Philip K Dick

By 2021, companies have built incredibly realistic androids. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government bans them from Earth, but when androids don't want to be identified, they just blend in. Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job is to find rogue androids and "retire" them. But cornered, they tend to fight back, with deadly results.

In Tony and the Beetles, ten-year old Tony Rossi, an Earthman growing up on Betelgeuse, becomes aware that the natives, known as the Pas-Udeti, are driving out the Earthmen colonists on nearby Orion. His father, a staunch believer in the superiority of Earthmen, describes Tony's native friends as Beetles. A trip into town to meet his native friends leads to awkward encounters with a Pas-Udeti cab driver and a fellow bus passenger. When his newly aggressive...

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...

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.

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?

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....

Beyond Lies the Wub was the first story ever published by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In this short story Peterson buys a "wub" from a local before his departure from Mars and takes it back aboard the ship on which he is a crew member. But the captain Franco cites his concerns about the extra weight of having this huge pig-like creature on-board, although he really seems more interested in how it might taste. Once in space however,

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"'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...

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...

A philosophical science fiction novel from Hugo Award—winning author Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth is a visionary alternate history of a dystopian United States, full of the conspiracy theories and religious themes that became the foundation for his celebrated VALIS trilogy. It is the late 1960s, and a paranoid incompetent has schemed his way into the White House and convulsed America into a vicious war against imaginary, internal enemies....