Philip K. Dick

We'll add Philip K. Dicks' novels, stories, and collections gradually, as we get them reviewed...

The Simulacra — (1964) Publisher: On a ravaged Earth, fate and circumstances bring together a disparate group of characters, including a fascist with dreams of a coup, a composer who plays his instrument with his mind, a First Lady who calls all the shots, and the world’s last practicing therapist. And they all must contend with an underclass that is beginning to ask a few too many questions, aided by a man called Loony Luke and his very persuasive pet alien. In classic Philip K. Dick fashion, The Simulacra combines time travel, psychotherapy, telekinesis, androids, and Neanderthal-like mutants to create a rousing, mind-bending story where there are conspiracies within conspiracies and nothing is ever what it seems.

The Simulacra

Philip K. Dick is one of those authors who I often enjoy reading for his peculiar ideas, cool technologies, bizarre plots, and neurotic characters. But every time I read one of his stories, I need a break from him — there’s a feeling of frantic paranoia permeating his work that makes me feel like I just need to chill out for a while. If you’ve seen the movie The Adjustment Bureau, which was based on one of his stories, you’ll know what I mean. In that story, the main character discovers that the reality he thought he knew was totally wrong. Instead, there is something big going on behind the scenes and his life is being manipulated by The Unseen People Who Are Really In Charge (TUPWARIC).

This theme is common in PKD’s stories, and The Simulacra is another example. The government of the United States of Europe and America, which appears to be a matriarchy, is a sham — the President is really a simulacrum. When TUPWARIC gives the contract for building the next simulacrum to a different simulacrum company, and Hermann Goering is fetched from the past with a time-travel device, problems ensue and the USEA government is in danger of being taken over by fascists.

Quirky characters include the First Lady who never seems to age, the telekinetic piano player who thinks that a commercial has given him phobic body odor and that he’s becoming invisible, the psychotherapist who has lost his job because a pharmaceutical cartel has managed to have the practice of psychotherapy banned, a couple of brothers who work for simulacra companies and are fighting over an ex-wife, and a couple of guys in a jug band who want to play for the First Lady. Then there’s the reclusive group of Neanderthals, descendents of radiation-exposed humans, who live in Northern California and seem to be waiting for something important to happen...

The Simulacra juggles a huge set of characters and several subplots which at first seem unrelated but which Dick successfully brings together into a coherent whole by the end of the novel, which is not necessarily a guarantee with PKD. The whole thing is chaotic, zany, creative, funny, and contains Dick’s usual undercurrent of frenzied paranoia. With so much weird stuff going on, I thought that a plot disaster was imminent, but Dick pulls it off. The Simulacra ends at the climax, though, and a sequel would probably have been well-received.

I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of The Simulacra, which was read by “Golden Voice” and “Voice of the Century” Dick Hill. Mr. Hill, who is always superb, handled all of those characters and that madcap plot with ease. And you should hear him play a jug. —Kat Hooper

Now Wait for Last Year — (1966) Publisher: Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation — a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth’s leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?

Now Wait for Last Year

Earth is allied with the planet Lilistar against the alien Reegs. Gino Molinari, the leader of Earth’s forces, has just hired Eric Sweetscent as his personal physician. For his new job, Eric has to leave his wife Kathy, who has just become addicted to a new hallucinogenic drug. Eric is glad to leave, though, because he and Kathy aren’t getting along.

When Eric arrives at Gino Molinari’s side, he finds that the man has some strange health issues. At first Eric thinks Mr. Molinari is a paranoid hypochondriac until he discovers that he has survived numerous bouts of cancer. Soon there are other strange discoveries about Molinari’s health that baffle Dr. Sweetscent. When he finds out that the drug that Kathy’s hooked on came from off-world and causes its users to travel through time, he wonders if her drug addiction and Gino Molinari’s bizarre symptoms could be related. He also starts to wonder if Earth is on the wrong side of the war.

