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Everybody's getting one.

Val and Julie just want what's best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all.

Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device.

Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it's everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot's powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.

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.

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This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955.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

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, The invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, A Unique to break through Diaspar's stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

This is a revised and expanded version of Against the Fall of Night.

"The good thing is, no one will ever die again. The bad thing is, everyone will want to."

A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of "fast ones," shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution. And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not.

Jean de Flambeur is back. And he's running out of time.

In Hannu Rajaniemi's sparkling follow-up to the critically acclaimed international sensation The Quantum Thief, he returns to his awe-inspiring vision of the universe...and we discover what the future held for Earth.