The following appeared in a recent American magazine ...

Fourteen years after his death, the reputation of Philip K. Dick
continues to grow. While it's lamentable that more honour wasn't
piled on him before his death, it is gratifying to those of us who
devoured each new work during his lifetime to know that so much of
his work remains in print to win the admiration of new generations.
Of course, a large part of the interest in Dick stems from the films
drawn from his work, Blade Runner and Total Recall, though (as many
have pointed out before me) both films took wide liberties with their
source material. Screamers, to be released by Sony Tristar this
October with Peter Weller (of Robocop and Buckeroo Banzai) in the
lead role, is the first time that a Dick story has been brought to
the screen with minimal tampering.
     The story Screamers is based upon, "Second Variety," was written
in 1952 and first published in the now-forgotten magazine Space
Science Fiction in May of 1953 - a period that marked the peak of
anti-Communist hysteria as Hollywood came under scrutiny from the
House UnAmerican Activities Committee for shades of "Red" and "Pink"
influence. Considering the times, the boldest aspect of Dick's story
was that it concerned the aftermath of a Soviet-American war that had
devastated Earth, and the handful of combatants - both Russian and
American - who band together in an effort to survive the final
weapon.
     Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon began work on the adaptation back in
1979, immediately after the release of Alien (cowritten by O'Bannon);
he originally retained the cold war subplot in his screenplay, at
that time entitled C.L.A.W. (Cybernetic Lethal Autonomous Weapon).
producer Charles Fries acquired the script and, in the early 1980s,
very nearly went into production with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the
lead role - but the actor decided to go with another script about
robot war and threatened human extinction, The Terminator. C.L.A.W.
was shelved, though Fries said at the time that the loss of
Schwarzenegger was only a temporary setback. The opportunity remained
to make the film as a low budget picture, but Fries refused all
offers, saying that the material deserved an A-level production -
even if it had to wait a decade or two before the opportunity
arrived.
     In the years that followed, glasnost, perestroika and the fall
of the "evil empire" rendered Dick's take on the cold war an outdated
relic; in 1990, Fries commissioned minor alterations to O'Bannon's
script. Instead of a ruined Earth, the action was moved to a mining
planet. Instead of commies and Americans, the conflict is a "class
war" between colonial mine workers and a mining consortium (thus
echoing some themes of O'Bannon's script for Alien).
     At the centre of the script, however, the story remains fully
intact. In an introduction to "Second Variety" written for a 1977
collection, Dick said of the story that "my grand theme - who is
human and who only appears (masquerades) as human? - emerges most
fully. Unless we can individually and collectively be certain of the
answer to this question, we face what is, in my view, the most
serious problem possible. Without answering it adequately, we cannot
even be certain of our own selves".
     This theme, also very important in Blade Runner and the story it
was drawn from ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), was not a
worry to Dick because of artificial intelligence and the
possibilities of the future; his concerns were not confined to hard
science and its imagined futures - in fact, the "science" in Dick's
science fiction primarily took the form of quasi-magical electronic
gizmos.
     Instead, Dick used his imagined worlds to strip his characters -
and the reader - of the reassuring illusion of stability fostered by
contemporary reality and expose them to the chaos of the universe at
large, in the hope that some truth about the human soul would emerge.
Philip Dick was himself subject, through much of his life, to vivid
experiences of what seemed to be other worlds and other times, and
most of Dick's later writing represents the herculean effort of a
sane intellect to rationalise such unfathomable experience.
     Which is not to say that Screamers is going to be any sort of
heavy headtrip; "Second Variety" was written just as Dick was
beginning to penetrate the science fiction pulp magazine market. The
metaphysical themes that dominated his later are securely cloaked in
a violent future war scenario, allowing the possibility for the film
to cross over to mainstream success as an "action" picture.
     In order to make the most of Screamers' moderate budget, the
film was shot in Montreal by a Canadian crew, a move that required
Fries to abdicate the producer's role to Tom Berry of Allegro Films.
Director Christian Duguay, whose most prominent work is Million
Dollar Babies, the recent television miniseries about the Dionne
Quintuplets, previously worked with Allegro on two interesting,
though poorly scripted, sequels to David Cronenberg's Scanners.
     Duguay, who is unique among directors in that he insists on
doing the camera work himself, does seem to have a handle on Dick's
work. "I didn't set out to make just another special effects
extravaganza," he says, "because that's not what Philip K. Dick is
all about. His stories have an impact because they are based on the
human condition in his own time, set in uncertain futures. We see
ourselves mirrored in his tales, and that often is an unpleasant and
frightening sight."