What do you think?
Rate this book
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick #5
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 5: The Little Black Box
Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.
Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, and in the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the late 1950's.
Volume 5/5. Contents:
- The Little Black Box (1964)
- The War With the Fnools (1964)
- A Game of Unchance (1964)
- Precious Artifact (1964)
- Retreat Syndrome (1965)
- A Terran Odyssey (1987)
- Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday (1966)
- Holy Quarrel (1966)
- We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966)
- Not by Its Cover (1968)
- Return Match (1967)
- Faith of Our Fathers (1967)
- The Story to End All Stories (1968)
- The Electric Ant (1969)
- Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked (1987)
- A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1974)
- The Pre-Persons (1974)
- The Eye of the Sibyl (1987)
- The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree (1987)
- The Exit Door Leads In (1979)
- Chains of Air, Web of Aether (1980)
- Strange Memories of Death (1984)
- I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1980, also titled Frozen Journey)
- Rautavaara's Case (1980)
- The Alien Mind (1981)
Other editions of this volume are titled:
- The Little Black Box
- We can remember it for you wholesale
- The Eye of the Sibyl
Editions published by Citadel don't include the story "We can remember it for you wholesale" into Vol. 5, it was placed in their Vol. 2 instead. Apart from that, contents are the same across editions.
Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, and in the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the late 1950's.
Volume 5/5. Contents:
- The Little Black Box (1964)
- The War With the Fnools (1964)
- A Game of Unchance (1964)
- Precious Artifact (1964)
- Retreat Syndrome (1965)
- A Terran Odyssey (1987)
- Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday (1966)
- Holy Quarrel (1966)
- We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966)
- Not by Its Cover (1968)
- Return Match (1967)
- Faith of Our Fathers (1967)
- The Story to End All Stories (1968)
- The Electric Ant (1969)
- Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked (1987)
- A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1974)
- The Pre-Persons (1974)
- The Eye of the Sibyl (1987)
- The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree (1987)
- The Exit Door Leads In (1979)
- Chains of Air, Web of Aether (1980)
- Strange Memories of Death (1984)
- I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1980, also titled Frozen Journey)
- Rautavaara's Case (1980)
- The Alien Mind (1981)
Other editions of this volume are titled:
- The Little Black Box
- We can remember it for you wholesale
- The Eye of the Sibyl
Editions published by Citadel don't include the story "We can remember it for you wholesale" into Vol. 5, it was placed in their Vol. 2 instead. Apart from that, contents are the same across editions.
395 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1987
199 people are currently reading
2718 people want to read
About the author
Philip K. Dick
2,006 books22.4k followersPhilip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound philosophical themes, Dick explored the nature of reality, the boundaries of human identity, and the impact of technology and authoritarianism on society. His stories often blurred the line between the real and the artificial, challenging readers to question their perceptions and beliefs.
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 189 reviews
June 8, 2020
I’ve been reading Dick’s novels in chronological order and I’m almost finished with the 1950s. But I needed a break from novels so I switched over to short stories. I decided to start with The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Stories, the last of the five volumes of Dick’s collected short stories.
I exceeded the 20,000 character limit ~ Oops! ~ so this review will be continued in the comment section.
The first story is “The Black Box.”
I’m especially interested in Dick’s religious themes, so a story that quotes the Bhagavad Gita and references Basho is sure to get my attention.
Telepathy is also a common theme in Dick’s stories and “The Black Box” is no exception. But as important as telepathy is to this story, empathy is even more important. In Dick’s own note on the story, he relates “The Black Box” to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I haven’t read that one yet, but of course I’m familiar with Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and the empathy test that distinguishes humans from replicants.
Telepathy allows one to read another’s thoughts, even subconscious thoughts. But empathy allows one to feel what another feels. The government utilizes telepathy, but bans empathy. Why? I suppose it’s because the telepath knows what another person thinks, but doesn’t think what that person thinks. The empath doesn’t just know what another person feels. The empath actually feels what that other person feels. This makes all the difference.
Like some of Dick’s 1950s novels, “The Black Box” features a messiah-figure ~ this time an alien messiah-figure. People use empathy boxes to feel what he feels as he marches toward his death. This is clearly reminiscent of the Via Dolorosa ~ the path of Christ.
One might ask why people want to suffer along with the alien messiah? But the real question this story raises is a political one: Why does the government want to ban this? What about empathy is politically subversive? Dick’s story reminds us that Christianity ~ a religion wherein devotees suffer along with their suffering messiah ~ was once a politically subversive religion. ★★★★★
The second story, “The War With The Fnools,” is a humorous piece described by Dick as a “low-budget invasion.” It is about aliens who try to take over Earth. They assume human guise, though they stand only two feet tall. The absurdity is that they don’t realize how different they look by being only two feet tall. Fortunately for the people of Earth, the tiny invaders have never experienced cigarettes, booze, and sex. ★★★☆☆
The third story, “Precious Artifact,” involves an engineer facing the aftermath of a war. Like so many of Dick’s stories, there are layers of illusion. Extra star for the kitten. ★★★★☆
The fourth story, “Retreat Syndrome,” reminded me a bit of the 1990 film Total Recall. (I have not yet read “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” so I can’t compare it to the short story which inspired the film.) Like Total Recall, the main character of “Retreat Syndrome” has a false memory and must figure out what is real and what is not.
However, the similarity ends there. In “Retreat Syndrome,” John Cupertino distinctly recalls murdering his wife even though she is alive. This thought is frequently described as an idée fixe, an obsession or “fixed idea” which is so resistant to change that even meeting and talking to his wife cannot alter it.
But there’s more going on than this. Throughout this story, Cupertino has experiences where everything seems unreal, insubstantial, and shadow-like. Yet when he finally discovers the truth, he is unable to accept it. Dick’s speculations about Cupertino’s illusory world are the highlight of this story.
“He wanted, he realized, to hang onto the delusional system; he did not wish to see it decompose around him. A person was his world; without it he did not exist” (81).
The world of shadows that Cupertino inhabits recalls Plato’s world of shadows. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato imagines men held prisoner in a cave. They spend their days watching the shadows reflected on the cave walls. It is all they have ever known, so they mistake it for the real world. When one prisoner is freed and sees the real world for the first time, he returns to the cave and informs his fellow prisoners, but they want nothing to do with reality. To them, the shadows are real and they will not give them up.
Dick suggests a reason why Plato’s prisoners might be unwilling to abandon their illusory world: self-preservation. So it is with Cupertino. He hangs on to his delusional system, even though it condemns him to repeat his actions over and over again ad infinitum.
The story isn’t perfect, for it is not clear how Cupertino’s existence or identity is threatened by the collapse of his illusion. The reality of his life is worse than the illusion he inhabits, but it is not substantially different. However, the story does explore mental illness, a frequent theme in Dick’s stories. It shows how the illusion is stronger than reality, so strong that it persists even after the truth has been discovered. ★★★★★
I skipped the fifth and sixth stories, “A Terran Odyssey” and “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday,” because I haven’t yet read the novels they are excerpted from and I don’t want any spoilers. (“A Terran Odyssey” is from Dr. Bloodmoney and “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” is from Counter-Clock World).
The seventh story, “Holy Quarrel,” is another story with a religious theme. The premise is intriguing: the Genux-B computer decides that Sousa, a penny-candy salesman, is Satan and must be destroyed. To accomplish this, Genux-B is preparing to destroy all of Northern California.
The best part of this story is the characters’ attempts to reason with the artificial intelligence. After failing to trick Genux-B into believing that Sousa doesn’t really exist, one of the FBI men cites St. Anselms’ ontological argument for the existence of God (147-148).
As with so many of Dick’s stories, there’s a lot going on. There is the dilemma of a super computer which is either malfunctioning or functioning exactly as it should. If it is malfunctioning, it will destroy Northern California for nothing. If it is functioning exactly as it should, the men ignore it at their peril. Then there is the question of whether Sousa is actually Satan or the computer is experiencing a religious delusion. And there is the mystery of the gum balls which may or may not be alien life.
The different strands of the story all come together at the end with a bit of Dick’s unique brand of absurdity. ★★★★★
“A Game of Unchance” is the eighth story in this collection and so far it is the one that least held my interest, but it did invite a comparison with Ray Bradbury. This is the story of a colony on Mars facing danger from a traveling carnival. But Dick’s Martian setting and sinister carnival are nothing like Bradbury’s. Instead of Bradbury’s iconic small town setting, Dick presents a struggling settlement of farmers and mechanics. Instead of Bradbury’s supernatural battle between good and evil, Dick presents an extraterrestrial plot of economic and military sabotage.
The conclusion of the story reminded me of the conclusion of “Retreat Syndrome.” In both stories, the characters do not learn from experience, so they repeat their mistakes over and over. I wonder if this is something that Dick observed in himself. Or perhaps he simply identified it as a flaw in human nature. Either way, I am curious to see if Dick uses this again. ★★★☆☆
The ninth story,“Not by it’s Cover,” is a clever theological story.
What do Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, the Bible, Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, the Encyclopedia Briannica, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon all have in common? They have all had their text altered by the living hide of an immortal Martian animal. Well, not quite all. The text of the Summa Theologica was not altered. It merely had a Biblical line inserted over and over again. And the Bible had a line repeatedly capitalized.
In a note to the story written by Dick ten years after publication he expresses his desire for the Bible to be true. ★★★★☆
The tenth story, “Return Match,” involves an alien pinball machine. A rather pedestrian story compared with the others. ★★★☆☆
“Faith of Our Fathers” is the eleventh story and it’s the highlight of this collection. In a world dominated by Communism, the protagonist, Chien, wakes up from the hallucination that everyone is under. The beginning of this story reminded me of my favorite sci fi movie, “They Live” (1988). “Put the glasses on!” Except that here it’s not sunglasses; it’s an anti-hallucinogen.
And what does Chien see when the veil is lifted from his eyes? God of course!
The theological foundation of “Faith of Our Fathers” reminds me a little of Clark Ashton Smith’s short story “Schizoid Creator.” In both stories, God is presented as both good and evil. But naturally Dick’s story goes deeper than Smith’s does, with Dick positing, not only that God is both good and evil, but that good and evil are really the same thing.
“’Did it ever occur to you,’ Chien said, ‘that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time‘” (221)?
Dick’s God is more horrifying that Smith’s even though Smith’s story could more accurately be called a horror story. That’s because Dick’s story is philosophical and Smith’s is not. God in “Faith of Our Fathers” is not a split personality. He is fully conscious of being both creator and destroyer. Dick’s God feeds off of the life that he creates. He creates in order to consume. When Chien sees God, he immediately tries to commit suicide, but God prevents him from killing himself.
God’s speech to Chien is a parody of God’s answer to Job.
In the Bible, God, speaking of Leviathan, says to Job: “The flakes of his flesh are joined together.... Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment” (Job 41: 23, 30-31).
Dick’s God says to Chien: “Sharp stones are under me; I spread sharp pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding places, the deep places, boil like a pot; to me the sea is like a lot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined to everything” (218).
I don’t think I’ll ever look at The Book of Job the same way again. Even though God’s answer to Job is veiled in mystery, it still offers the reassuring message that evil is something God merely permits, not something that God causes and certainly not something that God is.
But Dick’s God is evil. Not evil the way Satan is evil. That, at least, is comprehensible. Dick’s God is evil and because he is God and he is evil, evil is good. And that’s neither comprehensible nor bearable. Hence Chien’s reflexive suicide attempt. ★★★★★
The twelfth story, “The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions,” is a bizarre single paragraph story that followed “Faith of Our Fathers” in Dangerous Visions. All I can say is: Yikes! ★★★☆☆
The thirteenth story is “The Electric Ant.” Like so many of the PKD novels and stories I’ve read so far, “The Electric Ant” questions the nature of reality. At the beginning of the story, Poole discovers that he is a robot and decides to experiment with his reality tape. He punches new holes in the tape and covers up others to see how these changes will affect his reality. But then he gets a bigger idea:
“Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all reality” (236).
“What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality”(236).
This reminded me of something in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It’s the idea, borrowed from the philosopher Henri Bergson, that the brain acts as a filter. Huxley calls it a “reducing valve.” It filters out most of what we could perceive and reduces our perceptions to only what is useful for survival. If it were not for this “reducing valve,” we would perceive everything everywhere in the universe. Huxley wants to expand consciousness by allowing more perceptions to by-pass the “reducing valve.” Hence his experiment with Mescaline.
Huxley concedes that it is impossible to completely by-pass the “reducing valve” and in “The Electric Ant,” Poole also admits that this is impossible—for a human. But Poole is not human. As an Electric Ant, he is both less than and more than human. Less than human because for him reality is nothing but hole punches on a reality tape. And more than human because he has the ability to experience all of reality, which no human can do.
Yet there’s even more to the story than this. In addition to the possibility of experiencing “ultimate and absolute reality,” there’s the question of what that reality is. For Poole, it is a tape inside the mechanism of his chest. But what is reality to everyone else? The answer is a typically Dickian paradox. ★★★★★
The previously unpublished “Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked” is the fourteenth story and it’s unlike anything else I’ve read by PKD. It begins as a talking animal story, but it goes on to become something else entirely. I suppose it says something about Dick’s relationships with women, but all in all it doesn’t seem worth analyzing. I’ll give it three stars for being a curiosity and for having a rabbit psychiatrist. ★★★☆☆
I have mixed feelings about the fifteenth story, “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” As the word Tempunauts implies, it is a story about time travellers. It centers on the phenomenon of a time loop, but it is really more about the choice Doug has to make between maintaining the time loop or trying to break it.
Doug suffers from cyclothymia ~ which I had to look up since I had never heard of it before. Cyclothymia is a mild, but chronic, form of bipolar disorder. This mental disorder ultimately determines the decision he makes. The ending is melancoly and surprising. I felt this was a three star story, but the ending elevates it to four stars. ★★★★☆
The sixteenth story, “The Pre-Persons,” is the reason I bought this volume. I heard about the hate mail Dick received from fellow science fiction writer Joanna Russ and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I am separating my comments on Dick’s stance on abortion from my comments on the quality of this short story. Otherwise, rating this story would be nothing more than a political statement: If you’re pro-choice, it’s a one-star story. If you’re pro-life, it’s a five-star story.
I think the story begins with a good premise and has the potential to be a good piece of philosophical science fiction. Dick takes one argument against abortion and builds a story around it. The argument concerns personhood: When does a human being become a person? The pro-life answer to this question is: conception. This answer has the virtue of being absolute. The moment the egg is fertilized by the sperm, a new human being exists. The criterion for personhood is membership in the human species.
The pro-choice answer is not absolute. Since membership in the human species is not the sole criterion for personhood, something else must be added. But what? And when does this something else manifest? At twelve weeks gestation? Eighteen weeks? Twenty-four weeks? The moment of birth? Each answer takes some milestone in fetal development and posits it as the moment the fetus becomes a person. And whatever answer is given, the pro-life rebuttal will be that it is an arbitrary criterion.
