Philip K. Dick
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By: Citadel Press
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
There'll Never Be Another Like Him 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.
This book, third in a set of five from Citadel Press (who are doing similar definitive collections of Robert Bloch & Theodore Sturgeon), collects all of Dick's short stories, the vast majority of them from the 50s - not coincidentally, the high-water mark of the sf pulps. All are introduced by later-era sf writers like Tom Disch, Norman Spinrad & this volume's John Brunner; unfortunately, all take pains to point out that the true value of these stories was in their raw wealth of ideas, which Dick later cannibalized and expanded upon in his novels. During his short-story tyro period, Dick wrote fast and furious (how does a story a week sound?) and the conventional wisdom states that these tales are too one-dimensional, formulaic and crudely-written to have much artistic quality on their own merits. I strongly disagree. While Dick's later novels are of course worth reading, these early stories literally SEETHE with fevered imagination: it's important to note that he does not employ recurring characters or settings here. He literally starts each story with a blank canvas, which only makes his prolific output that much more astounding. All of his obsessions and central themes are already present, but emerging as they did against the backdrop of the American 50s, the oft-noted 'flaws' in these small gems lend an eerily authentic surrealism and subversive power that his 60s and 70s work (when the world he lived in was already waist-deep in 'science fiction time', to use a Spinrad phrase) somewhat lack. Actually, Dick's COLLECTED STORIES, like much of the most resonant 50s sf, can be savored as much for their horror-story frissons, or their mythic and allegorical properties, as they can as pure speculative fiction. (And one could make the argument that such work, produced under the spectres of McCarthyism, The Bomb, flying-saucer sightings, a growing militarism and the incipient gray-flannelled paranoia festering in the newly-minted utopia of suburbia, was much more daring and revolutionary than similar Dick-inspired work published in the far-less-restrictive, anything-goes 60s). Sure, many of the characters in COLLECTED STORIES read like print versions of Kenneth Tobey and Morris Ankrum, but therein lies their power; they're true to the era in a way that 'better-written', more fully developed protagonists probably couldn't be. Anyway, to cut a long-winded sermon short, readers drawn to either sf or horror, as well as those who nominally detest both genres but do enjoy a touch of strangeness and obsessiveness in their fiction, should run out and buy SECOND VARIETY and the other four books in this series. You may be surprised to find many of these 'one-dimensional' stories, written hastily for money, clinging like burrs to your subconscious long after the work of Great Authors have slid noiselessly from memory. Mandatory reading.
Editorial Review:
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 Second Variety, Foster, You're Dead and The Father-Thing, and many others.
"A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection". -- Kirkus
"The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post
"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street Journal
