Philip K. Dick Books

As the name suggests, this deals with time travel, sort of. PDK leaves it up in the air as to whether time travel is truly possible by suggesting that perhaps other time streams would be other parallel universes. Toss into this a bit of Xenophobia, marital strife and the drive of personal responsibility and you have a lot going on in 230 pages.

I am reading all the PDK novels, one a month. I am 10 months in to this three year trek. It seems, after 10 books, that PKD has an adjustment period. In the first few books I read he annoyed me. Now I'm into a groove.

One note, it's interesting to see the concepts in this book played out in the longer and different works by other writers like Orson Scott Card. There's more than a smidgeon of this in the Ender series.

I love Philip K. Dick's books (almost all of them, and I'm pretty sure I've read just about all of them over the years). But I have a strong suspicion that he wrote Now Wait for Last Year when he was a kid and had it published after his writing credentials had been secured. In the book, he uses a lot of big words (for an S.F. writer), but he doesn't seem to know how to use them properly. And he doesn't know how to use the English language properly, either. There's no way this book could have been published on its own, with no famous author's name on it. The plot is excellent, and true PK Dickian. But I had a VERY hard time finishing it because of the astonishingly bad writing (it's his style, but the awkwardness of the syntax and word usage is like driving on a pot-holed road). Any other book of his is better. Read this one last.

This book belongs very much in the mainstream of Dick's work. It has his typical emphasis on drugs, power structures, artificial people, alternate realities, and time discontinuities. What distinguishes it from many of his other works is the portrayed relationship between Dr. Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, one of conflicted love/hate and dominance games, a portrayal that is much more realistic than many such within the SF field, and which provides an underlying tension to the book well beyond its ostensible main plot of trying to save the Earth from the war between the `Starlings and the reeqs.

The drug in question is JJ-80, which not only is highly addictive after just one use, but makes the user actually travel in time. Regardless of the scientific implausibility of this, Dick handles the problem of time travel well, postulating that most such travelers end up causing parallel time tracks/universes, and neatly tying this concept in with using people from one universe as replacements for some in the viewpoint universe. Then Dick adds `robants', artificial people, to the mix, which leads to his typical confusion of just who is who (or what), along with questions about the ultimate nature of reality.

Dick's prose is quite utilitarian here, but it does get the job done. There are some odd lapses in both portrayals of some characters (mainly the Mole, ruler of the Earth) and in the underlying motives for some of the `Starlings actions. And it suffers from a typical failing of SF books of this period, that of the single average man as world saver, which makes the already difficult suspension of disbelief even harder. Still, it's more coherent than many of his books, though it's certainly not up to the level of excellence of his Man In The High Castle.

A must for Dick fans, worth reading by the casual SF fan.

-- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Dr. Eric Sweetscent's love/hate relationship with his wife is the focus of this bizarre tale of drugs, time travel, interplanetary war, and alternate realities. After a single exposure, Sweetscent's wife Katharine has become helplessly addicted to a little-known drug called JJ-180, which has time-warping properties. She purposely addicts the good doctor (her husband) in order to obtain his help. Eric's fight for survival leads him through a pharmaceutical company to the world government itself, where UN Secretary General Gino Molinari is using the reality-warping powers of JJ-180 to ward off an alien invasion. Can Eric conquer his addiction, save his wife, and fend off the alien overlords? Longtime readers of Dick's work can probably guess the answer.

Even with all the dangers and plot twists in this story, it's still basically an allegory about power. JJ-180 gives its users power over others, and the power to control events far beyond themselves. Katharine uses the drug's power to control her husband, even at the risk of killing him. Facing death, Eric uses his power to control others, but stops short of controlling his own wife. The moral is aptly summed up by the cabdriver at the book's conclusion: for Eric to take some critical step "would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions". A former drug addict himself, Dick is telling us that reality has to be enough for all of us, even when the going gets rough. We shouldn't need to have anything "uniquely special" just to make life worth living. A must for fans of PDK; for others who aren't put off by science fiction and Dick's quirky storytelling style, a sad and moving tale of love and reality.

Although Now Wait for Last Year is usually grouped with the novels of Dick's late 1960s period, it was completed by late 1963. It as the first of several novels in which drugs are a major element, the others being The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Lies Inc., and A Scanner Darkly. In Now Wait for Last Year the drug in question, JJ-180, supposedly hallucinogenic, does more than alter consciousness: it takes the user backwards or forwards in time. It alters not just subjective reality, but also objective reality, and allows concourse between the parallel universes of different time tracks. Of the novel's main characters, Gino Molinari, the world leader, attempts to use the drug to break out of the fatality of history and linear time and borrow from other possible universes for the benefit of his own. His physician, Eric Sweetscent, for his part, tries to create a desirable future by communicating with future versions of himself. His love/hate relationship with his wife becomes a major element of his desire to escape the present. In a well-known scene, he gets psychological counseling from a talking taxicab. This is a brilliant and fascinating novel that tends to get overlooked among Dick's better known works.

This novel had some potential, but ultimately left me unsatisfied. The elements for a decent story are here: there are essentially three interwoven subplots, but even while reading it the connection between two of them felt especially forced, contrived, and unrealistic. I was able to suspend disbelief, but just barely.

On the bright side, there are a few amusing parodies peppered throughout, such as a satire of drug culture (substituting subversive literature for drugs) and an interesting characture of messianic expectations. I liked his dystopian setting, too.

On the down-beat, PKD's attempt to create "new" slang was very annoying, and since most of them were variations of '60s counterculture lingo, it ironically ended up coming across as dated. That can probably be overlooked/forgiven by most readers, but the ambiguity of the ending was much harder (for me) to swallow. Although I suspect PKD figured this ended on a "happy note" I'm not convinced that's actually the case... some sense of closure that "everything works out for the best" (or not!) would have helped. [explaining/justifying that, though, is a major spoiler, so sorry for the vagueness.]