You never know what you’re going to get with a story by Philip K. Dick. Well, that’s not exactly true. You can almost certainly expect aliens, spaceships, robots, drug use, paranoia, bad marriages, time warps, alternate universes, and badly inaccurate psychology. What I mean is that PKD’s stories vary greatly in quality — some of them are incredibly clever and innovative, while others are almost painful to read. This may be because, according to biographers, Dick’s novels reflect his own unhappy life and his struggles with drugs, divorce, and mental illness.

Now Wait for Last Year (1966) is definitely one of the better ones. Eric Sweetscent is a complex character with complex problems for which there are no obvious solutions. A wrong move could endanger all of humanity! There’s mystery, whimsy, and humor here, too — the scenes with the talking taxis are funny (humorous situations with automatons are a familiar PKD element).

What stands out most, though, is that Now Wait for Last Year is an unusually emotional novel for Philip K. Dick. Eric deals with a whole spectrum of feelings toward his wife: grief, love, hate, treachery, anger, disgust, and pity. I actually dissolved into tears during the final scene of Now Wait for Last Year when the talking taxi gives Eric some beautiful advice.

I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of Now Wait for Last Year. Luke Daniels performed it perfectly, as usual. I love old science fiction and I love audiobooks, so I absolutely adore Brilliance Audio for putting so much old science fiction on audio this year! —Kat Hooper

The Crack in Space — (1966) Publisher: When a repairman accidentally discovers a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace, or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?

The Crack in Space

In Philip K. Dick’s The Crack in Space (1966), American technology and civilization has advanced so far that citizens can easily take a spaceship to make daily visits to an orbiting satellite whorehouse, personal Jifi-scuttlers are used to warp space/time so that people can quickly travel from home to work in a distant city, and overpopulation is such a public concern that millions of dispossessed Americans have chosen to be put in cryogenic storage until a habitable planet is discovered.

Yet, America has not advanced so far in other respects. It’s 2080, racism is still rampant, and Jim Briskin is hoping to be elected as the first African-American President. He needs to convince both the “Caucs” and the “Cols” (oh, what horrible nicknames!) that he’s the best man for the job. This isn’t always easy to do for a principled man who isn’t willing to abandon his conservative ideals just to get the endorsement of the powerful mutant who controls the satellite broadcasts. It gets even harder when his white campaign manager defects to the other side and Briskin is now the target of assassination attempts.

But when a repairman discovers an alternate universe in his client’s broken Jifi-Scuttler, Jim Briskin sees a way that he can win the election — by promising to send all the frozen people to inhabit the alternate Earth. Sure enough, in pure PKD style, the Americans quickly and unthinkingly embrace Briskin’s crazy idea and off they go, heading for disaster!

The Crack in Space is related to one of my favorite PKD short stories: “Prominent Author,” in which we’re introduced to the Jifi-scuttler. Dick’s stories are always bizarrely entertaining. They’re usually fast-paced and full of weird people with weird ideas doing weird things. In The Crack in Space, which contains a more straight-forward plot than many of his novels, we have a famous organ transplant doctor who’s divorcing his wife (an “abort-consultant”) while hiding his mistress in a parallel universe. Where is Dr. Sands getting all the organs for his transplants? Then there’s George Walt, the man with two bodies (but only one head) who runs the orbiting whorehouse and wants to get rid of Jim Briskin because Briskin wants to shut him down. As usual, all the characters talk on vid phones, drink synthetic coffee, avoid the automatic reporters, get divorced, and worry about overpopulation.

The Crack in Space is fun, but not up to par with the best PKD offers. I don’t know if Dick really imagined that in 2080 American race relations wouldn’t have progressed beyond 1960s levels, but this really makes the novel feel more dated than his other works do. Also, the way that Americans dealt with the parallel universe was so simplistic and naïve that this was hard to swallow, but yet it’s so typical of PKD. Fans, who are used to his frenzied plots and other little writing quirks, are likely to just chuckle and let it go. In the end, though, there’s a beautiful ironic message. As Americans are dealing with race warfare, PKD shows us that, really, we’re all human after all.

