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Rating: 
Summary: Dick the Revelator
Review: A decade ago, Philip K. Dick's complete short stories were published as a five volume series. Prospective buyers should note that this is simply a reissue of the fourth of those five volumes. It isn't a "best of" short story collection; you get the brilliant along with stories tossed off to keep bread on the table. It's still worth four stars. (The fifth volume is also particularly worth owning, and all five are still in print on backorder.)You can't compare Philip K. Dick to any other science fiction writer. About the only other author he can be fairly compared to at all is Franz Kafka - but a workingman's Kafka, shorn of all pretension or artiness. All his heros are the same besieged everyman as K., wrestling with elusive metaphysics, impossible transformations, a cosmic bureaucracy, and a dysfunctional society - but also with overdue rent bills, insistent advertising, and messy divorces. Precogs show up in many of Philip K. Dick's works, but Dick himself was not particularly in the prediction business. Nearly every world he created, large (in his novels) or small (in stories like these) was a future dystopia. But whereas the dystopias of other sf writers make you shudder and think, "Yes, it could be like that... If Things Go On," Dick's have a different flavor, a different kind of immediacy. And the reason for that is, that Philip K. Dick was not so much a science fiction writer as a prophet. He showed us a future that mirrored the present so faithfully that he could convince us of what he always felt - that dystopia is already here; apocalypse is already here. All you have to do (the original meaning of apocalypse) is tear away the veils. Many people are going to take a fresh interest in Mr. Dick's writings because of the movie Minority Report. For them, I give this advice: go first to his novels (some of the best ones are "Ubik", "A Scanner Darkly", "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"). You have to immerse yourself in his world to grasp where he's coming from, and short stories don't give you room to do that. The novels do. For those who already know his stuff, this book is a treat. Besides the great title story, you'll see the seeds of several of his novels here ("Palmer Eldritch" prefigured in "Days of Perky Pat", "Simulacrum" in "The Mold of Yancy", and "Ubik" in "What the Dead Men Say").
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable
Review: Although these are not necessarily Philip K. Dick's best short works, they are necessary reading for every fan. As the writer in the introduction says, the reason I read PKD is because he has that oddest and most unique of all virtues in a writer - strangeness. You'll be hard-pressed to find stories stranger than this anywhere. As PKD himself says in the notes section at the end of the book, he often sold his stories to the flexible SF magazine Galaxy, as the more famous Astounding and its editor, John W. Campbell, considered his stories "nuts." Also, this notes section is very interesting for other reasons: it becomes apparent in reading them that these stories have much deeper meanings than they at first appear to have. It is quite entertaining enough to read them for their sure strangeness - you will laugh out loud often reading PKD - mostly at the dialogue, which you'll be hard-pressed to determine whether it is entirely unreal, or more real than most. However, deeper and more profound themes were always resonating at the bottom of the well of Philip K. Dick's stories. Although he was quite consistent and extremely prolific with his writings, some of his stories were definitely better than others. Still, everything the man ever wrote is worth reading. This particular collection contains some of his best - and most interesting - shorter works. Covering the period from 1954-1964, we get such classic stories as The Minority Report, an all-time classic SF story; The Unreconstructed M, a dramatic story of spine-tingling SF suspense; and many others - classic stories, profound stories, and just plain weird stories. This is some of the best science fiction published since the Golden Age of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Essential reading for any fan of science fiction, or of off-kilter writing in general.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting--to say the least
Review: This was my first introduction to PKD, and although all the stories aren't the best they do entertain. My biggest complaint is many of the stories overlap in odd ways, and in turn make them feel a tad repetative. An example is the pre-cog (used for full effect in 'Minority Report') is brought up in numerous other stories although these stories take place in alternate futures. Dick seems almost obsessed with a nuclear fallout future, and although some of these stories are interesting, many are just dull. I enjoyed the stories as a whole, and recommend them to anyone who enjoys looking into the art of the short story and the mind of PKD.
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