The premise of Dick’s story is that a human being becomes a person at twelve years of age. What he has done is to extend the pro-choice argument to the point of absurdity to see what the results will be. This is what good science fiction so often does. It is the way science fiction engages in social criticism. And the age of personhood in this story is less absurd than it might first seem to be.
While Dick’s extension of abortion to a time after birth seems unfair to abortion advocates who reject infanticide, one argument for infanticide is based on the argument for abortion. Philosopher Peter Singer argues that the infant, like the fetus, lacks the defining human traits of rationality and self-awareness (Practical Ethics, 1979). The criterion for personhood in Dick’s story ~ the ability to do algebra ~ seems less absurd in light of Singer’s cognitive criteria.
So Dick is off to an interesting start. But it doesn’t last. The challenge to the status quo comes from a man who claims that he isn’t a person because he can’t do algebra, so he should be aborted just like any unwanted child under the age of twelve. However, the implication in the beginning of the story is that the age of twelve was chosen because it’s the general age at which a child becomes capable of doing algebra, not that doing algebra itself is required. (After all, one boy under the age of twelve was already doing algebra, but that didn’t make him a person.)
This is not merely a bit of sloppy writing. This is Dick needing a mouthpiece in the story to express his position on abortion. In short, “The Pre-Persons” is a propaganda piece that doesn’t work very well as a story.
Dick makes impassioned arguments against killing the helpless rather than challenging the cognitive criteria of personhood that allowed his futuristic society to abort children under twelve. This story could have been both better fiction and better propaganda.
But this flaw pales in comparison to another flaw. After all, to be passionately opposed to the killing of the helpless is laudable. While some might argue that it is misapplied in the case of abortion, the sentiment itself is laudable. But the other flaw in this story is the opposite of laudable: Dick’s portrayal of the only woman in the story is downright misogynistic. Cynthia is a “castrating” wife and a “kindermorder” (286). Everything about her is cold and cruel. Is this really Dick’s idea of women who have abortions? I think it is. He even uses the stereotype of women having abortions for frivolous reasons. Cynthia wants to get pregnant just so she can have an abortion.
“’Let’s have an abortion!’ Cynthia declared excitedly.... ‘Wouldn’t that be neat? Doesn’t that turn you on?’ ” (285).
Cynthia and her husband then discuss how she would get to take the embryo home in a glow-in-the-dark glass bottle ~ “in any color you want!” (285).
When I first read about Joanna Russ offering to beat Dick up over this story, I was ready to take Dick’s side. I don’t agree with his position on abortion, but I do believe in his right to express his opinion through his fiction. And I still feel that way. But after reading his caricature of women who choose abortion as cold castrating females who murder their children for frivolous amusement, I think I might just like to take a swing at him myself. ★★☆☆☆
Continued in the comment section . . .
I exceeded the 20,000 character limit ~ Oops! ~ so this review will be continued in the comment section.
The first story is “The Black Box.”
I’m especially interested in Dick’s religious themes, so a story that quotes the Bhagavad Gita and references Basho is sure to get my attention.
Telepathy is also a common theme in Dick’s stories and “The Black Box” is no exception. But as important as telepathy is to this story, empathy is even more important. In Dick’s own note on the story, he relates “The Black Box” to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I haven’t read that one yet, but of course I’m familiar with Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and the empathy test that distinguishes humans from replicants.
Telepathy allows one to read another’s thoughts, even subconscious thoughts. But empathy allows one to feel what another feels. The government utilizes telepathy, but bans empathy. Why? I suppose it’s because the telepath knows what another person thinks, but doesn’t think what that person thinks. The empath doesn’t just know what another person feels. The empath actually feels what that other person feels. This makes all the difference.
Like some of Dick’s 1950s novels, “The Black Box” features a messiah-figure ~ this time an alien messiah-figure. People use empathy boxes to feel what he feels as he marches toward his death. This is clearly reminiscent of the Via Dolorosa ~ the path of Christ.
One might ask why people want to suffer along with the alien messiah? But the real question this story raises is a political one: Why does the government want to ban this? What about empathy is politically subversive? Dick’s story reminds us that Christianity ~ a religion wherein devotees suffer along with their suffering messiah ~ was once a politically subversive religion. ★★★★★
The second story, “The War With The Fnools,” is a humorous piece described by Dick as a “low-budget invasion.” It is about aliens who try to take over Earth. They assume human guise, though they stand only two feet tall. The absurdity is that they don’t realize how different they look by being only two feet tall. Fortunately for the people of Earth, the tiny invaders have never experienced cigarettes, booze, and sex. ★★★☆☆
The third story, “Precious Artifact,” involves an engineer facing the aftermath of a war. Like so many of Dick’s stories, there are layers of illusion. Extra star for the kitten. ★★★★☆
The fourth story, “Retreat Syndrome,” reminded me a bit of the 1990 film Total Recall. (I have not yet read “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” so I can’t compare it to the short story which inspired the film.) Like Total Recall, the main character of “Retreat Syndrome” has a false memory and must figure out what is real and what is not.
However, the similarity ends there. In “Retreat Syndrome,” John Cupertino distinctly recalls murdering his wife even though she is alive. This thought is frequently described as an idée fixe, an obsession or “fixed idea” which is so resistant to change that even meeting and talking to his wife cannot alter it.
But there’s more going on than this. Throughout this story, Cupertino has experiences where everything seems unreal, insubstantial, and shadow-like. Yet when he finally discovers the truth, he is unable to accept it. Dick’s speculations about Cupertino’s illusory world are the highlight of this story.
“He wanted, he realized, to hang onto the delusional system; he did not wish to see it decompose around him. A person was his world; without it he did not exist” (81).
The world of shadows that Cupertino inhabits recalls Plato’s world of shadows. In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato imagines men held prisoner in a cave. They spend their days watching the shadows reflected on the cave walls. It is all they have ever known, so they mistake it for the real world. When one prisoner is freed and sees the real world for the first time, he returns to the cave and informs his fellow prisoners, but they want nothing to do with reality. To them, the shadows are real and they will not give them up.
Dick suggests a reason why Plato’s prisoners might be unwilling to abandon their illusory world: self-preservation. So it is with Cupertino. He hangs on to his delusional system, even though it condemns him to repeat his actions over and over again ad infinitum.
The story isn’t perfect, for it is not clear how Cupertino’s existence or identity is threatened by the collapse of his illusion. The reality of his life is worse than the illusion he inhabits, but it is not substantially different. However, the story does explore mental illness, a frequent theme in Dick’s stories. It shows how the illusion is stronger than reality, so strong that it persists even after the truth has been discovered. ★★★★★
I skipped the fifth and sixth stories, “A Terran Odyssey” and “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday,” because I haven’t yet read the novels they are excerpted from and I don’t want any spoilers. (“A Terran Odyssey” is from Dr. Bloodmoney and “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” is from Counter-Clock World).
The seventh story, “Holy Quarrel,” is another story with a religious theme. The premise is intriguing: the Genux-B computer decides that Sousa, a penny-candy salesman, is Satan and must be destroyed. To accomplish this, Genux-B is preparing to destroy all of Northern California.
The best part of this story is the characters’ attempts to reason with the artificial intelligence. After failing to trick Genux-B into believing that Sousa doesn’t really exist, one of the FBI men cites St. Anselms’ ontological argument for the existence of God (147-148).
As with so many of Dick’s stories, there’s a lot going on. There is the dilemma of a super computer which is either malfunctioning or functioning exactly as it should. If it is malfunctioning, it will destroy Northern California for nothing. If it is functioning exactly as it should, the men ignore it at their peril. Then there is the question of whether Sousa is actually Satan or the computer is experiencing a religious delusion. And there is the mystery of the gum balls which may or may not be alien life.
The different strands of the story all come together at the end with a bit of Dick’s unique brand of absurdity. ★★★★★
“A Game of Unchance” is the eighth story in this collection and so far it is the one that least held my interest, but it did invite a comparison with Ray Bradbury. This is the story of a colony on Mars facing danger from a traveling carnival. But Dick’s Martian setting and sinister carnival are nothing like Bradbury’s. Instead of Bradbury’s iconic small town setting, Dick presents a struggling settlement of farmers and mechanics. Instead of Bradbury’s supernatural battle between good and evil, Dick presents an extraterrestrial plot of economic and military sabotage.
The conclusion of the story reminded me of the conclusion of “Retreat Syndrome.” In both stories, the characters do not learn from experience, so they repeat their mistakes over and over. I wonder if this is something that Dick observed in himself. Or perhaps he simply identified it as a flaw in human nature. Either way, I am curious to see if Dick uses this again. ★★★☆☆
The ninth story,“Not by it’s Cover,” is a clever theological story.
What do Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, the Bible, Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, the Encyclopedia Briannica, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon all have in common? They have all had their text altered by the living hide of an immortal Martian animal. Well, not quite all. The text of the Summa Theologica was not altered. It merely had a Biblical line inserted over and over again. And the Bible had a line repeatedly capitalized.
In a note to the story written by Dick ten years after publication he expresses his desire for the Bible to be true. ★★★★☆
The tenth story, “Return Match,” involves an alien pinball machine. A rather pedestrian story compared with the others. ★★★☆☆
“Faith of Our Fathers” is the eleventh story and it’s the highlight of this collection. In a world dominated by Communism, the protagonist, Chien, wakes up from the hallucination that everyone is under. The beginning of this story reminded me of my favorite sci fi movie, “They Live” (1988). “Put the glasses on!” Except that here it’s not sunglasses; it’s an anti-hallucinogen.
And what does Chien see when the veil is lifted from his eyes? God of course!
The theological foundation of “Faith of Our Fathers” reminds me a little of Clark Ashton Smith’s short story “Schizoid Creator.” In both stories, God is presented as both good and evil. But naturally Dick’s story goes deeper than Smith’s does, with Dick positing, not only that God is both good and evil, but that good and evil are really the same thing.
“’Did it ever occur to you,’ Chien said, ‘that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time‘” (221)?
Dick’s God is more horrifying that Smith’s even though Smith’s story could more accurately be called a horror story. That’s because Dick’s story is philosophical and Smith’s is not. God in “Faith of Our Fathers” is not a split personality. He is fully conscious of being both creator and destroyer. Dick’s God feeds off of the life that he creates. He creates in order to consume. When Chien sees God, he immediately tries to commit suicide, but God prevents him from killing himself.
God’s speech to Chien is a parody of God’s answer to Job.
In the Bible, God, speaking of Leviathan, says to Job: “The flakes of his flesh are joined together.... Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment” (Job 41: 23, 30-31).
Dick’s God says to Chien: “Sharp stones are under me; I spread sharp pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding places, the deep places, boil like a pot; to me the sea is like a lot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined to everything” (218).
I don’t think I’ll ever look at The Book of Job the same way again. Even though God’s answer to Job is veiled in mystery, it still offers the reassuring message that evil is something God merely permits, not something that God causes and certainly not something that God is.
But Dick’s God is evil. Not evil the way Satan is evil. That, at least, is comprehensible. Dick’s God is evil and because he is God and he is evil, evil is good. And that’s neither comprehensible nor bearable. Hence Chien’s reflexive suicide attempt. ★★★★★
The twelfth story, “The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions,” is a bizarre single paragraph story that followed “Faith of Our Fathers” in Dangerous Visions. All I can say is: Yikes! ★★★☆☆
The thirteenth story is “The Electric Ant.” Like so many of the PKD novels and stories I’ve read so far, “The Electric Ant” questions the nature of reality. At the beginning of the story, Poole discovers that he is a robot and decides to experiment with his reality tape. He punches new holes in the tape and covers up others to see how these changes will affect his reality. But then he gets a bigger idea:
“Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all reality” (236).
“What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality”(236).
This reminded me of something in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It’s the idea, borrowed from the philosopher Henri Bergson, that the brain acts as a filter. Huxley calls it a “reducing valve.” It filters out most of what we could perceive and reduces our perceptions to only what is useful for survival. If it were not for this “reducing valve,” we would perceive everything everywhere in the universe. Huxley wants to expand consciousness by allowing more perceptions to by-pass the “reducing valve.” Hence his experiment with Mescaline.
Huxley concedes that it is impossible to completely by-pass the “reducing valve” and in “The Electric Ant,” Poole also admits that this is impossible—for a human. But Poole is not human. As an Electric Ant, he is both less than and more than human. Less than human because for him reality is nothing but hole punches on a reality tape. And more than human because he has the ability to experience all of reality, which no human can do.
Yet there’s even more to the story than this. In addition to the possibility of experiencing “ultimate and absolute reality,” there’s the question of what that reality is. For Poole, it is a tape inside the mechanism of his chest. But what is reality to everyone else? The answer is a typically Dickian paradox. ★★★★★
The previously unpublished “Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked” is the fourteenth story and it’s unlike anything else I’ve read by PKD. It begins as a talking animal story, but it goes on to become something else entirely. I suppose it says something about Dick’s relationships with women, but all in all it doesn’t seem worth analyzing. I’ll give it three stars for being a curiosity and for having a rabbit psychiatrist. ★★★☆☆
I have mixed feelings about the fifteenth story, “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” As the word Tempunauts implies, it is a story about time travellers. It centers on the phenomenon of a time loop, but it is really more about the choice Doug has to make between maintaining the time loop or trying to break it.
Doug suffers from cyclothymia ~ which I had to look up since I had never heard of it before. Cyclothymia is a mild, but chronic, form of bipolar disorder. This mental disorder ultimately determines the decision he makes. The ending is melancoly and surprising. I felt this was a three star story, but the ending elevates it to four stars. ★★★★☆
The sixteenth story, “The Pre-Persons,” is the reason I bought this volume. I heard about the hate mail Dick received from fellow science fiction writer Joanna Russ and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I am separating my comments on Dick’s stance on abortion from my comments on the quality of this short story. Otherwise, rating this story would be nothing more than a political statement: If you’re pro-choice, it’s a one-star story. If you’re pro-life, it’s a five-star story.
I think the story begins with a good premise and has the potential to be a good piece of philosophical science fiction. Dick takes one argument against abortion and builds a story around it. The argument concerns personhood: When does a human being become a person? The pro-life answer to this question is: conception. This answer has the virtue of being absolute. The moment the egg is fertilized by the sperm, a new human being exists. The criterion for personhood is membership in the human species.
The pro-choice answer is not absolute. Since membership in the human species is not the sole criterion for personhood, something else must be added. But what? And when does this something else manifest? At twelve weeks gestation? Eighteen weeks? Twenty-four weeks? The moment of birth? Each answer takes some milestone in fetal development and posits it as the moment the fetus becomes a person. And whatever answer is given, the pro-life rebuttal will be that it is an arbitrary criterion.
