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The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume One
Philip K. Dick is a literary phenomenon whose influence extends throughout modern popular culture and has endured for over half a century.
In his shorter fiction, Dick explores many ideas that would haunt him throughout his writing career. At once philosophical, surreal and strange, his stories have breath-taking scope and might even challenge your perception of reality.
This first volume contains twenty-nine stories, including some of Dick's most formative work, such as 'Beyond Lies the Wub' and 'Second Variety'. Never has there been a better way to experience one of 20th-century literature's most imaginative minds.
In his shorter fiction, Dick explores many ideas that would haunt him throughout his writing career. At once philosophical, surreal and strange, his stories have breath-taking scope and might even challenge your perception of reality.
This first volume contains twenty-nine stories, including some of Dick's most formative work, such as 'Beyond Lies the Wub' and 'Second Variety'. Never has there been a better way to experience one of 20th-century literature's most imaginative minds.
615 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2023
32 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Philip K. Dick
2,005 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
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 10, 2024
Last month, I helped the new OpenAI model o1-preview to write a short SF story. Casting about for points of comparison, I said in my afterword that it didn't seem unreasonable to compare with early Philip K. Dick; Dick is better, but I would put the AI in the same ballpark.
I had just started this collection, and it was the first thing that popped into my head. A couple of days later, I started to have misgivings. Maybe I'd been too hasty. But having now finished, I'm inclined to think I was more or less on target. These are stories Dick published when he was still in his early 20s. A few are quite memorable - I would say the standouts were Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub - but most are formulaic 50s pulp SF. Dick is still learning his trade. There are time-travel escapades with the usual kinds of paradoxes, bleak post-apocalyptic numbers where the world has been ravaged by atomic weapons, some extremely implausible space operas.
He comes up with some nice images; I liked the minaturised city in the paperweight from The Crystal Crypt (later, brilliantly satirised in John Sladek's Solar Shoe-Salesman), the Bradburyesque killer cuckoo clock in Beyond the Door, and the clever twist on Leda and the Swan from In the Garden. We see flickers of the themes that would later make him one of the great science-fiction novelists, the paranoia and the plays on the nature of reality, but he is not yet able to make them work properly. In the endnotes, written twenty-five years later, Dick is disarmingly candid about these early efforts and acknowledges the debt he owes to Anthony Boucher, who, he says, taught him how to create a proper story. Going back to where we came in, I felt I was doing the same thing with the AI. "Show, don't tell!" I advised it. "Write what you know!" o1-preview listened attentively, and, as you can see in the report, its fourth draft was a whole lot better than its first. But it's still a beginner.
Now I want to continue educating my enthusiastic silicon protegé. Dick reached maturity in just a few years, and AIs are much quicker than people. Perhaps it might work? Which in itself could be the premise for a typical early PKD short story. I wonder what the twist is?
I had just started this collection, and it was the first thing that popped into my head. A couple of days later, I started to have misgivings. Maybe I'd been too hasty. But having now finished, I'm inclined to think I was more or less on target. These are stories Dick published when he was still in his early 20s. A few are quite memorable - I would say the standouts were Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub - but most are formulaic 50s pulp SF. Dick is still learning his trade. There are time-travel escapades with the usual kinds of paradoxes, bleak post-apocalyptic numbers where the world has been ravaged by atomic weapons, some extremely implausible space operas.
He comes up with some nice images; I liked the minaturised city in the paperweight from The Crystal Crypt (later, brilliantly satirised in John Sladek's Solar Shoe-Salesman), the Bradburyesque killer cuckoo clock in Beyond the Door, and the clever twist on Leda and the Swan from In the Garden. We see flickers of the themes that would later make him one of the great science-fiction novelists, the paranoia and the plays on the nature of reality, but he is not yet able to make them work properly. In the endnotes, written twenty-five years later, Dick is disarmingly candid about these early efforts and acknowledges the debt he owes to Anthony Boucher, who, he says, taught him how to create a proper story. Going back to where we came in, I felt I was doing the same thing with the AI. "Show, don't tell!" I advised it. "Write what you know!" o1-preview listened attentively, and, as you can see in the report, its fourth draft was a whole lot better than its first. But it's still a beginner.
Now I want to continue educating my enthusiastic silicon protegé. Dick reached maturity in just a few years, and AIs are much quicker than people. Perhaps it might work? Which in itself could be the premise for a typical early PKD short story. I wonder what the twist is?
June 28, 2024
Averaged about 1 story per day: which is a great prescription for a good summer reading habit of awesome SF. Some of these stories are just 'meh', but a good portion are positively great, and everything you want from a Philip K Dick reading experience. I would put The Gun, the Skull, The Variable Man, The Crystal Crypt, The Builder, Meddler, and Second Variety in the top tier of short stories from the first volume of this series collecting PKD's short work.
Want to read
August 7, 2024813.54 Dic
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December 2, 2024This collection of stories presents very early works from Philip K. Dick, so my expectations were not very high to start with, but this volume still managed to disappoint them and if I were to sum it up in one word, that word would be "underwhelming." There is arguably not a single really good story in here, and even the barely readable ones can be counted on one, definitely no more than two hands.
s a general rule, the longer a story is, the more likely it is to at least be decent, which leads me to suspect that the short story just was not Dick's forte. We'll see how this hypothesis holds up in the other three volumes, but for this one it is a fairly accurate guideline. Two of the shorter stories that I found somewhat readable were "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Nanny" - both stand out for using the SF genre framework to formulate a critique of consumerism, and are doing so in quite imaginative (if not exactly subtle) ways. While not masterworks themselves, it is possible to find the seeds of later novels like Ubik here.
