth.
2) Twue wuv. Robot falls in love with the human she's supposed to kill. Hilarity ensues. Well, actually nothing ensues.

Both changes were blatantly made to soften the blow of Second Variety's original nihilism for a public presumed too weak-minded to take it as-is, to dumb it down for middle America.

Setting the story on Earth with the moon-base as humanity's last desperate retreat is diametrically opposed, intuitively, from setting the plot on some mining colony with Earth looming grandiosely in the background. The tone of desperation in the story depended on our growing realization that Earth, the cradle of humanity and our only hospitable environment, has already been lost, that the moon-base represents a species already in retreat with slim chances of long-term survival anyway, killer robots or not. We're not supposed to be left with some vague hope that mighty Terra will rally and repulse the android threat. There is a sequel to Screamers (which I haven't seen and refuse to) but the whole point of Second Variety is that there can be no sequel. Humanity is finished and the sequel to humanity has already started making bombs to destroy itself.

Worse still is the utterly moronic "love" angle, the cheesy romantic sub-plot which Hollywood hacks insist on cramming into every single movie regardless of its topic. The absolute sense of doom at the end of Second Variety encompasses not only humanity but sentient life as a whole. Not only will we not survive but nothing will because the robots are headed down the same path as us, only with assembly-line speed and efficiency. This effect hinges on their being utterly, implacably, single-mindedly merciless killers. The gynoid's cold-blooded (no-blooded?) manipulation of Hendricks is crucial to achieving this effect. It can admit no digressions or exceptions.

There's one last twist to consider:
"He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb."
This is Hendricks' last thought. This is the note on which the story ends, the hero's parting shot. After erasing every last shred of hope, Dick insisted on nullifying even our moral justification for hope. Hendricks realizes that the robots will destroy each other, and he's glad. We find no magnanimity in him, no high-mindedness, no noble last-second beatific forgiveness of his executioners, no hope for sentient life beyond humanity. He is witnessing the end of all things, the end of thought, and he's glad.

Because of course the first and second varieties, human and robot, were never all that different - wind-up toys acting out their pre-programmed destructive patterns. The means by which the second variety manipulates the first entail no objective ethical principles but basic programming, or in other words human instinct: tribal loyalties, protection of the young or a potential mate. Beyond that, the first variety proves just as ruthless and ethically incompetent a killer as the second.

-and if this is all sentience amounts to, then by all means we should embrace nihilism just as Hendricks did. Learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.


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P.S.:
Writing one of these posts is more work than it might look like. It often entails five to ten or more browser tabs' worth of references, especially if I'm looking for a song tie-in. So for the first time I ran across Second Variety's publication date: May 1953.
1953. Fucking hell. The Cold War had barely started. Stalin had only just died two months earlier. Forget moon-bases or even moon-landings. Even Sputnik wouldn't be launched for four more years. Yet everything in the story flows so naturally that it may as well have been written in the '80s. Philip K. Dick, you freaking genius bastard, I both hate and salute you

P.P.S.:
My music playlist for once contains nothing with truly apt lyrics for this story. You just don't run across much good music about killer robots. I do however find Apocalyptica's Delusion thematically appropriate.