Overall, if you're new to PKD, don't start with this one. If you're a PKD completionist (like I am) then give it a go, but keep your expectations reasonable. This isn't on the par of UBIK, High Castle, etc. but at least it's not as bad as Zap Gun or Cosmic Puppets. In all honesty, if anyone other than PKD had written this, I'd score it much lower.

this book is excellent and definetily underrated. i felt it is so much better than many PKD "classics" like UBIK or even Martian Time-SLip. To understand the art of PKD is to understand that all his best works deal with the quest for identity of Human and understanding of Absolute. The message of this book is most strongly felt in last pages, when two evil characters are transformed by the mysterious power of "friend from frolix8" and proceed to explain to the reader first the meaning of human life and then the idea of God. The beauty and subtelty of the way in which PKD expresses his complex views on life can be somewhat surrealistic & challenging for general reader ("incomprehensible weirdness" etc), but some people (like me) will just be unable to forget these wonderful passages that emerge from and illuminate PKD's strange stories of Everyman in the evil technocratic world, searching for salvation. Must-read!

Also essential: "Do androids dream of electric sheeps?", "Divine invasion", "Three stigmata of Palmer Eldrich" and of course his self-confessed masterpiece "Scanner Darkly".

Another fine work from my favorite guy that's got great action, pacing and, above all, characterizations. The people in this story were very real to me and the society in which they live seemed very plausible. The meandering and intersection of the characters' fates is set against an impending climax that we know is coming from the beginning of the story and when it arrives, it's thrilling and very moving. I loved this one.

One of Dick's less ambitious novels, this story is a bit thin compared to the density and dazzling complexity of his books of the early 1960s, and perhaps a bit of weariness with the standard conventions of science fiction is showing. The author seems very casual about controlling the plot and characters; both seem pretty random much of the time. We may not prize this novel as a masterpiece of structure, but it is typical Dick, involving and entertaining. The story is set in a world controlled by superintelligent "New Men" and telepathic "Unusuals," who reign despotically together over the "Old Men," or ordinary unevolved humans. In due course Thors Provini returns to Earth with a "friend" for the Old Men in the form of a telepathic, protoplasmic alien with extraordinary powers. This semi-divine intervention overturns the predictable order of the world and replaces it with a vision of the evolution of consciousness of every living thing on the planet toward some unimaginable fulfillment. In this preoccupation, it is congruent with Dick's other interesting novels of the late 60s such as A Maze of Death and Galactic Pot-Healer.

In my continuing effort to read all of Dick's work, I picked up the finally-reprinted Our Friends from Frolix 8 this week. What a disappointment!

I really like Dick's writing, and I have even enjoyed some of his less than stellar novels, like The Zap Gun or Clans of the Alphane Moon. This one, though, just doesn't do much for me. It's got a decent premise and some decent (but predictably Dickian) characters, but it just doesn't pull it all together and produce.

The climax was too long in coming and, once it came, was a let down. For the most part, I'm just glad to have finished it.

This one is rather quick and shallowly written. There is something there but it feels rushed and underdeveloped. The main premise is that Western World is run by an artificial organism pretending to be a real human behind which there is shadowy group etc. - the idea that things are not as they seem, and that this democracy of ours is anything but. That's all fine, except that the writing is not very well developed - it's got a rushed feel to it that leaves you a bit unsatisfied at the end.

I dont see how this could get 4.5 stars.

I'd mostly have to agree with Miles' review on the matter. Its not quite finished and the ending is rushed. He doesnt explain alot of things, like the acctual 'von lessinger' principle (which i can tolerate)

But he never quite explains the EME, the chuppers, what Bertold Goltz was really up to, the history of der Alte, not to mention who the man is that saves Dr. Superb in the beggining, and how he was contacted and why. Also, I had a hard time following why they wanted Goebbles there in the first place, and what the NP and Pembroke were all about.

Really i am saddened how a thing that showed such promise could just fade and rush into a scetchy and verry glossy ending.

Also, some of the stuff turns into a joke, while funny at first, especialy with Kongrosian.

Some of it is very uncinematic, especailly if you read the back of the book.

There is no point to Al Miller or Ian duncan, and i wont ruin the book for you, but theres no REAL point, maybe to show the power and influence of Nicole (the fact that they want to perform for her)

The charicters dont interact enough, and some of them dont even know of eachothers existence. And some charicters arent updated enough.

Definitely Not his best.

This is a grab bag of almost all the themes and character types found in Dick's other novels written in the early 60s. Everything is here: a repressive police state, a ruling elite in conflict with huge cartels, a charismatic cult leader, a fascinating and ruthless woman, time travel, psychic powers, Nazis, androids, emigration to Mars, and mind-manipulating media and simulacra. It shows that the way society appears to be structured is a complete fake, and that media manipulation conceals the real centers of power. Dick crowds more characters and different points of view into the anarchic pages of pages of this novel than in any of his other books. But it does not seem to go anywhere: it is a plunge into the deeper waters of Dick's universe, but without any clear re-emergence into the air. The energy is more frenetic than transformative. Such a tour de force lacks the impact of Dick's major works, though it is a dazzling ride. It's pure PKD.

Maybe it's my own political bent, but I consider this one of Dick's best novels-- it especially resonates today, over 40 years later. The "President" is an android figurehead who regurgitates what its masters want, and the true battle is which cartel will produce the "President" (shades of Dubya). The First Lady is an eternally youthful woman replaced every generation with a new actress-- shades of the smiling empty-vessel First Ladies we've come to expect (demand?) and the sniffling over pretty strangers like Princess Di. Better than any other SF writer, Dick shows how we live in a bubble of media myth manufactured by those who hold the reins. While the goverment presents this perfect facade, it is secretly arranging "talks" with Goebbels through time travel, apparently to negotiate an end to the past Nazi menace, unbenownst to the benighted masses. Typical.