Some of the stories are, and one really cannot put it any other way, relentlessly silly. Several may just have aged badly, but it is hard to imagine that a story like "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" (about, yes, a shoe that gains self-awareness) were anything but silly at the time when Dick wrote them. This particular story, though (and do note the Hemingway reference in the title) turned out to be rather charming in its silliness, and actually ended up on my list of favourites.
My remaining favourite stories are two of the longer ones: "Second Variety" which, although you can see the final twist coming from miles away, manages to successfully evoke a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape, and, as Dick points out in a note to this story, tackles his "grand theme - who is human and who only appears (masquerades) as human?" I'm not sure I'd agree with him on this actually constituting his "grand theme" - but whatever one considers that to be, there are definitely some early traces of it to be found in this story.
I also (somewhat) enjoyed "Jon's World," a story about time travel and alternative worlds which closes this volume. Again, it is not so much the story itself which is interesting but that it shows some glimpses of the Philip K. Dick to come. We are still some distance away from the mind-boggling world-juggling Dick accomplishes in his mature work but from hindsight, this story is clearly travelling in that direction.
Finally, on a side note, there are now two editions of Collected Stories of Philip K.Dick at Gollancz, one in five volumes, and this one (from 2023) in four. As far as I can tell, both editions contain exactly the same stories in exactly the same order; they are just distributed differently across the volumes. This first volume is not good and was frankly qujite a slog to get through. Future volumes can only improve upon this.
s a general rule, the longer a story is, the more likely it is to at least be decent, which leads me to suspect that the short story just was not Dick's forte. We'll see how this hypothesis holds up in the other three volumes, but for this one it is a fairly accurate guideline. Two of the shorter stories that I found somewhat readable were "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Nanny" - both stand out for using the SF genre framework to formulate a critique of consumerism, and are doing so in quite imaginative (if not exactly subtle) ways. While not masterworks themselves, it is possible to find the seeds of later novels like Ubik here.
Some of the stories are, and one really cannot put it any other way, relentlessly silly. Several may just have aged badly, but it is hard to imagine that a story like "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" (about, yes, a shoe that gains self-awareness) were anything but silly at the time when Dick wrote them. This particular story, though (and do note the Hemingway reference in the title) turned out to be rather charming in its silliness, and actually ended up on my list of favourites.
My remaining favourite stories are two of the longer ones: "Second Variety" which, although you can see the final twist coming from miles away, manages to successfully evoke a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape, and, as Dick points out in a note to this story, tackles his "grand theme - who is human and who only appears (masquerades) as human?" I'm not sure I'd agree with him on this actually constituting his "grand theme" - but whatever one considers that to be, there are definitely some early traces of it to be found in this story.
I also (somewhat) enjoyed "Jon's World," a story about time travel and alternative worlds which closes this volume. Again, it is not so much the story itself which is interesting but that it shows some glimpses of the Philip K. Dick to come. We are still some distance away from the mind-boggling world-juggling Dick accomplishes in his mature work but from hindsight, this story is clearly travelling in that direction.
Finally, on a side note, there are now two editions of Collected Stories of Philip K.Dick at Gollancz, one in five volumes, and this one (from 2023) in four. As far as I can tell, both editions contain exactly the same stories in exactly the same order; they are just distributed differently across the volumes. This first volume is not good and was frankly qujite a slog to get through. Future volumes can only improve upon this.
February 26, 2025
The first volume in the collected short stories of Philip K Dick features his very first published stories, from the pages of magazines like Planet Stories, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Imagination.
What begins as quite pulpy fare quickly develops into what would become Dick’s main focus, the very nature of reality and the psychological effects on man. Some of these early stories are very much of their time, with the indiscriminate use of Nuclear weapons, vast galactic empires, interplanetary wars and the like. But even so there are early classics like The Variable Man, Beyond Lies The Wub, The Preserving Machine, Paycheck and Second Variety.
Many of the ideas featured in his short stories would be expanded to novel length, but there is something immensely enjoyable about a well written short story, and Dick is a wonderful writer. The twenty-nine stories here show how he quickly developed as a story teller, moving away from traditional pulp, towards something more cerebral, deeper.
These volumes (there are four of them!) are a great way to start reading PKD, if you don’t feel like diving straight into the novels.
What begins as quite pulpy fare quickly develops into what would become Dick’s main focus, the very nature of reality and the psychological effects on man. Some of these early stories are very much of their time, with the indiscriminate use of Nuclear weapons, vast galactic empires, interplanetary wars and the like. But even so there are early classics like The Variable Man, Beyond Lies The Wub, The Preserving Machine, Paycheck and Second Variety.
Many of the ideas featured in his short stories would be expanded to novel length, but there is something immensely enjoyable about a well written short story, and Dick is a wonderful writer. The twenty-nine stories here show how he quickly developed as a story teller, moving away from traditional pulp, towards something more cerebral, deeper.
These volumes (there are four of them!) are a great way to start reading PKD, if you don’t feel like diving straight into the novels.
May 10, 2024
Years ahead of his time
December 23, 2024
promessa antiga: ler as histórias de dick
(vai ser um work em progress para 2025)
(vai ser um work em progress para 2025)
June 12, 2025
will come back and fully review later
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews