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Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

This was probably inspired more by Philip K. Dick's Paycheck than Office Space. In Paycheck, the protagonist agrees to work on a secret project for two years, after which his memory will be erased.

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There's a 2003 movie version of Paycheck with Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, and like 4 other people you'll probably recognize. I watched it when it popped up on Amazon Prime last year. Seems like it's not reviewed very highly but I enjoyed it going in with no expectations and not really knowing what it was about.

I liked it.

I remember watching it and I thought it fell apart in the second half. I really cannot remember how it ends, just that I didn’t like it. The concept of erasing your memory after you complete a job stuck with me, and was probably the most remarkable part of the movie.

Knowing PKD, it probably ends with the whole story being a "flash forward" caused by the protagonist looking through the device that sees into the future and then causing the actions that set up the beginning of the story.

Yup, that’s exactly what it was.

Yeah it was a bit predictable but not a bad movie IMO.

I watched this "live in theatre" when it came out and enjoyed it.

It may be a buggered memory, but I don't recall seeing a movie about reverse engineering often.

PKD is a gold mine of stories for the screen.

For anyone that missed it Amazon's Electric Dreams are just PKD short stories. I was rather surprised that they got some big name actors in it.

I missed it, thanks for the heads up.

Kind of a clever name though, reminiscent as it is of androids and sheep.

PKD is a gold mine for heavily modified stories for the screen. His imagination, themes, sci-fi concepts and world building are all fantastic, but he falls way short on characters, dialogue and plot.

> but he falls way short on characters, dialogue and plot.

Like most sci-fi writers, to be honest.

Ursula LeGuin being one notable exception.

Since you bring up LeGuin here I guess I will respond to the canard that Dick does not do characters well, in 'Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown' LeGuin argued that Dick had one of the only interesting characters in all of Science Fiction, that being Nobusuke Tagomi from The Man in The High Castle, the other being D-503 from Zamyatin's We (IIRC) of course it has been nearly 4 decades since I read the essay, and I have a hard time finding an ebook version of The Language Of The Night (which is where I encountered the essay) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_the_Night that I can pay for.

on edit: grammar, moving text

Been at least four decades (four and a half?) since I read We, but I can't recall a single character from it that had more life than a cardboard cut-out. (A bit like Brave New World in that respect.)

cough Isaac Asimov cough

It's interesting to see how they change his kind of old-timey story titles into cool modern ones.

It's interesting to see how they change his kind of old-timey story titles into cool modern ones, eg "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" -> "Total Recall".

On the other hand, there's often too much dialogue on the screen. (The Expanse for example)

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