Search Worlds Without End

Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D - which Arctor takes in massive doses - gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.

Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.

An artist searches for God so he can paint his portrait in Philip K. Dick's collaboration with Roger Zelazny.

After World War III, the Servants of Wrath cult deified the mysterious Carlton Lufteufel, creator of the doomsday weapon that wiped out much of humanity. But to worship the man, they need an image of him as a god, and no one has ever seen him. So the high priests send a limbless master painter named Tibor McMasters into the wilderness on a mission to find Lufteufel and capture his likeness. Unfortunately for Tibor, the nation's remaining Christians do not want him to succeed and are willing to kill to ensure that the so-called Deus Irae remains hidden. This hallucinatory tale through a nuclear wasteland asks what price the artist must pay for art and tries to figure out just what makes a god.

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep... They even built humans.

Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

This novel appeared in Ace Doubles D-421 (1960) and #15697 (1972).

Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, skilled at the most advanced medical techniques and dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now, he is caught between his own instincts and training as a healer and a society where it is illegal to save lives.

But Parsons is not the only one left who believes in prolonging life, and those who share his beliefs have desperate plans for Dr.Parsons' skills, and for the future of their society.

Dr. Futurity is not only a thrilling rendition of a terrifying future but it is also a fantastic examination of the paradoxes of time-travel that could only have come from the mind of Philip K. Dick.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). The story can also be found in the anthologies Alpha 2 (1971), edited by Robert Silverberg, The Fantasy Hall of Fame (1989), also edited by Silverberg, and Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror (1992), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collections The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), The Little Black Box (1987), We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1991), Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (2002) and Minority Report (2002).

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonymous with loss of life.

Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

Welcome to the nightmare reality of Philip K.Dick...Visit strange locales of the imagination where nothing is what it first seems to be...from the computer-induced memories of a man in frozen sleep that become more real than his reawakening...to the affecting tale of the love of a brown oxford for a demure high-heeled slipper. Travel to a savage planet where the isolated caretakers in their solitary bubbles form friendships warm enough to fight death itself. And follow a wary band of astronauts fated to return to Earth again, and again, and again...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later - essay
• The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford - (1954) - short story
• Explorers We - (1959) - short story
• Holy Quarrel - (1966) - novelette
• What'll We Do with Ragland Park? - (1963) - novelette
• Strange Memories of Death - (1984) - short story
• The Alien Mind - (1981) - short story
• The Exit Door Leads In - (1979) - short story
• Chains of Air, Web of Aether - (1980) - novelette
• Rautavaara's Case - (1980) - short story
• I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon - (1980) - short story

Shortly before his death, Philip K. Dick expanded his novella The Unteleported Man into Lies, Inc., a hallucinatory novel that explores Dicks hallmark themes of conspiracy, totalitarianism, and the thin line between illusion and reality.

When catastrophic overpopulation threatens Earth, a company begins offering teleportation to Whales Mouth, an allegedly pristine new home for migrs. The only catch is that the trip is one way. But when one man discovers that the images of happy settlers have been faked, he sets out on an eighteen-year trip to see if anyone wants to come back.

On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disorder may be a window into the future.

In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time.

Fourteen strangers came to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that planet whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers found that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O, God is either absent or intent on destroying His creations.

Also published as A Maze of Death.

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original, and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes stories that will make you laugh, cringe... and stop and think.

In "The Minority Report," a special unit that employs those with the power of precognition to prevent crimes proves itself less than reliable. This story was the basis of the feature film Minority Report.

In, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," an everyguy's yearning for more exciting "memories" places him in a danger he never could have imagined. This story was the basis of the feature film Total Recall.

In "Paycheck," a mechanic who has no memory of the previous two years of his life finds that a bag of seemingly worthless and unrelated objects can actually unlock the secret of his recent past, and insure that he has a future. This story was the basis of the feature film Paycheck.

In "Second Variety," the UN's technological advances to win a global war veer out of control, threatening to destroy all of humankind. This story was the basis of the feature film Screamers.

And "The Eyes Have It" is a whimsical, laugh-out-loud play on the words of the title.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Malcolm Edwards
• The Minority Report - (1956)
• Impostor - (1953)
• Second Variety - (1953)
• War Game - (1959)
• What the Dead Men Say - (1964)
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! - (1964)
• The Electric Ant - (1969)
• Faith of Our Fathers - (1967)
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966)

Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the Male better or to keep him poised just this side of death.

Now Wait for Last fear bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as ushers us into a future that looks uncannily like the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is.