There are plenty of other great Dick ideas in this novel, such as the fact that the pharmaceutical cartels have arranged for psychotherapy to be outlawed. No more talking cure, just jack up the serotonin. How could Dick see our future present, when even M.D.s are prescribing Prozac merely to increase somatic energy levels? He also shows a world where people pay outlandish prices to be a member of a particular "community," and how these communities become xenophobic about outsiders and strive to rise above them-- yet another insight into the mind of the human animal, so eager to rally around any totem.

There can be no doubt about it: Dick was a genius. This is one of his better works in my book, up there with Martian Time-Slip, before he became overly abstract and theological (see Valis and especially his Exegesis).

Nichole Thibodeaux is the First Lady who through her Martha Stewert type personality has remained in control of the government for over 70 years with daily White House television shows that have transfixed a nation conditioned by automatic advertisements that have the ability of thought control, meaning that the last line of defense, Dr. Superb, a psychotherapist, must try to maintain his capicity in society, even though his business has been outlawed by drug companies like A.G Chemie, who sponsor the mind control adverts and influence the government who have a time machine and are able to control the future somewhat except for the precogs in society who can tilt the balance.

There is no hope left for humanity in a world that is becoming ever maladjusted to the electronic conditioning, their love for Nichole and conforming to what she likes, except to grab a Loony Luke Jalopy and head off for mars for an alternative life. Luke has a sales papoola, a synthetic man made alien lifeform from mars that can influence people to like whatever the owners wants. One of Lukes workers steals the papoola to impress Nichole at the White House only to uncover a sinister plot where all is not as it seems and the Presidential executive all might be actors and Simulacra robots.

A secret policeman ND, Pembroke, has allowed Dr. Superb to work as a psychotherapist, so that he will meet someone who the doctor will fail to treat, as the time machine Lessinger apparatus predicted, unless the person seeks chemical treatment from A.G Chemie, become cured, and put the whole fabric of society in jeopardy. While all this is happening special mutant musician, Richard Kongrosian, who can play the keyboard with his mind, is having an emotional breakdown and believes he is becoming both invisible and smelly, only to start finding out things about himself that makes the government afraid of him.

Philip K. Dick conjures a frightening realistic world where people adore leaders based on image, are afraid to think outside of the norm or else are reduced in status... while living in a time where entertainment, coporate drugs companies and shadow governments control the world... all written back in 1964... over thirty years ago... and more is relevant than ever today.

The Simulacra is strong on dialogue given that this is one of his Philip K. Dicks early works. There are references to characters in his award winning book The Man in the High Castle with the same sort of everything comes home type of surreal adventure... the endings are both somewhat similar, although The Simulacra has a much more black humerious one.

Like we have said, given the current times, this book stands out as more important than ever. Sci Fi comes true yet again. This book is listed as number 57 in science fiction masteroworks released by Orion publishers. I recommend if new to Dick that you start with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik and then this one. I will be moving onto Clans of Alphane Moon next. See you for a review there.

What I like most about Philip K Dick (arguably one of my favorite authors) is the message behind the story -- social and political commentaries, even outright warnings about things like totalitarianism, religious cults, the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, and especially technology leading social structure and dynamics in rather odd directions. Most of Dick's writings are prescient and timeless.

Solar Lottery (I think this was Dick's first full-length novel) clearly shows Dick is learning the craft in moving from SF short story writer to novelist. If anyone has read any of the interview type books, Dick was really not making anything close to a livable income off of SF writing and felt pressured to crank out stories at a prolific rate (one of Dick's colleagues supposed that the stress of producing at anything close to producing a livable income was one of the major factors in Dick's early death).

Solar Lottery is a story about a rather bizarre form of government that has evolved where a "spin-the-bottle" process is used to select the leader of the solar system, and then assassins are selected by the same process to try to liquidate the new leader. I won't spoil the story. It's good, but not, as I said, Dick's best effort. Dick improved over time like fine wine (sorry) and produced much finer and better written classics like 'The Penultimate Truth', 'The Man in the High Castle', 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', 'Flow My Tears the Policeman Said', 'Valis', 'The Divine Invasion', 'The Transmigration of Timothy Archer'. Still, if you're a rabid PKD fan (like me), go ahead and get this one. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Since this was Dick's first novel, it is lowered in value to his great ones. In fact, I did not even read it until I had read the good reviews on Amazon and realized that I had been skipping a very exciting, fast-paced novel. I am giving it 5 stars just on the chance that others may have followed my faulty line of reasoning. Solar Lottery CAN indeed be read in a couple of days, and it is well worth your time. I was reminded of Ludlum's "Bourne" novels and of course A.E. van Vogt. It is a bit slow at first, but once it gets cooking, the chase to the end makes for some gripping hours of entertainment. Yes, all of the later Dickian elements come into play -- even identity -- although the protagonist thinks he is aware of the real situation. Don't skip it!

Solar Lottery was Philip Dick's first novel, published in 1955. It seems to be reasonably well regarded but I must say I found it a mess. It's set in a future in which the leader of the Solar System is chosen by lottery. The current leader, Quizmaster Verrick, has held the position for 10 years, even though assassins are selected by lot to try to kill him. Most of society is controlled by corporations that rate people, theoretically according to their abilities. People swear allegiance to individuals or corporations. As the novel opens, Ted Benteley is at last able to legally escape his allegiance to his corporation, and he travels to Batavia (now Djakarta, of course) in Indonesia, seat of the government, to try to work for the Quizmaster. Unbeknownst to him, however, a new Quizmaster has just been selected, an "unclassified" named Leon Cartwright. Benteley is fooled into swearing direct allegiance to the old Quizmaster.