Brilliance Audio, who is gradually producing all of Philip K. Dick’s novels in audio format, did another wonderful job with this one. Eric Dawe performs it superbly. —Kat Hooper

Ubik — (1969) Publisher: Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.

Ubik

Warning: Use only as directed. And with caution.

Written in 1969, Ubik is one of Philip K. Dick’s most popular science fiction novels. It’s set in a future 1992 where some humans have develop psi and anti-psi powers which they are willing to hire out to individuals or companies who want to spy (or block spying) on others. Also in this alternate 1992, if you’ve got the money, you can put your beloved recently-deceased relatives into “coldpac” where they can be stored in half-life and you can visit with them for years after their death.

As Ubik begins, Glen Runciter, the head of one of New York City’s top anti-psi organizations, discovers that all the operatives of the top psi organization (whose telepathic fields they like to keep track of) have disappeared. This means less work for Runciter’s employees and he’s concerned about how they’re going to get paid. When Runicter’s company is offered a big job on the moon, he figures they’ve found the missing telepaths and he’s eager to hire out as many of his inactive inertials as he can, including the new one who has a strange and disturbing power: she can nullify events before they happen. But when Runciter’s inertials get to the moon, disaster strikes, and when they return to Earth, they find that life is not how they left it. In fact, time seems to be going backward and something is killing them off one by one. The only thing that might help is Ubik — a mysterious product in an aerosol spray can... If only they can find it!

Ubik is a fast-paced SF thriller full of classic PKD themes such as an unreliable reality, time running backward, precognition, telepathy, paranoia, drug abuse, hallucinations, and spirituality. The story is quite funny in places and includes a bit of horror, too.

There are several plot twists in Ubik, including a big one at the end, which means that the reader is as unsure about what’s going on as the characters are until the big reveal and, still, there are some questions left unanswered. Mainly we're left contemplating what PKD is suggesting about death, salvation, and God. Ubik is one of those books where, at the end, you have to review the plot in light of your new knowledge just so you can try to put it all together.

I listened to Blackstone Audio’s version read by Anthony Heald. Heald successfully handles a rather large cast of alive and dead humans, not to mention the talking appliances and doors. Thanks to Heald’s skills, Ubik on audio was thoroughly entertaining.

Ubik has been named by Time Magazine as one of the Top 100 English-Language Novels From 1923 (list compiled by Lev Grossman). I can’t say that I agree with this accolade, but I can say that I enjoyed Ubik and can recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction. For Philip K. Dick fans, Ubik is an essential read. —Kat Hooper

Lies, Inc — (1984) Publisher: When catastrophic overpopulation threatens Earth, one company offers to teleport citizens to Whale’s Mouth, an allegedly pristine new home for happy and industrious émigrés. But there is one problem: the teleportation machine works in only one direction. When Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that some of the footage of happy settlers may have been faked, he sets out on an eighteen-year journey to see if anyone wants to come back. Lies, Inc. is one of Philip K. Dick’s final novels, which he expanded from his novella The Unteleported Man shortly before his death. In its examination of totalitarianism, reality, and hallucination, it encompasses everything that Dick’s fans love about his oeuvre.

Lies, Inc

In the early 21^st century, Earth has become overcrowded and has begun to look toward space as a potential new home. Only one habitable planet has been found — Whale’s Mouth — and it’s said to be a paradise. Rachmael ben Applebaum’s company has developed a spaceship that will take settlers there, but the trip takes 18 years. Just as business is about to begin, it’s undercut by Trails of Hoffman, Inc., a company who has developed a new teleporting technology that will get settlers to Whale’s Mouth in only 15 minutes. The only catch is that it’s a one-way trip — once you leave, you can’t come back. Ben Applebaum, whose company has been financially devastated by this new technology, discovers that the videos of happy settlers have been faked and thinks there’s something nefarious going on at Whale’s Mouth. After all, Trails of Hoffman is run by Germans, and their eugenic ideas have not been forgotten. Ben Applebaum also believes that the United Nations, also led by Germans, might be in league with Trails of Hoffman. With the help of a company called Lies, Inc., ben Applebaum sets out on the 36-year round-trip to investigate and inform the world about what’s happening in Whale’s Mouth.