In Our Friends from Frolix 8, the world is run by an elite few. And what determines whether one is part of the elite isn't wealth or privilege, but brains. As children, every citizen of Earth is tested; some are found to be super-smart New Men and some are Unusuals, with various psychic powers. The vast majority are Undermen, performing menial jobs in an overpopulated world.

Nick Appleton is an Underman, content to go with the flow and eke out an existence as a tire regroover. But after his son is classified as an Underman, Appleton begins to question the hierarchy. Strengthening his resolve, and energizing the resistance movement, is news that the great resistance leader Thors Provoni is returning from a trip to the furthest reaches of space. And he's brought help: a giant, indestructible alien.

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

What is human? What is a machine? How do they differ? Or do they?

In these 15 stories about robots and androids, Philip K. Dick asks these questions. The answers differ with each story--in the fictional world and in the exploring mind of Dick the only certainty is change--but the author establishes some guidelines: "To be human, one must maintain his intellectual and spiritual freedom at all costs. He must refuse obedience to any ideology; he must remain unpredictable, unfettered by patterns and routines."

Table of Contents:

• Second Variety - (1953) - novelette
• War Game - (1959) - short story
• The Defenders - (1953) - novelette
• The Electric Ant - (1969) - short story
• Autofac - (1955) - novelette
• Impostor - (1953) - short story
• The Little Movement - (1952) - short story
• The Exit Door Leads In - (1979) - short story
• Frozen Journey - (1980) - short story
• A Game of Unchance - (1964) - novelette
• The Last of the Masters - (1954) - novelette
• The Preserving Machine - (1953) - short story
• Sales Pitch - (1954) - short story
• Service Call - (1955) - novelette
• To Serve the Master - (1956) - short story

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick contains twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers.

In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In "Autofac," one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as "The Minority Report," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the film Total Recall. With an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Jonathan Lethem
• Beyond Lies the Wub - (1952)
• Roog - (1953)
• Paycheck - (1953)
• Second Variety - (1953)
• Impostor - (1953)
• The King of the Elves - (1953)
• Adjustment Team - (1954)
• Foster, You're Dead - (1955)
• Upon the Dull Earth - (1954)
• Autofac - (1955)
• The Minority Report - (1956)
• The Days of Perky Pat - (1963)
• Precious Artifact - (1964)
• A Game of Unchance - (1964)
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966)
• Faith of Our Fathers - (1967)
• The Electric Ant - (1969)
• A Little Something for Us Tempunauts - (1974)
• The Exit Door Leads In - (1979)
• Rautavaara's Case - (1980)
• I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon - (1980)

Table of Contents:

• 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)

This novel is a revised edition of A Glass of Darkness (1956). It originally appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, December 1956. It was included in Ace Double D-249 (1957).

Yielding to a compulsion he can't explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind-and never did. He also discovers that in this Millgate Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape. Unable to leave, Ted struggles to find the reason for such disturbing incongruities, but before long, he finds himself in the midst of a struggle between good and evil that stretches far beyond the confines of the valley.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

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?

"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."—Jonathan Lethem

Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this is the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, work.

In the Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, in a freewheeling voice that ranges through personal confession, esoteric scholarship, dream accounts, and fictional fugues, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit.

This volume, the culmination of many years of transcription and archival research, has been annotated by the editors and by a unique group of writers and scholars chosen to offer a range of views into one of the most improbable and mind-altering manuscripts ever brought to light.

Edited by Pamla Jackson and Jonathem Lethem

The three guerillas made a raid for food and supplies. The defenders kept them off with lasers. So they used the strange new weapons that they had found. The illusion machines. They worked well. Twenty-four phantom men who fought like veterans helped to carry the captured supplies up into the mountains.

Later they conjured up a complete army of illusions: giant vampires, man-eating plants, Valkyries, cannibal children.

The trouble was, when they switched the off the machines, the phantoms didn't go away...

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - (1980) - essay by Mark Hurst
• Introduction (1979) - essay
• The Golden Man - (1954) - novelette
• Return Match - (1967) - short story
• The King of the Elves - (1953) - novelette
• The Mold of Yancy - (1955) - novelette
• Not by Its Cover - (1968) - short story
• The Little Black Box - (1964) - novelette
• The Unreconstructed M - (1957) - novelette
• The War With the Fnools - (1964) - short story
• The Last of the Masters - (1954) - novelette
• Meddler - (1954) - short story
• A Game of Unchance - (1964) - novelette
• Sales Pitch - (1954) - short story
• Precious Artifact - (1964) - short story
• Small Town - (1954) - short story
• The Pre-Persons - (1974) - novelette
• Story Notes - (1980) - essay
• Afterword (1980) - essay

Originally appeared in Ace-Double D-193 (1956).