The premise of Dick’s story is that a human being becomes a person at twelve years of age. What he has done is to extend the pro-choice argument to the point of absurdity to see what the results will be. This is what good science fiction so often does. It is the way science fiction engages in social criticism. And the age of personhood in this story is less absurd than it might first seem to be.
While Dick’s extension of abortion to a time after birth seems unfair to abortion advocates who reject infanticide, one argument for infanticide is based on the argument for abortion. Philosopher Peter Singer argues that the infant, like the fetus, lacks the defining human traits of rationality and self-awareness (Practical Ethics, 1979). The criterion for personhood in Dick’s story ~ the ability to do algebra ~ seems less absurd in light of Singer’s cognitive criteria.
So Dick is off to an interesting start. But it doesn’t last. The challenge to the status quo comes from a man who claims that he isn’t a person because he can’t do algebra, so he should be aborted just like any unwanted child under the age of twelve. However, the implication in the beginning of the story is that the age of twelve was chosen because it’s the general age at which a child becomes capable of doing algebra, not that doing algebra itself is required. (After all, one boy under the age of twelve was already doing algebra, but that didn’t make him a person.)
This is not merely a bit of sloppy writing. This is Dick needing a mouthpiece in the story to express his position on abortion. In short, “The Pre-Persons” is a propaganda piece that doesn’t work very well as a story.
Dick makes impassioned arguments against killing the helpless rather than challenging the cognitive criteria of personhood that allowed his futuristic society to abort children under twelve. This story could have been both better fiction and better propaganda.
But this flaw pales in comparison to another flaw. After all, to be passionately opposed to the killing of the helpless is laudable. While some might argue that it is misapplied in the case of abortion, the sentiment itself is laudable. But the other flaw in this story is the opposite of laudable: Dick’s portrayal of the only woman in the story is downright misogynistic. Cynthia is a “castrating” wife and a “kindermorder” (286). Everything about her is cold and cruel. Is this really Dick’s idea of women who have abortions? I think it is. He even uses the stereotype of women having abortions for frivolous reasons. Cynthia wants to get pregnant just so she can have an abortion.
“’Let’s have an abortion!’ Cynthia declared excitedly.... ‘Wouldn’t that be neat? Doesn’t that turn you on?’ ” (285).
Cynthia and her husband then discuss how she would get to take the embryo home in a glow-in-the-dark glass bottle ~ “in any color you want!” (285).
When I first read about Joanna Russ offering to beat Dick up over this story, I was ready to take Dick’s side. I don’t agree with his position on abortion, but I do believe in his right to express his opinion through his fiction. And I still feel that way. But after reading his caricature of women who choose abortion as cold castrating females who murder their children for frivolous amusement, I think I might just like to take a swing at him myself. ★★☆☆☆
Continued in the comment section . . .
December 25, 2020
The final book in the almost complete collection of Dick's short stories; this volume contains 24 shorts of varying lengths with original publication dates spanning the period of his peak from 1963 to 1981. I must admit that there are some awfully banal stories here, but there are also some very good ones, include the story source for the movie Total Recall.
This may not show the best of Dick at all, but what it does give the reader is insight to the myriad realities and situations that were born from his creative mind. 6 out of 12 overall.
This may not show the best of Dick at all, but what it does give the reader is insight to the myriad realities and situations that were born from his creative mind. 6 out of 12 overall.
May 9, 2024
Five years after Philip K. Dick’s death in 1982, Underwood-Miller (US) published a definitive five-volume hardcover series containing a collection of all but three of his short stories, put into order of their receipt by Dick’s agent (not the same as order of publication). That year, Gollancz (UK) also published a trade paperback series of the same five volumes, but with retitled volumes 4 and 5. Unfortunately for the collector or completist, there are also other multi-volume series of his collected short stories, in other order, but with similar subtitles. If you are looking to complete the set, be sure to stick with the same series. If you are looking to read in order, I recommend the Gollancz series. To help you recognize those, here is a summary of The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Gollancz Science Fiction, Orion Publishing Company, 1987.
Volume 1 “Beyond Lies the Wub”, 1947, 1951-1952, Introduction by Roger Zelazny
Volume 2 “Second Variety” 1952-1953, Introduction by Norman Spinrad
Volume 3 “The Father-Thing” 1953-1954, Introduction by John Brunner
Volume 4 “Minority Report” 1954-1963, Introduction by James Tiptree, Jr.
(original Underwood-Miller title “The Days of Perky Pat”)
Volume 5 “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” 1963-1981, Introduction by Thomas M. Disch
(original Underwood-Miller title “The Little Black Box”)
This review is of Volume 5 of the Gollancz series, subtitled for “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”.
In 1990, Gollancz also republished Volume 5 as a stand-alone trade paperback collection under its original title “The Little Black Box”. There are enough good stories here to make the collection worthwhile singly, but it is just sad to see the evidence of the deterioration of PKD’s mind and writing in the last decade of his life. I describe and rate the individual stories from * to ***** below…
The Little Black Box (1963) – A new religion is being introduced throughout the world using a device known as an Empathy Box, that channels the experiences of Wilbur Mercer, and converts anyone who grips its handles. Perhaps this is a form of alien mind control of humans. It is investigated and opposed by US government telepaths, who are themselves especially susceptible. Note that the Mercerism religion re-appears in PKD’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) ***
The War with the Fnools – An inept CIA contends with an invasion of aliens two feet tall. Not as comical as it was apparently intended. **
A Game of Unchance (1963) – An agrarian community on Mars cannot help itself from winning a carnival prize that is trouble. A vision of Mars as American frontier, where lessons are not learned. ****
Precious Artifact (1963) – A war was fought between Earth and the Proxmen over the right to send their own overpopulation to Mars. Earth won, and Milt Biskle is one of the engineers hired to terraform the planet. But he suspects he has been fooled and is sent to Earth before he has a chance to disclose his theories to his fellow engineers. ***
Retreat Syndrome (1963) – John Cupertino seeks the truth behind his memory of killing his wife. All levels of his reality are drawn under suspicion, as he may have false memories induced by his own mental illness, or by manipulation by legal authorities on Earth, or by Ganymedian rebels. The reality is even more ironic than any of those. *****
A Terran Odyssey (1964) – I’m not sure which was written first, but this story is made up of sections of PKD’s novel Dr. Bloodmoney (1965). It is a post-nuclear holocaust Earth with rearranged geopolitics, and genetic mutation. It is a very complex setting, better conveyed by the novel than in this short story. ***
Your Appointment Will be Yesterday (1965) – PKD later expanded this into his novel Counter-Clock World (1967). Time is moving in reverse for most of the Earth, but things have backed up nearly to the point where Ludwig Eng created the Swabble that enabled time reversal. As his work is eradicated, will time go forward again? It is an interesting thought piece, as only events outside of the human mind itself are reversed – people see cause and effect reversed, without reversal of their minds and memories. In novel form, the novelty of this device wears out, so I prefer the story. *****
Holy Quarrel (1965) – It is possible construct sentences of English words that are not meaningful statements, or even that are self-contradictory. Only someone who is completely clueless about how computers work, would think that entering such sentences into one would have any effect on its “reasoning” or its developed “faith”. This is that kind of story. **
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1965) – Douglas Quail leads a boring life with an office job, and dreams of being a secret agent on Mars. One day he contracts with Rekal Inc. to implant that experience into his memory. During the procedure, it is discovered that this would conflict with some repressed memories he already has. While the two “Total Recall” films (1990 and 2012) that were adapted from this story further develop the action around that basic concept, the story further develops the concept itself. I prefer the story version. This was one of many stories on first ballot for 1967 Nebula Award. The footnotes of the book describe it as “nominated”, but because it did not make it to the final ballot, that would be inaccurate. *****
Not by Its Cover (1965) – Books published in “living” bindings are found to have been edited. ***
Return Match (1965) – A pinball machine is an instrument of alien invasion. ***
Faith of Our Fathers (1966) – This novelette was included in Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions, and was nominated for 1968 Hugo Award. It concerns a rising partisan official in the global revolutionary government, who must choose whether to see the truth concerning the Absolute Benefactor. Mind altering substances may help or may hinder. Truth has multiple layers, and the evidence of his senses is untrustworthy. It is a theme much repeated in PKD’s writing, but this is a particularly outstanding piece of it. *****
The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions (1968) – one paragraph *
The Electric Ant (1968) – Garson Poole finds that he is actually a humanoid android, programmed to avoid any considerations that would have revealed that. Playing with his own programming could lead to disasterous consequences. It’s easy to see how this overlaps with the concept of a human replicant in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). ****
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked (1971) - Simplistic metaphorical story about a self-centered male beaver who wants out of his marriage. This was written in a time when PKD was abusing amphetamines and exhibiting extremely erratic behaviors in his personal life. Previously unpublished, for good reason, I think. *
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1973) – Time travelers stuck in a loop upon their return to the present. The point of time travel stories is often the confrontation of a character with himself. In this story, the three tempunauts come near their deceased selves, but are unable to confront. They face depression and consider the desirability of suicide as a way out. ****
The Pre-Persons (1973) – In the near future, abortion has been made legal up to the age of 12 years. Several personal stories of terrified or captured children illustrate this future. Then the story continues into an explicitly misogynist rant about how selfish women will control men. Wretchedly bad story. *
The Eye of the Sybil (1975) – A citizen of the Roman Republic is able to see into our own time through the eye of a Sybil. Now is described as a time of secret police and mind control. PKD was suffering from hallucinations during the time this was written. Previously unpublished. **
The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree (1977) – Joe Contemptible leads a meaningless life, but meets the beautiful Joan Simpson. Previously unpublished. **
The Exit Door Leads In (1979) – Bob Bibleman wins a trivial contest and is sent to a military college. There he meets Mary Lorne and gets involved in a conspiracy ***
Chains of Air, Web of Aether (1979) – Leo McVane is assigned to live alone in a dome on a frontier planet, where he watches for disasters, and manages the import of music videos. He reaches out to a woman living alone in the next dome over, because she is dieing. He resists getting involved, but falls again into the traps of personal relationship. One of the few stories written in PKD’s last decade that I actually enjoyed. ****
Strange Memories of Death (1980) – The Lysol Lady is being evicted, and the first-person narrator ponders the meaning of money. Auto-biographical? **
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1980) – Victor Kemmings is in cryonic suspension for a ten year trip to another star system, but his automatic unit is malfunctioning. He is awake, but unable to move, and so the master computer struggles to find a way to keep his mind alive. It succeeds, sort of. ***
Rautavaara’s Case (1980) – Aliens reanimate the brain of one member of a crew who has died in space. **
The Alien Mind (1981) – A space travelling pilot should have taken better care of his pet cat. PKD’s last story before his death in 1982 **
Volume 1 “Beyond Lies the Wub”, 1947, 1951-1952, Introduction by Roger Zelazny
Volume 2 “Second Variety” 1952-1953, Introduction by Norman Spinrad
Volume 3 “The Father-Thing” 1953-1954, Introduction by John Brunner
Volume 4 “Minority Report” 1954-1963, Introduction by James Tiptree, Jr.
(original Underwood-Miller title “The Days of Perky Pat”)
Volume 5 “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” 1963-1981, Introduction by Thomas M. Disch
(original Underwood-Miller title “The Little Black Box”)
This review is of Volume 5 of the Gollancz series, subtitled for “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”.
In 1990, Gollancz also republished Volume 5 as a stand-alone trade paperback collection under its original title “The Little Black Box”. There are enough good stories here to make the collection worthwhile singly, but it is just sad to see the evidence of the deterioration of PKD’s mind and writing in the last decade of his life. I describe and rate the individual stories from * to ***** below…
The Little Black Box (1963) – A new religion is being introduced throughout the world using a device known as an Empathy Box, that channels the experiences of Wilbur Mercer, and converts anyone who grips its handles. Perhaps this is a form of alien mind control of humans. It is investigated and opposed by US government telepaths, who are themselves especially susceptible. Note that the Mercerism religion re-appears in PKD’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) ***
The War with the Fnools – An inept CIA contends with an invasion of aliens two feet tall. Not as comical as it was apparently intended. **
A Game of Unchance (1963) – An agrarian community on Mars cannot help itself from winning a carnival prize that is trouble. A vision of Mars as American frontier, where lessons are not learned. ****
Precious Artifact (1963) – A war was fought between Earth and the Proxmen over the right to send their own overpopulation to Mars. Earth won, and Milt Biskle is one of the engineers hired to terraform the planet. But he suspects he has been fooled and is sent to Earth before he has a chance to disclose his theories to his fellow engineers. ***
Retreat Syndrome (1963) – John Cupertino seeks the truth behind his memory of killing his wife. All levels of his reality are drawn under suspicion, as he may have false memories induced by his own mental illness, or by manipulation by legal authorities on Earth, or by Ganymedian rebels. The reality is even more ironic than any of those. *****
A Terran Odyssey (1964) – I’m not sure which was written first, but this story is made up of sections of PKD’s novel Dr. Bloodmoney (1965). It is a post-nuclear holocaust Earth with rearranged geopolitics, and genetic mutation. It is a very complex setting, better conveyed by the novel than in this short story. ***
Your Appointment Will be Yesterday (1965) – PKD later expanded this into his novel Counter-Clock World (1967). Time is moving in reverse for most of the Earth, but things have backed up nearly to the point where Ludwig Eng created the Swabble that enabled time reversal. As his work is eradicated, will time go forward again? It is an interesting thought piece, as only events outside of the human mind itself are reversed – people see cause and effect reversed, without reversal of their minds and memories. In novel form, the novelty of this device wears out, so I prefer the story. *****
Holy Quarrel (1965) – It is possible construct sentences of English words that are not meaningful statements, or even that are self-contradictory. Only someone who is completely clueless about how computers work, would think that entering such sentences into one would have any effect on its “reasoning” or its developed “faith”. This is that kind of story. **
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1965) – Douglas Quail leads a boring life with an office job, and dreams of being a secret agent on Mars. One day he contracts with Rekal Inc. to implant that experience into his memory. During the procedure, it is discovered that this would conflict with some repressed memories he already has. While the two “Total Recall” films (1990 and 2012) that were adapted from this story further develop the action around that basic concept, the story further develops the concept itself. I prefer the story version. This was one of many stories on first ballot for 1967 Nebula Award. The footnotes of the book describe it as “nominated”, but because it did not make it to the final ballot, that would be inaccurate. *****
Not by Its Cover (1965) – Books published in “living” bindings are found to have been edited. ***
Return Match (1965) – A pinball machine is an instrument of alien invasion. ***
Faith of Our Fathers (1966) – This novelette was included in Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions, and was nominated for 1968 Hugo Award. It concerns a rising partisan official in the global revolutionary government, who must choose whether to see the truth concerning the Absolute Benefactor. Mind altering substances may help or may hinder. Truth has multiple layers, and the evidence of his senses is untrustworthy. It is a theme much repeated in PKD’s writing, but this is a particularly outstanding piece of it. *****
The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Anthology Dangerous Visions (1968) – one paragraph *
The Electric Ant (1968) – Garson Poole finds that he is actually a humanoid android, programmed to avoid any considerations that would have revealed that. Playing with his own programming could lead to disasterous consequences. It’s easy to see how this overlaps with the concept of a human replicant in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). ****
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked (1971) - Simplistic metaphorical story about a self-centered male beaver who wants out of his marriage. This was written in a time when PKD was abusing amphetamines and exhibiting extremely erratic behaviors in his personal life. Previously unpublished, for good reason, I think. *
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1973) – Time travelers stuck in a loop upon their return to the present. The point of time travel stories is often the confrontation of a character with himself. In this story, the three tempunauts come near their deceased selves, but are unable to confront. They face depression and consider the desirability of suicide as a way out. ****
The Pre-Persons (1973) – In the near future, abortion has been made legal up to the age of 12 years. Several personal stories of terrified or captured children illustrate this future. Then the story continues into an explicitly misogynist rant about how selfish women will control men. Wretchedly bad story. *
The Eye of the Sybil (1975) – A citizen of the Roman Republic is able to see into our own time through the eye of a Sybil. Now is described as a time of secret police and mind control. PKD was suffering from hallucinations during the time this was written. Previously unpublished. **
The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree (1977) – Joe Contemptible leads a meaningless life, but meets the beautiful Joan Simpson. Previously unpublished. **
The Exit Door Leads In (1979) – Bob Bibleman wins a trivial contest and is sent to a military college. There he meets Mary Lorne and gets involved in a conspiracy ***
Chains of Air, Web of Aether (1979) – Leo McVane is assigned to live alone in a dome on a frontier planet, where he watches for disasters, and manages the import of music videos. He reaches out to a woman living alone in the next dome over, because she is dieing. He resists getting involved, but falls again into the traps of personal relationship. One of the few stories written in PKD’s last decade that I actually enjoyed. ****
Strange Memories of Death (1980) – The Lysol Lady is being evicted, and the first-person narrator ponders the meaning of money. Auto-biographical? **
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1980) – Victor Kemmings is in cryonic suspension for a ten year trip to another star system, but his automatic unit is malfunctioning. He is awake, but unable to move, and so the master computer struggles to find a way to keep his mind alive. It succeeds, sort of. ***
Rautavaara’s Case (1980) – Aliens reanimate the brain of one member of a crew who has died in space. **
The Alien Mind (1981) – A space travelling pilot should have taken better care of his pet cat. PKD’s last story before his death in 1982 **
February 13, 2009
The title story is SO much better than Total Recall.
January 5, 2019
Nine of these short stories were perfect jewels. Three of them simply disappointing. The rest were a lot of fun. PKD is the best SF short story writer!
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE WAR WITH THE FNOOLS: ☆☆☆
PRECIOUS ARTIFACT: ☆☆☆☆
RETREAT SYNDROME: ☆☆☆☆
A TERRAN ODYSSEY: ☆☆
YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE YESTERDAY: ☆☆
HOLY QUARREL: ☆☆☆☆☆
A GAME OF UNCHANCE: ☆☆☆☆☆
NOT BY ITS COVER: ☆☆☆☆
RETURN MATCH: ☆☆☆
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE ELECTRIC ANT: ☆☆☆☆☆
CADBURY, THE BEAVER WHO LACKED: ☆☆☆☆☆
A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS: ☆☆☆☆
THE PRE-PERSONS: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE EYE OF THE SIBYL: ☆☆☆
THE DAY MR. COMPUTER FELL OUT OF IT'S TREE: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN: ☆☆☆☆
CHAINS OF AIR, WEB OF AETHER: ☆☆☆
STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH: ☆☆
I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON: ☆☆☆
RAUTAVAARA'S CASE: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE ALIEN MIND: ☆☆☆
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE WAR WITH THE FNOOLS: ☆☆☆
PRECIOUS ARTIFACT: ☆☆☆☆
RETREAT SYNDROME: ☆☆☆☆
A TERRAN ODYSSEY: ☆☆
YOUR APPOINTMENT WILL BE YESTERDAY: ☆☆
HOLY QUARREL: ☆☆☆☆☆
A GAME OF UNCHANCE: ☆☆☆☆☆
NOT BY ITS COVER: ☆☆☆☆
RETURN MATCH: ☆☆☆
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE ELECTRIC ANT: ☆☆☆☆☆
CADBURY, THE BEAVER WHO LACKED: ☆☆☆☆☆
A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS: ☆☆☆☆
THE PRE-PERSONS: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE EYE OF THE SIBYL: ☆☆☆
THE DAY MR. COMPUTER FELL OUT OF IT'S TREE: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN: ☆☆☆☆
CHAINS OF AIR, WEB OF AETHER: ☆☆☆
STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH: ☆☆
I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON: ☆☆☆
RAUTAVAARA'S CASE: ☆☆☆☆☆
THE ALIEN MIND: ☆☆☆
August 25, 2025
Prologue
"How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?"
Philip K. Dick in a 1974 interview.
CRITIQUE:
Yesterday I Forgot That I Should Remember Tomorrow
This collection was my first experience of reading Philip K. Dick's short stories. The stories date from 1964 to 1981.
As usually happens, the reader has a choice of reviewing the collection on the basis of individual stories or on a more thematic approach (across the stories).
The stories are quite different, but they share some characteristics.
A few stories involve love between spouses, partners and co-workers.
Confrontations with Reality and Fiction
However, if anything links the stories, it's the context of conflict, confrontation, quarrels, disputes, and rivalry.
Once this context is established, Dick populates his stories with humans, androids, robots and aliens, between whom the confrontations occur.
Some of the disputes are between humans (Terrans) and aliens (Non-Terrans) who live off-world. Some of the Terrans have moved off-world and live on Earth colonies established on other planets (such as Mars) and the moons encircling various planets.
Some of the colonisation has led to disputes with aliens who are equally trying to colonise Terra and Earth colonies, so they can take advantage of superior living conditions.
Some of the disputes are between different Terran inhabitants.
The nature of the differences tends to be described as political, although many are what we would call religious.
The Mercerite Empathy Box
It's in one of these disputes that we come across a religion called Mercerism, which was created by a human called Wilbur Mercer.
One of the Terran states feels threatened by Mercerism:
Mercer is a Christ-like figure, who has suffered a similar fate to Jesus Christ, and asks that his followers empathise with his suffering.
Two representatives of the state discuss Mercerism in the following terms:
The Mercerites promote a form of "mystical communion" between themselves, which uses a little black box called an "empathy box". The box creates what is variously known as a "world-view", an "ideology" or a "trance-state". This empathy process is analogous to telepathy.
Philip K. Dick
Between Mysticism and Psychosis
Dick highlights how religion constructs a morality that is ostensibly derived from (and justified by) a divine source, even though it's supposed to regulate mortal activity.
Equally, it's reinforced by mysticism, which often collapses into psychosis.
While Dick personally seems to have opposed abortion on demand, in a story called "The Pre-Persons", he belittled the argument that abortion should not be permissible beyond the time that the foetus/infant/child acquired a soul (which an arbitrary compromise between Congress and the Church of Watchers in the story deemed to be 12 years old, when a child was capable of formulating higher math like algebra).
Thus, religion has within it the potential to undermine society and civilisation, whether or not there are any external threats.
It's understandable that the State would want to separate the Church/Religion and the State, and base both morality and politics in the secular.
SOUNDTRACK:
"How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How does one do this right in front of the enemy?"
Philip K. Dick in a 1974 interview.
CRITIQUE:
Yesterday I Forgot That I Should Remember Tomorrow
This collection was my first experience of reading Philip K. Dick's short stories. The stories date from 1964 to 1981.
As usually happens, the reader has a choice of reviewing the collection on the basis of individual stories or on a more thematic approach (across the stories).
The stories are quite different, but they share some characteristics.
A few stories involve love between spouses, partners and co-workers.
Confrontations with Reality and Fiction
However, if anything links the stories, it's the context of conflict, confrontation, quarrels, disputes, and rivalry.
Once this context is established, Dick populates his stories with humans, androids, robots and aliens, between whom the confrontations occur.
Some of the disputes are between humans (Terrans) and aliens (Non-Terrans) who live off-world. Some of the Terrans have moved off-world and live on Earth colonies established on other planets (such as Mars) and the moons encircling various planets.
Some of the colonisation has led to disputes with aliens who are equally trying to colonise Terra and Earth colonies, so they can take advantage of superior living conditions.
Some of the disputes are between different Terran inhabitants.
The nature of the differences tends to be described as political, although many are what we would call religious.
The Mercerite Empathy Box
It's in one of these disputes that we come across a religion called Mercerism, which was created by a human called Wilbur Mercer.
One of the Terran states feels threatened by Mercerism:
"The Party has taken the official stand that Mercerism is dangerous and must be wiped out...
"These Mercerites are fanatics...
"We must work for their extinction."
Mercer is a Christ-like figure, who has suffered a similar fate to Jesus Christ, and asks that his followers empathise with his suffering.
Two representatives of the state discuss Mercerism in the following terms:
"It's a communion in which they all suffer and experience Mercer's ordeal together...That's the real key: the communion, the participation that is behind all religion. Or ought to be. Religion binds men together in a sharing, corporate body, and leaves everyone else on the outside...But primarily it's a political movement, or must be treated as such."
The Mercerites promote a form of "mystical communion" between themselves, which uses a little black box called an "empathy box". The box creates what is variously known as a "world-view", an "ideology" or a "trance-state". This empathy process is analogous to telepathy.
Philip K. Dick
Between Mysticism and Psychosis
Dick highlights how religion constructs a morality that is ostensibly derived from (and justified by) a divine source, even though it's supposed to regulate mortal activity.
Equally, it's reinforced by mysticism, which often collapses into psychosis.
While Dick personally seems to have opposed abortion on demand, in a story called "The Pre-Persons", he belittled the argument that abortion should not be permissible beyond the time that the foetus/infant/child acquired a soul (which an arbitrary compromise between Congress and the Church of Watchers in the story deemed to be 12 years old, when a child was capable of formulating higher math like algebra).
Thus, religion has within it the potential to undermine society and civilisation, whether or not there are any external threats.
It's understandable that the State would want to separate the Church/Religion and the State, and base both morality and politics in the secular.
SOUNDTRACK:
March 24, 2020
“If only we could suffer, she thought. That’s what we lack, any real experience of suffering, because we can escape anything.”
These are musings of Joan Hiashi, who is sent on a mission by the American government to teach Zen Buddhism to Chinese businessmen in Cuba, with a view to destabilizing the Communist regime. Or so it seems, for in fact, she is sent there by her government in order to be scanned, unbeknownst to her, by Mr. Lee – a telepath and a member of the Communist nomenclature – for any information she would have on her friend Ray Meritan’s connection with the new sect of Mercerism.
Mercerism is a concept PKD fans will know better from his famous novel Do Androids Dreem of Electric Sheep? but its first appearance in the Dick universe is in the story The Little Black Box, which was published in Worlds of Tomorrow inthe summer of 1964. In Androids, Mercerism is a cult tolerated by the state because its focus on empathy and collective suffering is in line with the government’s fights against androids, who can be identified as non-human by their lack of empathy. In the earlier short story, however, Wilbur Mercer and his cult are regarded with suspicion by those in power – and characteristically, their animosity against Mercerism is so inveterate that it even unites Communist and Capitalist governments, whose representatives are willing to team up against a threat they have not fully fathomed yet.
Mercerism, with its focus on empathy, on shared suffering, and on emotion as such, would, of course, seem like an absurdity to the Communist mindset with its crude materialism and its utilitarianism that both end up in dehumanization. However, it is also the apparently free, democratic societies that feel menaced by Wilbur Mercer and his seemingly pointless suffering, and why this is so, probably becomes clear when we consider that the preferred religion in these states is obviously a special form of Zen Buddhism, which encourages its believers to dive deep into their own selves in order to contemplate the paradoxes of existence. In other words, we have a cult leading to isolation and fragmentation, which is opposed to the shared feelings of Mercerism. Now, people who are on their own, who see themselves as individuals and who hardly care for their fellow-beings (or at best, only in an abstract way that makes them feel good about themselves without really requiring a lot of personal commitment), are easier to govern, and a fragmented, egocentric society, which turns its citizens into consumers and recipients on government aids, will rarely be overthrown by the masses.
That is probably also why, at the beginning of the story, we will find one government official translate the meaning of caritas not as “love” or “charity” – but as “esteem”, qualifying it further by saying it is the kind of esteem good people feel for each other. This sounds like a rather genteel and watered-down concept, one that is based on white picket fences and can be found on golf-courses, for instance.
But my review is really leading nowhere, and this is probably because I found it quite hard to grasp the core meaning of this short story, which is full of implications and allusions. Why do the empathy boxes that are distributed in a mysterious way by the followers of Mercer not only allow believers to share the pain Wilbur Mercer feels when walking to his death, but also to contact each other, to establish mental and emotional communion amongst each other? Are these machines really working, or are they based on auto-suggestion, on the feeling of an inner emptiness that torments so many people like Miss Hiashi? After all, they can be built quite easily, as it seems, with the help of everyday articles lying about any person’s house, and isn’t it rather doubtful that a complex gadget could be assembled by any ordinary person? And does it really matter who Wilbur Mercer actually is? Whether he is from Terra or from some other planet, as some of his enemies seem to surmise?
What appears clear to me in this story, however, is PKD’s point that some religions may be used by those in power – such as Zen Buddhism here –, especially if they have a potential for isolating human beings, whereas others, probably mainly new ones, do challenge the established order. When I say “new ones”, one should not forget, however, that Mercerism has some similarities to Christianity, which itself managed to rise to a state religion at some point in history – and here we are again in Androids.
These are musings of Joan Hiashi, who is sent on a mission by the American government to teach Zen Buddhism to Chinese businessmen in Cuba, with a view to destabilizing the Communist regime. Or so it seems, for in fact, she is sent there by her government in order to be scanned, unbeknownst to her, by Mr. Lee – a telepath and a member of the Communist nomenclature – for any information she would have on her friend Ray Meritan’s connection with the new sect of Mercerism.
Mercerism is a concept PKD fans will know better from his famous novel Do Androids Dreem of Electric Sheep? but its first appearance in the Dick universe is in the story The Little Black Box, which was published in Worlds of Tomorrow inthe summer of 1964. In Androids, Mercerism is a cult tolerated by the state because its focus on empathy and collective suffering is in line with the government’s fights against androids, who can be identified as non-human by their lack of empathy. In the earlier short story, however, Wilbur Mercer and his cult are regarded with suspicion by those in power – and characteristically, their animosity against Mercerism is so inveterate that it even unites Communist and Capitalist governments, whose representatives are willing to team up against a threat they have not fully fathomed yet.
