Turning Wheel Other Stories

by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick creates a new world with a few words. With terrifying logic and brilliant imagination he compels you to enter a universe of unpredictable but highly credible situations. And each situation has a profound significance for Mankind...

These stories MAY change the way you look at your own world. THEY WILL CERTAINLY INTRIGUE, DISTURB--AND FRIGHTEN--YOU.

Comprising:

Nanny;
The Turning Wheel;
The Defenders;
Adjustment Team;
Psi-Man (Psi-Man Heal My Child!);
The Commuter;
A Present for Pat;
Breakfast at Twilight;
Shell Game.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Anthologies

189 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 1972

About the author

Philip 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

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

DAW Collectors #44

Cover Artis: Jack Gaughan

Name: Dick, Philip Kindred
Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois, USA, (16 December 1928 - 2 March 1982)

Alternate Names: : Philip Dick, Phillip K. Dick, Philip C. Dick.


Contents:

 The Book of Philip K. Dick (frontispiece) - interior artwork by Jack Gaughan
007 - Nanny (1955)
025 = The Turning Wheel (1954)
046 - The Defenders (1953)
071 - Adjustment Team (1954)
095 - Psi-Man - (1955)
120 - The Commuter - (1953)
134 - A Present for Pat - (1954)
153 - Breakfast at Twilight = (1954)
171 - Shell Game - (1954)

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 3 out of 5]

The nine short stories in this anthology are all from the 1950's, when Dick was just beginning as a science fiction writer, and before he hit his stride as a writer of reality-bending novels. Thus, the stories remind me of Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of stories written before Vonnegut hit his stride as a mainstream novelist, when he was still considered an SF writer. The stories in this Dick collection are rather dated, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way--they are dated because several of them take their themes from the darkest time of the Cold War, set in a near-future when the Cold War has turned into a hot war with the Soviet Union, and pretty much all of the stories share the anxiety and dread of that decade. But they are still eminently readable.

[Paola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Premessa: non ho mai visto il film Atto di forza, quindi sono stata piacevolmente sorpresa dal racconto da cui è tratto il film.
Seconda premessa: non ho letto molto di Dick, ma questa raccolta di racconti mi è davvero piaciuta!
Questa raccolta è davvero piacevole; ovviamente ci sono degli alti e bassi, ma ci sono due racconti che veramente mi hanno dilettata su più fronti: uno è I difensori della Terra (titolo originale: "The Defenders") ed il secondo è Ricordi in vendita (titolo originale " We can remember it for you wholesale"). Sono il primo e l'ultimo racconto della raccolta e mi hanno estasiata.
"I Difensori della Terra" mi ha fatto molto pensare e dopo quanto accaduto recentemente ho quasi sperato che potesse in qualche modo realizzarsi non sarebbe male se riuscissimo a creare delle forme di intelligenza artificiale che per preservarci dall'autodistruzione per guerre ridicole ci obbliga a vivere e lavorare nel sottosuolo fino allo scatto di coscienza utile a portare la pace nei vari popoli nonostante parta da una ormai dimenticata guerra fredda tra Russi e Americani.
Il secondo racconto ("Ricordi in Vendita"), invece, mi ha divertita con questo cancella ricordi/ristabilisci ricordi che prima comportano il rischio di essere eliminati e poi, invece, ti assicurano la vita!
Il racconto "Il Pendolare" (di cui non ho fatto menzione sopra), invece, mi ha risvegliato un lontano ricordo (tanto per rimanere in tema con il racconto precedente eh eh eh) di un episodio de "Ai confini della realtà".
Mettiamola così: non ho mai letto troppa fantascienza perché fin da piccola l'ho sempre associata solo a Star Trek e pensavo che leggerne non mi divertisse quanto vederla in TV (ingenua ed ignorante sotto tutti i punti di vista, lo so...) ma in questo ultimo anno (grazie anche alle varie sfide di tutti i gruppi) sono venuta in contatto prima di tutto con "Dune" (capolavoro), poi con Doris Lessing ed infine con il maestro P.K.Dick ed ho già pronto il mio proposito per il 2016: leggere più fantascienza per divertirmi come non mai!!!