The Man Who Japed is Dick's mesmerizing and terrifying tale of a society so eager for order that it will sacrifice anything, including its freedom. Newer York is a post-holocaust city governed by the laws of an oppressively rigid morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom. Allen Purcell is one of the few people who has the capacity to literally change the way of the world, and once he's offered a high-profile job that acts as guardian of public ethics, he sets out to do precisely that. But first he must deal with the head in his closet.

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), Second Variety (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), Paycheck, The Minority Report, and twenty more.

Contents:

• 1 - Fair Game - (1959) - short story
• 13 - The Hanging Stranger - (1953) - short story
• 27 - The Eyes Have It - (1953) - short story
• 31 - The Golden Man - (1954) - novelette
• 57 - The Turning Wheel - (1954) - novelette
• 75 - The Last of the Masters - (1954) - novelette
• 101 - The Father-Thing - (1954) - short story
• 111 - Strange Eden - (1954) - short story
• 123 - Tony and the Beetles - (1953) - short story
• 135 - Null-O - (1958) - short story
• 145 - To Serve the Master - (1956) - short story
• 155 - Exhibit Piece - (1954) - short story
• 167 - The Crawlers - (1954) - short story
• 175 - Sales Pitch - (1954) - short story
• 189 - Shell Game - (1954) - short story
• 203 - Upon the Dull Earth - (1954) - novelette
• 221 - Foster, You're Dead - (1955) - short story
• 239 - Pay for the Printer - (1956) - short story
• 253 - War Veteran - (1955) - novelette
• 291 - The Chromium Fence - (1955) - short story
• 305 - We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966) - novelette
• 323 - The Minority Report - (1956) - novelette
• 355 - Paycheck - (1953) - novelette
• 385 - Second Variety - [Claws - 1] - (1953) - novelette

THE WEIRD & WONDERFUL WORLDS OF PHILIP K. DICK

Robot psychiatrists activated by $20 coins
A war veteran who keeps changing into a blob of organic jelly
Business advice from the souls of the departed
A machine that turns musical scores into small, furry animals
A dog story that recalls Kafka's 'Investigations of a Dog'

These are some of the treasures of imagination in this collection of Philip K. Dick's short fiction. They display all the uncanny inventiveness & sad, quirky humanism of his wonderful novels as well as being a testing ground for many of their later themes.

Table of Contents:

• The Preserving Machine - (1953)
• War Game - (1959)
• Upon the Dull Earth - (1954)
• Roog - (1953)
• War Veteran - (1955)
• Top Stand-By Job - (1963)
• Beyond Lies the Wub - (1952)
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966)
• Captive Market - (1955)
• If There Were No Benny Cemoli - (1963)
• Retreat Syndrome - (1965)
• The Crawlers - (1954)
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! - (1964)
• What the Dead Men Say - (1964)
• Pay for the Printer - (1956)

Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted. Ian Duncan is desperately in love with the first lady, Nicole Thibideaux, who he has never met. Richard Kongrosian refuses to see anyone because he is convinced his body odor is lethal. And the fascistic Bertold Goltz is trying to overthrow the government. With wonderful aplomb, Philip K. Dick brings this story to a crashing conclusion and in classic fashion shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

In 1974, Philip K. Dick was commissioned to write a screenplay based on his novel Ubik. The film was eventually scrapped, but the screenplay was saved and later published in 1985. Featuring scenes that are not in the book and a surreal playfulness--the style of the writing goes back in time just like the technology in the book's dreamworld--this screenplay is the only one Dick wrote and features his signature mix of paranoia, humor, and big-idea philosophy.

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.

Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1966. It has been anthologized many times, and can be found in the collection We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, along with various other collections.

It was the basis for the 1990 movie Total Recall.

A revealing look into the life and final work of science fictions answer to Borges (Ursula K. Le Guin).

In the field of science fiction, the work of Philip K. Dick is unparalleled. Through books like Valis and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner) his appeal and influence has reached the world over, creating the standard for the literary science fiction novel.

In November of 1982, six months before the authors death, journalist Gwen Lee recorded the first of several in-depth discussions with Philip K. Dick, discussions that continued over the course of the next three months. The subjects touched upon included the specifics of his writing process, his enthusiastic response to the scenes and trailers hed seen of Blade Runner (he never lived to see the finished film), and accounts of his religious experiences. But the greatest amount of time was devoted to discussions of his next novel, a book he called Owl in Daylight, a book he would never get the chance to write. A tale steeped in mysticism, biotechnology, and the relationship between music and language, it was to be his masterpiece.

These extraordinary interviews are filled with the wit and aplomb characteristic of Dicks writing, helping make What If Our World Is Their Heaven? not only an engaging read, but a unique and compelling historical document. It will be a must read for anyone interested in the field of science fiction.