Mercerism, with its focus on empathy, on shared suffering, and on emotion as such, would, of course, seem like an absurdity to the Communist mindset with its crude materialism and its utilitarianism that both end up in dehumanization. However, it is also the apparently free, democratic societies that feel menaced by Wilbur Mercer and his seemingly pointless suffering, and why this is so, probably becomes clear when we consider that the preferred religion in these states is obviously a special form of Zen Buddhism, which encourages its believers to dive deep into their own selves in order to contemplate the paradoxes of existence. In other words, we have a cult leading to isolation and fragmentation, which is opposed to the shared feelings of Mercerism. Now, people who are on their own, who see themselves as individuals and who hardly care for their fellow-beings (or at best, only in an abstract way that makes them feel good about themselves without really requiring a lot of personal commitment), are easier to govern, and a fragmented, egocentric society, which turns its citizens into consumers and recipients on government aids, will rarely be overthrown by the masses.
That is probably also why, at the beginning of the story, we will find one government official translate the meaning of caritas not as “love” or “charity” – but as “esteem”, qualifying it further by saying it is the kind of esteem good people feel for each other. This sounds like a rather genteel and watered-down concept, one that is based on white picket fences and can be found on golf-courses, for instance.
But my review is really leading nowhere, and this is probably because I found it quite hard to grasp the core meaning of this short story, which is full of implications and allusions. Why do the empathy boxes that are distributed in a mysterious way by the followers of Mercer not only allow believers to share the pain Wilbur Mercer feels when walking to his death, but also to contact each other, to establish mental and emotional communion amongst each other? Are these machines really working, or are they based on auto-suggestion, on the feeling of an inner emptiness that torments so many people like Miss Hiashi? After all, they can be built quite easily, as it seems, with the help of everyday articles lying about any person’s house, and isn’t it rather doubtful that a complex gadget could be assembled by any ordinary person? And does it really matter who Wilbur Mercer actually is? Whether he is from Terra or from some other planet, as some of his enemies seem to surmise?
What appears clear to me in this story, however, is PKD’s point that some religions may be used by those in power – such as Zen Buddhism here –, especially if they have a potential for isolating human beings, whereas others, probably mainly new ones, do challenge the established order. When I say “new ones”, one should not forget, however, that Mercerism has some similarities to Christianity, which itself managed to rise to a state religion at some point in history – and here we are again in Androids.
August 2, 2020
Why Dick’s Stories Are So Good
The fifth and last volume of Philip K. Dick’s collected short stories covers his literary output from the years 1963 to 1981, and I have to admit that I am glad to have read Volume 5 before Volume 4 because among the later stories by PKD there were some that I did not really particularly enjoy, and so I can round off my journey through his shorter fiction with more pleasurable, “traditionally Dickian” tales. Readers of this volume should be aware of the fact that in the late 70s and early 80s, as a result of the author’s personal experiences, Dick’s writing became somewhat gnostic and esoteric, which is also reflected in some of the short stories, namely The Eye of the Sybil or The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree, stories that did not manage to capture my interest. On the other hand, however, there are tales like I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon and Faith of Our Fathers, which also fall into the “esoterics” category but which nonetheless fascinate with the idea they have got at their core, an idea that is highly ambivalent and enigmatic in the latter case, and full of psychological implications in the first. We might count these two stories among the finest fiction PKD has ever written.
Talking about ideas, I must say that in the course of my reading Dick’s short stories – and also some of his novels – it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that this man was a magic fountain of intriguing ideas and that it is probably this aspect that makes his fiction so fascinating. I am always reminded of this when I write a review on an individual short story: I sit down and start mentally interacting with the text, and as I am writing, the stories and the respective quotations that stuck with me whilst I was reading begin to interact with my own mind, and, without wanting to sound grandiloquent, I have the impression as though I were in a conversation with the story itself, at the end of which conversation my mind is suddenly filled with more understanding of the world around me. I am not saying that what I am reading out of his stories is exactly what Dick wrote into them, but then this was probably not what the author intended, anyway. Instead, these stories serve their purpose of inciting a reader’s imagination as well as his critical sense. Dick put the conditio humana into science fiction like hardly any other representative of this often wrongly spurned genre did, and this is probably why his stories age so well although some of the author’s attitudes – I am thinking of his sad misogyny in the first place, but also of his latter-life inclination towards the esoteric – most certainly do not.
Dick said himself, in an “Author’s Afterthought” to a collection of his “best” short stories:
Now, I would not go so far as to say that novels are usually more about style than about content, but one thing is certainly clear, namely that Dick’s short stories are pulsating with content, with ideas that yearn to enter into a conversation with their readers. Otherwise, I would have found it rather difficult to write so much about tales that are rather short, and I am afraid that in numerous cases I could easily have written more. Neither would I agree with Dick that he did not develop style in these stories – as he seems to imply – because if you take a look at, for instance Ratavaara’s Case, you will find that he plays with different points of view and attaches a different tone of writing to each of them, something that he also does in a novel like The Man in the High Castle. If there is one weakness in Dick’s writing, I’d identify it as his tendency to underdevelop his characters, but that’s about it. And maybe, one could also say that sometimes, the plot in his novels is all too obviously a stage on which to parade his ideas, and here we are again at our starting point – Dick’s status as a magic fountain of ideas!
The fifth and last volume of Philip K. Dick’s collected short stories covers his literary output from the years 1963 to 1981, and I have to admit that I am glad to have read Volume 5 before Volume 4 because among the later stories by PKD there were some that I did not really particularly enjoy, and so I can round off my journey through his shorter fiction with more pleasurable, “traditionally Dickian” tales. Readers of this volume should be aware of the fact that in the late 70s and early 80s, as a result of the author’s personal experiences, Dick’s writing became somewhat gnostic and esoteric, which is also reflected in some of the short stories, namely The Eye of the Sybil or The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree, stories that did not manage to capture my interest. On the other hand, however, there are tales like I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon and Faith of Our Fathers, which also fall into the “esoterics” category but which nonetheless fascinate with the idea they have got at their core, an idea that is highly ambivalent and enigmatic in the latter case, and full of psychological implications in the first. We might count these two stories among the finest fiction PKD has ever written.
Talking about ideas, I must say that in the course of my reading Dick’s short stories – and also some of his novels – it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that this man was a magic fountain of intriguing ideas and that it is probably this aspect that makes his fiction so fascinating. I am always reminded of this when I write a review on an individual short story: I sit down and start mentally interacting with the text, and as I am writing, the stories and the respective quotations that stuck with me whilst I was reading begin to interact with my own mind, and, without wanting to sound grandiloquent, I have the impression as though I were in a conversation with the story itself, at the end of which conversation my mind is suddenly filled with more understanding of the world around me. I am not saying that what I am reading out of his stories is exactly what Dick wrote into them, but then this was probably not what the author intended, anyway. Instead, these stories serve their purpose of inciting a reader’s imagination as well as his critical sense. Dick put the conditio humana into science fiction like hardly any other representative of this often wrongly spurned genre did, and this is probably why his stories age so well although some of the author’s attitudes – I am thinking of his sad misogyny in the first place, but also of his latter-life inclination towards the esoteric – most certainly do not.
Dick said himself, in an “Author’s Afterthought” to a collection of his “best” short stories:
”The advantage of the story over the novel is that in the story you catch the protagonist at the climax of his life, but in the novel you’ve got to follow him from the day he was born to the day he dies (or nearly so). Open any novel at random and usually what is happening is either dull or unimportant. The only way to redeem this is through style. It is not what happened built how it is told. Pretty soon the professional novelist acquires the skill of describing everything with style, and content vanishes. In a story, though, you can’t get away with this. Something important has to happen. I think this is why gifted professional fiction writers wind up writing novels. Once their style is perfected, they have it made. Virginia Woolf, for instance. wound up writing about nothing at all.
In these stories, though, I remember that in every case before I sat down to write, I had to have an idea. There had to be some real concept: an actual thing from which the story was guilt. It must always be possible to say ‘Did you read the story about –“ and then capsulize what it was about.”
Now, I would not go so far as to say that novels are usually more about style than about content, but one thing is certainly clear, namely that Dick’s short stories are pulsating with content, with ideas that yearn to enter into a conversation with their readers. Otherwise, I would have found it rather difficult to write so much about tales that are rather short, and I am afraid that in numerous cases I could easily have written more. Neither would I agree with Dick that he did not develop style in these stories – as he seems to imply – because if you take a look at, for instance Ratavaara’s Case, you will find that he plays with different points of view and attaches a different tone of writing to each of them, something that he also does in a novel like The Man in the High Castle. If there is one weakness in Dick’s writing, I’d identify it as his tendency to underdevelop his characters, but that’s about it. And maybe, one could also say that sometimes, the plot in his novels is all too obviously a stage on which to parade his ideas, and here we are again at our starting point – Dick’s status as a magic fountain of ideas!
December 28, 2015
"Objective reality is a synthetic product, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities."
A good collection of Philip K. Dick's short stories, his later stories having a brilliant effect on my literary mind. The Electric Ant, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon and A Little Something for Us Tempunauts stood out as wonderfully paranoid observations on conventional reality, while also being so damn entertaining to read.
A good collection of Philip K. Dick's short stories, his later stories having a brilliant effect on my literary mind. The Electric Ant, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon and A Little Something for Us Tempunauts stood out as wonderfully paranoid observations on conventional reality, while also being so damn entertaining to read.
May 4, 2019
Este es el quinto y último volumen de los cuentos completos de Philip K. Dick, y es el que menos me ha gustado, lo que no quiere decir que sea flojo. Hay cuentos muy buenos y otros no tanto. En mi opinión, la calidad ha ido de más a menos, o puede que haya sido mi falta de interés en los temas tratados. ‘La hormiga eléctrica’, ‘Una odisea terrícola’ o ‘No por su encuadernación’ son de mis favoritos.
En resumen después de haber leído los más de 100 relatos que escribió Dick, me quedo con su primera etapa como cuentista. Los tres primeros volúmenes son magistrales.
En resumen después de haber leído los más de 100 relatos que escribió Dick, me quedo con su primera etapa como cuentista. Los tres primeros volúmenes son magistrales.
March 25, 2020
Un recueil qui comprend 2 courts essais et 8 nouvelles :
La bombe atomique sera-t-elle jamais mise au point et, si ou, qu'adviendra-t-il de Robert Heinlein ? = Will the Atomic Bomb ever be Perfected, and if so, what Becomes of Robert Heinlein
Notes rédigées tard le soir par un écrivain de S-F fatigué
= Notes made late at night by a weary SF writer
Stabilité = Stability
L'Orphée aux pieds d'argile = Orpheus with Clay Feet
Une odyssée terrienne = A Terran Odyssey
Cadbury, le castor en manque = Cadbury, the beaver who lacked
Au revoir, Vincent = Goodbye, Vincent
L'œil de la Sibylle = The Eye of the Sybil
Le jour où Monsieur Ordinateur perdit les pédales = The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of its Tree
Étranges souvenirs de mort = Strange Memories of Death
La bombe atomique sera-t-elle jamais mise au point et, si ou, qu'adviendra-t-il de Robert Heinlein ? = Will the Atomic Bomb ever be Perfected, and if so, what Becomes of Robert Heinlein
Notes rédigées tard le soir par un écrivain de S-F fatigué
= Notes made late at night by a weary SF writer
Stabilité = Stability
L'Orphée aux pieds d'argile = Orpheus with Clay Feet
Une odyssée terrienne = A Terran Odyssey
Cadbury, le castor en manque = Cadbury, the beaver who lacked
Au revoir, Vincent = Goodbye, Vincent
L'œil de la Sibylle = The Eye of the Sybil
Le jour où Monsieur Ordinateur perdit les pédales = The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of its Tree
Étranges souvenirs de mort = Strange Memories of Death
April 14, 2011
I went for the fifth and final volume of this chronologically ordered collection of Philip K Dick's short stories because I supposed this one would contain his best stories. It covers the period from 1963 until 1982, the year he died. Novel wise, this period includes most of his greats although he was far less prolific short story wise, the majority of his short stories being written in the 50's.
Well, this collection does contain some real corkers. "Holy Quarrel" and "The Exit Door Leads In" are amoung the highlights. There are stories that are/were quite controversial like "Faith of Our Fathers" and especially "The Pre-Persons" that might even offend. There are a couple of stories that are (rather pointlessly in my opinion) adapted from novels such as "A Terran Odyssey" (Dr. Bloodmoney) and "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" (Counter-Clock World).
Dick explores themes that will be familiar to anyone who's read his novels such as notions of reality being repeatedly overturned. We see Mercerism that appears later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the story "Little Black Box". There's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that was later adapted by the famous film "Total Recall". We see Dick's cynical and despondant humour pervading most of the stories although this subsides in the later stories that tend to dwell more on mental illness, dying and death.
Of additional interest is an introduction by Thomas Disch and the authors notes on many of the stories included, as well as some general notes about his short story writing. All of which helped provide an additional insight into the author and the context in which the stories were written.
Despite a few duffers, the overall quality of the collection is very high and I definitely plan to read some (if not all) of the earlier volumes in this series.
Well, this collection does contain some real corkers. "Holy Quarrel" and "The Exit Door Leads In" are amoung the highlights. There are stories that are/were quite controversial like "Faith of Our Fathers" and especially "The Pre-Persons" that might even offend. There are a couple of stories that are (rather pointlessly in my opinion) adapted from novels such as "A Terran Odyssey" (Dr. Bloodmoney) and "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" (Counter-Clock World).
Dick explores themes that will be familiar to anyone who's read his novels such as notions of reality being repeatedly overturned. We see Mercerism that appears later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in the story "Little Black Box". There's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" that was later adapted by the famous film "Total Recall". We see Dick's cynical and despondant humour pervading most of the stories although this subsides in the later stories that tend to dwell more on mental illness, dying and death.
Of additional interest is an introduction by Thomas Disch and the authors notes on many of the stories included, as well as some general notes about his short story writing. All of which helped provide an additional insight into the author and the context in which the stories were written.
Despite a few duffers, the overall quality of the collection is very high and I definitely plan to read some (if not all) of the earlier volumes in this series.
April 13, 2017
A must read for fans of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'
April 21, 2019
Philip K. Dick is sometimes a crap shoot. From brilliant to absolutely terrible. I find PKD's short stories to be more bang for your buck. If they're terrible, you've only wasted an hour or two. And like his novels, they are hit or miss. Short stories are the best way for PKD to get his insane ideas across without going off on plot-unravelling tangents.
July 23, 2014
I gave up halfway through. PKD has great sci-fi ideas, but his writing style leaves a lot to be desired.
Primarily my concern is with how misogynistic it is. Every female character introduced is completely incidental to the story and PKD spends a couple of paragraphs describing each one's physical attributes and attractiveness thereof. Ugh.
