Philip K. Dick was a great SF writer. I think his short fiction, in particular, is extraordinary. Don’t be mislead by the mediocre movie adaptations of his stories. (E.g. “Total Recall”, “Screamers”, “Impostor”, “Minority Report”, “Paycheck”, and possibly one or two others that are not “Blade Runner”.) The original material is much more interesting, and often has a sense of fun entirely lost in the big-screen conversion.
Reading List
You should pick up these five books. Together, they comprise a 5-volume set covering all Philip K. Dick’s short fiction.
- ISBN-13: 9780806511535
- ISBN-13: 9780806512099
- ISBN-13: 9780806512266
- ISBN-13: 9780806512761
- ISBN-13: 9780806513287
They can be a little hard to find, so the Internet is your friend, here.
Reader Beware
The majority of Dick’s stuff is very good, but his later-period work (i.e. most of Volume 5) is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. (E.g. “Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked”.) Not uninteresting, but insane. This does nothing to detract from the greatness of 80% of his work.
Incidentally, even if you’re put off by Volume 5, you ought to read the last story he published, “The Alien Mind”. It’s a great return to form: coherent, sharp, punchy. I like to think that, had he lived, he could have gone on to write another 20 years of brilliant material.
The last words of his last short story were: “They were all the same flavor.” In context, that’s just the right line.