Dr. Futurity

Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, skilled at the most advanced medical techniques and dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now, he is caught between his own instincts and training as a healer and a society where it is illegal to save lives.

But Parsons is not the only one left who believes in prolonging life, and those who share his beliefs have desperate plans for Dr.Parsons' skills, and for the future of their society.

Dr. Futurity is not only a thrilling rendition of a terrifying future but it is also a fantastic examination of the paradoxes of time-travel that could only have come from the mind of Philip K. Dick.

Slavers of Space

It was carnival time on Earth. Prosperity was at its peak; science had triumphed over environment; all human needs were taken care of by computers, robots and androids. There was nothing left for humans to do but enjoy, themselves... to seek pleasure where they found it, without inhibitions and without thinking of the price.

Then an android died - in a senseless, brutal murder. And young Derry Horn was shocked out of his boredom and alienation. His life of flabby ease had not prepared him for a fantastically dangerous mission to outlying, primitive stars - but now, at last, he had a reason for living. And even when he found himself a prisoner of ruthless slavers, even when he learned the shocking truth about what the androids really were and where they came from... even when he saw all the laws of the orderly, civilised universe he knew turned upside-down and inside-out... he fought on.

For that universe had to be shattered and reborn - even if Derry Horn and the Earth he had irrevocably left behind died in the process!

Dr. Futurity

Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, skilled at the most advanced medical techniques and dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now, he is caught between his own instincts and training as a healer and a society where it is illegal to save lives.

But Parsons is not the only one left who believes in prolonging life, and those who share his beliefs have desperate plans for Dr.Parsons' skills, and for the future of their society.

Dr. Futurity is not only a thrilling rendition of a terrifying future but it is also a fantastic examination of the paradoxes of time-travel that could only have come from the mind of Philip K. Dick.

The Unteleported Man

Nobody would want to spend 18 years on a spaceship when you can make the journey via teleportation in an instant. In seconds, the Telpor effect could teleport you from an overcrowded Earth. 40 million emigrants had found it a solution to Earth's problems of pollution and overcrowding. But Rachmael ben Applebaum wasn't sure. Because there was a problem with the gateway to paradise. No one had ever returned.

Solar Lottery

The operating principle was random selection: positions of public power were decided by a sophisticated lottery. Everyone had a chance, everyone could live in hope that they would be chosen to be the boss, the Quizmaster. But with the power came the game - the assassination game - which everyone could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to avoid his chosen killer? Which made for fascinating and exciting viewing, compelling enough to distract the public's attention while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the solar system and the people, unnoticed and completely unopposed. Then, in 2203, with the choice of a member of a maverick cult as Quizmaster, the system developed a little hitch...

The Big Jump

All signs pointed to the fact that no human could come back alive from Barnard's Star. Something elusive, beyond comprehension, existed out there; something that was a perpetual bait, a perpetual trap. But Arch Comyn knew he had to join tht second fated mission. For somehwere beyond the veil of the Transuranae lay the answer to the question that was more important than life to him.

Philip K. Dick didn't predict the future -- he summoned the desperate bleakness of our present directly from his fevered paranoia. Dick didn't predict the Internet or iPhones or email or 3D printers, but rather he so thoroughly understood human nature that he could already see, even at the advent of the transistor, the way technology would alienate us from each other and from ourselves. He could see us isolated and drifting in our own private realities even before we had plugged in our earbuds. He could see, even in the earliest days of space exploration, how much of our own existence remained unexplored, and how the great black spaces between people were growing even as our universe was shrinking.

Philip K. Dick spent his first three years as a science fiction author writing shorter fiction, and in his lifetime he composed almost 150 short stories, many of which have gone on to be adapted into (slightly watered down) Hollywood blockbusters: The Adjustment Bureau, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, and Imposter are just a few of the films that have been adapted from PKD's work.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Reality of Philip K. Dick - (1977) - essay by John Brunner
• Beyond Lies the Wub - (1952) - short story
• Roog - (1953) - short story
• Second Variety - [Claws - 1] - (1953) - novelette
• Paycheck - (1953) - novelette
• Impostor - (1953) - short story
• Colony - (1953) - novelette
• Expendable - (1953) - short story
• The Days of Perky Pat - (1963) - novelette
• Breakfast at Twilight - (1954) - short story
• Foster, You're Dead - (1955) - short story
• The Father-Thing - (1954) - short story
• Service Call - (1955) - novelette
• Autofac - (1955) - novelette
• Human Is - (1955) - short story
• If There Were No Benny Cemoli - (1963) - novelette
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! - (1964) - novelette
• Faith of Our Fathers - (1967) - novelette
• The Electric Ant - (1969) - short story
• A Little Something for Us Tempunauts - (1974) - novelette
• Afterthoughts by the Author - (1977) - essay

The Cosmic Puppets

Yielding to a compulsion he can't explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind--and never did. He also discovers that in this Millgate Ted Barton died of scarlet fever when he was nine years old. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that it is literally impossible to escape. Unable to leave, Ted struggles to find the reason for such disturbing incongruities, but before long, he finds himself in the midst of a struggle between good and evil that stretches far beyond the confines of the valley.

