Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Library of America
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: May 2007
To be fair and honest right from the outset I was pre-disposed to like this collection for at least two reasons.
1) I have been a fan of The Library of America for a number of years now. The books that they put out are of the highest quality and are a great value for the content. Also in recent years they have been a good friend to genre fiction. That may seem like a small thing but I assure you it’s not.
2) For years now I have, unabashedly, been a Dick-Head. Can’t help it. I have been for years and probably always will be.
This brings me around to another Dick-Head, Jonathan Lethem. Lethem’s task was a difficult one because of Dick’s productivity. He published 19 novels in the 1960′s. In terms of selection only one of those books was a gimmie. You could also knock some of the more hastily written books out of contention but that still leaves one with some hard choices to make. There could easily be a second collection of novels from the 1960′s. All in all though Lethem made some good and interesting choices.
Philip Dick’s novels have become increasingly popular and influential since his death in 1982. Periodically discussions start up on the predictive power of science fiction. One such discussion even popped up recently. To be truthful, yes it is easy to look at something like the communicators from Star Trek and easily see that they resemble the cell phones that we use today but more often then not science fiction fails in its predictive power on a specific level. But one of Dick’s greatest attributes is that he was really able to nail a certain atmosphere, one that seems increasingly to hew closer to reality.
One of the great services that this collection provides is that it offers not only a great primer of Dicks work but also provides a great introduction to those readers looking to try some of his work.
The four novels included in this collection are:
The Man in the High Castle published in 1962 – An early Hugo award winner that describes an alternate history in which Japan and Germany won World War II and America is an occupied country.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch published in 1965 – Competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Published in 1968 – A bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a post apocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner.
Ubik published in 1969 – Illustrates a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life,”
I find the subtitle of this collection to be open to speculation. It immediately makes one wonder, if not down right hope, that there will be a future collection of Dick’s late period masterpieces from the 70′s. I for one hope that there will be one. Based on the quality of the selections here it would be a great companion volume.
On a side note the Philip K Dick android is still missing.