Lies, Inc. is the most inaccessible PKD work I’ve ever read. It actually starts off well — I loved the premise and couldn’t wait to find out what was going on at Whale’s Mouth. (Except that I still have no idea what was up with the rat in ben Applebaum’s head.) But just as ben Applebaum sets out, things get really weird. Too weird. In the middle of the novel, ben Applebaum gets hit by an LSD-coated dart and most of the rest of the story is one big time-warped acid trip for him and for the reader. There’s talk about paraworlds, hypnagogic experiences, paranoia, bad psychotherapy, and the illusion of reality. None of this is new for a PKD story, but this time the reader has no idea where or when the characters are. The plot jumps around in time and space and is so disorienting that the reader doesn’t know what’s going on. I think perhaps that if I read it a few more times, I could make more sense of it, but I really don’t want to.

Suddenly at nearly the end of Lies, Inc., things get back on track. At that point, I said to myself, “This feels like someone dropped a huge acid sequence into the middle of a novella.” After a few minutes of investigation on the internet, I found an afterword by PKD’s literary executor, Paul Williams, explaining that that’s exactly what happened. Lies, Inc. is an expansion of Philip K. Dick’s novella The Unteleported Man. The huge awful chunk in the middle (you can tell exactly where it begins and ends) is an addition to the novel that was originally rejected (with very good reason) by Don Wollheim at Ace. It gets complicated after that, but basically it was added back in after Dick’s death and patched up a bit by SF author John Sladek. The result is that a really cool novella was turned into something quite unreadable. I can recommend it only to PKD completists who want to know how weird it can get. To others, I suggest reading The Unteleported Man instead.

I listened to Lies, Inc. on audio. Brilliance Audio has just produced several old PKD works, and I’m excited about that! This one was read by Luke Daniels, who is fast becoming one of my favorite readers. His narration actually made the acid trip bearable — it’s probably the only reason I didn’t quit Lies, Inc.
—Kat Hooper

The Adjustment Bureau — (2011) Publisher: The Adjustment Bureau is a major motion picture based on Philip K. Dick's classic paranoid story, The Adjustment Team. This is the short story, The Adjustment Team, which asks the question — Do we control our destiny, or do unseen forces manipulate us? Ed Fletcher is a real estate agent with a normal life, until one day he leaves the house for work a few minutes later than he should have. He arrives at a terrifying, grey, ash world. Ed rushes home and tells his wife, Ruth, who goes back to the office with him. When they return, everything is normal. But he soon realizes people and objects have subtly changed. Panic-stricken, he runs to a public phone to warn the police, only to have the phone booth ascend heavenward with Fletcher inside...

The Adjustment Bureau

Brilliance Audio has recently put Philip K. Dick’s short story The Adjustment Team on audio and they sent me a copy. This is the story that the movie The Adjustment Bureau was based on (and the name of the audiobook is The Adjustment Bureau). The story is 57 minutes of tension and psychological terror as Ed Fletcher gets to work late and accidentally sees The Adjustment Team “adjusting” his office building and its occupants. Now, unadjusted Ed notices all the differences in his environment but his adjusted colleagues think everything is normal. Is Ed crazy?

Phil Gigante does an excellent job reading this story — the drama and terror really comes across well.  I enjoyed “The Adjustment Team,” I’m glad I’ve finally read the story that the popular movie was based on, and I’m particularly happy to be able to listen to short stories on audio.