Sargasso of Space

Almost half a century ago, renowned science fiction and fantasy author Andre Norton introduced apprentice cargo master Dane Thorson in Sargasso of Space and Plague Ship.

Dane signed on with the independent cargo ship Solar Queen looking for a career in off-world trade.

In Sargasso of Space, the Solar Queen free traders win exclusive rights to trade with the planet Limbo, but the crew arrives to find most of the planet's surface charred, with little signs of life. They find a valley with life, but others may still lurk. Worse yet, a strange force threatens to cripple the Queen. They must solve the planet's mysteries if they hope to escape not only with tradeable goods, but their lives.

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

The Man Who Japed

The Man Who Japed is Dick's mesmerizing and terrifying tale of a society so eager for order that it will sacrifice anything, including its freedom. Newer York is a post-holocaust city governed by the laws of an oppressively rigid morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom. Allen Purcell is one of the few people who has the capacity to literally change the way of the world, and once he's offered a high-profile job that acts as guardian of public ethics, he sets out to do precisely that. But first he must deal with the head in his closet.

The Space-Born

Far from Earth, on a ship carrying the 13th and 14th generations of descendants from the original crew, life is short. You are born, learn the tasks needed to keep the ship running, help breed and train the next crew - and your death is ordered by the computer in charge.

Gregson, chief of the psych-police, makes sure the computer's death-sentences are carried out quickly and painlessly. His duty is a sacred trust. He knows the intricacies of the system, how it works... and how it can be subverted.

He is growing old. Rebellious.

He also knows his name will soon come up in the computer for elimination.

And he has no intention of carrying out his own death-sentence!

The Unteleported Man

Nobody would want to spend 18 years on a spaceship when you can make the journey via teleportation in an instant. In seconds, the Telpor effect could teleport you from an overcrowded Earth. 40 million emigrants had found it a solution to Earth's problems of pollution and overcrowding. But Rachmael ben Applebaum wasn't sure. Because there was a problem with the gateway to paradise. No one had ever returned.

The Mind Monsters

In that plantary games, was he pawn of prime-mover?

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-150 (1956).

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief.

The World Jones Made

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief.

Agent of the Unknown

Don Haig had been content to lie around and drink in the synthetic beauty of the pleasure planetoid Fyon, until a woman came into his life. A woman more beautiful and more perfect than any other female in the galaxy. A woman who brought about a curious change in Don.

For she was a pocket-sized doll -- a very strange and miraculous puppet who shed constant tears and held powers that Don never even dreamed of.

But what Don did know was that dangerous alien forces were swiftly focussing on him and his living puppet... and that he had to discover the doll's super-scientific secret before his own life was smashed to atoms!

Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick's classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is.

The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn't know that. He thinks it's 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world's long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he begins to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry.

This novel originally appeared in Ace Double D-457 (1960).

Objective, unbiased and hyperrational, the Vulcan 3 should have been the perfect ruler. The omnipotent computer dictates policy that is in the best interests of all citizens-or at least, that is the idea. But when the machine, whose rule evolved out of chaos and war, begins to lose control of the "Healer" movement of religious fanatics and the mysterious force behing their rebellion, all Hell breaks loose.

Written in 1960, Philip K. Dick's paranoid novel imagines a totalitarian state in which hammer-headed robots terrorize citizens and freedom is an absurd joke. William Barrios, the morally conflicted hero, may be the only person who can prevent the battle for control from destroying the world-if, that is, he can decide which side he's on.

Vulcan's Hammer

After the twentieth century's devastating series of wars, the world's governments banded together into one globe-spanning entity, committed to peace at all costs. Ensuring that peace is the Vulcan supercomputer, responsible for all major decisions. But some people don't like being taken out of the equation. And others resent the idea that the Vulcan is taking the place of God. As the world grows ever closer to all-out war, one functionary frantically tries to prevent it. But the Vulcan computer has its own plans, plans that might not include humanity at all.

The Skynappers

When Ivan Wright stepped out of his mountain cabin, rifle in hand, to investigate the sound of a strange helicopter, he stepped right into the middle of a galactic crisis.