Cartwright has long been a Prestonite, devotee of the mad theories of John Preston, who believed in a tenth planet beyond Pluto called Flame Disc. Cartwright has just supervised the launch of a spaceship intended to reach Flame Disc, and his only hope of his new Quizmaster position is to buy time for the ship to reach Flame Disc before Solar authorities stop it. As soon as he becomes Quizmaster, Verrick sets in place a plan to fix the lottery for the assassin, and to use a remote controlled android as the next assassin. This, along with a clever scheme to sequentially control the android with different people, will allow his assassin to evade the telepathic protectors of the Quizmaster.

So it's kind of a wild, uncontrolled, mix of elements, some clever, some interesting, some just loony. The plot sort of reels along, as Ted is shanghaied to being one of the assassin's controllers, and also as he fools around with an ex-telepath girl now working for Verrick, while his true destiny, natch, is to work with Cartwright and become the next Quizmaster, hopefully in so doing restoring sanity to Earth's government. Everywhere traces of Dick's impressive imagination, as well as various of his obsessions, are clear -- but nowhere do things cohere, nowhere to they make even the weird sense that Dick made in his better novels.

In 1955 Philip K. Dick was a prolific and moderately successful writer of SF short stories, but I seriously doubt that anyone really paid attention when "Solar Lottery" hit the shelves that year. They should have. It was one of the opening moves in the game that eventually tore the SF world wide open.

There were plenty of notable exceptions, of course, but early SF largely concerned itself with great men of tremendous vision and extraordinary ability who got in there and solved problems - the kind of man Robert Heinlein liked to write about. PKD was among those later writers who noticed that most people in the real world aren't like that, and wrote stories about them instead. "Solar Lottery" lacks his later interest in what makes something real (although it does include a conspiracy in which a man with no real personality drives a whole crew of telepaths crazy), but in Ted Benteley it contains an early example of his interest in regular guys.

As is often the case with PKD, Ted Benteley finds himself in a classic SF plot turned inside out. In this case, the classic SF plot in question comes almost directly from a true genre classic, "The World of Null-A" by A.E. van Vogt. In both novels, a man tries to make his way in the world by gambling his future on the game that forms whatever government exists around him, only to find that someone is cheating. Van Vogt's protagonist is a typical post-World War II SF superman; PKD's is a talented but endlessly ticked off functionary who spends most of the novel trying to figure out what's going on.

Everything in his world depends on the random activity of an atomic device that determines the fates of millions - a lottery indeed, with one man at the head of it. What's more, for most people, the best fate they can hope for is to bind themselves in servitude to someone of a higher social position, if any such person will take them. Merit, ability and hard work count for nothing here, and there's no way up or out except by random chance for Benteley or for almost anyone else. If most early genre SF was about men of vision and courage saving the world by their own efforts, "Solar Lottery" was that SF's polar opposite.

Benteley is not as strong a hero as later PKD characters would be, partly because of his aforementioned nasty temper. He's got plenty to be annoyed about - he gets a chance for escape at the novel's beginning and misses it because someone misleads him at a critical moment. Nevertheless, dwelling in the mind of a character who's always complaining about something can wear on one pretty quickly.

Indeed, it's no easy task to sympathize with any of these characters. In addition to their unpleasant traits - uncontrollable rage, treachery, lust for power, cowardice - these people switch attitudes so quickly it can make you dizzy. The coward, for example, suddenly acquires a titanium backbone when the men who want to kill him actually show up. Of course, PKD wrote "Solar Lottery" at a time when SF novels had to end at about 180 pages by the decree of the age's major publisher, so he probably did not have space to develop his characters more fully, but it's a flaw nevertheless.

The same can be said for the novel's plot elements - there are so many seemingly unrelated ones that the central story loses its focus a good deal of the time. PKD was always among our least disciplined writers, and in addition to "Solar Lottery's" conspiracies and betrayals we also get telepaths, robotics, space travel and hints of nuclear catastrophe thrown in. When we read a longer novel, these kinds of details can add a lot to the richness of the writer's world - in 180 pages it can give you indigestion if you read it too fast.

That overstuffed quality robs "Solar Lottery" of a good bit of its velocity. I mentioned A.E. van Vogt - his take on this kind of story never lost energy for a second. His stories picked up speed from the very first word and never stopped any longer than dreams do. PKD missed out on that, but where he tops van Vogt is in the strength of his underlying theme. "Solar Lottery," for all its speed bumps, eventually makes you stop and think about what it takes to maintain one's integrity in a corrupt world. Benteley spends a good deal of time complaining about the lack of decency all around him, and his carping can get old, but isn't that a particularly important thing to complain about? And isn't it satisfying to see the protagonist of any novel, even a cheap genre piece, stand up and shake a fist at the thieves and the traitors no matter how much pressure they put on him? Isn't that the kind of person you aim to be?

Oh yeah, people should have paid attention when "Solar Lottery" came out. After all, it's about a regular person with no special powers or gifts, thwarting a great evil through the strength of his convictions alone. After this, even Superman and his overpumped muscles looked a bit silly.

Benshlomo says, Sometimes it's enough to just tell the truth.