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of short stories by Philip K Dick, published in 1973 as 'The Book of Philip K Dick' and republished in the UK in 1977 under the current title, actually consists of stories first published in magazines in the 1950s. This accounts for their rather antiquated flavour and attitudes.

In 'Nanny', children are taken care of by robotic nurses until things go sour with a kind of arms race.

In the title story, Earth is in decline far in the future under a controlling, caste-based society based on the idea of reincarnation. Everyone who does practical things, such as farming, are low down on the social ladder, and those who repair technology and deal with metal working etc, the Technos, are the lowest of all. In fact, they consist of Caucasians, who are despised as being possible descended from Neanderthals, and whose ancestors are blamed for the current state of the planet. Due to this attitude, no machinery is repaired and everything is breaking down, while the environment is impoverished and it is hard to grow food, with disease being rife. I won't describe the story further, other than to say by today's standards it probably comes over as racist from the point of view that only white people are capable of developing solutions and turning the situation around.

In 'The Defenders' all-out war between the USA and the Soviet Union has resulted in the survivors living underground in massive cities and continuing to pursue the war through the use of surface dwelling robots.

'Adjustment Team' is a rather odd story, more fantasy than SF, which deals with the results when one man is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The attitudes of the time are again conveyed by the means of distracting a key female character from pursuit of a vital point of information by having a vacuum cleaner salesman turn up.

In 'Psi-Man', the existence of psychics whose powers are demonstrably real has apparently been established since the late 1960s, but by 2017 when the story is set, war has reduced a remnant of humanity to living in communes among wastelands. Only a handful of psychics exist and they live among the ruins and provide services such as healing to the desperate commune dwellers. One is able to time travel by exchanging places with earlier selves and has been back many times to try to convince a key military figure to not tell the President of the USA to launch the initial attack, but without success. This was a rather muddled story with the viewpoint switching around quite a lot, though it ends with a ray of hope.

'The Commuter' is a surreal tale of what happens when a community which should not be there eventually comes into existence.

'A Present for Pat' is a really odd story, featuring the present - a being from a higher dimension - brought back as a present from Ganymede, and the havoc this creature unleashes. Again, rather fantasy in style.

'Breakfast at Twilight' is another war story; this time, a whole family spontaneously are brought forward in time to when the country is bombarded by robot controlled bombs.

Finally, 'Shell Game' is the tale of the survivors of a crashed spaceship who are under attack - though it increasingly becomes clear that they are a big part of the problem themselves.

I have greatly enjoyed some of Dick's novels, such as Ubik and , but I found these stories rather too much a product of their time. They are from the early part of Dick's career, so are interesting as a historical artefact, but for me do not rate more than 2 stars.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everyone has their own experiences when it comes to PKD (Notice how I use his initials and not his sole last name, as many a crass book reviewer does); some say that short stories outweigh his novels, some say that his latter work outdo his earlier ones, and some think that his literary fiction is better than his SF. I don't fall into any of those camps, and didn't even consider myself a fan od PKD until reading *Do Androids Dream...* last year and *The Simulacra* this year (despite reading and enjoying *The Philip K Dick Reader*, a collection of many of his influential stories, several years back), but after I got those works under my belt, I felt like a true PKD fan ready to concur this little DAW collection of nine of his short stories from the early 50s (specifically, 1953-1955). You're probably wondering if these stories are inconsequential compared to what we would eventually become or if they're fascinating glimpses into this troubled visionary's mind. As you may expect, the answer to both questions is: kind of... let's find out what I thought of each of these stories one-by-one.