For the crew of that odd aircraft were not men such as he'd ever seen before - and when he tried to oppose them, he found himself hurled uncontrollably into oblivion.

He awoke to find himself considered as a kidnapped barbarian from a backward planet in a galaxy of advanced civilizations - yet one who somehow held in his own hands the key to all their futures!

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-103 (1955).

The operating principle was random selection: positions of public power were decided by a sophisticated lottery. Everyone had a chance, everyone could live in hope that they would be chosen to be the boss, the Quizmaster. But with the power came the game - the assassination game - which everyone could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to avoid his chosen killer? Which made for fascinating and exciting viewing, compelling enough to distract the public's attention while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the solar system and the people, unnoticed and completely unopposed. Then, in 2203, with the choice of a member of a maverick cult as Quizmaster, the system developed a little hitch...

Dr. Bloodmoney is a post-nuclear-holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dick's most memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; Dr. Bluthgeld, the megalomaniac physicist largely responsible for the decimated state of the world; and Stuart McConchie and Bonnie Keller, two unremarkable people bent the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil. Epic and alluring, this brilliant novel is a mesmerizing depiction of Dick's undying hope in humanity.

In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye," blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first-but their motives are not exactly benevolent because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.

What would you do if your long-dead relatives started coming back? Who would take care of them? And what if they preferred being dead? In Counter-Clock World, one of Dick's most theological and philosophical novels, these troubling questions are addressed; though, as always, you may have to figure out the answers yourself.

Philip K Dick's classic dystopian novel set in the future where the remaining human survivors on Earth must gamble for their future with aliens from Titan, one of the moons circling Saturn.

Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff, allowing them to win or lose property and also form new marriages in order to maximise the remote chance some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game.

The telepathic, slug-like Vugs of Titan are the players and at stake is the Earth itself. The Game-Players of Titan is a brilliantly conceived vision of a future dystopia, full of imaginative detail, moments of pure humour and thought-provoking musings on the nature of perception, as the seemingly straightforward narrative soon turns into a tumultuous nightmare of delusion, precognition and conspiracy.

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.

While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry-a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels. Hamilton figures out how he and his compatriots can escape this world and return to their own, but first they must pass through three other vividly fantastical worlds, each more perilous and hilarious than the one before.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

The Three Stigmata hid a secret that could transform the world - or end it...

When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch returned from a distant galaxy, he claimed to have brought a gift for mankind. Chew-Z was a drug capable of transporting people into an illusory world, a world the could linger in for years wihout losing a second of Earth time. For the lonely colonists living out their dreary term on Mars, here was the ultimate trip, a pastime that could deliver immortality, wish fulfillment... the twin-power over time and space.

But in return, Palmer Eldritch exacted a terrible price. He would enter, control and be a god in everyone's private universe - a universe from which there was no escape, not even death...

Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him."

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical death.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions, as time collapses on itself and characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive, constantly shape-shifting panacea Ubik. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.

Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works--fantastic and weird, yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation--that are startlingly prescient imaginative anticipations of 21st-century quandaries.

This volume contains:

• The Man in the High Castle
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Ubik

"The floor joists of the universe," he once wrote, "are visible in my novels."

Martian Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where schizophrenia is a contagion and the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child's time-fracturing visions.

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles the deeply-interwoven stories of a multi-racial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab,

Now Wait for Last Year (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality.

In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity.

A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer's tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself.

Mixing metaphysics and madness, phantasmagoric visions of a post-nuclear world and invading extraterrestrial authoritarians, and all-too-real evocations of the drugged-out America of the 70s, Dick's work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure.

This volume gathering the best novels of Dick's final years, when religious revelation, always important in his work, became a dominant and irresistible theme.

In A Maze of Death (1970), a darkly speculative mystery that foreshadows Dick's final novels, colonists on the planet Delmak-O try to determine the nature of the God-or "Mentufacturer"-who plots their destiny.

The late masterpiece VALIS (1981) is a novelistic reworking of "the events of 2-3-74," when Dick's life was transformed by what he believed was a mystical revelation. It is a harrowing self-portrait of a man torn between conflicting interpretations of what might be gnostic illumination or psychotic breakdown.

The Divine Invasion (1981), a sequel to VALIS, is a powerful exploration of gnostic insight and its human consequences.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), Dick's last novel, is by turns theological thriller, roman à clef, and disenchanted portrait of late 1970s California life, based loosely on the controversial career of Bishop James Pike-a close friend and kindred spirit.

When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they'll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward. Nor do they suspect that Chuck's new employer, the famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, will also be there aiming his own laser gun.