Dick's first published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) is impressive and original. It was much influenced by several famous sf novels--A. E. van Vogt's complexly plotted World of Null-A, Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian black comedy Player Piano, and Alfred Bester's pyrotechnic novel of telepathic police The Demolished Man. Solar Lottery is not unworthy of being mentioned in their company. It is not quite a typical Dick novel: it lacks the humor of the later works, as well as the theme of reality breakdown, but it is quite effective on its own terms. Dick foresaw a world where all power is concentrated in the hands of the government and private corporations. A great quiz game which decides the leader, but it is rigged against the powerless. Furthermore, the system, with its built-in structure of killing its own leaders, decrees that nothing lasts or should last. In its dark, complex picture of power relationships, this novel is totally relevant today.

About half-way through the stories right now. The stories are just okay for PKD, but better than your average writer. Enjoyed earlier collections more.

Those two stories make it worth the price of admission. There are other, great stories included too.

In this final volume of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, we get a chance to read the short stories he wrote from the late 1960s to his death. For those who were accustomed to the imaginative and off-beat work of the first four volumes, this last book may be a bit jarring: as Dick's life got stranger, so did his stories. Even in the genre of the strange that is science fiction, stranger is not automatically better.

Some of the stories in this collection are every bit as good as the ones in the other books. Tales such as "The Pre-Persons," "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" and "The Electric Ant" are among his better stories. There are also stories that would eventually become novels like Counter-Clock World, Dr. Bloodmoney and The Divine Invasion. Then there are the previously unpublished works...which are strictly for PKD completists; there is good reason these were not published.

His later short stories, like his later novels (Valis, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) are often permeated with the theological and hallucinogenic qualities that also dominated Dick's life. These later stories are dominated more by ideas than by good writing; compare the title story to the similarly themed Waterspider in Volume 4 and you'll see the earlier story is far better.

Overall this book rates a weak four stars, although the whole set rates a full five stars. Even if a bit disappointing compared with the previous books, this still has enough quality to be well worth reading.

It is not that surprising to witness how this collection of short stories by Philip K. Dick is the least appreciated, since his later novels also tend to be greeted by varied reactions. But this volume is at least as good as the preceding four, and maybe even better. Here we find Dick less concerned with traditional forms, and perhaps more inclined than ever before to explore the issues that really interested him; many revolve around religion and theology. The stories were published from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, and reflect the thematic preoccupations of Dick's longer works from each period. The breadth of the tales is considerable, as the stories vary from deceptively light satire (The War With the Fnools, The Day Mr. Computer...) to politico-religious tensions (The Little Black Box, Faith of our Fathers), testimonies (The Eye of the Sibyl, Rautavaara's Case) and solitary soul-searching (The Electric Ant), often spanning all of these approaches in a single story. This collection might not be the best entry point in Dick's work, but a fair accessment of that work's relevance would not be possible without this essential book.

This volume has many of the stories from the out-of-print Ballantine "Best of Phil Dick." While his earlier work is more literate, his later style in stories/novels became much looser, but just as enjoyable. The themes here, like his novel "Do androids dream," are more mind-blowing and less reliant on finding a new twist on an old sci-fi theme. "Faith of our fathers," and "I hope I shall arrive soon"(probably the inspiration for movies "Open your eyes/Vanilla sky") are the most powerful, thoughtful and fun stories (how the heck does he do it?!) but may not resonate with gadget-oriented, non-psychological readers. Nevertheless, this is an indispensible book, and like "Do androids dream," my choice when giving a Phil Dick book to friends.

Dick does a good job portraying the ineffectiveness of legislating morals. While most of Earth's citizens adhere to the suffocating state-imposed moral code, the most heroic and memorable characters are the ones who buck the trend and safeguard their own freedom of choice in deciding between right vs. wrong. Their courage has important consequences late in the book and make the story ultimately readable.

But the suspense can't match the stakes. The main character "has the capacity to literally change the world" and yet it never feels like it. Devoid from the acts of terror and sabatoge are the intense moments of fear, the inconceivable risk of failure, the thrill of the getaway, etc. Judging from the characters' emotions, you'd think they were committing acts of petty vandalism. This man is supposedly trying to change the world and yet you never really feel riveted.

You know a book isn't so great when the world's civilization is a stake and you're indifferent to the result.

I have other complaints but I don't want to spoil the story for others.

Funny little story about a society completely obsessed with morality. Every bit as relevant today as when Philip K. Dick wrote it in 1956.

This was an early attempt by Dick to infuse humor into his science-fiction novels. A minor novel by the standards of his mature work, its flashes of originality and light touches of satire more than compensate for the contrived and improbable plot elements. The novel is set in a society based on the ideology of Morec (Moral Reclamation). Morec regulates individual morality through compulsory block meetings, in which one's friends and neighbors have the opportunity to take one to task for sexual peccadilloes or other lapses from puritanical conformity. Dick based his critique of the state as moral policemen on the structure of Chinese communism. It is not difficult, however, to see the roots of satire in American society, which has a long history of repression, from the Puritans to the Moral Majority. The protagonist is a man working for the media that promotes Morec, but he finds himself unconsciously japing, making fun of, the symbols of the regime. The most interesting part of the novel is when, after he is subjected to reprogramming, he suffers a breakdown in which his entire reality disappears. This episode prefigures themes that will become central in later Dick novels such as Ubik and Valis.

"At seven A.M., Allen Purcell, the forward-looking young president of the newest and most creative of the Research Agencies, lost a bedroom," and so begins the Man Who Japed.

This novel, published in 1956, a product of the very early period of Philip K. Dick's career, is an immense step forward from his inferior, disjointed, and amateurish novel, The World Jones Made. The uncanny feeling, which one associates with PKD when reading his later and more famous works, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Martian Time-Slip (Among others), is apparent from the very first line. For example, Purcell's apartment randomly changes shape - his oven is a table that is a sink that is a food cupboard - his intelligent, caring, and somewhat bewildered wife constantly sedates herself with a vast array of drugs - and mankind emigrates to other planets and moons. The most surprising element is Allen Purcell himself, a remarkably well-rounded character (albeit as a previous reviewer noted, the secondary characters are flat as ironed cardboard).