However... The audiobook is less than an hour long and it costs (at this writing) $11. As much as I enjoyed it, I just can’t recommend spending that much money for so little story, especially when the Kindle version costs only 99¢. —Kat Hooper

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume Two: Adjustment Team (1952-1953) — (2011) Publisher: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was one of the seminal figures of 20th century science fiction. His many stories and novels, which include such classics as The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reflect a deeply personal world view, exploring the fragile, multifarious nature of reality itself and examining those elements that make us — or fail to make us — fully human. He did as much as anyone to demolish the artificial barrier between genre fiction and 'literature,' and the best of his work has earned a permanent place in American popular culture. Adjustment Team is the second installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. This wide-ranging collection contains 26 stories and novellas from the extraordinarily productive years of 1952 and 1953, along with extensive story notes. Included here are "The Cookie Lady," an account of a young boy whose relationship with a lonely widow results in a bizarre act of transformation, "Second Variety" (filmed in 1995 as Screamers), a novella that powerfully evokes a post-apocalyptic society overrun by all-too-human looking robots known as "Claws," and the title story, in which a small accident of timing leads real estate salesman Ed Fletcher to an unexpected confrontation with the malleablenature of a once familiar world. Like its predecessor, The King of the Elves, this new volume offers both an astonishing variety of narrative pleasures and a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of a major American artist.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume Two: Adjustment Team (1952-1953)

Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories over his career, mostly for science fiction magazines. Subterranean Press has been collecting them in chronological order over several volumes. The first volume, The King of the Elves, contained 22 stories spanning the years 1947-1952. This second volume, Adjustment Team, covers the years 1952-1953 and includes 27 stories with notes that make up approximately 488 pages.

Many of these stories use themes that were common in 1950s SF shorts — space exploration, the cold war, racism, xenophobia, and the fear of atomic war and radiation. Like the stories of Ray Bradbury and other popular writers of the time, Dick’s stories are full of spaceships, aliens, Soviets, cigarettes, bad marriages, a disdain for 1950s psychology, and high-heeled housewives in aprons. You’ll also notice other favorite themes of Philip K. Dick: what’s behind reality, playing God through world-building, a vision of a post-robopocalyptic ash-covered Earth, and what it means to be human.

Most of the stories in this volume were new to me and I enjoyed all but one or two of them. My favorites were:

• Second Variety — A frighteningly realistic-feeling robopocalypse. This haunting story was the basis for the movie Screamers (1995) and one of the best in the collection.
• Jon’s World — A fascinating idea about parallel universes and a criticism of the practice of lobotomy.
• Some Kinds of Life — One of several anti-war stories in this collection. This one asks what we’re really fighting for.
• The Commuter — Two different realities seem to be colliding. This is a common theme for PKD, and one he does really well.
• A Surface Raid — One of several stories which imagine a post-war Earth covered in ash with a few remaining humans living underground. All of these ash-Earth stories are terrific. And scary.
• Project: Earth — Another common theme for PKD: Who is God?
• The Trouble with Bubbles — “World-building is the ultimate art form.” Another story about gods.
• Human Is — A wonderful look at what it means to be human. I saw the ending twist coming, but this was still one of my favorite stories.
• Adjustment Team — The basis for the movie The Adjustment Bureau (2010), this is one of several entertaining looks at a possible “back-end” of reality.
• The Impossible Planet — Another post-apocalyptic cautionary tale which starts with a chuckle and ends with a chill. A beautiful story — one of the best in the collection.
• Impostor — Another robot story, and the basis of the film Impostor (2002).
• Survey Team — This tale about the destruction of Earth has an interesting suggestion about where we came from.
• Prominent Author — This is another story with a common PKD theme, but I won’t mention which one, so as not to spoil the surprise ending. This is one of the few whose ending I didn’t see coming and which I would actually consider “mind-bending.”

Well, that’s a lot of favorites, I guess, but I had a hard time narrowing them down because this collection has so many great stories. Many felt dated and I could anticipate the ending of most of them, but that’s because I have, in 2011, the benefit of 60 more years of science fiction literature at my back than Dick’s first readers did. Even so, I loved this collection.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume Two: Adjustment Team (1952-1953) is an absolute must-have volume for any serious PKD fan, but it’s also a great place to start for anyone who wants to become better acquainted with the work of this prolific and highly esteemed science fiction writer.
—Kat Hooper