How things came to such a darkly hilarious pass is the subject of Clans of the Alphane Moon, an astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.

What if you discovered that everything you knew about the world was a lie? That's the question at the heart of Philip K. Dick's futuristic novel about political oppression, the show business of politics and the sinister potential of the military industrial complex. This wry, paranoid thriller imagines a future in which the earth has been ravaged, and cities are burnt-out wastelands too dangerous for human life. Americans have been shipped underground, where they toil in crowded industrial ant hills and receive a steady diet of inspiring speeches from a President who never seems to age. Nick St. James, like the rest of the masses, believed in the words of his leaders. But that all changes when he travels to the surface - where what he finds is more shocking than anything he could possibly imagine.

Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utlizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

In this biting satire, the Cold War may have ended, but the eastern and western governments never told their citizens. Instead they created an elaborate ruse, wherein each side comes up with increasingly outlandish doomsday weapons-weapons that don't work. But when aliens invade, the top designers of both sides have to come together to make a real doomsday device-if they don't kill each other first.

With its combination of romance, espionage, and alien invasion, The Zap Gun skewers the military-industrial complex in a way that's as relevant today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

A powerful and enigmatic alien recruits humans and aliens to help it restore a sunken cathedral in this touching and hilarious novel.

Sometimes even gods need help. In Galactic Pot-Healer that god is an alien creature known as The Glimmung, which looks alternately like a flaming wheel, a teenage girl, and a swirling mass of ocean life. In order to raise a sunken city, he summons beings from across the galaxy to Plowman's Planet. Joe Fernwright is one of those summoned, needed for his skills at pot-healing--repairing broken ceramics. But from the moment Joe arrives on Plowman's Planet, things start to go awry. Told as only Philip K. Dick can, Galactic Pot-Healer is a wildly funny tale of aliens, gods, and ceramics.

Nick has a problem. He has a cat named Horace, and cats are quite illegal on Earth. In fact all pets are illegal on Earth, and Horace has been reported to the anti-pet man. The only way for Nick and his family to keep Horace is to emigrate to Plowman's Planet.

Little did they know that, rather than the pastoral paradise Nick's father envisioned, they would land in the middle of a planetwide war against an entity known as Glimmung, a conflict in which Nick and Horace would play a pivotal role.

Nick and the Glimmung is Philip K. Dick's sole surviving young adult novel. Written in 1966, it shares elements with his novel Galactic Pot-Healer and is available for the first time in the U.S, and the first time anywhere in twenty years.

The first volume of the definitive five-book set of the complete collected stories of the twentieth century's greatest SF author. A matchless display of Philip K. Dick's quirky, humorous, idiosyncratically philosophical world view.

With one exception, all the stories here were written over a nine-month period between 1951 and 1952, when Dick was in his early twenties and making his first impact as a writer.

Table of Contents:

• Stability
• Roog
• The Little Movement
• Beyond Lies the Wub
• The Gun
• The Skull
• The Defenders
• Mr. Spaceship
• Piper in the Woods
• The Infinites
• The Preserving Machine
• Expendable
• The Variable Man
• The Indefatigable Frog
• The Crystal Crypt
• The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
• The Builder
• Meddler
• Paycheck
• The Great C
• Out in the Garden
• The King of Elves
• Colony
• Prize Ship
• Nanny

The stories within SECOND VARIETY were written between 1952 and 1955, while America was in the grip of McCarthyism. The concerns of the time are reflected in stories such as "Second Variety", which tells of an endless war fought by ever more cunning and sophisticated robots, or "Imposter" where a man accused of being an alien spy finds his whole identity called into question. Using his marvelously varied, quirky and idiosyncratic style, Dick speaks up for ordinary people against militarism, paranoia and xenophobia.

Table of Contents:

• The Cookie Lady
• Beyond the Door
• Second Variety
• Jon's World
• The Cosmic Poachers
• Progeny
• Some Kinds of Life
• Martians Come in Clouds
• The Commuter
• The World She Wanted
• A Surface Raid
• Project: Earth
• The Trouble with Bubbles
• Breakfast at Twilight
• A Present for Pat
• The Hood maker
• Of Withered Apples
• Human Is
• Adjustment Team
• The Impossible Planet
• Imposter
• James P. Crow
• Planet for Transients
• Small Town
• Souvenir
• Survey Team
• Prominent Author

The third volume of the definitive five-book set of the complete collected stories of the twentieth century's greatest SF author, with twenty-three tales which were written in little more than a year before Philip K. Dick's first novel, "Solar Lottery" was published in 1956. Many of these stories are previously uncollected, but also included here are some of Dick's most famous pieces, like "Foster, You're Dead", a powerful extrapolation of nuclear war hysteria, and "The Golden Man", a very different story about a super-evolved mutant human.