-The book starts with the rather Asimovian "Nanny," where like many couples, an American husband and wife have left the raising of their two children primarily to an android named Nanny, who tucks them in and wakes them up and plays with them and cooks for them. Everything is hunky dory with Nanny until the wife/mother notices that she's sneaking out at night, which leads to a stunning revelation of how they're manufactured. It hits upon some of the anti-consumerism themes that Dick visits in stories like "Sales Pitch" while writing a robot that one could compare to Asimov's Robbie. It was memorable, as decently written as any PKD story, and gave a tantalizing hint of what was to come. 7.5/10.
-I quite like "The Turning Wheel," despite the rocky reading experience I had with it because it was too late at night, since I've read it before and enjoyed it then as well. It's set in this future where an elite class that believes in karmic reincarnation rules the world. Our "hero" sees his future life - that of a fly on a distant planet, obviously punishment for a crappy life led on Earth - before being sent to clean up the insurrectionist "Caucs." The ending is ironic and the story is enjoyable, although the allure of its trappings are more interesting than the tale itself. 7.5/10.
-I guess "The Defenders" was expanded into Dick's novel *The Penultimate Truth*, and while it seems like the kind of story that should remain a short, I am more excited to read the novel-length version now than I was before. It's set in a post-Cold War future where humanity lives underground and the war is being fought by robots above the surface. Everything is as it should be until some of the Americans underground start questioning the robots... I can't say much else except for the fact that this, too, *felt* like a Dickian story and was another nice 7.5/10.
-I don't know how I didn't know that *The Adjustment Bureau* was based off a PKD story, but the inclusion of "Adjustment Team" did teach me that. The two works don't have all that much in common, but they are both good. In the story, a shadowy organization tries to get an ordinary man to work on time in order for him to be affected by the "change" which they plan on making throughout the office. The plan fails, though, and the man sees things that he's not supposed to see. Possibly the most smile-inducing ending in this collection, but I still didn't get the "visceral" engagement needed for a "four-star" rating, so... 7.5/10 it is. No, screw it... it gets an 8/10.
-"Psi-Man" is the weakest story so far. It's a Dickian post-apocalyptic story where humanity's survivors are split between dwelling in cities and dwelling in the desert. The "Talents," psychoactive humans who can heal or jump through time and the like, live on the outside. A family tries to flee to the outside to save their daughter, but little do they know that there's domestic troubles brewing about the Talents... it's a decent read with some good questions and concepts brought up, but it's just not memorable enough (in retrospect) to be ranked among the other stories with cooler concepts and more memorable plots. "Psi-Man" gets 7/10.
-'Like "Adjustment Team," "The Commuter" was also adapted into a piece of visual media that I've seen before: an episode of *Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams*. I don't remember that episode much, though, and I reckon that it wasn't too good. The story is, though; it starts with a man at the train station trying to buy a ticket to a town that officially doesn't exist, and the train company director doing a bit of first-hand research into the place. While the mysterious events are never truly explained, it's still an interesting journey with Dick's natural hues of paranoia splattered all over the literary canvas. Probably a low-level 7.5.
-"A Present for Pat," while riffing off Dick's inexplicable pension for life from Ganymede, is one of the least coherent stories in this bunch. In it, a man brings his wife a present from his travels - a weather deity. A little god, one could say. It becomes a problem when it turns out protagonist's esteemed colleague into a frog. Chaos ensues. I like it, but not as much as everything else; 7/10.
I should mention, as weird as it may sound, that I don't think a PKD 7/10 equally equates to any random author's 7/10. There's something interesting and off-kilter about not just his works but his ratings which adds, like, a 1/4 point to any given rating. But, anyways, I digress.
-"Breakfast at Twilight" is, like "Psi-Man," a Dick double header, this time co-starring post-apocalyptica and the questioning of reality when a suburban family wakes up in the middle of a dense fog and are commandeered by soldiers. They soon find out they've been transported into a nuclear wasteland only seven years in the future. Is there a way back to their time period? And if so, why the Hell aren't they considering that they'll only have seven years after their escape!? Okay, naivety aside, it's still a solid read that accrues a lower (sub-"Commuter) 7/10.
-Apparently I've read "Shell Game," which is top-shelf PKD paranoia, before. And I kinda forgot it; after this reread, I see why. The setup of the story - a village on an alien planet is attacked by alien soldiers every night, and then the villagers find evidence that they all might be psych-ward refuse - is intriguing, but the world around all of the characters is pretty thin and a bit unrealistic. But then again, they might all be psychos... or are they? One last, bottom-of-the-pack 7.5/10.