Primarily my concern is with how misogynistic it is. Every female character introduced is completely incidental to the story and PKD spends a couple of paragraphs describing each one's physical attributes and attractiveness thereof. Ugh.
February 16, 2016
I bought the 5th volume of Philip K. Dick’s collected stories because of the one advertised in the cover, We can remember it for you wholesale, since I had enjoyed Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall and wanted to know what inspired him.
This volume has 25 short stories covering topics such as reality and perception, space colonisation, interaction with alien races, religion, nuclear war, time travel… Having read other of his novels, like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, or The Minority Report, one is already expecting -and ready to welcome!- some of Dick’s oddities.
It wasn’t hard to rate this book: there were a couple of stories that left me indifferent, but most of them were very good, and some were simply brilliant! In some cases, it was as if Philip K. Dick was right there, next to me, ready to shake the foundations of my understanding of his work.
I wrote some notes for each of the stories. I’ve tried to keep them spoiler-free (unless you display the spoiler section), but it is not always easy due to their short length.
The little black box. A new religion threatens the world’s stability: Mercerism, and the strange empathy boxes that allow people to communicate with the even stranger religion’s spiritual leader. Mercerism plays a major role in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and there is some connection to The Minority Report as well.
The war with the Fnools. An alien race is threatening the Earth. But they take strange appearances and each country takes different measures to fight them. This is one of the most surreal stories of the collection, simply brilliant.
A game of unchance. A story about colonists living in Mars, under hard conditions. They often receive visits of spaceships which set up a Carnival for them, with prizes and games. Among the colonists, some people have developed psychic skills, and they are usually the ones trying to identify the games with the best odds to win prizes. However, things aren’t that simple.
Precious Artifact. I liked this story very much. A terraformer working on Mars finishes his assignment and is ready to receive his allocated piece of land, but before that, he wants to go back to Earth for visiting: there is something odd that worries him. Here again Philip K. Dick plays with reality, perception, our subconscious…
Retreat syndrome. When two policemen stop a driver going too fast, he shows them how he can get his arm through the windshield -without any damage to him or the windshield! The main character is confused: he thinks he is part of a simulation, but has no means to discover. However, he keeps trying to find flaws in such simulation… or is it the reality what is flawed? In a deliciously confusing story, one doesn’t know which side to believe: is the character crazy? Is he right? But then, how can one explain certain things? Very much in line with “We can remember it for you wholesale”!
A Terran Odyssey. This was probably the most ordinary of the stories, and not in a bad way at all. A post-apocalyptic account of life after a nuclear war, displaying telepaths, trading, scavenging… It was very good, and didn’t use any of the typical twists of the author.
Your appointment will be yesterday. And again, into a very original story where, after some invention, time moves backwards within a certain region. People cease to exist when they return to their mother’s womb, they are born when they are “assembled” together from DNA remains, and pretty much everything is amazing. Another interesting passage is an account of how one would eat if you look at it with an inverted time reference. This story led to him writing Counter-clock world, which is mentioned by Sean Carroll in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.
Holy Quarrel shows a computer that not only becomes self aware, it becomes superstitious. It tries to obliterate a region of the US for apparently no good reason, so a team of engineers try to “debug” the problem. Brilliant!
We can remember it for you wholesale is the short story behind Total Recall. Philip K. Dick plays with the reader and shakes us, so we can no longer tell what fiction, false memories, and reality are. A worker with a regular and monotonous life dreams of travelling to Mars and being a spy, but when he finally decides to go and get a memory implant, something odd is found. Another extraordinary story!
Not by its cover. A company in Mars sells Wub fur! The surprising thing is that these Wubs, somehow, manage to stay alive through their fur, and when this is used for bookbinding, it leads to extraordinary situations, with the Wur interacting with the book in clever ways.
Return match. What starts as a “regular” police raid against an alien casino, ends up wrong after a pinball survives the self-destruction initiated by the aliens to destroy any evidence. Somehow, the pinball doesn’t like to be played with, and eventually…
Faith of our fathers. In the future, after Communism has won, a large bureaucracy apparatus exists. One of the workers there receives an almost impossible task, and things get very odd when drugs and the recurring topic of altered reality come into play.
The Story to end all stories. A short story in a couple of paragraphs, describing war, mutants, sex, cannibalism, God… Reminding, maybe, of Greeks myths.
The electric ant. This story plays with similar concepts to the ones found in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Here, a sentient robot founds out who / what he really is. Only then he starts considering what reality is, where he gets his stimuli from, etc. Very good.
Cadbury, the beaver who lacked. I am still puzzled, this was too surreal. Could it be a fable? Or is it simply a random collection of thoughts? I wasn’t ready for this: a beaver with a wife he didn’t love and a job he didn’t like starts visiting a psychologist and tries to find a way out of that life into something better. It is unclear if what he finds is actually any better.
A little something for us tempunauts. What if instead of a Space Race between the U.S.’s Astronauts and the Soviet Union’s Cosmonauts we would have had Tempunauts and Chrononauts? What would happen if things go wrong and they accidentally entered a closed loop? How could they tell? Another great story.
The Pre-persons. Abortion of children younger than 12 is now legal. I found the story very good, but with a clear (and manipulative) anti-abortion message. It is sort of exposing a slippery slope, where you start aborting embryos and end up with children. It was very, very good how he proposed that the soul would only arrive when the pre-person learns higher math: algebra.
The eye of the Sybil. This story tells of an Oracle that gives a view of the future from Roman times (and eyes). It is very nicely written, maybe showing the things that seemed to annoy Philip K. Dick as he grew up, such as the lack of support from his family and relatives... It also talks about the future collapse of society, dark times to come, etc.
The day Mr computer fell out of its tree. Everything is controlled by a supercomputer. Clothing, food, transportation... Everywhere. But since this computer is a sentient being, it can get crazy. This has been accounted for, and a psychologist is always ready to help.
The exit door leads in. A contest gets a person in a college where they submit him to a test. It is about ethics, about what's right and wrong, authority and so on. This is another story in the same topic of reality and perception, "things are not what they look like". We see intelligent computers again, pre-Socratic philosophy, and some of the problems of following rules without questioning them.
Chains of air, web of aether. In another colony, dome operators are living in isolation, with little human contact. One of them gets sick, and so another tries to help her. However, caring for a sick person takes its toll.
Strange memories of death. Although this story seems to talk about an eviction in its surface, it is mostly about psychopaths, social conventions, and… how the agreements between adults is, in a way, what constitutes reality.
I hope I shall arrive soon. The cryogenic system of a spaceship fails, and the passenger stays awake for 10 years. The ship (which, of course, is sentient) has to feed him with stimuli to keep his brain from dying, but there is nothing available other than the passenger’s own memories.
Rautavaara’s case. After an accident in a space vessel, three humans die. One is “restored” to life by some aliens from Proxima Centauri (they are called “Approximations”, a term they hate), and hallucinates with Christ and the afterlife (or quite so). However, things quickly deteriorate when the aliens modify the life support system…
The alien mind. A guy kills his pet in retaliation for touching some buttons that divert his track, as he travels in a spaceship on his way to deliver a vaccine. However, the aliens receiving this vaccine don't like it at all.
This volume has 25 short stories covering topics such as reality and perception, space colonisation, interaction with alien races, religion, nuclear war, time travel… Having read other of his novels, like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, or The Minority Report, one is already expecting -and ready to welcome!- some of Dick’s oddities.
It wasn’t hard to rate this book: there were a couple of stories that left me indifferent, but most of them were very good, and some were simply brilliant! In some cases, it was as if Philip K. Dick was right there, next to me, ready to shake the foundations of my understanding of his work.
I wrote some notes for each of the stories. I’ve tried to keep them spoiler-free (unless you display the spoiler section), but it is not always easy due to their short length.
The little black box. A new religion threatens the world’s stability: Mercerism, and the strange empathy boxes that allow people to communicate with the even stranger religion’s spiritual leader. Mercerism plays a major role in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and there is some connection to The Minority Report as well.
The war with the Fnools. An alien race is threatening the Earth. But they take strange appearances and each country takes different measures to fight them. This is one of the most surreal stories of the collection, simply brilliant.
A game of unchance. A story about colonists living in Mars, under hard conditions. They often receive visits of spaceships which set up a Carnival for them, with prizes and games. Among the colonists, some people have developed psychic skills, and they are usually the ones trying to identify the games with the best odds to win prizes. However, things aren’t that simple.
Precious Artifact. I liked this story very much. A terraformer working on Mars finishes his assignment and is ready to receive his allocated piece of land, but before that, he wants to go back to Earth for visiting: there is something odd that worries him. Here again Philip K. Dick plays with reality, perception, our subconscious…
Retreat syndrome. When two policemen stop a driver going too fast, he shows them how he can get his arm through the windshield -without any damage to him or the windshield! The main character is confused: he thinks he is part of a simulation, but has no means to discover. However, he keeps trying to find flaws in such simulation… or is it the reality what is flawed? In a deliciously confusing story, one doesn’t know which side to believe: is the character crazy? Is he right? But then, how can one explain certain things? Very much in line with “We can remember it for you wholesale”!
A Terran Odyssey. This was probably the most ordinary of the stories, and not in a bad way at all. A post-apocalyptic account of life after a nuclear war, displaying telepaths, trading, scavenging… It was very good, and didn’t use any of the typical twists of the author.
Your appointment will be yesterday. And again, into a very original story where, after some invention, time moves backwards within a certain region. People cease to exist when they return to their mother’s womb, they are born when they are “assembled” together from DNA remains, and pretty much everything is amazing. Another interesting passage is an account of how one would eat if you look at it with an inverted time reference. This story led to him writing Counter-clock world, which is mentioned by Sean Carroll in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.
Holy Quarrel shows a computer that not only becomes self aware, it becomes superstitious. It tries to obliterate a region of the US for apparently no good reason, so a team of engineers try to “debug” the problem. Brilliant!
We can remember it for you wholesale is the short story behind Total Recall. Philip K. Dick plays with the reader and shakes us, so we can no longer tell what fiction, false memories, and reality are. A worker with a regular and monotonous life dreams of travelling to Mars and being a spy, but when he finally decides to go and get a memory implant, something odd is found. Another extraordinary story!
Not by its cover. A company in Mars sells Wub fur! The surprising thing is that these Wubs, somehow, manage to stay alive through their fur, and when this is used for bookbinding, it leads to extraordinary situations, with the Wur interacting with the book in clever ways.
Return match. What starts as a “regular” police raid against an alien casino, ends up wrong after a pinball survives the self-destruction initiated by the aliens to destroy any evidence. Somehow, the pinball doesn’t like to be played with, and eventually…
Faith of our fathers. In the future, after Communism has won, a large bureaucracy apparatus exists. One of the workers there receives an almost impossible task, and things get very odd when drugs and the recurring topic of altered reality come into play.
The Story to end all stories. A short story in a couple of paragraphs, describing war, mutants, sex, cannibalism, God… Reminding, maybe, of Greeks myths.
The electric ant. This story plays with similar concepts to the ones found in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Here, a sentient robot founds out who / what he really is. Only then he starts considering what reality is, where he gets his stimuli from, etc. Very good.
Cadbury, the beaver who lacked. I am still puzzled, this was too surreal. Could it be a fable? Or is it simply a random collection of thoughts? I wasn’t ready for this: a beaver with a wife he didn’t love and a job he didn’t like starts visiting a psychologist and tries to find a way out of that life into something better. It is unclear if what he finds is actually any better.
A little something for us tempunauts. What if instead of a Space Race between the U.S.’s Astronauts and the Soviet Union’s Cosmonauts we would have had Tempunauts and Chrononauts? What would happen if things go wrong and they accidentally entered a closed loop? How could they tell? Another great story.
The Pre-persons. Abortion of children younger than 12 is now legal. I found the story very good, but with a clear (and manipulative) anti-abortion message. It is sort of exposing a slippery slope, where you start aborting embryos and end up with children. It was very, very good how he proposed that the soul would only arrive when the pre-person learns higher math: algebra.
The eye of the Sybil. This story tells of an Oracle that gives a view of the future from Roman times (and eyes). It is very nicely written, maybe showing the things that seemed to annoy Philip K. Dick as he grew up, such as the lack of support from his family and relatives... It also talks about the future collapse of society, dark times to come, etc.
The day Mr computer fell out of its tree. Everything is controlled by a supercomputer. Clothing, food, transportation... Everywhere. But since this computer is a sentient being, it can get crazy. This has been accounted for, and a psychologist is always ready to help.
The exit door leads in. A contest gets a person in a college where they submit him to a test. It is about ethics, about what's right and wrong, authority and so on. This is another story in the same topic of reality and perception, "things are not what they look like". We see intelligent computers again, pre-Socratic philosophy, and some of the problems of following rules without questioning them.
Chains of air, web of aether. In another colony, dome operators are living in isolation, with little human contact. One of them gets sick, and so another tries to help her. However, caring for a sick person takes its toll.
Strange memories of death. Although this story seems to talk about an eviction in its surface, it is mostly about psychopaths, social conventions, and… how the agreements between adults is, in a way, what constitutes reality.
I hope I shall arrive soon. The cryogenic system of a spaceship fails, and the passenger stays awake for 10 years. The ship (which, of course, is sentient) has to feed him with stimuli to keep his brain from dying, but there is nothing available other than the passenger’s own memories.
Rautavaara’s case. After an accident in a space vessel, three humans die. One is “restored” to life by some aliens from Proxima Centauri (they are called “Approximations”, a term they hate), and hallucinates with Christ and the afterlife (or quite so). However, things quickly deteriorate when the aliens modify the life support system…
The alien mind. A guy kills his pet in retaliation for touching some buttons that divert his track, as he travels in a spaceship on his way to deliver a vaccine. However, the aliens receiving this vaccine don't like it at all.
June 10, 2025
A series of dystopian post apocalyptic classic Sci-fi short stories. Whilst each is stand alone we are in a world of conapts, vidphones, hover cars, Mars, god-like figures, hostile aliens, extra-terrestrial life, and mechanoids. “The future”, ie recent past, as envisaged in the 60s is quite quaint albeit anachronistic.
As I often find with short story collections, it is patchy with some hidden nuggets. I liked most Retreat Syndrome, We Can Remember it, and the Electric Ant. I feel Retreat Syndrome must have also influenced Total Recall.
I read this not least because Blade Runner is probably my all time favourite film. His imagination is very cinematic. Nearly every story feels like the set up for a great sci-fi movie but finishes before things get really interesting. Maybe the closest in feeling to a series of episodes of Black Mirror, which I think has acknowledged the influence.
As I often find with short story collections, it is patchy with some hidden nuggets. I liked most Retreat Syndrome, We Can Remember it, and the Electric Ant. I feel Retreat Syndrome must have also influenced Total Recall.
I read this not least because Blade Runner is probably my all time favourite film. His imagination is very cinematic. Nearly every story feels like the set up for a great sci-fi movie but finishes before things get really interesting. Maybe the closest in feeling to a series of episodes of Black Mirror, which I think has acknowledged the influence.