Also, the society of The Man Who Japed is remarkably vivid. The reader must remember that this book was written in the late 50s so concepts and societies that we might consider cliché were fresh off the oven (the totalitarian masterpiece 1984 had only been around for 7 years). The Man Who Japed takes place in 2114 after a nuclear war in a society founded upon Puritanical ideals (no extra marital sex or classic books). Allen Purcell simultaneously creates propaganda 'brochures' and debases symbols of the regime without understanding his own motivations. He eventually must decide if he is to change society.

All in all, this is a very good effort. Perhaps in comparison to his later works this might deserve 4 stars but considering how early this was written and what came before 5 stars is definitely the correct rating. It is well written and contains the embryonic manifestations of PKD's later compelling and poignant themes.

"The Man Who Japed" is a fairly early Philip K. Dick novel, and as such is somewhat dated, and a little more straight-forward stylistically. In many ways it reads like early Bradbury; those looking for true science fiction will probably be put off by the simplistic technology. However, as with Bradbury, the powerful message transcends the context and drives the novel forward.

Like many of Dick's novels, "The Man Who Japed" is set in a post-apocalyptic future, in this instance, some two hundred years after a nuclear war in the 1970's. Society is now governed by a strict moral code that emphasizes utility over comfort and social enforcement of societal mores. Enter Allen Purcell, an otherwise successful creator of "packets" (morality propaganda purchased by the state) who has inexplicably "japed" the statue of Major Streiter, founder of the Morec (moral reclamation) society. As his world begins a slow motion unraveling he comes to question everything about the society that has supported his family for generations.

This perspective on morality as the driving force in politics is oddly prescient with today's debates about abortion, gay marriage and the like. Dick, has taken this evolution to its logical, but insane conclusion, in which every person is held to account by their neighbors in what is theoretically a people's court, but which is in fact an on-going witch hunt in which anonymity allows vicious personal vendettas to be aired with impunity.

Admittedly, the actual story meanders and is not particularly engaging. While Purcell evolves into a rather intriguing character, by and large the supporting cast is rather two dimensional. To a degree this is understandable, as Dick is after all trying to create a world of cardboard cutouts. Nonetheless, this can make for a rather dry read at times.

A short novel with a powerful message, "The Man Who Japed" offers a glimpse into Dick early in his career. While the wit and thoughtfulness is on ready display, his story-telling abilities are not yet at the level of "The Man in the High Castle" or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" As such, this probably isn't the best novel for those new to the author to start, but it will definitely be appreciated by fans of his other work.

Jake Mohlman

Although the author's heart is in the right place, the book is sorely disappointing. Bishop captures none of the depth, anxiety, or mental displacement common to a Dick novel. Even Dick's characters, who aren't often noted for psychological breadth are superior to the ones in this book. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it's failure really makes clear how unique an author PKD really was.

This book is defenately worth reading but I do feel the need to write a slightly more critical review. Having read a lot of Dick's work this by comparison is disturbingly sane. I understand Michael Bishop was not trying to emulate, Dick, but, in that case, I would have liked to have seen something a little more original, something that explored and pushed the boundries of the way we see the world. Dick had a way of writing things that would toy with the reader and provoke them, of building up to something with logical and intelligent insite and then going right off the deep end. I miss that.

The original title of this book was "The Secret Ascension" and I'm not really sure which one works better, in all honesty. The current title is probably a little more evocative but a little misleading as well, since the book isn't really about Philip K Dick, not in the strict sense. Sure, he's in it and the book works in a few of his recurring themes, but in the end it comes perilously close to Bishop attempting to emulate a style that he doesn't have the mindset for. The setup for the book is great, taking place in a then-contemporary early eighties America where Richard Nixon is entering his fourth term and has turned the country into a near-fascist police state. We've won Vietnam and are currently engaged in "reorienting" the natives into our wonderful American way of life. Meanwhile dissent is actively crushed and matters are way closer to what everyone imagines Communist Russia was like. And in the midst of this, a faded writer named Philip Dick decides to have a stroke and die. Thus our story begins. Even though his name appears in the title, the author rarely appears in the book itself, after a bit in the beginning where he starts to interact with the characters, he sort of vanishes, maintaining a presence, although not an active one. The story focuses more on Cal Pickford, a Colorado native transplanted into Georgia with his wife. A big fan of PKD, he's trying to make a living in the new oppressive America, and finds himself actively engaged in trying to change it, almost against his will. Bishop's vision of a repressed America is actually quite well done and does feel real, which is something that Philip Dick was good at, circa "Man in the High Castle", for all the splits from known history, it does feel like ordinary people going about their lives. Cal and his wife come across as real characters, although the rest don't quite succeed as much, since they seem to exist more to push the plot along to wherever it needs to go. It seems at points that Bishop is trying to play with Dick's themes of different reality and rewriting our way into a better one. The thing is that Dick was able to convey the sheer weirdness of this in near psychedelic fashion, while letting the story remain somehow grounded. Bishop isn't quite up to that task and so the weirdness starts to feel way out of place, especially as the story reaches its climax and things start to make less sense. Dick was never big on explaining in his novels, preferring to let you make your own judgements, while here enough is laid out for us that we can get the scope of it, and it just doesn't resonate. Still, when he focuses on the ins and outs of this new wrong America, the book works pretty well, showing what happens when you let one person get too much power. More a homage than a recreation, Bishop does a credible job but at the same time only reinforces that the only person who could do Philip K Dick was, well, Philip K Dick. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Dystopian SF novel (and homage to PKD) in which Richard Nixon is in his fourth-term and the US has become a right-wing police state. PKD comes back to earth as an angel of sorts (clad in a "resurrection body" like the one worn by Jesus on Easter) to help a few disparate free thinker/weirdos release the universe from the grasp of "King Richard" (who, it turns out, is possessed by a demon).