I suppose the best rating for this book, because of all the 7.5's, is a 7.5/10. Still, it instinctually feels more like a 7/10... but I think that's because I tried to cram this in before leaving for vacation. So, not the best reading experience. Still, it was interesting to read some of Dick's initial - if not best - works. I was definitely happy to finally read this little DAW book that I picked up at a library sale 15 months ago, I just I would've read it at a happier time. Oh, well; I'm sure I'll make my way back to most of these stories some days. And now, I have to review the book I actually read on the aforementioned vacation; Grand Canyon Nature Notes. That is, as PKD might say, if the Grand Canyon really exists at all...

[Austin Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Book of Philip K. Dick is a collection of science fiction stories by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published by DAW Books in 1973. The book was subsequently published in the United Kingdom by Coronet in 1977 under the title The Turning Wheel and Other Stories. The stories had originally appeared in the magazines Startling Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, Orbit Science Fiction, Imaginative Tales and Amazing Stories.
Contents

"Nanny"
"The Turning Wheel"
"The Defenders"
"Adjustment Team"
"Psi-Man"
"The Commuter"
"A Present for Pat"
"Breakfast at Twilight"
"Shell Game"

[Moss Drake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories from the 50's is a mix of conventional stories of the time with flashes of the genius that makes Dick sui generis. "The Nanny", "Adjustment Team", and "Breakfast at Twilight" all feel like Twilight Zone episodes, dealing with planned obsolescence, the perils of a routine day, and "what if the cold war turned hot?"

Other stories are more offbeat. "The Turning Wheel" is a great example of PKD questioning reality. "The Defenders" would be later reworked into the premise for his novel "The Penultimate Truth".

Each story is worth reading.

[David Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Adjustment Team" after watching the movie version, "Adjustment Bureau," and proceeded to read the rest. Dick's stories generally aren't devastating, but they lightly flesh out a wild idea at their nub. What if reality was stage-managed and you caught them in the act? What if a suburb that was never built gradually takes shape anyway? How would a planet of paranoid people ever know they were paranoid? You can almost hear PKD chortling as he writes.

[Dmitry Verkhoturov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Psi-Man сильно перекликается с A World of Talent, и тоже недоступен на русском, также не существует перевода The Turning Wheel и Breakfast at Twilight.

[Justine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weird stuff as only Mr Dick can conjure up.

[19Utopia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pillole di trama
L'umanità è costretta a vivere sotto terra perché in superficie si combatte una feroce guerra che ha reso tutto radioattivo, gli unici a poter vedere com'è davvero la situazione sono dei robot che mandano avanti la guerra per gli umani.

Commento
Racconto veloce, il messaggio è abbastanza intuibile già all'inizio ma apprezzo la tematica affrontata. Molto critico verso l'uomo, sempre incline a farsi la guerra e senza una vera ragione, mi piace però che lascia una speranza alla fine.

[Miles Isham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice little collection of short stories, many of which have a strong anti-war message that gives the book a connectivity sometimes lacking in anthologies. As usual Phil gives us a platter of great ideas we can pick and choose from and a selection of believable characters in unbelievable situations. Nothing life changing but all super readable stuff from a writer with his heart in the right place.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read this for the first time in years. I am still impressed with the range he showed during the writing of these stories between 1953 and 1955. If you like him, this is for you.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

9 stories:

*** Nanny (1955)
*** The Turning Wheel (1954)
**** The Defenders (1953)
**** Adjustment Team (1954)
**** Psi-Man (1955)
*** The Commuter (1953)
*** A Present for Pat (1954)
*** Breakfast at Twilight (1954)
***** Shell Game (1954)

[Vivian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Light science fiction short stories, good for thought-provoking escapes from reality.

[Joshua Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great stories. Very "Cold War".