September 7, 2025
Zonder boek op stap, snel de dichtstbijzijnde boekhandel binnenspringen en daar in de ramsj de verhalenbundel van Philip K. Dick scoren die 'We Can Remember IT For You Wholesale' bevat: het verhaal waarop cultfilm 'Total Recall' met Arnold Swarzenegger en Sharon Stone werd gebaseerd.
We grasduinden met enige moeite door de verhalen van Dick.
De collected stories bevatten in totaal 118 verhalen en aan deel 5 gingen dus al zo'n 1500 pagina's vooraf, waardoor we soms het gevoel hadden dat het sop toch de kool niet echt meer waard was.
We lazen goede verhalen, daar niet van. En 'We can remember it for you wholesale' lazen we met heel veel plezier. Maar echt boeien deed deze verhalenbundel ons niet.
We grasduinden met enige moeite door de verhalen van Dick.
De collected stories bevatten in totaal 118 verhalen en aan deel 5 gingen dus al zo'n 1500 pagina's vooraf, waardoor we soms het gevoel hadden dat het sop toch de kool niet echt meer waard was.
We lazen goede verhalen, daar niet van. En 'We can remember it for you wholesale' lazen we met heel veel plezier. Maar echt boeien deed deze verhalenbundel ons niet.
January 22, 2023
Interesting set of stories, but overall I don't think Dick writes the most enjoyable short fiction. A lot of these feel quite lacking in the substance his full novels have, the endings especially leaving a lot to be desired. I don't think I'll read more of his short stories in the future - The only ones that really interested me are all in this volume.
September 1, 2025
I will never read a PKD short story for the first time again. A couple of bangers Faith of our Fathers and the Electric Ant stand out, but several chapters of novels that were sold as stories. Read for Dickapedia. longer review coming.
November 15, 2012
My Philip K. Dick Project
Entry #32 = The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick: Vol. 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl (1964 - 1981)
Well, here I am, skipping ahead in the chronology of Dick's writing again, this time all the way to the end of his life, and his very last story, “The Alien Mind”. This collection chronicles nearly 20 years of Dick's short stories, from 1964 to 1981, by far the longest span of time covered in any of the five collections.
It's a great collection, showcasing Dick's evolution into middle age. While there are a few stories in here that mirror Dick's great early shorts with their exuberance and bizarre concepts (“The War With The Fnools”, “Holy Quarrel”, “Return Match”, among others), there are definitely more notes of melancholy and reflection, even bitterness (“Precious Artifact”, “Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked”, “A Little Something For Us Tempunauts”, “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, among others). The language is saltier, the themes more adult, but with a sort of quaint "sticking it to the man, man," kind of 60s-70s vibe around the edges. Some of these stories, especially "Faith of our Fathers", are terrifying. And then we have the brilliantly masterful "The Electric Ant", perhaps the purest distillation of Philip K. Dick into written form.
This is also the most intimately personal collection of stories, for a variety of reasons. First of all, many of these stories were never written with the intent of being widely published, and were circulated privately. "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked" is a very odd little story, dealing explicitly with Dick's well-documented problems with women, which appeared with more frequency in his works. The titular Cadbury is literally a beaver, specifically, a worn-down middle aged schlub in a dead-end job married to a nagging shrew (not literally a shrew, mind you, she's a beaver as well). Cadbury finds love with a lovely lady beaver, but finds out in
the end she personifies woman-kind in all her facets. There is love, and warmth, but eventually they take everything from Cadbury and leave him fading into oblivion, in the darkness. It's a strange and bitterly misogynistic little tale, apparently born out of a bitch session between Dick and some of his friends. On the other hand, a silly trifle like "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out Of His Tree" is apparently an elaborate love letter of sorts to his latest paramour at the time. "The Pre-Persons" is as baldly anti-abortion as any story could be, leaving no possible room for doubt as to Dick's opinions on the subject, for which he was not apologetic. And of course, the intriguing title story, "The Eye of the Sibyl", is for the most part Dick's true account of his experiences after the pink laser changed him, and he came to believe he led a double life in ancient Rome. But perhaps the best of these personal tales is "Strange Memories of Death", hardly even a story, really, more of a personal essay concerning an episode in Dick's life concerning of all things, a housing issue in the Los Angeles area. It's simultaneously humorous, sad, and thought-provoking, and ends with an ironic twist, a story which really forces me to wonder what kind of greatness Dick would have eventually been capable of had his life not been cut short so early. Another story that makes me feel this way is the bizarre and melancholy "Chains of Air, Web of Aether", where a reluctant favor done for an ailing neighbor sends a man's life into a downward spiral of banality that he can't bring himself to end.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give to this book is the surprisingly intense melancholy I felt upon finishing it. For not only was it the end of a single volume, it was the end of Dick's short stories for me. Never again will I have the feeling of knowing there is some PKD short story that I haven't read yet. I've read them all, and I can never take that back. I've come to love them so much, so it was like parting with an old friend. In fact, I'm well over the halfway hump on this project now, and there are less novels in front of me than behind me, although many of his most acclaimed books still await me. Still, I'll miss these strange little short stories.
My edition: Citadel Press Paperback, 1992
Up next: “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”! One of Dick’s most acclaimed novels.
November 15, 2012
Entry #32 = The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick: Vol. 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl (1964 - 1981)
Well, here I am, skipping ahead in the chronology of Dick's writing again, this time all the way to the end of his life, and his very last story, “The Alien Mind”. This collection chronicles nearly 20 years of Dick's short stories, from 1964 to 1981, by far the longest span of time covered in any of the five collections.
It's a great collection, showcasing Dick's evolution into middle age. While there are a few stories in here that mirror Dick's great early shorts with their exuberance and bizarre concepts (“The War With The Fnools”, “Holy Quarrel”, “Return Match”, among others), there are definitely more notes of melancholy and reflection, even bitterness (“Precious Artifact”, “Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked”, “A Little Something For Us Tempunauts”, “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, among others). The language is saltier, the themes more adult, but with a sort of quaint "sticking it to the man, man," kind of 60s-70s vibe around the edges. Some of these stories, especially "Faith of our Fathers", are terrifying. And then we have the brilliantly masterful "The Electric Ant", perhaps the purest distillation of Philip K. Dick into written form.
This is also the most intimately personal collection of stories, for a variety of reasons. First of all, many of these stories were never written with the intent of being widely published, and were circulated privately. "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked" is a very odd little story, dealing explicitly with Dick's well-documented problems with women, which appeared with more frequency in his works. The titular Cadbury is literally a beaver, specifically, a worn-down middle aged schlub in a dead-end job married to a nagging shrew (not literally a shrew, mind you, she's a beaver as well). Cadbury finds love with a lovely lady beaver, but finds out in
the end she personifies woman-kind in all her facets. There is love, and warmth, but eventually they take everything from Cadbury and leave him fading into oblivion, in the darkness. It's a strange and bitterly misogynistic little tale, apparently born out of a bitch session between Dick and some of his friends. On the other hand, a silly trifle like "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out Of His Tree" is apparently an elaborate love letter of sorts to his latest paramour at the time. "The Pre-Persons" is as baldly anti-abortion as any story could be, leaving no possible room for doubt as to Dick's opinions on the subject, for which he was not apologetic. And of course, the intriguing title story, "The Eye of the Sibyl", is for the most part Dick's true account of his experiences after the pink laser changed him, and he came to believe he led a double life in ancient Rome. But perhaps the best of these personal tales is "Strange Memories of Death", hardly even a story, really, more of a personal essay concerning an episode in Dick's life concerning of all things, a housing issue in the Los Angeles area. It's simultaneously humorous, sad, and thought-provoking, and ends with an ironic twist, a story which really forces me to wonder what kind of greatness Dick would have eventually been capable of had his life not been cut short so early. Another story that makes me feel this way is the bizarre and melancholy "Chains of Air, Web of Aether", where a reluctant favor done for an ailing neighbor sends a man's life into a downward spiral of banality that he can't bring himself to end.
Perhaps the highest praise I can give to this book is the surprisingly intense melancholy I felt upon finishing it. For not only was it the end of a single volume, it was the end of Dick's short stories for me. Never again will I have the feeling of knowing there is some PKD short story that I haven't read yet. I've read them all, and I can never take that back. I've come to love them so much, so it was like parting with an old friend. In fact, I'm well over the halfway hump on this project now, and there are less novels in front of me than behind me, although many of his most acclaimed books still await me. Still, I'll miss these strange little short stories.
My edition: Citadel Press Paperback, 1992
Up next: “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”! One of Dick’s most acclaimed novels.
November 15, 2012
August 25, 2019
Un cuento sobre los orígenes del mercerismo, la religión sospechosamente mayoritaria de ¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?. En la novela, el mercerismo es una institución misteriosa y compleja. Se insinúa que quizás sea no más que una ilusión colectiva, pero ¿qué son si no las religiones? El mercerismo es una doctrina cuyo valor central es la empatía, y que no parece hacerle mal a nadie, incluso si su pretendido mesías, Wilbur Mercer, es nada más que un alien o una simulación computarizada.
En “The Little Black Box”, que no me queda claro si forma parte del mismo universo que ¿Sueñan…? o no, el gobierno auspicia, por sus propios intereses, una variante del budismo zen, y el mercerismo es todavía un credo clandestino. Los creyentes se conectan a unos dispositivos, las “cajas de empatía”, que les permiten ponerse en la piel de Mercer, sentir lo que él siente. Mercer está subiendo a una colina, mientras sus enemigos lo golpean y le arrojan piedras. En el cuento, parece que sus seguidores experimentan esto en tiempo real, mientras que en la novela la misma secuencia vuelve a reproducirse cada vez que se conectan a una caja de empatía.
Este ritual hace que los merceristas experimenten todos los sufrimientos del profeta, y también agudiza su sentido comunitario, ya que al parecer también se establece algún tipo de conexión entre los distintos usuarios de la caja. Es por esto que el estado, de carácter colectivista, recela del mercerismo y acaba prohibiéndolo.
Los paralelos entre esta historia y la del cristianismo son muchos y obvios. Las dos religiones se sostienen en un mito fundador muy similar, cuyo eje es el sufrimiento. El dispositivo tecnológico que usan los merceristas es útil, pero tenemos que decir que no imprescindible; las cajas de empatía, en el siglo I, se llamaban historias (en ciencia ficción, siempre funciona eso de transformar algún mecanismo sutil y poco visible –puede ser de índole mental o social– en un concreto dispositivo tecnológico).
La conclusión también podría ser la misma en ambos casos. Jesús quizás no haya existido, o no haya sido el que dicen que fue, pero eso no tiene importancia; lo que importa es el efecto que su doctrina pueda producir en la sociedad. Esta perspectiva utilitaria sin duda no será del agrado de los creyentes, ya que todo sistema de creencias presupone ante todo su propia verdad, sin preocuparse, al menos en teoría, por sus consecuencias (“si Cristo no resucitó de entre los muertos, nuestra fe es vana”). Los arquitectos sociales, que abundan en las historias de Dick, serán de otro parecer.
Al final, el cuento no nos dice concretamente si el mercerismo será una mejor opción para esta sociedad futurista. ¿Qué sería en este caso una mejor opción? El mercerismo contradice a lo que parece ser un sistema opresivo, ¿pero serviría para derrocarlo? No sería extraño que, como efectivamente ocurre en ¿Sueñan…? (como también, efectivamente, ocurrió con el cristianismo), el estado terminará adoptándolo y usándolo para sus propios fines. A lo mejor esto es lo máximo que se le puede pedir a una religión; no que transforme la sociedad, sino que haga de la sociedad existente (¿inevitable?) una más fácil de tolerar para sus súbditos.
En “The Little Black Box”, que no me queda claro si forma parte del mismo universo que ¿Sueñan…? o no, el gobierno auspicia, por sus propios intereses, una variante del budismo zen, y el mercerismo es todavía un credo clandestino. Los creyentes se conectan a unos dispositivos, las “cajas de empatía”, que les permiten ponerse en la piel de Mercer, sentir lo que él siente. Mercer está subiendo a una colina, mientras sus enemigos lo golpean y le arrojan piedras. En el cuento, parece que sus seguidores experimentan esto en tiempo real, mientras que en la novela la misma secuencia vuelve a reproducirse cada vez que se conectan a una caja de empatía.
Este ritual hace que los merceristas experimenten todos los sufrimientos del profeta, y también agudiza su sentido comunitario, ya que al parecer también se establece algún tipo de conexión entre los distintos usuarios de la caja. Es por esto que el estado, de carácter colectivista, recela del mercerismo y acaba prohibiéndolo.
Los paralelos entre esta historia y la del cristianismo son muchos y obvios. Las dos religiones se sostienen en un mito fundador muy similar, cuyo eje es el sufrimiento. El dispositivo tecnológico que usan los merceristas es útil, pero tenemos que decir que no imprescindible; las cajas de empatía, en el siglo I, se llamaban historias (en ciencia ficción, siempre funciona eso de transformar algún mecanismo sutil y poco visible –puede ser de índole mental o social– en un concreto dispositivo tecnológico).
La conclusión también podría ser la misma en ambos casos. Jesús quizás no haya existido, o no haya sido el que dicen que fue, pero eso no tiene importancia; lo que importa es el efecto que su doctrina pueda producir en la sociedad. Esta perspectiva utilitaria sin duda no será del agrado de los creyentes, ya que todo sistema de creencias presupone ante todo su propia verdad, sin preocuparse, al menos en teoría, por sus consecuencias (“si Cristo no resucitó de entre los muertos, nuestra fe es vana”). Los arquitectos sociales, que abundan en las historias de Dick, serán de otro parecer.
Al final, el cuento no nos dice concretamente si el mercerismo será una mejor opción para esta sociedad futurista. ¿Qué sería en este caso una mejor opción? El mercerismo contradice a lo que parece ser un sistema opresivo, ¿pero serviría para derrocarlo? No sería extraño que, como efectivamente ocurre en ¿Sueñan…? (como también, efectivamente, ocurrió con el cristianismo), el estado terminará adoptándolo y usándolo para sus propios fines. A lo mejor esto es lo máximo que se le puede pedir a una religión; no que transforme la sociedad, sino que haga de la sociedad existente (¿inevitable?) una más fácil de tolerar para sus súbditos.
August 27, 2024
Well...it wasn´t bad but I would not read it again.
The style in which Phillip K. Dick wrote these short stories are, to me, not satisfying. They start in the middle and quite a few of them have no end to them. Reading them felt like I was starting to read a story on page 100 and finishing it some 30 pages later by simply putting the book down, without finishing the book. You just stop and that, to me, felt unsatisfying.
Some I liked and would have loved to see the author find an ending to the story. They all feel unresolved but not in a good way. You are left wondering what happens to the main characters or a bit of mystery is left unresolved, which makes it interesting. But not here. The stories ends like a phone call that gets interrupted due to the line being cut and the conversation is never picked up again thereafter.
Shame (to me, not liking this style) because some stories have good potential.
No surprise that screenwriters have turned some of his stories into movies.
The style in which Phillip K. Dick wrote these short stories are, to me, not satisfying. They start in the middle and quite a few of them have no end to them. Reading them felt like I was starting to read a story on page 100 and finishing it some 30 pages later by simply putting the book down, without finishing the book. You just stop and that, to me, felt unsatisfying.
Some I liked and would have loved to see the author find an ending to the story. They all feel unresolved but not in a good way. You are left wondering what happens to the main characters or a bit of mystery is left unresolved, which makes it interesting. But not here. The stories ends like a phone call that gets interrupted due to the line being cut and the conversation is never picked up again thereafter.
Shame (to me, not liking this style) because some stories have good potential.
No surprise that screenwriters have turned some of his stories into movies.
December 14, 2016
Most of these stories are excellent. Around 1970, however, it seems PKD's latent but palpable misogyny exploded forth in several stories, most notably "The Pre-Persons", which is offensive not because it is a barely- disguised polemic against abortion, but because it treats women as stultifying figures who suck all the joy out if life. The same is true of "Chains of Air, Web of Aether", where one of the only round female characters in his entire output is described as "thanatous" (literally death-inducing) and becomes more and more parasitic, culminating in a de facto married state.
Thankfully the very late stories from around 1980 return to the more neutral state of bleakness that PKD cultivated for most of his career, otherwise this collection would have shown an unsalvageable descent into a very specific hatred of women.
Thankfully the very late stories from around 1980 return to the more neutral state of bleakness that PKD cultivated for most of his career, otherwise this collection would have shown an unsalvageable descent into a very specific hatred of women.
February 18, 2021
There are some outstanding stories in this collection (the title story, obviously, is one of these).
Unfortunately there are also quite a few that I found genuinely offensive, and I'm usually pretty good at overlooking casual misogyny and "she breasted boobily"s.
The rest are a mixed bag, almost always interesting ideas, sometimes executed well. Unfortunately the bad and mediocre outweighed the good for me.
A shame because I've loved everything else I've read by PKD. Guess I'm getting more feminist killjoy in my old age.
Unfortunately there are also quite a few that I found genuinely offensive, and I'm usually pretty good at overlooking casual misogyny and "she breasted boobily"s.
The rest are a mixed bag, almost always interesting ideas, sometimes executed well. Unfortunately the bad and mediocre outweighed the good for me.
A shame because I've loved everything else I've read by PKD. Guess I'm getting more feminist killjoy in my old age.
June 5, 2020
The first thing that I should mention here is that there are two books with the same title, and that one is volume two of Dick’s collected short stories and one is volume five. This one is volume five, but it’s all good because you don’t need to read through it in order.
I picked this up because I eventually want to read everything that Dick ever wrote, and his collected short stories seem like a good place to start. I could have started with volume one I suppose, but one of my friends picked out a random number to correspond with a book on my wishlist and this is what it corresponded to. It was a pretty good pick.
Sure, as with any short story collection, there are peaks and troughs, by which I mean that some of the stories are better than others. But that’s to be expected with any short story collection, and I was impressed with the overall quality here, especially when you think about how quickly Dick used to crank out his stories.
There are one or two that are perhaps not as deep as the others, but they’re still pretty entertaining. For example, there’s a story about these two-foot high aliens who grow in size when they’re exposed to some very human vices. They grow to four feet after smoking a cigarette and then develop a taste for alcohol and women. It’s probably not very 2020, but because it’s a jokey piece to begin with, I don’t think it matters too much.
In fact, one of the interesting things about this book is that it goes between serious societal issues and deadpan humour from one story to another, and that helps to show off Dick’s diversity as a writer. There are few others who could compete with him on diversity and output, although it’s also true that there are better writers in terms of quality.
But the real hallmark of success here is that the vast majority of the stories stuck in my mind, and just looking at the title alone is enough to take me back to them. The worry with a huge short story collection is that after a while, some of the stories can blend together. That doesn’t happen here.
So would I recommend this one? Yeah sure, why not? There’s also the benefit that you don’t have to read through the books in order and so you can even just keep your eyes peeled in charity shops and thrift stores for any of the five books in the collection series. Then you can read one story each evening until you work your way through it – or if you’re like me, you can just get hooked and binge through them. Whatever floats your boat, my friend. Happy reading.
I picked this up because I eventually want to read everything that Dick ever wrote, and his collected short stories seem like a good place to start. I could have started with volume one I suppose, but one of my friends picked out a random number to correspond with a book on my wishlist and this is what it corresponded to. It was a pretty good pick.
Sure, as with any short story collection, there are peaks and troughs, by which I mean that some of the stories are better than others. But that’s to be expected with any short story collection, and I was impressed with the overall quality here, especially when you think about how quickly Dick used to crank out his stories.
There are one or two that are perhaps not as deep as the others, but they’re still pretty entertaining. For example, there’s a story about these two-foot high aliens who grow in size when they’re exposed to some very human vices. They grow to four feet after smoking a cigarette and then develop a taste for alcohol and women. It’s probably not very 2020, but because it’s a jokey piece to begin with, I don’t think it matters too much.
In fact, one of the interesting things about this book is that it goes between serious societal issues and deadpan humour from one story to another, and that helps to show off Dick’s diversity as a writer. There are few others who could compete with him on diversity and output, although it’s also true that there are better writers in terms of quality.
But the real hallmark of success here is that the vast majority of the stories stuck in my mind, and just looking at the title alone is enough to take me back to them. The worry with a huge short story collection is that after a while, some of the stories can blend together. That doesn’t happen here.
So would I recommend this one? Yeah sure, why not? There’s also the benefit that you don’t have to read through the books in order and so you can even just keep your eyes peeled in charity shops and thrift stores for any of the five books in the collection series. Then you can read one story each evening until you work your way through it – or if you’re like me, you can just get hooked and binge through them. Whatever floats your boat, my friend. Happy reading.
February 1, 2023
Science fiction at its finest, this collection takes you on a paranoia filled journey covering topics such as control, reality, war, identity, empathy, prejudice, authenticity, religion, all of the classic Dick themes tied up nicely in what amounts to one big philosophy fueled cynically prescient portrait of humanity.
Among my favourite stories in this collection is The Little Black Box, a story about the popular new religion "Mercerism", an empathy focussed religion looking to replace Zen Buddhism, the major components of this short story were later included in Dick's highly acclaimed 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?'. Its fun to see the seeds of this idea through the more focussed lens of a short story, where themes of religion suppression and the human desire to connect are centre stage.
In Retreat Syndrome, Dick uses one of my favourite of his literary devices: the unreliable narrator, and because it is a Dick story it is further enhanced with a reality warped, borderline fit of psychosis. Dick is the master of creating paranoid fiction, and he uses his protagonist John Cupertino's memory of killing his wife to play with our brains and turn them into mush.
One that caused a lot of controversy is The Pre Persons, a story highlighting Dick's views on abortion; while I don't agree with the statement made by this short story, it was written with a hauntingly dystopian charisma that I absolutely loved. This is one of those stories that needn't have been adapted into a full novel, brevity works well with such a hard hitting statement, and Dick always manages to create broader worlds without the need to describe them.
I could go on about this short story collection for ages, but I'll just leave it with this:
Read this book; Dick's mind is one of the most unique minds ever to have existed, and I'm thankful he used it for writing, you're seriously missing out if you've never read his work.
Among my favourite stories in this collection is The Little Black Box, a story about the popular new religion "Mercerism", an empathy focussed religion looking to replace Zen Buddhism, the major components of this short story were later included in Dick's highly acclaimed 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?'. Its fun to see the seeds of this idea through the more focussed lens of a short story, where themes of religion suppression and the human desire to connect are centre stage.
In Retreat Syndrome, Dick uses one of my favourite of his literary devices: the unreliable narrator, and because it is a Dick story it is further enhanced with a reality warped, borderline fit of psychosis. Dick is the master of creating paranoid fiction, and he uses his protagonist John Cupertino's memory of killing his wife to play with our brains and turn them into mush.
One that caused a lot of controversy is The Pre Persons, a story highlighting Dick's views on abortion; while I don't agree with the statement made by this short story, it was written with a hauntingly dystopian charisma that I absolutely loved. This is one of those stories that needn't have been adapted into a full novel, brevity works well with such a hard hitting statement, and Dick always manages to create broader worlds without the need to describe them.
I could go on about this short story collection for ages, but I'll just leave it with this:
Read this book; Dick's mind is one of the most unique minds ever to have existed, and I'm thankful he used it for writing, you're seriously missing out if you've never read his work.
June 29, 2017
It casts a wide net of about 18 years so they're not all winners. But atleast a few of these stories ought to activate your almonds.
The better stories are in the later half I think. From Faith of our Fathers ( one of the best stories in here and absolutely begging for a movie adaptation ) and onwards. With the exception of The Eye of Sybil which is just self indulgently autobiographical and not in a very interesting way and A Little Something For Us Tempunauts which reads like a failed trial experiment for the movie Groundhog Day or something. But those two are really the only truly bad ones in the collection.
Despite kind of the hit or miss nature of the stories. The great one are just fantastic such as Faith of our Fathers, Holy Quarrel, Strange Memories of Death, The Exit Door Leads In, Retreat Syndrome ( which is basically just a better version of the We Can Remember it for you Wholesale which was frankly more interesting as Total Recall ), Chains of Air Web of Aether and my personal favorite Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked. ( God I would love to live in the alternate dimension where that got a movie adaptation just to see the reactions to it. )
Special shoutout to The Pre-Person, a supremely edgy hot take about abortion, passionately written for sure even if I don't agree with it. I admire his chutzpah. Atleast he wasn't afraid to catch some flack for contrarian opinions.
Also included are some authors notes which are interesting. And also an introduction that reads like a 3 page extended backhanded compliment or a straight up roast. With its crown jewel being that Ursula K. Le Guin did his shtich better in Lathe of Heaven. Thanks for that loving tribute to a dead writer Mr. Thomas M. Disch.
The better stories are in the later half I think. From Faith of our Fathers ( one of the best stories in here and absolutely begging for a movie adaptation ) and onwards. With the exception of The Eye of Sybil which is just self indulgently autobiographical and not in a very interesting way and A Little Something For Us Tempunauts which reads like a failed trial experiment for the movie Groundhog Day or something. But those two are really the only truly bad ones in the collection.
Despite kind of the hit or miss nature of the stories. The great one are just fantastic such as Faith of our Fathers, Holy Quarrel, Strange Memories of Death, The Exit Door Leads In, Retreat Syndrome ( which is basically just a better version of the We Can Remember it for you Wholesale which was frankly more interesting as Total Recall ), Chains of Air Web of Aether and my personal favorite Cadbury, The Beaver Who Lacked. ( God I would love to live in the alternate dimension where that got a movie adaptation just to see the reactions to it. )
Special shoutout to The Pre-Person, a supremely edgy hot take about abortion, passionately written for sure even if I don't agree with it. I admire his chutzpah. Atleast he wasn't afraid to catch some flack for contrarian opinions.
Also included are some authors notes which are interesting. And also an introduction that reads like a 3 page extended backhanded compliment or a straight up roast. With its crown jewel being that Ursula K. Le Guin did his shtich better in Lathe of Heaven. Thanks for that loving tribute to a dead writer Mr. Thomas M. Disch.
December 23, 2017
This is the last volume of Philip K. Dick's short stories, written between 1963 and 1981. While he sticks to many of the themes that have been a part of his writing from the beginning, the effects of a changing culture can be seen. For one thing, some of his characters have stopped smoking; they now chew tobacco. I imaging the author trying to kick his smoking habit, or beginning to realize that smoking in a spaceship is not a good idea or likely to be happening.
One story written in 1974, "Pre-Persons," imagining an overpopulated world in which abortion has been legalized up to age 12, when young people finally develop a soul, apparently enraged a few readers. The story is spun with his usual wit and understatement. He imagines in Stephen King style the terror of the grown children who know that the 'abortion truck' is coming. They would rather see the dog catcher or hear an ice cream truck than hear the abortion truck loudspeakers blasting out a version of Jack and Jill. While you may also be enraged by this thought experiment, you have to give him credit for following the idea to its logical conclusion.
One story in particular stands out: "Cadbury the Beaver Who Lacked." Wow, what a strange trip down the beaver hole with an insecure and strange beaver and his search for a mate to replace his nagging spouse. Three females, possibly women, all part of the same person, offer him bitingly honest appraisals of how they would treat him if they lived together. Very strange and totally not science fiction: it is all fantasy - very unusual for Dick - and as a result, very entertaining to his readers.
"We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" is the story that became the hit movie, "Total Recall." The story is wonderful, but it is so different from the movie that you have to give credit to the creators of the movie for taking the skeleton of an idea and expanding it into a mind bending feature film.
If you are a fan of Philip K. Dick, or simply a reader with OCD who wants to say you have "read everything" by the author, well give this book a spin. I had many entertaining moments from it.
My library had to borrow this book from a library in San Francisco! Amazing. Now on to Volume 4, which the library just got from North Carolina.
One story written in 1974, "Pre-Persons," imagining an overpopulated world in which abortion has been legalized up to age 12, when young people finally develop a soul, apparently enraged a few readers. The story is spun with his usual wit and understatement. He imagines in Stephen King style the terror of the grown children who know that the 'abortion truck' is coming. They would rather see the dog catcher or hear an ice cream truck than hear the abortion truck loudspeakers blasting out a version of Jack and Jill. While you may also be enraged by this thought experiment, you have to give him credit for following the idea to its logical conclusion.
One story in particular stands out: "Cadbury the Beaver Who Lacked." Wow, what a strange trip down the beaver hole with an insecure and strange beaver and his search for a mate to replace his nagging spouse. Three females, possibly women, all part of the same person, offer him bitingly honest appraisals of how they would treat him if they lived together. Very strange and totally not science fiction: it is all fantasy - very unusual for Dick - and as a result, very entertaining to his readers.
"We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" is the story that became the hit movie, "Total Recall." The story is wonderful, but it is so different from the movie that you have to give credit to the creators of the movie for taking the skeleton of an idea and expanding it into a mind bending feature film.
If you are a fan of Philip K. Dick, or simply a reader with OCD who wants to say you have "read everything" by the author, well give this book a spin. I had many entertaining moments from it.
My library had to borrow this book from a library in San Francisco! Amazing. Now on to Volume 4, which the library just got from North Carolina.
April 3, 2025
Some of these stories are pure genius, but others are terrible - downright embarrassing and nonsensical. I'm beginning to think that I dislike everything he wrote after his nervous breakdown in 1974. It just goes to show that everyone messes up every now and then, even PKD.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 189 reviews