Although the ending was fairly hokey, the details of the novel are terrifyingly prescient, in that it describes the mindset and the modus operandi of the Bush administration to a T.

Alas, Bishop climbed aboard the PKD Express without a destination in mind. His attempt to contact the ghost of PKD only produced some raps on the ceiling. Using bumper sticker brevity, there was too much of this and not enough of that. Alas, too many of his characters had nothing to do but fester in their boring world. Dick, himself, usually gave his quirky characters an alternate world to escape into. This story's tacked on Brave New World ending, the "redemptive shift," a gift from super aliens, didn't quiet work.

Admittedly, it is difficult to develop character for a ghost. But giving him a craving for strong coffee doesn't quite do it. And it was hard for the other characters to react to the command, "Don't touch me." There were some interesting characters drawn. Cal Pickford, who idolized PKD much as the author Bishop must have, was very well developed. But most of the others were but wheels to keep the story moving, that alas, kept falling off. Still, not a bad read when you're snowed in for the winter.

My husband turned me onto this author. It is definitely science fiction and I thought I would hate it, but I found several short stories in it I liked. They are really thought provoking. My husband bought this book and I know he would give it 5 stars, so I did. This is a nice change from a long, chaptered story, because you can jump around and pick and choose the longer and shorter ones depending on what time frame you are looking at. The stores run in length from 4 pages to 15 pages just to give you an idea.

It's a good collection. It is true that this is a reissue, however there are plenty of people who have never seen it before. (Including Me.)

The story Paycheck is completely different from the movie, in ALL manners. Also, it includes a ton of good stories, even if a few aren't the best. The forward also helps.

It's just a VERY good Sci-Fi book. Enough said. Beyond the Wub is priceless.

I just wanted to inform that this is the same "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1", published before under the titles "Beyond Lies the Wub" or "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford". I think it would be much easier to find this new edition, but this title is listed as "by Steven Owen Godersky" and not "by Philip K. Dick". If you already own the collection (or this particular volume), there is no need to buy it - the content is exactly the same. I am referring to the ISBN 0806526300 in this review, not the 0575070013 - so pay attention when you buy it.

This collection was previously released as "The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford" ISBN 0806511532. Don't be fooled by the new cover and title. It's being reissued under the title of the movie starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. You probably already have the collection if you're a PKD fan. The 1 star rating is for the cheap attempt to get my money a second time.

While this is a reissue of an earlier publication, this story collection is an excellent first book for those new to Philip K. Dick, as I was. In his forward to this edition, Dick writes that good science fiction must offer the reader a truly new idea and "it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his [or her] mind and wake it up to the possibility of something [s]he had not up to then thought of." (The brackets are mine.)

If we accept Dick's definition of good sci-fi, then this is truly good. The collection contains no stories that are "bad," and many that are outstanding. My favorites include "The Skull," the "Infinites," "The Variable Man," and "Beyond Lies the Wub."

If you don't yet own a story collection of Dick's, this one would be a good place to start.

Others have said this is lesser Dick-- not so, really. I read all the biggies many years ago but couldn't find this at the time, and I've just now finished it. It's full of ideas, as are all Dick's novels, and worthy of much study and thought. Yes, it's an "aliens attack and attempt to subdue Earth" novel, but it's atypical (and superior) due to Dick's odd and unique worldview. What a pleasure to enter his brain again-- all of his quirks are on view, with his enjoyable neologisms and snuff-taking and port-drinking protagonists fully engaged in a completely unpredictable plot. If you're a Dick fan, you've been here before and will enjoy the ride. If you're new to PKD, try it and see. You'll want to read more, as much to ty to figure out what made the author tick as to savor the intricate and neurotic works he wrote over the years. Dick was a singularity, often imitated and mocked, but ultimately a set of one. "The Ganymede Takeover" is a good read-- not first-class Dick, perhaps, but five-star SF.

PS: some of this is a bit un-PC, but sophisticated readers will have no problem with the racial stereotypes.

A minor Dick novel of the late 60s, The Ganymede Takeover was written in collaboration with Ray Nelson, and is derivative of The Game-Players of Titan, a much better book, with the situation of evil telepathic aliens who have conquered Earth. Here the aliens are large worms, who despite their form have a weakness for human culture: one collects model airplanes, another named Mekkis develops an obsession with the work of psychologist Dr. Rudolph Balkani. Balkani's "oblivion therapy" involves sensory deprivation treatment and makes a schizophrenic of the chief female character, Joan Hiashi. It also short-circuits the Ganymedian Great Common to which Mekkis connected mentally. The reason for this devastating effect seems to be that the Nothingness at the basis of reality is too much for any mind, human or alien, to bear. Even in this slight novel, Dick's philosophical concerns with the nature of subjectivity and consciousness march right to the forefront.

After reading a string of mostly top-notch PKD novels I was expecting the same from this but my expectations were only half-met. 'The Ganymede Takeover' is interesting and varied enough to get to the end without losing interest, but Phillip K Dick produces much better results on his own. Something seemed a little off with this novel to me and I think the two authors probably said "Hey, let's write a novel together" rather than "I've got this great idea for I novel, I need your help with this one". This is the first book Ray Nelson was involved in, his only claim to fame prior to this was being the inventor of the propeller-hat.
If you're on a mission to read the entire Phillip K. Dick catalog I'd put this a long way down on the list, there are better PKD books out there to be read.