Table of Contents:

• Fair Game
• The Hanging Stranger
• The Eyes Have It
• The Golden Man
• The Turning Wheel
• The Last of the Masters
• The Father-Thing
• Strange Eden
• Tony and the Beetles
• Null-O
• To Serve the Master
• Exhibit Piece
• The Crawlers
• Sales Pitch
• Shell Game
• Upon the Dull Earth
• Foster, You're Dead
• Pay for the Printer
• War Veteran
• The Chromium Fence
• Misadjustment
• A World of Talent
• Psi-Man Heal My Child!

This fourth volume of the definitive five-book set of the complete collected stories of the twentieth century's greatest SF author covers a wide span, from late 1954 through to 1963. Those were the years during which Dick began writing novels prolifically and his short story output lessened. The title story of this collection is being made into the Steven Spielberg-directed movie of the same name, while "The Days of Perky Pat" inspired one of Dick's greatest works, the novel "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. "The Penultimate Truth" grew from "The Mold of Yancy". Philip K. Dick is shown at his incomparable prime in this stunning collection.

Table of Contents:

• Autofac
• Service Call
• Captive Market
• The Mold of Yancy
• The Minority Report
• Recall Mechanism
• The Unreconstructed M
• Explorers We
• War Game
• If There Were No Benny Cemoli
• Novelty Act
• Waterspider
• What the Dead Men Say
• Orpheus with Clay Feet
• The Days of Perky Pat
• Stand-By
• What'll We Do with Ragland Park?
• Oh, to Be a Blobel!

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, The Cookie Lady, The World She Wanted, and many others.

Also published as The Little Black Box.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (The Little Black Box) - (1987) - essay by Thomas M. Disch
• The Little Black Box - (1964) - novelette
• The War With the Fnools - (1964) - short story
• A Game of Unchance - (1964) - novelette
• Precious Artifact - (1964) - short story
• Retreat Syndrome - (1965) - novelette
• A Terran Odyssey - (1987) - novelette
• Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday - (1966) - novelette
• Holy Quarrel - (1966) - novelette
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - (1966) - novelette
• Not by Its Cover - (1968) - short story
• Return Match - (1967) - short story
• Faith of Our Fathers - (1967) - novelette
• The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison's Anthology Dangerous Visions - (1968) - short story
• The Electric Ant - (1969) - short story
• Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked - (1987) - short story
• A Little Something for Us Tempunauts - (1974) - novelette
• The Pre-Persons - (1974) - novelette
• The Eye of the Sibyl - (1987) - short story
• The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree - (1987) - short story
• The Exit Door Leads In - (1979) - short story
• Chains of Air, Web of Aether - (1980) - novelette
• Strange Memories of Death - (1984) - short story
• I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon - (1980) - short story (variant of Frozen Journey)
• Rautavaara's Case - (1980) - short story
• The Alien Mind - (1981) - short story
• Notes (The Little Black Box) - (1987) - essay

An electric collection of interviews--including the first and the last--with one of the 20th century's most prolific, influential, and dazzlingly original writers of science fiction

Long before Ridley Scott transformed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick was banging away at his typewriter in relative obscurity, ostracized by the literary establishment. Today he is widely considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. These interviews reveal a man plagued by bouts of manic paranoia and failed suicide attempts; a career fuelled by alcohol, amphetamines, and mystical inspiration; and, above all, a magnificent and generous imagination at work.

Valis is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others being are The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer).

This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. Valis is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.

God is not dead, he has merely been exiled to an extraterrestrial planet. And it is on this planet that God meets Herb Asher and convinces him to help retake Earth from the demonic Belial. Featuring virtual reality, parallel worlds, and interstellar travel, The Divine Invasion blends philosophy and adventure in a way few authors can achieve.

As the middle novel of Dick's VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion plays a pivotal role in answering the questions raised by the first novel, expanding that world while exploring just how much anyone can really know--even God himself.

The final book in Philip K. Dick's VALIS trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer brings the author's search for the identity and nature of God to a close. The novel follows Bishop Timothy Archer as he travels to Israel, ostensibly to examine ancient scrolls bearing the words of Christ. But, more importantly, this leads him to examine the decisions he made during his life and how they may have contributed to the suicide of his mistress and son.

This introspective book is one of Dick's most philosophical and literary, delving into the mysteries of religion and of faith itself. As one of Dick's final works, it also provides unique insight into the mind of a genius, whose work was still in the process of maturing at the time of his death.