Philip K Dick
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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 twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied 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...
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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 simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep... They even built humans. Immigrants to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial...
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The discovery of mysterious gateway leads to a new world full of dangerous possibilities in this science fiction tale from an iconic author.
When a repairman accidentally finds 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
...6) Lies, Inc
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This is a longer version of Dick's 1964 novella The Unteleported Man. Typical of the author's dark imaginings, it reveals a future Earth so overpopulated that a company offers free transport to a paradiselike planet called Whale's Mouth to those willing to leave permanently. When protagonist Rachmael learns that the images used to lure the colonists are fake, he travels to Whale's Mouth to see if those stranded want to come home.
7) The Skull
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In The Skull, a convict is offered his freedom if he agrees to travel back in time and kill someone. He learns that the assassination target was the founder of a religious sect that grew in strength and influence from its inception in 1960. Carrying his target's skull so he can identify the religious leader, the convict comes to learn a terrible secret about why he was chosen to find its owner.
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The Eyes Have It is a humorous, early short story by Philip K. Dick that first appeared in Science Fiction Stories in 1953. In it, a bus-riding reader of a discarded melodrama with an overactive imagination is persuaded by the hackneyed prose that the world has been taken over by aliens. Thus, when eyes slowly roved around the room, the reader imagines disembodied eyeballs traveling of their own free will. A rare example of satire from the Dick canon....
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In The Crystal Crypt, Earth and Mars are poised on the verge of war. On the last spaceship to leave Mars for Earth, law enforcement officials are looking for three fugitives who somehow made a great Martian city disappear. Unable to find the perpetrators, the officials allow the ship to disembark for Earth. A businessman named Thacher strikes up a conversation with a young woman and two men who reveal a very interesting secret to him about the mysterious...
10) Beyond the Door
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In Beyond the Door, a man buys a cuckoo clock for his wife who has always wanted one. When he catches her cheating on him, the man throws his wife out of the house with her lover. Though he never really cared for the clock, he keeps winding it because he dislikes the silence. But the cuckoo clock, who preferred the wife's company, begins to plot against its owner.
11) Second Variety
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In Second Variety, UN forces have retreated to a moon base in the aftermath of early Soviet victories in a nuclear conflict. In response, the UN forces developed special robots, called Claws, which feature spinning blades and rudimentary artificial intelligence. Six years later, the Soviet leadership asks for negotiations to end the war. A UN officer travels back to earth to discover that not only have the Claws learned to replicate themselves, they...
12) The Defenders
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In The Defenders, the Soviet and American survivors of a nuclear holocaust have created vast underground tunnels, so as to continue the war on the surface via remote control robots. When a robot from the surface is found not to be radioactive, a team of American scientists returns topside to investigate this anomaly. Expecting to see massive devastation, the scientists are unprepared for the shocking truth that awaits them.
13) The Variable Man
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In The Variable Man, Earth (The Terran System) is in a cold war with the older, corrupt Centaurian System, suppresses Terra from exploring space and expanding its borders. When a devastating new weapon called Icarus is developed by Terra, everyone expects the odds to tip in Terra's favor. But the computers calculating these odds find an unknown variable that throws off the odds. A time traveler from 1913, known as Thomas Cole has arrived. Can this...
14) The Gun
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In The Gun, a group of space explorers are shot down above a deserted planet. While some of the crew work on repairing the ship, the remainder set out to investigate the planet. Otherwise unpopulated, they discover the huge gun that shot them down sitting atop a trove of cultural artifacts from a bygone civilization. What harm could come of dismantling the gun and taking a few of the artifacts home with them?
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In Beyond Lies the Wub, the crew of a spaceship buys a wub, a large pig-like animal from a native Martian to eat on the way home. The Wub turns out to be a sentient being capable of intelligent conversation, empathy, and possibly telepathy and mind control. When a crew member converses with the remarkable Wub, the captain makes a rash and violent decision that could put the return mission in danger.
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The magnificent and 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. 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, Dick tried to write his way...
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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....
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This satirical adventure from Philip K. Dick deals with issues of power, class, and politics, set in a world ruled by big-brained elites. 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...
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In Piper in the Woods, an army doctor is asked to treat a soldier from Asteroid Y-3 who claims he is a plant. This wouldn't be a problem, but the soldier is incapable of any physical activity, preferring to stand still and point himself towards the sun. When more soldiers return from Asteroid Y-3 also claiming to be plants, Dr. Harris travels there to investigate. While there, he learns about a mysterious indigenous people living in the woods called...
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Every legend has a beginning. Dreamscape Media presents a collection of thirteen early short stories penned by Philip K. Dick. Exploring themes of authoritarianism, alternate universes, and altered consciousness, the stories (including The Variable Man, Second Variety, and The Defenders) first appeared in American science fiction magazines of the 1950s and earned him the respect of such peers as Robert Heinlein and Ursula LeGuin, as well as the adulation...