In December 2005, a passenger on an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas fell asleep. Woken by a steward when the plane touched down, the man wearily disembarked and took a connecting flight to San Francisco. It was only there that he realised he’d forgotten an item of hand luggage on the first flight. Despite heroic attempts to retrieve it, the item was never seen again. This is a pity. The item was the head of Philip K. Dick.
Not his real head, of course. That had been cremated, along with the rest of the science fiction writer, in 1982, shortly before the release of Blade Runner, the film based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The head was part of a robotic replica of Dick (and yes, its creators did toy, briefly, with calling it the Dick Head). The passenger who lost it was David Hanson, one of the team of AI (Artificial Intelligence) enthusiasts who had designed and built the replica. This book is the account of how they did it, and wowed the AI and sci-fi communities in America. If the word ‘geek’ is now flashing across your mind, it shouldn’t be. This story is touching, absorbing and, ultimately, an exploration of what it means to be human.
It begins when Hanson and his colleagues set themselves the challenge of creating an android that’s as lifelike as possible. Such creatures being a recurring theme in Dick’s work (not least in Do Androids Dream …), they decide to model both its appearance and personality on the author himself, and to call it ‘Phil’. Early research involves adapting a Billy Bass singing fish so it can deliver a lesson on Newtonian physics.
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