The Phillip K. Dick Reader

The Phillip K. Dick Reader is a selection of 24 Phillip K. Dick stories.  It collects mostly earlier stories from the mid 1950's with the exception of the inspiration for Total Recall (which was published in the 60's).  As with many short story collections, the quality varies, especially for a collection early in an author's career.

All of the stories have the seed in an interesting idea.  One that is particularly memorable to me is  about aliens fishing for humans and what sort of lures they would use.  Other ideas include marketing bomb shelters and robots that try to sell themselves, various post apocalyptic situations, and questioning mental states.  A short story collection like this is a great way to experience the author's work because he had so many interesting and unique ideas, even if they weren't always executed perfectly.

My favorite story in the book is the basis for the movie Paycheck (which I didn't know until I started writing this blog post), which I haven't seen (and from the rotten tomatoes rating, maybe I shouldn't).  It follows a man who has lost his memory and put himself in a perilous situation. However, he has mailed himself a few items which are all critical in the present time.  It's a fun deduction game to determine how the pieces are going to be used to help the protagonist.

Overall, I would give this collection an 89%.

The Man in the High Castle

After reading and enjoying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I knew I wanted to read more Phillip K. Dick.  I read that The Man in the High Castle was an interesting alternate history story and, without seeing anything else about it, decided to pick it up.  It turns out to be an alternate history where the Axis wins World War II and divides up America between Germany and Japan.

The book follows several characters around as they try to live in this world.  They are related but the storylines do not really intersect to come to a climax, it is more like we just see several people's stories that flesh out the world.  The story focuses generally on people trying to continue to live with their American ideals even a world where those are belittled and unvalued.

The racism in this book is so intense that it actually bothered me to read.  The way that the culture treated basically every non-Aryan, non-Japanese person caused me a moderate amount of stress while reading.  The fact that people could be that horrible to one another, and these people weren't even the villians of the story, just casual people off the street, is amazing and not in a positive way.  History was rough, but this clearly shows it could have been rougher.

Almost every character in this book consults the I Ching which I am not exceedingly familiar with but my understanding is that it is a fortune telling device like tarot cards.  The way that the people tend to read whatever they want into it seems like a minor critique of fortune tellers while at the same time showing how much America has changed from the one of the real world 60's.

I think the part that will stick with me the longest is a quote towards the end of this book: “We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”  The quote has an interesting sentiment and I like the concept that doing good is hard but it is worth doing anyway.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Around three years ago, I watched the movie Blade Runner.  I know that there are multiple different editions and I could not really tell you which one I watched.  I primarily watched it because it is a classic and stars Harrison Ford, one of my favorite actors.  I knew it was based on a book but I never really got around to picking it up until this summer.

This summer I was in an environment with a lot more used book stores than the town I currently live in and I went a little crazy.  I am unsure of exactly how many books I bought but shipping them home came to about 25 pounds.  I went in one bookstore that had more than 20 copies of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which is the book Blade Runner is based on.  I snatched it up because, well, why not?  (Also, it had an abnormal cover for the book which I always like)

I have to say that I didn't notice this was a sheep until I got the cover for this post.  I just thought it was random blobs of color.  Suddenly, it makes way more sense.



While it has been a while since I have seen the movie, I felt that this book made more sense than the movie overall.  They definitely bring up the question of the difference between humans and replicants in different ways than the movie.  In addition, there is this whole strange religion that the movie basically ignores that allows the author to bring in some other concepts like the battle between entertainment and religion. 

Overall, this book uses its post apocalyptic setting to fit a surprising amount of metaphor, symbolism, and debate into its relatively short story.  There are certainly some parts that are strange, but if the reader can take those in stride, this book will give them a lot to think about.  I would give it an 84%.