Hello. My name is Albert Godphrey and I love Phillip K. Dick. Dick uses basic writing techniques for this book, yet something about it grasps me. He really gets deep inside the human mind and shows why we act the way we do. He shows that some people will never give up and they will do whatever they need to survive, yet it also shows the meek and the weak. This book is also humorus. I was cracking up when Dick made Percy X, the leader of a rebellion from an alien invasion of earth, used the mind machine to imagine killer girl scouts tearing apart the alien troops. Then he imagined killer boy scouts. Then the boy scouts raped the girl scouts! That was classic. The amount of time he put into this book is so obvious! He uses futuristic devises that we have now! Phillip K. Dick is amazing. My hands were literaly glued to this book. I couldn't put it down, I didn't sleep for 2 1/2 days because I was reading this. I really am glad that I met Phillip K. Dick before he died. I remember we listended to the clasical music together while we discussed his books. He was ingenius. The day he died, i cried. It was a sad day for science fiction lovers, for they lost the king... DAMMIT!!!! Not Elvis!!!!

The question is: Who is Milton Lumky? I read Dick's novel expecting to find out but came to the end without this question being answered. OK, so maybe Milton Lumky is not so much a character in this novel as device concocted by Dick to reveal the persona of Bruce "Skip" Stevens, a young man trying to find his way in life. Within a few pages we see that Bruce is immature socially and intellectually. Not much more is revealed about Bruce even with the, sometimes painfully, detailed interaction with Milton Lumky. So we are still left with a lot of questions. But... perhaps this is exactly as Dick intended.
Even though there is almost no action in this story, the book draws you along with expectations and a kind of morbid curiosity. Bruce Steven's life unfolds as many others do, with a purposeless but inexorable impetus. As things turn sour for the young man, we can even sympathize to an extent, although Bruce is not the most engaging fictional character. I see this novel as a logical offshoot of the Existentialism of the 40's and 50's. It owes more to Sartre and Kerouac than Arthur Miller.
And the end is a shocker. Not because of any tragic or outrageous happening but because it seems totally contrived and, well, ersatz. I think it is Dicks raised middle finger to the literature of the day and perhaps to the reader that is expecting the happy resolution of the conflicts in the story. It provides the happy resolution in an unbelievable setting.
"In Milton Lumkey Territory" is in some ways unsatisfying and often troublesome to the reader but I believe that Philip K. Dick would not have it any other way. If you don't ponder circumstances in your own life when reading about Bruce Steven's, then there is something missing in your existence.

This realist novel, written in 1958 and not published till 1985, is a concise, ironic story, set in Idaho, of the marriage of Bruce, a young man, to Susan, his former fifth grade teacher, and his devastating experiences in trying to run her business. Milton Lumky, a dumpy, red-faced salesman with a penchant for outrageous remarks, is not the main character in the novel, but he has center stage whenever he is on. Dick wrote In Milton Lumky Territory under the influence of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Both works deal with the tragedy of the common man, making the point, as Dick quoted in an interview, that "attention must be paid to this man." Like Willy Loman, Milton Lumky is a man of essential goodness who has been beaten down by what he has come to see as the degrading nature of his job. His Idaho is a provincial world of small towns, small minds, and a certain unrelieved nastiness. The only reprieve from the dreariness of this barren land and culture is to be found in the felicities of the heart, which Bruce and Susan take refuge in at the end when they move out of Milton Lumky territory.

Mid twenties Bruce Stevens lives in Reno working as a buyer for Consumers Buying Bureau. It is one of those new establishments: a discount place. He stops in Montario, Idaho to buy Trojans; planning to use them when he visits Peg Googer. However, Peg has company including Susan Faine, who looks familiar, but he cannot place her. Susan runs a typewriter rental service mostly used by male lawyers and has just obtained a divorce from Walt in Mexico. He leaves for Boise but forgot his coat so he returns to Peg's house; only Susan is there as the others went out. As he leaves again, he is attracted to Susan before realizing that she was Miss Reuben, his fifth grade teacher at Garret A. Hobart Grammar School in Montario back in 1944.

Ten years his senior, Susan and Bruce marry giving him an instant family as she has a stepdaughter and her typing business to run while he is on the road a lot as he does the circuit between most of the major cities west of the Rockies. His western travels lead to his meeting older traveling paper salesman Milton Lumky whose depressing look at the American conditions haunts Bruce as the middle aged seller pontificates negatively about traveling salesmen being a dying dinosaur with the discounters on the rise. Meanwhile, Susan's fears that Bruce will leave her for some younger female he meets on the road harm their relationship while his misperceptions about families hurt their marriage further.

Although written as a late 1950s contemporary, IN MILTON LUMKY TERRITORY has the deep feel of a well written character driven historical that feels so apropos today with the dramatic demographic shifts in employment skills. Bruce is actually the prime player with Milton and Susan providing strong support mostly insight into the lead character or his work. Philip K. Dick shows his versatility and currency with this fine tale that holds up well as both a historical and as a deep look at people struggling with radical societal changes in their lives.

Harriet Klausner

I'd advise only reading this if you're like me, you enjoy Philip K. Dick's writing, you've read a fair few of his books including 'Confessions of a Crap Artist', and you hope to read all his works (and steer clear of stuff like 'The Ganymede Takeover').
'In Milton Lumky Territory' may not be as exciting and quirky a read as 'Confessions of a Crap Artist' but it is a good read nonetheless and it's a shame that this was languishing as a manuscript on one of Dick's bookshelves until after his death.
It's set in the 50's, it has a purposeful main character in his mid-twenties who has that same horrible awareness of bad interpersonal situations that can be found in 'Confessions of a Crap Artist'. It's a good quality novel that you'll look back on and like.