Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two

The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety
by Philip K. Dick

The second volume of Philip K. Dick's complete short stories has been variously published under the titles Second Variety, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (not actually included in the 1999 Gollancz edition I have, and confusingly also the title of volume five in the Gollancz editions), and Adjustment Team, and contains stories originally published from 1953 to '55 (the collections overlap in publication date a little bit because they are collected in sequence of composition). I'm reading it as part of my project of reading old Hugo winners and related books; it's a "related book" on the grounds that The Man in the High Castle won the 1963 Hugo and I liked it enough that I've kept going with Dick's stuff since.

Collection published: 1999
Contents originally published: 1953-55
Acquired and read: November 2023

I didn't find this quite as strong as the first volume. There are a lot of fantasy stories in this one, which are less to my taste, and a few too many stories where some spooky happens at the end and then the story stops, also a few too many stories about people exploring space. Which is usually my favorite subgenre of sf, but not one that plays to Dick's strengths. Some are undermined by seventy years of subsequent science fiction: "Second Variety" could be great, but if you've read later stuff, or even just another stuff by Dick, you'll see the twist coming. A similar complaint can be lodged at some of the time travel stuff here. Some of the stories have good concepts but don't totally convince on the worldbuilding, like one about a father in a world where robots do the childrearing... only he's somehow never heard of this dramatic change in social norms, or another about robots that are discriminating against humans, but ends up making everything too easy for a human to push against it.

That said, when Dick hits, he scores. There's some good satire of military imperialism in "Some Kind of Life," where every year some new excuse is thought of for good Terrans to go off to war—for the benefit of the Earth economy, of course. "The World She Wanted" is a weird story about someone convinced she can arrange the world the way she wants... and maybe she really can! "Breakfast at Twilight" is a neat glimpse of an ordinary suburban family suddenly plunged into a world at war. "Human Is" is a little bit predictable but effective all the same, about a man who may have been replaced by an alien. Dick loves this theme, of course; "Human Is" focuses on a wife uncertain about her husband but there's another where the replaced person themself is uncertain. On slightly similar lines, there's "Small Town" about a guy who obsessively builds a model of the town he lives in in his house's basement, taking out his dissatisfaction with his real life on the model...

My favorite here, though, was "The Commuter," where the main character begins slipping into another world, a world where a commuter town was built in the suburbs that never existed in his own. Like Dick's best stories, it captures the unease and uncertainty of modern life.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: ...And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny